Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years

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Author: Charles Coulston Gillispie

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SC IENCE AND POLIT Y IN FRANCE: THE REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC YEARS

Also by the Author books Genesis and Geology. A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850. 1951. 2nd ed., with a foreword by Nicolaas Rupke, 1996. The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. 1960. 2nd ed., 1990. Lazare Carnot, Savant. 1971. Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, with the collaboration of A. P. Youschkevitch. 1980. The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784, with a Word on the Importance of Ballooning for the Science of Heat and the Art of Building Railroads. 1983. Pierre-Simon Laplace: A Life in Exact Science, with the collaboration of Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness. 1998. published lectures Les Fondements intellectuels de l’introduction des probabilités en physique. Conférences du Palais de la Découverte, Paris. 1962. The Professionalization of Science: France 1770–1830, Compared to the United States, 1910–1970. The Neesima Lectures, Doshisha University, Kyoto, 1983. editions A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry: Manufacturing and the Technical Arts in Plates Selected from the “Encyclopédie” of Denis Diderot. 2 vols. 1959. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 16 vols. 1970–80. Monuments of Egypt, the Napoleonic Edition: The Complete Archaeological Plates from “La ´ Description de l’Egypte.” Co-edited with Michel Dewachter. 2 vols. 1987.

Copyright 䉷 2004 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Science and polity in France : the revolutionary and Napoleonic years / Charles Coulston Gillispie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-11541-9 (acid-free paper) 1. Science—France—History. 2. Science and state—France. I. Title. Q127.F8G53 2004 509.44—dc22 2003055451 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Printed on acid-free paper. ⬁ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Toujours et a` jamais a` mon amie ERCG

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations Introduction Chapter I. Science and Politics under the Constituent Assembly 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Science and Politics in 1789 Bailly and the Constituent Assembly Lavoisier and the Arsenal Vicq d’Azyr and the Reform of Medicine Condorcet and Truth in Politics Condorcet, Bailly, and the Governance of Paris Political Economy Varennes and the Champ-de-Mars

Chapter II. Education, Science, and Politics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Scientists in the Legislative Assembly The Condorcet Plan for National Education Talleyrand’s Educational Proposal The Educational Legacy of the Old Regime The Political Setting The Convention Education and Science

Chapter III. The Museum of Natural History and the Academy of Science: Rise and Fall 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Natural History and Theoretical Science The Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle The Academy of Science in the Revolutionary Climate Artisans and Inventors The Last Year of the Academy

Chapter IV. The Metric System 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Background Proposals Methods and Instruments Operations in the Field The Provisional Meter

Chapter V. Science and the Terror 1. Terror amd Expropriation

ix 1 7 7 15 25 36 56 67 78 96 101 101 110 124 129 136 140 146 165 165 167 184 195 210 223 223 235 250 258 278 286 286

viii 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

CONTENTS

The Republican Calendar The Observatory of Paris The Collège de France Individual Destinies The Calvary of Condorcet

Chapter VI. Scientists at War 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The Monge Connection Weaponry The Mobilization of Scientists Munitions and Guns Inventions Natural History and Conquest Effects of Wartime: Science and the State

Chapter VII. Thermidorean Convention and Directory 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Institutionalization of French Science, 1794–1804 Institut de France, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and Bureau des Longitudes Completion of the Metric System The E´ cole Normale de l’an III The E´ cole Polytechnique The E´ cole de Santé and Clinical Medicine

Chapter VIII. Bonaparte and the Scientific Community 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Monge in Italy, 1796–1798 The Egyptian Expedition The Idéologues and 18 Brumaire The Consulate, 1799–1804 Napoleon and Science

Chapter IX. Positivist Science 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Discipline Formation Comparative Anatomy Experimental Physiology Mathematical Physics Conclusion

293 298 306 311 326 339 339 358 381 397 428 433 444 445 445 446 458 494 520 540 551 551 557 600 611 640 652 652 655 662 675 694

Acknowledgments

697

Bibliography

699

Index

717

ABBREVIATIONS

AN AP BMHN BN DE DE, EM DE, HN DSB HARS HSRM MARS MIF OL PVARPS PVAS PVBCAM PVCA&C PVCd’ IP PVCS PVCTA PVIF PVRCM SABIX SE

Archives Nationales Archives Parlementaires Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle Bibliothèque Nationale ´ Description de l’Egypte ´ ´ Moderne Description de l’Egypte, Etat ´ Description de l’Egypte, Histoire Naturelle Dictionary of Scientific Biography Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences Histoire de la Société Royale de Médecine Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences Mémoires de l’Institut National de France Oeuvres de Lavoisier Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture Procés-Verbaux de l’Académie des Sciences Procès-Verbaux du Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers Procès-Verbaux des Comités d’Agriculture et de Commerce, de la Constituante, de la Législative, et de la Convention Procès-Verbaux du Comité d’Instruction Publique Procès-Verbaux du Comité de Salubrité Procès-Verbaux de la Commission Temporaire des Arts Procès-Verbaux des Sciences de l’Académie des Sciences de L’Institut de France, 1795–1835 Procès-Verbaux et rapports du Comité de Mendicité de la Constituante ´ Bulletin de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique Mémoires de mathématique et de physique présentés . . . par divers s¸cavans (This collection is usually referred to as the Savants étrangers.)


SC IENCE AND POLIT Y IN FRANCE: THE REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC YEARS


INTRODUCTION

The modern period in the history of both politics and science opens out of the quarter century of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel. In both respects the relative importance of developments in France then reached a maximum in ways that were reciprocally reinforcing although neither one, in my view, was reducible to the other, nor were they to any further sector of historical change. In an earlier volume treating the last decades of the old regime, I ventured to identify and analyze loci of interaction between politics and science. The present purpose is to continue that approach throughout the time when the density of the intersections increased to a degree that is characteristic of modern polity in general. Let me state first the exordium concerning politics. The issues defined by the French Revolution were paramount in the politics of every country in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In France the central thrust was toward democratization encased in a nationalism purporting to be cosmopolitan. In other countries, the order was reversed, owing in part to revulsion from French domination. Whichever the sequence, the imperative that governed feelings was assertion of the equal worth of every citizen sharing in, or confronted with, the only legitimate power, the power of the state, enormously augmented. In the exercise of government, bureaucracy displaced particularism, while the appetite of the state for power grew by what it fed on, filling and overflowing the vacuum left by the dissolution of all the intermediate powers, whether local, regional, juridical, clerical, or economic, which had governed life in its many aspects while buffering the subject from direct exposure to the authority of the sovereign. Nowhere did resolution of the issues of the Revolution prove to be a simple matter of liberalism prevailing over reaction, and certainly not in France. The Terror of 1793–94 and Napoleonic despotism were no less intrinsic to its inwardness than the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The violence of the former pertained to means and the principles of the latter to ends, although the two could become conflated, as in the minds of those who thought like Robespierre. For the French Revolution was as much the progenitor of modern totalitarianism as of modern democracy. Both in totalitarian and in democratic states the constant preoccupation of government is its immediate relation to the whole people. Absolute monarchs of the old regime would have found the practices of twentieth-century dictators no less unthinkable than the liberties of twentieth-century democracy.

2

INTR ODUCTION

Let me in the second place state the exordium concerning science. In Europe generally, the French establishment predominated throughout the half-century and more of which the Revolution was the centerpiece, from the 1770s through the 1820s. The chemical revolution, analytical and celestial mechanics, the rigorization of the calculus, the mathematicization of physics, botanical systematics, comparative anatomy, experimental physiology, clinical medicine—French scientists were the prime movers and French institutions the initial loci of all these new departures along the road of modernization. It would appear, indeed, that for a time the vigor of high culture in France had passed from arts and letters into science. In a graph of the importance of French literature, of French art, of French music, the quarter century between 1789 and 1815 would show a dip, not to say a trough, between the peaks of the Enlightenment and of the nineteenth century. What writers in that interval are still read for the quality of their language? Two, André Chénier and Chateaubriand. What painters stand out? Two again, David and, later, Ingres. What composers wrote music that lives, other than the Marseillaise? One, Cherubini—an Italian whose name has failed to find its way into the Nouvelle Dictionnaire de Biographie Fran¸caise. In Germany and England, on the other hand, the literary landscape was anything but barren. The paucity of French talent expressing itself in the humanities in our period is to be contrasted to the galaxy of leading scientific lights who constitute the dramatis personae of this book—Lavoisier, Laplace, Lagrange, Berthollet, Cuvier, Jussieu, Lamarck, Fourier, Legendre, Cauchy, Ampère, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Pinel, Bichat, Magendie, Fresnel, Poisson, GayLussac, Monge, Sadi Carnot—some twenty stars of the first magnitude, not altogether arbitrarily singled out from among another two to three dozen luminaries of second and third magnitude and as many more practitioners, in sum a larger scientific population than in the rest of Europe put together. The wellsprings of vigor manifest in comparable ways in the politics and science of revolutionary France lie in cultural strata deeper than the surface layer of either and issue through different channels. It is not through following the occasional political activities of scientists that we will get at them, however, nor is it through considering the involvements of science in the arena where parties, classes, and interests compete for momentary power. Such episodes there were, often interesting and occasionally momentous. We will need to mark them, but in the last analysis their importance was incidental rather than systematic. With respect to politics, indeed, historiography may possibly have occupied itself too exclusively with the turbulence at the surface. For a striking feature of the Revolution is the contrast between the magnitude of the events and the stature of the participants. Until Napoleon Bonaparte gave

INTR ODUCTION

3

his measure, and by then the merely political dynamism was exhausted, not a single great man stood forth within the forum. No one was to the French Revolution what Solon and Pericles were to Athenian democracy, what Luther and Calvin were to the Protestant reformation, what Washington and Jefferson were to the American Revolution, or what Lincoln and Lee were to the Civil War. Mirabeau, Lafayette, Barnave, the two Lameths, Duport, Roland, Brissot, Vergniaud, Desmoulins, Marat, Pache, Hébert, Carnot, Danton, Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Barras, Boissy d’Anglas, Reubell, LaReveillière-Lépaux—of the whole lot, and dozens more, one feels that it was only by slight accidents of circumstance that they, instead of almost any other among hundreds of deputies, occupied the positions they did. And of the deputies to all the legislative bodies, one feels the same thing relative to almost any others among tens of thousands of intelligent, educated Frenchmen, newly awakened politically. The leaders came and went, mostly after a very short interval at the forefront. The policies they implemented were not so much their own creations as items in the logical set of possibilities, eventually exhausted. The events produced the men, and not the men the events. Neither the passions of politics nor the force of ideologies were what made the Revolution all it was historically. Its enduring features have not been the outcome of disputes in the National Assembly between constitutional monarchists and republicans, Girondists and Montagnards, Jacobins and Thermidoreans. Nor do they derive from the larger configuration of leftward movement culminating in the rule of the Committee of Public Safety followed by Thermidorean reaction, political bankruptcy during the Directory, and military receivership under Bonaparte. Ideas lead little further. Condorcet’s belief in the perfectibility of man, Marat’s friendship for the people, Robespierre’s ideal of civic virtue—such notions have played an altogether negligible role in the daily life of citizens of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (though the same may not be said of Napoleonic glory). No, the changes that mark off modern polity from the old regime transpired at a level deeper than the political or ideological. The factors differentiating the lives of Frenchmen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the lot of their ancestors in the old regime were those that realized the principles affirmed in 1789, and that were not afterward in dispute among the factions: sovereignty of the nation, liberty of conscience and opinion, freedom of the press, national unity, equality before the law, presumption of innocence until proof of guilt, absolute right of property, equitable rules of inheritance, universal and secular education, access to health care, public responsibility for the disadvantaged, universal obligation for military service, a standard system of weights and measures. These matters are intrinsic to the lives people lead. Once the principles were established, and the Declara-

4

INTR ODUCTION

tion of Rights of Man and Citizen accomplished that at the outset, provision for realizing them came out of administrative and institutional practice, not out of politics, though politics had to make the provision possible. More generally, the French Revolution was the surface manifestation of something like a seismic shift relieving pressures that had been building throughout the Enlightenment. For a century and more, if a tectonic metaphor is permissible, the philosophic plate carrying the value structure shifted past the plate of social and juridical structure until convocation of the States-General in 1789 triggered the release in all directions of enormous political energies. A society in which roles were defined by status then gave way to a society in which roles are defined by function. What matters in a civic sense is what one does, not who one is, the person one comes to be, not the person one was born to be. These are fundamental determinants of attitude which, along with the modernization of their institutional and juridical embodiment, transcend, or rather underlie, the battle of revolutionary politics. On these, the fundamentals, there was no difference between constitutional monarchists and republicans, between Girondists and Montagnards, between Thermidoreans and surviving Jacobins under the Directory, eventually between Bonapartists and the onetime democrats of the year II. The fundamental shifts were irreversible. They survived restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815. The disputes throughout the preceding quartercentury had been over means, not ends. The difference over ends, and it was unbridgeable, was between pre-modern and modern polity in general, between the Old Regime and the Revolution, between status and mobility, between subjects of the King and citizens of the Republic. Indicative of the change in ethos was universal acceptance of the bourgeois axiom that careers, whether in the public or private sector, should be open to talent, not birth. Clearly, the proposition is one with which the norms of the scientific community are altogether congruent. More broadly than that, however, indeed much more broadly, political and social sensibility shifted toward the orientation characteristic of science, toward shaping the future, rather than conserving the past. Characteristic of science, but of what science? For a comparable shift, at bottom the same shift, occurred there. In the long half-century of French scientific predominance, from the 1770s through the 1820s, we are in the presence of two generations of scientists, well marked off from each other by the crisis of the Revolution. In the earlier, leadership of the old Academy belonged to Lavoisier, to Condorcet, to Vicq d’Azyr. They and their colleagues had had their general education in the excellent clerical colleges of the eighteenth century, and beyond that were largely self-taught in a culture dominated by letters. Their successors consisted of the first set of scientists formed in the new, professional institutions: the Museum of Natural History, the Faculty of Medicine drawing on the clinical facilities of the Hôtel-

INTR ODUCTION

5

´ Dieu and other hospitals, the Ecole Polytechnique. Only five careers of great note spanned the divide—those of Laplace and Lamarck, and less fully so of Lagrange, Monge, and Berthollet. We are concerned here not merely with the succession of generations, although that certainly, but also with two distinct modes of doing science. The one, the earlier, is encyclopedic. The other, its successor, is positivist. By encyclopedic is meant the science done according to the method defined by Condillac. Analysis orders a complex sector of experience—in the global case of the Encyclopédie itself, all experience—by identifying its elements. Science then arranges those elements according to the natural connections inherent in the phenomena, whether chemical, botanical, mineralogical, mathematical, technological, social, economic, political, or whatever. Thus, Lavoisier’s chemistry only begins with an explanation of combustion. That was merely the theory. The actual ordering of the science is a tabulation arranging the fifty-five known simple substances laterally by class and species while the columns show the relation of compounds to the action on each species of the principles of caloric, oxygen, acidity, and non-acidity. The approach is also that of the Jussieu system of natural classification, in which flowering plants are ranged in genera and families according to their relations in nature. This was no mere taxonomy. The Botanical School at the Jardin du Roi and the Trianon garden were actually planted that way. Thus does Romé de l’Isle, and after him René-Just Haüy, classify minerals on the basis of the cleavage forms of their crystals. Thus does Gaspard Monge classify geometric surfaces according to their mode of generation. Thus does the technology of the Encyclopédie amount to a natural history of industry. Many practices deriving from the encyclopedic mode of science are still with us, of course. Chemical nomenclature is the most obvious, but the most widespread is also the most characteristic. The metric system based weights and measures on dimensions drawn from nature. For the natural sciences, in a word, the general problem is to find where things belong, their status in nature, and for the human sciences to show how we fit, our status in society. Application then consists in reforming practice in conformity with principles that are true to the nature of things physical and social. The science of the next generation, by contrast, is functional, a positive science of how things work. By positive is meant the actual practice from which Auguste Comte abstracted his philosophy, a philosophy—be it noted—of politics as well as science, though not a political philosophy. The phenomena investigated are actions in nature, and indeed on nature, rather than arrangements. Thus, to anticipate, Fresnel’s problem is the interference of the light waves, not the waves themselves, and his integrals predict the illumination of the shadow of a refracting diskette. Thus, too, Malus polarizes light, and his formulas predict the relative intensities of rays of ordinary

6

INTR ODUCTION

and extraordinary refraction. Thus, Ampère makes magnetism consist of electricity in motion. Thus, Fourier performs mathematical investigations of the conduction, not the nature, of heat, and Sadi Carnot analyzes the conditions of maximum yield of a heat engine. The thrust is similar in other sciences. Berthollet initiates a fully physical chemistry with the study of mass action. Cuvier bases comparative anatomy on the relation between the functioning of the organism and its mode of life. Lamarck makes the life processes the constitutive factor in the economy of nature. Bichat and, much more, Magendie intervene in the functioning of the organism. But apart from these indications, it will be best to reserve a characterization of that science until we have set forth an account of the revolutionary transformation of the context, which is the main purpose of this book.1 1 Earlier treatments of the subject of this book, in whole or in part, and from various points of view, will be found in Biot (1803), Cuvier (1809), Delambre (1809), Despois (1868), Pouchet (1896), Fayet (1936), Dhombres and Dhombres (1989). Spary (2000) on natural history came to my attention while this book was in production. Alder (2002) on the metric system appeared during that interval.

CHAPTER I

Science and Politics under the Constituent Assembly

1. SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN 1789

In the history of science, narrowly speaking, the year 1789 is notable for several events, foremost among them publication by Lavoisier of Traité élémentaire de la chimie. That supremely lucid manual draws together the oxygen theory of combustion, the gravimetric method of analysis, and the modern denotative nomenclature into a coherent foundation for a reformed chemistry. Lavoisier and the associates who had gathered round him thereupon launched Annales de chimie, the earliest journal consecrated to a single discipline. The first three volumes were approved for publication by the Academy of Science respectively in April, June, and September 1789.1 Equally important for the ordering of the life sciences, Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu completed the classification of flowering plants according to the natural method that he and his uncles Antoine and Bernard had developed at the Jardin du Roi over the preceding half-century. Genera plantarum secundum ordines naturalis disposita, published in July, was one of the last major treatises in any science to appear in Latin and the first to define the principle of subordination of characters. Extended to zoology, the approach guided the taxonomic program of the revolutionary Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle for the next thirty years. Also in 1789 the Academy of Science printed a memoir by Laplace on Saturn’s rings. He there stated the basic equation of spheroidal attraction theory in a form that later became the potential function of mathematical physics. A second memoir, on the secular variation of planetary orbits, appeared in the same volume. At the meeting of the Academy held on 18 July, four days after the fall of the Bastille, Laplace read a paper on the inclination of the plane of the ecliptic.2 In none of these writings would one expect to find, nor does one find, the slightest indication that the financial plight of the monarchy had forced Louis XVI to convoke the Estates-General of France, the first meeting since 1

The “authors,” or board of editors, consisted of Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Dietrich, Hassenfratz, and Adet, in that order on the title page. 2 “Mémoire sur la théorie de l’anneau de Saturn,” MARS (1787/89), pp. 249–267. For a complete Laplace bibliography, see Gillispie (1997a).

8

I. SCIENCE AND POLITICS

1614, and that the opening ceremony took place in Versailles on 4 May 1789. Three members of the Academy of Science were elected to the EstatesGeneral, all from Paris. The not-very-eminent astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly was chosen by the electors of the Third Estate, while the nobility selected the foremost honorary member, Louis-Alexandre duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, together with the jurist Pierre-Achille Dionis du Séjour. An astronomer and mathematician of considerable note, the latter was not in his element in politics and maintained the lowest possible profile. In addition, Lavoisier was named an alternate by the nobility of Blois. Two more academicians, the botanist André Thouin and the engineer Constantin Périer, were alternates for the third estate of Paris. Otherwise the principal figures who would now be described as intellectuals were ConstantinFran¸cois de Volney, Pierre-Samuel Dupont, and the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès. Volney, a historian in the making, had a certain reputation for his Voyage en ´ Egypte et Syrie (1787) and for the liberal journal he founded and edited, La Sentinelle. Dupont, an economist, had been Turgot’s chief of staff in the illstarred attempt to liberalize the grain trade and commerce in general in 1774–76. He now added the appelation de Nemours to distinguish himself from a deputy of the same name from Bigorre. Sieyès had become famous at one stroke through the manifesto that asserted the right of commoners to constitute the nation. His powerful pamphlet is less notable for the political theory it presupposed than for the opening rhetoric: “What is the Third Estate? All. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it wish? To be Something.”3 Nevertheless, although natural science and formal knowledge in general had little or nothing expressly to do with the opening events of Revolution, the expectations of the participants are unthinkable except with reference to the participation of science in forming, however ambiguously, the mentality of the Enlightenment. Its central feature was the dual conviction that the human mind had achieved the capacity to know the nature of things, and that nature is the norm to which human arrangements should, nay must, conform. In no way was confidence impaired by the inconsistency, readily apparent in hindsight, between the nature investigated by scientists, the repository of what is, and the nature invoked by moralists, the wellspring of what ought to be. The fissure appears in literary form in the conflict between Voltaire and Rousseau. Nor was passion for reform in any way diminished by incompatibilities which they, and many another, manifest between temperaments that respect science and those that love nature, or more generally between rationalism and romanticism. These entwined but contradic3

Roberto Zapperi has published an edition of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état with an interesting commentary from a Marxist perspective (Geneva: Droz, 1970).

I. 1 . IN 1789

9

tory strains are the intellectual taproots of the great paradox posed by the French Revolution en bloc, which is that liberty failed to coexist with equality and fraternity, that assertion of the rights of man gave way within four years to the reign of terror and within ten to military dictatorship. Appeal to the talisman of nature was more characteristic of the Enlightenment in France than elsewhere. A difference with America, for example, may be noticed in a comparison of those otherwise very similar documents, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 together with the American Declaration of Independence on the one hand, and on the other the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of October 1789. Nature was not absent from American political thinking, of course. The opening sentence of the Virginia Declaration asserts that “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights.” The word does not occur again, however. George Mason seats the legitimacy of government rather in a social contract. Jefferson, too, refers to nature only in passing in the Declaration of Independence. The briefer French Declaration, by contrast, invokes nature prescriptively. In the preamble, the rights of man are “natural, inalienable, and sacred”; in article II they are “natural and imprescriptible”; in article IV the “exercise of the natural rights of man has no limits except those which assure to other members of society enjoyment of the same rights.” Most telling is the difference in diagnosis of the incorrigibility of the existing regimes. The Virginia Declaration blames specific illegitimate actions on the part of the British government, the same as those that the Declaration of Independence personifies in the bill of particular misdeeds ascribed to George III. In the French Declaration, by contrast, “Ignorance, disregard, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortune and governmental corruption.”4 What is the cure for such ignorance? In the eyes of the philosophes, in the sensibility of the cultivated people who had absorbed their writings and discussed them in provincial academies, masonic lodges, literary societies, cosmopolitan salons, and other forums all over France, the answer was obvious. It was knowledge of nature, which is to say science, not in a professional but in a cultural sense. Whether true science was to be attained intuitively in the manner of Rousseau and the romantics, or analytically in the mode of Condillac and the rationalists, was not at issue in the inculcation of intellectual instincts. The process was a literary one in large part, and its monument is the Encyclopédie. Anterior to the readings that occupied a literate person’s maturity, how4 Robert R. Palmer (1959–64) prints passages from the Virginia and the French declarations side by side (1, Appendix IV, pp. 518–521). For the complete text and a fine appreciation of the French declaration, see his translation of Lefebvre (1947), appendix.

10


ever (and this has been appreciated only in the light of recent scholarship),5 minds were prepared in a manner favorable to scientific culture in the very schools that educated the generation of the High Enlightenment and its revolutionary successor. In contrast to the sclerotic teaching of the humanities, which prescribed rules of conduct drawn from classical morality and Christian doctrine, the emphasis in natural philosophy, even in the strictest of clerical colleges, and perhaps especially there, was on changes in knowledge, on novelty, on justification by reference to fact. Only in science did systematic knowledge put a premium on innovation. Only there did the content, though not the discipline, of education point the way to a future different from the past. The road might be traveled, not only by the small minority who would do science, but by all participants in a culture where it flourished. It was not the intent of its teachers that science should thus be felt as a force for reform. Neither, though for quite different reasons, was that the effect among people outside the educated class who were excluded from its procedures for lack of talent, opportunity, or means, or who felt threatened by the inexorable extension of its grasp over traditional domains of skill, practice, and understanding. Such ambiguities attending the place of science in the Enlightenment were institutional and political as well as cultural. On the one hand, science made for progress and reform. On the other hand, it was housed in the Royal Academy of Science, a privileged body jealous of its prerogatives. In this respect, the place of the scientific establishment in the political process was similar to that of the juridical nobility, though of incomparably less moment in the crisis of the old regime. The aristocracy exerted its leverage and forced the calling of the Estates-General in the expectation that the summoning of representatives of the nation would curb royal absolutism and preserve the vested rights and legal exemptions of privileged persons in a constitutional regime. Its miscalculation precipitated the French Revolution. The anticipations of the scientific community, if more constructive in character, were no less severely dashed. The Academy of Science was dissolved early in the Terror. Of the five members most widely involved in public affairs under the Constituent Assembly, all perished: Bailly and Lavoisier guillotined, La Rochefoucauld assassinated, Condorcet hounded, and Vicq d’Azyr driven to their deaths. Seen from outside the Academy of Science, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, J.-A.-N. Caritat marquis de Condorcet, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Louis-Alexandre duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, and Félix Vicq d’Azyr had in common membership in that body and general visibility as champions of its definition of the public welfare. Bailly grasped every opportunity to identify 5

Brockliss (1987).

I. 1 . IN 1789

11

himself with the civic interest in the 1780s. He served as chairman of the three blue ribbon commissions appointed by the Academy at the behest of the government to investigate abuses posed by the vogue of Mesmerism, by the dismaying conditions in the Hôtel-Dieu and other hospitals, and by the unsanitary location of slaughter houses near Les Halles. Lavoisier presided over a fourth commission charged with inquiry into the state of prisons. Bypassing the bookish Faculty of Medicine, Vicq d’Azyr founded the Royal Society of Medicine in 1776 with the dual purpose of mobilizing the medical profession in the control of epidemics and of bringing scientific resources to bear upon problems of public health. The appalling task of exhuming millions of cadavers in the centuries-old Cimetière des Innocents fell to a commission of the Society headed by Marc-Augustin Thouret, as did the even more unsavory cleanup of the huge sewage disposal plant at Montfaucon. The ducal cousins La Rochefoucauld d’Enville and La RochefoucauldLiancourt, twins in point of noblesse oblige, were patrons of the Academy of Science and the Society of Medicine, respectively. Almost indistinguishable from one another in doing good from on high, they participated in the work of a number of these commissions alongside other leading members of both bodies.6 Condorcet, Permanent Secretary of the Academy, was responsible exofficio for communicating with both government and the public in regard to all its enterprises. Not every undertaking improved what would now be called the image of the Academy. Its report on Mesmer and animal magnetism in 1784 offended fashionable Paris by its arrogant dismissal of what everyone found fascinating.7 Science also shared in the odium incurred by Lavoisier when the corporation of tax farmers, acting on his initiative, obtained the authority to erect a wall around Paris in order to thwart traffickers smuggling dutiable commodities into the city by way of many side streets.8 Several of the elegant customs houses designed by Nicolas Ledoux, through which their wagon loads were to pass, may still be admired, one flanking the Lion de Belfort at Denfert-Rocherau, a second in Place de la Nation, a third at La Villette. Seen from inside the Academy, the five members most in the public eye had very little in common. Affable and generally well liked, Bailly had made useful astronomical observations at the time of his election and afterward in the 1760s, but was no longer taken seriously by his colleagues on scientific grounds. He had done nothing in science proper following a 1771 paper, of real though limited importance, on the intensity of light reflected by the

6 7 8

On science and civic reforms, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 244–256. Ibid., pp. 261–289. Poirier (1993), pp. 184–187.

12


moons of Jupiter and on their respective diameters.9 In the ensuing years Bailly turned to literary activities and to writing about the history of astronomy. Montucla’s history of mathematics and Delambre’s of astronomy are evidence that works of enduring value in the historiography of science might be produced by capable scholars of their generation.10 Not so Bailly’s treatment, especially of antiquity, which has the interest of a high-flown and occasionally eloquent compilation of astronomical legend. He wrote in the persuasion that the various fragments of astronomy known to Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, and Indians, which is to say the germs of modern science, represent the relics of a perfect knowledge of the heavens possessed by the pristine civilization that had united all humanity prior to its collapse into the barbarism we know as ancient history. Bailly went on to compose discursive writings on the supposed origins of this astronomy in India and of all knowledge in the lost continent Atlantis. Voltaire having been incautious enough to acknowledge the gift of the first volume appreciatively, Bailly inflicted these further speculations on him in the form of a public correspondence that the sick old man lacked the strength to ignore.11 Bailly’s main ambition in all this was to be the first triple academician since Fontenelle. In that he succeeded, though not without the help of intervention from Versailles in all three instances. Supplementing his membership in the Academy of Science (1763), he was named to the Académie Fran¸caise in 1783 and to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1785. Bad blood between Bailly and Condorcet went back to academic politics in 1773, when d’Alembert prevailed over Buffon in securing the election of Condorcet rather than Bailly to assist, and in 1776 to succeed, the ailing Grandjean de Fouchy in the post of Permanent Secretary. Condorcet was thus strategically placed to serve as spokesman for science throughout the heady days of reform attempted by the Turgot ministry from 1774 to 1776. A letter to Voltaire in the latter year laments his mentor’s fall from power: “We had a beautiful dream, but it was too short. I shall go back to Mathematics and Philosophy. It is cold comfort to work only for vainglory when for a time you have flattered yourself that you have been working for the benefit of the public.”12 Go back he did, albeit with an inelegance in mathe9

“Mèmoire sur les inégalités des satellites de Jupiter.” MARS (1771/74), pp. 580–667. On Delambre’s history, see below, chapter 4, section 3. On Montucla, Histoire des mathématiques (2 vols., 1758), see Swerdlow (1993). 11 Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, depuis son origine jusqu’à l’établissement de l’école d’Alexandrie (1775); Lettres sur l’origine des sciences (1777); Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon (1778). For bibliographical detail of Bailly’s further works on the history of modern astronomy, see Chapin, “Bailly,” DSB 1 (1970), pp. 400–402; and for a fair-minded account, E. B. Smith (1954), chapters 4 and 5. 12 June 1776. See Condorcet, Oeuvres (12 vols., 1847–1849) 1, pp. 113–115. 10

I. 1 . IN 1789

13

matical style that cost him the respect of rigorously minded mathematicians at the time and ever since.13 A mathematician lacking creativity and skill in calculation suffers more keenly from comparison to colleagues who possess such attributes than do scientists with similar disabilities in other disciplines. The kindest judgment professionally comes from Sylvestre Lacroix. The preface to his 1810 textbook on the calculus says of Condorcet’s contribution to the field, “We must see in it what he was capable of doing rather than what he did.”14 Condorcet, in short, was a literate but innumerate mathematician. In later times the expression would be a contradiction in terms. It would not necessarily have seemed so to a d’Alembert, to a Leibniz, or to a Descartes, who also thought, perhaps with greater power of mind though not of character, to turn mathematics outward upon philosophy rather than inward upon itself. For Condorcet, philosophe and not philosopher, mathematical analysis would reach fulfillment in the reformation not so much of knowledge as of society. Lavoisier existed on a different plane from the one inhabited by his fellow academicians. Tax farmer and chairman of the board of directors of the Caisse d’Escompte, he was a wealthy financier. Agronomist and experimental farmer, he was a landed proprietor with an estate at Freschines near Blois in the Beauce and a family property just north of Paris at Le Bourget. Administrator of the munitions industry, he along with his wife held scientific court at the Arsenal in an official apartment adjoining the laboratory where he revolutionized the science of chemistry. Chemist by calling, he collaborated with the leading mathematician, Laplace, in founding the study of calorimetry and also with a leading engineer, Jean-Baptiste Meusnier, in the pyrolysis of water. Beyond that he thought to confirm his theory of combustion by investigating the physiology of respiration. Among peers, Lavoisier aroused admiration, provoked jealousy, and won little or no affection. Among inferiors he inspired fear and even hatred. All of this was far from the intention of a scientist whose passion for getting things right simply took no account of the sentiments of others.15 One of the few who felt easy in Lavoisier’s company was La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, for whom there was no question of competition. In April 1785 the duke collaborated closely with Lavoisier, then Director of the Academy, in effecting a difficult reorganization that increased the number of scientific sections from six to eight in order to accommodate the relatively recent 13 That judgment has been redressed, to a degree, in recent scholarship. See below, chapter 1 section 5. 14 Quoted from Traité du calcul différentiel et intégral (1810), xxiii–xxiv, in Crépel and Gilain (1989), p. 18. 15 The most recent, and by far the fullest, biography is Poirier (1993).

14


development of natural history and mineralogy and of general physics.16 As Gunpowder Administrator, Lavoisier welcomed La Rochefoucauld’s initiative in conducting experiments on the extraction of saltpeter from chalk cliffs along the Seine near his ancestral property of La Roche-Guyon. La Rochefoucauld published several other papers of mineralogical and chemical interest.17 Scions of one of the greatest families of France, La Rochefoucauld and his cousin were, of course, influential rather for their position than for their science. Nevertheless, they were respected participants and not mere ornaments in the societies they honored with their membership. Liancourt, even like Lavoisier, turned his estate into a model farm in the 1780s, and beyond that created a trade school for the children of needy military families. It enrolled 130 pupils on the eve of the Revolution and eventually became the ´ Ecole des Arts et Métiers of Châlons-sur-Marne. Alleviating poverty was Liancourt’s central preoccupation, and the health of the working poor his principal reason for involvement in the Royal Society of Medicine. Vicq d’Azyr, first and only Permanent Secretary of that Society, combined great personal charm with equally important seriousness of purpose. It was, no doubt, owing to the former attribute that he had the rare, perhaps the unique, good fortune to be equally popular at court and among the progressively minded heirs of the Turgot legacy who frequented enlightened salons in the capital. In Versailles, Vicq d’Azyr was personal physician to Marie Antoinette, who delighted in the company of her “philosophe.” In Paris, he was an intimate of Condorcet, his counterpart and role model in the Academy of Science. There was, however, a difference in the public perception of the two institutions for which they spoke. The one was exclusive, the other inclusive. The Academy was an element in the structure of authority and made many enemies among would-be innovators whose ideas it judged. The Royal Society of Medicine, by contrast, was itself an innovation. Reforms it sought to effect were at the expense of privilege, seated in the Faculty of Medicine, which had always exercised over medicine an oversight comparable to, though not identical with, the Academy’s over science.18 To turn the medical profession away from collective self-serving and toward responsibility for public health, that was the thrust of Vicq d’Azyr’s reform. It was an effort that could scarcely be unpopular. The Society’s network of correspondents might well be compared, though it does not seem to have been, to the Freemasons and the Mesmerist Societies of Har16 Oeuvres de Lavoisier (hereafter OL) 5, pp. 555–614, and Lavoisier, OL, Correspondance 4, Annexe V, pp. 311–316. See Hahn (1971), pp. 99–101. 17 “Mémoires sur la génération du salpêtre dans la craie,” SE 11 (1786), pp. 610–624; “Examen d’un sable vert cuivreux de Pérou” (jointly with Fourcroy), MARS (1786–87), pp. 465– 473. On the family, see Rousse (1892), and on La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Dreyfus (1903a, b), Weiner (1993). 18 On the Royal Society of Medicine, see Gillispie (1980), chapter 3.

I. 2 . B AILLY AND THE ASSEMBLY

15

mony in foreshadowing the revolutionary spiderweb of political communication linking the Jacobin Club of Paris with provincial affiliates. But Vicq d’Azyr was more than an organizer. He was a notable anatomist, and insisted on the importance of anatomy over Latin in the study and practice of medicine. For the new medicine was to be based on science. Hence his insistence on academic procedures within the Society of Medicine. Provision of care was to be inseparable from advancement of knowledge.19 Let us follow the trajectory of these, the most visible members of the Academy, throughout the first phase of the Revolution, from the Convocation of the Estates-General on 4 May 1789 until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 30 September 1791. They began by sharing in the view, which was the consensus of responsible opinion until nearly the end of that period, that the stirring events underwritten by violence through which the country was passing should and would culminate in the transformation of an absolute into a constitutional monarchy. It did not at first occur to them that irresponsible opinion would instead prevail at both extremes, in the Court at Versailles and in the streets of Paris. 2. BAILLY AND THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

Scientific habits of mind are not normally congruent with political reality. Both Condorcet and Lavoisier failed in their bids for election to the EstatesGeneral, while the only scientist chosen by the Third Estate was the genial and superficial Bailly, who never sought a seat. Indeed, no record remains of his ever having raised his sights beyond the scourges of charlatanism and pollution to the political process in general prior to the intense discussions that occupied all Paris, indeed all France, in the interval between 8 August 1788, when the King’s Order in Council convoked the Estates-General, and the ensuing elections held in April and May 1789. What is more remarkable, thrust by circumstance into the opening breach between the Assembly and the King, and forced to improvise, Bailly acquitted himself with style and distinction, indeed with bravery, and saved the day, or at least the dawn.20 Elections to the Estates-General were indirect. In each constituency all higher prelates together with representative secular and regular clergymen 19

Vicq d’Azyr, “Nouveau plan pour la médicine,” HSRM 9 (1788–87/1790), p. 150. The following account of Bailly’s political debut is based mainly on his memoirs and on the minutes of the meetings of the Assembly of Electors of Paris. The memoirs were first published in 1805 under the title Avant-Moniteur, ou tableau sommaire des huit premiers mois de la Révolution. They were republished, with annotation, under the title Mémoires de Bailly, ed. St. A. Berville and Barrière, Collection des mémoires relatifs a` la Révolution Fran¸caise (3 vols., 1821–22). The proceedings of the electors, Procès-Verbal des séances et délibérations de l’Assemblée Générale des Electeurs de Paris (3 vols., 1790), were recorded by Bailly as secretary from 26 April through 21 May 1789 and by Duveyrier, his successor in that post, from 22 May through 22 July. For additional documentation, see Hahn (1955), and for secondary treatments, Brucker (1958), E. B. Smith (1954), Kelly (1982), Pt. IV. 20

16


chose the deputies of the First Estate and all noblemen those of the Second Estate, 300 in each order. As for the Third Estate, male taxpayers over twenty-five years of age elected delegates to local electoral assemblies, which were constituted differently in town and country. Those assemblies then selected the deputies to meet in Versailles, 600 in principle, a few of whom failed to appear. The King had yielded in the opening political struggle of the Revolution, and prior to the elections had agreed to doubling the representation of the Third to equal the combination of the privileged orders. Dispute continued over the question of whether the three orders would sit together in a single assembly, in which case the deputies of the Third Estate combined with liberal members of the First and Second might prevail, or whether the orders would sit separately in a tri-cameral body, in which case the two privileged orders could always outvote the commoners.21 Paris was a special case. Primary assemblies in each of sixty districts chose the members of an Electoral Assembly, which in turn selected deputies for the twenty seats allocated to the capital. Bailly tells in his memoirs of conversations at his club and at dinner parties amid the political ferment of the previous winter. Friends, among them the abbé Maury, kept predicting that his character and civic reputation would win him election to the EstatesGeneral, a thing he would never have imagined for himself. Though he lived in the suburb of Chaillot, Bailly voted in the relatively well-to-do district of the Feuillants. A young passerby outside the Convent where voters were foregathering sized him up and volunteered, “You will be named an Elector.” Only as the meeting got underway did Bailly begin to take the notion seriously: “Finding myself among the Assembly of the District was like breathing new air: To be something in the political order felt phenomenal.”22 The sentimental style of his recollections recaptures the optimism of the moment, marked by a courteous give and take of messages among nobles and bourgeois, by reverence for the paternal image of a king needing only to hear the true voices of his people, by the illusion that the general will was good will. Articulate in speech and writing as befitted a triple academician, Bailly was named to the committee that drafted the cahier or statement of demands for the district. He and his colleagues repaired to a separate room between midnight and three in the morning and there produced a document containing “all the germs of liberty.”23 Proceeding to the choice of delegates, voted on one by one, the district assembly named Bailly first among its seven electors. All this occupied a twenty-four-hour session on 21–22 April 1789. 21 22 23

For detail on the arrangements, see Hyslop (1968). Bailly, Mémoires 1, p. 9. The standard work on the Paris elections is Chassin (1888–89). Ibid. 1, p. 12.


17

Bailly’s success repeated itself writ larger in the Assembly of Electors. Cahier and credentials in hand, he and his colleagues of the Feuillants presented themselves on the afternoon of the twenty-second in the great public room of the Hôtel de Ville, which he then entered for the first time in his life, there to rub elbows with electors of the other districts. The next morning all three orders assembled together in the hall of the Archbishopric to hear formal addresses by the royal officials. Bailly would have preferred that clergy, nobility, and Third Estate continue to represent the interests of the capital in a single assembly, thus setting an example to the Estates-General due to convene in Versailles in ten days time. That was not to be. The verifying of credentials, the recognition of electors from the suburbs, the swearing of oaths—all the formalities used up three more days until Sunday, 26 April. Clergy and nobility then withdrew unto themselves, leaving the Assembly of Electors of the Third Estate, 250 strong, to organize its procedures. Time was very short. Deputies were to be presented to the King on 2 May. Suspicion was voiced that the authorities had deliberately dragged out the ceremonies in Paris in order to place the Assembly of Electors before a Hobson’s choice: to commit irregularities in the preparation of cahiers and choice of deputies or else to fail in completing its work by the appointed day. In either event, the influence of the city would be nullified when the Estates-General opened in Versailles. The Electors refused to fall into the trap, if trap it was, and conducted careful deliberations. In so doing the Assembly won the respect of all Paris. Precedent dictated that royal officials should take the chair and keep the minutes. The Assembly would have none of that and chose its own officers. For a moment Bailly, inexperienced in parliamentary procedure, feared lest he be elected president. To his combined relief and gratification, he placed second and was thereupon named secretary. Serving on the commission that drew up the cahiers or revolutionary agenda were three members of the Académie Fran¸caise, Jean-Fran¸cois Marmontel, Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, and Antoine Suard; two members of the Academy of Sciences, the chemist Louis Cadet and the botanist André Thouin; the publisher C.-L.-F. Panckoucke; the manufacturer of wallpaper J.-B. Réveillon; and the doctor Ignace Guillotin. The ritual of the procès-verbal, formal minutes legitimating official proceedings of any sort, was among the tissue of ingrained practices that changed hands but not their nature in the Revolution. Bailly was as meticulous as the clerk of any court, but had to admit to one mistake, the more readily since it was fortunate. The Assembly decided early on that nobles and clergymen were ineligible to represent the Third Estate. The resolution to that effect passed late one night and seemed so matter-of-course that he failed to record it. On the last day, with nineteen of the twenty deputies chosen, there was strong sentiment in favor of naming the abbé Sieyès for

18


the remaining place. Impossible! To do so would flout the letter of the Assembly’s own law. Or so it seemed until, looking back in the procès-verbal for the exact wording, Bailly found no record of the measure that everyone remembered passing. Owing to his oversight, it could have no effect. Legalism, as characteristic of French procedures in revolutionary as in normal times, had its compensations. Otherwise, Sieyès, champion of the Third Estate, would have had no seat in the Estates-General. Bailly had sought to remove himself from consideration as a deputy before ever his name was put forward on the grounds that he had depended on the government for his entire career and virtually all his income. The renunciation was first applauded and then refused. His memoirs are frank about another, related matter, where too he felt himself the exception to the rule. “I noticed,” he remarked, “that the Assembly held men of letters and academicians in great disfavor.”24 The dominant groups were merchants and lawyers, who also disliked each other. Merchants knew little of literary men, while lawyers were in the best position to appreciate them. By rights, lawyers and writers should have been at one. Theirs had been the freest of conditions in the old regime. The authorities had never dared silence a courageous lawyer, and had feared both the intelligence and the words of distinguished writers. Why, then—Bailly continues—should so few of the latter have come forward in the front ranks of the Revolution? He could not deny that certain writers might simply have been sitting on the fence, but a more general attitude may be thought to account for the hesitation of philosophic minds. Liberty and human dignity are indeed important to philosophers. Above all, however, they value peace. Let enlightenment indeed spread, let human beings recover their rights, but let these good things come about gradually, without shocks, without violence. Liberty will arrive of itself when a great people is ready. Better to accept a little less of it than to insist on an extra increment bought in the blood of our brothers. “Those exalted spirits who believe themselves the only sons of Liberty may treat as bastards all who engage in such calculations, but it has to be admitted that their thinking is reasonable enough. I always thought, and still do, that a little more of that philosophic spirit would not have been amiss in the Constituent Assembly.”25 Bailly recorded his memoirs while in seclusion in 1792 or early 1793. Whatever his private doubts, if any, in May 1789, he said nothing to rub his fellow electors the wrong way. He had the gift of allowing others to think well of themselves while participating in the forefront of all the proceedings he recorded. The unassuming urbanity that had charmed the court and brought him academic place was no less pleasing in this new, political com24 25

Ibid. 1, p. 51. Ibid. 1, p. 52.


