Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
The title page of the Encyclopédie
Author(s)	Numerous contributors, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Country	France
Language	French
Subject(s)	General
Genre(s)	Reference encyclopedia
Publisher	André le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand, and Antoine-Claude Briasson
Publication date	1751–72

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts) was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. As of 1750, the full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l'Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. d'Alembert de l'Académie royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de Londres. (Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by a Company of Men of Letters, arranged by M. Diderot of the Academy of Sciences and Belles-lettres of Prussia: as to the Mathematical Portion, arranged by M. d'Alembert of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, to the Academy of Sciences in Prussia and to the Royal Society of London.) The title page was amended as D'Alembert acquired more titles.

The Encyclopédie was an innovative encyclopedia in several respects. Among other things, it was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to lavish attention on the mechanical arts. Still, the Encyclopédie is famous above all for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie's aim was "to change the way people think."^[1] He wanted to incorporate all of the world's knowledge into the Encyclopédie and hoped that the text can disseminate all this information to the public and to future generations.^[2]

Origins[link]

The Encyclopédie was originally conceived as a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728).^[3] In 1743, the translation was entrusted by the Parisian book publisher André Le Breton to John Mills, an English resident in France. In May 1745, Le Breton announced the work as available for sale, but to his dismay, Mills had not done the work he was commissioned to do; in fact, he could barely read and write French and did not even own a copy of Cyclopaedia. Furious at having been swindled, Le Breton beat Mills with a cane. Mills sued for assault, but Le Breton was acquitted in court as being justified.^[4] For his new editor, Le Breton settled on the mathematician Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Malves were the young Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis Diderot. Within thirteen months, in August 1747, Gua de Malves was fired for being an ineffective leader. Le Breton then hired Diderot and Jean d'Alembert to be the new editors.^[5] Diderot would remain editor for the next twenty-five years, seeing the Encyclopédie through its completion.^[6]

Fig.2: Extract from the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth — surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the Enlightenment). Two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth. (entire frontispiece)

Publication[link]

The work comprised 28 volumes, with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations. The first seventeen volumes were published between 1751 and 1765; eleven volumes of plates were finished by 1772. Because of its occasional radical contents (see "Contents" below), the French government suspended the encyclopedia's privilège in 1759,^[7] but because it had many highly placed supporters, notably Malesherbes and Madame de Pompadour, work continued "in secret." In truth, secular authorities did not want to disrupt the commercial enterprise, which employed hundreds of people. To appease the church and other enemies of the project, the authorities had officially banned the enterprise, but they turned a blind eye to its continued existence.

In 1775, Charles Joseph Panckoucke obtained the rights to reissue the work. He issued five volumes of supplementary material and a two-volume index from 1776 to 1780. Some scholars include these seven "extra" volumes as part of the first full issue of the Encyclopédie, for a total of 35 volumes, although they were not written or edited by the original authors.

From 1782 to 1832, Panckoucke and his successors published an expanded edition of the work in some 166 volumes as the Encyclopédie méthodique. That work, enormous for its time, occupied a thousand workers in production and 2,250 contributors.

Contributors[link]

Since the objective of the editors of the Encyclopédie was to gather all the knowledge in the world, Diderot and D'Alembert knew they would need various contributors to help them with their project. ^[8] Many of the most noted figures of the French Enlightenment contributed to the Encyclopédie, including Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.^[9] The most prolific contributor was Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote 17,266 articles, or about eight per day, between 1759 and 1765. The publication became a place where these contributors can share their ideas and interests.

Still, as Frank Kafker has argued, the Encyclopedists were not a unified group^[10]:

... despite their reputation, [the Encyclopedists] were not a close-knit group of radicals intent on subverting the Old Regime in France. Instead they were a disparate group of men of letters, physicians, scientists, craftsmen and scholars ... even the small minority who were persecuted for writing articles belittling what they viewed as unreasonable customs—thus weakening the might of the Catholic Church and undermining that of the monarchy—did not envision that their ideas would encourage a revolution.

