Our history is no more than a series
of incredible events.
Every one of us can influence its course.
The most infinitesimal of our decisions
can influence the future of humanity.
To know the past is to foresee the future.
1835, the Winter Palace.
After a vain escape attempt,
Tsar Nicholas I was brought back by force
to St. Petersburg by angry rioters.
At the end of a summary trial,
he was sentenced to death by beheading.
Guillotine starts its reign of terror
in the new republic of Russia.
During the previous century, faced with constant censorship,
Diderot, chief editor of the Encyclopedia,
fled France for Russia.
Turned close advisor to Empress Catherine II,
he contributed to the spread of ideas
during the Enlightenment, inspiring many philosophers.
These new ideas had enraged the Russian people
in the grip of deep poverty.
Today, revolution has overwhelmed the Russian empire,
but none of that ever happened.
In 1762, a small grain of sand
is going to enable the completion of the Encyclopedia,
monumental work of the age of Enlightenment in France.
1746, France.
The royal power authorizes a great project,
a universal dictionary of arts and sciences.
1762, Empress Catherine II offers philosopher Denis Diderot
to finish the Encyclopedia in Russia,
away from censorship.
1772, after 26 years of a monumental work,
this formidable editorial adventure is finally over.
These three inextricably linked events
are key moments in the age of Enlightenment
and have set the pace of the great Encyclopedia adventure.
Aristotle, Galen, and Pliny the Elder.
In the west, for centuries, these three ancient scholars
had been perceived as the foundation of knowledge.
Medieval society values know-how and experiment,
but science often consists
of reconciling Greco-Roman knowledge
with Christian theology.
From the 16th century on,
a new way of thinking about the world emerges.
In 1543, after having waited until the end of his life,
the astronomer and mathematician Copernicus
publishes De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium.
Contrary to what Aristotle said,
the scholar declares that the Earth is not a fixed planet
at the center of the universe
but that it revolves around the Sun.
It's a revolution.
At the end of the century, theologian Giordano Bruno
goes even further.
The Sun isn't the center of the universe either.
It's only a star among many others in the universe.
Condemned for heresy and tortured,
Bruno was ordered to abandon his beliefs on pain of death.
But he does not relent.
In 1600 in Rome, he is burnt alive.
33 years later, the church attacks another scholar.
Facing its omnipotence, Galileo is forced
to recant his theory on celestial bodies' motions.
At the end of the century, the Englishman Isaac Newton
formulates his law of universal gravitation,
founding modern physics.
In his calculations,
no borrowing from Aristotle or the Bible,
but a prominent place given to mathematics and experiments.
The scientific milieu is in a fever of excitement.
The philosopher Descartes develops a method of reasoning,
excluding de facto beliefs and superstitions.
Time to make way for the Cartesian spirit,
criticism, and logic.
The trend is towards polemic and exchange.
In the 18th century, the kingdom of France
is at the heart of this intellectual boom.
Reason must prevail over all.
Independence of the individual is primary.
In the face of obscurantism and ignorance,
these philosophers become beacons in the night,
the lanterns of knowledge emerging from the abysses.
It's the Age of Enlightenment.
But like Giordano Bruno or Galileo before them,
the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment
are going to meet with full force,
censorship from both the church and central authority.
Almost all of them are going to experience exile,
prison, or censorship.
Very soon, their motto becomes Sapere Aude, Dare to Know.
Welcome to the memory of humanity.
Every historical event, regardless of how small,
is recorded and connected.
You only need to change one to upset all the others.
Here, we were able to control time,
analyze and compare billions of events
in order to rewrite history in infinite ways.
Censure is an arbitrary limitation
of the freedom of expression of the individual.
In the 18th century in France,
it is the responsibility of the royal census.
Only a few philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment
escaped it.
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Russo,
Helvetius, and many others.
