Monsieur de Lubières encyclopédiste

Abstract

Jean-Daniel Candaux: Monsieur de Lubières the Encydopœdist . Newly-discovered unpublished documents in Geneva (in particular an exchange of letters between Charles Bonnet and the bibliographer Jean Senebier), show that the three Encyclopédie articles Idée, Induction and Probabilité were the work of Charles-Benjamin de Langes de Lubières (1714-1790). He was born in Berlin of a great Huguenot family from the principality of Orange, and settled in his youth in Geneva, where he studied, mixed in scientific circles, met Voltaire and acquired a reputation as a distinguished amateur. According to Bonnet, Lubières took his articles from the manuscript of a private course of logic given in French by the mathematician Gabriel Cramer to a young Genevan lady around 1745. The Geneva Library has at least four copies of this text, one of which is in Lubières's handwriting. A rapid preliminary comparison of this Logic with the three Encyclopédie articles shows that they were in fact largely taken from Cramer's work, whole paragraphs of which are copied word for word. Diderot apparently originally intended to write Probability himself, but he must haven given up the idea and used the article compiled by Lubières, although we do not know exactly how the two came into contact.