On what project did Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot work together from 1740-57?

Answer 1

On the Encyclopédie, the first French encyclopaedia, the Wikipedia of its day. The Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.

The idea arose as follows: The bookseller and printer André Le Breton had applied to Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, undertaken in the first instance by the Englishman John Mills, and the German, Gottfried Sellius.

Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became transformed. Instead of a mere reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion.

His enthusiasm infected the publishers, Diderot became overall editor and d'Alembert edited the science and mathematics sections. D'Alembert wrote more than 1,000 articles for it.

The Encyclopédie proved threatening to the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it takes for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought and the value of science and industry. It asserts the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the main concern of the nation's government.

There was a contemporary belief that the Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were now made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759 the Encyclopédie was formally suppressed. The decree, however, did not arrest the continuance of the work, which went on, but with its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine.

D'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, among them, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired an evil fame. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as best he could. He wrote several hundred articles, some of them very slight, but many of them most laborious, comprehensive, and ample. He wore out his eyesight in correcting proofs, and in bringing the manuscript of less competent contributors into decent shape.

At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an end, he encountered one last and crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the displeasure of the government, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he chose to think too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labour of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced.

Answer 2

The "Encyclopédie".
Most of her 71, 818 articles were written by Diderot and d'Alembert.
Other contributors included Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Baron d'Holbach, Necker, Turgot, Buffon and other well-known writers and philosophers.

Answer 3

They were co-editors of the Encyclopédie - d'Alembert edited the math and science sections.

Answer 4

check out link below, I think he worked on differential equations

Answer 5

hang on i'am not that old i'll ask my grannie