19

pany. Bailly came on as the very epitome of cultivated public spirit brightening the future while not thinking of himself. His was the first name put in nomination for the Estates-General. He won a majority on the initial ballot, and by virtue of seniority became the leader of the Paris delegation in the Third Estate. What with the late start and correct procedures of the Assembly of Electors, the deputies of Paris missed the opening of the Estates-General on May 4 and arrived in Versailles three weeks late. Except for renunciation of fiscal privileges by clergy and nobility and acceptance of equality before the tax collector, nothing had yet been accomplished. The impasse over the crucial issue of organization continued. Should the credentials of individual deputies be verified by each order separately or by all three sitting together in plenary session? At stake in the niggling procedural question of powers was the fundamental constitutional issue of the locus of power, whether it would lie with the majority in a unicameral body or with the two privileged estates against the Third. Commissioners named by the three orders failed for the second time to reach agreement on 25 May, the day the three Paris delegations took their places among their peers. The next weeks were critical. The deputies of the Third Estate represented a capable and civilized people deprived for centuries of any voice in their own political affairs. They were themselves devoid of parliamentary experience. Few of them knew each other, nor even the regions represented apart from their own. Nevertheless, the grass roots went deep. So clearly did the Third Estate know its interest, so astute were they in a politics none had ever practiced, that they prevailed against the weight of royal authority, against the prestige of a powerful nobility, against distant precedents not in their favor, against the menace of military force. They prevailed—and this perhaps was most difficult of all—despite the commitment of the great majority to the institution of monarchy and the patriotic and filial affection widely felt for the person, or at least the idea, of the King of France, a resource it took Louis XVI another two years to squander. Sieyès was the strategist, Mirabeau the orator, but it was Bailly who presided over this triumph. On 3 June the Paris delegation nominated him, its senior deputy, to succeed the ailing d’Ailly as dean, in effect president, of the Third Estate. Tradition from earlier centuries was that the privilege normally accrued to Paris, and by right to the Prévôt des Marchands, and though neither privilege nor office now had claims, Bailly felt he must take the chair lest the influence of the capital go by default. His was now the delicate task of incarnating the dignity of the Third Estate by standing up to ministers and court officials while showing proper deference to the monarch himself. The strategy, in effect, was to implement the rhetoric of Sieyès’s clarion title, “What is the Third Estate?”—the answer being that it was to all intents and purposes the nation. Following a further week of stalemate, and

20


repeated refusal by the nobility of a compromise favored by Necker, the deputies of the Third Estate rallied to Sieyès’s proposal that they proceed on their own to the verification of the credentials, not just of their order, but of all three. The clergy had so far not taken a position. Representatives of the lower clergy, many of whom sympathized rather with their parishioners than with their bishops, now began to come aboard, three of them on 13 June, six more the next day, notable among them the abbé Henri Grégoire. A few days later, on the seventeenth Sieyès moved that the deputies of the Third Estate, representing 96 percent of the nation, declare themselves the “National Assembly.” Acting like a responsible legislature, they at once took the first step into government and authorized the collection of taxes, subject to whatever fiscal reforms might be enacted in the future. On the nineteenth, the clergy, not to be left behind, voted by a narrow margin to join with the Third Estate. Should the declaration of a National Assembly be allowed to stand, the Estates-General would be superseded. Early the next morning, Saturday the twentieth, word came to Bailly in his lodgings that the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs was surrounded by the Guard and that a royal order had been posted closing the great hall and suspending any further meeting on the pretext that preparations needed to be made for a royal session to be convened three days hence. Bailly hastened to the entrance, completing his toilette in the carriage. Other deputies milled about in the avenue de Paris. Getting no satisfaction from officials on the scene, Bailly welcomed the general cry that the meeting must go forward in another place. Guillotin suggested the nearby tennis court, and Bailly led his colleagues thither through the rain to meet with a cordial welcome from the manager. The only furniture was a rough table and a few benches along the wall. There, crowded into a space like a giant squash court, with the public peering down from galleries normally occupied by spectators of the sport, the self-invented National Assembly some 600 strong stood through a daylong session. It culminated in the famous oath “never to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances required, until the constitution of the Kingdom should be established and settled on a solid foundation.”26 Reading the formulation in a stentorian voice that could be heard by the public massed outside, Bailly took the vow himself, inscribed the words in the register—no mistake in this procès-verbal—and administered the oath to every member except one, who refused. The session closed with “Vive le roi,” for the pretense persisted that only his advisers, only the court, were ill disposed. So they were, from the point of view of the commons, though it became more difficult to keep up the pretense that the King was merely the victim of bad advice. Meeting on the twenty-first, the Royal Council rejected all 26

Ibid. 1, p. 190.


21

compromise on the composition of the Estates-General. Ushers seated the three orders apart at the Royal Session on the twenty-third, the nobility in gorgeous raiment, the clergy in their vestments, the commoners in the sober black suits of the respectable bourgeoisie. The tone and bearing of the King belonged to the time of Louis XIV, or perhaps of Fran¸cois 1er. He had, haughtily declared Louis XVI, done everything in his power for the benefit of his people when he resolved to convoke the Estates-General. He would accept equal taxation and civil liberties. In the future, he would submit fiscal measures and legislation to periodic meetings of the Estates General. But the Estates would remain separate. The time-honored distinction of the three orders was essential to the constitution of the kingdom. Never, he insisted, had a King done so much for his people. His only desire was the good of the public. If the deputies were to abandon him in that fine enterprise, he would proceed of his own authority. They were to remember that none of their projects, none of their arrangements, could have the force of law without his approbation. “Thus I am the sole guarantor of your respective rights, and all the Orders of the State can rely on my trusted impartiality. Any defiance on your part would be a grave injustice. To date, it is I who do everything for the happiness of my people, and it is rare that the sole ambition of a sovereign should be that his subjects agree among each other to accept his boons.” The king closed by ordering the estates to separate at once and to reconvene the next day in the rooms assigned them. “Unhappy prince,” wrote Bailly in his memoir, “on what course are they embarking you? And how have they deceived you!”27 The nobility and higher clergy dutifully withdrew after the departure of the King. Not so the commons, who remained all silent in their places. When the chief marshall, marquis de Dreux-Brezé, asked Bailly whether he had heard the order of the King, Bailly replied that the Assembly was adjourned after the Royal Session but would not disperse before deliberating. “Is that your reply, and may I transmit it to the King?” Yes, said Bailly, adding—according to most histories—“The nation assembled cannot be given orders.” By his own account, he made that remark to the people around him, not to the King’s representative, which would have been disrespectful. Mirabeau showed no such restraint. Taking the floor, he cried: “Go tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people and we will leave only by force of bayonets.”28 It was a gratuitous piece of demagoguery, in Bailly’s view, for there was no question of bayonets. As yet. The Assembly did reconvene the next day, though not as a separate order, and immediately declared the immunity of its members from arrest or inter27 28

Ibid. 1, pp. 208–214. Ibid. 1, pp. 214–215.

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ference. Clearly, restrained defiance had won the parliamentary battle. The majority of the clergy came over to the Assembly on the twenty-fourth. A group of forty-seven liberal nobles followed on the 25th, among them the duc d’Orléans, the King’s cousin and first prince of the blood royal, the duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, and the comte de Clermont-Tonnerre. Instead of dissolving the Assembly that had disobeyed him, Louis XVI gave in on the twenty-seventh and now urged the remaining clergy and nobility to join with the Third Estate. On 7 July the deputies redesignated themselves the National Constituent Assembly. Exhausted, Bailly had stepped down from the chair on 3 July, to be succeeded by the Archbishop of Vienne. To his great satisfaction La Rochefoucauld headed the deputation named to honor him for the “wise and noble manner in which he had presided” during the preceding four weeks.29 Thus ended the brief, intense time in which Bailly’s qualities were well adapted to political circumstance. It was the fatality of the French Revolution that victories of principle had always to be secured by violence. The action shifted now from the halls of Versailles to the streets of Paris. For bayonets were not to be excluded after all. At the very moment of abandoning the parliamentary front, the king allowed the queen, his brothers, and the noble advisers ever at his elbow to persuade him to consider force. The reign of Louis XVI shows no more characteristic instance of the combination of irresolution with deviousness that may have doomed it from the start. Troop movements began on 26 June. By 1 July the Royal German regiment was camped in the Bois de Boulogne, four Swiss regiments were in the Champ de Mars, and the Provence infantry was in Saint-Denis, with its artillery train in the Invalides— 30,000 men all told. In Paris, the popular reaction, exacerbated by a shortage of bread and fear of famine, began with desertions in the garrison regiment of Gardes-Françaises. Among the rank and file, sympathy was with the populace and vice versa. On 30 June a mob invaded the Abbaye prison and liberated soldiers who had been arrested for frequenting political clubs and gatherings. They were secured in a safe house in the Palais Royal, the property of the duc d’Orléans and thus exempt from police jurisdiction. On 2 July a demonstration in the garden there protested the concentration of troops around the capital. As in other constituencies, the Assembly of Electors that had chosen the delegates from Paris remained in being, nobles and commoners together, as a committee of correspondence with a watching brief. In their meeting of 1 July several motions were proposed (and then watered down) requesting the King to withdraw the regiments menacing the capital and to authorize instead creation of a municipal militia—“Garde Bourgeoise.” 29

Ibid. 1, p. 278.


23

Paris was thus already simmering when word came on 12 July that on the previous day Louis XVI had dismissed Jacques Necker from the post of finance minister and, in effect, head of government. Blamed on all counts by the court, Necker was credited by public opinion with having forced the King to convoke the Estates General in the first place, and further with having insisted on double representation for the Third Estate. A Swiss banker and nothing of a nobleman, he was, for the moment, the symbol of fiscal probity and of the public interest in cleansing the gilded Augean stable of Versailles. The fall of Necker turned turbulence into panic and anarchy on the twelfth and thirteenth. Shops were either shuttered or pillaged. Theaters and restaurants closed. Houses were set ablaze. Mobs surged from one quarter to another. Thieves, madmen, and beggars postured as leaders. Young toughs sold revolutionary cocardes under the threat that refusal to buy was treason. Harangues were incessant in the garden of the Palais Royal and on many a street corner. Amid all this a group of electors formed themselves into a Permanent Committee sitting round the clock at the center of the hubbub in the great hall of the Hôtel de Ville, all open to the public. Their object was, not to supplant the municipal government consisting of the Prévôt des Marchands and aldermen, but to fill the vacuum of authority created by its near paralysis and to restore confidence and order. To that end they persuaded Jacques de Flesselles to preside. Prévôt des Marchands since the previous April, he had formerly been Intendant of Lyons and patron in 1784 of the first flight of a manned Montgolfier balloon outside of Paris.30 Mobilizing a civic militia was the first order of business. Volunteers sprang forward in every district. “Aux Armes!” Camille Desmoulins and fellow orators kept crying. But where were arms to be found? Crowds formed early on the fourteenth to search the installations where muskets, pistols, ammunition, and sabers might be stored. The Invalides was invaded and yielded a considerable supply. Flesselles had undertaken to have 12,000 muskets shipped immediately to the Hôtel de Ville from the factory at Charleville, with another 42,000 to follow. When the cases, marked “Artillery,” were opened, they turned out to be full of rags intended for the paper trade. The Bastille was the next target. There is no need to rehearse the tragedy of errors that led to the taking of the obsolete stronghold in the course of that momentous day.31 Its cellars in fact contained no arms. Throughout the troubles, Bailly and his fellow deputies remained in Versailles passing resolutions urging removal of royal troops. He was thus spared the sight of the heads of marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, and 30 31

Gillispie (1983), pp. 69–78. See Godechot (1965).

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Jacques de Flesselles, whose successor as chief magistrate of Paris he was about to become, paraded through the streets on triumphant pikes. On the fifteenth Louis XVI, yielding once again, appeared before the Constituent Assembly to announce withdrawal of the regiments surrounding Paris and approval of the fait accompli of a militia. Nowhere is the political reality more evident than in the contrast these desperate ceremonies exhibited between the outward show and the inward rot of royal authority. A great deputation from the Constituent Assembly, headed by Lafayette and over one hundred strong, departed forthwith for Paris to establish solidarity between nation and city. Among the noblemen were La Rochefoucauld, his cousin Liancourt, and Clermont-Tonnerre; among the clergy were the Archbishop of Paris, Talleyrand, and Grégoire; among the commoners were Bailly, Guillotin, and Sieyès. In default of the old municipality, the logic of events had transformed the Permanent Committee of Electors, now under the presidency of Moreau de St-Méry, from an emergency body into the forerunner of the Commune of Paris.32 Deputies joined forces with electors in the presence of all the Parisians who could squeeze into the great hall of the Hôtel de Ville. There Lafayette read out the King’s words, which were applauded by the audience and loudly cheered by the multitude outside in the Place de Grève, where nothing could be heard. At once the new municipal authority named Lafayette, “defender of American liberty,” commander of the civic militia, now to be the National Guard. It remained to replace Flesselles. There could be only one choice, the first deputy of Paris, by acclamation. “Bailly Prévôt des Marchands,” cried many voices. “Non pas “Prévôt des Marchands,” called another, “mais Maire de Paris!” “Oui, Maire de Paris,” echoed the entire throng.33 His first official act was to assure the assemblage of the King’s good faith. His next was to present his sovereign the keys to the city in a ceremony held in the Hôtel de Ville on the seventeenth. On that day Louis XVI (who, meanwhile, had yielded again and restored Necker to office) visited his capital. To the momentary plaudits of the crowd, he donned the revolutionary cocarde that Bailly offered him on alighting from his carriage. It combined the white of the monarchy with the blue and red of Paris to symbolize “the august and eternal alliance between king and people.”34 Thus did Jean-Sylvain Bailly, member of three academies, embark on novel and dangerous political duties. ´ The clearest brief account of the Assemblée des Electeurs is the introduction by Sigis⬘ série (7 vols., mond Lacroix to volume 1 of his edition of Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1ere 1895–99, AMS Press reprint, New York, 1974) 1, pp. i–xx. Cited hereafter as Lacroix, Actes. See also Robiquet (1890a), pp. 8–41. 33 ´ Procès-Verbal des séances . . . des Electeurs de Paris (n. 3), 1, pp. 447–479. 34 Bailly, Mémoires 2, pp. 54–69. 32

I. 3 . L AVOISIER AND THE ARSENAL

25

3. LAVOISIER AND THE ARSENAL

In 1787 Lavoisier was among fifty-two noblemen, clergymen, and landholders composing the new provincial assembly of the generality of Orléans. The notion of a system of regional representation had started with Turgot, for whom Dupont de Nemours worked out the detail of a scheme that, like his reform program in general, never took effect.35 Dupont revived the idea for presentation to the Assembly of Notables in February 1787. Convened by the King at the instance of Calonne, Controller-General of Finance since 1783, this ad hoc convocation of eminent personages was intended to dramatize the imminence of bankruptcy and to seek a resolution of the everworsening problem of the deficit. The desirability of provincial assemblies (provided that the orders sit and vote separately) was the one recommendation on which the magnates managed to agree. Initiated by Loménie de Brienne, who succeeded Calonne in the Finance Ministry in April 1787, the assemblies were meant to enlist local participation in the work of administration and in reforming the incidence of taxation. They were neither elective nor representative bodies, however. The King named half the members, who coopted the other half. Until then, Lavoisier had divided his energy between chemistry, munitions, finance, and agriculture, to all of which he brought the method of exact accounting for the relevant quantities that was his hallmark. Now he threw himself enthusiastically into the work of the provincial assembly. He was, indeed, its moving spirit, and the experience introduced him to the practice of politics. Although he had inherited a minor title of nobility, Lavoisier sat with the Third Estate, serving on the Committee on Public welfare and Agriculture, the most important of the four into which the Assembly organized itself. Among his colleagues were comte de Rochambeau, formerly French commander in the American war, and the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès, vicar-general and canon of Chartres, as yet unknown to a wider public. Proceedings of the other committees all passed through Lavoisier’s hands, however, since he was named Secretary of the whole Assembly at the outset. He kept the minutes of the plenary sessions, over a hundred in all, conducted at intervals throughout the year of the Assembly’s deliberations.36 The city of Orléans reacted to the arrival of the provincial assembly with a sharp stirring of interest among the civic-minded. Its Société philanthropique, its Société royale d’agriculture, its Société royale de physique et d’histoire naturelle, in company with the municipality and leading landed proprietors, named spokesmen who composed and addressed to the Assembly a 35 36

Gillispie (1980), p. 34. Lavergne (1861), pp. 688–696.

26


number of memoirs on the problems of the region. Lavoisier, it is clear, read them all, with close attention. In all circumstances, Lavoisier’s capacity to bring order to the matter at hand was felt, sometimes resentfully, in this instance respectfully. During the life of the Assembly he poured out a spate of memoirs pointing the way to modernization of the economy of the relatively backward region. The stream of his proposals reads like a litany of social and economic progressivism. First off, he urged, let the province consolidate the taxes owed the King and collect them directly. Identifying himself only as “author of this memoir,” Lavoisier offered on his own account to advance seed money in the form of an interest-free loan that would enable the local authorities to buy up the rights currently farmed out to middlemen and speculators. Then let the funds paid into a new provincial treasury serve as reserves for founding a provincial discount bank that would accommodate the needs of local merchants and manufacturers for liquid capital. Let a mutual insurance society be established to provide for the retirement of elderly workers and the support of widows and orphans. Let a system of workfare for healthy paupers be put in hand, and let infirmaries be opened for the ailing poor. Let a small allowance be given to single mothers so that they not abandon their children. Let a system of canals and watercourses be constructed along the Loire to open its difficult navigation downstream to the Atlantic and upstream to connections with the Rhône and the Mediterranean. Let a mineralogical map be prepared to exhibit, not merely the natural resources, but the economic topography and the demography of the province. Let the forced labor of the corvée be abolished, and let the maintenance of roads, essential to the prosperity of the region, be paid for by a tax levied on landed proprietors of all three orders. The model should be the mode of financing the upkeep of church properties in the common interest.37 Lavoisier’s main emphasis was agricultural. By coincidence, 1787 was the very year in which he drew up the balance sheet of a decade of experimental farming in his fields at Freschines.38 He had then been serving for three years as Secretary of the Committee on Agriculture created at the instance of Necker in 1785 to advise the Ministry of Finance.39 His recommendations for the province were thus drawn from findings of much more general import. 37 “Mémoires présentés a` l’Assemblée de l’Orléanais,” OL 6 (1893), pp. 238–312. Most of these papers were published anonymously in Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée provinciale de l’Orléanais (Orléans, 1788). 38 “Résultats de quelques expériences d’agriculture et réflexions sur leur relation avec l’économie politique,” read to the Société royale d’agriculture of Paris in 1788, OL 2 (1892), pp. 812– 823. Lavoisier published this piece only in 1792. Annales de chimie 15 (December 1792), pp. 267–285. 39 For this episode, and references to the earlier literature on Lavoisier and agronomy, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 380–387, and for the most recent account, Poirier (1993), chapter 12, pp. 211–230. Lavoisier’s 1791 monograph, De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France, has been reprinted in a critical edition by Jean-Claude Perrot (1988).


27

How did it happen that the yield of an acre in England was on average 40 percent greater than in France? The explanation was not that land across the Channel was more fertile, nor that English farmers were more intelligent or industrious than French. “Let us dare to say it, Messieurs”—he is addressing his colleagues of the Provincial Assembly—“the disproportion derives principally from the form of our antique institutions.”40 Crucially at fault was the capricious incidence of the taille, the personal tax calculated to discourage the most enterprising of farmers. What was required to bring France abreast of England in agricultural production, the main source of national wealth, was in the first instance to substitute an equitable and progressive land tax for that regressive imposition, and further to abolish all tithes, dues, tolls, excise taxes, and restrictions on the free circulation of grain and other products of the land. Increased capitalization and lower interest rates would surely follow. With respect to husbandry itself, Lavoisier called for a shift in emphasis from wheat to cattle, systematic fertilization and crop rotation, elimination of fallow, draining of marshes, and other improvements standard among enlightened agronomists. None of these fine recommendations had any effect, and in 1788 interest shifted to the prospect for calling the Estates-General. Lavoisier did not give up on the provincial assemblies, however. He saw them, indeed, as building blocks in what could become a sound structure of national representation. True, they were not yet representative, but Lavoisier felt confident that their members would willingly resign in favor of elected representatives if so requested by the King. A memoir on the convocation of the Estates-General reverts to the pyramidal plan imagined by Turgot, a four-tier scheme in which primary assemblies in every commune would nominate delegates to a departmental assembly, they in turn would choose the provincial assembly, and provincial assemblies would elect deputies to the Estates-General, which would thus be a national legislature. Lavoisier thought the constitution of the existing provincial assemblies— one-fourth clergy, one-fourth nobles, one-half Third Estate, with voting by head—a great improvement over the last Estates-General (1614). Even so, he acknowledged, a bit more weight might properly be given to the people. Not, he hastened to add, that an exact proportionality should obtain, in which case thirty-nine votes out of forty would accrue to the Third Estate. That would never do. “No, the rank, the property, the enlightenment of the first two orders should no doubt be counted.”41 (There is no evidence that Lavoisier discussed this, or other issues, with his colleague Sieyès, or that the latter advanced radically democratic propositions about the place of the Third Estate amid the deliberations of the Orléans Assembly.) Experiment showed that Lavoisier possessed little in the way of electoral 40 41

“Sur l’agriculture et le commerce de l’Orléanais,” OL 6, p. 256. ´ “Mémoire sur la convocation des Etats-G´ enéraux,” OL 6, pp. 313–334.

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affinities, if the expression is permissible for a chemist. He failed to win election to the Estates-General as deputy of the Third Estate of Blois. A local official raised two objections to his candidacy, first that a nobleman and member of the General Tax Farm was ineligible, and second that, in any case, the parish in which Freschines was situated belonged by some fluke of feudal gerrymandering to the jurisdiction of Tours, and not of Blois. The hostilities expressed would indicate that Lavoisier, sweeping in from Paris twice a year, had set an example of enlightened and scientific husbandry that went down badly with neighboring farmers. He fared better personally among the nobility. Readier with the pen than many of high rank, he was chosen secretary of their electoral assembly. The draft of instructions for the deputies of the nobility of Blois is thus from his hand.42 In aristocratic company too, however, his participation in the Tax Farm gave pause, and Lavoisier was elected only as an alternate, not as deputy to the Estates-General. From a liberal point of view, Lavoisier’s sentiments were politically impeccable on the eve of the Revolution: “Until the reign of Louis XVI, the people counted for nothing in France. The word was only of the force, power, and wealth of the State. Word of the happiness of the people, of liberty, of the good life never reached the ear of those who governed us, and they were unaware that the true end of government should be to augment the sum of benefits, the sum of happiness and well-being of all individuals.”43 More specifically, taxes should be proportional to wealth and are illegitimate without the consent of the governed. The power to make laws inheres in the people and is to be exercised through their representatives. Slavery is inadmissible in principle. Had the opinions of Lavoisier and others of like mind prevailed, there would have been no revolution outside the science of chemistry. His limitations were of another order. Realistic about things, about money, about quantities, Lavoisier harborerd illusions about people. He supposed, for example, that the privileged orders in the Orléanais would willingly share the cost of substituting paid labor for the corvée.44 Not at all, of course—the clergy and nobility objected that the recommendation infringed upon their privileges. The completed Procès-verbal of the provincial assembly omits his memoir about the corvée. Lavoisier also supposed that the public-spirited nobility of Blois would agree to voting by head in the Estates-General. Again not so—they required that the instructions to their ´ “Instruction donnée par la noblesse du baillage de Blois a` ses députés aux Etats-G´ enéraux,” OL 6, pp. 335–363. Cf. Poirier (1993), pp. 239–244. 43 “Mémoire sur les encouragements qu’il est nécessaire d’accorder a` l’agriculture,” OL 6, pp. 216–226, on p. 217. 44 “Rapport sur la corvée et sur les suites de sa conversison en une contribution pécuniaire,” OL 6, pp. 301–312. 42


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deputies stipulate voting by head on matters of general import, but by order on anything concerning the particular interest of each of the three.45 Here, finally, is his judgment of the political situation in 1788, after the King’s decision to call the Estates-General: Candor is the distinctive characteristic of the nation. Whoever lacks this virtue is not French. The King wishes for the good. It is in order to bring it about that he is convoking the Estates-General. He asks that he be informed of the truth. Not to put it before him in a spirit of noble confidence, of respectful liberty, would be to betray at the same time both our fellow citizens and the monarch.46 Having failed of election to the Estates-General, Lavoisier encountered the reality of the Revolution, not in Blois, nor in Versailles, but in Paris, on what until the fall of the Bastille had been his own ground. Just to the south of the fortress stood the Petit Arsenal, his headquarters as Gunpowder Administrator. Within the enclosure were residences and offices for himself and his three colleagues. There he had his laboratory. There Madame Lavoisier kept her salon. The working sectors—saltpeter yard, refinery, and powder magazine—stretched along a gully emptying into the Seine. (It has since been developed into the maritime Gare de l’Arsenal at the entrance to the Canal Saint-Martin.) Adjoining those installations at a right angle, the Grand Arsenal paralleled the Seine and fronted on the channel that divided the Ile Louvier from the Right Bank. (This narrow waterway has been filled to form the boulevard Morland.) The Arsenal is the only one of those structures that still stands, housing the library that bears its name. It was then an official residence connected with weapons only by proximity and name. Sully had lived there. The rooftop balustrade of sculptured cannons and flaming mortars capped the first of the great seats of power that a traveler would perceive on entering Paris by boat or riverbank from the East.47 Policy dictated that only the régisseurs and officials high in their service 45

“Instruction donnée par la noblesse du baillage de Blois,” loc. cit., n. 42 above. ´ “Mémoire sur la convocation des Etats-G´ enéraux” (1788), loc. cit., n. 41 above, p. 314. 47 Gillispie (1980) treats the Régie des poudres under Lavoisier’s administration. For munitions in general, see Bret (1994), I, 1A, pp.76–131. Lavoisier’s memoirs and treatises concerning the Régie are printed in Volume 5 of his Oeuvres. Payan (1934) is an administrative history, while Bottée and Riffault (1811) is a valuable contemporary history by two officials of the service whose experience extended from the old regime right through the Napoleonic period. Brochures and pamphlets relating to saltpeter and gunpowder are catalogued in series Lf 65 in the Bibliothèque nationale. In the Archives Nationales, documents concerning the Régie des poudres are classified in series AD VI, 16, 17, for the pre-revolutionary period and in AD VI, 79, for the early revolution. The registers of the Régie des poudres are conserved in the administrative offices of the Laboratoire central des poudres, boulevard Morland (still in the old quarter). A special number of the review, Croix de Guerre (Oct.–Nov. 1961), entitled “Le Service des Poudres,” contains much historical, technical, and administrative detail. 46

30


should know the state of the stores in the Arsenal. Nevertheless, though no one else had the facts, neither could the neighborhood be kept in ignorance of the movements of wagons and boats. Laborers from the quarter were in and out, morning, noon, and night. Every two weeks saltpetermen dumped their loads of raw material in the yard and grumbled their way back to their shops, chronically incensed at the high-handedness of their reception. Transport to and from Paris was largely by barges, which served the Arsenal from the docks at Port Saint-Paul, opposite the shoulder of the Ile Saint-Louis. With all this coming and going, word of activity at the Arsenal always leaked out, seeping from quarter to quarter ever further from the facts, westward through mean streets toward the Hôtel de Ville, across the stream into the two isles, northwest in the Marais, north beyond the Bastille and the Port Saint-Antoine, and east into the faubourg. From those neighborhoods, and specially the last, swarmed the people who assembled before the Bastille on 14 July. Their dark sense of the Arsenal swelled the general suspicion that the Crown, its army and its agents, meant to reduce the city and the country to subjection. It was true, and known in the quarter, that the powder magazine, which did not normally contain important stocks, was just then full to overflowing. In fact, the surplus consisted of the inferior grade of powder manufactured exclusively for the slave trade. The barrels were in transit from Metz and Mézières and destined for Rouen and Nantes. Such was also the explanation of an additional 5,000 pounds discovered on 14 July at the Port Saint-Nicolas by vigilant patriots sniffing out treachery in every hole and corner. The consignment had actually been ordered for the commerce of the Guinea Coast long before it thus found itself fraught with quite different political significance in the Revolution. It was true, too, that the Régie had issued 1,200 pounds of gunpowder to the barracks at Saint-Denis on 15 May, 1,000 pounds to the regiment of Senlis on 10 June, and 1,200 pounds to the Swiss Guards on 3 July. The imagination and ingenuity of gossips, orators, and pamphleteers, among them provocateurs, made play with all of this, and much else, late in May, in June, and early in July 1789. Already in April the popular temper had boiled over in a nearby neighborhood. When the names of the Electors chosen by the districts were announced on 27 April, an angry crowd gathered before the Hôtel de Ville and hanged one of their number, J.-B. Réveillon, in effigy. Manufacturer of the finest wallpaper, and an acquaintance of Lavoisier, Réveillon had his factory in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, rue de Montreuil. Etienne Montgolfier had there constructed the hot-air balloons that soared over Paris in 1783. Amid the tension of the primary elections, the falsity was put about, no doubt to discredit the proceedings, that Réveillon had urged going back to the good old days when a laborer was paid fifteen sous an hour instead of the going rate of twenty. Troops posted to protect his factory failed to repel the mob that sacked it on the twenty-eighth.


31

Twenty-five people were killed in the assault and as many wounded. None of them, and none of those arrested, was one of his employees, who in fact were well paid. Among the casualties were two looters in the dye shop who mistook the contents of flasks containing sulfuric and nitric acid for liquor.48 The Réveillon affair was a foretaste much in the minds of those responsible, if that is the word, for law and order when the entire city began to stir on news of Necker’s dismissal. Twelve July was a Sunday. At eleven o’clock at night the officer commanding the Arsenal, which remained under military control, called the two régisseurs who were then in their quarters, one of whom had gone to bed and had to be roused. Lavoisier tells of the episode, but does not say which of the four colleagues were present, the others besides himself having been J.-B. Clouet and Le Faucheux, father and son. (The younger Le Faucheux had replaced Le Tort, killed eight months before in the explosion of potassium chlorate powder at Essonnes.)49 A detachment sent by Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was at the gate. They bore an order from higher authority to transfer a supply of powder from the Arsenal to the fortress. The pretext for thus suddenly stocking the Bastille with munitions late on a Sunday night was that the powder magazine at the Arsenal might take fire “in a moment of disorder.” Its stores must be lightened in order to protect the neighborhood. Lame though this sounds, the Régie—so said Lavoisier—could not refuse a legitimate directive. The responsible régisseur, whether he or another, limited objections to insisting that a week’s supply be left in the magazine. In the aftermath of the fourteenth, agents of the newly forming National Guard did indeed find that amount of powder in the magazine when posses of patriots followed the surrender of the Bastille with inspections of other critical installations. On Monday the thirteenth, Launay, little accustomed to securing explosives, began to fret about whether he had his powder stored properly. Increasingly persuaded as night came on that he did not, he sent again to the Régie at six o’clock in the morning of the fourteenth requesting help in choosing the safest places to put it. Clouet went round immediately with the sergeant-major who had brought this appeal. He picked a basement far from the kitchen and the domestic quarters. After seeing to disposition of the powder barrels there, he left the Bastille. It was between 9:00 and 10:00 in the morning. By then, the fortress was surrounded. People milled about densely in the labyrinth of streets leading back to the Place de Grève and the 48

On the Réveillon affair, see Rudé (1959), pp. 34–44, modified by Rosenband (1997). For Lavoisier’s account, see “Mémoire de la Régie des Poudres,” OL 5, pp. 714–731. JeanBaptiste Clouet (1739–1816), Lavoisier’s colleague as régisseur, is not to be confused with JeanFran¸cois Clouet (1751–1801), also a chemist and staff member at Mézières before the Revolu´ tion and at the Ecole polytechnique afterward, nor with the abbé Pierre-Romain Clouet ´ (1748–1810), librarian at the Ecole des Mines (Taton 1952). On the accident at Essonnes, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 71–72. 49

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Hôtel de Ville. Negotiations were under way between self-appointed leaders of the throng and the elderly, confused Launay. Launay agreed not to fire on the people if they refrained from an assault. In earnest of that pledge the antique cannons were withdrawn from the embrasures—to be loaded, cried voices in the front. Portents attached to every coming and going. “There goes the Governor,” went the murmur when Clouet appeared. “He is going to the Arsenal,” ran the word. The crowd had not forgotten him when at noon he left the Arsenal again, this time in company with an intendant of finance on some regularly scheduled business in the latter’s office. By the time he returned from this mission, the public had penetrated into the outer courtyard of the fortress. Misunderstanding had meanwhile degenerated into massacre, and some eighty people lay dead. In the rue de Beautreillis, Clouet was again taken for the governor of the Bastille. A knot of vigilant patriots set upon him, beat him about with sticks, bloodied him all over his body, and only reluctantly released him into the hands of security officers, the commandant de Saudray and marquis de la Salle, who had been dispatched hastily when word reached the Permanent Committee.50 In the weeks following the fall of the Bastille, dread of being undone by faceless enemies spread from Paris through much of the countryside. Combined with latent hatred of seigneurial authority, the fear of brigands issued in the sacking of many a château and manor house. Throughout the summer of 1789 it was with gunpowder as it had often been with grain in times of dearth and with taxes in times of penury. Beset by trouble, the French body politic turned from an organism into an aggregate of parts, each acting for itself. Local populations were frightened lest they lack for weapons or lest munitions fall into hostile hands if allowed to pass from place to place. Municipal officials tended to heed the alarmists and to interfere with the normal circulation of saltpeter, potash, and sulfur, and of finished gunpowder. Port cities flouted the regulations of the Régie, welcomed contraband gunpowder from abroad, and stuffed their magazines. In Cambrai the people took possession of a consignment of 4,200 pounds of gunpowder being shipped to the artillery center of La Fère. The powder mill of Esquerdes was the nearest to Saint-Omer. Citizens there prevented it from supplying the needs of Amiens, Lille, and Valenciennes. In Lyons the authorities refused to permit the normal distribution of gunpowder from the depot to the outlets and installations of surrounding cities and provinces. Even potash excited retentiveness. Officials of the Régie were threatened when they tried to explain that the substance was merely an extract of wood ashes. Since before the revolu50

324.

Procès-Verbal des séances . . . de l’Assemblée Générale des E´ lecteurs de Paris 1 (1790), pp. 322–


33

tion, there had been a store of 14,000 pounds of surplus gunpowder at Caen. Not a single pound would the people permit sending to Granville and the coastal cities of the falaise for their defenses.51 Personnel of the Régie, striving to maintain the operations of their service, their very sensitive service, were among the suspect in the waves of fear reflected back upon Paris from the provinces. In August they nearly engulfed the régisseurs themselves. The night of the fourth brought the next peak tide in the ebb and flow of political intensity following the fall of the Bastille. Recognizing the fait accompli of the peasant revolt, and seeking to forestall further class conflict, noble deputies at Versailles, led by the liberals among them, kept the Constituent Assembly up all night individually renouncing their feudal privileges and casting their manorial rights voluntarily into the common cause. It was too little, too late, and perhaps too obvious. All day on the fifth, Paris tensed to make good this fever of seeming sacrifice. At the Hôtel de Ville the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune of Paris, newly elected on 24 July to replace the Assembly of Electors, was in continuous session. About ten o’clock in the evening, word came to its “provisional” or executive committee that 10,000 pounds of gunpowder were being loaded onto a boat at the Port Saint-Paul, that the prospect of sending it out of Paris was disturbing the peace of the quarter, and that the people wanted to know whether the committee was aware of what was afoot. They were not. Moreau de Saint-Méry, president of the Assembly, ordered on its authority that no munitions be shipped out of the city without the express approval of Bailly and Lafayette, and that the gunpowder at Port Saint-Paul be held overnight, be unloaded the next morning, and be returned to the Arsenal. No one except Lavoisier and his associates knew that this shipment, and indeed this very boat, had already been halted at Château-Thierry. Local patriots, imagining it to be destined for the Royal German Regiment, had had it conveyed to the Arsenal of Paris for safekeeping. Now citizens of the Ile Saint-Louis and the Saint-Gervais quarter saw this same craft being readied to move upstream, whence it had come under civic guard. In countermanding the régisseurs’ disposition, Moreau de Saint-Méry thought only to calm an excited quarter. Instead, his prompt interference gave the appearance of forestalling the renewal of a plot. Suspicion, thus given further substance, grew throughout the night. Lavoisier spent the night of 5 August, or much of it, drawing up an explanation, a genre in which his ineffectiveness increased with experience in the next few years. He set forth how, with Essonne nearby, the magazine at the Arsenal had been restricted to a capacity of only 20,000 pounds, and how the Régie must stock five types of gunpowder. The needs, first of the 51

Lavoisier, “Mémoire sur le service des poudres,” OL 5, pp. 703–711.

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armed forces (poudre de guerre), second of hunters (poudre fine ou a` giboyer), third of commerce (poudre royale), and fourth of mining and quarrying (poudre de mine), had to be met according to strict specifications. The fifth and lowest grade (poudre de traite) was manufactured solely for export in the slave trade (traite) and was unfit for any domestic use. This was what had been seized at Château-Thierry. The barrels now encumbered half the magazine. In these circumstances, the intention of the Régie had been to free its space by shipping the export gunpowder to Essonne pending quieter times. It would then go on by boat to Rouen or Nantes, and thus make room in the magazine of the Arsenal for an equal amount of useful gunpowder to be delivered by return of the same boat from Essonnes. The régisseurs had taken the precaution, moreover, to secure a permit from Lafayette’s deputy, the comte de La Salle.52 That explanation succeeded with the pair of commissioners, JacquesAlexis Thuriot de la Rivière and Charles Franchet, whom the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune named to investigate the affair. But another set of facts was overriding. “However natural the proposed exchange appeared to the Assembly,” say the minutes, “however solid the reasons for disembarrassing the magazine at the Arsenal, the people were upset. It was essential to reassure them. Every other consideration disappeared in the face of that one.”53 Thus, the Assembly confirmed the provisional order to suspend the shipment and to return the cargo to the Arsenal. Repairing to the scene at the dock, the two commissioners found the people unwilling to be reassured. The guards originally placed there had already been taken to custody in the Hôtel de Ville, lucky not to have been hanged from a lamppost en route. In their place, Thuriot and Franchet found an immense circle of volunteers from distant districts mounting watch. They thought it prudent to send for the régisseurs to supervise the unloading. Le Faucheux père was in the Arsenal and brought with him a crew of laborers used to handling explosives. Murmurs rose as the barrels came out of the hold, fifty of them, each stenciled clearly “poudre de traite.” Traitre, cried those of the onlookers who could read more or less, and back into the crowd went the word, “Traitors’ Powder.” Four wagons carried the explosives along the Quai du Mail, around the Grand Arsenal, and into the magazine. There Lavoisier appeared. Leaders of the crowd insisted on opening the barrels in order to see for themselves that the gunpowder was poor stuff. They pried off six covers and fired the con52

“Rapport fait le 6 août 1789 a` l’Assemblée des Représentants de la Commune . . . par un de MM. les régisseurs des poudres.” Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la Commune de Paris ⬘ série, 1, pp. 107–108. Hereafter cited as Lacroix, Actes. See also pendant la Révolution, 1ere Guillaume de Brune (the future Napoleonic Marshal), Lettre occasionnée par la découverte du bateau de poudre . . . adressée a` l’Hôtel de Ville, le 8 août 1789 (BN, Lb 39.7612). 53 Lacroix, Actes 1, pp. 108–109.


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tents in the breach of a musket. The supposedly useless powder flared and burned. Clearly, it was good. “Treason,” yelled the crowd again and seized Lavoisier and Le Faucheux. Thuriot and Franchet pushed ahead to forewarn the Assembly of the Commune that the régisseurs were being haled to the Hôtel de Ville under popular arrest. Launay and Flesselles had met their fate on Bastille Day in those very streets. Six days later, on 22 July, Bertier de Sauvigny, last intendant of Paris, and his father-in-law, Fran¸cois Foullon, were seized by a mob, hanged, and their bodies dismembered just outside the Hôtel de Ville. Dripping blood, Bertier’s heart was thereupon carried into the council chamber and displayed before the new Assembly. These were the things in the younger Le Faucheux’s mind on learning of the plight of his father and of Lavoisier. He rushed to join them. Clouet, the fourth régisseur, was absent, recovering from his beating on Bastille Day. As they passed, voices called out from windows and sidewalks urging the lamppost for traitors without further ado. Meanwhile at the Hôtel de Ville, the Assembly repaired to the Great Hall to receive the press of citizens. Those who could not squeeze in waited outside in the Place de Grève, ready to enjoy an execution if matters should turn that way. In these circumstances, Lavoisier gave his explanation. It succeeded with the Assembly itself, as also with many onlookers. Not with all, however: “The general anxiety was not allayed”—this from the report of Thuriot and Franchet—“people persisted in seeing, in this shipment of gunpowder out of the city, some hidden plan, some secret conspiracy, some criminal plot, and whatever certain citizens found to say along those lines was greeted with a kind of enthusiasm.”54 Bailly was absent at Versailles all the while, but at this juncture Lafayette arrived. Lavoisier took advantage of exoneration by the Assembly to slip away without waiting for the hall to clear or the crowd outside to disperse. He did not dare try the streets back to the Arsenal that night and made his way instead through the arcade Saint-Jean to a cousin’s apartment in the rue Croix des Petits-Champs. For the crowd was unappeased. It turned suspicion now against the comte de La Salle, fixing on the notion that, an unfaithful deputy, he had forged Lafayette’s signature on the shipping order. Muttering greeted Lafayette’s reminder that an accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Citizens were convinced that La Salle was hiding in the Hôtel de Ville. Nothing would do but that the entire structure be ransacked. At the same time a deputation went off into the dark to search his apartment. La Salle was in neither place. Only the waning of the night calmed the affair, quite without clarification of the facts. Lavoisier thought to clarify them by proceeding with the exchange of good gunpowder for the shipment that had caused the trouble. Ten thou54

Ibid., p. 112.

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sand pounds of hunting powder from Essonne reached Port Saint-Paul on the morning of the eighth. Under the eyes of representatives of the four surrounding districts, six commissioners from the Commune verified its transfer to the Arsenal to replace the slave powder. They further certified that no weapons accompanied the latter on its return to Essonnes. Never able to let go before straightening things out, Lavoisier then insisted on reading his Hôtel de Ville memoir before a meeting of the political committee of the district, Saint-Louis de la Culture. He was badly received, and intensified the hostility he provoked by demanding in conclusion that the district print and distribute his memoir. Lavoisier was told that he was free to print what he pleased—on his own and at his own risk. What will, perhaps, strike the modern reader was not remarked upon at the time. If Lavoisier perceived any incongruity between his opposition to slavery and his supplying the slave trade with gunpowder, or indeed between his opposition to excise taxes and internal dues and his service on the Tax Farm, he did nothing to resolve these inconsistencies. 4. VICQ D’AZYR AND THE REFORM OF MEDICINE

The transformation of medical care offers an illuminating example of revolutionary changes that go deeper than politics and affect the way people live, and how they die. Its preparation, like that of most of the topics with which we shall be concerned in this book, took place in committees. It could, indeed, be argued that the substantive course of the French Revolution transpired in committee, whereas the politics was theater, played out in the forum of the Jacobins, on the stage of the National Assembly. The labor and seriousnesss of the committees—on the Constitution, on Agriculture and Commerce, on Finance, on Public Instruction, on Poverty, on Health, and many another—are impressive evidence of the involvement of relevant sectors of French society in its reordering. Memoirs, projects, plans, proposals, the many papers submitted by interested parties to the appropriate committees—all these come out of their concerns in business, in family, in property, in manufacturing, in trade, in professional life. The much-studied cahiers de doléance, drawn before the convening of the Estates-General, may be scrutinized as horizontal cross-sections of desires of the population, by locality and class. The Procès-Verbaux, and attendant papers of the many committees named when the Revolution was under way, amount to a set of vertical cuts into the concerns of constituents, by profession, by interest, by subject matter. Not that petitioners had been shy about requesting favor from agencies of state in the Old Regime. But the spirit had changed. Citizens making their wishes known through committees of the National Assembly, or locally through those named by municipal bodies,

I. 4. VICQ D’AZYR AND MEDICAL REFORM

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were not humble subjects supplicating a remote sovereign. They were addressing their own representatives, who were responsible to them. So it was in the important instance of the medical profession, under the leadership of Félix Vicq d’Azyr. Elected to the Académie Fran¸caise in the place of Buffon in 1788, he was at the top of his form professionally at the very outset of the Revolution. In that he was unlike Bailly, Condorcet, and even Lavoisier, whose scientifically creative years were a long way or slightly in the past. The prospect the Revolution opened to him was professional, not political. It created the possibility, as he saw it the imperative, for institutionalizing his lifework, the reform of medicine. He was different from his colleagues in a further respect. He never deliberately set so much as a toe into the political arena proper. Vicq d’Azyr was too engrossed in what he was doing to indulge political inclinations, even if he had felt any. The daily functioning of the Royal Society of Medicine depended immediately on the activity of its founder and Permanent Secretary. The routine of the Academy of Sciences, by contrast, presupposed no such constant attention on the part of Condorcet. Vicq d’Azyr conducted, almost single-handed, the enormous correspondence with provincial and foreign doctors that was the life blood of the Society. He wrote each installment of its Histoire, to be combined with the Mémoires and seen through the press in a bulky annual volume. He lavished literary ´ pains on composing the Eloges through which he thought to form the future of the profession on his image of famous medical men in its past. His own program of anatomical investigations of systems of organs in animals and human beings exemplified his commitment to the management of epizootics no less than epidemics and to inclusion of veterinary medicine within the art of healing. His dissections belong in the immediate background of the far more systematic and analytical approach to comparative anatomy inaugurated by Cuvier in 1795.55 Besides all that, Vicq d’Azyr had taken in hand the heavy task of editing the Dictionnaire de médecine of the Encyclopédie méthodique. Thirteen volumes on medicine and three on surgery (edited by others) compose just under 10 percent of the entire compilation.56 The publisher Panckoucke had 55 On Vicq d’Azyr and the Society of Medicine, see P. Huard and M.-J. Imbault-Huart, DSB 14 (1976), pp. 14–17; Gillispie (1980), pp. 28–33, 194–203, 218–226. 56 The first six volumes of the Dictionnaire de médecine were published by Panckoucke and edited by Vicq d’Azyr: 1 (1787), 2–3 (1790), 4–6 (1792). The last article is “Gyrole,” by Philippe Pinel. Volumes 7 (1798) and 8 (1808) were published by Henri Agasse and edited by Philippe Petit-Radel. Volumes 9 (1816), 10 (1821), and 11 (1824) were published by Mme. veuve Agasse and edited by J.-L. Moreau de la Sarthe (who also edited the Oeuvres de Vicq d’Azyr) (6 vols., 1805). Volumes 12 (1827) and 13 (1830) were published by Agasse and edited by Auguste Thillaye. Volumes 1, 7, 10, and 12 contain prefaces by the successive editors that are informa-

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conceived the notion that this enterprise, initiated in the 1770s, should realize the pioneering goal of Diderot and d’Alembert. The form was to be modern, however. A literary overview of all knowledge would give way to a battery of specialized dictionaries, discipline by discipline. Each was to be edited, and all articles were to be composed, not by philosophically inclined writers, but by experts in the several fields. The history of the publication of the Encyclopédie méthodique, completed only in 1830, has been written several times.57 Study also of the contents would permit, what has never been attempted, a comparison of the state of knowledge in the various fields over three generations: that of the high Enlightenment of the 1750s and 1760s as reflected in the original Encyclopédie, that of the 1780s and early 1790s as reflected in the volumes completed before publication was impeded in 1793–94, and that of the early nineteenth century as reflected in appropriate articles from the latter part of the alphabet published in the several dictionaries from 1815 through the 1820s, when the set was completed. The contrast, for example, between Vicq d’Azyr on “Anatomie pathologique” (volume 2, 1790) and Moreau de la Sarthe on “Physiologies” (volume 12, 1827) epitomizes the transition between the encyclopedic and the positivist modes in the medical sciences in the period covered by this book. Vicq d’Azyr’s article is really a treatise consisting of 325 pages of postmortems in double column, without a whiff of physiology (which, to be sure, did not yet exist as an experimental science). The approach is classificatory and not at all functional. Anatomy, he states at the outset, has two branches, one concerned with the healthy body, the other with the effects of disease. The latter is the proper subject for a medical dictionary. Vicq d’Azyr follows Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) in grouping organs of the human body into three divisions according to whether they are located in the head, thorax, or abdomen. He then gives a number of case histories for each structure, describing its distorted, degenerated, deteriorated condition consequent on the disease or accident that had led to the tive for the evolution of the work. Volume 13 concludes with an elaborate analytical index and concordance of subjects covering the whole set. The text of the Dictionnaire de Chirurgie appeared in two volumes (1790, 1792) published by Panckoucke and edited jointly by de la Roche, a Swiss surgeon, and Petit-Radel, listed as Regent Doctor of the Faculty, who also edited volumes 7 and 8 above. A third volume of plates published by Agasse appeared in 1799. Sheets of certain other dictionaries of the Encyclopédie méthodique were bound into volumes in a haphazard manner, so that some sets consist of 166 volumes (the number usually given) and others of as many as 200. The Dictionnaire de médecine is an exception. All sets known to me consist of the same thirteen volumes of approximately 750 pages each in double columns. The only difference is that in volumes 9–13 the print is small and mean and the paper of poorer quality than in the earlier volumes. 57 On Panckoucke and the publication of the Encyclopédie méthodique, see Watts (1958), Tucoo-Chala (1977), and Darnton (1979).