Following is a list of notable contributors with their area of contribution (for a more detailed list, see Encyclopédistes):

• Jean Le Rond d'Alembert — editor; science (especially mathematics), contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion, among others
• André Le Breton — chief publisher; article on printer's ink
• Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton — natural history
• Denis Diderot — chief editor; economics, mechanical arts, philosophy, politics, religion, among others
• Baron d'Holbach — science (chemistry, mineralogy), politics, religion, among others
• Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt — economics, literature, medicine, politics, bookbinding, among others
• Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle - mathematics
• Montesquieu — part of the article "Goût" ("Taste")
• François Quesnay — articles on tax farmers and grain
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — music, political theory
• Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune — economics, etymology, philosophy, physics
• Voltaire — history, literature, philosophy

Contents[link]

The introduction to the Encyclopédie, D'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse", is considered an important exposition of Enlightenment ideals.

Fig. 3: "Figurative system of human knowledge", the structure that the Encyclopédie organised knowledge into. It had three main branches: memory, reason, and imagination.

Among other things, it presents a taxonomy of human knowledge (see Fig. 3), which was inspired by Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. The three main branches of knowledge are: "Memory"/History, "Reason"/Philosophy, and "Imagination"/Poetry. This tree of knowledge was created for the readers in order to help them evaluate the usefulness of the content within the Encyclopédie, and to organize its content.^[11] Notable is the fact that theology is ordered under "Philosophy". Robert Darnton argues that this categorisation of religion as being subject to human reason and not a source of knowledge in and of itself was a significant factor in the controversy surrounding the work. Additionally, notice that "Knowledge of God" is only a few nodes away from "Divination" and "Black Magic".

Likewise, many contributors saw the Encyclopédie as a vehicle for covertly destroying what the contributors viewed as superstitions (namely, revealed religion, primarily Catholicism), while overtly providing access to human knowledge. In ancien régime France, it caused a storm of controversy, due mostly to its attacks on Catholicism and favor for religious tolerance. The Encyclopédie praised Protestant thinkers^{[who?][citation needed]} and challenged teachings and dogma of the Catholic Church.

At the same time, the Encyclopédie was a vast compendium of knowledge, notably on the technologies of the period, describing the traditional craft tools and processes. Much information was taken from the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers. These articles applied a scientific approach to understanding the mechanical and production processes, and offered new ways to improve machines to make them more efficient.^[12] Diderot felt that people should have access to "useful knowledge" that they can apply to their everyday life.^[13]

Influence[link]

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion," wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. In The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution, a work published in conjunction with a 1989 exhibition of the Encyclopédie at the University of California, Los Angeles, Clorinda Donato writes the following:

The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed their belief in the potential of reason and unified knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape the social issues that the French Revolution would address. Although it is doubtful whether the many artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and presence and interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared the terrain for demands for increased representation. Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to the destruction of old values and the creation of new ones (12).

While many contributors to the Encyclopédie had no interest in radically reforming French society, the Encyclopédie as a whole pointed that way. The Encyclopédie denied that the teachings of the Catholic Church could be treated as authoritative in matters of science. The editors also refused to treat the decisions of political powers as definitive in intellectual or artistic questions. Some articles talked about changing social and political institutions that would improve their society for everyone.^[14] Given that Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe at the time and that many European leaders used French as their administrative language, these ideas had the capacity to spread.^[15]

Statistics[link]

Frontispiece of the first volume in the library of the Teyler's Museum, one of the two remaining complete original copies in the world

Approximate size of the Encyclopédie:

• 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
• 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
• 18,000 pages of text
• 75,000 entries
  • 44,000 main articles
  • 28,000 secondary articles
  • 2,500 illustration indices
• 20,000,000 words in total

Print run: 4,250 copies (note: even single-volume works in the 18th Century seldom had a print run of more than 1,500 copies)

Quotes[link]

• The goal of an Encyclopédie is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race. (Encyclopédie, Diderot)^[16]
• "Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian... Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy." (Philosophers, Dumarsais)
• "If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare." (Wealth, Diderot)

