Louis de Jaucourt

(1704 - 1779)

Around 1734, having studied philology, mathematics, and medicine, Louis de Jaucourt began a six-volume Latin dictionary of anatomy. He sent his only copy of the manuscript to a publisher in Amsterdam, but it was lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Holland. Starting in 1751 Jaucourt wrote more than seventeen thousand articles for the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot, on subjects including democracy, equality, and law. Diderot called him “the slave of the Encyclopédie,” remarking that he lacked the other contributors’ wit and style.