In 1789, during the French Revolution,
the National Assembly adopts
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Articles 10 and 11 very clearly state
that no one may be disturbed for his opinions,
even religious ones, provided that their manifestation
does not trouble the public order established by the law
and that any citizen may speak and write freely.
Theoretically, a Frenchman is thus free to speak.
However, today, France is only ranking 33rd in the world
for the freedom of the press.
Let's go back.
1745, Paris.
The German scholar Gottfried Sellius is in town.
He has to meet a certain le Breton, a publisher,
to present him with a project,
the translation into French of the Cyclopedia,
an English language universal dictionary.
The word encyclopedia comes from Greek
and means body of knowledge for a complete education.
Unlike a dictionary that defines the words of a language,
an encyclopedia explains things in a universal way.
It compiles and summarizes the whole of knowledge
to make it available to all.
An encyclopedia is thus necessarily
a substantial and bulky work.
And at this time, no work of this scope
has yet been published.
The initial translation project comes to a sudden end.
But for le Breton, the idea is launched,
the edition of a great universal dictionary
of arts and sciences, actually a real encyclopedia.
He obtains a 20-year royal privilege,
the exclusive authorization to print and sell this work,
a publishing concession.
Editorial supervision
is entrusted to Abbot de Gua de Malves,
mathematician, member of the Royal Academy of Sciences,
and professor at the College du France.
The scholar immediately surrounds himself
with collaborators, among them Jean le Rond d'Alembert,
himself a member of the French Academy of Sciences,
and Denis Diderot, a translator.
But very soon, the abbot leaves the project.
Diderot and d'Alembert are then given the weighty task
of taking over the direction of the project.
And if, at the beginning, the intentions of the publishers
were relatively modest,
those of the two new publishers are less so
because Diderot and d'Alembert embodied the spirit
of the Enlightenment perfectly.
Their watch word, accept nothing without proof
and encourage thinking.
Their ambition opened the doors of knowledge
to as many people as possible,
fight superstitions and obscurantism,
ensure that reason prevails.
Diderot in particular doesn't seek
to put a rigid system in place or a new method of thinking.
On the contrary, he questions, raises incoherences,
lets the readers think by themselves.
But he proves himself reckless.
In 1749, following one of his anonymous publications,
he is imprisoned for three months
in the prison of Vincennes.
The tone is set.
Financing a project.
The publishing world of the 18th century
is very different from today's.
Despite the progress of printing,
the manufacturing process remains tedious.
Paper itself is a very costly material
and of variable quality.
To finance such an ambitious project,
encyclopedists turned to the system of subscriptions.
A subscription is a pre-purchase.
The future client accepts to pay in advance
to allow for the publication of the work
and gets a copy once manufacturing is complete.
It represents a risk.
He cannot be certain either of the delivery schedule
or of the final quality.
To convince subscribers, Diderot then writes a text
accompanied by an image representing schematically
the structure of the encyclopedia
in the form of a tree of knowledge.
These types of text, named prospectus,
have given their name to the leaflets we know nowadays.
This system of subscription is very similar to
crowdsourcing or crowdfunding, as we know it today,
a way for every one of us to finance the culture we like.
1751, five years after the launch
of the encyclopedic project, the first volume is released
from le Breton's workshops.
A preface by d'Alembert expounds the author's ambitions,
a true Enlightenment manifesto.
The following year, the release of the second volume
seems to go smoothly until one of the collaborators,
an abbot, publishes a thesis.
It includes rational explanations
for Jesus Christ's miraculous healings.
It's a scandal, a blasphemy.
The opponents of the Encyclopedia seize the opportunity
and obtain from the king the condemnation of the two
already published volumes.
It is prohibited for anyone to sell, buy,
or even to simply possess copies.
The encyclopedists come to fear their project
might be taken over by the church
and leave with the Jesuits.
It's in these tough times that an ally
as powerful as unexpected steps in.
Guillaume de Malesherbes, director of censorship.
His duty requires him to throw Diderot into a dungeon.
However, he works cleverly
to get the prohibition lifted by the king.
