Editing Denis Diderot (section)

===Diderot's contribution===
Diderot was left to finish the task as best he could. He wrote approximately 7,000 articles,<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/15/denis-diderot-america-donald-trump|title='Beware the affluence of gold': on reading Diderot in the age of Trump|last=Curran|first=Andrew S.|date=15 December 2018|work=The Guardian|access-date=5 February 2019|language=en-GB|issn=0261-3077}}</ref> some very slight, but many of them laborious, comprehensive, and long. He damaged his eyesight correcting proofs and editing the manuscripts of less scrupulous contributors. He spent his days at workshops, mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing what he had learned during the day. He was incessantly harassed by threats of police raids. The last copies of the first volume were issued in 1765.

In 1764, when his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered a crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, Le Breton, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too dangerous. "He and his printing-house overseer", writes Furbank, "had worked in complete secrecy, and had moreover deliberately destroyed the author's original manuscript so that the damage could not be repaired."<ref>P. N. Furbank. ''Diderot: A Critical Biography.'' New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 273.</ref> The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced.<ref name="EB1911"/> It was 12 years, in 1772, before the subscribers received the final 28 folio volumes of the ''Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers'' since the first volume had been published.{{clarify|date=August 2023}}

When Diderot's work on the ''Encyclopédie'' project came to an end in 1765, he expressed concerns to his friends that the twenty-five years he had spent on the project had been wasted.<ref name=":0" />