Diderot’s Battle against Books : Books as Objects during the Enlightenment and Revolution

Diderot against books ?The idea may seem surprising, considering the popular assumption that the Enlightenment, in which Diderot played a leading role, had always advocated education for all, and education necessarily required literacy and access to books.This optimistic vision reflects the desire of our contemporaries to see a linear progression from the eighteenth century to the Revolution and ultimately to the Republican values of present-day France.In fact, Diderot and his fellow philosophes did not set out to democratize knowledge.Instead, the rise of literacy during their lifetime alarmed them ; they denounced the quantity of books in circulation and the populace's avidity for them.It was only in the last years of the eighteenth century that reformers such as Benjamin Franklin and the marquis de Condorcet saw access to books as a desirable goal for a society. 2In what ways was Diderot against books ?Despite his current reputation as a precursor to the Revolution, he described ways of reading, interpreting, and collecting books that depended on a sharp distinction between the savants (such as himself) and ordinary readers.In his view, only a few people deserved to have books, and only a few books deserved to be printed.In regard to his personal attitude towards books as objects, we can see much ambivalence in his relationship to his own publishers.Despite his feat of producing the massive Encyclopédie and despite his defense of libraires 1 in his Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie, we can still see traces of distrust against the act of publishing.Finally, in his persona of collector, he put into practice the idea that books were meant not to be idolized but to be circulated.In all of the areas above, we can see that the essential distinction that Diderot makes is between, on the one hand, books as objects that people want to possess for their monetary value or their social prestige, and, on the other hand, books as useful objects or tools that allow experts to produce more books.Diderot's Battle against Books : Books as Objects during the Enlightenment an...

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