Literature[link]

• Preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, translated by Richard N. Schwab, 1995. ISBN 0-226-13476-8
• Jean d'Alembert by Ronald Grimsley. (1963)
• The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 by Robert Darnton (1979) ISBN 0-674-08785-2
• The Encyclopedists as individuals: a biographical dictionary of the authors of the Encyclopédie by Frank A. Kafker and Serena L. Kafker. Published 1988 in the Studies of Voltaire and the eighteenth century. ISBN 0-7294-0368-8
• Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Editions Flammarion, 1993. ISBN 2-08-070426-5
• Diderot, the Mechanical Arts, and the Encyclopédie, John R. Pannabecker, 1994. With bibliography.
• L'Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert, édition DVD, Redon, ASIN: B0000DBA4X—the complete Encyclopédie on DVD-ROM
• Enlightening the World: Encyclopedie, The Book That Changed the Course of History by Philipp Blom (2005). ISBN 1-4039-6895-0
• The Encylopédie and the Age of Revolution. Ed. Clorinda Donato and Robert M. Maniquis. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-8161-0527-8

Facsimiles[link]

Readex Microprint Corporation, NY 1969. 5 vol. The full text and images reduced to four double-spread pages of the original appearing on one folio-sized page of this printing.

Later released by the Pergamon Press, NY and Paris with ISBN 0-08-090105-0.

References[link]

Notes

Sources

• Blom, Philipp, Enlightening the world: Encyclopédie, the book that changed the course of history, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, ISBN 1-4039-6895-0
• Brewer, Daniel, "The Encyclopédie: Innovation and Legacy" in New Essays on Diderot, edited by James Fowler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN 0-521-76956-6
• Burke, Peter, A social history of knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot, Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000, ISBN 0-7456-2485-5
• Hunt, Lynn, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures: A Concise History: Volume II: Since 1340, Second Edition, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007, ISBN 0-312-43937-7
• Kramnick, Isaac, "Encyclopédie" in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick, Toronto: Penguin Books, 1995, ISBN 0-14-024566-9
• Magee, Bryan, The Story of Philosophy, New York: DK Publishing, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-7894-3511-X
• Spielvogel, Jackson J, Western Civilization, Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, ISBN 0-495-89733-7
• Stockwell, Foster, A History of Information Storage and Retrieval, McFarland & Company, December 2000, ISBN 0-7864-0840-5

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers

• On-line version in original French, contains the scans of the images too.
• On-line version with an English interface and the dates of publication
• Encyclopédie collaborative translation project currently contains a rather small but growing collection of articles translated into English (1,315 articles as of January 5, 2012).
• The Encyclopedie, discussion on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, broadcast on October 26, 2006. With Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London; Caroline Warman, Fellow and Tutor in French at Jesus College, Oxford; and David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York, and presented by Melvyn Bragg.
• Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers on French Wikisource
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • "Encyclopédie". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. 
  • James Wood (1907). "Encyclopédie". The Nuttall Encyclopædia. 

v t e Works by Denis Diderot Author The Indiscreet Jewels Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient Le Fils naturel Le père de famille La Religieuse Rameau's Nephew Le rêve de D'Alembert Jacques the Fatalist Madame de La Carlière Supplément au voyage de Bougainville Ceci n'est pas un conte Editor Encyclopédie

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It is written like an advertisement and needs to be rewritten from a neutral point of view. Tagged since June 2009. Its tone or style may not reflect the formal tone used on Wikipedia. Tagged since June 2009.

Bernard Werber
Bernard Werber
Born	(1961-09-18)September 18, 1961 Toulouse, France
Citizenship	France
Occupation	Journalist (1983-1990), writer

Bernard Werber (born 18 September 1961 in Toulouse) is a French science fiction writer active since the 1990s.

Novels[link]

His style of writing mixes different literary genres, notably the saga, the science fiction of the inter-war years, and tracts of philosophy.

In most of his novels, Bernard Werber uses the same form of construction, alternating informative articles in the style of an encyclopaedia and normal prose. The articles define or enlarge upon the ideas in the main text.

