Enlightening the World

"During the sixteen years it took to write, compile, and produce all twenty-seven volumes, the writers had to defy authorities and face exile, jail, and censorship, as well as numerous internal falling-outs and philosophical differences. Encyclopedie's editors and contributors daily skirted danger based solely on their belief systems. Compiling this collection made them - the Encyclopedists, as they came to be called - the most feared men in all of Versailles and the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution. In Enlightening the World, novelist and historian Philipp Blom breathes new life into the sixteen-year struggle to create the Encyclopedie, by portraying the men who wrote it, the powerful forces that tried to suppress it, and the tremendous impact it had on the world."--BOOK JACKET.