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decease of the subject, who is often identified by name. There are occasional comparisons with animal pathology. Many cases are taken from the literature, which Vicq d’Azyr enriches with autopsies from his own research and observations. “In the encyclopaedic order,” so he announces generally in the preface to the Dictionnaire, “medicine is a branch of zoology, which is itself a division of ‘Physique particulière.’ ” What distinguishes it from other sciences of nature is that man is there himself the object of his own experience. Vicq d’Azyr had taken as his point of departure the articles on medical subjects in the Diderot Encyclopédie, but found them very incomplete. The basic categories of medical science were not even recognized as such. The main partition must (as in the subsidiary science of anatomy) lie between the two great objects of medicine, first, conserving health and, second, restoring it. Practices that conduce to the first come under the heading of “Hygiène,” measures for achieving the second under “Pathologie.” The former comprises three main divisions: 1. “Hygiène proprement dite,” the art of maintaining a sound mind in a sound body; 2. “Orthopédie,” the art of preventing or correcting malformation in infants; and 3⬚, “Gymnastique,” the art of strengthening the parts of the body by appropriate exercises. The second object of medical science, treatment of illness, is also tripartite, and consists of: 1. “Pathologie proprement dite,” the study of diseases, 2. “Sémé¨ıotique,” examination of their symptoms, on which are founded the arts of “diagnostic” and of “pronostic”; and 3. “Thérapeutique,” knowledge of the curative agents, traditionally called “matière médicale.” The last entails information from botany and chemistry, both inorganic and organic (“substances animales”). But these sciences, like all topics in the dictionary, are to be treated only relatively to their medical application. Finally, two important fields had not even been recognized in the old Encyclopédie. Forensic medicine puts anatomical expertise at the service of the judicial system in cases of suspected wrongdoing, while medical jurisprudence codifies the laws concerning the practice of medicine and of pharmacy. Military medicine, veterinary medicine, and history of medicine in the guise of biography are also highlighted on the title page as major fields to be treated by expert practitioners. Such is Vicq d’Azyr’s schematization, as interesting for the vocabulary as for the form. With respect to the content and structure of medicine, he is the complete encyclopedist, taking guidance from the eighteenth century. His program for the practice of medicine is another, though related, matter. There he came forward as the revolutionary, anticipating, or preparing for, the nineteenth century in a proto-positivist spirit. In November 1790 the Société Royale de Médecine presented the Constituent Assembly with a comprehensive proposal for reorganization of health care. In the dozen years of its activity, the Society had been primarily con-

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cerned to reorient the professional commitment of physicians from defense of their privileges to responsibility for control of epidemics, research into disease, and advice to government on matters of public health. It had conceived itself to be an Academy of Medicine, and had no more taken a position on the education of physicians than did the Academy of Science on the education of scientists.58 The origins of clinical teaching lie elsewhere, in examples from England and Scotland, from Germany, Austria, and Italy, and more immediately in on-the-job training of young surgeons in the Paris hospitals. Even as Vicq d’Azyr was drawing up the Nouveau plan de constitution pour la médecine en France, Pierre-Joseph Desault, chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu since 1786, was regularly performing operations before classes of students in its newly installed amphitheater.59 Vicq d’Azyr’s New Plan calls, in effect, for a synthesis of the surgical practice of clinical teaching and treatment with the Society’s program for investing a reformed medical profession with responsibility for public health. Implicit is the proposition that universal access to health care, though not specified in the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, is nevertheless the duty of the state to provide as a matter of constitutional right. In keeping with that expectation, the scheme is inspired throughout by the activist, indeed by the democratic, impulse generated by the surgeons in the drive they had mounted for equality with physicians during the last years of the Old Regime.60 The New Plan is thus a cardinal document, a program for modern clinical medicine. It merits analysis in some detail.61 There is no need to dwell on Vicq d’Azyr’s diagnosis of the ills afflicting medicine: the bookish emptiness of the education, the unavailability of care for the peasantry, the widespread resort to quacks and folklore. If a handful of physicians in Paris and other centers managed to achieve mastery of their art, and some did, their individual success was of little benefit to the people 58

Gillispie (1980), chapter 3. On Desault and clinical teaching of surgery, see Gelfand (1980), chapter 7. For extremely valuable correctives to the virtually canonical view that clinical medicine originated in the adoption of surgical practices by the hospitals of Paris in the Revolution, and for a guide to the voluminous literature, see Keel (1985, 2001). The most famous book on clinical medicine (Foucault [1963]) is in my opinion to be treated with all the caution called for when reading a brilliant work of scholarly ideology. 60 Gelfand (1985), chapter 4; Gillispie (1980), pp. 203–212. 61 The full title is Nouveau plan de constitution pour la médecine en France: Vues générales sur la Réforme dont la Médecine est susceptible. & sur la nécessité de la rappeler a` l’état d’unité et de simplicité où elle étoit au temps d’Hippocrate, en la réunissant a` la chirurgie (HSRM 9 [1786– 87/1790], pp. 1–170. The New Plan enlarges on a “Projet de Règlement” for the Society, submitted to the Constituent Assembly on 19 September 1790 in compliance with a 20 August summons from the Assembly to give an account of its organization and correspondence. (“Adresse a` l’Assemblée Nationale”, Noveau plan de constitution pour la médecine, pp. xxxiv– xxxvi). 59


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as a whole. Prominent among the remedies must be uniting the twin branches of the healing art. Or rather, reuniting them, for there had been no separation between medicine and surgery in Hippocrates or Galen, and none in the schools of Renaissance Italy. Pharmacy also was to be brought within the bounds of the profession, while all remnants of the divisive spirit and practice of separate academies, colleges, guilds, and corporate entities were to be eliminated. The most striking provision of the design for medical education is the central role envisioned for the teaching hospital in the formation of physicians. Before reaching that point, however, the fledgling doctor would satisfy the requirements of an elaborate curriculum. Apart from the general proposition, to which there was broad assent, that a system of public instruction is a precondition of liberty, Vicq d’Azyr has nothing to say of elementary and secondary schooling. With respect to professional education, however, he agreed with Condorcet, with Lavoisier, and with other leaders of the Academy of Science. At the highest level, teaching and research should go together. The idea was not, he acknowledged, altogether novel. Courses given in the Collège Royal and the Jardin du Roi, as well as the chairs of hydrography at the Louvre ´ and of mineralogy at the Ecole des Mines, all presupposed that knowledge was best transmitted by people engaged in advancing it. But these examples were mere fragments of what should be a systematic whole. As model he cites Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s design for an integrated academy of all learning in Bologna, a project that had never come to pass. We propose, then, that in the capital of the French Imperium there be established a great encyclopaedic Institute, a center of learning under a centralized administration. In it are to be united all the Academic bodies. They are to be responsible, on the one hand, for the advancement and progress of Letters, Science, and the Arts, and on the other, for teaching all subjects that are capable of enriching the memory and enlightening the mind, and everything to which the imagination may attain.62 In that passage appears the earliest enunciation of the notion for an institutionalization of all knowledge in a form eventually realized, though only with respect to research, with creation of the Institut de France in 1795. More immediately, the New Plan for Medicine anticipates Condorcet’s design for a national system of education adopted by the Committee of Public Instruction of the Legislative Assembly in 1792. There, too, both teaching and research would be administered under the aegis of a National Institute consisting of transformed academies.63 62 63

Ibid., p. 11. Below, chapter 2, section 2.

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Clearly, Vicq d’Azyr had discussed these matters in general with leaders of the scientific community, of which medicine would become a part, and had gone over them in detail with the leadership of the Royal Society of Medicine, whose spokesman he was. His consultants for medical education were the colleagues who collaborated with him on the medical volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique, equally an enterprise looking to the reform of medicine. He relied notably on the advice of Thouret for the regime of hospitals, on Jeanroi for pediatrics and medical practice, on de Horne for venereal disease and cardiovascular medicine, on Chambon for gynecology, on Fourcroy for chemistry and materia medica, and on Doublet for forensic medicine, to use the modern terms. These and a dozen others whose names appear on the masthead of the Dictionnaire de médecine acted as an editorial board for the dictionary and a sounding board in the drafting of the New Plan for Medicine. The subdivision of medicine into branches and specialties is the same in both cases, and is evidently the fruit of reflection and experience, and not part of a scheme hastily concocted to take advantage of political opportunity. Vicq d’Azyr had informed himself of procedures in Germany and Austria and in the hospitals of London and Edinburgh. The most modern curriculum, he thought, was the sequence planned by Van Swieten for the Faculty of Medicine in Vienna, where the course of instruction required five years and involved advanced students in the care of patients in the hospital. The picture in Michel Foucault’s brilliant and dramatic Birth of the Clinic is thus overdrawn.64 That powerful book reduces the origins of clinical education and the accompanying reorganization of hospitals to a medical internalization of the politics of the French Revolution. It is, of course, true that political revolution made possible the reform of medicine (though not until after 1795, when radicalism had run its course, and fundamental changes wrought by politics were institutionalized). Creation of the metric system fits the same pattern, as do most of the developments with which we are concerned in this book. It is true, too, that the elements of medical reform were in keeping with the political tenor of the times. It is true, finally, that the New Plan for Medicine contains such phrasing as the following: “The Clinical School . . . will be established in a large hospital, where men, women, children, and old people will be admitted so that the diseases affecting both sexes and all ages will be offered to students being trained in the practice of our Art.”65 But all this falls far short of justifying the polemical notion that, at bottom, reform of the hospital imposed upon the bodies of the sick and indigent the power that the bourgeoisie preempted over the whole population in the class struggle of 1793–94. 64 65

Foucault (1963). Noveau plan de constitution pour la médecine, p. 57.


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Even if such an interpretation of the Revolution were convincing, and its time seems to have passed, nothing of the sort had yet happened in 1790, when Vicq d’Azyr was drawing up the New Plan for Medicine. At all events, its central feature is indeed “annexation,” to use his word, of every medical college to a major hospital. The spirit of the proposal may have been a bit wishful, but there is no reason to think it insincere: “What is good for the patients accords so entirely with what is good for instruction that it is impossible to prescribe anything truly advantageous for the one which is not immediately applicable to the other, so that the best of hospitals will at the same time be both the most advantageous for the advancement of the art, and the most conformable with the interests of humanity.”66 Just as nowadays, the curriculum for the first two years was to be largely scientific—in the first, physics applied to medicine, anatomy, and physiology, along with beginning dissections; in the second, the same at a higher level, and also chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and zoology. The courses of the third year were to be advanced anatomy, chemistry, botany, and materia medica, graduating into pharmacology and hygiene. Students were to begin clinical training in the second semester and would regularly attend surgical operations in the amphitheater. In the fourth and last year of course work, pathology, nosology, and therapeutics would be offered in addition to advanced pharmacology and hygiene. Students would practice standard operations on cadavers. They would learn bandaging and the art of delivering babies. Only in this fourth year would they begin to follow the professor of clinical medicine in his rounds of the hospital. Even now the head of a department in a major French hospital is known as “Professor” rather than simply “Doctor.” The protocol for these visits was very elaborate. It represented an importation of that distinctive feature of French administrative procedure, the procès-verbal, into medicine. In charge of every ward would ´ eve-Inspecbe a student who had completed his formal requirements. The El` teur was the equivalent of an intern in an American teaching hospital today. Among his responsibilities would be keeping two registers, the one a record of observations, the other a log of the professor’s rounds, each consisting of separate forms for compiling the case history of every patient, identified by number, not by name. When the professor with his retinue of students would reach and surround the bed, the intern would read out the patient’s entire record from the one register, and the account of the previous day’s visit from the other. The professor would thereupon examine and interrogate the patient, speaking out his findings and questions, and repeating the responses, so as to be clearly audible. He would, finally, prescribe the medicines, diet, and regime 66

Ibid., p. 80.

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he thought appropriate, make a prognosis, and pass on to the next bed. In such a hospital patients were to be assigned to wards according to the nature and gravity of their illness. On completing the ward, or set of wards, the professor would answer questions and conduct a review of what was to be learned from the condition of the patients seen that day. The head intern of the ward would complete each history when the case was terminated, whether by release or death. In the latter event, the professor gave instructions to guide the autopsy. The register of observations was to be closed out twice a year, in January and August. The intern in charge would then tabulate the incidents and outcome for all patients treated and would correlate the data with the meteorological record of the semester in the interest of establishing a reliable body of statistical information on the medical constitution of the spring and autumn seasons annually. Five such Colleges of Medicine associated with major hospitals were to be established, the largest in Paris and Montpellier, responsible between them for forty-five departments, over half the country, and three on a smaller scale in Strasbourg, Bordeaux, and Nantes. Students whose families could afford tuition would pay a modest 500 or 600 livres a year; others would be on scholarship. There would be ten chairs in Paris and Montpellier, and seven in the lesser colleges. The professors of clinical medicine and of surgery— two of each in Paris and Montpellier—would be paid twice the salaries of their colleagues in the less arduous fields of theoretical medicine, the relevant sciences, hygiene, forensic medicine, and history. Appointments were to be by open competition. Students would have a voice in the selection. When a post was to be filled, applicants would undergo a public examination replying viva voce to a set of twelve written questions covering various aspects of medicine. The candidates’ performances would be evaluated in ballots taken among three different groups, all present for the exercise: first, a panel of judges consisting of two doctors of the faculty and three representatives of the regional medical profession; second, students who had satisfied their examination in theoretical medicine; third, the candidates themselves, each voting on all the others. Pluralities in two ballots would suffice for election. Appointments were for life, barring dismissal for cause. The colleges would be self-governing with a president elected by the professors from among themselves for a term of one year. A visiting committee composed of three regional doctors chosen by the departmental electors would exercise oversight and hear complaints on the part of students or the public. Country doctors would undergo a different training, less an education than an apprenticeship. In the interest of practicability, Vicq d’Azyr’s model of the medical profession was frankly a two-tier system. Advancement of knowledge would be the responsibility of the faculty, and eventually the graduates, of the five colleges in urban centers. General practice in town and


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country would be the role of rank-and-file physicians and surgeons. To expect all medical practitioners in France to follow the course outlined for the medical colleges would be a counsel of perfection. The great majority of students were not in a position to leave home and would be unable to afford the cost of living in big cities. What they needed was practical training, urgently so, and local hospitals could suffice. In general, Vicq d’Azyr observed, there was no lack of hospitals for teaching, but rather a lack of teaching in the hospitals. Let local lads be admitted as students in order to learn on the job. They might follow the doctors on their rounds, assist in treatment of patients, study anatomy by performing dissections, and complete a course of reading in standard textbooks. Doctors and surgeons who accepted students would be paid a small fee. The local pharmacist could give instruction on the side in chemistry and materia medica. Such was already the method of forming doctors in England, so Vicq d’Azyr said, and here again he also cited the example of the surgical training currently offered in Paris and in Rouen. Finally, the ´ most promising graduates of such a network of “Ecoles pratiques” could be awarded scholarships to spend a year or more in one of the medical colleges that conferred degrees. Complementing the design for medical education, the New Plan proposes measures intended to assure the delivery of health care to the entire popula´ tion. Medical students trained in the Ecole pratique at public expense owed their services to the Department which had provided the opportunity. They should, therefore, be distributed according to the needs of the region. A doctor in every canton would be about right. If he lived near the geographical center, he would have a maximum of four leagues, some twelve miles, to cover in making house calls, or more often cottage calls. There being 6,733 cantons comprising some 42,000 parishes and municipalities in the whole country, an individual doctor would cover an average of six parishes containing a population of 2,000. On the assumption that the experience of the peacetime army was applicable among civilians, 50 to 100 people would be ill in any one day. If the proportion of the poor among the whole population was the same as in England, and there was no reason to think otherwise, each doctor or surgeon would normally have only three or four poor patients on his hands at the same time. Thus, enough well-to-do people would always be ailing to afford the doctor a decent livelihood. It would be up to the state to reimburse him for the care of the indigent. The doctor in each canton would in effect be an official—Vicq d’Azyr uses the phrase “Health Officer.” In addition to seeing patients, he would be responsible for inoculation programs and for overseeing the work of veterinaries, pharmacists, midwives, and the wet nurses engaged to nourish foundlings. He was to draw up regular reports to the district authorities on these and other matters relevant to public health. The entire medical corps,

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moreover, would hold itself in reserve to be mobilized in the event of epidemics. When such emergencies arose, the departmental authorities would convoke a Health Council consisting in principle of all the doctors under their jurisdiction. Vicq d’Azyr put his main emphasis on the rural population, which constituted over 90 percent of the whole. In a human way, care for the urban poor was no less important, however. In small cities with a single hospital, one doctor on the staff might be assigned the mission of looking after the indigent with the aid of nurses and students. In major cities, the evils of huge hospitals could be obviated by establishing neighborhood hospices of the sort that were common in other countries, notably in Holland and in Spain. To the historian exposed to current debates over health care, Vicq d’Azyr’s discussion of the proposed system reads with a timelessness that transcends mere anachronism. Everyone must be at liberty to consult whomever he wishes on matters of health. The role of the state is not to assign doctors to patients. Confidence is nothing if not freely given. The law must limit itself simply to requiring that only graduates of the medical colleges be allowed to practice with the title of doctor. Pharmacists and midwives were equally to be licensed by the appropriate authorities. Society does have a responsibility for the poor. Local health officers must ensure that the medicines prescribed be available to all in need. Cost was a great concern, and not only for the indigent. That the price of pharmaceuticals should be arbitrary was a general abuse. All products being in principle of uniform composition and quality, the only difference should be in the cost of distribution. In order to assure price stability, local health agencies were to purchase simple, standard drugs from wholesalers. Pharmacists in turn would purchase at cost ingredients for the medicines they compound in their shops. In no case were surgeons or doctors employed by the public health service to prepare or sell medicines they prescribed. They might be above reproach but would inevitably incur the appearance of conflict of interest. Only with respect to midwifery are Vicq d’Azyr’s recommendations largely irrelevant two centuries later. Even there he was forward looking. It was greatly to be wished, he observed, that childbirth should be handled by the cantonal surgeon. But since the prejudice in favor of women for that office would prevail for a long time, at least let them be properly prepared. Every departmental hospital should assign a surgeon who was expert in obstetrics to conduct the training of midwives. Trainees should be lodged and fed at the expense of the state and should undergo a public examination on completion of the course. Theirs was not to be a full-time profession, however. “The birth of children makes for an occupation that is only accidental, so to say.”67 It is to be recompensed as piece-work, therefore—six livres a delivery 67

Ibid., pp. 74–75.


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would be reasonable. In all respects—hospitalization, the doctor’s or surgeon’s fee, nursing care, prescription medicine, childbirth—local authorities would maintain a list of families poor enough to qualify for medical aid at the expense of the state. Though formally addressed to the National Assembly, Vicq d’Azyr’s New Plan for the Constitution of Medicine was never discussed by that body, nor referred to its Committee on the Constitution. The initiative that brought the subject of public health into the purview of politics was civic and philanthropic, not professional. Nothing is said of poverty, nor of social questions in general, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Yet nothing was more glaring in the dire winter of 1788–89 than the misery of the indigent in town and country, and nothing more ubiquitous throughout Paris in the first year of Revolution than beggars of both sexes and all ages, some menacing, most simply wretched, all in violation of draconian edicts that had outlawed begging under the old regime. On 22 December 1789, a deputation from the Commune of Paris appeared before the National Assembly urging on its attention a pair of powerful memoirs concerned with the unemployed and the poor. “They are no longer serfs,” observed one author, Pierre-Fran¸cois Boncerf, member of the Society of Agriculture, “but what have they gained? If they are no longer bound to the soil; if they are no longer chattels of a master who, whatever else he might be, at least had an interest in their survival; if they are free, and hence citizens, what use to them is that fine title, that apparent liberty?” In the companion piece, Fréteau de Saint-Just, former president of the Constituent Assembly, joined with Jean-Fran¸cois Lambert, inspector of apprentices in the General Hospital administration that was responsible for orphanages among many other things. They urged the Assembly to form a committee “to apply the great principles of justice enounced in the Declaration of Rights of Man and in the Constitution to the protection and conservation of the class without property.”68 Nothing happened. On 20 January Bailly added his still considerable weight, suggesting that the deputies themselves take up a subscription on behalf of the poor in the capital. Generalizing what started as a merely charitable gesture, the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt thereupon proposed appointment of a commission to consider means for the elimination of beggary. The outcome was creation of the Comité de Mendicité, Begggary Committee, composed of sixteen deputies at full strength. They were advised by experts coopted from outside the Assembly, the two most important having been M.-A. Thouret, Vicq d’Azyr’s close associate in the Society of Medicine and the leading sanitary reformer of the 1780s, and A. L. de La Millière, the official responsible for hospital funds in the Ministry of Finance. Deliberations began on 26 April 1790 and continued throughout the 68

Quoted in Dreyfus (1903), p. 140.

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life of the Constituent Assembly until 16 September 1791. Their discussions were the first, it may fairly be said, to recognize the reality of a social dimension in the French Revolution. Liancourt, the moving spirit and chairman throughout, was admirably qualified by experience with the trade school he supported at Châlons-sur-Marne and more generally by long preoccupation with the condition of the working poor. Otherwise, the notable figures were Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and Pierre-Louis Prieur, future member of the Committee of Public Safety with the style Prieur de la Marne.69 Not to go into detail, the proposals developed by the Beggary Committee would have amounted, had they been enacted, to a comprehensive system of public welfare, including provision for health care for the laboring class in town and country. The underlying rationale was straightforward and farreaching. Having nationalized the property of the Church, the State must assume responsibility for the humanitarian services that had justified, and indeed motivated, the existence of rich endowments formerly under clerical control. Food for the starving, relief of the poor, care of the sick, homes for foundlings and orphans, and shelter for the homeless, the insane, the handicapped, the aged, in general the sustenance of those unable to sustain themselves—all these must become obligations of government. They were no longer to be matters of charity, but of civic right, founded in constitutional law. The principle was simple: “Every man has a right to his subsistence.”70 First, however, a distinction had to be made between citizens physically and mentally capable of supporting themselves and those who were not. With regard to invalids, orphans, the ailing, the elderly, there could be no argument. Supporting the unfortunate is “an inviolable and sacred debt” for society. The Beggary Committee easily reached agreement on eight concrete “projets de décret,” drafts of legislation to be presented to the Constituent Assembly with a view to correcting specific abuses.71 The proposed law concerning abandoned children, for example, laid down that orphans were no longer to be stockpiled in enormous hospices such as La Pitié in Paris, which housed some 1,400 boys ages four to twelve in huge dormitories with no provision for guidance of any sort. Instead, municipal authorities were to take responsiblity for placing children in families who would receive a modest stipend and bring them up to learn a trade and become useful citizens. Liancourt and his committee saw their way less clearly with regard to the adult able-bodied. His regulatory remarks smack more of rhetoric than of 69 Camille Bloch and Alexandre Tuetey, eds., Procès-Verbaux et Rapports du Comité de Mendicité de la Constituante, 1790–1791 (1891) (cited hereafter as PVRCM). The introduction gives a detailed account of the foundation of the committee. See also Dreyfus (1903a, b), and for a full and excellent modern discussion, Weiner (1993), chapters 2 and 3. 70 “Plan du Travail du Comité pour l’extinction de la mendicité,” 30 avril 1790, PVRCM, 309–327, on p. 310. 71 For a tabulation, see PVRCM, p. 574.


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principle: “If whoever exists has the right to say to society, ‘Afford me a living,’ society has equally the right to reply, ‘Give us your work.’ ”72 A further distinction was in order, this one between those willing to work but unable to find jobs, the “deserving poor—véritables pauvres,” and those refusing to work, the type whom the English called sturdy beggars and Liancourt the “bad poor—mauvais pauvres.”73 About the latter the Committee felt no ambiguity. It drafted highly specific laws prescribing arrest for panhandlers and transportation of repeated offenders to penal colonies. That was simple, but what was to become of the deserving poor if there was no work? Or insufficient work? For, unfortunately, the labor force was normally larger than the job market. The Beggary Committee refrained from drawing the conclusion that the right to subsistence combined with the duty to work equals the right to a job. A few things were clear, however. Public works—canalization of the Ourcq, extension of the quays along the Seine, drainage of swamps, clearing of wasteland—these tasks and others like them might take up some slack, as indeed they already did. Jobs of any sort were better than the dole, and the horde of foreign workers, principally Italians, who were displacing Frenchmen from such menial labor, must clearly be deported forthwith. In the last analysis, however, and for that matter in the first, the remedy for unemployment must lie with the expansion of industry and agriculture, with training and preparation of workers, and not with artificial creation of jobs by government. Certainly the poor must not be allowed to starve. Nevertheless, the Poverty Committee was equally concerned lest overly generous welfare encourage idleness. The guiding principle must be the following: “The man who receives aid from the Nation, and for whom it is responsible, should . . . be less well off than if he had no need of assistance but could live on his own earnings.”74 The problems of health, if not more tractable than the problem of underemployment, were at least more definable. There was nothing ambiguous about the horrors of the hospital. Neither was there anything new in principle. The Beggary Committee was guided in its investigations, particularly of the Hôtel-Dieu, by the 1788 Mémoires sur les hôpitaux of Jacques Tenon, whose expertise had already informed the famous report of the hospital commission of the Academy of Sciences of 1786.75 Liancourt and his colleagues cast a wider net, however. Subcommittees visited not only the general hospitals, the Hôtel-Dieu and its dependencies Saint-Louis and Sainte-Anne or La Santé, but also the Hospital for Incurables in the grounds and many of the buildings of the present-day Laënnec. 72

“Premier rapport du Comité de Mendicité,” PVRCM, pp. 327–334, 12 juin 1790, on p.

327. 73 74 75

“Plan du Travail,” op. cit., n. 70 above, p. 317. PVRCM, “Premier rapport,” op. cit,, n. 72 above, p. 330. Gillispie (1980), pp. 252–256.

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They also inspected eleven lesser medical installations consecrated to specific purposes or clienteles such as the military hospital of the Place Royale and the small Convalescent Hospital in the rue du Bac. Two private establishments received high praise, the Saint-Sulpice in the rue de Sèvres, founded by Madame Necker, and the Hospice in the parish of Saint-Jacques, founded by the abbé Cochin. Larger and more complex was the task of taking the measure of ten custodial institutions grouped under the rubric and administration of Hôpital Général—its commissary and administration in the Maison de Scipion; the orphanage already mentioned in La Pitié; La Salpêtrière for female paupers, madwomen, and prostitutes; Bicêtre, largely for the insane; the three “Enfants trouvés” foundling hospitals; La Pélagie, a penal hospital for fallen women; the orphanage of Saint-Esprit; and the huge Mont de Piété, where impoverished inmates of these establishments had to pawn their goods before receiving charity. The total population more or less maintained by the General Hospital was between 11,000 and 12,000 at an annual expenditure of £1,055,504.76 Certain of these visits were thorough. Others were on the cursory side, intended mainly to give the commissioners a personal impression of conditions that were generally well known.77 Liancourt and his colleagues also had at their disposal an enormous mass of data assembled by authority of the municipality, which had not awaited the formation of the Beggary Committee to address itself to the same problems. On 8 October 1789 the City Council of the Provisional Commune chose Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu to head its Department of Hospitals with the title “Lieutenant du Maire.”78 Like many naturalists, Jussieu had taken a medical degree before entering on the career of a botanist. His experience in managing detail as a systematist also stood him in good stead, as did his service on the commission named by the Royal Society of Medicine in 1784 to investigate the phenomena of mesmerism.79 On 12 April 1790 Jussieu addressed to the administrators of all hospitals in Paris highly detailed questionnaires concerning their respective regimes. Replies, mostly very full, came in during the early weeks of May, the time when the Beggary Committee was initiating its own inquiries. The documentation Liancourt’s committee then elicited largely overlaps and in certain respects complements the facts already compiled by Jussieu’s staff.80 76

PVRCM, p. 634n. “Rapports . . . des visites faites dans divers hôpitaux,” PVRCM, pp. 575–692. 78 Robiquet (1890a), pp. 255–258. 79 Not to be confused with the more famous Commission of the Academy of Science, headed by Bailly. See Gillispie (1980), pp. 279–284. 80 On Jussieu’s role in municipal hospital administration, see Alexandre Tuetey, ed., L’Assistance publique a` Paris pendant la Révolution, documents inédits, (4 vols., 1895–97), 1 (Les hôp77


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It was not, therefore, for lack of information that implementation of health reform had to await the Directory and the Consulate. Nor was it for lack of a large consensus on the need and on the responsibility of government. The lag is simply an instance of the generalization that it proved impossible to effect revolutionary change in the metabolism as distinct from the actions of the body politic before political transformation had worked itself out. Meanwhile, life and death in the Paris hospital system went on much as before, paupers lumped in with the sick, the (formerly) Augustinian sisters faithfully and stubbornly tending the lot despite the dissolution of their order, the patients four or five to huge beds in the Hôtel-Dieu, Desault making his rounds there with a retinue of students, the mélange of “worthy poor, prisoners, and insane” at Bicêtre,81 the mixture of prostitutes with madwomen, homeless mothers, and indigent crones at the Salpêtrière, and so on, literally ad nauseam. Jussieu’s concerns were of a narrow administrative order.82 Liancourt’s were broadly social. The Beggary Committee brought in recommendations on the many aspects of its mission in a series of detailed reports presented to the Constituent Assembly between June 1790 and September 1791.83 Dora Weiner has shown how their medical features laid the conceptual groundwork for the consular law of 1803 regulating the professions of medicine, nursing, and pharmacy, and more largely for provision of health care in all modern societies influenced by the French example. The program goes beyond correction of abuses that were already notorious. Needy citizens were to be given access to decent hospital facilities free of charge as a matter of civic right. Admission was to be selective. Only the ill were to be received, not (as was the common charitable practice) the merely homeless, the idle, or the derelict. General hospitals were to be reduced in scale and relocated into neighborhoods. Instead of routine institutionalization of the aged or infirm, home care was to be provided wherever itaux et hospices, 1790–91), introduction. The replies that survive are those from Bicêtre (噛84, 230–253), the Salpêtrière (噛94, 265–284), the Enfants Trouvés (噛108, 303–312), the SaintEsprit (噛123, 354–364), the Maison de Scipion (噛126, 377–390), and the Petites Maisons (噛127, 390–405). There is no reason to suppose that the reports that have disappeared were not equally full and precise. Not all were critical—Jussieu found the regime of the Hôpital de la Charité, of Charenton, and of the Hôpital des Convalescents to be above reproach. 81 “Réponse aux questions de M. de Jussieu . . . concernant la maison de Bicêtre,” op. cit., n. 80 above, 1, p. 231. Evidently Liancourt’s distinction between the good and bad poor and others was general. Here it reads “Bons-pauvres, Prisonniers, Fous.” 82 Jussieu’s memorandum of 6 frimaire an II (6 December 1793), “Rapport sur les hôpitaux de Paris,” is very illuminating for the administrative history. Op. cit., n. 80 above, 3, 噛21, pp. 49–64. 83 Collected in PVRCM (see n. 69), and especially the Quatrième Rapport, composed and presented by La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt himself on 1 December 1790, “Secours a` donner a` la classe indigente dans les différentes circonstances de la vie,” pp. 383–464.

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possible. Specialized facilities were to be established for women in childbirth, for the mentally disturbed, for the venereally diseased, and for the terminally ill. Foundlings and orphans were to be placed in families, and adoption to be favored by revision of family law. Secularized endowments of existing institutions, as well as sale of other church properties, were to support the new system, which was to be administered by municipalities under the control of the Ministry of the Interior. Nurses, pharmacists, surgeons, and physicians were to become in effect civil servants implementing public policy.84 Members of the medical profession had other views, not about the hospital regime, but about their part in it. Medicine itself, its content and practice, came in for little or no attention amid the deliberations of the Beggary Committee, the majority of whom were laymen. Neither did it figure in the survey conducted by Jussieu for the municipality. Concerned lest their voices not be heard with respect to the reform of medicine, physicians took matters into their own hands. In the meeting of the Constituent Assembly of 12 September 1790, Guillotin moved the appointment of a “Health Committee” (Comité de Santé ) to consist of all deputies who were also physicians. Its mission was to frame measures that would govern medical education and practice in conformity with the new constitution. Albeit a euphemism for “Medical Committee,” the name was not an altogether empty phrase. The central purpose of the Royal Society of Medicine had consistently been to reorient the profession toward its responsibility for public health and personal healthiness. Liancourt, however, took aristocratic umbrage at this démarche, planned and arranged behind his back by a member of his own committee. Complaining that Guillotin, not even very faithful in attendance at meetings, had not consulted his chairman and had introduced his resolution at a Sunday session when the Duke and other deputies were absent, Liancourt obtained from the National Assembly a resolution that it had not meant to deprive the Beggary Committee of any of its functions. A still more influential nobleman was equally critical. Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, considered that everything to do with education lay within the purview of the Constitutional Committee, of which he was chairman. Dismayed by the reaction, the new Health Committee changed its name to Comité de Salubrité and hastily added distinguished laymen to its roster—among them the abbé Grégoire and Liancourt’s cousin, duc de LaRochefoucauld-d’Enville. This imbroglio, a complication amid the birth pangs of modern medicine, may

84 Weiner (1993), chapters 2 and 3. For the Poverty Committee’s own summary of its work, of which the economic aspect was even more significant than the medical, see “Septième Rapport, ou résumé sommaire,” PVRCM, pp. 534–574.


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be taken as evidence that tension between the social and professional aspects of medical practice is a congenital condition. Dora Weiner does so interpret it. It is also her view that Vicq d’Azyr, not being a deputy, was pulling strings behind the scenes, that Guillotin was his puppet, and that we have to do with an overt conflict between the Royal Society of Medicine, driven by professional self-interest, and the Poverty Committee, driven by a social conscience all the keener for being inspired by noblesse oblige. It may have been even so. The discord may, on the other hand, have been rather less categorical and more episodic than that. For one thing, Guillotin had never been close to Vicq d’Azyr and never a member of the Royal Society of Medicine. His allegiance was to the opposite professional party, the reactionary Faculty of Medicine. For another, Thouret, Liancourt’s right-hand medical man in the committee, was also one of Vicq d’Azyr’s leading collaborators in the Society, in the Dictionnaire de médecine, and in preparation of the New Plan. The content of that document must thus have been known to Liancourt and his colleagues, though it was not printed until November 1790. As matters turned out, their eventual recommendations for the distribution of doctors in town and country and also for oversight of health care by local authorities were virtually the same as those of Vicq d’Azyr and of the Health Committee.85 In this respect, indeed, he intervened in person to smooth things over. The minutes of the Health Committee record that Vicq d’Azyr attended the session at which its version of these arrangements was formulated.86 It further appears that Vicq d’Azyr’s New Plan was not known to Guillotin and the members of his Health Committee prior to its publication in late November, some nine weeks after their nomination.87 They convened on 4 October. Guillotin, the prime mover, was elected chairman. The secretary was Jean-Gabriel Gallot, a country doctor from Poitou and something of a busybody. The committee proceeded to name a panel of eminent people who would be welcome to assist in its deliberations, among them Vicq 85 Compare the provisions proposed in Nouveau Plan, Pt. II, “De l’exercice de la médecine dans ses rapports avec la salubrité publique,” 噛1, pp. 68–72, with the Projets de décret accompanying the third and fourth reports of the Comité de Mendicité, PVRCM (15 July 1790), pp. 380–383, esp. articles 14–18, and 6 August 1790, pp. 399–402. 86 Procès-Verbaux des Séances du Comité de Salubrité, 1790–91 (hereafter cited as PVCS), AN, AF*I, 23. Séance 噛84, 26 mai 1791. “M. Vicq d’Azyr a fait . . . lecture de quelques réflexions offrant le rapprochement des agences de secours proposés par le Comité de Mendicité avec le Conseil de Salubrité.” The conclusion was that local oversight of health care for the poor and of medical practice should be united under an Agence de Secours et de Salubrité in each department to consist of nine members, four doctors, one pharmacist, and four laymen, named by the departmental Conseil général. 87 The only study of the Comité de Salubrité is a thesis for the Faculté de Médecine, Ingrand (1934). It is drawn from a study of the PVCS.

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d’Azyr, Lavoisier, Bailly, Tenon, Antoine Louis, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Surgery, and a dozen others of similar standing. In the event, Vicq d’Azyr attended rarely, Lavoisier once, Louis a number of times, the rest not at all. (Thus began, evidently, an association between Guillotin, who first proposed an equitable mode of execution, and Louis, who actually invented the machine that has mortally immortalized the doctor’s name.)88 Discussion in the early meetings was aimless, concerned with organization, procedures, quorums, and the question of what persons were to have the right to “practice the art of healing.” Three sessions were occupied with the notion of eliminating invidious distinctions by dropping traditional terminology and according physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries alike the title “Officers of Health.” The idea failed in favor of a more limited equality to be instituted between physicians and surgeons, all of whom were to be called “Doctor,” while apothecaries would become pharmacists. One other agreement was reached easily. Persons who prescribed medicines must be prohibited from selling them and vice versa. On 17 November 1790 Vicq d’Azyr presented the Health Committee with the finished draft of the New Plan. Only then did the discussions come into focus. Let the committee take it for a worksheet, urged the referee.89 Agreement was immediate. Provided thereby with a concrete agenda, the Health Committee settled down to work, convening three times a week at six and adjourning at nine-thirty or ten o’clock in the evening. Its business, like that of other standing committees, consisted of two parts. First, it had to receive, consider, and deal with correspondence. Second, and taking that into account, it had to draft, item by item, the legislative proposal it intended to submit to the National Assembly. The Health Committee regularly recorded over a dozen communications at most meetings. Guillotin would open the proceedings by calling on Gallot to summarize materials that had come in since the last session. Among the eighteen items noticed on 8 January 1791, for example, were memoirs from the Faculty of Medicine in Perpignan, the College of Medicine in Dijon, the College of Medicine at Montpellier, and the College of Surgery at Lyon; six proposals about the general reform of medicine from individual doctors or groups of doctors; referral by the National Assembly of a request for a pension from a midwife in Alsace; a complaint by a surgeon, one 88

Guillotin proposed a measure of penal reform in the 10 October 1789 session of the Constituent Assembly. It provided, among other things, for the same mode of execution for all criminals sentenced to death and called for invention of a mechanism that would sever heads instantaneously and as painlessly as possible. On 10 April 1792 the Legislative Assembly commissioned Louis to design such a device. Constructed by a German harp maker called Schmitt, and initially dubbed a Louison, the machine was first employed on 25 April to execute a thief, one Pelletier. 89 AN, AF*I23, “. . . pour le canevas de son travail.” PVCS, Séance 16, 17 November 1790.


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Gabaude, in LaRochelle about his colleagues, with extensive documentation; two memoirs on the plague; and assorted reforms needed in pharmacy and midwifery. In all, the Health Committee at a rough estimate must have received on the order of 1,500 memoirs and recommendations in the course of its deliberations over a period of not quite twelve months. Each was referred to an appropriate subcommittee for a report, and every one was acknowledged. The secretariat of two doctors and two clerks was not underworked, despite complaints about inflated staff from economy-minded deputies in the National Assembly.90 The docket cleared, the Health Committee turned in the second and substantive part of each session to its main task, which consisted of drafting regulations for the teaching and practice of medicine. That process occupied a sequence of 126 meetings continuing throughout the lifetime of the Constituent Assembly. Guillotin and his colleagues went over every item in the New Plan and adopted language for the articles—288 all told—they intended to submit to the Assembly for incorporation into law. They finished the job by the end of July 1791. Gallot then organized the provisions topically and assembled them in a “Projet de décret sur l’enseignement et l’art de guérir.” The committee approved the final draft in its meeting of 6 August. It was printed in early September. The document is in the style of legislation, and therefore terser and less rhetorical than Vicq d’Azyr’s master text.91 There were also certain differences in substance. The Health Committee called for creating four medical colleges of equal importance, with twelve professors each, at Paris, Montpellier, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg, rather than two major institutions at the first two centers and three minor ones in lesser cities. Students would not participate in the election of professors. Also omitted was the plan for forming country doctors in practical schools of clinical medicine in every department. Objecting to the very formation of the Health Committee, Talleyrand had taken special exception to the notion of an inferior level of medical training. On the other hand, the Health Committee gave greater importance to military and naval medicine than had Vicq d’Azyr. Medical officers for the Army and Navy were to be trained in the main military and naval hospitals. The draft law placed much less emphasis on other types of specialization, however, and the recondite areas of forensic medicine and history of medicine were scarcely noticed. These were details, however. The essential features of the New Plan remained unchanged. Medicine and surgery were to be joined in a single profession. Medical education was to be solidly based on the relevant sciences, anatomy being the most important. Medical schools were to be asso90 91

Ibid., 8 January 1791; 2 December 1790. Reprinted as Annexe in Ingrand (1934).

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ciated with major hospitals. Advanced students were to accompany the professors in their rounds and to learn the actual practice of the art clinically, at the bedsides of patients. They might present themselves for examination in both theoretical and practical medicine when they were ready, and no factor other than success in the examinations was to have any bearing on the award of a diploma. Government must see to the availability of health care by establishing hospitals and distributing doctors among the population, one to every canton and arrondissement in the proportion to population recommended by the New Plan. The departmental Agence de secours et de salubrité would oversee the exercise of responsibility by doctors, pharmacists, and midwives, and would assure access to health care for all citizens. The Constituent Assembly acted on none of this, anymore than it did on reform in other sectors ancillary to the constitution itself. The sands were running out in the summer of 1791. Neither time, nor energy, nor consensus sufficed for legislation on education, weights and measures, public finance, agriculture, trade and commerce, social welfare, and health care. Hard-working committees and commissions had been engaged in all these matters. The Assembly ordered their dissolution on 21 September, stipulating that their papers be preserved for the guidance of its successor. Certain provisions of the Health Committee’s proposal, notably passages calling for the clinical teaching of medicine, found their way into Talleyrand’s “Rapport sur l’Instruction Publique.”92 For the rest, its “Projet de décret” remained a dead letter, as did the several drafts of legislation proposed by the Poverty Committee. What survived and eventually guided the legislators of the Directory and Consulate were the considerations behind those texts, the New Plan of Vicq d’Azyr, the series of Reports of Liancourt and his associates. The one has proved to be nothing less than a charter for the practice of medicine as it has actually evolved, in France and throughout the modern world. The other asserts the responsibility of society for assuring public health, a goal as yet unrealized wherever universal access to medical care is unobtainable. 5. CONDORCET AND TRUTH IN POLITICS

Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science from 1776, member of the Académie Fran¸caise from 1782, deputy in the Legislative Assembly and in the Convention, Condorcet was the intellectual heir both to d’Alembert and to Turgot, investing the legacy from his mathematical mentor in politics and from his political mentor in science. No one in the scientific community, not even Bailly, involved himself more deeply in the unfolding of events from 1789 to 1793. “For about thirty years,” he wrote in January 1790, “I 92

Below, chapter 2, section 3.

I. 5 . CONDORCET AND TRUTH IN POLITICS

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have rarely passed a single day without thinking about political science.”93 Among the major figures of the Revolution, Condorcet asserted the broadest range of opinions with which humanitarian and progressive temperaments of the early twenty-first century are bound to sympathize. For example: On human rights—“No power, other than the unanimous consent of all members of a society, can make an infringement of these rights legitimate.”94 On slavery—“The generous friends of liberty will feel that they would degrade their cause if they authorized by law the servitude of negroes.”95 On the inadmissibility of capital punishment—“Now then, the death penalty is the only one . . . that makes the commission of irreparable injustice possible; it is therefore demonstrated that it is unjust to establish it. This reasoning seems to us effectively to have the absolute force of a demonstration.”96 On citizenship for women—“Have they [philosophers and legislators] not violated the principle of equality of rights in quietly depriving half the human race of the right of concurring in the formation of law, in excluding women from the rights of citizenship?”97 On the intellectual contrast between men and women—“It is not nature, it is education, it is existence in society that causes that difference.”98 On public schools—“Thus, education should be universal, that is to say provided to all citizens.”99 On academic freedom—“The primary condition of all education being to teach only truths, the establishments that the public powers devote to that purpose ought to be as independent from all political authority as possible. . . . No public power ought to have authority, nor even influence, to prevent the development of new truth or the teaching of theories contrary to its particular policies or interests of the moment.”100 On liberty of thought—“Neither the French Constitution, nor even the Declaration of Rights, shall be presented to any class of citizens as tablets handed down from Heaven that must be adored and believed.”101 If it were ever historically legitimate to say that someone was ahead of his 93 “Réponse a` l’adresse aux provinces, ou Réflexions sur les ećrits publiés contre l’Assemblée Nationale,” Oeuvres de Condorcet 9, p. 489. 94 “Déclaration des droits” (1789), Oeuvres 9, p. 181. 95 “Au corps e´lectoral contre l’esclavage des noirs” (3 February 1789), Oeuvres 9, p. 471. 96 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilité des décisions rendues a` la pluralité des voix (1785), p. cxxvi. 97 “Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité” (3 July 1790), 噛5, Journal de la Société de 1789, pp. 1–2; also Oeuvres 10, p. 121. 98 Journal, p. 7; Oeuvres 10, p. 125. 99 “Rapport et projet de décret sur l‘organisation générale de l’instruction publique” (21 April 1792), PVCd’IP (L), p. 190. 100 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 101 Ibid., p. 191.

