On this date in 1423, the English won a great victory over the French in the Hundred Years’ War. I bet you didn’t know that, and I bet you don’t care either. Every day is an anniversary of something or someone, and most of them are infinitely forgettable, and forgotten. We hang on to dates like the Fourth of July because they have holidays attached, but the rest get lost in the smog of history. This is a pity because, when we dip into the vast ocean of unremembered anniversaries, we never know what we may find.
Here’s one for today. Denis Diderot died on July 31, 1784, in Paris. This may not seem like the most interesting news on a Monday morning, more than two centuries after the event. But every time Mr. Google or Wikipedia, or any online search engine answers one of our questions we are benefitting from the genius and determination of Monsieur Diderot.
His idea, which was as simple as it was revolutionary, was to gather together all the knowledge in the world in a systematic way so that anybody could find information about anything. In other words, Diderot invented the encyclopedia.
It was a project on a heroic scale, completed in 1772 and filling twenty-seven large volumes containing seventy-five thousand entries. It was not at all popular among the rich and powerful of the time. The idea of spreading knowledge is never welcomed by people whose position depends on general ignorance. Knowledge really is power. Once ordinary people start thinking for themselves, who knows what might happen? Some of the articles in the Encyclopedia were so radical that the entire book was banned for a time. But now it is treated as an intellectual monument.
When I was growing up encyclopedia salesmen came from door to door. “The encyclopedia man” was a kind of joke. My parents had two different sets in multiple volumes, one for adults and one for children – that is to say, for me, my very own encyclopedia. An encyclopedia in the house was supposed to guarantee that your child would grow up both intelligent and knowledgeable, and obviously it worked in my case. You can still find printed encyclopedias gathering dust in public libraries, but rarely on family bookshelves – the internet has seen to that.
The great virtue of an encyclopedia in book form, and especially a big one like Britannica or Americana, is that one subject leads to another, and another, and another. You may start by looking up Diderot and end up reading about speculative fiction or Italian opera.
Intellectual giants of the past like Goethe, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Freud all admired Diderot, not just for his massive encyclopedia but for his subversive satirical writing. He was a man with a mission, to promote knowledge in all its forms without prejudice, without lies, and without censorship. It's ironic to reflect that if he were to pursue the same passion two and a half centuries later, he would probably be as unpopular now, as he was then.
Copyright: David Bouchier
