Diderot seemed equally uninterested in portraying the often brutal conditions under which the French working class labored. If the occasional plate inadvertently conjures up the reality of the era’s laborers — in the image on this page, for example, one can see a young boy holding a pitcher into which an engraver is pouring acid — the intent of the editors and the artists was hardly to raise consciousness about the plight of either slaves or the workhands who made the country function.