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time, Condorcet would be an instance—in respect of those positions, of others like them, and equally of his belief in establishing a science of society on a mathematical foundaton. The timeliness of his commitments is, indeed, a principal motivation for the recent surge of scholarly interest in his career.102 Another, and related, is the heightening in the 1980s both of political awareness among scientists and of historical awareness among social scientists. The effect has been to redress the judgment that made Condorcet the last and perhaps least of the philosophes, a mathematician and political thinker esteemed in each field mainly for his supposed qualities in the other, a mere martyr, finally, of liberalism amid the revolutionary passions that the Enlightenment had ended by provoking in political reality. Condorcet approached the Revolution with a full agenda. It consisted of the unrealized program of the Turgot Ministry: establishment of representative institutions in the form of municipal and provincial assemblies; creation of a system of public education; elimination of the privileges and fiscal exemptions of the clergy and the nobility; financial reform comprising liquidation of the national debt and institution of an equitable system of taxation based on reassesment of land values; promotion of commerce by substituting market forces for regulation, by abolishing trade barriers, by standardizing weights and measures, and by constructing canals and highways. All the more surprising is it that, unlike the vast majority of his countrymen, and alone among the persons treated in this chapter, Condorcet should have deplored the King’s decision to convene the EstatesGeneral. Here is his reaction to the summons, promulgated on 2 August 1788: 102 The movement began with Granger (1956). See further Baker (1975) and Bru (1988). Crampe-Casnabet (1985) is a brief but discerning intellectual biography. Badinter and Badinter (1988), written from the point of view of a modern politician, in no way supersedes the standard political biography (Cahen 1904). A proper edition of Condorcet’s published and unpublished works is much to be desired. The Oeuvres (12 vols., 1847–1849), edited by his sonin-law, Arthur Condorcet-O’Connor, and Fran¸cois Arago, include no mathematics, and the edition suffers from the lack of any scholarly oversight. The manuscripts inherited by Condorcet’s daughter, Eliza, are in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France; there are two smaller, though important, collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale (see Baker 1975, 486). Pierre Crépel and Christian Gilain, both mathematicians, have canvassed this record thoroughly in the course of arriving at a revised and balanced view of Condorcet’s mathematical accomplishments. They are preparing a catalogue, and have published important studies of their author’s contribution to, respectively, probability and the integral calculus, in a volume of papers on aspects of late eighteenth-century mathematics (Rashed 1988). Crépel and Gilain have also edited Condorcet, mathématicien, économiste, philosophe, homme politique (1989), the proceedings of a colloquium on all aspects of Condorcet’s career. Other essays appear in a number of the Revue de synthèse 109 (janvier-mars 1989) devoted to Condorcet. Finally, Brian (1994) gives an admirable analysis of the epistemological and institutional roots of Condorcet’s thinking, and Bru and Crépel (1994) have published an illuminating collection of Condorcet’s writings, either unpublished or little known, on the application of probability and statistics to political and economic matters.


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A National Assembly, prepared for by public education, could only have inspired hope. It would have marked an epoch of assured restoration for the nation, and not a crisis of uncertain issue. Today there remain barely a few months to dissipate that cloud of errors amassed by the ignorance, the habits, the prejudices of several centuries, to destroy the sophistries on which passion and special interests have supported error, and after this short time. . . .103 He dared not, evidently, complete the sentence. In order to understand why Condorcet so conspicuously failed to share the enthusiasm that had swept the country, we shall need to consider his thinking in mathematics and philosophy after his return to those disciplines in the interval following the dismissal of the Turgot government in May 1776. Sympathetic scrutiny of his papers, published and unpublished, has identified one sector of analysis wherein Condorcet broke new ground.104 In a memoir printed in 1775, he made a distinction between the class of functions he called analytic, or elementary, which are expressible in finite terms, and all others, to which his approach would be inapplicable.105 The relatively limited program he now proposed was to determine a priori whether an integral is analytic, and if so to calculate it. The investigation formed the subject of a Traité du calcul intégral, never published, on which Condorcet was working along with other interests into the 1780s. He did not succeed in solving the two-stage problem he had set himself. Neither has anyone else. He did, however, obtain results which amounted to creating, albeit confusedly, the theory of integration in finite terms. Its fundamental theorem was enunciated by Liouville in 1833. It is unlikely that the latter had read Condorcet’s paper in the archives. Here too, and now in mathematics itself, Condorcet appears the unappreciated precursor of modern times, for integration in finite terms has proven central to computerized calculation. His main interest, however, was theory of probability and its potential applicability to quantification of social science. Political arithmetic was the term then coming into use. No more than in analysis did Condorcet’s contribution to the field consist in techniques of calculation. There the palms went to Laplace. In a sequence of powerful papers published from 1774 through 1786, Laplace applied inverse probabilities, since called Bayesian analysis, to problems of causality, error theory, and demography. His work, and that of others, on demography culminated in a six-part collaboration, published from 1786 through 1791 by the Academy of Sciences under the 103 Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des Assembles Provinciales (1788), Oeuvres 8, pp. 117– 657, in Post-Scriptum, p. 656. 104 C. Gilain, “Condorcet et le calcul intégral,” in Rashed (1988), pp. 87–147, to which I am indebted for the analysis summarized in this paragraph. 105 “Recherches du calcul intégral,” MARS 1772 I/75, pp. 1–99.

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names of Condorcet, Dionis du Séjour, and Laplace. The purpose was to estimate the size of the French population on the basis of birth rates recorded in parish registers.106 Since the number of people was generally thought to be the measure of national well-being, it has been argued, and convincingly so, that this essay in demography represents the earliest instance in modern history, not of mere governmental patronage, but of a conjunction in actual subject matter between the exact sciences and affairs of state.107 Condorcet himself published nothing in probability until 1784, turning matters over in his mind all the while that Laplace was going from computational strength to strength.108 He it had been, however, who at the outset of Laplace’s work pointed out the prospect for employing inverse probability, which is to say statistical inference, in analysis of social and political problems.109 Relations between the two were testy. Laplace was d’Alembert’s technically gifted disciple, the young mathematician climbing toward scientific preeminence who was politically indifferent, not to say obtuse. Condorcet, six years his senior, was d’Alembert’s politically engaged disciple, the wellplaced mediator between science and intellect. For that very reason, Condorcet was led to rethink the entire standing of the theory of probability. Condorcet’s main treatise on the subject, Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilité des décisions rendues a` la pluralité des voix, appeared in 1785.110 A lengthy Discours préliminaire develops the reasoning behind the calculations. He begins with the classical definition of probability: the number of combinations that will produce an event divided by the total number of possible combinations. But that is not the only meaning of probability. Three further features are commonly understood. First, if there are more favorable than unfavorable combinations, there is reason to believe that the event will occur. Second, this reason for belief (motif de croire) strengthens as the ratio of favorable to unfavorable cases increases. Third, reason for belief in an event grows proportionally to its probability. Nevertheless, reason to believe in a fact, however compelling, is not to be 106 “Essai pour connaˆıtre la population du royaume,” MARS (1783/86–1788/91). The actual numbers were assembled by Fran¸cois de La Michodière, former intendant of Lyons, a pioneer in demography. 107 Brian (1994). 108 Condorcet’s six-part “Mémoire sur le calcul des probabilités” appeared in four successive volumes of MARS: (1781/1784), pp. 707–728; (1782/1785), pp. 674–691; (1783/1786), pp. 539– 559; (1784/1787), pp. 454–468. Its many obscurities make for very difficult reading. Bru and Crépel (1994), pp. 387–444, have annotated the memoir in an illuminating manner and republished the text on pp. 387–444 of their edition of Condorcet’s writings on political arithmetic. Their discussion of the background and early drafts is equally helpful, (pp. 449–465). 109 Gillispie (1972) (1997a), and for a more elaborate discussion, Brian (1994). 110 Bru and Crépel (1994), pp. 349–384, give by far the most valuable account of the work that has yet appeared.


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confused with the truth of it, nor the probability of an event with its reality. If a ball from a sack containing 90 white and 10 black ones is hidden under a cloth, the probability that it is white is 0.9 and the reason to believe so is correspondingly strong. Unveiling may, nevertheless, reveal it to be black. All our knowledge is similar. It is based on repeated experience of phenomena serving laws of nature that we take to be unvarying, or in later words on statistical inference. The reason for believing in the most elementary of physical facts, the existence of bodies, is itself probabilistic. We expect the sensations we have invariably experienced to be repeated in the future. Even the certainty (Condorcet does not say the “truth”) of mathematical demonstrations is of the same nature. We do not repeat the proof of every theorem each time we employ it. We remember having seen it demonstrated and base our belief that it will always prove correct on past experience, that is to say on probability.111 In nothing that he wrote was Condorcet further ahead of his times. He would thus annul at a stroke the privileged position the mathematical sciences held in their claim to the monopoly of certain knowledge. Not that his motive was epistemological, except insofar as he thought to meet his mentor’s objection to the calculus of probability. D’Alembert had considered its calculations to be correct mathematically, but inapplicable in principle to the physical world, which is determined, or to the moral world, which is inexact. But that was by the way. Condorcet’s idea, his literally revolutionary idea, was to vindicate Turgot’s often-quoted faith that “the truths of political and moral science are capable of the same certainty as those that form the system of physical science.” In effect, however, he turns the assertion on its head by arguing that proof in the exact sciences is itself probabilistic, and none the worse for that.112 The probability of a correct mathematical demonstration approaches certainty, and the assurance we take from it is simply the highest degree of the kind of belief that a reasonable and prudent man accords to the truth of propositions drawn from rightly analyzed experience of the world in any and all of its aspects, whether natural or social. That political experience is capable of yielding truths in this sense will make more comprehensible other of Condorcet’s statements on politics, wherein decisions and policies are often, and even usually, characterized as matters of truth or error. Those stark alternatives seem not incongruous in discussions of the procedures of juries and judicial panels, which is one of the main topics of the Essai. He calculates the probability of convicting an innocent person, or reciprocally of allowing a criminal to go free, under 111

Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilité, “Discours préliminaire,” esp. pp. vii–x, xiii, lxxiv–lxxv. For excellent discussions of Condorcet’s “motif de croire,” see Rashed (1974), chapter 3, and Bru (1988). 112 Ibid., p. i.

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various hypotheses concerning the size of the panel, the plurality required for a conviction, and the veracity of jurors. In effect, the method is to take the conviction for an event and to compute the probability that it was caused by the guilt of the accused. The object was to specify figures for the optimal composition and voting practice of a jury with a view to maximizing the assurance that an innocent person not be convicted while also safeguarding the security of society. The inevitable lack of certainty in such proceedings is the reason for his opposition to capital punishment. The sense in which Condorcet could consider electoral as well as judicial decisions to be a matter of truth or error will not be immediately obvious to modern citizens of a democracy who are periodically confronted in the voting booth with lists of candidates for public office. Voting procedures, however, were the topic that Condorcet developed most fully. They represent, moreover, the one sector in which his analysis left a legacy that may be traced through actual political and institutional practices. The question is not who is the true candidate and who are the false ones, but which choice embodies the true views of the electorate. No problem arises when there are only two. A decision reached by the votes of a majority expresses the preference of the voters. Not so, or not necessarily so, of a plurality when there are three or more options. Condorcet demonstrates mathematically that, when all voters rank all candidates by order of preference, the one who receives a plurality of first places may under certain combinations be the least favored. Recourse both to proportional representation and to the preferential ballot derives from the cogency of this argument, developed and refined throughout the nineteenth century, though never applied in Condorcet’s lifetime.113 For readers used to modern representative institutions, the difficulty in taking Condorcet’s meaning increases drastically with respect to the processes of legislation. The third and politically most important set of procedures treated in the Essai, it is also the sector in which he constructs the fewest models for calculation.114 It will help to recall the exact wording of the title: “Essay on the application of analysis to the probability of decisions reached by a plurality of votes.” The probability sought is that legislative decisions conform to the truth. A legislature makes a true or false decision according to whether it votes to adopt or reject a good law, and vice versa in the case of a bad one. Condorcet gives no definition of goodness or badness 113 Condorcet’s analysis of elections was attended by a priority dispute with Borda, who had reached essentially similar conclusions in a memoir read to the Academy in 1770. Borda published it in vindication of his claims only in 1784, “Mémoire sur les e´lections au scrutin,” MARS (1781/1784), pp. 657–665. Condorcet had then completed writing the relevant section of the Essai. On this affair, see Bru and Crépel (1994), pp. 351–359. 114 Granger (1956), chapter 3, likens Condorcet’s method to the construction of models in modern socio-political analysis.


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in laws, however. The problem is rather to calculate the plurality required for reaching true legislative decisions under specified assumptions concerning the size and enlightenment of an assembly. In order to get at his sense of the laws themselves, it will help to recall the fundamental proposition of the book: the truths of political and of physical science are susceptible of the same sort of certainty, which is always approximate, and the degrees of which are subject to probabilistic analysis. Rational legislation, then, is the outcome of a collective research project in the social sciences. The decision to pass a measure is tantamount to the statement (or by analogy with physics to the discovery) of a law. It is always subject to the revision that increase of knowledge about the nature of society and of human rights will bring. Nothing in the abstractness or benevolence of the reasoning prepared Condorcet to participate in the realities of popular politics. The effect he would, and soon did, have on others was bound to depend on his position, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science, and on his vocabulary— truth, error, certainty, proof, demonstration. The words came across with all the old dogmatism that laymen, enlightened or not, feel in mathematics, unsoftened by the probabilistic sense he purported to have given them in a book that few if any had read or could read. Whoever did would have learned that society was far from ready for democracy. There is no possibility that large popular assemblies will consist of highly enlightened people. The members, through no fault of their own, would be bound to bring a combination of great ignorance and much prejudice to the making of many decisions. The prior probability that each of them would cast a true vote would be less than one-half, so that the larger the assembly, the greater the probability of false decisions. It would thus be dangerous to give a democratic constitution to an unenlightened people. A counting of ignorant heads would be the road, not to truth, but to error. At a still deeper level, the sense of the political process that Condorcet had drawn from his mentor, Turgot, was simply not consonant with the partisan practices through which the affairs of the modern world have in fact been conducted ever since their time, and indeed in earlier times. A passage in the opening pages of the Essai alludes to the bad example set at the dawn of history: When we reflect on what we know of the constitutions of the peoples of Antiquity, we see that they were much more concerned to balance the interests and passions of the different bodies that participated in the makeup of the State than to ensure that the results of their decisions conformed to the truth.115 115

Essai, p. 111.

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Such was the evil genius still animating the British institutions fallaciously idealized in Montesquieu’s celebration of checks and balances. Not for Condorcet an adversarial jurisprudence of which the purpose was, less to find the truth, than to wear down a jury of twelve men as ignorant as the accused. Not for him the bicameral asymmetry, the irrational representation of a Parliament in which localities, classes, and corporate groups contended for their abusive interests. Even like its homonyms, the Parlements of France, the British legislature was a survival of precisely the corporative structure of society that an assembly truly representative of the public interest should supplant. For at bottom the public interest was one. On that, and on the subordination of subsidiary claims, Condorcet agreed with Rousseau. To the problem of determining the true good of society amid a multiplicity of irreconcilable views, Rousseau responded intuitively with the notion of the general will, Condorcet analytically with the concept of the probabilistic will. In Rousseau’s eyes, the enemy was malevolence and the weapon was virtue. In Condorcet’s, the enemy was ignorance and the weapon was education. The appearance of conflicting interests reflects an ignorance preyed on by charlatans in pursuit of gain, an ignorance inculcated by priests in the service of religion, an ignorance exploited by potentates in the exercise of power. Given all these reasons, Condorcet could only deplore the notion of calling the Estates-General to deal with the fiscal crisis after the failure of the Assembly of Notables in 1787. He saw, quite correctly, that under the cloak of constitutionalism, the advocates of this recourse to a distant, almost mythical, past precisely were the beneficiaries of privilege.116 By no stretch of possibility could resuscitation of the defunct Estates constitute an assembly representing the nation. The most extensive of Condorcet’s political writings argues the importance of beginning from the bottom up with a variant of Turgot’s hierarchy of communal, local, and provincial assemblies, for which Condorcet supplies a probabilistic gloss.117 Lavoisier, it will be recalled, took a similar position, based on his actual experience in the Orléanais. The purview of these bodies would be administrative and fiscal, as was the case with the Provincial Assemblies of 1787, rather than legislative and constitutional. Only when they were in operation, along with a system of education, would the nation become capable of electing a national assembly representative of its true interests. Condorcet composed the treatise in the autumn and early winter of 1787– ´ “Sentiments d’un républicain sur les assemblées provinciales et les Etats-G´ enéraux” (1789), Oeuvres 9, pp. 127–143. 117 Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assemblées provinciales (1788), Oeuvres 8, pp. 117– 657. Cf. Gillispie (1980), pp. 33–36. 116


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88. When it went to press, revival of the Estates-General did not appear imminent. By the time he was reading proof in the autumn of 1788, events had overtaken his reasoning. The King had announced the summoning of the Estates-General, and Condorcet lamented the prospect in the post script already quoted. He could only warn his fellow citizens to attain a thorough knowledge of the natural rights of human beings, their rights to liberty, to property, to equality, lest they fall victim to their own errors of judgment and to others that would be visited upon them.118 All the more did Condorcet wish, and wish passionately, to be elected to the Estates-General. No matter how ominous the prospect, Condorcet invariably refused to despair. Whatever the state of affairs, he directed his efforts, whether political or literary, to making the best of the situation, even while explaining how it could have been bettered and still might be. For Condorcet was not one of those reformers who believes in humanity to the detriment of human beings. He had an intimate, a compassionate realism, not about politics, but about the needs of flesh and blood, mind and spirit. He stood for office in Mantes, where he had a country house. Regret as he might the division into three estates, he nevertheless belonged to the nobility. His peers in the bailiwick commissioned him to draw up the instructions for the deputy they were to elect to the Estates-General. Seizing the chance, he prepared a document conceived to remedy the political ills of the nation rather than of the constituency.119 By its terms, the mandate of deputies was to be limited to one year. A Declaration of Rights was to be the first order of business. Thereafter, the nobility of Mantes charged their delegate to press for equality of all persons before the law, to recommend the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery, to vote for eliminating representation by order, and to support creation of communal and provincial assemblies. Taxation and legislation were to be reserved exclusively to the National Assembly. The Constitution must provide for periodic referendums on possible revisions. The document thus embodied the main ideas that Condorcet had been contributing to the national debate in the various brochures he had published prior to the elections in April 1789. His colleagues adopted his text, one of the most sweeping to be forwarded to the impending Estates-General. They did not, however, elect its author to represent them, preferring one Antoine Vion de Gaillon, a cavalry officer and younger son whose only political act in the Constituent Assembly consisted in offering a motion at the outset abolishing the rights of primogeniture. Thus passed over, Condorcet tried again in Paris. The Mint, where he had an official apartment, was in the Luxembourg quarter. He figured 118 119

Op. cit., n. 103 above, p. 656. AP, Première Série, 3, pp. 661–666.

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among forty-seven noble electors of the 15th District. They named him secretary to draft their instructions and also elected him a member of their delegation to the General Assembly of Electors of Paris, which convened on 23 April. Condorcet could be effective in committee. In that large and rancorous body, he was altogether out of his element. No more than most of his successors in the discipline of political science, which he thought to found, did he prove to be an effective politician. Too decent a person, Julie de Lespinasse had said of him. He was nothing of an orator. His voice was thin and reedy. He was nervous and, worse, he looked nervous. Incapable of speaking extemporaneously, he was at a loss in the thrust and parry of debate and always preferred to argue his positions by the printed word. His set speeches usually failed to persuade his successive audiences, which were the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune of Paris, the Jacobin Society, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention. He learned that hard lesson at the outset among his peers in the Assembly of Electors of Paris. Condorcet’s fellow nobles in the capital were of a different stripe from the small number with properties in Mantes, who were largely liberal in sympathy and who might conceivably have elected him to the Estates-General. Not so the courtiers, gentlemen of fashion, high officials, luminaries of government, ranking officers of the Army and Navy, who constituted the aristocracy of Paris. In their worldly eyes, Condorcet’s very title had little more validity than his ideas. Each of the three orders—the clergy inevitably— refused to sit with the two others in the General Assembly of Electors. The cahier adopted by the nobility further demanded that the separation be maintained in the Estates-General and that final votes on decisions there be by order instead of by head. All too prescient appeared to be Condorcet’s foreboding that an unprepared public would err by failing to reach decisions true to the national interest, and that privilege would prove the beneficiary of haste. Relegated to the wings for the opening of the Estates-General on 5 May and for the crucial contest over their organization, Condorcet took both nobles and Third Estate to task in an anonymous pamphlet criticizing their erroneous preferences for their own interest over the true good of the nation.120 Nothing in his analysis prepared him for the resolution and political skill with which the Third Estate, under the leadership of Bailly, Sieyès amd Mirabeau, transformed itself into the Constituent Assembly. During those weeks of May and June Condorcet drew close to Sieyès. They had in common that at this stage they were the only considerable figures of whom it may be said that theirs was the role of political scientists. Also unpredicted in the calculus of probabilities was the capacity of the populace of Paris to 120

Réflexions sur les affaires publiques par une société de citoyens (1789). Cf. Cahen (1904), pp. 130–133.

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serve the true interest of the nation by seizing power. In the opinion of his political biographer, the fall of the Bastille made a democrat of Condorcet, not just in eventual principle, but in immediate practice. Others consider that he shifted his stance in the direction of democracy more gradually.121 However that may have been, Condorcet ceased insisting upon the safeguard of education as a precondition to electoral politics, though neither did he throw his favorite cause to the winds. Condorcet was already intimate with Lafayette, who as commander of the National Guard reached the peak of popularity simultaneously with Bailly. Now Condorcet, the scion who had renounced his family’s tradition of military nobility, also enlisted in the ranks of civic defense. Solidarity with the mood of the capital, reinforced for the moment by his reputation, brought him office at last, if only municipal office. On 18 September, his fellow citizens of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district elected him to the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune of Paris. There, as will appear, he was soon at odds with Bailly, mayor for the last two months and exerting himself to define and act the part. Mutual antipathy stemmed from Condorcet’s victory fifteen years previously in the contest for the post of Permanent Secretary. Their disagreements and temperamental incompatibility now carried over from academic politics into a more hazardous arena. 6. CONDORCET, BAILLY, AND THE GOVERNANCE OF PARIS

Science had the largest representation it received in any of the elected bodies of the Revolution in the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune of Paris, which convened in the great hall of the Hôtel de Ville on 18 September 1789. Counting Bailly, ex officio in the office of Mayor, eleven members of the scientific community were included. Condorcet was named, albeit in a disputed election, by the District of Saint-Germain des Prés; Lavoisier by Saint-Louis de la Culture; A.-L. de Jussieu and André Thouin by Saint´ Nicolas du Chardonnet; J.-A.-J. Cousin by Saint-Etienne du Mont; Louis Lefèvre de Gineau by Saint-Jean en Grève; Constantin Périer by les Capucins de la Chaussée d’Antin; Alexandre Vandermonde by La Madeleine de Trainel (Popincourt); Auguste Broussonet by les Blancs-Manteaux; and J.-D. de Cassini by Val de Grâce. This assembly, the second, was in session from 18 September 1789 to 8 October 1790, when it was succeeded by the commune legally established by the National Assembly. Its predecessor had been chosen on 25 July 1789 to take over governance of the city from the regime improvised by the Electors during the crisis of the Bastille. The first communal Assembly confirmed the popular nominations of Bailly as Mayor and Lafayette as commander of the 121

Cahen (1904), pp. 137–138; but cf. Baker (1975), pp. 267–269.

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National Guard and began the invention of a new municipality amid abatement of the disorders of July and early August.122 Elected in a more deliberate manner, the second Assembly considered itself to be the municipal counterpart of the Constituent Assembly. Its principal mission was to devise a constitutional plan for the capital. Condorcet should have been in his element there, and on 4 December 1789 he was duly named chairman of the committee elected to draft a plan. Meanwhile Paris, like France, had to be governed. There, too, Condorcet came forward. He took a leading part in efforts to calm the capital in the aftermath of another of the critical revolutionary “journées,” 4 October, when the housewives of Paris marched the royal family from Versailles into virtual imprisonment in the Tuileries.123 Responsibility for governing Paris would appear to have been in the hands of leading figures in the professional life of the city. Numbering 300 in all, the Assembly exhibited nothing of the chronic radicalism associated with the Commune of Paris in later times. Danton, elected by the extremist Cordeliers on 23 January 1790 to fill a vacancy, was the only notable figure who provided foretastes of what was to come. Otherwise, prominent lawyers, merchants, physicians, and civil servants, members of the bourgeoisie, sat alongside scientists, engineers, architects, pharmacists, surgeons, and skilled artisans in the luxury trades. Literary Paris was represented by three members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and by Antoine Suard of the Académie Fran¸caise, the long-time friend who would deny Condorcet shelter in his last extremity. Each of the sixty districts had designated one of its five representatives to sit on the City Council, intended in an ill-defined manner to oversee administration. It was in that capacity that Jussieu, as we have seen, served as one of eight councillors who were also appointed Lieutenants to the mayor, in his case for the department of hospitals. He held the post throughout Bailly’s entire time in office, until November 1791. The mathematician Cousin also was of the Council. His election, indeed, led him into a second career in urban affairs. He assisted Jussieu with problems in the hospitals, particularly the Salpêtrière, where he is credited with having insisted on the sanitary measures that eliminated the ravages of scabies. Appointed secretary of the Committee of Subsistence, which is to say the food supply, he was consulted regularly by Liancourt and the Poverty Committee of the National Assembly. Cousin studied the problem of the Paris food supply systematically and published a memoir on methods for assuring its adequacy, always the precondition of orderliness in the capital. 122 123

For the proceedings of the first Assembly, see Lacroix, Actes 1. Ibid., 2, pp. 201, 207–208.


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He was reelected to the City Council when the second Assembly of Representatives gave way to the definitive Commune on 8 October 1790, was named administrator of public properties, and, more important, served as food administrator from March 1792 until February 1793.124 On 10 August 1792 Cousin was in the chair for what turned out to be the last session of the legal commune. He thereupon presided over the first meeting of the insurrectional commune that voted the overthrow of the monarchy.125 Later, under the Directory, he served in various municipal posts. In 1797 he was elected to the lower house of the legislature, and to the upper house in 1799. Bonaparte named him a senator in 1800. Cousin died a few months later. Cousin’s scientific reputation, be it noted in passing, is a bit of a puzzle. Professor of mathematics in the Collège de France (as it was soon to be), he had been a member of the Academy of Sciences since 1772. His name turns up often in contemporary sources, and is always mentioned respectfully. The question is why. He contributed three excellent textbooks to the literature, but nothing original.126 The explanation must lie, therefore, in his presence and his teaching. What little we know of the latter is tantalizing. He changed the designation of his chair to mathematical physics in 1791 in recognition, apparently, of a shift in subject matter. For if we may judge from the titles of his courses in the 1780s, they anticipated, if they did not initiate, the application of mathematics to physics. But we know nothing of the content. It may be significant that Cousin’s closest colleague at the Collège, Louis Lefèvre de Gineau, also converted his chair from its traditional to a modern definition, in his case from mechanics to experimental physics. It was probably no more than coincidence, though a remarkable one, that he also should have been a representative of his district, a member of the City Council, and an official of the food administration. Lefèvre-Gineau, as he soon styled himself, had entered into municipal politics even earlier than Cousin. He represented his district both in the Assembly of Electors and from July to September in the first communal Assembly. In later life he too returned to politics, serving as senator from the Ardennes from 1807 to 1814 and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies after the Restoration. Even less than Cousin did he contribute to the literature of physics. He published, indeed, nothing at all. That he was, nevertheless, a master with precision instru124

Mémoire sur les moyens d’assurer l’approvisionnement de Paris (1790). On Cousin’s contribution to municipal administration, see Bloch and Tuetey, PVRCM; Lacroix, Actes, 1e` re série, Index vol. 1; C. Laplatte, “Cousin,” Dictionnaire de biographie fran¸caise. 125 Robiquet (1890a), p. 511. 126 Le¸cons de calcul différentiel (1777), Introduction a` l’étude de l’astronomie physique (1787), Traité de calcul différentiel et de calcul intégral (2 vols., 1796).

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ments will be evident when we meet him again determining the exact value of the standard kilogram for the commission on the metric system.127 His friend, the poet Delille, invokes his aid thus in Les Trois Règnes: Viens donc a` mon secours, Gineau! dont la main sûre Organise le monde et sonde la nature; De ces sentiers obscurs fais-moi sortir vainqueur; J’aime a` voir par tes yeux, a` jouir par ton coeur.128 Except for Condorcet, the remaining scientific members of the Assembly of Representatives were less concerned with urban affairs in general than with ad hoc commissions for which their particular expertise was pertinent. Broussonet, naturalist and Permanent Secretary of the Society of Agriculture, was reluctant to take on administrative duties for which his constituents designated him and resigned from the City Council on 10 October 1789. He was reelected on 5 December, but only as a Representative. Cassini resigned altogether in January 1790, pleading the pressure of duties in overseeing delineation of the new departmental boundaries on the Observatory’s Map of France. Thouin, head gardener at the Jardin du Roi, made inspec´ tions of the quality of grain and flour stored in the Ecole Militaire. Lavoisier limited himself to advice on munitions, finance, and minor technical issues. Questions concerning the supply and quality of gunpowder for the National Guard were referred to him, as were the accounts of the Administrative Committee. He sat on commissions reporting on projects of canalization and the efficacy of a new rust preventive. It can only have been embarrassing that a fellow member of the commission named to report on a memoir concerning the improvement of mediocre local wines should have been the apothecary and pornographer, Jean-Fran¸cois Demachy, one of the more scurrilous critics of the new chemistry in general and Traité élémentaire de la chimie in particular.129 In addition to Condorcet in the chair, three other members of the Academy of Sciences, Cousin, Vandermonde, and Périer, were among the twentyfour representatives elected to the committee on drafting a municipal constitution, the central matter. Its roster did not include any notable political figures.130 Alexandre Vandermonde, mathematician and metallurgist, was director of the Cabinet des Mécaniques, forerunner of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Constantin Périer, engineer rather than scientist, 127 Below, chapter 7, section 3. There is a copy of the funeral oration by Charles Dupin (4 February 1829) in the Archives of the Académie des Sciences. On Lefèvre de Gineau’s participation in the Assembly of Representatives of the Commune, see Lacroix, Actes. index. 128 Les trois règnes, poëme en huit chants, avec des notes par MM. Cuvier, Lefèvre-Gineau, Libes, etc., in Oeuvres de J. Delille (16 vols., 1824) 10, p. 79. 129 Lacroix, Actes 7, pp. 289–290. On Demachy, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 330–331. 130 The names are given in Lacroix, Actes 3, pp. 113–114.


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was the elder of the two brothers whose pumping station on the Butte Chaillot was the first installation in France to employ steam engines equipped with James Watt’s separate condenser. Any proposal for a municipal constitution would, of course, have to be enacted by the National Assembly before becoming law. Already on 19 October that body had begun discussion of municipal organization. It adopted a definitive measure on 14 December 1789. Recognizing in the course of discussion that the size and complexity of the metropolis required special dispositions, and also no doubt with an eye on revolutionary politics, the National Assembly agreed on 25 November that, while the general principles should apply to Paris, it would await a proposal from the provisional Commune before legislating constitutional arrangements for the capital.131 Since this was precisely what both Bailly and the Communal Assembly desired, they might have been expected to work together. Quite the contrary. A bark on the waters of the Seine is the symbol of Paris, and Bailly’s was but an uncertain hand on the tiller, if he can even be said to have been at the helm. Amid the euphoria of his elevation to the mayoralty on 15 July 1789, neither Bailly nor anyone else ever imagined that he would actually have to govern Paris.132 What he initially envisaged was a largely ceremonial role entailing robes, receptions, an official coach, and keys to the city. Before the month of July was out, evidence was all too abundant that leadership would be required. In his attempt to govern, Bailly set himself two goals, completion of the Revolution and preservation of order. Striving to secure them both, he guided himself on two allegiances, to the people and to the King. The allegiances soon proved irreconcilable and the goals mutually exclusive. Bailly’s illusions about king and people were curiously similar. Neither could do wrong. When Louis XVI made a false move that provoked unrest, it was because enemies of the Revolution had given him bad advice. When the people rose in fear or anger, it was because enemies of the Revolution had deceived them. Amid the manifold uncertainties, city services had somehow to be maintained. Bailly’s administration had to deal with the supply of food, with the price and quality of bread, with regulation of markets, with collection of taxes, with payment of creditors, with apprehension of thieves and malefactors, with oversight of prisons, with maintenance of hospitals, with the security of persons and property, with public works and poor relief, with the safety of the royal family in virtual captivity in the Tuileries, with some measure of control over an inflammatory press. Attempting to carry out these tasks and others, though with what authority was now unclear, were 131 132

Ibid. 3, pp. iii–v, 88–89. Bailly, Mémoires 2, p. 26, edition cited above, section 2, n. 20.

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personnel of the old municipality and volunteers of the new National Guard. Among the latter in August and early September was Condorcet, prior to his election to the Communal Assembly. Bailly had frequently to appeal to its commander, Lafayette, to give orders for dispersing a demonstration here, for preventing a riot there, for having the streets regularly patrolled at night. Whether the vigilante spirit in the neighborhoods was an asset or a liability depended unstably on circumstance.133 The detail need not detain us, but it is important to grasp the structure of the tri-partite tension between Mayor, Assembly, and Districts in the midst of which Condorcet and his colleagues made the effort to craft a coherent municipal plan. Bailly found himself from the outset in the awkward, not to say impossible, position of being clothed with responsibility but denied authority. From the beginning of his mandate he sought to invest the mayoralty with the power of a strong executive office capable of running municipal government and keeping order in the capital. Every such move immediately provoked the endemic suspicion concerning agents of government that dominated the revolutionary climate. The pattern is already evident in the popular distrust provoked by the Electoral Assembly when it assumed the role of the municipality by default in mid-July. Its successors, the assemblies of the provisional commune, saw themselves continuing in that capacity. After the second Assembly was elected, on 18 September 1789, the sixty representatives chosen for the City Council, one from each district, were designated “Administrators.” They served on commissions overseeing the functioning of the central municipal departments. Bailly saw the matter differently. In his view the Assembly preferred constant interference in the work of running the city to fulfilling its raison d’être, which was drafting a constitutional plan. Starting in his first weeks in office, Bailly’s strategy in disputes with the Assembly or its Council was to appeal over their heads to the districts. Hastily marked out by strokes of a pen in 1788, these were arbitrary subdivisions of the city—it would be anachronistic to say constituencies—wherein the primary assemblies were held, each in the church by which the District was known, which chose the Electors of the Third Estate in April 1789. The district assemblies also debated and drew up the respective cahiers by which they wished their representatives to be guided. Having served this ad hoc purpose, they were supposed to vanish from the scene, as was the Assembly of Electors after it in turn had named deputies to the Estates-General. Instead, the districts remained in being, not temporarily like the Electoral Assembly, but as a major and continuing factor in the politics of the Revolution. In every district, politically active citizens formed steering committees for 133

Robiquet (1890a); Brucker (1958), chapter 3.


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something like a New England town meeting, or an Athenian democracy, perpetually in session. At the very outset, Bailly had insisted that his elevation to the mayoralty by the acclamation of a crowd be referred to the districts for ratification. So, too, with the nomination of Lafayette to command the National Guard. There, in Bailly’s eyes, was the true source of authority, there the locus of his popularity, there among the people. They, and not the Assembly they elected to draft a blueprint for the municipality, constituted the true Commune of Paris. In this respect, Bailly was for the moment at one with the temper of revolutionary Paris. Such was the suspicion of government, and so powerful the instinct for replacing it with direct democracy, that no sooner were people elected to office than they were distrusted. It compounded the effect that at this still early stage of the Revolution, most of those well enough known to be elected even in the more popular districts were already notables. Hence the highly bourgeois complexion of the second Assembly of Representatives, which thought of itself as a deliberative and legislative body. The Districts that elected it had no such sense of the matter. There was no notion abroad among the public that they had empowered any assembly whatever to act for them. Representatives were expected to be delegates, mere creatures of the communal will, expressible directly in the district where all might assemble, and many did. Already by 28 July 1789, a Central Committee of the Districts had come into being with the purpose of coordinating their actions and keeping a vigilant and suspicious eye on the proceedings of all officialdom and especially on the first Assembly of Representatives, which had convened only three days previously, on the twentyfourth.134 For the time being, through the winter of 1789–90 and into the following spring and summer, Bailly’s popularity held good. The second Assembly did, moreover, give grounds for complaint, from the points of view both of mayor and districts. Bailly found it dilatory as well as meddlesome. Only on 3 December, two and a half months after the Assembly had convened, did it get around to naming the Committee of Twenty-four who would draft a muncipal plan. Deliberations began the next day, with Condorcet in the chair. The long-standing academic rivalry, indeed enmity, between Bailly and himself was not calculated to ease relations between mayor and Communal Assembly. The districts for their part took alarm at the whole proceeding. Brissot de Warville (as he still liked to be called) was an active member of both the first and second Assemblies. Early in the life of the first Assembly, he had taken it on himself to draft and publish a municipal scheme that, to Bailly’s indignation, he presented on 12 August without its having been submitted to the 134

Lacroix, Actes 1, pp. 33–36.

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districts. Brissot stirred the hornet’s nest again on 30 November when he moved a resolution of gratitude to the National Assembly for its decision to await proposals from the Commune before legislating a municipal statute for Paris. His motion was no mere courtesy. It contained a further provision. The National Assembly was requested to authorize its Committee on the Constitution to act in concert with a corresponding Committee of the Communal Assembly (not yet named) in preparing a plan for the municipality. By that language, the whole Assembly of the Commune was not even to be consulted. Nor, and this was serious, were the districts. Reaction was swift. The District des Mathurins circulated a resolution that twenty others adopted forthwith: “The citizens, alarmed that the project of the Representatives of the Commune presupposes their wish to act in concert with the National Assembly in order to make a definitive plan for the Municipality of Paris without the participation of the Districts, protest against any such enterprise, oppose it, and remind the Assembly of its powers and its functions.” The Prémontrés were still harsher and even less elegant in their phrasing: “The proposition is contrary to the powers given to the Representatives and to the rights of their Districts, without the consent of whom no such initiative can be taken without letting it be feared that the said Representatives are exerting on the plan of the Municipality an influence already suspect by the fact that they have brought to the work of the Municipality, which was their duty, a negligence that nothing can justify.”135 Brissot’s misstep provided Danton and his allies with ammunition in their campaign, pressed at every opportunity, for restricting the Representatives of the Commune to the role of delegates bound by the wishes of their districts and subject to recall if they disobeyed. “Mandataires provisoires de l’Hôtel de Ville,” the Assembly is called dismissively in the drumbeat of resolutions and addresses emanating from the Cordeliers.136 Such were the circumstances in which Condorcet entered on his first real political responsibility, chairmanship of the Committee of Twenty-Four, charged with drafting a municipal plan. He immediately composed and published a broad definition of a commune, specifying what duties a citizen owes to it and what to the state.137 The work of his committee was nothing theoretical, however. The issues that divided and ultimately defeated them were peripheral and procedural, and all the more important for that. What place, first of all, should Paris have in the new departmental structure of local government? The decision would lie with the National Assembly, but such was the importance of the question that leading deputies from Paris—the duc de La Rochefoucauld, the comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, Guillotin, and others—appeared at the 14 Decem135 136 137

Ibid., 3, pp. iv–v, 89–91. Ibid., 2, pp, 470–472, 638–639; 3, pp. iv–vi, 10–11, 31–32, 300–301. “Sur la formation des communes” (1789), Oeuvres 9, pp. 405–410.


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ber meeting of the Communal Assembly to present the alternatives and to seek the opinion of the Representatives. Should the capital become the seat of a department like other major cities? Such was the view of officials who had experience of municipal affairs, and who thought it essential that the metropolis be united with a sufficient expanse of countryside to assure provisioning in produce, water, and firewood. Or should the exceptional character of Paris be recognized administratively, and its influence curbed, by confining the city to a geographically small department consisting of the capital itself, insulated from the country by a green ring of suburbs? Such was the view of many in the provinces, ever fearful of domination from the capital. On this largely external question, the districts, though they were consulted, were unsure of their views and reached no consensus. The Assembly of Representatives, on the other hand, made no doubt of its preference for the large department. Appearing before the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly, Condorcet tried to make the case for the city. He failed. Instead, provincial suspicion of the capital carried the day, and the department of Paris became a black hole of high political density in the doughnut of the Seine-et-Oise.138 The second hurdle over which Condorcet stumbled was the question of property qualification for public office, which was directly related to the suffrage. On 29 October 1789 the Constituent Assembly had accepted a motion restricting eligibility for future National Assemblies to property owners paying direct taxes in the amount of fifty-four livres, in effect to men of wealth. The question concerned the whole country, obviously, and not just Paris. Nevertheless, Condorcet took it on himself, as chairman of the Communal Assembly’s Committee of Twenty-Four, to protest the inequity and unwisdom of substituting a governing class defined by riches for one defined by privilege. He enlarged the question by disputing the decision already reached on the suffrage. Under the new constitution, the “active citizens” eligible to vote in primary assemblies would be those who annually paid direct taxes equivalent to the wages a laborer earned in three days. Payment of direct taxes equal to ten days wages would qualify a man to sit in the secondary assemblies that would choose the deputies. In Condorcet’s view the property qualifications were inequitable and unnecessary. The practice of indirect, two-stage elections would itself protect against the danger lest ignorant rabble-rousers be chosen amid some tumult at the polls.139 He managed to refrain from saying that he had proved this point mathematically. In thus pressing toward democracy, Condorcet diminished the small po138

Lacroix, Actes 3, pp. vi–vii, 198–201. “Adresse a` l’Assemblée Nationale sur les conditions d’éligibilité,” Oeuvres 10, pp. 77–91, originally printed in the first issue of Journal de la Société de 1789 (5 June 1790), pp. 9–25. Condorcet had presented an earlier, more polemical draft to the Committee of 24 on 12 Decembcer 1789. See Cahen (1904), pp. 158–171. 139

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litical credit of his reputation among his own kind while failing to win any compensating popularity among the objects of his solicitude, citizens of the working class. It hurt his cause in virtually all circles, high and low, that he was becoming known through other writings as a champion of Jews, blacks, and women. The Committee of Twenty-Four went along with their chairman in general, but resisted his attempt to include a provision enfranchising women in the plan for the governance of Paris. His colleague, Moreau de Saint-Méry, whose family and property were in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), had to defend himself against the “calumny” of being said, falsely, to have introduced a resolution in the Assembly of Electors in favor of freedom for the blacks in that colony. The accuser, threatened with a libel suit, recanted and apologized.140 The Committee of Twenty-Four finished their work on 6 February 1790. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the surrounding controversies, their Plan de la Municipalité de Paris is a dry administrative blueprint.141 The Assembly of Representatives amended a few small details and on 8 February issued a blanket invitation to all Parisians to examine the provisions. A fortnight should have sufficed. On the twenty-fifth the Committee, with Condorcet in the chair, opened what was intended to be a series of hearings at which citizens speaking for the districts might raise questions and impart their views. There was no interest. No one appeared. The decisive reactions—not responses—came from the districts of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois and, predictably, from the Cordeliers. On 23 and 25 February, respectively, their committees called for delegates from all districts to foregather at their rallying place in the Archbishop’s palace, not to discuss the Condorcet plan, certainly not, but to produce an alternative. Two closely related issues had agitated the more radical district committees all the while that Condorcet and his colleagues were working on a constitution for Paris. They feared lest the districts be passed over in the National Assembly’s deliberations about a municipal plan. Even more fundamentally, they feared lest the districts be eliminated altogether: “You are free and you will no longer be so,” warns an earlier summons to the districts on 18 January, this one from the Prémontrés: “You are the Commune, and it is going to be abolished. Reclaim your inalienable rights. Demand your perpetuation in permanent activity. Save Paris from the municipal aristocracy, the Commune that will basely annihilate you.”142 Thirty districts endorsed this call for a meeting of delegates. On 1 March 1790, four days after Condorcet held his unattended hearing, 140 141 142

Lacroix, Actes 4, pp. 10–11. The text is published in Buchez and Roux (1834–38) 4, pp. 121–162. “Adresse aux districts,” 18 January 1790, quoted in Lacroix, Actes 4, p. iv.


