Censorship and the Survival of the Encyclopédie

The Encyclopédie survived repeated attempts to suppress it; in 1752, after a scandal involving a contributor's theology thesis, the royal council banned the first two volumes, though work continued. In 1759, after controversy over another book and d'Alembert's article on Geneva, the government revoked the publishing privilege, and Pope Clement XIII placed the work on the Index of Prohibited Books. D'Alembert withdrew, but Diderot persisted, writing thousands of articles himself.

The project survived partly because of Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the royal director of the book trade, who sympathized with the editors and reportedly warned Diderot of a raid and offered to hide his papers. Volumes of plates were allowed, and the last ten text volumes appeared together in 1765 with a false foreign imprint. Diderot later discovered that Le Breton had secretly cut passages to avoid trouble. The story shows how censorship in old-regime France was powerful but inconsistent, often negotiated from inside the government.