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Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History, by Philipp Blom

Free Download Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History, by Philipp Blom

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From Publishers Weekly

In the dark corners of Paris's bohemian cafes, salons and theaters, some of the greatest European thinkers of the 18th century congregated, and it was here that the Encyclopédie was born. The most enormous publishing effort of the day, the Encyclopédie would be neither the first of its kind nor ultimately the largest. But in this meticulously researched historical narrative, journalist and historian Blom (To Have and to Hold) argues that the Encyclopédie represents a turning point in the tide of intellectual history and is the last veritable record of Europe's ideas, traditions, politics, economics, tools and restrictions before the French Revolution. The bulk of Blom's narrative is driven by the drama that occurred among the work's many contributors and between them and the society in which they lived. The writers, many of whom stood for free thought and secularism, struggled with censorship, exile and even prison. And, as is revealed here through epistolary exchanges, on a personal level, the famed band of philosophes-including Diderot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, Grimm and Rousseau-were divided by mistresses, money, manipulation and, most of all, ego. Blom takes the reader through these events and through the Encyclopédie itself in a thorough and engaging way, and he makes a strong case for the work's importance in shaping philosophy and political thought for years to come. This book is a welcome read for European historians and for those interested in learning about one of the foremost works of the Enlightenment.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Late in this absorbing history of the most notorious European publication of the eighteenth century, Blom says that the Encyclopedie marks the end more than the beginning of an era. Intended in part to describe, and thereby honor, the shop crafts on which urbanizing Europe relied for the material base of civilization (apparel, foodstuffs, building materials, utensils and tools, etc.), the 28-volume work, 25 years in the making, became the largest resource on preindustrial means of production. In mid-eighteenth-century Paris, the church and the monarchy saw (accurately) in the Encyclopedie the uprising of materialism, atheism, and republicanism against them. Many Encyclopedie contributors were harassed, imprisoned, and/or exiled by Louis XV's government, spurred on by Jesuits and Jansenists, who, otherwise at each other's throats, united against the godless Encyclopedie. In the end, the new age of venture capitalism won out. The Encyclopedie's bookseller-financiers were too heavily invested to let it die. They made out like bandits, too, while the intellectuals who wrote it had to settle for fame (the principal writer of the last several volumes didn't even get a complimentary set). The sympathetic hero of the whole endeavor was Denis Diderot, leading editor throughout, who was legally obliged, for the sake of the Encyclopedie, to suppress his now-classic novels and essays during his lifetime. The Encyclopedie's story is both epic and epochal, and Blom tells it intelligently, gracefully, and stylishly. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 416 pages

Publisher: St. Martin's Press (June 11, 2005)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1403968950

ISBN-13: 978-1403968951

Product Dimensions:

6.2 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Average Customer Review:

4.4 out of 5 stars

11 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#605,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This is the kind of book that even such dedicated encyclopedistes as Diderot, the Chevalier de Jaucourt and d'Alembert would have found hard to classify. Yes, it's history -- but is it political history? social history? biography? philosophy?In fact, Blom's work is a masterful combination of all these, making it as unique and intriguing as the original Encyclopedie must have seemed to its 18th century readers, confronted as they were with a world where the amount of knowledge available (theoretically) to them grew exponentially by the day. How to keep pace with this? How could they maintain an understanding of the world and their place in it? That, as described by Blom, was one of the catalysts for the creation of the Encyclopedie, but the goals of its contributors and chief architects, especially Denis Diderot, were quite different. Rather than reinforce the existing social order and its underpinnings -- theological dogma as conveyed by the Catholic Church and absolute monarchy, represented in the person of Louis XV -- they embarked on a mission to portray an alternative world, one in which reason prevailed and where an artisan's talents and knowledge were valued as much as those of a pleasure-loving monarch. Often, this could only be accomplished indirectly -- as Blom shows by pointing out how thoughtful readers could fill in the gaps between the lines in the entries on drone bees, who served only as courtiers to the queen bee and didn't work for a living but lived off the efforts of the worker bees.Blom effortlessly weaves together the political and social background against which Diderot and his collaborators toiled for 16 years to assemble what became a 28-volume opus with the details of their lives and experiences, from Diderot's incarceration in the Chateau de Vincennes (to obtain his liberty, he had to forego a career as a professional philosophe -- devastating to him on one level, but something that forced him into his lifelong work on the Encylopedie) to the likely impact of Rousseau's hereditary incontinence problem on his anti-social behavior and ultimate rupture with the cosmopolitan encyclopedistes who had previously been his closest friends. Especially intriguing are the glimpses of other personalities, less familiar to history, such as de Jaucourt and the Baron Holbach.When Diderot embarked on his life work -- reluctantly enough -- he was not a member of any prestigious Academy and, in Blom's words, "was known only to his friends and to the police." Today, he is widely known -- but ironically, to many, it is because of his endless travails on the Encyclopedie, a project that often felt like a millstone around his neck. As for the encyclopedie itself, while it did serve as an intellectual precursor to the Revolutionary-era thinkers who would follow the encyclopedistes, the work itself was as much a mark of the end of the world that Diderot and his companions knew. It would serve to preserve the traditional artisanal crafts that would shortly give way to industrialized processes. Meanwhile, the creation of the book itself -- with even censors tacitly acknowledging the importance of the project to the French economy -- served, as Blom points out, as a sign that the age of capitalism had arrived. "Questions of true religion, of dogma, of respect for authority, even of royal power, could be subjugated to the higher interests of economic wellbeing if this was judged necessary."I can't comment from a scholarly perspective on the nuances of Blom's portrayal of Diderot and his collaborators, but the book is a lively and compelling introduction to the era and the subject that anyone interested in the topics it concerns -- political philosophy, the rise of a civil society, the history of ideas, censorship, etc. -- will find compelling. And Blom does justice to his subject, making each character, from the best known (Rousseau, Voltaire) to the most obscure (Diderot's mysterious mistress, 'Sophie' Vallon) remarkably vivid.There are two few books of this kind - accessible, well-written, thoughtful, well-researched and broad in scope -- and Blom has added yet another to his own personal canon within the genre. (Interestingly, his previous book, To Have and To Hold was a history of collecting objects; this book focuses instead on the collecting but also the dissemination of ideas and concepts and information.) It's a lively history of the times -- you'll almost feel the famous Parisian mud pulling your shoes off as you read about Paris in the middle of the 18th century -- but also a group biography and the history of an endeavor and its legacy.If you find this book intriguing, you might also be interested in another book about literary ventures and misadventures in 18th century France. As Blom mentions throughout this history, many French writers published in Amsterdam to avoid the royal censors -- their works were later smuggled back into Paris inside barrels of salted herring, among other things -- a form of 18th century samizdat. A good survey of the literary underworld of Diderot's era can be found in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.