D'Alembert, on the other hand, has learnt the lesson.
He leaves the direction and becomes a mere collaborator.
Diderot is left alone in charge.
The publications resume.
The attacks increase and are more and more virulent
as the volumes are published.
In 1754, Voltaire, enthusiastic, joins the project.
But on January 5th, 1757, a failed attack
against Louis XV shakes the public.
These new subversive ideas are bound to be the guilty party.
The encyclopedists are accused of undermining royal power.
Malesherbes himself is threatened.
D'Alembert abandons the project.
Voltaire urges all of his collaborators to show caution.
But Diderot and a handful of hardliners stand firm.
He urges his collaborators not to flee the fighting,
not to lose ground to their enemies.
In Rome, the Pope puts the work
on the Index of Prohibited Books.
Any Catholic found guilty
of owning a copy of the Encyclopedia
is systematically threatened of being excommunicated.
A royal decree revokes the privileges
and declares illegal the first seven volumes.
Diderot's manuscripts are seized.
But those hidden at Malesherbes are not.
The head of royal censorship, taking huge risks,
manages to appease people's minds.
He obtains from the king permission to keep publishing
but only volumes of illustrations and engravings.
Then starts the clandestine period of the Encyclopedia.
With the passive complicity of the police,
the volumes of text remaining are written
and printed in secret in le Breton's workshops.
This is a very tough period for Diderot.
For years, enduring threats and insults,
he works himself to death in silence.
That is when in 1762, Empress Catherine II
proposes him to finish the Encyclopedia in Riga,
in the Russian empire far away from censorship.
We have arrived at a point of divergence.
A point of divergence is a key moment,
a crossroads in our history where our world can swing
from one side to the other.
The impact of books on our societies
is very difficult to evaluate.
What would our world look like without the Bible,
the Torah, or the Quran,
or if the works of Karl Marx or Darwin
had never been published?
What would have happened if,
under the pressure of censorship,
Diderot had accepted the offer of Catherine II?
We can consider that in France,
the course of history would have been pretty much the same.
The French Revolution would still have happened,
but for the 18th century Russia,
it would have been different.
Catherine II was very receptive
to the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers
and maintained an intense correspondence with Diderot.
The Encyclopedia would have attracted many thinkers,
philosophers, and enlightened minds.
Russia might have followed a similar path to that of France.
Driven by new ideas of freedom
inspired by the French example,
the Russian people, enslaved and miserable,
would have rebelled in their turn
right up to overthrowing the power
and establishing a republic in Russia.
We can consequently imagine a period of turmoil
leading up to the public execution
of the last tsar of Russia,
a guillotine in front of the Winter Palace.
1765, the last 10 volumes of text
printed in secret without a royal privilege
are published in one go and under a false address.
To circumvent the ban, the volumes are handed out
outside of the city walls of Paris.
For safety purposes, the name of Diderot
doesn't appear on it anymore.
For the chief editor, the great and cursed work is finished,
the end of a 20 or so years of work and sacrifices
but also of treasons.
Not long before the publication,
Diderot has realized that le Breton
had exercised preventive censorship.
In 1772, the last volumes of illustrations
are finally completed and published in turn.
After a quarter of a century of incredible work,
the epic adventure of the publication of the Encyclopedia
is over,
its final title, Encyclopedia or A Systematic Dictionary
of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts.
Offering about 72,000 articles
and thousands of illustrations spread across 28 volumes,
it's a monumental work.
No work of this scope had ever been published.
The Encyclopedia astonishes by its modernity
and by the diversity of its subject matter.
It includes topics previously considered insignificant.
Mechanics stands alongside astronomy, surgery, mathematics.
Its conception is original in itself,
a collective work with over 150 collaborators
who have written articles mostly voluntarily.
Diderot is the author of a great variety of articles,
especially technical ones.
Numerous stories describe him pacing the fabrication shops
at length to understand all of their secrets.
