Catherine II corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot and offered to publish the Encyclopédie, banned in France, in Riga.
The events
- Diderot's Encyclopédie1751–1772 · Paris. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, the multi-volume Encyclopédie of sciences, arts and trades began to appear. Despite censorship and bans, it became the great monument of the Enlightenment, spreading ideas of reason and tolerance.
- Accession of Catherine the Great1762 · Saint Petersburg. In July 1762 the guards overthrew Emperor Peter III and placed his wife Catherine on the throne. During her 34-year reign Russia expanded south and west, and reforms were pursued in the spirit of the Enlightenment.
More amazing facts
- 1741 · 1768 Steller's sea cow was discovered in 1741 and wiped out in just 27 years: the last was apparently killed in 1768, the year Cook set off on his first voyage.
- 1755 In January 1755 Moscow University was founded; that November an earthquake destroyed Lisbon and shook all of Europe.
- 1755 Moscow University was founded in January 1755.
- 1769 · 1820 Antarctica was first sighted only in 1820, by the Bellingshausen–Lazarev expedition — by then Watt's steam engine was already half a century old.
- 1775 · 1776 In January 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow; in April the first shots of the American War of Independence were fired.
- 1776 The Bolshoi Theatre and the United States are the same age: the theatre dates from March 1776, the Declaration of Independence from July of that year.