Excellent book!

Mr. Blom adroitly tells how an important set of books came about that helped banish darkness at a time of absolute rule, much ignorance, and very limited tolerance. The courage, clear thinking, and simple humanity of the various dedicated authors who worked to create "The Encycopedia" in pre-revolutionary France is inspiring. A book I highly recommend as one fun to read along with "Enlightening the World" is "Voltaire in Exile" by Davidson, which is also out this year. Both deserve readers.

This volume is a bit thin as history but an easy read and useful for those who want an easy way to get their head around d'Alembert and Diderot's Encyclopedie project. I like the book but don't consider it "high book" scholarship. With those qualifications, however, I'd recommed for the casual reader. D'Alembert's Preface to the Enclopedie is far "deeper," and provides a better summary. This is a nice book, worth having, but a bit of a coffee table edition, perhaps.

Most of the French Encyclopaedists were men of sparkle and wit, and Philipp Blom's book shares these qualities. We get an excellent account of the historical background, of the contents and subversive nature and outlook of the Encyclopédie, of the immense task of compiling its 17 volumes of texts and 11 of plates over a period of 19 years, of the trials and tribulations it encountered at the hands of the authorities, but above all of the main characters associated with it, especially the lovable Diderot and the less than lovable Rousseau, but also d'Alembert (so much more arrogant than his charming portrait by Quentin de la Tour would suggest), the Chevalier de Jaucourt (three different figures are given on different pages for the number of articles he contributed), Helvétius, and many others.Like the Encyclopédie itself, this book about it contains many digressions which are only thinly connected with the work itself, but as these are almost all entertaining, one cannot really complain. They are mostly about the lives of men and women who moved in the circle of the Encyclopaedists even if they were not direct contributors to the work. Blom does, however, dedicate no fewer than 12 pages to the story of Damien's attempt in 1757 on the life of Louis XV and the ghoulish details of his torture and execution - all on the specious grounds that, in reaction to this event, the Encyclopaedia was banned two years later: Blom makes it clear that there were far more immediate reasons for the Encyclopaedia being suppressed.Each chapter has at its beginning one of the plates that illustrated the great work, and there is just the niggle that there is no key to the figures or to the little letters labelling the parts of the images.The book was first published in 2004 under the title "Encyclopedie". You can google an excellent review by the American specialist Raymond Birn in H-France Review Vol.6, and this points out a rather alarming number of factual inaccuracies. Had I not read this, I would have given the book five stars.

Philipp Blom is a delightful writer and this is a fascinating and highly entertaining history of the great French Encyclopedie created over the course of 25 turbulent years in the mid-1700s. Despite the title, this is really a book about people, with the encyclopedie as thread to tie the stories together. I have very little background in 18th C European/French history Blom makes it entirely accessible for novice and expert alike (although I suspect many of the stories here are well worn, but new to me, and well told). Probably the greatest compliment is I want to learn more about those involved, probably starting with a biography of Rousseau. This book easily sits besides Simon Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything" and Henry Hitchings "Defining the World". As another reviewer mentioned, anyone with an interest in Wikipedia will find it fascinating.

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