 The middle of the eighteenth century has appeared to many as a watershed moment in French intellectual history. As a nineteenth-century commentator put it, after this date “writings hostile to religion appeared and multiplied, and a war broke out between skepticism and faith” (Wilson 1972: 94–95, quoting an editor of Barbier 1857: vol. 4, p. 378, fn. 1). Whatever the prior preparation, the launch of the Encyclopédie at precisely this moment fueled this dynamic, and it quickly provoked a war between its editors and the religious authorities in France. At the heart of the struggle were the Jesuits, especially Guillaume-François Berthier, who used the Jesuit journal to attack the new encyclopedia project and its editors. Diderot responded with pamphlets, and this sparring continued as the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie appeared in print.