Also there are connections between his novels. One finds characters like Edmond Wells both in the trilogy Les Fourmis (The Ants) and in the L'Empire des anges (The Empire of the Angels). Also there are recurrent themes like l'Arbre des Possibles (The Tree of Possibilities) of Isidore Katzenberg, or even the novel Nous les dieux, which treats the ideas first presented in the short story L’École des jeunes dieux (The School of the Young Gods).

In the eight novels, Werber describes various authors. We are presented with an author who, at the end of his life, writes a last book which makes sense of his previous work. Thus in having a certain similarity of characters, themes and styles, one can conclude that he is trying to give a certain coherence to the ideas that he is developing.

The 3 October book launch[link]

Several years ago Bernard Werber decided to launch a book each year on 3 October, after the end of the summer holidays. The aim is to give the public something other than the prix Goncourt.^[1]

Stage and screen[link]

In addition to the film Nos amis les Terriens, released in 2007, Werber has also produced a short film, La Reine De Nacre ("The Mother-of-pearl Queen"), and written a play, Nos Amis Les Humains ("Our Friends, the Humans").

Symbolism[link]

The symbolism in his books is extensive. Animals such as the dolphins, rats and ants are intelligent animals, or at least are presented as such.

Also he returns frequently to the symbolism of figures that, according to the manner in which they are explained, reflect the stage of the evolution of the soul.

Werber's philosophy[link]

None of his works are intended to prove or support any particular scientific theory, but to present in a work of fiction various little-known discoveries to the public at large. L'Ultime secret (The Ultimate Secret) is a good illustration of this. It contains the following sentence: « Ils vont aller de surprise en surprise jusqu'à l'extraordinaire dénouement basé sur une découverte scientifique peu connue mais réelle. » (They are going to go from surprise to surprise eventually leading to the extraordinary conclusion, which is based on a little known but nevertheless real scientific discovery. )

Bernard Werber is a member of INREES, Institute for Research on Extraordinary Experiences, an association which exists to promote the acknowledgement of extraordinary or unusual experiences among the clientele of medical health professionals, doctors and caregivers.

This approach is reflected in the contents of his novels, like for example the Thanatonautes, which proposes a spiritualist version of near death experiences and afterlife, or even L'Empire des Anges through to Le Mystère des Dieux which describe some kind of scientific mythology from souls to God through angels, or even Nos Amis Les Terriens which talks of alien abductions. Science, the paranormal and spirituality influence several of his novels.

Works[link]

[edit] Les Fourmis trilogy

• Les Fourmis, Prix des lecteurs de Science et Avenir, 1991, ISBN 2-226-05257-7. (lit. The Ants, translated into English as Empire of the Ants). This book sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages.^{[citation needed]}
• Le Jour des Fourmis, 1992, ISBN 2-226-06118-5 (lit. The Day of the Ants)
• La Révolution des Fourmis, 1996, ISBN 2-226-08636-6 (lit. The Revolution of the Ants)

[edit] Les Thanatonautes trilogy

• Les Thanatonautes, 1994, ISBN 2-226-06758-2 (lit. The Thanatonauts)
• L'Empire des Anges, 2000, ISBN 2-226-11526-9 (lit. The Empire of the Angels)
• Nous, les Dieux, 2004, ISBN 2-226-15498-1 (lit. Us, Gods)
  • Le Souffle des Dieux, 2005, ISBN 2-226-16807-9 (lit. The Breath of the Gods)
  • Le Mystère des Dieux 2007, ISBN 2-226-17979-8 (lit. The Mystery of the Gods)

[edit] Le Père De Nos Pères trilogy

• Le père de nos pères, 1998, ISBN 2-226-10562-X (lit. The Father of our Fathers)
• L'ultime secret, 2001, ISBN 2-226-12740-2 (lit. The Ultimate Secret)
• Le rire du Cyclope, 2010, ISBN 2-226-21529-8 (lit. The Laughter of the Cyclops)

Other novels[link]

