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Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, better known as Encyclopédie, was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with supplements, revised editions, translations. It had many writers, known as the Encyclopédistes, it was edited by Denis Diderot and, until 1759, co-edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert. The Encyclopédie is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie's aim was "to change the way people think" and for people to be able to inform themselves and to know things, he and the other contributors advocated for the secularization of learning away from the Jesuits. Diderot wanted to incorporate all of the world's knowledge into the Encyclopédie and hoped that the text could disseminate all this information to the public and future generations, it was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, it was the first general encyclopedia to describe the mechanical arts.
In the first publication, seventeen folio volumes were accompanied by detailed engravings. Volumes were published without the engravings, in order to better reach a wide audience within Europe; the Encyclopédie was conceived as a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia. Ephraim Chambers had first published his Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in two volumes in London in 1728, following several dictionaries of arts and sciences that had emerged in Europe since the late 17th century; this work became quite renowned, four editions were published between 1738 and 1742. An Italian translation appeared between 1747 and 1754. In France a member of the banking family Lambert had started translating Chambers into French, but in 1745 the expatriate Englishman John Mills and German Gottfried Sellius were the first to prepare a French edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia for publication, which they entitled Encyclopédie. Early in 1745 a prospectus for the Encyclopédie was published to attract subscribers to the project.
This four page prospectus was illustrated by Jean-Michel Papillon, accompanied by a plan, stating that the work would be published in five volumes from June 1746 until the end of 1748. The text was translated by Mills and Sellius, it was corrected by an unnamed person, who appears to have been Denis Diderot; the prospectus was cited at some length in several journals. The Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux arts journal was lavish in its praise: "voici deux des plus fortes entreprises de Littérature qu'on ait faites depuis long-temps"; the Mercure Journal in June 1745, printed a 25-page article that praised Mill's role as translator. The Journal reported that Mills had discussed the work with several academics, was zealous about the project, had devoted his fortune to support this enterprise, was the sole owner of the publishing privilege. However, the cooperation fell apart on in 1745. André Le Breton, the publisher commissioned to manage the physical production and sales of the volumes, cheated Mills out of the subscription money, claiming for example that Mills's knowledge of French was inadequate.
In a confrontation Le Breton physically assaulted Mills. Mills took Le Breton to court. Mills returned to England soon after the court's ruling. For his new editor, Le Breton settled on the mathematician Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Malves were the young Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Denis Diderot. Within thirteen months, in August 1747, Gua de Malves was fired for being an ineffective leader. Le Breton hired Diderot and d'Alembert to be the new editors. Diderot would remain as editor for the next twenty-five years, seeing the Encyclopédie through to its completion; as d'Alembert worked on the Encyclopédie, its title expanded. As of 1750, the full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l'Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. d'Alembert de l'Académie royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de Londres.
The title page was amended. The work consisted with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations; the first seventeen volumes were published between 1751 and 1765. Engraver Robert Bénard provided at least 1,800 plates for the work; because of its occasional radical contents, the Encyclopédie caused much controversy in conservative circles, on the initiative of the Parlement of Paris, the French government suspended the encyclopedia's privilège in 1759. Despite the suspension, work continued "in secret," because the project had placed supporters, such as Malesherbes and Madame de Pompadour; the authorities deliberately ignored the continued
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment. Diderot began his education by obtaining a Master of Arts degree in philosophy at a Jesuit college in 1732, he considered working in the church clergy before studying law. When he decided to become a writer in 1734, his father disowned him for not entering one of the learned professions, he lived a bohemian existence for the next decade. He befriended philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1742. Though his work was broad as well as rigorous, it did not bring Diderot riches, he secured none of the posts that were given to needy men of letters. He saw no alternative to selling his library to provide a dowry for his daughter. Empress Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles and commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library, she requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, act as her librarian with a yearly salary.
Between October 1773 and March 1774, the sick Diderot spent a few months at the empress's court in Saint Petersburg. Diderot died of pulmonary thrombosis in Paris on 31 July 1784, was buried in the city's Église Saint-Roch, his heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia. He has several times been denied burial in the Panthéon with other French notables; the French government considered memorializing him in this fashion on the 300th anniversary of his birth, but this did not come to pass. Diderot's literary reputation during his lifetime rested on his plays and his contributions to the Encyclopédie. Denis Diderot was born in Champagne, his parents were Didier Diderot, a cutler, maître coutelier, his wife, Angélique Vigneron. Three of five siblings survived to adulthood, Denise Diderot and their youngest brother Pierre-Didier Diderot, their sister Angélique Diderot. According to Arthur McCandless Wilson, Denis Diderot admired his sister Denise, sometimes referring to her as "a female Socrates".
