The Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier and the History of Heresy

Abstract

The history of heresy is often the history of the campaign for religious tolerance, which cannot be written without reference to the philosophes of the eighteenth century. Among their works the Encyclopédie must figure in the first rank. The number of pages on the subject is fairly limited; but the work as a whole acquired a reputation for fighting institutional authorities, and lent the metaphorical weight of its 28 folio volumes to the fight for reform. The epithet “encyclopédiste” became pejorative during the middle decades of the century, with the function of scholarship subsumed to that of criticism of political and ecclesiastical institutions in the minds of the reading public. By the 1770s a certain revisionism began to occur, illustrated most eloquently by the 58 quarto volumes of the revised Encyclopédie produced by Fortunato De Felice in Yverdon, Switzerland, the subject of the previous chapter in this collection. Just as that enterprise drew to an end in 1780, a new one, with intellectual and commercial aspirations on an unprecedentedly vast scale, was organized by the highly successful publisher, Charles Joseph Panckoucke.¹