Philosophers trim the tree of knowledge

The philosophes persecuted or disdained, they battled alone, fighting for future generations who would grant them the recognition that their contemporaries had refused.

D'Alembert he celebrated the man of letters as the lone warrior in the struggle for civilization, and went on to issue a declaration of independence for gens de lettres as a social group. Although they had been humiliated and ignored, they deserved well of mankind because they had carried the cause of Enlightenment forward since the Renaissance and especially since the reign of Louis XIV, when the "philosophic spirit" began to set the tone in polite society. This view of history owed a great deal to Voltaire, who had proclaimed the importance of men of letters in the Lettres philosophiques (1734) and then identified them with the progressive drive in history in Le siecle de Louis XIV (1751). Voltaire's own contributions to the Encyclop'edie, notably in the article GENS DE LETTRES, developed the same theme and made its implications clear. History advanced through the perfection of the arts and sciences; the arts and sciences improved through the efforts of men of letters; and men of letters provided the motive force for the whole process by functioning as philosophes. "It is this philosophic spirit that seems to constitute the character of the men of letters." The article PHILOSOPHE made much the same point. It was adapted from the celebrated tract of 1743, Le Philosophe, which established an ideal type — the man of letters committed to the cause of Enlightenment. The philosophes came to be recognized or reviled as a kind of party, the secular apostles of civilization, in opposition to the champions of tradition and religious orthodoxy. Many of them contributed to the Encyclopédie — so many, in fact, that Encydopediste and philosophe became virtual synonyms, and both terms crowded out their competitors — savant, érudit, gens d'esprit — in the semantic field covered by the general expression gens de lettres. D'Alembert contributed to this shift in meaning by glorifying his fellow philosophes as the ultimate in gens de lettres, the heirs to Newton and Locke, at the end of the Discours préliminaire. The entire Encyclopédie proclaimed itself to be the work of "a society of men of letters" on its title page, while its friends and enemies alike identified it with philosophie. It seemed to embody the equation civilization = gens de lettres = philosophes and to funnel all the progressive currents of history into the party of Enlightenment.

Robert Darnton