Diderot began his formal education at a Jesuit college in Langres, earning a Master of Arts degree in philosophy in 1732. He entered the Collège d'Harcourt of the University of Paris, he abandoned the idea of entering the clergy in 1735, instead decided to study at the Paris Law Faculty. His study of law was short-lived however and in the early 1740s, he decided to become a writer and translator; because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence. In 1742, he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he met while watching games of chess and drinking coffee at the Café de la Régence. In 1743, he further alienated his father by marrying a devout Roman Catholic; the match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social standing, poor education, fatherless status, lack of a dowry. She was about three years older than Diderot; the marriage, in October 1743, produced a girl. Her name was Angélique, named after sister.
The death of his sister, a nun, in her convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion. She is assumed to have been the inspiration for his novel about a nun, La Religieuse, in which he depicts a woman, forced to enter a convent where she suffers at the hands of the other nuns in the community. Diderot had affairs with Mlle. Babuti, Madeleine de Puisieux, Sophie Volland and Mme de Maux, his letters to Sophie Volland are known for their candor and are regarded to be "among the literary treasures of the eighteenth century". Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Temple Stanyan's History of Greece. In 1745, he published a translation of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, to which he had added his own "reflections". In 1746, Diderot wrote his first original work: the Philosophical Thoughts. In this book, Diderot argued for a reconciliation of reason with feeling so as to establish harmony. According to Diderot, without feeling there is a detrimental effect on virtue, no possibility of creating sublime work.
However, since feeling without discipline can be destructive, reason is necessary to control feeling. At the time Diderot wrote this book. Hence there is a defense of deism in this book, some arguments against atheism; the book contains criticism of Christianity. In 1747, Diderot wrote The Skeptic's Walk in which a deist, an atheist, a pantheist have a dialogue on the nature of divinity; the deist gives the argument from design. The atheist says that the universe is better explained by physics, chemistry and motion; the pantheist says that the cosmic unity of mind and matter, which are co-eternal and comprise the universe, is God. This work remained unpublished till 1830; the local police—warned by the priests of another attack on Christianity—either seized the manuscript, or authorities forced Diderot give an undertaking that he would no
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish-French film actress, director and singer. She rose to prominence as French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's muse in the 1960s, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier, A Woman Is a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville. For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1972, Karina set up a production company for her directorial debut, Vivre ensemble, which screened in the Critics’ Week lineup at the 26th Cannes Film Festival, she directed the French-Canadian film Victoria. In addition to her work in cinema, she has worked as a singer, has written several novels in French. Karina is considered an icon of 1960s cinema; the New York Times has described her as "one of the screen’s great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave." Karina's mother was a dress shop owner and her father left the family a year after she was born. She lived with her maternal grandparents for three years.
She spent the next four years in foster care before returning to live with her mother. She has described her childhood as "terribly wanting to be loved", as a child she made numerous attempts to run away from home, she began her career in Denmark, where she sang in cabarets and worked as a model playing in commercials. At age 14, she appeared in a Danish short film by Ib Schmedes. In 1958, after a row with her mother, she hitchhiked to Paris. Karina was 17 when she arrived in Paris unable to speak French, she lived on the streets. One day while sitting at the café Les Deux Magots she was approached by a woman from an advertisement agency who asked her to do some photos, she began to work as a model and became successful, posing for several magazines, including Elle, meeting Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel. Karina has said that Chanel helped her devise Anna Karina. Jean-Luc Godard a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, first saw Karina in a series of Palmolive ads in which she posed in bathtubs, he was casting his debut feature film and offered her a small part in it, but she refused when he mentioned that there would be a nude scene.
When Godard questioned her refusal, mentioning her apparent nudity in the Palmolive ads, she is said to have replied, "Are you mad? I was wearing a bathing suit in those ads—the soapsuds went up to my neck, it was in your mind that I was undressed."In the end, the character Godard reserved for Karina did not appear in the film. The next year, Godard offered her a role in Le Petit Soldat. Karina still under 21, had to persuade her estranged mother to sign the contract for her. Karina won the Best Actress Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961 for her performance as Angela in A Woman Is a Woman, her career continued to flourish thereafter, as she appeared in dozens of films through the 1960s, including Godard's Bande à part, The Nun, directed by Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti's The Stranger, the George Cukor/Joseph Strick collaboration Justine, Tony Richardson's Laughter in the Dark. She continued to work into the 1970s, with roles in Christian de Chalonge's The Wedding Ring, Andre Delvaux's Rendezvous at Bray, The Salzburg Connection, Franco Brusati's Bread and Chocolate.