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two sets of delegates, representing the great majority of the sixty districts, formed a single assembly committed to both objectives, perpetuation of the districts and a municipality of their own planning. Orchestrated by Danton, the campaign gathered force in successive sessions of the Assembly of the Archbishopric, where all delegates joined in requesting Bailly to convene simultaneous meetings of the sixty districts on 15 March in order to review the text of an address demanding their preservation. When the great majority of districts adopted it with enthusiasm, Bailly fell further into line and accepted their invitation to head the delegation that would present the request to the National Assembly. The legislators received them on 23 March and agreed to take their demands under consideration. In his introductory remarks, the Mayor further advised his fellow Deputies (for he retained his seat) that in a week’s time they would also be presented with a plan for the municipality prepared by a commission of the Assembly of the Archbishopric. Bailly had decided, evidently, to associate himself completely with the claim that the “true Commune” consisted of the districts and to join the radicals in marginalizing the Assembly of Representatives and the Condorcet Plan, of which he made no mention whatsoever. It took longer than a week to deliver the promised General Regulation for the Commune of Paris, drawn up by its deputies sitting in the Archbishopric, but the text was ready by 10 April.143 Bailly’s is the first signature, and he again headed the delegation, purporting to act for the Commune, that presented it for consideration by the National Assembly. Its authors allowed that an elective City Council, which was the central feature of the National Assembly’s design for municipal government in general, would work for cities other than Paris. In smaller, simpler communities the citizenry would be able to keep a council under scrutiny. Not so the Commune of Paris. Its huge and varied population would be incapable of exercising surveillance over a council, which in the absence of popular controls would have the power to “multiply abuses, to encroach upon liberty, to erect a veritable aristocracy upon the ruins of liberty.”144 The very size and complexity of the capital required that the functions of such a council be exercised directly by the Commune through its districts. Power is to be transmitted from the people to their municipality, not through the wheels and levers of representative machinery, but immediately, and it must be immediately revocable. What, meanwhile, of Condorcet, the Committee of Twenty-four, and the Assembly of Representatives? Bypassed and humiliated, the Assembly resigned en masse on 9 April, resolving only to place their own municipal plan, which they had been elected to prepare, before the Constitutional 143

Règlement général pour la Commune de Paris, rédigé par ses députés réunis a` l’Archevêveché. Quoted from Esprit du Règlement général pour la Commune de Paris (1790) in Lacroix, Actes 4, pp. viii–x. 144

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Committee of the National Assembly, and to join a recommendation that the Municipality be organized forthwith. They also expected, so it was said, to be recalled by a wave of moderate opinion. That did not happen, but since the resignation was phrased to be effective on their replacement, which would not occur until a new Commune was in being, they hung on in empty office, for six months as it turned out, until 8 October 1790. The immediate problem was how to go about putting the Condorcet plan, which in the view of his Committee was the legitimate plan, before the National Assembly, where Bailly was still held in high esteem. There seemed nothing for it but to request the Mayor to head their deputation also. So they did, on 12 April, two days after he had led the delegation from the Archbishopric. Bailly temporized, replying that he must first read the document. Refusing a second request, he replied that he could not be in the position of disavowing a proposal that had already won the approval of the Commune. Left to its own resources, the Assembly of Representatives managed to secure a hearing from the Constitutional Committee on 20 April. The chairman, marquis de Bonnay, received them courteously, and assured them that, among the several municipal proposals before them, his colleagues would consider their design very carefully. They were as good as his word. The plan eventually enacted was very close to Condorcet’s, and the legal commune was installed on 8 October 1790. The districts were maintained, though redrawn and reduced in number from sixty to forty-eight. Otherwise, the municipal constitution retained nothing of direct democracy, which had originated with the Cordeliers, and which came to dominate, not in the official structure of the Commune, but in its actions, and prior to that in the Jacobin Society. Condorcet thus had the eventual satisfaction of seeing the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly adopt the essentials of his scheme in preference to its populist rival. His personal humiliation was nonetheless severe, for he had been passed over to head the delegation that presented it.145

7. POLITICAL ECONOMY

Every time that Condorcet was disappointed by experience of political reality, as he had been on the fall of Turgot and would be finally when driven into hiding by the Terror in 1793, he took up his pen instead of indulging in despair. So it was in the summer of 1790. Condorcet betrayed no discouragement over the political failure of his municipal plan. Then, and throughout the remaining life of the Constituent Assembly, he conducted himself in 145

Ibid., pp. x–xiii. See also Cahen (1904), pp. 171–175.

I. 7. POLITICAL ECONOMY

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the manner of a professional scholar addressing educated readers with a view to informing the opinion of the public that mattered. To that end he required a forum and played the leading part in organizing the Society of 1789.146 Associated with Condorcet were Dupont de Nemours and Sieyès among intellectuals, the cousins LaRochefoucauld and Liancourt among liberal aristocrats, and among wealthy industrialists, Constantin Périer, who had served with Condorcet on the Committee of Twenty-Four. The group began foregathering informally as early as October 1789, organized themselves into a club in January 1790, and resolved to enlarge the membership into a patriotic society in April. They did not come forward as a party. The very notion of a political party was anathema to Condorcet. In his eyes the public interest was undivided. Put positively, the purpose of the Society was to favor enactment of a constitutional order— emphasis on order—that would conserve the gains of 1789.147 In practice, and this caveat goes to the heart of Condorcet’s inability to be realistic, no such grouping could be nonpolitical. Seen negatively, and the left did see it this way, the purpose of this elite of science, rank, and wealth was not to save the Revolution, but to stop it in its tracks and roll it back.148 Historically speaking, the Society of 1789 may be considered the final embodiment of the spirit of patrician reform that had operated successfully in the 1780s, enlisting expertise and wealth in the uncontroversial service of public health, of renovation of hospitals and prisons, of rationalization of agriculture, and of modernization in commerce and industry. Lavish quarters were taken in the Palais Royal. Sumptuous banquets were given there. Members of the Academy of Science joined the company, notably Monge, Lamarck, Lacepède, and Lavoisier, who served as Secretary. Important bankers and financiers, both French and foreign, were prominent among the number. Also inscribed were leading political figures, those committed to reconciling the constitutional with the monarchical principle, notably Mirabeau and Talleyrand, and those striving to maintain liaison between the municipality and the National Assembly, particularly Bailly and Lafayette. Dues were steep and complimentary membership was offered to deputies in the Estates-General, many of whom were in modest circumstances. In the early summer of 1790 the Society succeeded, though briefly, in attracting dissidents of moderate persuasion from the Jacobin Club. Its organ, Journal de la Société de 1789, speaks in the mingled accents of an 146 On the Society of 1789, see Condorcet, “A Monsieur ***, sur la Société de 1789” (1790), Oeuvres 10, pp. 69–76; Challamel (1895), pp. 391–443; Cahen (1904), pp. 235–248; Moravia (1968), pp. 152–161; Baker (1973) and (1975), pp. 272–285. 147 Sieyès, E´ bauche d’un nouveau plan de société patriotique, adopté par le Club de Mil-septcent-quatre-vingt-neuf (1790). 148 See, for example, Le patriote fran¸cais (17 April 1791), pp. 411–412; and Camille Desmoulins in Révolutions de France et de Brabant (9 May 1791), pp. 487–490.

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eighteenth-century academy, a nineteenth-century professional society, and a twentieth-century pressure group.149 Fifteen numbers appeared, in principle weekly, between 5 June and 15 September 1790. With Number XII the name changed to Mémoires de la Société de 1789, a title more in keeping with both mode and content. In tone and intellectual level, the collection is comparable to publications of provincial societies of arts and letters in the old regime. Condorcet wrote the prospectus. The goal of the Society, he explained, was to advance “L’art social,” which should become the guide to national felicity even as moral philosophy had been to the individual good life in antiquity. Of the total of twenty-four memoirs, Condorcet composed nine, all on predictable themes: the suffrage, the inadmissibility of an established church, the rule of law, citizenship for women, the common interest of Paris and the provinces, and so on. Other members of the society contributed a paper or two apiece, each on a favorite topic: Philippe A. Grouvelle on whether the crown or the national assembly should have power to declare war and make peace; La Rochefoucauld on Benjamin Franklin; Dupont de Nemours on the diplomatic drawbacks of the Family Pact between the French and Spanish monarchies; Armand de Kersaint on recruitment and organization of the Navy. Seeking to reach out through correspondence, the Journal published letters from travelers in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and French provincial centers. Patriotic themes were sounded in each issue. At the meeting of 14 July 1790, which celebrated the festival of federation on the first anniversary of Bastille Day, a delegation of ladies placed garlands on the heads of Sieyès, Mirabeau, Le Chapelier, and Talleyrand, whereupon they ran out of flowers. The original plan of the journal called for contributions on science, arts, and trades. The only examples are three pieces by Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, on fabrication of soda, on mineral resources, and on recovery of bronze from bell metal. An assistant in Lavoisier’s laboratory who was also a teacher at ´ the fledgling Ecole des Mines, Hassenfratz later became an extreme Montagnard and boasted of having been expelled from the Society. The journal devoted an entire issue, No. XIII, to the one paper that is still alive and readable: André Chénier’s impassioned identification of the real enemies of France. They were the demagogues, left and right, maligning responsible men of good will who were striving to create a new and just regime. They poisoned the civil atmosphere with libel, with falsehood, with incitement to violence and murder.150 Prominent among their targets were Condorcet and Lavoisier, highly visible leaders of the scientific establishment. 149 ´ A facsimile reprinting of the Journal was published in 1982 by Editions d’Histoire Sociale (EDHIS). 150 “Avis au peuple fran¸cais sur ses véritables ennemis,” 24 August 1790, ibid.


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The respective postures and involvements of Condorcet and Lavoisier one year into the Revolution are instructive to compare and to contrast. Their most signal contributions still lay before them, Condorcet’s in the area of educational planning and enlightened thought, Lavoisier’s in public finance and (still) in munitions. Both had met with rejection in their hopes of participating in the political process itself. Lavoisier’s reaction, not merely to that but to events in Paris and in the country, was to stand apart from politics. The Revolution is an accomplished fact and cannot be undone, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin early in February 1790: There is, however, still an aristocratic party which makes vain efforts and which is evidently the weakest. The democratic party has the largest number on its side, and in addition the educated, the thoughtful, and the enlightened. Moderate persons, who have retained their sangfroid in the general effervescence, think that circumstances have carried us too far, that it is unfortunate that the people and all citizens had to be armed, that it is impolitic to put weapons of force in the hands of those who should obey, and that establishment of the new Constitution will beget obstruction on the part of the very ones in whose interest it was designed. . . . We regret your absence from France. You would have been our guide, and you would have marked out the limits we ought not to go beyond.151 Nevertheless, though Lavoisier might and did stand apart from politics, he had no notion of abandoning officialdom. Condorcet, by contrast, committed to the perfectibility of man, never took the imperfections of political reality for a reason to rise above them to some haughty plane. The literary effort he made throughout the life of the Constituent Assembly may, even as he would have wished, be taken as an instance of political science beginning to define its role. That would be far from all he wished, for his writings exerted no appreciable effect on the course of events. The question nowadays, however, is whether they contribute to the understanding of events, and the answer is bound to be that his analyses yielded a considerable harvest of judgments that have stood the test of time. Professional historians of all persuasions would concur in a large proportion of them. They are of a different order from the manifold utterances of a Mirabeau, a Robespierre, a Danton, political actors whose whole being was pressed into the battle. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy may serve for a characteristic and important instance of the cogency of Condorcet’s political judgment. Having expropriated the Church, the Constituent Assembly, while pretending not to interfere with religious belief, proceeded to dissolve the monastic 151

Quoted in Poirier (1993), p. 271.

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orders and to convert the clergy into civil servants paid by the state. Bishops and parish priests were to be elected to office at the departmental and district levels, respectively. Successful candidates were to swear an oath of loyalty to the constitution. No single measure, in the opinion of historians of many persuasions, proved more divisive. The wedge it drove into any prospect for general assent to the new order of things opened a permanent fissure in the French body politic. It compounded political with religious conflict, forcing Catholics throughout France to choose between the Church and the Revolution. Louis XVI might in time have brought himself to abide by other provisions of the constitution. Faithful to Catholicism, he could be forced to sign but not to stomach this one. It confirmed his wavering resolve to escape into the arms of Counter-Revolution beyond the border, and it assured the failure of the experiment in constitutional monarchy. In Condorcet’s judgment, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy erred by omission and by commission. It failed to institute toleration. The religious reform he thought incumbent would have entirely separated religion from the state and placed all sects on a voluntary footing. Instead, the state itself took on responsibility for administering a Catholic monopoly of belief, thereby fortifying the authority of a priestly caste, though at the expense of the whole nation, while at the same time forcing believers to offend against Catholic discipline. The measure managed to achieve the worst of all possible worlds, both in principle and in practice.152 In the complementary sector of economics, and specifically on liquidation of the debt inherited from the old regime, Condorcet and Lavoisier saw much alike. No one knew the amount of the national debt in May 1789 when the Estates-General convened. Best guesses put it at a level of 4 billion livres, approximately half of which was due or overdue. Certain was it that over 50 percent of the annual revenue of the monarchy went to payment of the interest. The remainder, Necker calculated in September 1789, would leave a deficit of 90 million in 1789 and 80 million in 1790. Certain taxes had been abolished. The collection of others, direct as well as indirect, was faltering, and Necker’s dismaying estimates proved insufficiently pessimistic. They involved Lavoisier more immediately than Condorcet because, among his manifold responsibilities, in May 1788 he had been elected president of the board of the Discount Bank (Caisse d’Escompte), which by the end of 1789 held 200 million livres of government debt. A joint stock company founded in 1776, the bank attracted wealthy investors, served as a clearing house for bills of exchange, entered into many transactions with the Tax Farm, and profited from a monopoly of supplying the mint with gold 152 “Sur la constitution civile de la clergé” (Mai 1790), Oeuvres 12, pp. 3–8; “Sur le décret du 13 avril 1790: Réligion Catholique,” Journal de la Société de 1789 (no. 2, 12 juin 1790), also in Oeuvres 10, pp. 95–103.


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and silver. At the outset of the Revolution, Lavoisier was thus responsible for two institutions dating from the time of Turgot, the Gunpowder Administration in his capacity of chemist, and the Discount Bank in his capacity of financier. One was public, the other private. By September 1789 repeated loans had frayed the Treasury’s ability to borrow. There was no disagreement about the problem itself. France was a rich country with a financially strapped government. An obvious set of assets lay to hand. The value of the lands expropriated from the Church was estimated to be 3 billion livres, and that of the royal domain another 1.5 billion. The total would come close to 10 percent of the value of all the arable land in France. The amount should more than suffice to extinguish the national debt. The question was, not whether to draw on these resources, but how to privatize them and realize the value, while at the same time meeting the current expenses of government. The least bad solution, in Necker’s view, and equally in Lavoisier’s (though they did not put it this way), was to follow the model of the Bank of England. On 14 November, Necker proposed to the National Assembly that the Discount Bank be converted into a state bank, in effect the Banque de France, for the purpose of managing the national debt. Its capital would be increased from 100 to 150 million by sale of 12,500 new shares at 4,000 livres each. Its notes, which circulated at par, would be augmented by a new issue of 240 million. Half that sum would be lent to the Treasury at 4 percent to meet current needs. Gradual sale of the former clerical and royal properties through an auxiliary agency, the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire, would retire the National Debt and, not quite incidentally, reimburse stockholders of the Discount Bank for its advances to Necker in 1788 and early 1789. Fiscally, that scheme might well have worked. Politically, it stirred up a storm. Few members of the Constituent Assembly understood even the elements, let alone the intricacies, of banking. Not merely were deputies ignorant of economics and hostile to financiers, though they were all of that, but to some of them the prospect of national bankruptcy was no grievous thing. The ones who would suffer were precisely capitalist usurers responsible for the crisis in the first place. More temperate critics—among them Condorcet, who here parted company with Lavoisier—considered it impolitic to resign management of the finances of the state into the hands of bankers acting in the interest of wealthy stockholders. Opponents prevailed, and foundation of the Banque de France (in 1803) had to await Bonaparte. Heeding Mirabeau and deaf to warnings from all who understood public finance, the Assembly itself took responsibility for liquidating the national domains. The method on which it settled was the emission of paper, initially in the form of securities—assignats, short for “billets assignés sur les biens du clergé.” The first issue in September 1789 amounted to 400 million in notes of 1,000 livres bearing interest at 5 per-

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cent. They were non-negotiable—again initially—for any purpose other than purchase by the holder of nationalized properties, clerical or royal. Proceeds from the sale of assignats financed the one element adopted from Necker’s proposal, the Caisse de l’extraordinaire, which would apply its funds solely to retiring the national debt. Assignats so employed would return to the Caisse, which, their work done, would destroy them. So far, so good. Inevitably, matters went much further. In April 1790 the Constituent Assembly reduced the interest on assignats to 3 percent and authorized their use, not merely for retiring public debt, but for balancing the budget in the current year. Depreciation was rapid. Merchants, farmers, and laborers alike resisted payment in assignats. People hoarded their real money. Bad money drove out good in service to Gresham’s Law, and coins became scarcer and scarcer. On 27 September, the Assembly, a legislative King Canute with the tide rising, voted to require acceptance of assignats as legal tender at face value. A further issue of 800 million was voted for 29 September, this time in bills of 1,000, 300, and 200 livres at no interest. By 1795, not to follow the downward slalom point by point, the 1,000 livre assignat was worth 80 livres in specie. By 1797 it was worth nothing, and the Directory returned to a metallic standard with a deflationary thud. Among the consequences of the double movement of prices, soaring and suddenly collapsing over a five-year span, were a decline in productivity, speculation in land rather than purchase by peasants, and a shift in the basis of inequity from privilege to finance. The debacle had its compensations. It did solve the problem of the debt. In effect, though not by intention, the revolutionary governments, ever professing to honor the national debt, repudiated it by inflating the money supply. Politically speaking, that may have been the only possible solution. Financially speaking, other courses were conceivable and urged, notably by Lavoisier and Condorcet. If Condorcet never despaired, Lavoisier could never let go. By the end of the summer of 1790, Necker, among other expedients, had been forced to borrow a further 100 million from the Discount Bank. On 29 August Lavoisier delivered a magisterial lecture before the Society of 1789, printed forthwith under the title “Réflexions sur les assignats.”153 “At this moment, when payments of the revenue of the state are in part suspended, when the Public Treasury, independently of current expenditures and interest charges, is also obliged to confront an overdue debt the prospect of which is appalling, the State, as you know, Gentlemen, has no other resource than the sale of the national domains.” It would be only prudent, Lavoisier continued, to take the measure of the situation before settling on procedures, and first to 153

“Réflexions sur les assignats et sur la liquidation de la dette exigible ou arriérée,” OL 6, pp. 364–384, p. 364.


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reckon with the bad news: The expropriated lands were in fact worth much less than generally supposed. Capitalizing the annual revenues of the Church prior to dissolution of the order of the Clergy, an estimator might reasonably have put the former value of its property at four billion, as was commonly said. No longer, however. Approximately half that revenue had consisted in the payment of tithes, which the Assembly had suppressed, as it had the tolls and feudal dues also levied on vassals and tenants of the church. Moreover, the Assembly had wisely reserved all forests for the nation. Land equal in value to the sum of assignats already issued was also in effect mortgaged. When all deductions were made, the remaining capital value of clerical and royal property amounted, in Lavoisier’s disheartening calculation, to 1,050 milion. “You will be appalled, Gentlemen, to see that a capital that came to four billion when the State took title has dwindled to one billion in so brief a time, and”—here Lavoisier permitted himself one of the asides that earned him resentment—“perhaps you will regret that a moment of enthusiasm led the Assembly to give up the tithe, redemption of which would have contributed so effectively to the stabilization of business and the extinction of the debt.” Next, however, the good news. Repayment of the debt was also less urgent than generally supposed. The Committee on Finance of the National Assembly, chaired by the marquis de Montesquiou, had estimated the total due and overdue at 1,902,342,632 livres. Lavoisier refrained from saying that the membership was inexperienced in finance. He simply pointed out that the Committee had made no distinctions between the manifold components of the debt. Many advances made under contracts with financial companies such as the Tax Farm were not yet due; the same was true of large amounts in loans; offices and privileges purchased from the Crown did not have to be redeemed at once; the Committee had confused certain obligations of the crown with those of the clergy and counted them twice; and so on. It would be imprudent to incur all at once the pain of settling accounts not due in many instances for fifteen or twenty years. Without going into detail on these reductions, Lavoisier calculated that the amount currently payable was between 1,200 and 1,500 million, a figure roughly equivalent to the diminished value of nationalized property available for sale. The exchange of property for debt should be feasible, therefore. The question was how to go about it. Two main schemes were before the National Assembly. The first, championed by Mirabeau, would extend the issuance of assignats up to the two billion of overdue debt and thus create a paper currency for the purchase of nationalized property. The second, presented by Talleyrand, would avoid recourse to printed money. Instead, the state would satisfy its creditors directly by deeding them lands equivalent in price to the capital value of their claims. Lavoisier meant, or so he said,

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simply to reflect on the probable consequences and to draw on the best features of each proposal in order to indicate a middle way. His notion, he remarked in an addendum, was “to neutralize one by the other, if I may be allowed to use an expression that is natural to me, just as a pharmacist tempers the action of a medicine that is too strong by combining it with another, gentler remedy.”154 In fact, while making gestures to each, Lavoisier proposed a quite different plan, a banker’s plan essentially. He sought to avoid the onus of demolishing the Mirabeau scheme, clearly the favorite in the National Assembly, by invoking passages from David Hume to demonstrate how the creation of two billion in assignats would inevitably double the price of everything and destroy the competitiveness of French manufactures in the world market. The Talleyrand approach would produce no such ill effects and would be fairer, therefore, and more in keeping with the intentions of the National Assembly. Unfortunately, it was utterly impracticable since it provided for no liquidity whatever and would give creditors of the state no way to satisfy their own creditors. Lavoisier’s plan had three parts. The first, and most original, opens with a nod to Talleyrand. Due and overdue debts of the state could in principle be satisfied by transfers of property. First, however, creditors would receive promissory notes from the Treasury in settlement of the value of their claims. The notes would be short-term, one quarter of them payable in each of the next four years, and would bear low interest, 3 percent or 4 percent the first year with diminished rates thereafter, in order not to become longterm investments themselves. The effect would be to spread out retirement of the overdue debt of 1,200 livres across four years. The notes would be reimbursable in assignats, which in turn would be applicable to purchase of national properties. In the second place, and here the bow is to Mirabeau, current needs left the Treasury no choice but further emission of assignats beyond the 400 million already in circulation. Another 500 million, to be issued as needed and in denominations no smaller than 200 livres, would, Lavoisier thought, produce only a tolerable inflation. Third and finally, the liquidity of promissory notes would permit beginning the sale of land in 1791. The proceeds would then constitute a fund for paying off notes in 1792 and so on through 1795. Lavoisier addressed the problems of national debt and deficit as a finan154 “Addition aux observations de M. Lavoisier, député suppléant de Blois, sur la liquidation de la dette,” OL 6, pp. 385–402. The addendum is undated, but it is in the style of a lecture, and Lavoisier must have composed it within weeks of the “Réflexions sur les assignats.” It spells out in greater detail why the government could not operate without a further but strictly limited emission of assignats. Lavoisier is here unsparing in condemnation of the Mirabeau plan. It would lead “to nothing less than adulteration of all values, to overturning all prices, to extinction of our manufactures, to emigration of our workers” (385).


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cier and banker. He understood, and he explained, the management of money and credit. He it was who, as president of the board of the Discount Bank, had persuaded its stockholders to advance Necker the sums in 1788, 1789, and 1790 by dint of which, along with other expedients, the Minister had tided the state over into the second year of the Revolution.155 He was party to the detail of the fiscal position of the Treasury. He gave precise numbers. He knew what was involved in buying, selling, and managing property, in attracting and reassuring purchasers and investors. Given the uncollectibility of many taxes, he recognized that there was no choice but to issue assignats. Recourse to paper need not be catastrophic if controlled. He directed his efforts to calming and defusing the crisis rather than to confronting situations head on and assigning blame. Unfortunately, his language, if admirably clear, could also be heard as condescending, and the presidency of the Discount Bank, the greatest creditor, was scarcely a point of vantage for an impartial arbiter. Condorcet, too, had made a serious study of economics and finance.156 In the 1780s he contributed articles to the Encyclopédie méthodique applying mathematical probability to the analysis of insurance risks, to lotteries, and to the evaluation of annuities, tontines, and feudal obligations.157 He certainly heard Lavoisier present “Réflexions sur les assignats” before the Society of 1789. His own proposal is similar to Lavoisier’s, though much less finely tuned. He would have the state issue notes bearing 5 percent interest, the going rate, in exchange for claims. Their term would be the two years it should take to sell off nationalized property, for which purpose alone they would be accepted, along with hard money and the 400 million of assignats already created. Condorcet was adamant against further emission of assignats and far more vehement in his denunciation than Lavoisier. His style was very different, that of a political philosopher—a politique et moraliste— treating of public finance. His discussion is hard to understand, as it often is in his mathematical work, not because of the difficulty of the subject, but because of his manner of writing about it. The numbers he cited are global with no breakdown into categories. The examples are hypothetical rather than concrete. The vein is moralistic. Fiat currency is “papier-forcé,” the 155 Explaining in the “Addition” (n. 9) how the new Caisse de l’extraordinaire should model itself on the Discount Bank in the way it circulates funds, he allows himself to express bitterness over the treatment accorded “that establishment, the target of such harsh calumny it so little deserved, without which there would have been neither a National Assembly nor a Constitution, without which it would have been impossible to reach the stage at which the property of the clergy could be nationalized, that establishment, finally, which public opinion will sooner or later avenge, and to which posterity, more generous than the present generation, will accord the place it should occupy in the history of the Revolution” (p. 391). 156 Perrot (1988); Crépel and Gilain (1989), part 3; Crépel (1990b). 157 Crépel, “Condorcet, la théorie des probabilités et les calculs financiers,” in Rashed (1988), pp. 267–328.

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fiscal equivalent of mortal sin. He takes no account of the need to meet current expenses somehow. There is much about fairness to creditors balanced against fairness to the state. Peasants are the land purchasers of choice. Warnings alternate with exhortations: “Legislators of France, Deign to hear the voice of a citizen who respects you, who has often admired you, who will never flatter you!”158 Legislators could and did ignore Condorcet’s advice, and equally Lavoisier’s, but not their expertise. Lavoisier, ironically enough, headed a commission of the Academy of Science, named by Condorcet as Permanent Secretary, which reported on a technique for printing assignats that would be economical, expeditious, and proof against counterfeiters.159 Far more importantly, on 7 April 1791 the King appointed Lavoisier and Condorcet to serve on the six-man commission created by the National Assembly to oversee a completely reorganized National Treasury. It is a deeper irony that Lavoisier should have formed the skills he brought to the Treasury through his part in running the General Tax Farm, in the eyes of revolutionaries the most heinous of the enterprises to be superseded. The two academicians were party here to an important, perhaps the most important, instance of a transformation, the scope of which could scarcely have been apparent to them or their contemporaries. Its nature was first perceived, not by a historian, but by a novelist, one much concerned with ordinary life. Bureaucracy, wrote Balzac in 1836, began in the French Revolution.160 It was not a boon in his eyes. Seldom, indeed, is the modern apparatus of governmental administration viewed with favor by persons of humane sensibility who would, nevertheless, agree that the business of state is to be carried out by civil servants in the public interest rather than by private entrepreneurs or corporate entities in their own interest. Such was the transformation of the finances of the state occurring in conformity with the determination of the Constituent Assembly to make over every agency and every act of government so that they should serve the people in a regular manner instead of the King in an arbitrary manner. Prior to the ministry of Loménie de Brienne, the phrase Royal Treasury was a mere manner of speaking, a covering term for the disparate, and ever inade158 “Sur la proposition d’acquitter la dette exigible en assignats” (1790), Oeuvres 11, pp. 487– 515, on p. 511. An addendum, “Nouvelles réflexions sur le projet de payer la dette exigible en papier forcé,” ibid., pp. 515–527, is dated September 1790. 159 “Observations sur les propositions des citoyens Wallier et Straubharth, sur le polytypage des planches destiné a` l’impression des assignats,” OL 6, pp. 706–710. The report was submitted to the Commission des assignats jointly by the Academy of Science and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers. 160 La Comédie humaine (Pléiade edition, 6, pp. 238–239). I owe the citation to Bosher (1970), p. 276, whose exposition I follow in the next few paragraphs, and whose excellent and original study of French financial history in the late eighteenth century is too little known to historians of the Revolution.


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quate, resources of the Crown. Over the centuries fiscal functions attaching to sovereignty had been sold, leased, or farmed out to capitalists, financiers, and speculators—privatized in the jargon of our day. The entrepreneurs were a congeries of tax farmers, tax collectors, and receivers of this, that, or the other set of dues, imposts, and taxes in the Royal Domain, the Courts, the Army, the Navy, the various provinces, municipalities, ports, and colonies. Funds thus collected—or more often advanced to the Crown and then collected at a profit from the public—were disbursed, sometimes by the same people, in most instances by a further set of treasurers, paymasters, and intendants accountable to quite different bodies, if at all. The misnomer of calling the Minister of Finance “Controller-General” epitomizes the disorder: he had no control over expenditures, and could only estimate them as well as might be while finding ways to raise and borrow money. Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, and Controller-General in 1787–88, between Calonne and the return of Necker, has had a bad press from political historians for his fiscal policy. Policy and administration are not the same, however. The historian of French financial administration in our period makes a very interesting finding, a further instance of Tocqueville’s dictum about the Revolution’s completing what the Old Regime had begun. It was Loménie de Brienne who, in March 1788, combined hitherto autonomous Keepers and Treasurers of major accounts—several for the Royal Household, for the Army, for the Navy, for large categories of debt—into a single entity, a Royal Treasury, really under his control, responsible for both receipts and payments, and directed by a single Intendant.161 It remained for the Constituent Assembly to build on that foundation, not in one fell swoop, but piecemeal in a series of measures and reforms with a consistent purpose, which was to subordinate the fiscality of the state to the public interest. Like the assumption in principle of public responsibility for health care, the process of financial reform transpired in committee, in that case through the deliberations of the Poverty and Health Committees, in this one through the work of the Finance Committee. Both instances exemplify the general point that implementation of the substantive changes that the Revolution made in the actual working of society occurred in the administrative and bureaucratic layers of government, and not at the surface of politics.162 That is where Lavoisier had his effect on public finance.163 Though each 161

Bosher (1970), pp. 232, 309, and especially the chart, on p. 239. Bosher’s story is largely unaffected by the great shifts that dominated the political scene from 1789 through 1795. He barely needs to mention them. The relative autonomy of bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis political change is a point that was borne in on me in quite a different connection, a study of the development of weaponry from 1792 to 1825 (Gillispie 1992). 163 Poirier (1993) gives the fullest account of Lavoisier’s service in the Treasury (chapter 15). 162

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of the six commissioners had responsibility for directing certain sections of the Treasury, Lavoisier took the leading part in organizing procedures in general. The operation was a large one. A staff of over five hundred clerks and accountants with their supervisors occupied offices in the rue Vivienne and the rue Neuve des Petits-Champs, quarters later occupied by the Bibliothèque Nationale. They had to be trained to adopt new ways. Their very language—echoes of the chemical revolution!—must be reformed and the terminology made uniform. Hitherto, for example, the word “accountability” (comptabilité) had been used indiscriminately to cover everything to do with disbursements. Henceforth, “vérification” will confirm an actual payment of funds, and “comptabilité” the validity as well as the fact of a transaction. All bookkeeping was to be double entry (a practice consistent with, though not derivative from, the regulative principle of chemical experimentation, where also input must equal output). Registers must be kept up to date (even as were Lavoisier’s laboratory notebooks), showing receipts, expenditures, and balances day by day. Each set of accounts was to be compiled monthly, quarterly, and annually, so as to exhibit the state of the Treasury as a whole, and also every part of it, on any given day, and further to permit comparisons over time. Figures were to be analyzed as well as compiled. The Accounting Office (Bureau du Calcul) would establish statistical data permitting assessment, and also prediction, of the state of agriculture, industry, trade, the population, sector by sector, region by region, and nationwide. In all this, Condorcet strongly seconded Lavoisier, and was indeed the one mainly responsible for the statistical aspect. In one important regard they parted company, however. Lavoisier had not given up on the Discount Bank. His initial recommendation called for the Treasury to avail itself of the bookkeeping expertise already established there, services that it rendered free to all its clients in return for the use of their money. There was no reason, wrote Lavoisier, that the Treasury should not be among those clients, no reason that it should not open an account like any other entity possessed of important funds. Every day the Treasury would pay into its account the sums received, thus limiting its task to the collection of revenue while making disbursements through the skilled hands of its banker (whose offices, incidentally, were right across the street, near the present location of the Banque de France). Condorcet demurred. Acknowledging the potential savings, he considered them altogether outweighed by the conflict of interest that would be built in between ministers of finance and the bank. Abuses would inevitably ensue. The National Assembly agreed with him, and again rebuffed any identification of private banking with public finance. Condorcet further came to fear lest, even so, the Treasury become an


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agency subservient to the power of the executive.164 Moving left in his political sympathies throughout the spring and summer of 1791, he decided in late May to stand for election to the Legislative Assembly, scheduled for September, and accordingly resigned from the Commission on the Treasury. Though not on the face of it unreasonable, his apprehensiveness about politicization of the Treasury was never borne out. For the Treasury internalized the accounting procedures of the bank at the outset. Whatever the government in power, it has received the taxes imposed and disbursed the funds appropriated without questioning the uses to which they would be put. It has thus served as a balance wheel, or better an engine that ran the same no matter who was steering the ship of state. After recovering from the binge of assignats, France enjoyed remarkable fiscal stability amid all its political vicissitudes until the war of 1914. Instrumental in designing the machinery of the Treasury, Lavoisier exercised no influence over the economic policies of the Constituent Assembly, whether with respect to emission of assignats or management of the debt. His failure was not for lack of trying, both on his part and on the part of a knowledgeable few who would have taken advantage of his mastery of macroeconomics. On 15 March 1791, a month prior to organization of the Treasury, Pierre-Louis Roederer, chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Taxation, and himself a student of political economy, asked Lavoisier to make an evaluation of national wealth to serve as the basis for a reformed system of taxation. It was at their instance that, following the presentation, Lavoisier reluctantly agreed to publish De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France.165 Lavoisier considered this small monograph but an imperfect abstract of a work he had intended for years. Rarely, he lamented in an apology that may echo down the corridors of scholarship, are long-term projects finished. He had been gathering data since 1784, the time of his collaboration with Dupont de Nemours and others on the Committee on Administration of Agriculture appointed by Vergennes. From the point of view of later readers, Lavoisier had no need to make excuses. The essay has been reprinted many times.166 It is a masterpiece, a pioneering work at once of economics and 164

For Condorcet on the Treasury, see “Sur la constitution du pouvoir chargé d’administrer le Trésor National,” Oeuvres 11, pp. 541–579, esp. pp. 568–569. 165 The title is worth giving in full: Résultats extraits d’un ouvrage intitulé: de la richesse territoriale du royaume de France; ouvrage dont la rédaction n’est point achevé: remis au Comité de l’Imposition par M. Lavoisier de l’Académie des Sciences, député suppléant a` l’Assemblée Nationale et commissaire de la Trésorerie, imprimé par ordre de l’Assemblée nationale, 1791. 166 The most recent reprinting (Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1988) is a critical edition by Jean-Claude Perrot. It contains a historical introduction, extensive notes, and related texts, including Dupont de Nemours, “Aper¸cu de la valeur des récoltes du royaume” (1787) and Lavoisier’s 1787 “Résultats de quelques expériences d’agriculture et réflex-

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demography, arriving at estimates of the gross and also the net national product and the constituent elements of each, of the size and state of the population, and of the prospective yield of property taxes. Lavoisier’s approach consisted of an extension to the national economy of the input-output analysis he had applied to maximizing the productivity of the manor he had purchased at Fréchines in 1778 and converted into an experimental farm. His assumption of an overall equality between production and consumption in an average year is the same, and is not at all gratuitous. It represents the transfer to political economy of conservation principles of the sort that made quantitative chemical analysis, and much other exact science, possible at all. Such, intellectually, was his goal: “May I be allowed to observe here,” he writes in the preface, “that the type of combinations and calculations, of which I have here sought to give several examples, is the basis of all political economy. That science, like almost all the others, began with metaphysical discussion and reasoning. Its theory is well advanced, but the practical science is in its infancy, and at any juncture the statesman lacks facts on which to ground his conjectures.”167 Practically, the goal was to give the Committee on Taxation a reasonable basis on which to assess property taxes, which were to be the foundation of a reformed fiscal system. Lavoisier feared that, even as with the possessions of the Church, the politicians were overestimating the yield of a tax rated at one-sixth the net income derived from land. The imposition on rural property could not, he calculated, produce more than 1,200 million when the price of grain was 2 sous a pound. At current prices the yield would not much exceed a billion. Taking the average, Lavoisier considered it impossible that proceeds of the land tax would amount to more than 180 million. Another 30 million, at best, from urban property would bring the total barely to 120 million, at least 30 million short of what the National Assembly anticipated. A further 60 million allocated to departmental expenses would prove proportionally inadequate, and deepen the deficit the Assembly was leaving to its successors. “It would have averted that disaster if, placing less confidence in results of which I have tried to show the exaggerated value, . . . it had continued in the first plan it adopted, and decreed that the land tax would be set at one-fifth of net income, as the Committee originally proposed.”168 As usual, Lavoisier ended on a note of reproach. As usual, the reproach was heard, but not the facts. ions sur leurs relations avec l’économie politique.” Lavoisier presented the latter to the Société d’Agriculture in 1788 and printed it in Annales de chimie 15 (December 1792). On Lavoisier’s agricultural experiments and the Committee on Agriculture, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 382–386. 167 Lavoisier, “Richesse territoriale,” Avertissement, OL 6, pp. 403–404. 168 Ibid., p. 416.


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While still at the Treasury, he made one more effort. The headings of his memoirs on these subjects identify the author, forlornly enough, as “Alternate Deputy to the National Constituent Assembly from the constituency of Blois.” The Constituent gave way to the Legislative Assembly in September 1791, and in November Lavoisier published De l’état des finances en France au 1er janvier 1792, in effect a budgetary forecast for the year ahead. His only interest, he assured the reader, was to put things in their true proportion by subjecting the finances of the state to the rigorous calculations of arithmetic. He would proceed “in the cold light of reason,” he promised at the outset. “The facts are the data that never deceive us; it is the operations of our judgment that lead us astray.”169 There is no clearer source for the financial position of the French government in the third year of the Revolution than this brochure of ninety pages. The experience to date of assignats, the receipts for sale of nationalized property, the yield of taxes for 1791, the prospective cost of every agency and responsibility of state—the ministries of war, the navy, foreign affairs, the interior; civil engineering and public works; the civil list; the newly national church; each of the Academies; many minor items—everything is tabulated. The shortfall, Lavoisier calculated, would come to 266 million livres, including 40 million remaining from 1791. In addition to that, 140 million in short-term debt would fall due. The Caisse de l’extraordinaire would thus need to provide 506 million, which would have to be covered by a further issue of assignats on top of the 1,400 million already circulating. Still, there was no need to be alarmist. The experiment of assignats was not working so badly after all, acknowledged Lavoisier, in a change of tune from his 1790 address to the Society of 1789. The relatively small decline in the international value of the currency would, indeed, have a temporarily beneficial effect in making products of French industry more competitive. It should even be possible to issue another 200 million in order to meet unforeseeable contingencies. All things considered, or rather calculated, it should therefore be possible to meet the financial obligations of the state in 1792—but only on condition that the property tax be raised from one-sixth to one-fifth of net income, and only on condition that tax revenues come in on time. And here, in peroration, the light of reason, or perhaps of realism, failed Lavoisier: People of France! Such is the perspective you are offered; But be not blind to the danger that menaces you; Do not forget that you are walking on the edge of a precipice. In all this we have presupposed the existence of a public revenue, and this revenue does not yet exist. . . . Frenchmen! Such is the task imposed on your representatives! It re169

Ibid., p. 464.

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quires lengthy meditation on their part; profound knowledge of the resources and wealth of the nation; cool and reflective prudence in bringing plans to maturity, ingenious intelligence in calculating their details, and indefatigable energy in their execution. No doubt the task is immense. Let us hope that it will not prove beyond their strength. But above all, let them get to work promptly to carry it through. For I dare to make a dire prediction: If in a very few months the taxes imposed for the year 1791 are not fully collected; if in six months at most the system of taxes for 1792 is not enacted and the funds are not coming in, no human force can save the fatherland from an appalling catastrophe, from the horror of which the old regime, with all its abuses, nevertheless spared us.170 The warning went unheeded, of course. Clearly, the bent of Lavoisier’s mind was simply incommensurable with revolutionary politics. Politically speaking, his conduct at the outset of his service to the Treasury did his reputation grave discredit. Among officials of the old regime it was common, and not improper at the time, to multiply sources of income by occupying several positions at once. Lavoisier, for one, made money from the General Tax Farm, drew a stipend as Gunpowder Administrator, was paid a salary by the Discount Bank, and received a pension from the Academy of Science as well as a fee for each meeting he attended. Accumulation of offices was among the practices that had come to seem “abuses” in the puritanical light of revolutionary public spirit, and Lavoisier sought to avoid offense in taking on still another post in the Treasury. He had no intention of abandoning chemistry for finance, however. He had his residence (rent-free) and laboratory in the Arsenal. The Gunpowder Administration remained the center of his professional life. He made it a condition of accepting the post of commissioner that he retain his apartment in the Arsenal and return to the Gunpowder Administration when his service in the Treasury should be finished. He then had the unhappy notion of advertising his self-sacrifice, his devotion to public service, and his disinterestedness. He did so in an open letter, which can only be described as meaching, printed in Le Moniteur on 9 April 1791. The sole reward he sought, so he pleaded, was one single favor: “That I be allowed to perform free the new duties entrusted to me. The recompense I receive as Gunpowder Administrator, precisely because it is modest, suits my manner of life, my tastes, my needs; and at a time when many honest citizens are losing their positions, I could not, for anything in the world, consent to accept a double salary.” Lavoisier was a very wealthy man, and known to be. The reaction was calamitous, from right as well as left. The Actes des Apôtres, journal of the 170

Ibid., pp. 509–510.


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Counter-Revolution, ridiculed him in the ironic couplets of a lengthy verse beginning: Généreux Lavoisier, ta lettre pathétique M’a fait, je l’avouerai, presque verser des pleurs; Tu viens de conquérir a` la fois tous les coeurs En nous développant ta conduite héro¨ıque. Marat had already launched his denunciations in L’ami du peuple. Brissot now joined in: “A chemist, Lavoisier would have become an alchemist if he had indulged only his insatiable thirst for gold. But he and his associates found surer ways to slake that thirst, by cutting tobacco excessively and by monopolistic, speculative purchasing of grain. France owes them eight or ten famines.”171 Lavoisier’s departure from the Treasury was equally awkward. The Legislative Assembly showed no sign of facing up to the financial situation in early 1792. Instead, the factions favoring war with Austria grew stronger. Limiting his liabilities, Lavoisier without explanation resigned his presidency of the Discount Bank on 21 January. Later that month his chief clerk in the Treasury, one Gislain, turned on him and involved him in an embarrassing controversy over whether he was entitled to receive both his academic pension and the salary of commissioner that, on leaving the Gunpowder Administration, he had been drawing after all. With all that, and wishing no doubt to free his time for chemistry, on 19 February Lavoisier also resigned his post in the Treasury he had largely organized. Three days later, in the meeting of the Academy of Science on 22 February 1792, he introduced a paper, “Second mémoire sur la transpiration,” reporting on experiments performed by his young colleague Armand Seguin, with whom he had been collaborating on the chemistry of respiration and perspiration since 1790.172 Lavoisier’s ability to compartmentalize his energies was among his most astonishing qualities. From 1790 into 1792 he spent the time reserved for his laboratory carrying forward the research program on the chemistry of life processes that complemented his central work on oxidation. The new experiments, and for that matter the old, were unknown to his detractors and, probably, to his financial and administrative collaborators. Neither set would have been interested had they been aware. Both the stockholders of the Discount Bank and Lavoisier’s fellow com171

Quotations in Poirier (1993), pp. 290–293. Seguin published the first part of this memoir only in 1814, under his name and Lavoisier’s, “Second mémoire sur la respiration,” Annales de Chimie 91 (1814), pp. 318–334. The second part, which may have dealt with “transpiration,” seems never to have appeared. For the record of Lavoisier’s work in the life sciences from 1790 through 1792, see Daumas (1955), pp. 64–66; for a summary, see Poirier (1993), chapter 16; and for detailed discussion, Holmes (1985). 172

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missioners of the Treasury expressed their esteem and regrets over his departure from direction of their respective affairs. Louis XVI also appreciated his services. It had scarcely improved the figure Lavoisier cut in public that the civil list was among the accounts for which his particular division of the Treasury had been responsible. He was thus, in effect, paymaster for the King, the Queen, the palace, and the members of the royal family. Among the final measures of the Constituent Assembly was a decree of 21 September 1791 transforming the Régie des Poudres from a privately financed concession into an agency of the Ministry of Finance. When Lavoisier retired from the Treasury in February 1792, the Minister, Etienne Clavière, asked him to resume his post in the reconstituted Gunpowder Administration. He declined, fearing lest his enemies renew their attacks, but agreed to serve on an interim and voluntary basis in order to assist his former colleagues. On 12 June 1792, two months into the war, Louis XVI dismissed the government in which Roland was the leading figure. Naming a new set of ministers, the King offered Lavoisier Clavière’s post as Minister of Finance (“Contributions publiques”). For once Lavoisier knew when to decline. Two months later, on 10 August 1792, the city of Paris rose under the leadership of its Insurrectional Commune, dethroned the King, and declared France a Republic. 8. VARENNES AND THE CHAMP-DE-MARS

The fiasco of the royal family’s attempted flight from Paris on 20 June 1791 was the point of no return for the monarchical credit of Louis XVI. Its sequel, the massacre in the Champ-de-Mars on 17 July, was the point of no return for the political credit of Bailly. The eventual outcome of those days proved fatal to them both. The events are well known and need only be recalled. Throughout the spring of 1791 rumors abounded that the King was plotting to escape France and put himself at the head of the e´migrés. So keen was suspicion that on 18 April a crowd gathered round his carriage and thwarted his intention of passing Easter with his family in the château of Saint-Cloud on the edge of Paris. In this instance the demonstrators came largely from bourgeois quarters in the west of Paris. Abetted by rebellious elements of the National Guard, they prevented Bailly and Lafayette from making good on their determination to assure the royal family safe passage through the city. Thereafter Louis XVI, who had wavered until then, allowed the Queen and others of the court, notably the Swedish officer Fersen, said to be her lover, to persuade him to escape their virtual imprisonment in the Tuileries. The plan was to take refuge with marquis de Bouillé, commander of the royal regiments in Alsace and Lorraine, who would install the royal family in the fortress of Montmédy, still on French soil. In the dead of night, the

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King, the Queen, the King’s sister, the Dauphin and his sister, and the children’s governess managed to slip away from the Tuileries and out of Paris in a rented coach, with Fersen driving the horses. The royal party transferred to a heavy-duty berlin awaiting them at a road junction north of the city. It passed through the countryside unnoticed as far as Châlons. Thereafter the presence of soldiers posted by Bouillé to secure the route aroused suspicion among the country folk. In Sainte-Ménéhould the postmaster caught a glimpse of the king, recognized him, and alerted the municipality. The local authorities captured and detained the family in Varennes, a few leagues further along the way. In Paris the King’s absence was discovered at the time of his normal levée, seven o’clock in the morning. Dismayed, Bailly, Lafayette, and Alexandre de Beauharnais, president of the National Assembly, put their heads together and concocted a story: Enemies of the Revolution had kidnapped the royal family. It fooled no one. The National Assembly thereupon dispatched three of its members to reconduct the “liberated” royalty to Paris. The journey back was far slower than the flight. Rather than enter by the Porte SaintDenis, the convoy skirted the walls to the Porte de la Conférence on the west. The deathly silence of the King’s passage through the city is one of the set pieces of revolutionary pageantry. It seemed as if the entire population of ´ ees. People packed Paris and the suburbs had gathered in the Champs-Elys´ the route. Faces appeared at every window. Eyes peered down from all the rooftops. Youngsters perched in all the trees. Save an occasional “Vive la Nation,” not a sound was uttered. Not a cap was doffed. The National Guard, holding their muskets muzzle down, as if at a funeral, lined the streets to the portal of the Tuileries.173 Thereafter any political program predicated on participation of Louis XVI in a constitutional monarchy could only be pretense. It was a pretense kept up, for lack of an alternative, during the remaining three months of the Constituent Assembly and throughout the life of its successor, the Legislative Assembly. The immediate effect of the King’s folly was vindication of the extremism of the Cordeliers and radicalization of the Jacobins. On 15 July 1791 a petition to the Constituent Assembly calling for creation of a new executive power, in a word a Republic, was forwarded for signatures to the Jacobins from the Cordeliers and another extremist group, the Cercle Social. Debate over modifications to the text alienated those who remained faithful to the principle of monarchy. Led by the triumvirate of Adrien Duport, Joseph Barnave, and Alexandre de Lameth, the moderates seceded from the Jacobins and formed a rival club, officially named “Société des 173 Jérôme Pétion gives a vivid account, Mémoires Inédits, ed. C. A. Dauban (1866), pp. 189– 204. Pétion was one of the three deputies who escorted the King back to Paris. The others were Barnave and Latour-Maubourg.

