Dictionnaire de Trévoux
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The Dictionnaire de Trévoux, as the Dictionnaire universel françois et latin was unofficially nicknamed, was a historic synthesis of French dictionaries published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Edited under the direction of the Jesuits, it appeared in fascicles in seven editions between 1704 and 1771, growing into one of the outstanding European encyclopedias of the early eighteenth century.
Origins
Following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Protestant scholars diffused their ideas through gazettes printed outside the kingdom of France, from Switzerland to Scandinavia. In reaction, the Jesuit party in France began publishing their Mémoires de Trévoux from 1701 onward from the town of Trévoux in the independent principality of Dombes, under the protection of Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, the illegitimate son of Louis XIV. Similarly, in reaction to the success of Protestant versions of Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel published in Holland, the Jesuits launched a nearly identical but somewhat re-Catholicized encyclopedia in 1704, under their new title of the Dictionnaire universel françois et latin.
The Dictionnaire de Trévoux was a seminal work, a synthesis of the best lexicography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, produced by editors who remained anonymous, but who scrupulously mentioned their sources, in dictionaries, literature, works of history and philosophy, in encyclopedic entries.
