Encyclopedias date back to antiquity in the West, at least to the Historia naturalis (AD 77) of Pliny the Elder. The early enterprises down through the Middle Ages sought more than the mere codification of knowledge. The Speculum Majus (1244) of Vincent de Beauvais, for example, tried to show not only how the world is, but how it might be made better. His encyclopedia was divided into three parts entitled Nature, Instruction and History. Nature was organized according to the order of the six days of creation.

But the encyclopedia, as we recognize it today, took shape in the 18^th century and at its origin was the work of one man, the Scottish scholar Ephraim Chambers, who published his prestigious Cyclopaedia in 2 volumes in 1728. Chambers used a coherent, if incomplete, taxonomy and endeavoured to connect the scattered articles by a system of references and to consider "the several matters, not only in themselves, but relatively, or as they respect each other." Chambers established a sound bibliographic practice that has been a feature of encyclopedias ever since.

The translation of Chambers’s work into French inspired the singular editorial adventure of the Enlightenment, l’ Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, a work that began as a simple translation and ended up as an attempt to incarnate all the power of knowledge, a virtual "war machine" in the battle against ignorance and superstition. L’ Encyclopédie was the very definition of the Enlightenment and remains an emblem of French culture.

Making of Diderot's l’ Encyclopédie

The first stirrings of l’ Encyclopédie occurred in 1745 when the bookseller André-François Le Breton formed a plan to bring out a French translation of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. He engaged the mathematician d' Alembert and the philosopher/writer Denis Diderot, who became joint editors in 1747.

Diderot by temperament was a polymath and he saw the potential of what Chambers had done. What could be more rewarding, as well as useful, to present the new mass of knowledge and discovery of the great age of French science and letters – the epoch of Descartes, Racine and Bossuet? What an opportunity for the enemies of prejudice, ignorance and superstition to create a fighting force? Though government and church were deeply suspicious of the enterprise from the start, Diderot’s account of the potential of the project even dazzled the old Chancellor of France himself, d’ Aguessau.

A year or two later, Diderot drew up a prospectus, in which he showed plans to retain the best part of Chambers. He and d' Alembert then had to decide upon some overall system of classification to serve both as a shaping principle and as a means for the retrieval of information. They were influenced here by Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, which attempted the almost impossible task of organizing the natural world. For an even vaster scope, the editors needed a "tree of knowledge." Just such a tree existed in the work of Francis Bacon, based on human faculties; that is, on the sources of knowledge: memory, reason, and imagination. These would correspond to the three great branches of knowledge: History (that is, Natural history, for history as we know it was not then a subject for serious study), Philosophy, and Poetry. This system was set out by Diderot in an elaborate "Illustrated System of Human Knowledge." The tree differed from Bacon’s notably in treating religion as a mere branch of philosophy.

L’ Encyclopédie would serve all the purposes of a library for a professional man on any subject apart from his own. As a totality it should become a "sanctuary" where "men’s knowledge shall be secure from time and revolutions." It should be more than a repository but also an engine of research, a stimulus to invention and it should promote fresh discoveries and "excite genius to open untrodden paths for itself, treating as their stepping-off place the point where great men have stopped."

On the surface, an alphabetical arrangement of entries seems to violate the notion of a "tree of knowledge" but this deficiency would be overcome by an elaborate system of cross-references, really the first innovation in what today we mundanely call information management.

To establish the authority of the text, Diderot would ask the greatest minds of his time to participate. He asked his then friend Rousseau to write on music, Dauberton on natural history and numerous government officials to describe technical matters such as naval tactics, engineering, finance. He asked the composer Cahusac to write on ballet and opera, César du Marsais on grammar. Theology was a trickier matter because of the power of the censors and the anti-religious proclivities of the philosophes. Some of the first entries, such as that by abbé Mallet on "Arche de Noé," disguised their true feelings with satire, in this case by ridiculing the discussion about the exact arrangement of the animals on the ark. D' Alembert wrote on mathematics and physics and Diderot on almost everything, including in the first volume "Arabes," "Argent," and "Acier." From his social background Diderot brought his special interest in the Arts (that is, crafts and industry) to l’ Encyclopédie, a significant fact since most educated persons of the time considered such matters below their dignity. For Diderot, the son of a cutler, this was considered a matter of justice. He visited workshops, interviewed craftsmen, studied machines and drawings. To help illustrate complex processes, such as steel making, he commissioned magnificent engravings to accompany the entries.

In 1749 Diderot’s book Pensées philosophiques was burned by the public hangman. That year the French government rounded up anti-government propagandists, atheists, and abusers of the King, among them Diderot, who was carried off by a lettre de cachet. He was interned at Vincennes where he suffered greatly from confinement. He offered an abject submission and after promising to recant, he was released. He resumed work on l’ Encyclopédie in November 1749, seeing at once how much editing he had to do on the material that had accumulated. Some of this work was needed to "improve" the entries by adding, for example, to the entry "Ame" a subtle ridicule of the whole discussion of the exact location of the soul. Diderot early on faced the challenge of description, realizing the gaps in language and the impossibility of clear explanation of complex processes. On the topic of "Bas" (stockings) he wrote that "the interdependence of the machine’s various parts would seem to require one to talk about them and illustrate them, all at the same time; and that is impossible." We can only assume that he would have welcomed current technologies of animation and multimedia

The first volume appeared in June 1751. On its title page was this epigraph from Horace:

"Tantum series juncturaque pollet/Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris!" ("What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection.")

