Louis de Jaucourt
| Louis de Jaucourt | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
16 September 1704 Paris, France |
| Died | 3 February 1779 (aged 74) Compiègne, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Physician, philosophe, writer |
| Known for | Encyclopédie |
Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (French: [də ʒokuʁ]; 16 September 1704 – 3 February 1779) was a French scholar and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote about 18,000 articles on subjects including physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history, or about 25% of the entire encyclopedia, all done voluntarily. In the generations after the Encyclopédie's, mainly due to his aristocratic background, his legacy was largely overshadowed by the more bohemian Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, but by the mid-20th century more scholarly attention was being paid to him.
Jaucourt was born in Paris. He studied theology in Geneva, natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, and medicine in Leiden. Upon returning to France, he spent the next 20 years writing the Lexicon medicum universalis, a six-volume work on anatomy. He sent it to be published in Amsterdam to avoid French censorship but the ship carrying the sole manuscript sank, and 20 years of labor was lost. He also wrote a biography of Leibniz.
He volunteered to work on the Encyclopédie, recruited by publisher Michel-Antoine David starting with the second volume of the work. He began modestly, with only a few articles in each of the next several volumes, but gradually became more and more involved. Between 1759 and 1765 he wrote on average 8 encyclopedia articles per day, for a total of 17,266 out of 71,818 articles (or about 25%), making him by far the single most prolific contributor to Encyclopédie. His contributions come to some 4,700,000 words. He was especially active in the later volumes, writing between 30% and 45% of the articles in volumes 10 to 17. This earned him the nickname l'esclave de l’Encyclopédie (the slave of the Encyclopedia).
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