• Le papillon des étoiles, 2006, ISBN 2-226-17349-8 (lit. The Butterfly of the Stars)
• Le miroir de Cassandre, 2009, ISBN 2-226-19402-9 (lit. The Mirror of Cassandra)

Experimental books[link]

• L'Encyclopédie du savoir relatif et absolu, 1993, ISBN 2-226-06583-0 (lit. The Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge)
• Le Livre du Voyage, 1997, ISBN 2-226-09445-8 (lit. The Book of Travel)
• Le Livre secret des Fourmis, 2002 (lit. The Secret Book of the Ants)
• Nos amis, les humains, 2003 (lit. Our Friends, the Humans)

Short stories[link]

• L'Arbre des possibles, 2002, ISBN 2-226-13459-X (lit. The Tree of Possibles)
• Paradis sur mesure, 2008, EAN13 9782226188502 (lit. Custom Paradise(s)*) – (*:Probably in the sense of "A paradise for everyone" (hence, many ones), as in French, Paradise is "Paradis", it is therefore impossible to say if it is singular or plural; but the fact that the book is composed of multiple stories points towards the use of the plural meaning.)

Comics[link]

• Exit
  • Exit Tome 1, 1999, ISBN 2-226-10451-8
  • Le Deuxième Cercle, 2000, ISBN 2-226-11474-2 (lit. The Second Circle)
  • Jusqu'au dernier souffle, 2002 (lit. Until the Last Breath)
• Les Enfants D'Ève, May 2005 (lit. The Children of Eve)

Films[link]

• La Reine de nacre (short, 15'), 2001 (lit. The Mother-of-pearl Queen)
• Les Humains (short, 9'), 2003 (lit. The Humans)
• Nos amis les Terriens (full length), produced by Claude Lelouch, 2007 (lit. Our Friends, the Earthlings)

Theatre[link]

• Nos amis, les humains, 2003, ISBN 2-226-13793-9, produced in 2004 by Jean-Christophe Barc with Audrey Dana and Jean-Christophe Barc

• Bienvenue au paradis, 2011,produced in 2011 by Jean-Christophe Barc with Thierry Liagre

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bernard Werber

• (French) Werber's official website
• (French) Albin Michel's Werber website
• (French) Encyclopédie du savoir relatif et absolu online
• (French) His page as a member of the assistance committee of the INREES

Charles Dantzig is a French author, born in Tarbes on October 7, 1961^[1]

Early life and career[link]

Charles Dantzig was born into a family of professors of medicine. He obtained the baccalaureate at the age of seventeen, but rather than following the family tradition or taking up his place to prepare the entrance exams for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he decided to study Law. Having completed a doctorate in Law from the university of Toulouse, he moved to Paris.

A few years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he published an essay on Remy de Gourmont entitled Remy de Gourmont, Cher Vieux Daim ! (Le Rocher, 1990), soon followed by his first collection of poems, Le chauffeur est toujours seul'', to critical acclaim.

Author and publisher[link]

Charles Dantzig joined the publishing company Les Belles Lettres, launching three new collections: "Brique", specialising in contemporary literature, "Eux & nous", in which French writers discuss the authors of classical Antiquity, and "Trésors de la nouvelle", which, as its name suggests, specialises in short stories. He published the first French translation of a collection of poetry by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thousand-and-First Ship (Mille et un navires), and himself translated the play The Vegetable (Un legume). He also translated the first French edition of a collection of Oscar Wilde’s journalism, Aristotle at an Afternoon Tea (Aristote à l'heure du thé). Charles Dantzig also oversaw the publication of Marcel Schwob’s complete works (Œuvres, Les Belles Lettres).

