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The Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and one of the more radical of his group, described his fellow philosophes as “a class of men less concerned with discovering truth than with propagating it.” That was the spirit which animated the great Encyclopédie, the most ambitious publishing enterprise of the century. It appeared in 17 volumes between 1751 and 1765, after checks and delays that would have disheartened anyone less committed than its publisher, André-François le Breton, or its chief editor and presiding genius, Denis Diderot. Its publishing history is rich in incident and in what it reveals of the ambience ...(100 of 156573 words)