Written by Ida Yalzadeh
Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert took on the task of creating one of the first encyclopedias in history with more than just expository reference in mind. The editors—with the help of powerful and intellectual contemporaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Baron de Montesquieu—created a revolutionary text, known as the Encyclopédie, which helped lay the ideological foundations of the French Revolution. Although the coeditors authored over 7,000 entries combined, some lesser-known figures of the Enlightenment actually contributed a hefty amount of the tome in their own right. Most all of the following make Rousseau’s 385 articles look downright minuscule in comparison.