As he finally completed work on the last volume, he blamed the radically uneven quality of the articles on the unending compromises he was obliged to make to satisfy the censors. And yet one of the many ironies associated with the Encyclopédie is that the same conservative constituencies that succeeded in censoring and shutting down the publication of the Encyclopédie on two occasions — a story to which we will return — were partially responsible for the genius and texture of this huge dictionary. After all, it was the most repressive elements of the ancien régime that spawned the book’s
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