Les Belles Lettres published his early essays, including Il n'y a pas d'Indochine (1995) and La Guerre du cliché (1998), and his poetry collections Que le siècle commence (1996, awarded the prix Paul Verlaine), Ce qui se passe vraiment dans les toiles de Jouy (1999), and À quoi servent les avions ? (2001), which foreshadowed the events of 9/11. He later wrote, “A few people have said to me that the mysterious power of poetry is such that it foresees events. I’m not so sure. […] Poetry reasons rather than foresees. The result – as in all literature, and even in all works of art – is thought. Except that rather than obtaining it by sparking speculations, it does so by sparking images, within the demands of rhythm, and in some cases, prosody” (J'ai interrompu très tôt une carrière de poète). A selection of his poems was published in 2003 with the title En souvenir des long-courriers. 2003 also saw the publication of the Bestiaire, a collection of animal poetry.

He then moved to Grasset, where he oversees the "Cahiers Rouges" series, breathing fresh life into the list by publishing cult classics such as Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s L'Horizon chimérique and Jean Desbordes’s J'adore, as well as major twentieth-century diarists and authors of memoirs, such as Harold Nicolson, George Moore, and Robert de Saint Jean. He wrote the preface to a hitherto unpublished novel for young readers by Truman Capote, Summer Crossing (La Traversée de l'été), and was also responsible for the first publication of Samuel Beckett’s lessons, based on notes by one of his students (Brigitte Le Juez, Beckett avant la lettre). Other works he has published include a collection of famous critic Bernard Frank’s articles for Le Monde from 1985 to 1989 (5, rue des Italiens) and Barack Obama’s famous Philadelphia speech on race in America.

Between 2006 and 2008, Charles Dantzig penned the epilogue for the special reports in the monthly Magazine Littéraire, offering his faithful readership his reliably iconoclastic literary views on everything from the French-speaking world to authors and psychoanalysis.

He was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for his body of work in October 2010.^[2]

Since september 2001, Charles Dantzig writes the literary chronicle in the Magazine Littéraire, and is a producer on the cultural public radio France Culture, where he created "Secret professionnel", on the artistic creation.

Novels[link]

Charles Dantzig’s first novel, Confitures de crimes (the title refers to a line from a poem by H.J.-M. Levet: “Le soleil se couche en des confitures de crimes”), was published by Les Belles Lettres in 1993. It recounted the life of a poet elected president of France, who went on to start a war. This work of fiction was the first indication of Charles Dantzig’s passion for literature and his ironic handling of posturing and comedy. His second novel, Nos vies hâtives (Grasset, 2001), was awarded the Prix Jean Freustié and the Prix Roger Nimier. The third, Un film d'amour, was published in 2003. It was a choral novel with a scholarly structure that supposedly drew on a TV documentary on the death of a young film-maker by the name of Birbillaz. “At first, the reader takes this book – intelligent from the first line to the last – for a formalist whimsy, before grasping that it aims for a kind of totality, like all great books. It leaves behind its ostensible subject, the portrait of the absent figure, Birbillaz, to focus on his brother – his double, his mirror image – like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson: a failure in life, bitter, rotten to the core, who says no to everything, to the point of obstinacy and pain. No to love, to talent, to creativity, to goodness, to beauty. A “no!” that he shouts in people’s faces, to the very gates of Hell – and no doubt beyond.” (Jacques Drillon, Le Nouvel Observateur, October 16, 2003). Grasset published Charles Dantzig’s fourth novel, Je m'appelle François, in 2007. It was inspired by the real-life crimes of Christophe Rocancourt, which the author transformed and transfigured into a new fictional destiny. In august 2011 appears "Dans un avion pour Caracas", a novel entirely happening in a plane flight between Paris and Caracas.

Essays[link]

2005 saw the publication of Charles Dantzig’s Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française, which was awarded a number of prizes, including the Prix Décembre, The Prix de l’Essai de l'Académie française and the Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle. The Dictionnaire gave him free rein to develop his aesthetic vision of literature, illustrated with numerous comments on style. The work enjoyed considerable critical and popular esteem, not only in France but also abroad, and was hailed as the major literary event of the year.