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Amis de la Constitution.” Like the other pressure groups, they were commonly known by the name of the former convent where they met, the Feuillants in the rue Saint-Honoré. Maintaining the fiction that the King had been misled, if not actually abducted, by enemies of the Revolution, the Feuillants—all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—sought to patch things up, to put Humpty-Dumpty back on the throne, until the constitution should have had a chance to prove its worth. Lafayette was a founder of this party, though at odds with the triumvirate. Mirabeau, who had died on 2 April, was the major figure in the background. Most of the prominent personnages with whom we have had to do—Talleyrand, La Rochefoucauld, Liancourt, Sieyès, Dupont de Nemours—rallied to it or sympathized with it. Lavoisier did so from what he tried to preserve as the political privacy of the Treasury. We know nothing of Vicq d’Azyr’s political sentiments at this juncture, but almost certainly they were not republican. Ever loyal to the crown, Bailly also threw in his lot with the Feuillants. He had won reelection for a term of two years on 2 August 1790. Only some 14,000 voters of the 80,000 “active citizens,” wealthy bourgeois eligible to vote, cast their ballots, 12,550 of them for Bailly.174 Chronically in conflict with the Municipal Council, he was already losing the support he imagined himself to enjoy in the sections. Marat in L’Ami du Peuple and Camille Desmoulins in Révolutions de France et de Brabant kept up a tattoo of defamation, harping on his supposed coziness with the king and queen and on the pomp he affected as Mayor, attended by footmen, riding in a state carriage, bearing himself in a haughty manner. There is no need to follow the decline of his popularity, accompanied on the downward slope by Lafayette’s, through the quelling of one riot and the dispersal of the next demonstration until their failed attempt in April 1791 to assure the royal family safe passage to Saint-Cloud. Upon the departure of the Feuillants on 15 July, heated discussion ensued among the remaining Jacobins, who were a considerable majority. The debate ended with adoption of language calling on the National Assembly to treat the flight of the king as an abdication and to replace the monarchy by constitutional procedures. This last reservation caused still another split, and the Jacobins never did reach agreement on a document. Meanwhile, on the morning of the sixteenth Danton called on the membership of the Cordeliers to foregather in the Champ de Mars to sign the petition under discussion at the Jacobins. It would be placed for that purpose on the altar of the Fatherland in the Champ-de-Mars. When the Jacobins failed to agree, the Cordeliers substituted their own, unequivocally republican petition. Beginning in the late morning of the seventeenth, a crowd eventually 174

Lacroix, Actes 6, p. 653, n. 4.

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numbering 50,000 assembled before the site, there where Talleyrand had said a patriotic mass during the Festival of Federation on the first anniversary of Bastille Day, just over a year previously. The mood was peaceful, almost festive at first, though there had been an altercation early in the day. A pair of loiterers was discovered hiding or skulking under the altar of patriotism at dawn. Taken for spies by a band of vigilantes from the Gros Caillou quarter, the two were seized and killed forthwith. Such was the situation confronting the officials responsible for public tranquillity, Bailly, mayor of Paris, and Lafayette, commander of the National Guard. They came under enormous pressure from an alarmed, an almost hysterical National Assembly, determined to maintain the monarchy at all costs, fearful of a lapse into anarchy on the scale of Bastille Day, with themselves as targets. Distrusting police reports to the effect that the crowd in the Champ-de-Mars was peaceful, Bailly took the lynching of unknown vagrants by an unknown gang for a reason to declare martial law and to prohibit public meetings. He requested Lafayette to call out a battalion of the National Guard and put himself at the head of the column, which marched under the red banner of martial law from the Place de Grève to the Champ-de-Mars. Bailly had no opportunity to read out the ordinances enjoining disturbers of the peace to disperse. Like undertrained, underdisciplined, and frightened protectors of order in other times and places, guardsmen over-reacted to cries and insults and fired into the crowd. Thirty to fifty Parisians fell dead upon the field. Uncounted others nursed wounds and grievance.175 Bailly’s exercise of authority destroyed what little was left of it. He hung on in the Hôtel de Ville until the closing days of the Constituent Assembly and tendered his resignation on 19 September 1791, effective upon election of a successor. The forty-eight sections of the city were convoked for that purpose on 15 November. On the eighteenth, Bailly was replaced in the Hôtel de Ville by Jérôme Pétion, one of the three commissioners who had escorted the king from Varennes back to Paris. Condorcet’s conduct was the exception among the elite of the Revolution throughout this period. The King’s apparent treason freed him to be the republican politically that he had long since become intellectually.176 Parting company with most of his fellow members from the erstwhile Society of 1789, Condorcet drew close to Brissot and to Tom Paine, with whom he shared democratic confidences and for whom he translated, all this in the final months of the Constituent Assembly. Despite, or rather because of, his disappointment in its legacy, he profoundly wished to share in the work of 175

Ibid., série 2, 5, pp. 399–414. “De la République, ou, un roi, est-il nécessaire a` la conservation de la liberté?”, read to the Cercle Social, 12 July 1791, Oeuvres 12, pp. 227–237. 176

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its successor. The self-denying ordinance by which the Constituents had precluded their own reelection made it easier for others in the public eye to gain a seat. This time Condorcet did win election to the National Assembly, as a deputy from Paris. He thereupon felt committed to working within the constitution, monarchical though it was, even while looking to the day that France, having proved herself unready on the morrow of Varennes, should ripen to republicanism.

CHAPTER II

Education, Science, and Politics

1. SCIENTISTS IN THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY

Condorcet took his seat at the opening session of the Legislative Assembly on 1 October 1791. Three of his colleagues among resident members of the Academy of Science were also deputies, namely, two naturalists, Auguste Broussonet and Bernard de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacepède, and one surgeon, Jacques Tenon. Tenon was the best known of the trio, not for his contributions to anatomy, but for his expertise in the regime of hospitals. His Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris (1788) had provided the substance of the report of the Academy’s commission on hospitals in the 1780s and was, as we have seen, the point of departure for the investigations conducted by the Constituent Assembly’s Poverty Committee headed by the duc de Liancourt.1 Lacepède had prudently ceased using his title. He owed his place of Curator and Under-Demonstrator in the Cabinet du Roi, and his election to the Academy of Science, to Buffon, whose Histoire naturelle he had promised to complete by undertaking the classes of reptiles and fish. A cultivated gentleman, competent in music and letters as well as natural history, Lacepède wrote in the grand manner of his master, producing a volume on oviparous quadrupeds in 1788 and another on snakes in 1789. He completed five volumes of ichthyology and one on cetaceans later, between 1798 and 1804.2 Broussonet was a breath, at times a gale, of fresh Mediterranean air from Montpellier. Born into a medical family in 1761, he finished a thesis for the M.D. at age eighteen, but shifted his interest to Linnaean natural history, and specifically to ichthyology, when he came up to Paris in 1779. Moving on to London in 1780, the young man charmed Sir Joseph Banks, who had his youthful protégé elected to the Royal Society and engaged him to classify the specimens of exotic fish that Banks had amassed during the first of Cook’s expeditions to the South Seas. Broussonet’s recognition of the anatomical structure known as pseudobranchia was the most important contribution of the initial ten sections (1782), all he ever published, of what was to have been a general Ichthyologia. 1 2

Above, chapter 1, section 4; Gillispie (1980), pp. 251–256. Gillispie (1980), pp. 156–159.

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II. EDUCATION, SCIENCE, POLITICS

On his return to Paris in 1785, Broussonet presented further “Notes ichthyologiques” before the Academy of Science and, with Daubenton’s support, he was elected to associate membership in the section of anatomy. Once again he changed fields at the behest of an eminent patron, this time to agronomy. While in London Broussonet had met the Intendant of Paris, Fran¸cois de Berthier de Sauvigny, the very model of an enlightened magistrate, who was informing himself about British agriculture and animal husbandry with a view to improvement of yields in the regions that supplied Paris. Trusting that youth, enterprise, and inexperience would energize the Société Royale d’Agriculture, Berthier persuaded Broussonet to accept the post of secretary of that nearly moribund body while at the same time qualifying himself in agronomy. He learned by teaching, for Daubenton turned over to him the duties of the chair of rural economy in the Veterinary School at Alfort. Though liberal in his sympathies, Broussonet held the extreme left in horror. He was present in the Place de Grève before the Hôtel de Ville on 22 July 1789 when, in the aftermath of Bastille Day, the mob lynched Berthier and dragged his mutilated body through the streets. People were furious that, throughout all the turmoil of the spring and summer, he had succeeded in assuring not merely their food supply within the city, but also the rations of the royal regiments surrounding Paris.3 Except for Condorcet, none of the above took nearly so active a part in the politics affecting science as did certain other technically qualified deputies to the Legislative Assembly, to wit Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois (who soon called himself Prieur de la Côte-d’Or), Lazare Carnot, L.-F.-A. Arbogast, and Gilbert Romme. The first three were Burgundians. Guyton was already well known to the scientific community while Carnot and Prieur, future members of the Committee of Public Safety, were as yet unknown quantities. Prieur was just twentyeight years old when the electors of the Côte d’Or chose him to be a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Like Carnot, ten years his senior, he was a ´ graduate of the Ecole Royale du Génie at Mézières and held a commission in the Royal Engineering Corps. Prieur had made his entry onto the stage of the Revolution in February 1790 with one of the early proposals for a reform of weights and measures. Except to note that his father and Guyton de Morveau were cousins, it will, therefore, be more natural to introduce Prieur in connection with the origins of the metric system.4 Born in 1737 and a barrister by training, Guyton served the Parlement of Dijon in the post of advocate general, or prosecutor, for twenty years beginning in 1762. Prominent among the enlightened bourgeoisie, he became 3 On Broussonet, see Thiébaut de Berneaud (1824) and the article by Jean Motte, DSB 2, pp. 509–511. 4 Below, chapter 4, section 2. The standard biography is Bouchard (1946).

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chancellor of the Royal Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters of Dijon, the forum for the vigorous cultural and scientific life that animated the Burgundian capital. In its proceedings, as in those of similar bodies in Bordeaux, in Lyons, in Toulouse, in Rouen, in Montpellier, in still other regional centers, scientific, literary, and social strains of thought commingled in preparing minds, all ignorant of the immediate future for the events of 1789.5 Guyton retired from the law in 1782 in order to devote himself to his favorite activity, chemistry, in which science he had already established an international reputation. He won notoriety on the national stage, not as a scientist (no one did, after all), but for a pair of exploits, related to chemistry in that they involved hydrogen. On 25 April 1784, in company with one Claude Bertrand, an astronomer, he soared above Dijon in an elaborate balloon of his own design. Six weeks later he and another co-pilot repeated the adventure, making an attempt at locomotion. Guyton’s were the first ascents to be tried outside Paris after the maiden flights there the previous autumn.6 With respect to chemistry, it would be altogether anachronistic to qualify Guyton as an amateur at a time when the discipline itself was at most in a proto-professional stage. His role befitted his situation in a prosperous, productive, industrious, but still provincial city. He conducted himself as an informant at the forefront of the science rather than as an original investigator. To that end, he offered a course of lectures for the general public under the aegis of the Academy. In a beautifully equipped laboratory he sought to repeat, understand, and exhibit the experimental work he learned about in an extensive correspondence with counterparts in Britain, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. He arranged for translation of memoirs by Scheele, Bergman, Kirwan, and others and saw to their publication in the ´ emens de chymie, the publicaJournal de Physique and elsewhere. His own El´ tion of his course, appeared also in German and in Spanish.7 Not that Guyton was a passive reporter. He did try original experiments, particularly on combustion, and engaged Macquer in critical exchanges sufficiently searching that the latter had Guyton elected to corresponding membership in the Academy of Science as early as 1772. Panckoucke engaged Guyton to edit the volumes on chemistry in the Encyclopédie méthodique, the first of which was published in 1786. In preparation for the article “Air,” to appear in the second, Guyton repaired to Paris in early 1787 for a stay that lengthened to seven months. He then met regularly with Lavoisier in the laboratory at the Arsenal. Discussion soon 5 For the provincial academies, see Roche (1978), who is concerned entirely with their social role, however, and not at all with their actual proceedings. 6 Gillispie (1983), pp. 44–66. 7 ´ Eléments de chymie, théorique et pratique, rédigés dans un nouvel ordre, d’après les découvertes modernes, pour servir aux cours publiés de l’Académie de Dijon (2 vols., Dijon, 1777–78).

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persuaded him of the cogency of the anti-phlogistic position, and he entered into the collaboration for which he is best known to historians of chemistry, composition of Méthode de nomenclature chimique proposée par MM. de Morveau, Lavoisier, Berthollet, & de Fourcroy (1787). That work, the origin of modern chemical nomenclature, sealed the oxygen theory of combustion into the very language of the science. The title gives Guyton’s name first in recognition of his having been the leading part in an enterprise for which a lawyer’s experience in fitting terms to facts proved especially appropriate. His lawyer’s experience also brought him back to public office after 1789. In March 1790 the King named Guyton to the commission responsible for organizing the administration of the Côte d’Or, the new department comprising the heartland of the old province of Burgundy, and in May he was elected its first Procurateur-Général Syndic. Guyton appears never to have evinced any special discontent with the order of things in the old regime, nor to have taken part in revolutionary politics prior to joining the Patriotic Club in Dijon on 15 July 1789. In him the voters chose rather a respected notable than a political activist to represent the Côte d’Or in the Legislative Assembly.8 There is no record of Guyton’s ever having met Lazare Carnot prior to their taking seats in the Legislative Assembly. Carnot represented, not his native department, but the Pas-de-Calais, where he was on garrison duty in the Corps of Military Engineers. They must have been aware of each other’s existence, however, for as a young officer aspiring to notice, Carnot submit´ ted several essays to the Academy of Dijon, one of which, an Eloge of Vauban, won its prize and was published. His was a distinctly more modest, and a more troubled, past than Guyton’s, but a notably more brilliant future, politically and also scientifically. Carnot, indeed, is one of the rare figures whose career in statesmanship and in science repays careful study on both counts. He is the only one in all history, moreover, whose political reputation antedated recognition of the interest of his science, which his fame as military leader has since overshadowed if not obscured.9 The name Carnot is known to every French schoolchild as the “Organizer of Victory,” the member of the Committee of Public Safety who in 1793–94 directed the war effort that defeated the armies of monarchical Europe and saved the Republic. The only science he had then published was a very slim Essai sur les machines en général, printed by a provincial bookseller in Dijon in 1783. Read in the light of the physics of the nineteenth century, it appears to be an early, if partial, statement of the principle of conservation of energy 8 On the career of Guyton, see Bouchard (1938), who devotes the first half of his biography to the background in Dijon, and Grison, Goupil, and Bret (1994), pp. 3–11. 9 The standard biography is Reinhard (1994). Gillispie (1971) treats Carnot’s scientific work. Charnay (1984–85) publishes papers contributed to a colloquium on Carnot’s career emphasizing the military aspects.


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and an anticipation of the analysis by means of which, applying it to heat engines, his son Sadi founded the science of thermodynamics in the classic Puissance motrice du feu of 1824. Lazare Carnot’s little essay issued dead from the press, premature if not abortive in the 1780s. Two earlier versions that he had submitted to the Academy of Science in competition for prizes in 1778 and 1780, and also a memoir on the foundations of the calculus presented to the Berlin Academy in 1786, received honorable mentions but won him no notice. Carnot had graduated from the Royal Military Engineering School at Mézières in 1773, a pupil (though not a favorite) of Gaspard Monge, and well trained, therefore, in mathematics. His background had nothing of the urbanity of Dijon. Claude Carnot, his father, was the notary in Nolay, a dull little town situated mournfully on the stony western slope of the Côte d’Or with never a vineyard in sight. A young engineering officer’s life in the peacetime army held little but frustration. The chief problem was how to fill one’s days in periods of garrison duty punctuated by long leaves of absence. Promotion beyond the rank of captain was out of the question for any but those of noble birth, and even that took many years. Carnot had the added misfortune of an affair with a Dijonnais girl whose father arranged her marriage to a scion of the aristocracy. Jilted and furious, he attempted to break up the engagement on the eve of the ceremony by revealing that they were lovers. The scandal led to his imprisonment under lettre de cachet in April 1789. Carnot was thus in confinement at the moment when the States-General convened, upon which his superiors had him released. To Carnot, therefore, the Revolution came literally as a liberation, as it did figuratively to the able and talented bourgeoisie of whom he was an epitome, cramped as its members felt themselves to be within the confines of an Old Regime whose strength they were, whose rewards they were denied, and whose injustices they might now rectify. Besides Carnot, the two other deputies of a mathematical temperament in the Legislative Assembly were L.-F.-A. Arbogast and Gilbert Romme. Like Guyton de Morveau, Arbogast, having been trained in the law and admitted to the bar, nevertheless gravitated to science, in his case to mathematics, its teaching and its practice. Arbogast was an original thinker. He won a competition set by the Academy of St. Petersburg in 1787 on the nature of the arbitrary functions introduced in the integration of multivariable differential equations, and his main work, Calcul des dérivations (1800), contains ideas that anticipate the operational calculus of the following century. At the outset of the Revolution, Arbogast was a professor in Strasbourg, teaching ´ mathematics in the Ecole Royale d’Artillerie and physics in the Collège Royal. He became director of the latter in 1791, when its name changed to Collège National, and thereafter was named rector of the University of

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Strasbourg. Broadly sympathetic to the work of the Constituent Assembly, Arbogast joined the Société des amis de la Constitution (the Jacobin Society) in 1790. He was never an active member, however. Rather, and in this too like Guyton, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly as a notable in the Alsatian capital.10 Also elected a deputy from Alsace was a fellow Strasbourgeois and future Napoleonic prefect, Louis-Fran¸cois Ramond de Carbonnières. Ramond came to natural history in what may seem a slightly unnatural, or at least improbable, manner. Having completed university studies of law and medicine, he made a leisurely tour of the Alps in 1777 before settling into a career. In 1781 he published a translation of an English work on the region accompanied by detailed notes of his own observations. He had been particularly intrigued by the structure of glaciers.11 The work interested the Archbishop of Strasbourg, Prince Louis Cardinal de Rohan, who engaged Ramond to be his private secretary. Ramond thereby came to serve as go-between in the cardinal’s questionable negotiations with the magician Cagliostro. Later, in 1787, he traveled to the Pyrenees with Rohan, who was taking a cure in the spa of Barèges. The sojourn gave him the opportunity to explore the flora and fauna of those mountains, whereas in the Alps he devoted attention to glaciers, the existence of which in that region had been little known. Ramond published his account in 1789, and spent the early years of the Revolution in Paris prior to taking his seat in the National Assembly with other political novices in October 1791.12 Gilbert Romme was quite another matter. Mathematician manqué, he became a thorough revolutionary, a` propos of which process two of those who have written on him quote a saying attributed to Carnot, “On n’est pas révolutionnaire, on le devient.” Second son of an Auvergnat lawyer who died young and left his family in straitened circumstances, Romme distinguished himself in his studies of mathematics and experimental physics in the excellent Oratorian collège in Riom. His older brother, Nicolas-Charles, who had also done very well in exact science, went on to a career as professor in the Navigation Academy in Rochefort. Graduating in 1774, the younger Romme went up to Paris with letters from local luminaries to the abbé Rozier, to Lalande, to Macquer, and to others in the scientific and medical circles of the capital. He was astounded to find it easy for a young man to meet Lalande and d’Alembert, but thought them overbearing and self-satisfied when he did. There being no clear way to make a living in physics and mathematics, Romme had decided to qualify himself for a med10

On Arbogast, see Fréchet (1937–39); Itard (1970). William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Switzerland in a Series of Letters to Willliam Melmoth (London, 1779). 12 Ramond, Observations faites dans les Pyrénées (1789). On Ramond, see Joan M. Eyles, DSB 11, pp. 272–273, and Déherain (1905). 11


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ical career. Sleeping now in a garret, now in a cellar, attending courses on anatomy, on pharmacy, on chemistry, he led the eighteenth-century anticipation of a Bohemian life. Rousseau was his god, of course. Otherwise he found all literature and poetry insipid and the reading of history odious. Only in writings on physics, chemistry, and natural history did he find intellectual satisfaction. Thinking to support himself by tutoring sons of the well-to-do, Romme somehow became known to Count Golitsyn, an expatriate Russian nobleman, also a Rousseau disciple and exemplar of the sentimental as distinct from the analytical Enlightenment. The two became intimate, so much so that the young Romme modeled his still malleable sensibility on Golitsyn’s worldview. His patron also arranged a livelihood by finding him, not a number of students, but one, the only son of a still grander Russian aristocrat, Count Stroganov, also resident in Paris. Pavel Alexandrovitch Stroganov—“Popo” to his family and to his “governor” (to give Romme’s place of tutor its official title)—was born in Paris in 1772. He became known to history as a member of the 1801 “Secret Committee” of aristocratic confidants—the others were Adam Czartoryski, Viktor Kotchoubei, and N. N. Novosiltsev—who advised their contemporary, Alexander I, on the plan of reform with which the idealistic young Czar dreamed of making over Russia on ascending the throne. Romme devoted all his energies to his pupil, and accompanied the sevenyear-old boy to St. Petersburg when Catherine II recalled his father in 1779. There he was installed in a luxurious apartment in the Stroganov Palace, with the run of the natural history collection, astronomical instruments, and well-stocked library. The parents soon separated, and Romme not only taught but essentially raised the youngster. Educating Popo was, indeed, the only career Romme ever had. The object was to make a man of him, Spartan in style, Rousseauist in spirit, one who would become a forward-looking leader of his country. Romme followed intently the concurrent proceedings of the commission appointed by the enlightened King of Poland, Stanislas Poniatowski, who thought to breathe new life into his moribund kingdom by developing a universal system of education. Peasant, bourgeois, and noble alike were to be instructed in modern subjects. Stillborn in Poland, its thorough-going proposals were well known among French educational reformers, among them Condorcet. Dupont de Nemours had served briefly as its secretary.13 The education of the young Stroganov followed the general line of those recommendations. The subject matter was mathematics, chemistry, physics, and natural history, followed at a distance by modern works of political economy. The language was French, not Latin, as were the books, among 13

For the Polish commission on education, see Jobert (1941).

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them Jean-Paul Marat’s Recherches physiques sur le feu (1780). Body and character were strengthened by lessons in horsemanship, swimming, and fencing, by a regime of long walks, fresh air, and hard beds, by a diet of vegetables, peasant bread, and very little meat. The boy was not allowed to mingle with pampered youngsters of his class or to play any but mathematical games. His bookish studies were relieved by instructive trips to various parts of Russia, across the Urals into Siberia, north to the White Sea, into the heartland along the Volga. These were travels undertaken in order that he and his tutor might see how the people lived in the countryside and might visit such industrial facilities and mining sites as each region offered. It does not appear from the diary Romme kept, or from his correspondence, that either the structure of Russian society or its autocracy troubled him. After being presented at court, he expressed admiration for the Empress: “Ascending a throne so often shaken by terrible shocks, she has been able to stabilize it by her gentleness and by the tender interest she takes in her subjects. The happiness of her people is her sole concern.”14 In 1786 Romme brought his pupil, now a teenager, back to western Europe to finish his education. In addition to 2,000 rubles for travel expenses, he was furnished with a letter of credit good for 24,000 livres annually. Stopping briefly in Paris, they repaired with a servant to the simplicity of Romme’s Auvergnat background. At home in the village of Gimeaux, near Riom, his family, and especially so his mother, protested the austerity of the regime he imposed on the charming boy who might otherwise have enjoyed every amenity. Inflexible in his pedagogy, Romme held to the guiding principle that a young Russian must be brought up to be not a Frenchman, but a stalwart true to his own country. Not for Popo the temptations of Paris, but rather the rigors of Geneva, where they removed after a difficult visit under the maternal roof. Young Stroganov was ready for advanced instruction now, and over a period of two years he followed courses in the various branches of science given by foremost specialists in a vigorous scientific community. Excluded were lessons in literature, poetry, or art—there was already too much art in Russia, in Romme’s opinion. Bodily exercise occupied part of every day, while mountain climbing under the guidance of skilled Alpinists exposed the young man to realities of nature. On returning to France in 1788, tutor and pupil took an instructive route up the Rhone Valley, pausing along the way to become acquainted with the operation of the paper mills in Annonay, with the manufacture of weapons ´ in Saint-Etienne, with the fabrication of silk in Lyons, with the roar of the blast furnace and the clanking of forges at Le Creusot. They arrived in Paris on 24 November 1788. The ferment throughout the country over the calling of the States-General had not yet impinged on Romme’s plans for his pupil. 14

Quoted in Galante Garrone (1959), p. 132.


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He intended the two of them to spend the year 1790 in sojourns abroad, in Germany, Holland, and England. As the events of 1789 unfolded, Romme’s role was observer rather than participant. To a close friend and correspondent in Riom who reproached him for his preoccupation with mathematics and physics in a time of great political turmoil and opportunity, he replied with an avowal of sentiments favorable to the prospect for national solidarity, universal citizenship, equality before the law, a constitution, and a paternal monarchy.15 Romme reacted positively to the outcome of each set of great events, but during the early years he expressed no opinions reaching beyond the measures enacted by the Constituent Assembly. He went only so far as to write his friends in Riom urging establishment of a reading room to serve the town as political forum and formation of a committee to conduct correspondence with its representatives in the Assembly. He and Stroganov regularly attended the sessions of the Constituent Assembly. In January 1790 they helped found the Société des Amis des Lois, a discussion group, not a pressure group, and in no way radical. As yet Romme was nothing of a political actor. The Revolution was a phenomenon to observe, an immense lesson in civics unfolding before his pupil’s eyes, and incidentally before his own. To that end Romme joined the Jacobin Club. Also enrolled was one Pavel Otcher, whose diploma was signed by Barnave on 7 August 1790, and whose name was that of a river running by one of the Stroganov properties. The pseudonym failed to deceive the Russian ambassador in Paris, I. M. Simolin, whose intelligence network was widespread and accurate. Whatever Catherine II’s tenderness toward her people at home, her concern for her subjects in Paris was apprehensiveness lest they be politically contaminated. On 4 June 1790 a confidential decree communicated in cypher to her ambassador required all Russians to leave France forthwith. Simolin was to conduct a census and see to it that every Russian be so informed. The only one who caused him uneasiness, he replied, was the young Count Stroganov. He had never met the lad, but understood that he held himself apart from his countrymen, that he had changed his name and joined the Jacobins, and that his governor had led him into the company of “les plus enragés.” Given the eminence of the family, Simolin feared a scandal if its scion were to be included in a blanket ukase and recommended that instead his father send for him privately, and at once. Stroganov père did not agree. He liked Romme and had no intention of separating his son from a trusted mentor. Instead, the situation being what it was, he directed them to quit Paris discreetly and to leave France in a reasonable time. Accordingly, Romme, Popo, and the serf, one Voronokhine, who was their manservant throughout (and who became a well-known ar15

Romme to Dubreuil, April 1789, quoted in ibid., p. 204.

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chitect in later life), set forth in July for Riom, on foot, carrying what they needed in knapsacks. Opinions had polarized in Auvergne, as everywhere. A right-wing deputy from the region, one Guilhermy, was dismayed that a delightful and aristocratic young foreigner had fallen under the spell of an “exalté” so that he talked of nothing but revolution and equality and ate with the servants. Guilhermy took it on himself to pass that word along to Simolin, who at once transmitted the letter to Saint Petersburg for Her Majesty’s eyes. Now she herself scrawled a minute in the margin ordering that it be sent along to Stroganov. He had long resisted, he wrote to Romme, but now he had no choice. “I find myself obliged to recall my son and to deprive him of a governor worthy of respect at the very moment when your guidance is most necessary for him.”16 Romme and the youth he had had in his sole charge for twelve years returned to Paris in early December 1790. Awaiting them was an older cousin, Lieutenant Colonel N. N. Novosiltsev, the same who was later to join in the Secret Committee, and who had been sent to conduct Popo back to the ideological safety of Saint Petersburg.17 A farewell letter reached Romme from Strasbourg: When I think of the beautiful Revolution of which we have been witnesses, and when I raise for an instant a corner of the veil that hides the future from me, with what horror do I envisage the hideous spectre of despotism. I dare not support the sight from afar, and yet I have to confront it, I have to see it in its entirety. And yet I have to contain in myself all the horror that so difficult a thing inspires in me, and I have to do that at the age of eighteen. . . . Oh, my friend, how hard that task is! To be alone responsible for my own education at eighteen, to be the guardian of my own innocence in the midst of the most unbridled corruption—that idea, I acknowledge, terrifies me.18 Left at loose ends, but far from penniless, Gilbert Romme went home to Gimeaux, bought land, and turned half-heartedly to farming. Less than a year later, in September 1791, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly and proceeded to act on the revolutionary sentiments his detractors had imputed to him, specializing in designs for education and for the calendar. 2. THE CONDORCET PLAN FOR EDUCATION

There was general agreement that provision for schooling the youth of the nation was the most urgent matter awaiting the Legislative Assembly. Orga16

Quoted in V. M. Daline, “Gilbert Romme, Pavel Stroganov, et la cour de St.-Petersbourg,” in Ehrard and Soboul (1966), pp. 69–80, p. 75. 17 On this entire affair, see Galante Garonne (1959), pp. 286–318. 18 Stroganov to Romme, 14 December 1790, quoted in ibid., p. 302.

II. 2. CONDORCET PL AN FOR EDUCATION

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nizing its committee structure was the first business of that body. Of the technically qualified deputies just discussed, Broussonet was assigned to agriculture, Tenon to Public Health, and Guyton, by reason of his long administrative experience, to Finance. The remaining six, Condorcet, Lacepède, Arbogast, Romme, Prieur, and Carnot, were among the twenty-four deputies forming the Comité d’Instruction Publique. They dominated the proceedings throughout. Condorcet was elected chairman at the first meeting, 30 October 1791, with Arbogast and Lacepède serving as secretaries. Although the by-laws of the Assembly required standing committees to rotate their officers monthly, those three remained in office for three months, until early February 1792. Thereafter, their colleagues in the order listed each served a month in the chair until the fall of the monarchy in August 1792. Only two other members of the Committee were given a chance to preside, Pastoret in February and Baudin in June. The deliberations of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and of its successor named by the Convention after the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly, continued virtually without interruption from October 1791 to October 1795. Its dispositions held all the importance for cultural developments in the Revolution that, in a far more concentrated way, the actions of the Committee of Public Safety (on which Carnot and Prieur also served) did for politics during the crisis of 1793–94, the year of the Terror.19 Normally the Comité d’Instruction Publique met three evenings a week, though press of business often required more frequent sessions, sometimes daily. Policy was formed there and measures framed accordingly, though their adoption and sometimes modification depended on the legislature, and their eventual effectiveness on unpredictable vagaries of receptivity on the part of elements of the public. The Committee’s purview comprised all culture from the level of the Académie fran¸caise to that of the boulevards. Its mission was to make provision for science, letters, language, art, music, theater, festivals, the handicapped, weights and measures, the calendar, the telegraph, architecture, monuments, natural history collections, botanical gardens, museums, archives, and libraries, whether national, local, or sometimes individual in scope. All or most of that had been matters of state in the French scheme of things since the reign of Louis XIV, and to a large degree earlier. Education 19

The proceedings were published a century ago in one of the indispensable monuments erected by the first generation of fully professional historians under the Third Republic, James Guillaume, ed., Procès-Verbaux du Comité d’Instruction Publique de l’Assemblée Législative (1889) and Procès-Verbaux du Comité d’Instruction Publique de la Convention Nationale, 6 vols. (1891– 1909), hereafter cited as PVCd’IP (L) and PVCd’IP. An index to the latter, including errata and additions, appeared as Vol. 7 in two fascicules, undated but ca. 1960. The model for such collections was Alphonse Aulard, Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public (28 vols. 1889– 1919), for which see Palmer (1941).

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remained the centerpiece, however, as befitted the Committee’s name, and, with the exception of the Collège de France, teaching had never been a concern of the state, but always of the Church. Education, it is always hoped or feared, has the power to shape the future. It is with respect to education, therefore, that the expectations held of science, as of the other components of culture, are apt to be stated most explicitly. The topic has two parts. The first concerns the place of science in general education, and the second the technical and professional training of scientists. In a fully developed system, the two aspects intersect at all levels, while still not being identical. In this embryonic period, they remained quite distinct.20 Discussing both features, in the present chapter and further along, will exemplify and bear out one of the leading themes of this history, which is the contrast between two modes of doing science, the encyclopedic and the positivistic. The argument will be that programs for general education in science were cast in the encyclopedic mold and came to little, whereas institutions for technical training succeeded in producing scientists, even though they were intended to turn out engineers and doctors, in large part because they were in keeping with needs and forces of the future. So much is by way of preamble to considering the role for science envisioned in the Rapport et Projet de Décret sur l’Organisation Générale de l’Instruction Publique that Condorcet proposed to the Legislative Assembly on 20 and 21 April 1792.21 The importance of that document as a point of departure for the institutionalization of science and learning in modern France is impossible to exaggerate. We shall summarize its provisions en bloc, therefore, before considering its background in the educational practices that Condorcet and the Committee he then dominated thought to replace. Its form was standard for the presentation of legislation to the revolutionary assemblies. The prefatory report consists of a broad discussion of principles and goals. Provisions of the intended law itself are formally set forth in a succession of “Titres” or chapters subdivided into numbered articles prescribing every detail. About the fundamental proposition that a modern state must assume responsibility for educating its citizens, there was 20 Among recent writings on education in the revolutionary period, the most comprehensive are Julia (1981), whose emphasis is thematic and didactic, with long excerpts from the sources, and Palmer (1985), whose more institutional approach treats education in the context of political developments. 21 Charles Coutel has annotated a facsimile reproduction of the 1883 reprinting by G. Compayré in volume 2 of Condorcet, écrits sur l’instruction publique ed. Coutel and Cathérine Kintzler, (2 vols., Edilig, 1989). Volume 1 of this set reprints Condorcet’s five earlier memoirs on education. Citations below are to the text of the Rapport et projet de décret as printed in PVCd’IP (L).


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general agreement. As we shall see, Talleyrand had presented the Constituent Assembly with a well worked out plan, though one less thorough than Condorcet’s, which that body failed to act on. Condorcet’s originality, therefore, will be found in his conception, not of the need for public education, but of its basis and role. For the basis was to be science, and the content was to be free of all values more temporal than respect for fact and reason. Condorcet develops the latter argument first. Since the primary condition of all teaching is that the things imparted be true, the educational system must be as independent as possible of political authority. No agency of government should have the power, nor even the credibility, to prevent the development of new knowledge or the teaching of theories that might be contrary to its particular policies and momentary interests. Even adherence to the principles of the French Constitution and to the Rights of Man is to be secured through teachings of political science rather than by inculcation of unthinking allegiance. The justification for insisting on freedom of thought is pragmatic. To enjoin a superstitious reverence for existing law would simply weaken respect for it. Any government that forbade teachers to discuss the laws critically would contradict the very purpose for which civil institutions exist, which is the perfecting of social arrangements. Such progress comes about as the inevitable consequence of the enlightenment produced by competition among ideas. Only when liberty of opinion obtains throughout academia above the level of primary school, only then may the teaching of methods for correcting defects in the legal structure be reconciled with an informed acceptance of its basis.22 There, surely, Condorcet states the rationale for academic freedom with a simplicity and clarity never attained in the milieu to which its origin is usually traced, the German university of the nineteenth century. As for personal belief, its basis is no more the business of the system of education than is allegiance to a political system. A distinction in terminology needs emphasis here. Not for nothing does Condorcet address himself ´ to the organization of Instruction Publique rather than to Education Publi´ que. “Education” meant the formation of character, manners, and conduct. That is the affair of the family. Families there would be, for a time and perhaps indefinitely, who would still wish to bring up their children in the moral teachings of a religious sect. Their right to be thus misguided must be respected. On no account, however, must religious doctrine of any sort adulterate the process of instruction in the schools, where the morality taught would be that common to all humanity.23 “Instruction” meant imparting 22 23

The important passages will be found in Rapport et projet de décret, pp. 189–191, 223–224. Ibid., pp. 204–205.

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skills and knowledge—reading, writing, and arithmetic at the elementary level; techniques of arts and trades and the learned and professional disciplines in the higher reaches. That is the responsibility of the state. Let us, however, employ the phrase “public education,” as indeed Condorcet himself did on occasion. In its modern sense it has essentially the meaning of “Instruction Publique” and sounds more natural. The education provided by the state, then, was to be, on the one hand, as equal and universal, and, on the other, as complete as circumstances permitted. Every child in France was to receive the same primary education as every other. The principle applied equally to boys and girls. (Condorcet reserved the subject of women’s further education for a separate report, which he was never able to write.) Young people in a position to go beyond the elementary level were to have the opportunity to reach the limit of their powers. That a chance for advanced schooling would not be available to everyone was no reason for denying it to some. Provision of higher levels of education would be beneficial to those who received it—and, albeit indirectly, to those who did not. Children who pursued their education would be those whose families did not need to put their offspring to work when they completed primary school, normally at the age of ten. Condorcet mentions that consideration in a passing phrase, as a matter of course. The limitation is not to be read as a derogation from his genuine liberalism, but simply as a feature of economic reality in the late eighteenth century. The Constitution had laid down that primary education was to be tuition-free. Condorcet would extend the principle to all levels. Anticipating the objection that higher education of the well-to-do would thus be subsidized at the expense of the whole society, Condorcet replied that the intellectual capital of the nation would be maximized if interest, ability, and diligence were to be the primary factors in determining how many courses a student chooses to follow and how fully he manages to cultivate his native talent. The cost to his family must not deter him. Reliance on tuition would have the further disadvantage of favoring large schools in rich and populous districts. If, finally, professors were to be dependent on fees rather than fixed salaries, they would be tempted to scintillate rather than instruct and to cadge popularity in order to increase their income along with the number of their pupils. The system itself would consist in an educational pyramid on five levels, four for teaching and one for research. The base was to be a layer of primary schools. Every village with 400 residents would have a school in charge of a single master. They would be larger in the towns, one teacher serving a population of 2,500 on average. A community of 1,500 to 4,000 people might opt for a single school with two teachers or two with one each. In


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these and more populous municipalities, half the teachers were to be men and half women. The goal of primary education must be to instill in every citizen what he would need to know in order to handle his affairs and enjoy his rights. Besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, a child would have instruction in the elements of land measurement and of estimating the dimensions of a building; he would be informed about the natural resources of the region; he would learn fundamental operations of agriculture or of arts and trades, depending on whether the locale was rural or urban; he would have received lessons in civics. In four years time, he would be ready for apprenticeship or, if possible, for secondary education. As for the teachers, Condorcet’s expectations were nothing if not demanding. Having taught all four grades throughout the week, the schoolmaster or mistress would hold adult education classes every Sunday. Citizens who had not had the advantage of any education must be given the opportunity to repair the deficiency, while those who had been to schools of some sort should be enabled to improve their capacities throughout their lives. Secondary schools were to be established, to move to the next stage, one in every district and every town of 4,000 inhabitants. In larger communities, there would be up to three teachers in each school, with one such establishment for every 15,000 people. They may be compared in function to three-year grammar schools, except that the curriculum would be largely technical and practical: beginning mathematics, natural history, and chemistry applied to the arts; a fuller development of moral and social science; and elementary classes in business and commerce. Facilities would consist of a library, a cabinet of natural history, a collection of meteorological instruments and models of looms and other simple machines. The staff would number one, two, or three teachers, depending on the size of the school. There was little danger of their being underworked—they, too, were to give weekly lectures open to all citizens every Sunday. General culture was the goal of the education to be given at the third level. Schools equivalent to the present-day lycée or to the American high school—or, more pertinently, to the collèges that had produced the educated class of the Old Regime—were to be called institutes. There were to be one hundred ten throughout the country, one in each of sixty-one departments, two or three in the more populous departments, and five in Paris. The culture that distinguishes the educated man was to be of a new sort, however. For a truly modern education must by definition be based upon science and contemporary studies instead of Latin and ancient history. Several considerations, Condorcet explained, had determined that choice. In the first place, for those of an unreflective disposition, who never really master any form of knowledge, the study of science, even at an elementary

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level, is the best instrument for training their minds and for teaching them to reason and to analyze their ideas. No doubt the study of literature, of grammar, of history, of politics, of general philosophy, makes it possible to develop judgment, sound mental habits, and a profound command of logic, even in the absence of scientific knowledge. There are eminent examples to prove it. But an elementary knowledge of those disciplines has no such value. They employ reason, but do not form it. Science does: “No child, unless he be absolutely stupid, can fail to acquire some habit of applying himself through elementary lessons in natural history or agriculture. These sciences are a remedy against prejudice and small-mindedness that is surer, if not more universal, than philosophy itself.”24 Besides, they are useful in all sorts of occupations and are tending to revolutionize the arts and trades, a fortunate outcome that will only be hastened by their dissemination. The matter is broader and deeper than the merely pedagogical, however. Intellectual life throughout Europe generally is ever more eagerly drawing toward science. Now that the social order is on the way to being perfected, the spur to ambition must change while incentives to greed will diminish. In order that idleness and bordeom not set in, it will be essential “to find a useful outlet for that thirst for glory, that need for action, that are not offered sufficient scope in a well governed society, and at last to substitute the ambition of enlightening mankind for that of dominating it.”25 Only in the ensuing passage does Condorcet so much as allude to the existence of education in the old regime, when a progressive study of Latin throughout six years had been the basis for the teaching of grammar, geography, history, composition, and declamation. “No less vicious in its form than in the choice and distribution of subject matter,”26 the system in no way answered to the need for general education. An elementary knowledge of Latin sufficed to read the few works worth knowing. No longer was it the language of learning, for everything of value had been translated. Only for the history of science need the original texts be read, not for science itself. Worse, the mission of education is to teach the truth, and the classical writings are full of error. Its further purpose is to develop powers of reasoning; in reading the classics, however, one needs reasoning powers that are already fully developed. Otherwise, one will be led astray. So removed are the ancients from us that they can serve as models only after all the differences in idiom, custom, circumstances, religion, and ideas are discounted. Consider oratory. Citizens in an Athenian meeting were participating in direct democracy. What was at stake was their own welfare 24 25 26

Ibid., p. 198. Ibid. Ibid., p. 199.


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when they responded to the impassioned delivery of a Demosthenes. Their responsibility for judging of their affairs was immediate. Deputies to a French assembly are in a different case. They betrayed the interests of others, their constituents, when they allowed a speaker to appeal to feeling instead of to reason. In ancient times, it might have been permissible, even useful, to excite the people. Nowadays, the task must be to enlighten them: “You owe the French nation an education in keeping with the spirit of the eighteenth century. . . .”27 The institutes—Condorcet’s pen slipped once and wrote “collège”— would, in effect, produce the governing class (his circumlocution was “would give those who benefit from the education a genuine superiority that the distribution of functions in a society makes inevitable”).28 All the more reason to insist that the curriculum exclude religion and include political science taught in a rational and impartial manner. These were to be intellectually mature establishments on a considerable scale. Teachers would be professors, four in the sciences and three each in the social sciences, the applied sciences, and literature and fine arts. They would give courses, as distinct from holding classes, in the subject matter of the main disciplines of formal knowledge. How those were defined will appear in discussing the provisions for the two upper levels of the pyramid, the loci of higher education and research. A young man would complete his general education at an institute in four or five years at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Courses would be elective. An able student might follow four at once in all the areas of instruction. Another might prefer to take one at a time in a single division. Discussion sessions, practical work, and compositions would complement lectures. Each institute would be provided with a library, a botanical garden, a cabinet of natural history and one of machines, and an agricultural station. Members of the general public might be admitted to courses as auditors, and the professors would regularly offer public lectures on current developments in their area of specialization. Professional education occupied the fourth level of public instruction. The new establishments were to be called, confusingly enough given current terminology, lycées, the word “university” being unmentionable except with reference to England, Germany, and Italy. Not that Condorcet wished to avoid comparisons—on the contrary, he was confident that the republican foundations would provide training at the forefront of both modern and traditional disciplines with a comprehensiveness unequalled throughout Europe. The scientific and learned disciplines are distributed into four classes in 27 28

Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 202.

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the upper three levels of Condorcet’s scheme. The tabulation for the lycées are found in the list below. FIRST CLASS: Mathematical and Physical Sciences Transcendental Geometry and Mathematical Analysis Fluid Mechanics, Celestial Mechanics, and Application of Analysis to Physical Objects Application of Calculus to the Moral and Political Sciences One of these professors will teach mathematical geography.

One Professor

Observational Astronomy This professor will direct the Lycée observatory.

One Professor

Experimental Physics Chemistry Mineralogy and Zoology Botany and Vegetable Physiology Zoology One of the preceding two professors will teach entomology.