In 1972, she set up a production company, for her directorial debut, Vivre ensemble, in which she acted. The film screened in the Critics’ Week lineup at the 26th Cannes Film Festival. In 1976, she starred in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette, she wrote and acted in Last Song and has since appeared in Haut, Fragile, directed by Jacques Rivette, sung in The Truth About Charlie, a remake of the 1963 film Charade. In 2008, Karina wrote and starred in Victoria, a musical road movie filmed in Montreal and Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean. Richard Kuipers praised it in Variety as "a pleasant gambol through the backwoods of Quebec." Karina has maintained a singing career. At the end of the 1960s, she scored a major hit with "Sous le soleil exactement" and "Roller Girl" by Serge Gainsbourg. Both songs are from the TV musical comedy Anna, by the film director Pierre Koralnik, in which she sings seven songs alongside Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Brialy. Karina subsequently recorded an album, Une histoire d'amour, with Philippe Katerine, followed by a concert tour.
In 2005, she released a collection of songs sung in movies. Karina has written four novels: Vivre ensemble, Golden City, On n'achète pas le soleil, Jusqu'au bout du hasard. In 1961, after working together on Le Petit Soldat and Godard were married. During their marriage, they made seven feature films together. A writer for Filmmaker magazine called their work "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema." Despite the critical success, their relationship behind the scenes has been described as tumultuous. The couple divorced in 1965. Karina has said, she described the relationship in an interview with W Magazine:It was all exciting from the beginning. Of course we have a great love story and all that, but we were so d
Letter on the Blind
In Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can see, Denis Diderot takes on the question of visual perception, a subject that, at the time, experienced a resurgence of interest due to the success of medical procedures that allowed surgeons to operate on cataracts and certain cases of blindness from birth. Speculations were numerous upon what the nature and use of vision was, how much perception and experience allow individuals to identify forms in space, to perceive distances and to measure volumes, or to distinguish a realistic work of art from reality. According to Diderot’s essay, a blind person, able to see for the first time does not understand what he sees, he must spend some amount of time establishing rapports between his experience of forms and distances and the images that were thereafter apparent to him by sight. In the work Diderot revealed his atheist stance, revolutionary at the time, he was imprisoned for that, but protection of people associated with the Encyclopedia led to his liberation after few months.
L'Aveugle et le philosophe, ou Comment la cécité fait penser, ed. Marion Chottin Kate E. Tunstall and Enlightenment. An Essay. With a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind Michael Kessler, "A Puzzle Concerning Diderot’s Presentation of Saunderson’s Palpable Arithmetic," Diderot Studies, 1981, n° 20, pp. 159–173. Andrew Curran, "Diderot’s Revisionism: Enlightenment and Blindness in the Lettre sur les aveugles," Diderot Studies, 2000, n° 28, pp. 75–93. John Pedersen, "La Complicité du lecteur dans l’œuvre de Diderot à propos de la Lettre sur les aveugles," Actes du 6ème Congrès des Romanistes Scandinaves, Upsal, 11-15 août 1975, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977, pp. 205–10. Marie-Hélène Chabut, "La Lettre sur les aveugles: l’écriture comme écart," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 1992, n° 304, pp. 1245–49. Gerhardt Stenger, "La Théorie de la connaissance dans la Lettre sur les aveugles," Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, Apr 1999, n° 26, pp. 99–111. Mary Byrd Kelly, "Saying by Implicature: The Two Voices of Diderot in La Lettre sur les aveugles," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1983, n° 12, pp. 231–241.
M. L. Perkins, "The Crisis of Sensationalism in Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 1978, n° 174, pp. 167–88. Christine M. Singh, "The Lettre sur les aveugles: Its Debt to Lucretius," Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, Univ. of Exeter, 1975, pp. 233–42. Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient, audio version
Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette was a French film director and film critic most associated with the French New Wave and the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He made twenty-nine films, including L'amour fou, Out 1, Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse, his work is noted for its improvisation, loose narratives, lengthy running times. Inspired by Jean Cocteau to become a filmmaker, Rivette shot his first short film at age twenty, he moved to Paris to pursue his career, frequenting Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française and other ciné-clubs. Rivette began writing film criticism, was hired by André Bazin for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953. In his criticism, he expressed an admiration for American films – those of genre directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray – and was critical of mainstream French cinema. Rivette's articles, admired by his peers, were considered the magazine's best and most aggressive writings his 1961 article "On Abjection" and his influential series of interviews with film directors co-written with Truffaut.
He continued making short films, including Le Coup de Berger, cited as the first New Wave film. Truffaut credited Rivette with developing the movement. Although he was the first New Wave director to begin work on a feature film, Paris Belongs to Us was not released until 1961, by which time Chabrol and Godard released their own first features and popularised the movement worldwide. Rivette became editor of Cahiers du Cinéma during the early 1960s and publicly fought French censorship of his second feature film, The Nun, he re-evaluated his career, developing a unique cinematic style with L'amour fou. Influenced by the political turmoil of May 68, improvisational theatre and an in-depth interview with filmmaker Jean Renoir, Rivette began working with large groups of actors on character development and allowing events to unfold on camera; this technique led to the thirteen-hour Out 1 which, although screened, is considered a Holy Grail of cinephiles. His films of the 1970s, such as Celine and Julie Go Boating incorporated fantasy and were better-regarded.