"A bestseller in the francophone world, Dantzig's Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française is en extraordinary undertaking, and anyone who buys it is expecting a fact-filled reference book will be either disapointed or, more likely, happily surprised. Biased, mischievous, provocative, Dantzig is also massively well read, funny and instructive. He is an elegant writer, and is clearly passionate about books." Patrick McGuinness, Times Literary Supplement, jul, 14. 2006^[3]

In January 2009, Grasset published a new major work by Charles Dantzig. The Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, written as a compilation of lists, enjoyed considerable success. It met with wide critical acclaim and made the front cover of Le Monde in a cartoon by Plantu. It won the Prix Duménil in May 2009 following a unanimous vote.

Charles Dantzig published his essay on reading, Pourquoi Lire ?, in October 2010. It again met with immediate critical acclaim and popular success and was awarded the Grand Prix Giono. "Divided into over seventy short chapters, the book is an impassioned, wide-ranging and occasionally humorous meditation, buttressed by well-chosen quotations, on reading in all its aspects from "Learning to read", in which he says that he has never understood the pejorative tag attached to the word "bookish", through "Reading aloud" to "How to read".", Adrian Tahourdin,^[4]

In 2012, he published a page in the French newspaper "Le Monde" (march, 17) called "Du populisme en littérature" (On populism in literature) where he expresses his concern on a dangerous trend in modern literature. Wouldn't more and more "realist" writers be in fact serving some obscure reactionary forces? It has raised a huge controversy all over the world (Canada, Italy - translation in the Corriere della sera)…

Poetry[link]

In January 2010, Charles Dantzig published two books of poetry simultaneously: a collection of his own new poems in Grasset’s Collection Bleue, Les nageurs, and an anthology of his poetry with new writing and critical essays, La Diva aux longs cils. The poems were selected by Patrick McGuinness of St Anne's College, Oxford. At the same time, Charles Dantzig’s novel Je m'appelle François was published in paperback and his translations of Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald were republished in the Cahiers Rouges collection. Les nageurs and La Diva aux longs cils were presented at the Maison Française in Oxford in 2010.

Art[link]

Charles Dantzig’s cultural interests are not limited to books. He is also a connoisseur of art, regularly contributing to arts and aesthetics reviews, working alongside artists such as Philippe Cognée and Antonio Segui. He inaugurated the Petit pan de mur jaune series at the Musée du Louvre in 2007, giving a presentation in front of Van Dyck’s painting Les princes Charles-Louis et Rupert du Palatinat. He was an associate curator of the inaugural exhibition of the new Centre Pompidou museum in Metz, Chefs-d’œuvre?, where the Charles Dantzig Room explored the notion of the masterpiece in literature.^[5]

Bibliography[link]

Essays

• Pourquoi lire ? (Grasset, 2010, Grand Prix Giono)
• Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien (Grasset, 2009, prix Duménil)
• Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Grasset, 2005, et Le Livre de Poche, prix Décembre, prix de l'Essai de l'Académie française, grand prix des lectrices de Elle)
• La Guerre du cliché (Les Belles Lettres, 1998)
• Il n'y a pas d'Indochine (Les Belles Lettres, 1995)
• Le style cinquième (Les Belles Lettres, 1992)
• Remy de Gourmont, Cher Vieux Daim ! (Le Rocher, 1990 ; 2e édition : Grasset, 2008)

Poetry

• Les nageurs, (Grasset, 2010)
• La diva aux longs cils, (Grasset, 2010)
• Bestiaire, avec des encres de Mino (Les Belles Lettres, 2003)
• En souvenir des long-courriers (Les Belles Lettres, 2003)
• À quoi servant les avions ? (Les Belles Lettres, 2001)
• Ce qui se passe vraiment dans les toiles de Jouy (Les Belles Lettres, 1999)
• Que le siècle commence (Les Belles Lettres, 1996, prix Paul Verlaine)
• Le chauffeur est toujours seul (La Différence, 1995)

Novels

• Je m'appelle François (Grasset, 2007, et Le Livre de Poche)
• Un film d'amour (Grasset, 2003, et Le Livre de Poche)
• Nos vies hâtives (Grasset, 2001, et Le Livre de Poche, prix Jean Freustié, prix Roger Nimier)
• Confitures de crimes (Les Belles Lettres, 1993)

References[link]