One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor

One Professor One Professor

SECOND CLASS: Moral and Political Sciences Scientific Method, Analysis of Sensations and Ideas, Natural and Moral Law Social Science, Political Economy, Finance, Trade Public Law and Legislation in General French Legislation Chronology, Geography, Philosophical and Political History of the Several Peoples

One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor

THIRD CLASS: Applied Science Anatomy and Physiology Pharmacy and Materia Medica Theoretical Medicine (Pathology, Semiology, Nosology, Therapeutics) Practical Medicine, Internal and External These courses will be conducted partly at the bedside of patients and partly in a neighboring room. Obstetrics Veterinary Art Every year these professors will choose one of their number to teach the history of medicine as well as forensic medicine, and another to teach hygiene.

One Professor One Professor One Professor Two Professors One Professor One Professor

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Agriculture and Rural Economics Art of Mining Theory of the Military Art Naval Science Stereotomy and Drafting Mechanics and Physics of Arts and Trades Chemical Aspects of Arts and Trades

One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor

FOURTH CLASS: Literature and Fine Arts Theory of the Fine Arts in General, and Poetry and Eloquence in Particular Antiquities Oriental Languages Greek Language and Literature Latin Language and Literature Modern Languages and Literatures Each Lycée will offer the three languages most appropriate to its location. Drawing for painting, sculpture, and architecture Musical Theory and Composition

One Professor One Professor One Professor One Professor Three Professors

Two Professors One Professor

There would thus be thirty-nine professorial chairs in every one of the nine lycées—nine in the sciences, five in the social sciences, fourteen in applied science, and eleven in the humanities. Each institution was to be provided with a major library, a botanical garden and agricultural station, a museum of natural history and anatomy, a set of scientific instruments and models of machines, and a collection of ancient artifacts, paintings, and sculpture, the libraries and collections to be open to the public. The locations were to be regional centers of culture, Douai, Strasbourg, Dijon, Montpellier, Toulouse, Poitiers, Rennes, Clermont-Ferrand, and Paris—not Lyons, Rouen, Bordeaux, Marseilles, or Lille, where the pressures of commerce might prove distracting. Paris must no longer be allowed to dominate higher education and learning. Nevertheless, certain special features would attach to the lycée of Paris. Additional chairs in the capital would permit doubling the number of courses offered there in the Class of Applied Science, appointing a larger number of professors of ancient and modern languages, and creating a complete school of fine arts. Apart from the diametric shift of focus from classics to science and modern studies, the most novel features of the scheme were the incorporation of medicine into applied science—literally, “Science Applied to the Arts”— and the promotion of the other subjects gathered into Class III to the equivalent of university status. With regard to Latin and Greek, Condorcet observed, students who had advanced this far in their education would be

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critical enough to study the masterpieces in order to discern the beauty of the form without being seduced by the falsity of the content. In an enormous footnote to the table of organization of the lycée, Condorcet gives yet another exposition of the application of the theory of probability to the social sciences in justification of allocating a chair in the First Class to his favorite subject.29 One man in sixteen would qualify for advanced education, a proportion that would suffice to satisfy the need for scientists, scholars, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other experts. That tuition should be free was not enough to open to children of the poor the possibility of fully cultivating their talents. Only well-to-do families would be able to support young men all the way through to completion of the lycée at age twenty-two. Accordingly, the Committee proposed to subsidize a portion of the student population as élèves de la patrie, national scholars. The primary schools in each district would annually choose a number of pupils equal to the size of the departmental deputation in the National Assembly who would be subsidized to attend the secondary school in every district. Their stipend would be the equivalent of 300 days’ labor at the wages prevailing in the region. Similarly, the secondary schools would select a number equal to a third of the deputation to attend the departmental institute with a stipend equal to 450 days’ wages. The institutes, finally, would name one student each to the regional lycée at a stipend of 500 days’ labor. The tenures would be three, four, and five years, respectively. There would thus be 110 National Scholars a year expected to matriculate in the lycées annually.30 At the three lower levels the content of courses would be prescribed. The Committee proposed to commission the writing of text books and manuals for use in primary and secondary schools and also in the institutes. Not so in higher education. Nothing will be required of the professor except that he teach the course assigned to him. The choice of method and materials is up to him. If, by misfortune, the manuals or teaching at the lower levels should become tainted by politics, freedom of teaching in the lycée would expose the corruption. With that safeguard, it “need never be feared that the language of truth can be extinguished.”31 So we are no more to look to the German university for the earliest statement of the Lehrfreiheit it really did practice than for a definition of the academic freedom it did not. Finally, the top level of public education, the apex of the pyramid of learning, would be a National Society of Science and the Arts, “instituted to oversee and direct the establishments for instruction, to occupy itself with 29

Ibid., pp. 232–236. The above provisions are specified in the Projet de décret. The Rapport proposes more generous numbers: 3,850 scholarship students in secondary school, 1,000 in the institutes, and 600 in the lycées. 31 Ibid., p. 213. 30


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the advancement of science and the arts, to collect, foster, apply, and disseminate useful discoveries.”32 The Society would combine, in a word, the old responsibilities of the Academy of Science with those of a future Ministry of Education. The strategy was twofold: to insulate scientific leadership from political pressures by situating it within the perimeter of the educational system while reciprocally assuring quality and rigor in the schools by placing them under the authority of science. Evidently Condorcet had given up on the form of the Academy, acknowledging it to have been a privileged corporation rife with inequality. The function and composition, however, he defended. For the Society would also choose its own members. That much was essential. Despite all that had been written in the past two years against the domineering spirit of academies, their calumniators, even when challenged, had failed to cite a single example of a genuine discovery that the Academy of Science had rejected, or a single case of anyone whose reputation had outlived him and who had been excluded, or any instance of a scientist known throughout Europe who had met with repeated refusals. Nothing of the sort could be found. Elections always had been based on public credentials. Errors in assessing them could be exposed. Scientists and men of letters were ever subject to the scrutiny of public opinion. The Academy was accountable to all of Europe for its selections. Experience showed, indeed, that the more influence foreign scientists have upon decisions in their fields, the greater the assurance that the choices will be beyond reproach. That was one reason for restricting the membership of the new Society to a number most all of whose names would be known throughout Europe. The changes would be in form. Rank would be eliminated, and all members of the Society would hold equal status. There would be no correspondents, who had taken little effective part in the Academy. Instead, half the members of each scientific section would be resident in Paris and half in the departments. Selectivity would not be compromised, however. Were that to happen, prospective membership would cease to be a spur to ambition, and a learned society would be unable to govern itself. The Royal Society of London offered a cautionary example. Of the seven or eight hundred fellows, the vast majority were incapable either of producing science or of passing on the work of the few who did. Inevitably, the conduct of its affairs had reverted to an aristocratic committee. The new Society, then, must be composed of savants and only of savants, “men who have embraced a science in its full extent, who have penetrated its depths, or who have enriched it by discovery.”33 The activity and excel32 33

Ibid. Ibid., p. 221.

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lence of research would thus continue, as under the old Academy, to be a function of the quality of its membership. So, too, would progress in technology, “for knowledge of the principles of the arts is still foreign to almost all those who cultivate them.”34 Most important, however, the entire educational system would depend upon the Society to set standards and enforce them. Not only would the Society renew itself by choosing its own members. Each section would also be responsible for electing, from a list of candidates prepared by the entire class, the professors who would hold the corresponding chairs in the lycées. The professors in the lycées, in turn, would select their colleagues one stage down in the institutes. The municipality would be entitled to eliminate candidates whom it found objectionable, but would have no positive voice: there, at the level of general education, feelings “about personal and local suitability begin to have some importance, and this right of exclusion will suffice to assure that they not be too overtly wounded.”35 The professors in the institutes of each arrondissement, finally, would form lists of candidates for teaching posts in the lower schools. The criteria no longer being those of professional knowledge, these selections would be made by the municipal body for the secondary schools and by an assembly of fathers of the children for primary schools. The hand of the Society, however, would reach right down through the hierarchy into neighborhood and village. Commissions named by the Society, lycées, and institutes, respectively, would conduct regular inspections of the schools lower on the scale. Some might object that the system would discriminate against studious persons outside the educational establishment. The reply must be that the question is not a democratic one of equality, but an administrative one of competence in an official function. All reasonable men would agree that those charged with instructing the young should be chosen by persons as enlightened as themselves, or more so. Surely, the same principle applies to the oversight of the institutions. Inspectors of teaching in the lycées must be supposed to be of equivalent learning with the professors, and those in the lower schools to be superior in knowledge to the staff. Only if the supreme body was composed of scientists and scholars recognized by intellectual peers to be leaders in their field could those conditions be satisfied. If membership in some voluntary society, or mere pretention to learning, were to give a man a voice, there would then be no reason to exclude the whole mass of citizens. Under such circumstances, “It is not ignorance alone that is to be feared. It is charlatanism, which would speedily destroy both education and the arts and sciences.”36 34 35 36

Ibid. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 220.


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Hence the need for the equivalent of an Academy of Science in republican form, modernized in its representation of the disciplines and undiminished in scientific authority, a new learned body to be set over public education. It would act as collective schoolmaster to the nation. A glance at the table of organization, and concurrently at the distribution of subject matter in the curriculum of higher education, will show how the inspiration was at once Cartesian and encyclopedic. The pattern of the structure is, in effect, a rectangular grid. Horizontal partitions mark five main stages along a continuum, which resides at once in the process of education and in the strata of learning, and which leads from the elementary skills to be acquired in childhood to the mastery vested in the scientist. Vertical partitions range the kinds and species of knowledge along a spectrum of learned disciplines that become differentiated at the point where skills begin to serve science. Condorcet’s plan for education, in sum, wears the guise of a classification of the sciences, and vice versa. The four main divisions are called classes, even as in a botanical or zoological taxonomy. That there is an overall unity in science, as in nature, is reflected in the conception of the National Society, a house of all learning, wherein the meetings of each class would be open to all members. Were they to attempt conducting their actual business in common, however, it would be a Tower of Babel. Hence the need for partition into classes, which would meet separately, and of classes into sections, which would oversee the teaching program in each discipline. The problem was how to define and where to place the sections so that interdisciplinary exchanges would occur naturally and freely across boundaries to be thought of as zones rather than barriers. The First Class would consist of the mathematical and physical sciences, ranging by insensible degrees from those that employ only calculation to those founded entirely on observation. For over a century no one would have thought of separating them. As for the Second Class, Moral and Political Science, Condorcet says only that it is surely superfluous to argue that the subjects should not be separated or confused with others. It was in the creation of the Third Class, the application of mathematical and physical science to the arts, that he thought to break new ground. The very size is startling—seventy-two places, as compared to forty-four for pure sciences, thirty for social sciences, and forty-four for arts and letters. The incorporation of medical subjects, itself an interesting departure, accounts for twentyfour of them, but even so the distribution appears at first sight to be a tilt toward the fostering of something like engineering science and education. In fact, Condorcet was imagining nothing of the sort. Neither the military engineering school at Mézières nor the civil engineering of the Ponts et Chaussées figured in the background of his experience or his thinking. He is perfectly explicit with respect both to applied science in the Third Class and

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to fine arts in the Fourth: “In public education, in the National Society, fine arts, like the mechanical arts, are considered only relatively to the theory appropriate to them. The purpose is to fill the gap that separates abstract science from practice and the philosophy of an art from its simple execution.”37 The notion, as in other encyclopedic writings on science and industry, was to “enlighten” the arts. It would not be in courses on “Arts de construction” that a man would learn to construct a building, nor in “Navigation” to sail a ship, nor in “Arts mécaniques” to assemble a machine, nor in “Peinture, sculpture, architecture” to paint, shape, and draw. Those skills would still be acquired on site or on board, in the workshop or the studio. The National Society would, for its part, be responsible for analysis and explanation of the principles to which a practice that could be called enlightened would, by definition, increasingly conform. The system over which it would preside would create the educated man in its image, man the knower rather than man the maker. 3. TALLEYRAND’S EDUCATIONAL PROPOSAL

That Talleyrand should have been the author of the first comprehensive plan for national education is, on the face of it, surprising. Doubts, indeed, have often been expressed as to whether he had himself composed the proposal he read out before the Constituent Assembly on 10 and 11 September 1791. The other major reform that bears his name, the first report on weights and measures, had clearly been framed by qualified academicians.38 Nevertheless, Talleyrand always claimed to have written his Rapport sur l’Instruction Publique, while acknowledging that Lavoisier, Vicq d’Azyr, Lagrange, Monge, Laplace, and La Harpe had furnished advice and information.39 He also mentions Condorcet, and though he does not say so, must surely have read the series of six memoirs on education that Condorcet had published in La Bibliothèque de l’Homme Public from January 1790 to June 1791.40 Almost certainly, Talleyrand would also have had in mind the addresses on education delivered by Mirabeau in 1790 and published after his death on 2 April 1791.41 Beyond that, no evidence has ever been found that other hands, philosophical or political, may have been involved, and it would have been in character for Talleyrand, the epitome of the free-think37

Ibid., p. 216. Below, chapter 4, section 2. 39 Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Mémoires complets et authentiques, (5 vols., 1967), 1, pp. 134–135. 40 Above, section 2, n. 21. 41 Honoré-Gabriel-Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, Travail sur l’éducation publique (1791). It was Cabanis, much in Mirabeau’s confidence, who found the drafts of these speeches among his papers and published them. The first three are reprinted in Hippeau (1881). 38

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ing worldly ecclesiastic of high lineage, to have made the cause of education his own politically. He had, in fact, conducted an inquiry on the subject for the Assembly of the Clergy some ten years previously. The formal proposals advanced by Talleyrand and, seven months later, by Condorcet had certain features in common. In both schemes, primary schools in village and neighborhood were to be provided for all children, boys and girls, from ages six through ten. In both, the second level would consist of district schools that would continue the instruction of youngsters from families who could afford it. In Talleyrand’s plan, however, the second tier would go beyond the stage of Condorcet’s grammar schools, in effect replacing the collèges of the old regime. Adolescents would complete seven years of general education at the age of sixteen or seventeen. At the next level, the third in Talleyrand’s system, institutions for professional training would be dispersed throughout the departments. Finally, a National Institute in Paris would have responsibility for the advancement of science and learning. The provision for elementary schools in both schemes reflected a consensus among educated people concerning the need for a national, secular system—though not too secular, in Talleyrand’s case. Beyond that, the similarities in form and structure were superficial and less striking than the contrasts in spirit and expectation. Important differences are to be noted even at the primary level. Attendance was to be compulsory in Condorcet’s plan, voluntary in Talleyrand’s. Religion expressly was to be taught in Talleyrand’s schools, “for if ignorance of it is a misfortune, misunderstanding is, perhaps, worse.”42 Formation of the moral character was, indeed, a fundamental purpose, of both elementary and secondary education, and Talleyrand has nothing to say about independence from political authority. In his system tuition was to be free only in elementary school. If higher education opened the way to profitable careers, as it would, it was only fair that families of the prospective beneficiaries, and not the whole society, should pay the cost. Talleyrand was vague about the number of schools that would be required. Those decisions were to be left to municipal and departmental officials for primary and district schools, respectively, but it is clear that he imagined a much lower density than did Condorcet. Talleyrand was also less precise and altogether less innovative, though perhaps more practical, than Condorcet with respect to the curriculum. The sequence of studies he imagined in district schools represented little of a break with the past: two years of grammar, two of humanities, two of rhetoric and logic, one of mathematics and physical science. True, those courses would include modern topics: in grammar, French as well as Latin authors; 42

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du Comité de Constitution (1791), p. 28.

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in humanities, French as well as ancient history and literature; in rhetoric, comparative study of the French and other constitutions, ancient and modern. Still, the notion of education was literary and conservative in the spirit of classical humanism. Its purpose was acculturation. It was oriented toward the past, recent as well as ancient, for that was where lessons concerning conduct, language, taste, and politics were to be found. Talleyrand had been educated in that manner himself, and his gesture toward science was perfunctory. He had, and could have had, no feeling for it. A science-based education, by contrast, and Condorcet’s was the first such plan, was bound to be future-oriented, like science itself. His purpose was not to weave strands of old knowledge into the fabric of the coming generation. The purpose was, indeed, precisely the contrary. It was to instill new knowledge, and to make the future different from the past. Now, it may very well be that the traditional mode is more in keeping with the nature of the learning process in a civilized society. The centrality of humanist studies in liberal education, both in earlier and later times, not to mention the high level of cultivation characteristic of Talleyrand, Condorcet, and their class, would suggest as much. If so, the radicalism and daring, if not the realism, of Condorcet’s plan stand out in all the greater contrast and all the sharper focus. As for higher education, Talleyrand too eschewed reference to the university. In effect, however, his reform would simply have replaced its three higher faculties with separate schools of theology, medicine, and law, alongside which would be added a fourth category of military schools. They were to be parceled out singly among the main cities of the more developed departments. Talleyrand did have views about how the training for the three traditional professions and for the armed forces was to be accommodated to the changed tenor of the times. Theology, for example, must not be confused with a science. Enemy to all innovation, it is strictly incapable of progress, of experiment, of discovery. The point is simply to keep it intact while training ministers of religion to meddle with nothing else, and especially not with politics. There were to be ten law schools, most of them situated in cities that had been seats of the former parlements. Law must henceforth be a matter of public knowledge, however, and no longer of arcane lore, though neither must it be confused with political theory. It is the science of what is, not what ought to be. In the future, medicine must accord equality to surgery and pharmacy. The new schools—like Condorcet, Talleyrand slipped once and wrote “collèges”—were to be situated within teaching hospitals. The limited availability of professorial talent would restrict the number to four in all. There would, on the other hand, be twenty-three military schools, one in each of the commands into which the country was divided, together with six large centers for tactical and strategic theory in important frontier cities. The central feature of the training, apart from technical aspects, must be to prepare boys for careers in

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which talent would be rewarded rather than stultified. That would require reform in the Army and Navy and elimination of advantages accruing there, and elsewhere, to high birth. Finally, at the summit of the system of public education a National Institute would be created in Paris to facilitate the progress of letters, science, and the arts. As in other points of comparison between Talleyrand’s system and Condorcet’s, the resemblance between the organizations at the top is more formal than functional. The most significant similarity is that both authors contemplated folding the separate academies into a single corporation embodying the unity of culture. Both proposals bespeak a consensus that the old, privileged companies had outlived their time. Moreover, Talleyrand’s term for the supreme cultural body, Institut National, rather than Condorcet’s Société Nationale, was the one adopted by the reorganizers of science and learning in 1795. It has carried over to the present day. The substantive differences, however, are still more striking. Where Condorcet’s National Society would have been exclusive, like the Academy of Science, Talleyrand’s Institute was inclusive, in principle and in prospective practice. The humanities would have had pride of place. The new foundation would have two main divisions: first, Philosophical Sciences, Belles-Lettres, and Fine Arts; second, Mathematical and Physical Science and Practical Arts. Both divisions would consist of ten classes with a total of sixty-four members each. In both, the first six classes would operate jointly as equivalents, respectively, of a society of the humanities and social sciences and a society of the natural sciences. A class would number eight, twelve, or sixteen members, depending on the extent and importance of the discipline, the two largest in the first division being eloquence and poetry, and in the second mathematics and mechanics. The remaining four classes in both divisions would be largely autonomous and concerned with the practice of the several arts: in the first, painting and sculpture, architectural design, music, and declamation; and in the second, agriculture, healing, architectural construction, and military arts. These classes would also be much larger—agriculture and medicine, for example, would have sixty places each. Members of the Institute were to be the leading lights of their specialties, literary, scholarly, scientific, and practical. Talleyrand makes little of the honorific aspects, however. He has nothing to say of the prospect for election as an incentive to scientific activity and does not dwell on maintaining standards of rigor, on chastizing charlatans, or on safeguarding priorities in discovery. The Institute would have enouraged and facilitated science and other aspects of culture, but would not have policed it or them. What would govern its judgments would be “good taste.”43 His plan, in a word, bears the political mark of an aristocrat. It would have been dangerous, he warned, to 43

Ibid., p. 58.

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overeducate artisans and laborers. Nothing of a scientist or scholar himself, he would have the state patronize science and learning from on high. Condorcet’s approach, by contrast, was that of a scientific elitist whose political goal was democratization. Talleyrand’s Institute would have had none of the responsibility that Condorcet vested in his Society for overseeing education in the lower echelons. Instead, it would itself be a teaching body. For the advancement of letters, arts, and science was only half the story. The other half was imparting them. The Institute (to compare it with modern agencies) would have combined the functions of a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique with those ´ ´ of an Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Professorial chairs were to be established in the subject matter of all the specialties. The provision would be nothing if not lavish—thirteen chairs in the human sciences and nineteen in the natural sciences, together with an undetermined number of elementary teaching posts in schools for artists and mechanics that were to be annexed to the Institute. Forward-looking in the scale and also in the mission—“teaching at the most transcendent and highest level of human knowledge”44 —the arrangement would have continued the practice initiated in the sixteenth century with the creation of the chairs that became the Collège de France. Subsequent examples were the teaching positions in the Jardin des Plantes, the ´ chair of hydrodynamics founded by Turgot in 1775, and the fledgling Ecole des Mines. Instead of bringing subjects of current interest into the purview of the university, reformers bypassed the formal structure of higher learning, deeming it more practical to proceed ad hoc in order to provide new specialties with advanced instruction entailing no degrees. Such was Talleyrand’s strategy. He would have suppressed, along with all academies, all chairs for the teaching of literature, science, and art in the establishments just named and also in the Collège des Quatre-Nations, the Collège de Navarre, the Mint, the Louvre, indeed everywhere. The National Institute would then gather into its embrace everything to do with research and professional training in subjects other than theology, medicine, law, and military science. In company with other participants in the debate he opened on education, Talleyrand leaves the impression that the practice of the old regime had been a disaster. A passage from his preamble conveys the ritual contempt of the revolutionary generation for what had gone before: We shall not here seek to bring out the nullity or the innumerable vices of what has gone by the name of Instruction until this day. Even under the old order, it was impossible to fix one’s thoughts on the barbarism of our institutions without being appalled by the total absence of en44

Ibid., p. 184.

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lightenment among the great majority of men, without, further, being revolted by the deplorable opinions dropped into the minds of those who were not entirely devoted to ignorance; by the prejudices of all sorts with which they were fed; by the incongruity, or rather the absolute contradiction, that existed between what a child was required to learn and what a man would have to do; and, finally, by that blind and persistent deference toward practices long since superannuated, which, endlessly carrying us back to the period when all knowledge was located in the Cloister, still seemed, after more than ten centuries, to prepare the generality of citizens to live in monasteries.45 4. THE EDUCATIONAL LEGACY OF THE OLD REGIME

In fact, of course, the intellectual quality of the literate public on the eve of the Revolution in France is not to be explained as a product of spontaneous generation. France did then possess a considerable set of educational institutions. True, they were largely under clerical control, were of unequal merit, and were unevenly distributed. They nevertheless constituted, taken all in all, the most extensive system in the world, and one distinguished by a number of schools of very high quality indeed, such as the famous Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris.46 Important recent scholarship has redressed the bleakness of the instructional landscape painted by Talleyrand and Condorcet, and before going on to consider the discussion that ensued, perhaps it will be well to summarize the findings about the legacy of the old regime.47 For cultural and economic indices of many sorts, France, unlike Gaul, may be divided into two parts on either side of a line named after the nineteenth century analyst Louis Maggiolo, who described it. It runs from Saint-Malo in Brittany to the border with Geneva. Generally speaking the rural areas to the south and west, including Brittany, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Massif central, areas that tilt toward Spain, the Atlantic, or the Mediterranean rather than toward Europe, were less developed economically, socially, and culturally than were the northern and eastern reaches of the country. With all due allowance for local variations, and they were considerable, in much of northeastern France at the end of the eighteenth century, upwards of 80 percent of peasant men and the great majority of artisans in town and city were able to sign their names and to read simple French. In the south and west, on the other hand, the proportion may probably have been below 30 percent in most regions, particularly mountainous areas, away from such prosperous centers as Bordeaux, Nantes, and Toulouse. Wherever parish schools existed, some of them endowed, others maintained by the 45 46 47

Ibid., pp. 1–2. Palmer (1975). Notably, Chartier, Compère, Julia (1976); Palmer (1985).

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church, children were taught writing, reading, figuring, and the catechism. The master would also assist the parish priest in all that had to do with inculcating morality and in mediating between the life of the village and the regimen imposed by an officialdom that was party to words and numbers written on paper and sometimes even on parchment. In certain localities, notably in the dioceses of Reims and of Rouen, and in the upper Marne Valley, nearly every parish had its school. It is estimated, though again no complete census is possible, that the same was true of over 80 percent of the parishes in northern and eastern France generally, whereas over 50 percent lacked schools in the South and the West. Even the Condorcet plan, therefore, will look more realistic when it is appreciated that almost as many primary schools as it envisioned were already functioning in certain parts of the country, and that a fully national system would not have had to be created from whole cloth. To do so would have required something like doubling the number of schools in France and transferring their basis from ecclesiastical to civil authorities and territorial units. Universities, to move to the other end of the scale, had recovered a limited importance after the low state into which they had subsided in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though without regaining anything of their medieval vibrancy as centers of international scholarly and intellectual life.48 Apart from the University of Paris, which was in a class by itself, there were twenty-two provincial universities in France in 1789. They had become, for the most part, local institutions for the training of clergymen, lawyers, and doctors. Aspirants for the priesthood were required only to attend a seminary, but those with ambitions for preferment needed degrees in formal divinity. There is reason to think that these courses were on average superior in seriousness and scholarly quality to their counterparts in the other faculties. The teaching of jurisprudence had the reputation of repetitious pedantry in Roman law with little practical exposure to unwritten, customary law. Nevertheless, admission to the bar or access to the notarial or administrative bureaucracy, whether in Paris or the provinces, lay through the portals of a Faculty of Law. As for medicine, bookish courses in anatomy and physiology were giving way to the beginnings of clinical training outside the university, but any who aspired above the role of surgeon still had to take the doctorate in a Faculty of Medicine. The relative importance of the three higher faculties varied considerably from one institution to another. Several universities lacked one or two of them altogether. The newest, Dijon, consisted only of the Faculty of Law, which tended to be predominant in the other universities situated in those 48 Marie-Madeleine Compère’s excellent chapter, “Les universités,” in Chartier, Julia, and Compère (1976), is the source of the numerical data in the paragraphs that follow. See also Jean de Viguerie (1979).


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provincial capitals that were also seats of the Parlements. Strasbourg had only theology, and Montpellier was largely, though not quite exclusively, a medical university, with a more progressive reputation than that of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. Reims, on the other hand, was little more than a mill churning out diplomas for all three degrees, though there were one or two well-known professors there. The university system as a whole was thus of real, if minor, importance in the institutional and social dynamics of the old regime. The size of the student population gives a measure of the scale. There were, it is reliably estimated, approximately 3,500 law students, 620 medical students, and 3,500 to 4,000 divinity students in France, for the most part between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. To them may be added another 5,000 arts students enrolled in the final two-year collegiate study of “philosophie,” which, as will appear, was the nearest thing to formal study of science. That comes to a total of 12,500 to 13,000 young Frenchmen doing what would now be called higher education. Paris attracted much the largest contingent—about a fifth of all law students and a sixth of those in medicine. Several provincial universities, Douai, for example, and Valence, were very small indeed, numbering fewer than 200 students. Generally speaking, university studies held little appeal for the upper classes, whether nobility or higher bourgeoisie. Law students came largely from families solidly situated in middle or lower officialdom or in the professions; the fathers of medical students were very apt to be themselves physicians, surgeons, or apothecaries; the Faculties of Theology drew the largest proportion, though still a minority, from the milieux of artisans and peasants. Also inscribed there would be younger sons of the nobility destined for high ecclesiastical office together with the occasional intellectual, for example Turgot and Morellet, both of whom appreciated the rigor of the training. Providing the education that made possible the level of taste and literacy which distinguished cultivated people was the responsibility, not of the higher university faculties, but of the extensive system of secondary schools known as colleges, of which there were 348 on the eve of the Revolution. These were endowed institutions charging no tuition and, in that sense, public. Almost a third had been founded in the sixteenth century by the Jesuits, the pace-setters of European education, and run by the Society until its expulsion from France in 1762. Thereupon they were taken over by one or another of the teaching orders or by the secular clergy. In some, elementary instruction would be given. In all, the sequence of numbered grades began with the sixth, which a boy would normally enter at age eleven, and continued in reverse order to the first, called Rhetoric. The establishments were of two sorts. There were 177 collèges d’humanités and 171 collèges de plein exercice. In the former, which were usually smaller institutions in cities of lesser importance, the course lasted six years and ended with Rhetoric. In

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the latter, instruction continued, as has already been mentioned, through another two years of largely scientific study, known as Philosophie. Thirtythree of these full-course colleges, and most notably ten in Paris, were subject to the Faculty of Arts in the local university. Only a minority of students in most such schools did their philosophie, however. Nothing beyond Rhetoric was expected for matriculation in one of the higher faculties or for acceptance in the polite world. No area of investigation has been more felicitously clarified by the quantitative touch of historians who publish in the Annales than has the history of education. Underway as of the present writing is a multivolume inventory of French colleges from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, giving in each instance detail of the affiliation, juridical status, enrollment, facilities, resources, teaching and administrative staff, curriculum, regulations, and history. Preliminary studies already permit making certain statements with considerable confidence.49 Approximately 48,000 students were enrolled in the collegiate system. That total represents about one French boy in fifty between ages eleven and eighteen. Just over three-quarters studied in full-course colleges. The enrollment was 200 to 300 in about a quarter of these schools. The largest, such as Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which was independent of the university, numbered as many as 500 pupils. The smallest might have only 100 or so, whereas over three-quarters of the humanities colleges enrolled fewer than that. In about half the colleges, the student body consisted of both day students and boarders, some of whose parents paid for food and lodging and others of whom benefited from a considerable array of scholarships, or bourses. Neither merit nor need was as significant in their award as were conditions laid down by the founders with respect to the beneficiary’s origins or family connections and, more important, the favor of influential patrons and officials. To a limited degree, scholarships did provide educational opportunity for boys from artisanal circles and the more prosperous farming milieux. A larger proportion, roughly 20 to 30 percent in certain schools, came from families of shopkeepers and lesser tradesmen and merchants. The fathers of another 20 percent or so would be lower officials or members of quasi-professional occupations such as apothecaries, surgeons, and architects. As many again would be sons of high officials, of lawyers, and of doctors. Smaller proportions, less than 10 percent each, represented the top layers of the social scale, the wealthy bourgeoisie and the (often less wealthy) nobility. Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dominique Julia, Les Collèges fran¸cais, 16 e –18 e siècles. Volume 1, “Midi,” appeared in 1984 and volume 2, “France du Nord et de l’Ouest,” in 1988. A third volume, “Est,” and a fourth, “Paris,” are in preparation. Meanwhile, the statistics in Julia and Pressly (1975) are precise and informative. See also Palmer (1975, 1985). 49


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Except that there were virtually no students from the laboring class, a boy would thus rub elbows and share adolescence throughout his college experience with all elements of the mix that made up the France of the old regime, an open society culturally and intellectually, however rigid in its social structure and authoritarian in its politics. It is estimated, paradoxically enough, that the secondary educational system provided a much broader social exposure and rather more opportunity for rising in the world on the eve of the Revolution than it was to do in the bourgeois France of a hundred years later, though less than it had done a century and more earlier.50 Two qualifications need to be made. The foregoing observations do not include the enrollments in military and naval schools or in the relatively small but professionally leavening engineering and technical schools.51 Nor do they take account of the numerically important growth of private education. Boarding schools, often under lay control, were giving the colleges serious competition in the last two decades of the old regime. Charging tuition, they nevertheless appealed to many families, in part because they put more emphasis on modern subjects, in part because surveillance and discipline were thought to be stricter than in the old public schools. There is no telling how large the enrollments were, but taken all in all they may have accounted for between a quarter and a half as many students as did the colleges. Exempt from the legislation though not altogether from the troubles of the Revolution, they continued their growth into the nineteenth century. What did boys learn in the public schools of the old regime? An answer to that question begins to be possible thanks to the pioneering research of an English scholar whose study of the curriculum of French higher education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries complements the quantitative and sociological approach of contributors to the Annales.52 L. W. B. Brockliss ranges the courses of instruction under the three broad, and admittedly anachronistic, headings of Humanities, or “Propadeutic Arts,” imparted throughout six years of college education; Ethical and Metaphysical Science (Philosophy, Theology, and Law) as taught in universities; and Natural Science, consisting on the one hand of physics in the final two-year “Philosophie” sequence of the collège de plein exercice, and on the other of physiology, anatomy, chemistry, and botany in the medical faculties. The scheme has the disadvantage that it makes generalizations concerning the import of schooling in the various subject matters depend on the experi50

These approximations, intended to indicate orders of magnitude, are drawn from precise tabulations of enrollments and scholarship students in the Collège Louis-le-Grand, which is compared to certain other institutions in Chisick (1975); cf. Palmer (1985), pp. 21–24. 51 See Taton (1964); Gillispie (1980), chapter 7. 52 Brockliss (1987); see also Palmer (1975), for the history of a single school, the Collège Louis-le-Grand.

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ences of rather different, and not fully comparable, sectors of the educated public. All students perforce did their humanities, but, as we have seen, only a minority went beyond the class of rhetoric into what would later count as higher education. A still smaller proportion, which was probably not representative of the educated public generally, qualified themselves professionally in the faculties of theology and law, while the scientific exposure of those studying general physics in college can have had little in common with that of the relatively few students doing medical subjects professionally in the university. The conclusions are, nevertheless, interesting. The college curriculum consisted (even as Condorcet had charged) of a very thorough, highly disciplined training in the language, literature, and history of Rome, tempered in the seventeenth century by a more superficial introduction to the legacy of Greece, and late in the eighteenth by a comparative look at French grammar, literature, and history. Student theatricals, intended to develop oratorical and forensic skills, offered the only diversion. Throughout, the spirit was of indoctrination in the duties of obedience to parents, of fidelity to the Church, and of subservience to constituted authority. The rhetoric and style of the Latin language were to be emulated in the manner of Cicero, but not the pagan values or stoic virtues of Roman civilization, which indeed were held up as the seeds of its destruction. Indoctrination was equally the purpose both of the instruction in philosophy that, accompanying physics, gave its name to the final two college years, and of the university courses in the moral, metaphysical, and juridical sciences required of students in the faculties of theology and law. At this level the thrust was intellectual rather than personal. In principle, the student entering upon higher education was a master of latinity with a well-formed character. He would be ready for a subject matter that derived from the medieval university, in essence Thomas Aquinas’s transformation of the relevant parts of the Aristotelian corpus together with Justinian and Gregory IX. When a professor treated of modern philosophers, and he could not simply ignore the thinkers who interested the reading public, he would show how to refute such aspects of the doctrines of Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Condillac as could in no way be assimilated to orthodoxy. The record, Brockliss finds, is of a hidebound curriculum and a largely sterile practice of teaching in both the humanities and moral sciences. The system, committed as it was to closing minds rather than to opening them, was not at all concerned with the advancement of knowledge but only with its management in the interests of established order. It was quite otherwise in the sciences, where the curriculum did undergo development and the teaching was open rather than closed. Not that the conscious motivation was different, but the innate intellectual progressivism of science inevitably carried conservative as well as forward-looking physics


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professors along in the transitions from Aristotelianism to Cartesianism to Newtonianism. Given the nonpolitical and amoral character of scientific knowledge, the authorities interposed no objections to these great shifts, nor to regular inclusion of particular discoveries in the teaching of science. To be sure there was always a lag, more or less important depending on the relative openness of the different institutions. For neither college nor university was a seat of research except in the case of such fortunate accidents as placed the abbé Nollet in the Collège de Navarre, the abbé Lacaille in the Collège des Quatre-Nations, and Paul-Joseph Barthez in the Medical Faculty of Montpellier. About the cogency of one of Brockliss’s particular conclusions there can be no doubt. The range and quality of French science on the eve of the Revolution would be inexplicable in the absence of the educational system through which the great majority of the Academy of Science, along with other members of the literate public, had passed. True, it carried them only to the threshold of their careers rather than into advanced training. But very few French scientists of any note were self-taught, whereas almost all of the much smaller number of their English contemporaries were. In many instances, for example Laplace’s enrollment in the mathematics courses taught by Christophe Gadbled and Pierre Le Canu at Caen, we know the identity of the masters. The point may be extended beyond science to French civilization in general. Its level, appeal, and influence inside and outside France presuppose that the cultivation of a considerable element of the population depended on education and not on class or birthright. Beyond that, Brockliss descries a tension between the conservative outlook inculcated in the humanities and moral sciences and the critical spirit of the mechanistic philosophy engendered, however unintentionally, by the teaching of science. He thus explains the acquiescence of the educated class in the political system until the dam broke in 1789 together with their openness to the literature of the Enlightenment. It may have been even so, or partly so. It may, however, also seem that the dichotomy is a bit simplistic. For Brockliss’s argument with respect to the humanities and moral sciences supposes, what is very doubtful, that teachers have the effect on students’ minds and sensibilities that they intend to have, and that schooling was the reason for conformism among an educated public whose bourgeois component had every reason to espouse practical reform even as it did intellectual liberalism. What seems more plausible is that the vast majority had no political choices to make until the breakdown of the regime opened their eyes to the possibility of realizing their real interests. It may further be that the Revolution itself was the forum in which the effects of a classical education made themselves felt in politics. To say that the history of the French Revolution may be read as a recapitulation of Roman history would, no doubt, be an exaggeration, but not a gratuitous

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exaggeration. What the schooling of the revolutionary generation leaders did accomplish was to provide its leaders with a political vocabulary, something denied them by their own history, and, in the measure that language shapes events, with a set of choices and commitments. The very ideas of the Republic itself, of Stoic Virtue, of Citizenship, of Public Safety the Supreme Law, of a champion of the plebes (Babeuf) taking the name Gracchus, of the conquest of Egypt, of a proconsular coup d’état, of resort to a triumvirate of consuls, of a Senate, of a Tribunate, not to mention the overall process through which the Republic degenerated politically while developing militarily into Empire, a transformation consummated by the acceptance as something virtually natural of the conqueror’s self-proclamation as Emperor—such a historical drama presupposes actors who had learned their lines, and also the manner of declaiming them, through study of the history of the Roman Republic and the Augustan Principate. That reflection may help explain how the French Revolution could dispense with the creative leadership of great men. It took its categories ready-made from history and filled in the blanks with modern content. As to the antithetical part of the Brockliss argument, the liberalizing effect of the teaching of science, it depends on an assumption contrary to his supposition with regard to humanistic pedagogy, namely that here the professors had an influence they did not intend, which was to open their students’ minds. A more general point needs to be stated, though this is not the place to press it. The proposition that the Enlightenment owed its impetus to the scientific movement is no longer tenable. The reverse was equally true, and the relationship is to be perceived rather as one of symbiosis than of causality one way or the other. Certainly it is true that science normally flourishes rather in a future-oriented than in a regressive culture, but the effect is indirect. Seldom are practicing scientists significant participants in actual politics, whether concerned with reform or anything else, and such proved to be the case during the Revolution. Nor are practicing politicians characteristically sympathetic to the concerns of scientists.53 If, to return to this aspect of the Brockliss interpretation, the progressive politicians of 1792–94 had in truth owed their cast of mind to the influence of the scientific aspects of their education, it is strange that they should have turned so totally deaf an ear to Condorcet’s grand plea for basing a republican system of education primarily on science. 5. THE POLITICAL SETTING

Of all the measures that occupied Condorcet in the Revolution, his educational plan was the one he took most to heart. That he should have been 53

These considerations are more fully developed in Gillispie (1968) and (1980), pp. 549–552.

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the spokesman for public education at the outset may be thought the zenith of his career politically, just as his life culminated intellectually a year and a half later in composition of the essay on the progress of the human mind. With respect to both achievements, the circumstances could scarcely have been less auspicious. Condorcet had neither the born politician’s gift for timing nor the blessing of luck. The schedule called for him to present his Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation générale de l’instruction publique to the National Assembly on 20 April 1792. On the previous afternoon that body had been advised that the King intended to visit at 12:30. In accordance with the agenda, Condorcet mounted the tribune and began reading his fifty-page report. Thirty minutes into it, his monotone was interrupted by the head usher announcing the arrival of royalty. Into the chamber stepped Louis XVI, followed by the bellicose Girondist ministers who had replaced the discredited Feuillants on 9 March. At their head were Roland de la Platière, Minister of the Interior, and General Dumouriez, Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the name of the King, Dumouriez demanded Declaration of War against Austria, asserting that peaceful means of settling differences had been exhausted. The Constitution precluded holding debates in the presence of the monarch, and the meeting was adjourned. Reconvening that evening, the National Assembly, with only seven contrary voices, declared a war, not of dynastic conquest, but of defense of liberty, a war not of nations, but of peoples against kings. The next day, 21 April 1792, Condorcet resumed and completed his report. The minds of his fellow deputies can scarcely have been running on what it would be that six-year-olds should learn in primary school. Menaced by foreign armies, beset by treason, ever more bitterly divided over the status of the King, the Legislative Assembly never again took up education in the four tense months left to it before the rising of Paris abolished the Monarchy on 10 August. Seldom have hopes held of a representative body been more drastically dissipated. In October 1791, at the time when the Legislative Assembly convened, moderates had supposed, or perhaps pretended, that the Revolution was over and that the newly elected legislature would be the first in a regular sequence of national assemblies exercising legislative power under the new Constitution. To that end the Constituent Assembly had adopted a provision refusing its members the right to stand for reelection. Intended to preclude perpetuation both of their power and their divisions, this self-denying ordinance had the effect of intensifying the latter while institutionalizing inexperience among all factions. On the right sat the partisans of constitutional monarchy, the Feuillants, who had split off from the Jacobins when the fiasco of the King’s flight to Varennes further radicalized the latter. On the left, occupying the high ranks later called the Mountain, sat those who

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had become republicans more or less openly. The salon of Madame Roland was their gathering place and Brissot their spokesman and leader on the floor of the Assembly, whence the name Brissotins for the party later known as Girondists after their provincial base, which was mainly in the Southwest. In the center sat the mass of deputies derisively dubbed the Plain or the Marais. Debates were for the most part empty of substance. What concerned the public was not legislation. The real issues were dangers posed by the e´migrés plotting against the Revolution at every foreign court, festering division over the status of the church and clergy, accelerating depreciation of assignats, uncollectability of taxes, rising prices, the danger posed to French commerce and colonies by the revolt of the slaves in the future Haiti, the menace of foreign intervention, finally the regime itself. Nor was the Assembly the forum that counted. It was the Jacobin Society, wherein the majority of the Brissotins were inscribed, but where the voices mainly heard were those of veteran revolutionaries, foremost among them Maximilien Robespierre. Still further to the left on the political spectrum was the Cordeliers Club, dominated by Danton, and intimately associated with the popular sections of Paris. On the national scale, the effective chain of authority no longer ran from ministries of state down through official channels to the agents of local government. The latter were for the most part incapable of carrying out directives from ministers in Paris even had they wished to do so. The nervous system that worked throughout the body politic was the network of Jacobin Clubs in constant correspondence with the extra-governmental seat of political power, the parent club in rue SaintHonoré. The hostility of European courts, the activities of the e´migrés in general and the King’s brothers in particular (the comte d’Artois in Trier, the comte de Provence in Turin), the political paranoia that in this, as in comparable situations throughout history, blamed the inability to resolve problems at home on the machinations of enemies abroad—all those factors fueled the movement to submerge internal differences and save the Revolution by a preemptive strike against its foreign foes. Thus opened the war that for a quarter-century France was to wage against Europe in general. In company with Brissot and the majority of republicans, Robespierre excepted, Condorcet was of the war party. His expectations were as unrealistic as those of the King himself, though in the opposite sense. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their confidants calculated that war would produce a rallying to the crown or a defeat of France, either of which would undo the Revolution. Condorcet supposed, on the contrary, that internal divisions would be healed, that among the e´migrés many who were patriots at heart would rally to the nation, that liberal and anti-imperial elements in England, in Poland, in the kingdom of Sardinia would bring those govern-

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ments to side with humanity, that Prussian statesmen would recall how Austria was ever the enemy, in short that an alliance of forces of the future would prevail over incorrigible tyrannies in Austria and Spain bent on rescuing the remnants of monarchy in France. With respect to foreign as well as domestic policy, Condorcet’s break with moderate opinion was thus entire.54 At the same time, his bearing and deportment, and indeed his lineage, were such that the left could never feel him to be one of theirs. Robespierre and Condorcet distrusted each other politically and detested each other viscerally. In the early months of the Legislative Assembly, Condorcet defended the right to travel and reside abroad, despite its abuse by the e´migrés. He persisted in summonses to rigor over fiscal policy and called for amortizing the assignats rather than issuing further amounts in small denominations. He was a foremost advocate of emancipation of slaves at a time when plantations were being torched and colonists murdered in Saint-Domingue. Such stands, truth-driven as always, irritated enthusiasts pressing for easy and popular—Condorcet kept saying erroneous—remedies for political insecurity and for the worsening financial crisis. The Declaration of War allayed nothing. On the contrary, it exacerbated disarray. Military prospects were alarming. An undisciplined army of recruits commanded by a decimated officer corps faced the joined Austrian and Prussian forces reinforced by regiments composed of e´migrés. Future montagnards of the Jacobin left blamed the situation on the Brissotin or Girondist faction, which in turn pointed to royalist and counter-revolutionary machinations. Louis XVI turned on his Girondist ministers and dismissed the lot. Coexistence of the National Assembly with a monarchical form of government having become unworkable, the only serious question was how to end it. Condorcet insisted on legality.55 The answer proved to be insurrection. A rehearsal was held on 20 June, one of the signal revolutionary journées. Mobs invaded the meeting place of the Assembly in the Manège and occupied the Tuileries, terrorizing the legislators and menacing the person of the King until the Mayor of Paris, Pétion, persuaded the rioters to disperse. The Assembly reacted to the ensuing paralysis of government by creating a sort of Committee of Public Safety avant la lettre. This Commission of 21 included Vergniaud, Brissot, Guyton de Morveau, and Guadet among its number. They proceeded to name Condorcet their chairman. His credit was still important. He, it was felt, could reconcile constitutionalism with a change of regime if anyone could. In the event, the enemy commander was the one whose actions sealed the fate of Louis XVI. Word of the Duke of 54 The evolution of his opinions may be followed in the journal he edited, Chronique de Paris. 55 “Opinion sur les mesures générales propres a` sauver la patrie des dangers imminents dont elle est menacée, prononcée a` l’Assemblée Nationale le 6 juillet 1792,” Oeuvres 10, pp. 477– 519.