After attempting to make four consecutive films, Rivette had a nervous breakdown and his career slowed for several years. During the early 1980s, he began a business partnership with producer Martine Marignac, who produced all his subsequent films. Rivette's output increased from on, his film La Belle Noiseuse received international praise, he retired after completing Around a Small Mountain, it was revealed three years that he had Alzheimer's disease. Private about his personal life, Rivette was married to photographer and screenwriter Marilù Parolini during the early 1960s and married Véronique Manniez. Jacques Pierre Louis Rivette was born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France, to André Rivette and Andrée Amiard, into a family "where everyone is a pharmacist". According to childhood friend André Ruellan, Rivette's father was a skilled painter, his younger sister said that their home in Rouen was next to a cinema theatre, where she remembered watching Pathé Baby's Felix le Chat cartoons with Rivette and their grandparents.
Rivette, educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, said that he studied literature at the university "just to keep myself occupied". Inspired by Jean Cocteau's book about the filming of Beauty and the Beast, Rivette decided to pursue filmmaking and began frequenting ciné-clubs. In 1948, he shot Aux Quatre Coins, in Rouen's Côte Sainte-Catherine section; the following year, he moved to Paris with friend, Francis Bouchet, because "if you wanted to make films it was the only way". On the day of his arrival, he met future collaborator Jean Gruault, who invited him to see Les dames du Bois de Boulogne at the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. Éric Rohmer, whose film criticism Rivette admired, gave a talk at the screening. Although Rivette submitted his film to the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques because it "was the kind of thing that would have pleased my parents", he was not accepted by the school, he took courses at the Sorbonne, but began frequenting screenings at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française with Bouchet instead of attending classes.
At the Cinémathèque, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Bouchet were immersed in films from the silent and early "talkie" eras that they were unfamiliar with. He and this group of young cinephiles became acquainted as they customarily sat in the Cinématographique's front row for screenings. Rivette was active in post-screening debates, Rohmer said that in film-quiz competitions at the Studio Parnasse he was "unbeatable". Rivette credited Langlois's screenings and lectures for helping him persevere during his early impoverishment in Paris: "A word from you saved me and opened the doors of the temple". Unlike his contemporaries, Rivette attended screenings at the Cinémathèque well into the 1970s, he and his friends attended screenings at the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, run by Rohmer. Although Rivette began to write film criticism in 1950 for the Gazette du Cinéma, founded by Rohmer with Bouchet as his assistant, the magazine ceased publication after five issues.
That year he made his
Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de Croismare
Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de Croismare, Marquis of Lasson, was a French dilettante known for having inspired The Nun to Denis Diderot. He was depicted as "M. le Marquis de Roquemaure" by Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani, in his Dialogues sur les commerce des blés. Croismare was descended from an old noble family of Normandy, well established at the royal court, the son of François-Nicolas, Lord of Botoirs and La Plesse, Elizabeth de Croismare, heir to the branch of the lords of La Pinelière and Lasson, a descendant of Nicolas Croixmare. In his youth, the Marquis served as a captain in the infantry regiment of the King, where his brother Louis-Eugene has long been lieutenant-colonel. Uninterested in securing the higher ranks, he left the service after receiving the cross of St. Louis; the archetype of the amicable Frenchman, the marquis of Croismare earned the nickname "The Philosopher" for giving up ambition early in life. Alternatively devout, strong-minded or indifferent, he fell in love with a Protestant girl of his countryside, Suzanne Davy de La Pailleterie.
His fervor for the Catholic religion was such. Her conversion, effected on 30 October 1734 at Cagny, is the only one he achieved. After his marriage, on 3 August 1735, she gave him a daughter. Having lost her early, he nearly died of grief. After his wife's death, he left his land of Lasson, for Paris. Soon after, he was sought after by the best company, he had left his devotion behind in Normandy, the company of Fontenelle, Mirabaud, D'Alembert, Diderot inspired him to keep things this way. In 1759, his business recalled him in Normandy for a few months. Instead, he remained there for nearly eight years. Keen to lure him back to the capital and his friends plotted a ruse inspired by the true story of a nun named Marguerite Delamarre who had appealed her vows: they pretended that nun had escaped the convent and was addressing the Marquis to seek his help; the ploy to bring the Marquis back to Paris failed when, instead of returning to Paris, the Marquis offered asylum to the imaginary nun in his home in Normandy.
French literature gained one of its most poignant novels. Croismare returned to Paris in 1767, having lost none of his gaiety and grace, which held true until company where his death. Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, t. 10, Paris, Éd. Maurice Tourneux, Garnier Frères, 1879, p. 46-50
