Heresy in the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon [1770–1780]

Abstract

What could a reader of eighteenth-century encyclopedias learn about heresy from a perusal of their folio and in-quarto tomes spanning the period 1751–1780? This question brings us squarely into the center of the debate that raged throughout Europe in Protestant and Catholic quarters alike over the representation of religion in Diderot and D’Alembert’s 25-folio volume Encyclopédie (1751–1765). While every stripe of anti-philosophe had denounced the En- cyclopédie’s heretical premises, European perception of the editors’ religiously subversive intentions escalated substantially in 1759 when Pope Clement XIII placed the Encyclopédie on the index. Access to the compilation became difficult in Austria, Italy, and especially Spain, where the ironclad efficiency of Inquisitorial censorship and the fear it instilled in booksellers cut off all but a privileged few from any work published in France.¹ Italy’s lack of central leadership had made it possible for two expurgated folio reprints to surface in Tuscany, where despite the purported autonomy of the Tuscan duchy under Leopold III, the Church was simply too close at hand for the Tuscan publishers Ottaviano Diodati in Lucca and Giuseppe Aubert in Livorno to produce thoroughly unaltered editions.² However, even less is known about the 58-volume, in-quarto “Protestant” response published in the Swiss town of Yverdon-les-Bains, in 1770–1780.³