You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (March 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,562 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Encyclopædia Universalis]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Encyclopædia Universalis}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Encyclopædia Universalis is a French-language general encyclopedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company.^[1][2] The articles of the Encyclopædia Universalis are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of full-time editors and expert contributors.

The Encyclopædia Universalis was originally published by the publishing company Encyclopædia Universalis SA. This company was created in 1966 by a specialist in publishing and selling books and collections by mail order, the French Book Club (CFL), owned by the Aubry family, as well as Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. (publisher of the Encyclopædia Britannica), the most famous English-language encyclopedia, owned at the time by the Foundation of the University of Chicago. This joint ventureà 50/50 was intended to combine the skills of the two shareholders in each of the two forms of distribution then essential for encyclopedias: mail order on the one hand and door-to-door sales on the other hand, a specialty of American society.

This formula, as well as the quality of the successive versions of the Encyclopædia Universalis, the first volume of which appeared in 1968 under the direction of Claude Grégory with graphic design by Pierre Faucheux, enabled remarkable commercial success until the early 1990s, when sales began to decline.^[3]

During the second half of the 1990s, the introduction and rapid improvement of electronic versions of the encyclopedia, using editorial funds from the paper version enriched with numerous specific contributions, under the leadership of its president Pierre Le Manh and the editorial director Louis Lecomte, allowed the Encyclopædia Universalis to experience a second period of success and growth. On the other hand, this transformation had the effect of modifying the economic balance between the distribution networks, thus leading to growing conflicts between the shareholders, the departure in the early 2000s of several directors to other areas and the appointment - on demand of Britannica - from a receiver who managed the company until July 2005, when the French Book Club finally sold its shares to Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. at the end of an auction process, after forty years of partnership.^[4]

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