You are looking at 1-20 of 60 entries
A. R. J. Turgot
(1727–81)French politician and economist. A follower of the physiocrats, Turgot tried to free the grain trade in France from internal tariffs during his brief career as Louis XVI's finance minister ...
Abraham-Joseph de Chaumeix
(c. 1730–1790).Author of Préjugés légitimes contre l'Encyclopédie (1758–9), a voluminous attack on the Encyclopédie and Helvétius's De l'esprit.
Baron d'Holbach Paul Henri
(1723–89)German-born French intellectual. Paul Heinrich Dietrich took the name and French nationality of his maternal uncle, who had made a fortune in Paris. For many years Holbach's salon in Paris ...
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
(1657–1757)French man of letters, polymath and philosopher. Educated by Jesuits, he settled in Paris, where from 1699 he was permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and as such a considerable ...
Book Trade
[see also Libraries; Literacy; Manuscripts; Printing in France until 1600]1. An Unchanging RegimeThe organization of the French book industry changed little between the age of Gutenberg and the ...
British, Irish, and American Influences
1. Before 1700The English crown held sway over much of what is now France for long periods in the Middle Ages. After the Norman Conquest, however, French was the ...
Brittany
Former duchy and province of north-western France on the Armorican peninsula, coextensive with modern French Departments of Finistére, Côte d'Armor, Morbihan, Ille-et-Vilaine, and Loire-Atlantique ...
César Chesneau Du Marsais, sieur
(1676–1756).He wrote on religious and philosophical topics, but is remembered as a grammarian, author of many articles on language in the Encyclopédie and of the posthumous Logique et principes ...
Charles-Georges Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingey
(1727–1800).Inspecteur Général of a salt‐works and contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote drames, the most famous being L'Honnête Criminel (1767), a protest against the position of Protestants in ...
Charles-Joseph Panckoucke
(1736–98) French publisher and bookseller.Beginning his career in Lille, where his father was a printer and publisher, he moved to Paris in 1762, soon becoming the wealthiest and most ...
Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes
(1721–1794), French administrator, royal minister, and Louis XVI's lawyer during the Revolution. Born into an important noble family of jurists who served in the parlement of Paris, Malesherbes was ...
cities
A large, densely populated urban settlement, larger than a town, which can include two or more independent administrative districts within it and usually has suburbs.
Clandestine Manuscripts
Publication during the ancien régime was not free; censorship was constant, though often ineffective, and the penalties serious. In consequence a thriving trade in all sorts of clandestine literature ...
Claude Buffier
(1661–1737)French Jesuit whose aim was to show how experience requires interpretation in terms of an external world, thereby countering the sceptical tendencies inherent in the philosophies of ...
Comte de Buffon
(1707–1788) French naturalistThe son of wealthy Burgundian landowners, Buffon was born in Montbard; he studied law at Dijon and medicine at Angers. After traveling in Italy and England, he inherited ...
currency
1 Any kind of money that is in circulation in an economy.2 Anything that functions as a medium of exchange, including coins, banknotes, cheques, bills of exchange, promissory notes. etc.3 The money ...
Denis Diderot
(1713–84),French philosopher and man of letters; a leading member of the Enlightenment, and from 1746 editor of the Encyclopédie. His works demonstrated close links with English literature: he ...
dictionaries
The origins of the English dictionary are found in the late 16th cent. when people became aware of the two levels of English (‘learned’, ‘literary’, ‘inkhorn’, distinct from ‘spoken’, ‘popular’) to ...
Encyclopaedia Britannica
It was first issued by a ‘Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’ in numbers (1768–71), edited by William Smellie, a printer, afterwards secretary of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries. It was a ...
Encyclopaedists
The contributors to the French Encyclopédie (28 vols., 1751–72), edited by D. Diderot and (initially) J. Le R. D'Alembert. The Encyclopédie sets out to review the full extent of human achievement in ...