D' Alembert’s "Preliminary Discourse" in Volume I explained how the work is to function as an encyclopedia and as a dictionary. As an encyclopedia, the aim was to display

human knowledge, not in the order in which it happens, but from the point of view of an eagle, which he called "encyclopaedic order." This survey of the vast labyrinth of knowledge "distinguishes the general branches of human knowledge and points which separate or unite them, and even sometimes glimpse the secret routes which connect them." His ideas were based on Francis Bacon’s "tree of knowledge" but d' Alembert warned the reader not to expect too much of any system of classification.

The general reader would encounter the work in "dictionary order" (that is, in alphabetical order by headword). The reader would glimpse the inner order with a system of cross references that would hime back down the tree of knowledge. Central to this system was d' Alembert’s vision of the unity of truth and the rationalist mindset of the Enlightenment in which knowledge is an uninterrupted series, or "great chain," of propositions. As d' Alembert put it, "The universe, for someone who was able to take it in as a whole, from a single standpoint, would appear as a unitary fact and a single great truth."

The editors of l’ Encyclopédie were very slighting in their attitude towards human history, which was relegated to a small fraction of the Arts of Memory and not regarded as a serious intellectual description. Nor were there biographical entries. The philosophes were determined to focus on ideas and principles and to avoid personal histories, which would only served to glorify soldiers, bishops and Kings.

Given the power of the censor, there was a need not to give mortal offence. Even the atheist d' Alembert pretended to pay pious tribute to God. The challenge of outwitting the censors gives l’ Encyclopédie much of its character: ridiculing pagan rituals and by analogy their Christian counterparts, focussing on the bizarre aspects of religion, using imaginary interlocutors – for example a visitor from China, to raise objections to an article of faith. Diderot’s entry "Adorer" deals in the same breath with the worship of god and the worship of one’s mistress. The most underhanded strategy was the sly system of cross-references, which led the reader to entries that would undermine the current article.

When Volume II appeared in 1752, a controversy erupted over the entry "Certitude" by abbé de Prades and the King was induced by the Church to ban the first two volumes in exchange for prayers to save his mortally ill daughter Henriette. By Volume III the success so far had encouraged other famous lumières, such as Montesquieu, to contribute.

Volume V, which appeared in November 1755, included the entry "Encyclopédie" by Diderot himself. He argued that this above all was the exact time in human history to undertake such a project, with reason in the ascendance, philosophy advancing, men shaking the yokes of authority and custom. L’ Encyclopédie must be more than a repository of simple facts. It must employ numerous contributors, men of letters linked by general interests of mankind, since no one person or group possesses all knowledge. It must draw on the skills of artists as well as scholars.

On the topic of arrangement, Diderot notes that the word "encyclopédie" itself implies that it begins and ends somewhere, or nowhere. Since the universe can be described from an infinity of different points of view, why then not place Man at the centre of all things and then begin and end with him. The question of what space should be allotted to individual articles he declared unanswerable, since scholars themselves make the most wildly diverse claims as to the scope of their work, a situation that has certainly not changed in our time.

The second question Diderot dealt with was how to distribute material along the branches of their topic area. The encyclopaedic order would function globally, with the dictionary arrangement providing local detail and cross-references functioning as "itineraries" between the two worlds. In an approach clearly philosophical, and not rhetorical, Diderot defined an article as a single argument which starts with an individual phenomenon, ascends to less specific knowledge and then to a broader plane, until one arrives at the knowledge of axioms, "for in any sphere of knowledge, one has not covered all the ground until one has arrived at a principle which one can neither prove, define, classify obscure or deny without losing part of the daylight already won and taking a step backwards into the shadows." Diderot boldly criticized his own work as failing on most of the accounts.

In this entry, Diderot gives away the devious game he had been playing with the cross-references, giving the work an "inner force and a secret efficiency."

Voltaire was an early admirer of l’ Encyclopédie. He believed that it could play an important role in transmitting knowledge to posterity. In Volume IV his entries on "Eloquence," "Elegance," "Ésprit" and "Littérature" appeared. These were belles lettres type of entries and Voltaire forced the editors to face up to the weakness of their work. D' Alembert admitted that it was "a monument to what we wanted, and were not able to achieve." He stuck out his neck and asked Voltaire to write an entry on Geneva. Voltaire himself hatched a plan for a Swiss pastor, Polier de Bottens, to write entries espousing Voltaire’s own religious views. In October 1757 Volume VII appeared with Voltaire’s "Geneva," a diatribe against Swiss attitudes and the "atrocious soul" of Calvin. The entry, and d' Alembert’s recklessness caused a furore and placed Diderot in a difficult position. On March 8, 1759 l’ Encyclopédie was suppressed by royal decree.

