The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

Unlike his other chapters, Darnton’s essay on The Encyclopédie—the groundbreaking Enlightenment text edited by Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert—reads less like anthropological history and more like a work of literary criticism. Published in 28 volumes between 1751 and 1772, The Encyclopédie is ostensibly a reference book compiling over 70,000 articles on subjects as diverse and benign as grain grinding and verb conjugation. The prefaces and knowledge diagrams at the beginning of the book, however, strongly espouse Enlightenment values like the supremacy of reason over religion and the idea that perception and reflection are the sources of all knowledge. Much of this is transmitted by the editors’ efforts to raise boundaries between the knowable and unknowable, the latter of which includes religion.

Darnton spends most of the first half of the essay comparing and contrasting The Encyclopédie’s “Figurative System of Human Knowledge” and the diagram that inspired it, a similar tree of knowledge found in English philosopher Francis Bacon’s 1605 book The Advancement of Learning. In diagramming knowledge as a tree of interconnected disciplines, The Encyclopédie seeks to depict knowledge as an integrated whole, rather than an alphabetical list. Where Diderot and d’Alembert most stray from Bacon is how they situate religion on their tree.