The ARTFL Project

Comprised of 878 volumes and published monthly from January 1701 to December 1767 the Journal de Trévoux, or Mémoires pour l'Histoire des Sciences & des Beaux-Arts, was one of the most influential and controversial 18th century French periodicals. A sort of literary journal reviewing and commenting on a wide variety of contemporaneous publications, the Journal de Trévoux dealt with almost every discipline of knowledge: Grammar, Rhetoric, Sacred and Profane Philology, Religious, Ancient, Modern and Literary History, Moral Theology, Law (French and Ecclesiastic), Philosophy, Political Economics, Physics, Mathematics, Natural History, Astronomy, Fine Arts and to a lesser extent, Poetry and Drama.

While not overtly a journal of opinion, but rather a collection of book reviews concerned with scientific publications in France and abroad, the editors and contributors of the Mémoires wished to be considered by their public as serious scholars and men of letters rather than Jesuits (a Society to which most of them belonged), and continuously affirmed their intellectual impartiality in every domain « excepté quand il s'agira de la religion, des bonnes moeurs ou de l'État en quoi il n'est jamais permis d'être neutre. »

SEARCH the Journal de Trévoux using PhiloLogic4

Currently, the ARTFL Project's online Journal de Trévoux starts at volumes from 1751 and 1752, years in which the editors of the Mémoires began a fierce polemic debate concerning the publication of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Additionally, we have just added 5 more volumes - from 1753 to 1757 - and in the future we will complete the data capture on the last 10 years of publication (1758-1767) before beginning work on the volumes prior to 1750.

We are aware of that some typographical errors have been introduced during the data capture process, and that some unrecognizable characters have been replaced by the "$" character - these errors will be corrected in the future as part of the on-going Journal de Trévoux project. UPDATE 8/2007: We have corrected more than 9,000 of the unrecognized "$" errors in this database.