Some years later, Voltaire recounted a story that a servant at court had told him. Louis XV was dining at the Petit Trianon when the conversation turned to gunpowder. The Duc de Nivernois declared that it was absurd that people killed partridges or people without having the least understanding of the means they were doing it with. "Alas it is the same with everything in the world," replied Mme de Pompadour," who added that she had not the least knowledge of how her stockings were made. "It is a pity" said another "that your majesty has confiscated our encyclopedias. We would soon have found the answers there." The King defended the confiscation. He had been told that it was a danger to the whole regime. He sent three footmen to fetch the volumes, which were an instant success in explaining the formula for gunpowder and in charming Mme Pompadour with Diderot’s account of how her stocking were made. The rest of the party fell on the volumes, said Voltaire, "like the daughters of Lycomedes on Ulysses’ jewels."

Some time in 1764 Diderot went to the printer to consult his own article on Sarrasins. To his horror he found the entry mutilated. On examination he found many others similarly defaced. The printer Le Breton, out of cowardice and prudence, had decided to emasculate l’ Encyclopédie behind Diderot’s back and had destroyed the manuscripts so that the damage could not be repaired.

Of course the story of Diderot and l' Encyclopédie is inspiring to anyone undertaking a similar project. L' Encyclopédie has taken on a kind of mythical stature as the theory that the Revolution was the more or less direct work of the philosophes took a long time to die. Reflecting on my own experience, when I became editor in chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia in 1980, both the ideas that a work of global knowledge could change the world and that information could be arranged according to a rational system were still alive. Certainly, the public’s expectations of what an encyclopedia should be had not changed. In the mind of the general public, if not of the scholarly community, this was a worthy enterprise.

The tree of Saint Bonaventure, 1217-18, offers a contemplation of the elements of life.

Well-known Edmonton publisher and nationalist Mel Hurtig had tried to procure funding for a Canadian encyclopedia for many years, without success, until Premier Peter Lougheed took an interest and agreed to fund the research and development as part of the celebrations of Alberta's 75th anniversary of provincehood.

Whatever its practical uses might be, Hurtig’s motives for producing an encyclopedia were not so unlike the motives of the philosophes, for he wanted a work of knowledge that would somehow change the world, that would celebrate accomplishment, that would combat ignorance. By making Canadians more aware of ourselves, it would perhaps preserve us. His argument was buttressed by one of those studies showing how ignorant Canadian students are of their own country that periodically causes such hand wringing among educators. There had not been an encyclopedia produced in Canada since 1957, and that had been published by the American company Grolier.

I had had no experience in such an undertaking but soon saw the enormous expectations placed on any encyclopedia. There was, first of all, that idea that it could somehow contribute to nationhood, that it might finally help define the indefinable Canadian identity, that it would confirm that oil-rich Alberta cared about its role in Canada. Secondly, there is the idea buried in that word encyclopedia. But the idea of encompassing a full circle of human knowledge was a dubious ambition, even in Medieval times when Vincent de Beauvais set down his Speculum majus. Was it ever possible to describe every place, every idea, every person, every bird, every flower within the confines of a single printed work? Needless to say, the past 300 or 400 years have added beyond measure to what is known of the universe, of the natural world, of history and prehistory; the number of places in Canada alone probably outnumber the significant places in Europe in Vincent's time; the number of people has grown geometrically. I emphasize this point because though most people know that the body of human knowledge is immense, many of them still cling to the belief that d’Alembert expressed, that a unity of knowledge can somehow be contained, if not in an encyclopedia, then perhaps today by the World Wide Web.

There is yet another expectation for an encyclopedia as well: that an encyclopedia remain a beacon of authority not only in a sea of misinformation but amid the scattered debris left by postmodernist deconstruction. In any event, our encyclopedia has been quoted in the House of Commons Hansard, in more than one Supreme Court Decision and even by the present premier of Quebec during the controversy over Canada's role in the Quebec Conference during World War Two. The way to establish authority, now as in Diderot’s day, is to hire experts to write the entries, and we have attracted some 4000 contributors to the task.

What our encyclopedia has helped to reveal, at least to the editors, is that the definition of what we know, or what an expert knows, can be very complex. While an editor of an encyclopedia is expected to know a little about a great many things, Isaiah Berlin’s fox, a great many people know one big thing. Over the years some of these people have written to me, pointing out errors of fact or contesting points of interpretation. My favourite letters are from those who write from their direct experience, for example, the man who wrote to tell me that the experts who describe the route of the explorer Samuel Hearne have much of it wrong since he himself has taken a canoe and followed that route. I too had my problem with would-be censors, at first in the Alberta government and then by religious groups. I have had religious fundamentalists camped by my office and creationists attempt to discredit me. I was called a communist by the Alberta Report and an anti-business ideologue by the Globe Report on Business. A group of scholars at Laval prepared a secret report on the treatment of Quebec. But it has been in their obsession with place that Canadians have shown their most powerful view of Canada, as many critics across the country scoured the encyclopedia with the sole aim of proving that it was unfair to their locality.

These concerns about the authority of the text take us back to the central creative act of making an encyclopedia, the day-to-day decisions on what topics should be included, what should be left out, and how the isolated topics relate to one another.