D'Alembert, in spite of his withdrawal,
provided about 1,600 articles, mainly on mathematics.
But also the Chevalier de Jaucourt, this workhorse
entirely devoted to the work of the Encyclopedia
even in the toughest times,
we owe him more than 17,000 articles,
nearly 24% of the total volume.
If, with more than 150 different collaborators,
the quality of the articles is bound to be highly variable,
never the Encyclopedia could have existed
without the dedication of the encyclopedists.
They have defied censorship and worked clandestinely
to forge beyond the mere compiling of knowledge
a political weapon, a weapon of light.
Nearly 72,000 articles
in all fields of knowledge.
The amount of data is, for the time, phenomenal.
To structure the books, the encyclopedists have decided
upon an alphabetical classification
over a thematic one.
All subjects are thus on an equal footing,
but it makes the reading very tedious.
That's why an ingenious system of cross-references
has been added.
At the bottom of each article,
the reader is invited to go and read the related subjects.
For example, the article agriculture
can refer to plow or wheat.
Centuries before the Internet,
the encyclopedists have thus invented the concept
of hyperlink.
In addition to the help in reading it provides,
this system allows the authors to circumvent censorship.
Viewed in isolation, the articles are often quite neutral,
but connected together, they can convey
a subversive message.
It's the case with the article nobility
linked to fortune and birth,
or with the article priests linked to cult,
itself linked to idolatry.
The stream of cross-references give the encyclopedists
the freedom censorship denies them.
For the publishers,
the profits had been proportionate to the risks endured,
colossal.
Indisputably, the Encyclopedia was the greatest publishing
undertaking of its time.
And this is only the beginning
because the first edition called Of Paris
is going to generate many others.
Among editions, republications,
reorganizations, and translations,
its development will be very prolific and lucrative.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution,
it is estimated that more than 25,000 copies
of the different versions
are in circulation in western Europe.
Today, although aged more than 250 years,
the Encyclopedia still seems modern.
Its system of cross-references
allows us to navigate between articles,
just like on the Internet,
according to our thinking and wishes.
This system, imagined by Diderot,
has found its prolongation in 2008
at the time of the upload of an open access
digital version of the Encyclopedia.
The cross-references have become real hyperlinks.
But the Internet revolution doesn't stop here.
Today, the worldwide network enables a new way
of gathering knowledge.
Wikipedia is a universal, multilingual encyclopedia
created in 2001.
It is hosted on the servers of a non-profit foundation.
Even though the net encyclopedia was in 2017
the fifth most visited website in the world,
it chose to keep its independence
by not selling any advertising space.
Financially, Wikipedia is entirely dependent
on the Internet users' donations.
In open access for reading as well as for editing,
it is also in need of contributors,
but this time, we are the contributors.
Anyone can log into it and modify its content.
It is thus prone to errors
and to manipulation of information.
Powerful tool of diffusion,
Wikipedia distinguishes itself on a fundamental point,
the wish for neutrality.
Diderot would probably not have settled
for this simple juxtaposition of contents.
He would have made a political work out of it.
But that is another story.
Can a book change the face of the world?
Diderot was convinced that with time,
this work would produce a revolution of minds.
The watch word of the encyclopedists,
encourage the reader to think for himself,
to free himself from the yoke of superstition,
of fanaticism, of intolerance, and, broadly speaking,
of any argument from authority.
But even though the text, simple and clear,
was understandable by everyone,
the Encyclopedia remained a costly set of books,
affordable only to the well off,
impossible today to measure its impact on the world.
Is the Internet the extension of the encyclopedic project?
In a way, yes.
The creation of new encyclopedias
or the free access to those of the past
serves the ideal of knowledge gathering.
But the great accumulation of data
and the immense diversity of collaborators
is in no way a guarantee of quality.
The immediate availability advances
exempts us from searching, thinking by ourselves,
putting into perspective.
From there on, the question is,
is it still a matter of knowledge
or of only information?