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Brunswick’s manifesto, which threatened the population of Paris with reprisals if the least harm should befall the royal family, reached the city on 2 August. On the ninth Condorcet read the recommendation of the Commission of 21 before the National Assembly. It called for legal suspension of the King and convocation of a constitutional convention.56 By then any proposal at all would have been moot. The next day, 10 August, the sans-culottes again poured out of the popular quarters, and the insurrectional Commune of Paris seized power for the people. 6. THE CONVENTION

The impression sometimes obtains that the Legislative Assembly adjourned sine die on 10 August, leaving the country without a legislature pending inauguration of the Republic and opening of the Convention on 21 September 1792. Not so—as a general rule the formalities have been observed when the regime changes in France, whatever the political or military crisis that prompted recourse to force and however improvised the transition. Condorcet followed the events of 10 August from the insecurity of his seat in the Assembly, in the midst of which the royal family had taken still less secure refuge from the mob that invaded the Tuileries and decimated its defenders, the Swiss Guards. Still chairman of the Commission of 21, Condorcet drafted the denunciation of Louis XVI adopted by the Assembly on 13 August in justification of his suspension.57 Still of the inner legislative circle, Condorcet was party to nomination of candidates for executive office and proposed his mathematical colleague, Gaspard Monge, known for advanced political views, to be Minister of Marine Affairs in the provisional government energized by Danton at the Ministry of Justice. Roland returned to the Ministry of the Interior. Real power, raw power issuing from the direct democracy of the Paris sections, had been seized by the insurrectional Commune. Though retaining Bailly’s successor, Pétion, in the figurehead office of mayor, the triumvirate of Danton, Robespierre, and Marat dominated the Commune. Throughout the interval, Condorcet in common with the Girondist deputies, many of whom remained in Paris, never acknowledged that the Commune had, in point of hard political fact, seized the controls and that their rump of a National Assembly was spinning its wheels. Like most of them, he averted his gaze from the outbreak of mass paranoia and sadism in early 56

“Rapport fait au nom d’une commission extraordinaire a` l’Assemblée Nationale, sur une pétition de la Commune de Paris, tendante a` la déchéance du Roi” (9 août 1792), Oeuvres 10, pp. 523–530. 57 “Exposition des motifs d’après lesquels l’Assemblée Nationale a proclamé la convocation d’une Commission extraordinaire et prononcé la suspension du pouvoir exécutif entre les mains du Roi,” Oeuvres 10, pp. 550–564.

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September. Amid the breakdown of authority a kind of visceral atavism set in among ordinary people. Imagining enemies on every hand, bands of artisans, shopkeepers, and tradesmen, alongside the ever-desperate poor of the faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, invaded the prisons of Paris and massacred eleven to fourteen hundred of some two thousand inmates. Political detainees, noblemen, refractory priests and nuns, prostitutes, thieves, and petty pickpockets—all were butchered on equal terms. This, which remains the most inexplicable of the outbreaks of savagery that punctuated the great movement of the Revolution, touched the scientific community in an eminent particular. On 4 September the duc de La Rochefoucauld was traveling to La Roche-Guyon in company with his wife, his mother, the duchesse d’Enville, and the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, of equally noble lineage. Vigilantes stopped the carriage on the highway near Gisors, dragged the duke from his place, stabbed him to death without robbing him, and hurled the corpse at the feet of his two ladies and his friend. No matter how ominous the circumstances, Condorcet was determined to win election to the Convention, now that the chance had come for constituting the Republic. He could not be reelected in Paris, deplore the division between capital and country though he might, for the Commune had adopted a quite unconstitutional ordinance requiring electors to cast their ballots in public. The provinces proved more appreciative of his philosophic reputation, however, and Condorcet’s name appeared on the final list of no fewer than five departments. He chose to represent l’Aisne, his native region in Picardy. The three-year span of the Convention, from 21 September 1792 through 25 October 1795 (3 brumaire an IV), was the crux, not to say the crucible, of the French Revolution. De facto the Republic already existed. It had emerged full grown in August out of the sense of the people, like Athena from the head of Zeus. The mission of the Convention—the name was chosen with the American model in mind—was twofold, both constitutive and legislative: to give the Republic a constitution and to govern France in the meantime. In considering the dispositions taken by the Convention with respect to science, it will be convenient to follow its affairs topically through the main phases of revolutionary politics. The topics are three: first, the continuing discussion of education and the measures adopted concerning scientific institutions more generally; second, the preparation of the metric system of weights and measures; and third, the involvement of science in prosecution of the war. The phases were also threefold. The first was occupied by the factional struggle between the Mountain and the Gironde. The conflict opened with the latter in the stronger position and closed with the victory of the former and arrest of the leading Girondin deputies on 2 June 1793. The second period, of just a year from July 1793 to the overthrow of Robes-

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pierre on 27 July 1794 (9 thermidor an II), comprised the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, often and rightly called the Reign of Terror. The ensuing and third period, ending with the dissolution of the Convention on October 1795, is usually designated the Thermidorean reaction. The term is an improper one on the whole. No element in the Convention had any thought of undoing the Revolution, let alone of restoring the old regime. Those fifteen months will be better understood as a time when political passions, exhausted rather than appeased, were subordinated to fundamental interests in the process of institutionalizing the profound changes in polity through which the Revolution achieved the modernization of the basic structures of French society. Before considering the further developments affecting education and science, we will need to recall the pattern of events in the first phase of the history of the Convention. Throughout that eight-month factional struggle, the fortunes both of the Gironde and the Mountain were intimately related to the fortunes of war, though in opposite ways. The Girondists depended on military success in the war they had favored. When reverses set in, as they did in the spring of 1793, the Republic in danger turned to their opponents, to the men capable of extreme measures. After the opening of the Convention, the Girondists were on the offensive politically even as French armies were on the offensive in the field. On 20 September, the day before the initial session, Dumouriez and Kellermann won a victory, the first French victory, at Valmy. Outflanked, and intimidated by the e´lan of patriotic soldiers, the Prussians withdrew without a serious battle into the Rhineland. Thereupon Dumouriez wheeled the Army of the North into the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium, and, meeting with little resistance, occupied much of the country. The Rhineland, meanwhile, fell as readily to a second French force under the command of Custine, whose Army of the Rhine occupied Speyr, Worms, and Mainz. The lifting, however momentary, of the military threat that had precipitated the fall of the monarchy freed the factions to indulge their partisan animosities. One question loomed over all others. What disposition awaited Louis XVI, imprisoned with his family in the Temple? The debate occupied the Convention throughout December 1792 and much of January 1793. Should the King be tried for treason? Before what tribunal? A special court? The whole Convention? If he was convicted, should the judgment be submitted to the people for ratification by referendum? Should punishment be a separate issue? Would a sentence of death be just? If so, would execution be politic? Ringing the changes on those differences widened the gulf between Montagnards and Girondists. Most of the latter temporized. On 21 January 1793 the issue was resolved by the guillotine, mounted on the present site of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Execution of Louis XVI made the division between factions unbridgeable politically as it had long since become temperamentally.


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Flush with military success, carried away by the prospect of exporting the Revolution, the regicide Convention proceeded to declare war on England and Holland on 1 February and on Spain on 7 March, thus provoking formation of the first coalition in the conflict that pitted France against Europe. Successive annexations, of the county of Nice, of Monaco, of the Alsatian enclaves ruled by German princes, of Belgium, and of papal Avignon, turned the war of peoples against kings into one of French conquest. Or would-be conquest, for the tide turned. Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and idol of the Girondists, resented the packing of critical bureaus in the Ministry of War by activists of the Commune and their interference in the conduct of the war. For he had his own agenda. Montagnards, both in the Jacobin Society and in the Convention, suspected him of harboring proconsular designs. Among his hidden projects—it was feared—was a triumphal return from a conquest of Holland and replacement of Louis XVI with the duc d’Orléans on a restored throne, behind which he would be the military éminence grise. His detractors were only partly right. What Dumouriez probably had in mind was a restoration of an eight-year-old Louis XVII, imprisoned with Marie Antoinette in the Temple. However that may have been, on 18 March the Austrians defeated his army at Neerwinden. In the ensuing negotiation, Dumouriez traitorously agreed with the enemy commander to evacuate Belgium and to march on Paris with Austrian support. When the Minister of War, Beurnonville, accompanied by four deputies from the Convention, arrived at his headquarters to relieve him from command, he arrested the lot, handed them over as prisoners to the Austrians, and attempted to turn his army against the revolutionary regime. It refused to follow, and on 5 April Dumouriez himself defected to the Austrians, bundling into his carriage with him the duc de Chartres, future Louis ´ Philippe, heir to the duc d’Orléans, now Philippe Egalit´ e.58 Meeting with comparable reverses in Germany, Custine (though not at all treasonous) was forced to abandon a French garrison in Mainz and, on 1 April, to withdraw from the Rhineland. Meanwhile, the threat of civil war compounded defeat beyond the frontier. On 3 March the peasantry of the backward and very Catholic Vendée rose in insurrection. The Convention’s resort to conscription was what provoked the rising, but their anger went deeper. It was rooted in layers of hostility to a Revolution that left them landless while favoring well-off townspeople. Confined at first to the one department, the Vendéan insurgency spread by mid-summer into a rebellion of the Catholic peasantry and nobility joined together throughout Brittany and the west of France. Elsewhere in the country endemic resistance to conscription cropped up here and there even as a constant trickle of desertions among soldiers already in uniform swelled into a stream. The home front fared no better. Prices rose. Assignats depreciated. The 58

On Dumouriez, see Chuquet (1914).

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Convention decreed that merchants accept them at face value. In vain— another billion, two hundred million were printed on 5 May. Discontent simmered in working-class quarters and boiled up in sporadic pillaging of groceries and bakeries. Its leaders—the enragés—demanded a policy of economic regulation—price controls, forced requisition of provisions, death for hoarders and speculators—from a Convention consisting of propertied deputies purporting to represent the people. As control over events slipped out of the hands of government, the factions in the Convention blamed each other. In Girondist eyes, the Mountain consisted of demagogues inciting the rabble and toadying to the Commune of Paris while subjecting their own fair cities and regions to the depredations of an ungovernable capital, a monstrous leech draining the lifeblood of the country into the Seine. The Mountain saw the Girondists as closet aristocrats in republican clothing, unprincipled, compromising, corrupt, worst of all unpatriotic. Objectively the difference was neither social nor economic. Or barely so—the Girondists may have been marginally wealthier on average, the Montagnards somewhat more sensitive to the needs of workers and peasants, and also more willing to use the people as a tool to serve their own ends. But the decisive outward difference was regional. Paris was the core of Montagnard strength, augmented by strong representation from the North and the Atlantic port cities, Rouen, Le Havre, Nantes, though not Bordeaux. The Gironde took its very name from the Southwest, and exerted the greater appeal throughout the provinces and major cities elsewhere, especially Lyons. Among the 749 deputies elected in September 1792, around a hundred sat on the high benches of the Mountain and roughly two hundred with the Gironde. The competition for the votes needed to prevail from among the uncommitted of the Plain was not symmetrical. As late as April 1793 the advantage of numbers still lay with the Girondists. The incalculable but more dynamic advantage of revolutionary will lay with the Mountain: witness the execution of the King, for which the underlying motivation was less hatred of Louis XVI than a determination to burn the bridges and preclude any return to the past. It would be overly simple but not false to say that the Girondists took their inspiration from the Encyclopedists and the Montagnards from Rousseau. Shrinking from extreme measures, the Girondists resonated to liberty. Embracing extreme measures, the Montagnards resonated to fraternity and, though more ambivalently, to equality. Enjoying life, the Girondists were republicans for whom the Revolution was a great adventure.59 Harboring resentments, the Montagnards were republicans, and some few were democrats, for whom the Revolution was a great cause. 59 In the vast literature on the Girondist-Jacobin contrast and conflict, the most informative and suggestive works are Talmon (1952), Sydenham (1961), Soboul (1980), Jaune (1989), and Furet and Ozouf (1991).


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Before it could dominate the Convention, the Mountain had first to secure its hold over the Jacobin Society. What defined the Jacobins under the Legislative Assembly was the republicanism of its members. In its early months Brissot and Vergniaud were no less Jacobins than Robespierre and Marat. The differences within the Society (originally named Friends of the Constitution) were at first incidental matters of local interest, general emphasis, and personality. After March 1792, when Louis XVI named leading Brissotins—Roland, Servan, Clavière along with Dumouriez—to the ministry, incipient rivalry partook of opposition to government, often bitter. It was unappeased by the king’s dismissal of Roland and his colleagues on 13 June. After the rising of 10 August destroyed the monarchy, divisions deepened into hostilities and hatreds, exacerbated progressively by the Insurrectional Commune’s seizure of governmental power, by the horror of the massacres in September, and by the looming question of the King. Ever the bearer of Revolution and unconstrained by parliamentary rules, the Jacobin Society rid itself of its Girondist members, repelling some, expelling others, one by one or a few at a time, until on 1 March it resolved to exclude all deputies who had voted to submit the King’s sentencing to a referendum. The military reverses of March and April 1793 were, finally, what undid the Gironde, whose leaders appeared unable or unwilling to wage the war they had provoked. They were fatally compromised by the treason of Dumouriez, the general they had trusted, even as they had been damaged in August 1792 by the nearly identical defection of LaFayette. Orchestrating the vendetta, now in the pages of L’Ami du Peuple, now from the tribune of the Jacobins, now from a seat in the Convention, Marat was in his element. Journalist and muckraker of genius that he was, his personal paranoia was a microcosm of the political realities.60 On being elected president of the Jacobins on 1 April 1793, Marat called for and secured a resolution summoning “brothers and friends” to rise up and arrest all enemies of “our Revolution.” Alarmed, the centrist majority in the Convention supported the Girondist motion calling for indictment of Marat for incendiary acts. When the revolutionary tribunal acquitted him on 24 April, he returned in triumph to the Convention on the shoulders of the crowd. Retribution followed. The month of May brought severe economic hardship for the working class of Paris. Girondist leaders had the maladresse to allow the Mountain to appear as champions of economic regulation. The half-measures then enacted did little to ease matters in practice, but opposing the attempt appeared to be siding with the rich against the poor. Once again, leaders of the popular quarters called out the sans-culottes to force the Revolution leftward. A mass demonstration on 31 May ended late in the evening without decisive action. On 2 June cannon of the National 60

On Marat, see Coquard (1993), pp. 357–417.

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Guard backed by shouting masses surrounded the Convention, sitting now in the palace of the Tuileries. In command was Thomas Hanriot, a birthright sans-culotte of stentorian voice and muscular stature, one of the few truly working-class revolutionaries. One of his deputies was the minor chemist and professor of mineralogy Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, formerly an assistant in Lavoisier’s laboratory, currently an intimate of the Jacobin mayor of Paris, Jean-Nicolas Pache.61 Hassenfratz was of the coterie that had organized the affair, having made their own the Montagnard demand for arrest of the twenty-nine leading Girondist deputies and the ministers of finance and foreign affairs. As on the other great revolutionary journées, Bastille Day and 10 August, popular force-majeure carried the day. The centrist deputies had two choices: to accede, or to let the Convention go the way of the Monarchy and themselves the way of the court and royal family. They acceded. The triumph of the Montagnards was thus complete—even too complete, in that their tactics invested the politics of the Revolution with social and economic dimensions that formed no part of their bourgeois vision of the future. After the fall of the Girondists, the term “Montagnards” also dropped from currency. In effect it already meant the same as “Jacobins,” and the Jacobins were now the motor driving government. The Commune of Paris, not the Committee of Public Safety, was the wellspring of the uprising of 2 June. The latter had been named on 6 April upon receipt of the news of Dumouriez’s desertion. Its initial mission was to assure liaison between the Convention and the ministers, but in practice the Committee of Public Safety quickly became the seat of executive authority. Ministers merely carried its directives into effect. Danton was the foremost member at the outset, seconded by Guyton de Morveau and Barère among eight others until 10 July. In this early phase, the great Committee, as it became known, was thoroughly Jacobin but little despotic. It was the election of Robespierre on 27 July and enlargement from nine to twelve members that marked the start of dictatorship and government by terror, ending one year later to the day, 9 thermidor an II of the Revolutionary calendar. 7. EDUCATION AND SCIENCE

The rules of the Convention limited deputies to membership of a single standing commmittee. Condorcet for his part chose the Committee on the Constitution, thus in effect leaving further discussion of his plan for education to his erstwhile colleagues and their new associates on the Comité d’Instruction Publique. Nothing had been settled, but he had succeeded in setting the educational agenda, whereas endowing the Republic with a Constitution was, after all, the raison d’être of the Convention. 61

Grison (1996), pp. 153–75.

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Elected vice-president of the Convention in its opening session, on 21 September, Condorcet seemed destined to play a considerable part in its general proceedings. Girondists in the Legislative Assembly had grown used to depending on him for intellectual legitimation, and he on them, particularly on Vergniaud and Brissot, to clothe his views in oratory and retort on the stream of vilification visited on him in the pages of Marat and the speeches of Robespierre. In the larger and more tumultuous Convention, where declamation and passion made the orator, Condorcet proved even less capable of making himself heard. Neither faction wished to hear his preachments about the unity of all republicans, and his association with the Girondists began to falter in the autumn of 1792. To say that his political sympathies continued to move leftward would misrepresent the tenor of his views. If Condorcet distanced himself from his onetime Girondist allies, and he did, it was because he considered them to be abusing their initial electoral advantage. He thought their conduct aggressive and divisive, aggressive in fastening the blame for outrage and massacre on leaders of the Mountain and of the popular sections, divisive in exacerbating the hostility of provincial opinion with respect to Paris and its populace. If he also drew closer to the Mountain in the autumn of 1792, it was because he admired in Danton the incarnation of just such a national will as the Revolution was meant to arouse in a Republic one and indivisible. Marat and Robespierre were merely evils to be outlived, the one a loathsome charlatan in his eyes, the other a jesuitical zealot cloaking religiosity in politics. Condorcet, in sum, was incapable of being at one with either faction, the less so since he disallowed the legitimacy of party in public affairs. The anomaly of Condorcet’s situation comes out in his position with respect to the disposition of Louis XVI. True to his constitutional principles, Condorcet held that the accused should indeed be brought to trial, but before a special tribunal, not before the National Convention. When that did, nevertheless, happen, he voted with the majority for finding the former King guilty of conspiring to undo liberty and of sabotaging national security. He then sided, again with the majority, against submitting the judgment to popular ratification. Finally, any capital punishment being inadmissible, he voted with the minority against execution. Adherence to all this principle left Condorcet as isolated politically as he was philosophically. Elected to serve with him on the Constitutional Committee were Sieyès, Pétion, Vergniaud, Paine, Brissot, Gensonné, Barère, and Danton, all of whom received more votes in the Convention than did Condorcet. Lag though he did in popularity, Condorcet dominated the proceedings by virtue of knowledge and motivation. Sieyès shared the former but lacked the latter. Or perhaps it was prudence that led Sieyès to shun the limelight, many elements of the Third Estate having turned out to be other than what he had expected in 1789. In any case, the draft of a constitution presented to

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the Convention on 15 February 1793 was essentially the work of Condorcet. It called for a centralized state, a unicameral legislature, an executive consisting of a largely autonomous council of elective ministers, an elective judiciary, and provision for direct political action by initiative and referendum. Since no constitution should be a straitjacket, it would be subject to periodic review and amendment by successive Conventions to be convoked at twenty-year intervals.62 Condorcet’s voice and strength gave out halfway through his presentation. Barère had to relieve him, and Gensonné to complete the reading the next day. The proposal was heard with a general indifference sharpened by hostility among the Montagnards. The Convention took no action other than to give deputies two months to reflect while inviting them in the meanwhile to frame amendments or alternative proposals. By that time, mid-April, the political and military situation had soured. What with the treason of Dumouriez, the rebellion in the Vendée, and the conflict between Mountain and Gironde, all envenomed by Marat and the gutter press, the Condorcet constitution issued from committee as dead as a letter can be. To return now from Condorcet’s constitutional design to his educational proposals, the rhetoric of the concurrent debate over the plan he had submitted to the Legislative Assembly, like the phrasing of the text itself, would lead the unwary to suppose that the schools of the old regime, besides having been vicious, had been shut down at the beginning of revolution, leaving classrooms empty to await the new dispensation. In practice successive national assemblies were nothing like so dogmatic. When the dˆıme, or tithe, an important source of revenue for many colleges, was abolished along with other feudal dues on 4 August 1789, the Constituent Assembly recognized the need to find other ways to subsidize schools, colleges, and hospitals. A decree of 20 April 1790 did assign administration of ecclesiastical properties to local authorities, but it made an exception for the endowments of colleges and other educational and charitable institutions.63 To be sure, the normal rhythm of teaching and learning, as of everything else, was much disturbed. The effects of the civil constitution of the clergy divided faculties and decimated teaching staffs. Some teachers took the oath to the constitution. Others refused. Still, even amid the gravest disorders in a body politic, most people try their best to maintain their occupations and to do each day what they did the day before. Schoolteachers and their pupils were no exception. Individual and local petitions to the Comité d’Instruction Publique are evidence that many a master and mistress managed to persevere.64 As for the colleges, a clause of the decree of 18 August 1792, which dis62 63 64

⬘ AP (15 February 1793), 1ere série, 58, pp. 583–609. ⬘ AP (20 April 1790), 1ere série, 13, p. 148. PVCd’IP (L), Appendice, pp. 385–442.


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solved the religious congregations in the wake of the overthrow of the monarchy, required members of the secular clergy engaged in teaching, both in schools and colleges, to remain in their posts until such time as a national system should be established. A further decree of 27 October 1792 provided for salaries and maintained teachers in their lodgings. Endowments continued to be exempted from the nationalization of church property until 8 March 1793, when finally the Convention adopted a measure recommended jointly by the Committees of Finance and Public Instruction that called for educational assets to be treated like other clerical resources and sold for the benefit of the nation.65 Thrown on their own, administrators of many colleges improvised as best they could, tightening belts and turning for support to municipalities, departmental authorities, and parents. Certain of the strongest institutions, for example the former Benedectine colleges of Pontlevoy and of Sorrèze and the famous Louis-le-Grand in Paris, renamed ´ Collège de l’Egalit´ e, held classes of some sort right through the Terror and all the changes of regime that followed.66 Among Condorcet’s scientific colleagues of the original Comité d’Instruction Publique, Arbogast, Carnot, Prieur, and Romme had also been reelected to the Convention, as had Guyton de Morveau. Lacepède had not chosen to stand, however. Nor had Broussonet or Tenon, the other two members of the Academy of Science who had held seats in the Legislative Assembly. A scientist who did was Antoine-Fran¸cois de Fourcroy, well known in the quarter of the Jardin des Plantes, where his chemistry course was attended by persons from all walks of life. One of the co-authors of the system of chemical nomenclature, a member of the board of the new Annales de chimie, and Guyton’s successor as editor of the dictionary of chemistry in the Encyclopédie méthodique, Fourcroy had become a prominent player on Lavoisier’s team before 1789. He had, it may be thought, an instinct for siding with the winners in any set of circumstances. Elected an alternate deputy for the city of Paris, Fourcroy joined the Jacobin Club, where the oratorical gift that had made him a famous lecturer served the politics of the Mountain. On 22 July 1793 the Convention named him to replace Marat, assassinated on the thirteenth, the eve of Bastille Day, and immediately assigned him to the Comité d’Instruction Publique.67 Four others among the new members of that committee took a particular interest in the politics of the arts and sciences, namely Fran¸cois Daunou, Jacques-Louis David, Henri Grégoire, and Joseph Lakanal. An Oratorian and professor of philosophy before 1789, Daunou made himself known by the address he delivered at the funeral of Parisians who fell in the attack on 65 66 67

PVCd’IP (L), pp. x–xvii; PVCd’IP 1, pp. 23–31, 343–345. Palmer (1975), pp. 125–48. PVCd’IP 2, p. vi; Kersaint (1966), p. 30.

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the Bastille. Accepting the civil constitution of the clergy, he was appointed vicar to the constitutional bishop of Calais in his native department, which elected him to the Convention in September 1792. Daunou was a member of the Comité d’Instruction Publique from January until October 1793, when he was arrested in consequence of having put his signature to a protest against the arrest of the Girondist deputies on the previous 2 June. Unlike them, he was spared the guillotine throughout fourteen months in prison and released in December 1794. On resuming his seat in the Convention, Daunou was to serve on the Committee on Organic Laws. The hard work of drafting the Constitution of the year III (1795) fell to him. His was to be the pen, therefore, that would preserve those features of the Condorcet Educational Plan that were incorporated in the organization of the Institut de France, and which remain its constitutional basis.68 David may be thought not only the most accomplished artist of his time, as indeed he was, but painter laureate of the entire revolutionary epoch. His sense of the opportune was no less acute than Fourcroy’s. David’s portrait of Lavoisier seated quill in hand before his writing table, with chemical apparatus before him and Madame Lavoisier at his shoulder, epitomizes the dignity accorded science in the closing years of the old regime. Thereafter David’s tableaux magnify the great moments: the Oath of the Tennis Court, the crucifixion of Marat in his bath, the coronation of Napoleon, the regality of the Bonapartes. The revolutionary career of the abbé Grégoire affords the rare, perhaps the unique, instance to show that fidelity to principles of democracy and Christianity was possible in a public-spirited person of clear mind and selfless character throughout all changes of regime. Schooled by the Jesuits, Grégoire was a priest so open to the ideas of the Enlightenment that he published a tract advocating tolerance for Jews in 1788.69 He represented the lower clergy of Lorraine in the States-General and took the lead in rallying his fellows to throw in their lot with the Third Estate. Grégoire joined with Condorcet in the Société des Amis des Noirs, became its president in January 1790, and published a study of the literature and intellectual faculties of blacks in 1808.70 Though opposed to the suppression of monastic orders, he took a foremost part in drawing up the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, was the first to take its required oath late in December 1790, and served as constitutional bishop of Blois (Loir-et-Cher) from February 1791. Consistently republican in his sympathies, he identified himself neither with factious Girondists nor with fanatical Jacobins. He favored, for example, 68

On Daunou, see Taillandier (1847). Essai sur la régénération physique, morale, et politique des juifs (Metz, 1788). 70 De la littérature des nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morale, et leur littérature, suivi de notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres, et les arts. 69


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the trial but not the execution of the King. Grégoire made the work of the Comité d’Instruction Publique his central interest throughout the life of the Convention. His firm chairmanship was largely responsible for the relative coherence of the institutions it advocated in the constructive phase follow´ ing Thermidor—the Ecoles Centrales or secondary schools in each department, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, the Bureau des Longitudes, the Metric System, the Institut de France.71 Rather a lobbyist than a legislator of science and learning, Lakanal was of quite another stripe, except for his clerical background. A priest in the Congregation of Christian Doctrine, a teaching order, he was a professor in the 1780s, first of rhetoric at Bourges, and then of philosophy at Moulins. Lakanal readily swore his oath to the constitution in January 1791 and changed the spelling of his patronymic, Lacanal, in order to distance himself from three brothers who were unsympathetic to the Revolution. Thereupon his patron, Bernard Font, constitutional bishop of Pamier in his native Ariège, chose him to be episcopal vicar. The memoirs of Lakanal are untrustworthy.72 On occasion he claimed never to have been ordained. At other times he said that priests surrounding his youthful sickbed had extorted the vows from him during the delirium of a grave illness. While serving as deputy on mission to the Dordogne in January 1793, he wrote in a report to the Convention, “Thus, I was never a priest and everything about that horde of jugglers is foreign to my frank and loyal spirit.”73 It is unknown what the local political activities were that had led the department of l’Ariège to elect Lakanal to the Convention. He said that he hoped from the outset to be named to the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and that his expectations were not disappointed. In fact he was elected to the committee only in January 1793, at the same time as Daunou. In the absence of Condorcet, the Convention’s Comité d’Instruction Publique chose Arbogast to be the first chairman at its organizational meeting 71 Plongeron (1989) is an excellent brief study of Grégoire’s combination of democratic and Catholic principles. A facsimile reprinting of the Oeuvres de l’abbé Grégoire (14 vols., 1788– 1832) appeared in 1977 (Kraus-Thomson, Liechtenstein). Hippolyte Carnot published a twovolume selection in 1840, Mémoires de Grégoire . . . précédés d’une notice historique sur l’auteur. 72 Lakanal, Exposé sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal (1838). Equally unreliable are Nigoul (1879) and Le Gendre (1882). The only balanced account in French is the preface in Labroue (1912). Dawson (1948) is most interesting for Lakanal’s exile in America after 1815. He settled first in Kentucky, and moved to New Orleans in 1822 upon being named president of the College of Orleans. He resigned that post after two years in favor of his son-in-law, ´ Hippolyte-Lucien Charvet, an 1816 graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (Fourcy [1828], p. 454). Retiring to Mobile, Lakanal offered himself as a candidate for the first presidency of the University of Alabama, which opened in 1831. In his letter of application he acknowledged not having mastered English, and he was not selected. Lakanal returned to France in 1836, leaving descendants in Louisiana, and died in 1844. 73 Lakanal to the Convention, 25 November 1793, quoted in Labroue (1912), p. 3.

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on 15 October 1792. Twenty-four in number, the initial membership of the Committee included, besides those already noticed, the journalist LouisSebastien Mercier, a man of moderate views; the doctor Fran¸cois Lanthenas, a Girondist from Le Puy and associate of the Rolands, notable mainly for serving Tom Paine as translator; the dramatist Joseph Chénier, in political sympathies far to the left of his older brother, André, the poet; and the former Oratorian priest, Joseph Fouché, once a mathematics teacher in Nantes, remembered for his part in the massacre in Lyons in November 1793 and later as Napoleon’s Minister of Police. Arbogast’s expectation was that the task of designing a system of education had been completed, that it remained only to review the Condorcet plan and report it out for adoption by the Convention, and that the Committee would thereupon take up its other concerns having to do with the institutions and patronage of arts, letters, and science. Matters fell out otherwise. The disputes that ensued over education involved pedagogy, child psychology, religion, the family, the Enlightenment, learning, science, morality, patriotism, talent, opportunity, liberty, equality, fraternity, and the nature of the Republic.74 In that angry tangle of themes, the attitudes expressed toward science and its place in political culture will here be the focus of attention. A succession of educational proposals and counter-proposals, five in all, occupied the Committee, and to a degree the Convention, at two junctures, in December 1792 and again from June through September 1793. At neither time was the problem foremost in its claim on the attention and emotions of the deputies. In December and through most of January 1793, the overriding question, as we have seen, was the fate of the King. In the latter period, expulsion of the Girondists on 2 June, assassination of Marat on 13 July, and burgeoning dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety permitted little attention to other things. It would be a mistake, however, to see education as an issue on which the Girondists differed systematically from Montagnards. Neither in the Comité d’Instruction Publique nor on the floor of the Convention did deputies divide along those lines with respect to the Condorcet plan in particular or to educational matters in general. The coincidence of their being debated at times of great political stress had the effect of heightening emotions rather than aligning opinions. The most that can be said, and this none too categorically, is that deputies on the extremes of right and left, those whose politics partook of religiosity, whether Catholic and retrograde or civic and 74

The fullest account continues to be the introduction (1891) by Guillaume, PVCd’IP, vol. 1, which prints the texts. There is a clear general summary in Palmer (1985), chapter 4. The analysis of Coutel, in Coutel and Kintzlen (1989), vol. 1, 199–240, rather labors the relevance of the debate for current educational politics.


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progressive, reacted with hostility to the rationalism of the Condorcet plan. Its defense and amendment depended on persons, Girondist and Jacobin, in whose minds the eventual success of the Revolution as the political realization of the Enlightenment was necessarily a function of the development of an informed and intelligent citizenry.75 Having completed its review, article by article, of the first and most urgent part of the Condorcet plan, the section dealing with primary schools, the Committee on 20 November adopted a legislative proposal largely embodying those provisions together with a report worded rather vaguely by Lanthenas.76 Three weeks elapsed before the Convention took up the matter. On 12 December Joseph Chénier presented the text of the proposed measure, though without reading Lanthenas’s report, which had been printed. He won applause for his emphasis on the article stipulating that religious instruction must on no account be given in schools, but only in houses of worship. In reaction, another member of the Committee, Durand de Maillane, who had (so he said) made his objections known to his colleagues in vain, broke ranks and declared his intention to present a different plan. A specialist in ecclesiastical law in the old regime, Durand de Maillane had been an architect of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy during the Constituent Assembly. Given the floor, over Chénier’s objection, this deputy from Aix-en-Provence, who sat among the central mass of the Convention called the Plain, delivered himself of a denunciation of the Committee’s project. Its motifs, indistinguishable in many respects from the tenets of Marat, echoed and reechoed throughout discussions of the relation of science and learning to republicanism. The proposed primary schools, Durand warned, were designed to be the groundwork of a structure culminating in the so-called National Society, which was certain to become a “formidable corporation.” It is passing strange that the nation, after having shaken off the yoke of tyrants, after having rid itself of priestly domination, should under the guise of science and enlightenment be visited with the proposition of conferring special and permanent status at the expense of the public upon a certain class of citizens. And what citizens? Precisely those men with the greatest ability to dominate public opinion and to steer it. For self-named savants are held in a kind of superstitious awe like that surrounding kings and priests. I allude to our vaunted academies. Durand de Maillane did allow for instruction through the level of secondary or grammar schools, which he would have joined to the primary system. The services of thirty to forty thousand teachers would be required. They 75 PVCd’IP 1 (1891), introduction. See also Palmer (1985), pp. 129–139; Coutel, op. cit., n. 74 above, pp. 199–240. 76 PVCd’IP 1, pp. 68–80.

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would have to be well paid. Beyond that, it was quite wrong to propose the extravagance of many additional posts at still higher salaries for professors concerned mainly with matters of taste and refinement. The nation should not be expected to provide cultivation for people who could afford to develop it in themselves and in their children. There had, after all, been no public schools in Athens or Sparta, while Rome had never been happier than in her agrarian phase. Durand de Maillane declined to enter into the question whether “the sciences are more harmful than advantageous to morality.” Still, “It may be that we became so corrupt only because we had too much learning. . . . In order to be happy, the French people need only enough science to be virtuous.” Studying in common a single textbook, “to serve as a national catechism,” children between the ages of six and twelve would receive in a single school all the instruction for which the state should take responsibility. Any further education must be a question of parental choices among opportunities provided by private initiative. Durand de Maillane concluded with a profession of faith, rare in revolutionary oratory: “It is because we are free that we shall not cease to be Christians.”77 Another deputy, also leaning rather right than left, Claude-Louis Masuyer, turned Condorcet’s affectation of rigorous argument against him in a “proof ” of the unacceptability of cultural domination by the science and learning of Paris: I think I can demonstrate mathematically, not to an Academic Committee, but to the nation itself that this system subverts every principle of liberty and equality, that it will have no other effect than to create two classes of men, those who think and reason, and those who believe and obey. . . . A National Society of Science and the Arts, Supreme Administrator of Science and the Arts! What then! Are we reverting to the fourteenth century, when thinking was allowed only in accordance with authority? . . . You will reject, with justified indignation, this monstrous concept of a National Society, serving mainly to intrude into the State a National Administration, an autocratic government for science and the arts, a seminary, a literary priesthood; which would revive the priestly college of Memphis; which would quickly become nothing but a nest of intrigue and corruption; and which, in a word, would seem to have been imagined only to favor private interests at the expense of the public interest, and to provide for the game of creating positions to be distributed at will, positions which I am tempted to believe have already been distributed in petto.78 77 ´ “Opinion de Durand-Maillane sur les Ecoles Primaires, . . . le 12 décembre 1792,” PVCd’IP 1, pp. 123–131. 78 “Discours sur l’organisation de l’instruction publique,” ibid., pp. 133–49, 137, 140.


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Replies there were, decrying Durand de Maillane’s fanaticism, Masuyer’s parochialism, and the intellectual vandalism of both orators. As will appear, Condorcet’s National Society would still find a place in alternative proposals, and would, indeed, eventually be partially realized in creation of the Institut de France. No one, however, then or later, came to the defense of the administrative role his plan had assigned to it in the educational system. On that, these rightist critics made their point, even while swelling the train of political suspicion, compounded of anti-intellectualism, civic religiosity, sentimental egalitarianism, moralization of nature, and idolization of Spartan virtues, a tide of sentiment steadily gathering force against the Academy of Science, largely from the left. Before proceeding with primary schooling, the Committee, having been thrust instead into a discussion of general principles, bowed to necessity and commissioned Romme to draw up a report on the plan of education as a whole. His instructions were to make no mention, at least for the present, of a National Society, and further to reconsider the questions of free tuition above the primary level, of the independence of the system from political authority, and of the way it would be supervised. Not only, therefore, did the Committee tacitly abandon the Condorcet plan as its structural blueprint, it threw the basic principles open to debate. In the meantime, it intended to proceed with discussion of primary schools. That failed to happen. The agenda was further confused, and indeed undone, by the very member, Lanthenas, who had agreed to draw up the report expounding the previous proposal that had been presented, confusingly enough, by Chénier instead of by himself. Lanthenas now acknowledged that, like Durand de Maillane, he had all along disagreed with Arbogast and the leadership of the Committee. He appears, indeed, to have had a kind of penchant for incoherence. During the debate on the sentencing of Louis XVI Lanthenas declared that he was in favor of a reprieve and then voted against it. In contradiction with his own published report on the Condorcet plan, he privately considered that the proposal did nothing for republican morality, too little for adults, and too much for higher education, which the state had no business supporting at all. Primary schooling was again on the agenda of the Convention for the session of 18 December. When Chénier suggested proceeding to the next article of the decree on elementary schools, Lanthenas threw fat into the fire by calling for a prior discussion of the general basis of public instruction and particularly of the question whether there should be several levels. He later pretended to have been surprised that he had, in effect, derailed the proceedings. More oratory ensued—“O Rousseau, O mon maˆıtre,” cried one speaker—but no action. Marat observed that, however brilliant the speeches, the Convention would do better to occupy itself with urgent matters such as the oppression of common soldiers by their officers. Romme meanwhile worked rapidly with his colleagues in the leadership

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of the Committee to reformulate the essential features of the original plan in terms that might stand a chance of adoption. He brought in his report and legislative proposal in two days’ time, on 20 December. The tactics were to salvage higher education at the price of embracing the demand for combining “education” with “instruction.” The Convention had clearly resonated to the insistence on the part of most of the speakers that a national system of schooling must inculcate personal morality and republican values in children even while imparting skills and knowledge. At once Jacobin and mathematician, Romme was undoubtedly sincere in his synthesis of the elements that Condorcet, concerned about personal liberty and academic freedom, would have kept distinct: Instruction enlightens the mind, engages all the intellectual faculties, extends the domain of thought. Education develops the character; imparts a healthy outlook to the soul; controls the feelings; directs the will; puts into action the mental concepts translated into conduct; and, guardian of morality, teaches the submission of thoughts and actions to the tribunal of conscience. . . . Instruction without education develops ability and pride, capacity and arrogance, and can become the fatal instrument of unregulated passion in the man who is restrained neither by reason or examples. Education without instruction is formative only of habit and conduces to prejudice of every sort. Limited in means, its course is slow and uncertain; with the best of intentions, it fails in its grasp of truth and justice, confines the intellect within narrow bounds, and employs all the powers of mind and body to assure the triumph of error in individuals who in their benightedness take their very ignorance for a virtue. . . . On the undissolvability of that union, which we shall henceforth designate under the term Public Instruction, depends the regeneration of morality, the progress of science, literature, and the arts, and their proper application to public prosperity.79 The actual structure of the educational system would have been that of a decapitated Condorcet Plan consisting of primary school, secondary school, institute, and lycée, with the National Society removed from its shoulders. Romme gives far less detail of the curriculum, but much the same instruction would have been offered at the four surviving levels. The sciences were simply among the subjects to be taught, however, and not the basis of the education. For the rationale throughout is utility rather than truth. Committed to public responsibility for higher education, Romme thought to rid it of the stigma of privilege. His argument reversed the proposition that society has no interest in higher learning but only in the univer79

“Rapport sur l’Instruction Publique, considérée´ dans son ensemble, suivi d’un projet de décret sur les principales bases du plan général,” PVCd’IP 1, pp. 201–220, 205–206.


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sal provision of elementary schools. Exactly the contrary is the case. Public support of primary and secondary education answers to the needs, not so much of society, as of individual persons, all persons, including women. Every citizen must be enabled to acquire the competence to control his or her life, provide for his or her family, and do his or her duty by the Republic. Properly considered, the need of society is what dictates public support of higher education. The Republic requires both the services of graduates of the institutes who will have received a broad general education, and the expertise of the select few who will have gone further to qualify themselves professionally as lawyers, doctors, scientists, and teachers. It would be in the public interest that these opportunities should be open to persons from all classes and not simply to children of the wealthy who could afford to educate their offspring privately. Tuition must be free to all and scholarships provided to support the bright and needy. How extensive should professional training be? Before the number of lycées be decided, Romme suggested, a survey should determine the demand for experts in the various specialties. The number would not be large, and an oversupply would waste talent and entail dangerous frustrations. With regard, finally, to the institutes, as indeed in most respects, Romme was more realistic than other participants in the debate. Alone among them, he recognized that many of the older colleges were making do and carrying on, for better or probably for worse, that their professors had to be paid somehow if education was to continue at all, and that it would cost less than was currently being spent to take over their property and finance the institutes out of the proceeds. The endowments would more than suffice since the Committee envisaged only half as many institutes as there had been colleges. (His projection lends unwitting credence to the finding of latter-day scholarship that educational opportunity had been more widespread in the old regime than it was later to become.) Hearing Romme out, the Convention ordered the printing of his report and, along with it, reprinting of the original Condorcet plan of the preceding April. Condorcet, watching from the disadvantage point of the Committee on Constitution, supplied a set of notes responding to the main criticisms that had been adduced in the preceding eight months.80 He further published an article in Chronique du mois for January 1793 insisting on two favorite themes, that education must be independent of politics, and that learned societies were scientifically indispensable and politically innocent.81 Although, or perhaps because, Romme was much more guarded on both these points, the Convention appeared at last to be on the brink of 80

Guillaume reproduces Condorcet’s notes in PVCd’IP (L). Coutel, op. cit., n. 74 above, discusses them intensively. 81 “Sur la necessité de l’instruction publique,” printed as Appendix I in PVCd’IP 1, pp, 609–613.

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legislating the creation of an educational system that would achieve much of what he hoped for. Nothing of the sort occurred, however. On the following day, 21 Decem´ ber, Rabaut Saint-Etienne called for grafting adult education and responsibility for patriotic festivals onto the stem of the system. Its mission was to be, not mere school-teaching, but republican indoctrination from the cradle to the grave. In transports of enthusiasm the Convention nominated Rabaut Saint-Etienne by acclamation to membership on the Committee of Public Instruction. It then heard one more long speech, on the twenty-fourth, by Jean-Henri Bancal des Essarts, who wished to consolidate the four levels of education into two and to extirpate every vestige of clericalism. Apart from those orations, the politics of the King’s trial left no place in the agenda for education. Others with opinions to air were reduced to printing them for circulation. Among them the most indicative of the sentiment that eventually prevailed were the Rousseauist views expressed by Jeanbon Saint-André, former Protestant pastor and future member of the Committee of Public Safety, a Jacobin but nothing of a zealot in temperament. He ´ agreed with Rabaut Saint-Etienne. What the country needed was education, by which he meant moral regeneration, throughout the whole fabric of its being. Enactment and enforcement of truly republican laws would alone accomplish such a change in values. Public instruction, in the restricted sense of schools, was of altogether subsidiary importance. Any system should be strictly voluntary, elementary in level, and the same for all children who participated. Cultivation in general and preparation for careers in science and the arts were to be left to the private sector. I have heard Durand-Maillane refuted from this rostrum as an absurd fomentor of ignorance because he stated an incontestable truth, which is that the Republic has no obligation to train scientists. . . . But it is not from science that men draw happiness, it is from virtue . . . . It would seem astonishing to temperate men that a person should be stigmatized as Goth or Vandal because he does not wish the nation to be burdened with the cost of an education in science that it has no interest in paying for. . . . But, after having overturned the sacerdotal hierarchy, are you going to create a scientific hierarchy to replace it? What is all this gradated instruction, and to what will it lead? To forming a true corporation, a new clergy which you will have armed with fearful influence.82 Clearly, then, in December 1792, four months into the Republic, the Convention was reacting with hostility to every suggestion of preserving institutionalized authority of any sort in science as in culture generally. 82

PVCd’IP 1, pp. 272–82, p. 275.


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There was broad agreement in principle about the urgency of elementary education but little or none with Condorcet’s argument that character and morality were for the family to form while skills and knowledge should be the affair of schools. The prevailing mentality admitted no such distinction between personality and citizenship, between the private and the civic. Teaching children their letters was all very well, but what mattered was forming them along with their elders into born again citizens of the Republic one and indivisible. Anti-intellectualism was certainly a feature of these attitudes, particularly in popular circles, but rather as an accident of democracy than an intrinsic component. Intellect need not itself be politically incorrect on condition it be subordinate to virtue. True, the proposition that the state should provide, much less pay for, higher education had aroused little or no support. The issue was not one that divided people along the lines of their political views, however. As will appear, the moderates Sieyès and Daunou eliminated everything beyond primary schooling and public festivals from the project they prepared in the late spring of 1793. The two upper levels of institute and lycée from the Condorcet and Romme plans did, on the other hand, figure in the most extreme of the schemes for moral regeneration through education, a proposal drafted by Michel Le Peletier in early January 1793 and presented to the Convention by Robespierre in July. Meanwhile, the Romme project, which the Committee had reported out on 20 December 1792, formally remained before the Convention as unfinished business. No vote was ever taken. With Romme’s revision of the Condorcet plan on hold throughout the political travails of the spring and into the summer of 1793, the Comité d’Instruction Publique occupied itself, not with education, but with matters of detail and with particular institutions: with the situation of artists and writers, with nationalized monuments, with weights and measures, with the calendar, with schools for the military and one for deaf-mutes at Bordeaux, with a project for a national library, with the Jardin du Roi, with the Academy of Science, and with many other problems of great or little moment. Preoccupied with the losing battle for the Constitution, and soon to go into hiding, Condorcet took little part in the deliberations. On 23 May a discouraged Arbogast refused reelection to the chairmanship—he had already served twice—which changed every month. In his place, the Committee chose Sieyès. Sieyès proceeded to associate himself with two other constitutional clergymen among his colleagues, Pierre Daunou and Joseph Lakanal. Quietly, and rather slyly, they drew up in place of Romme’s a further plan, which the Committee put before the Convention on 24 June, three weeks after the arrest of the Girondists. Inevitably, this trio of one-time abbés, however lapsed, was accused of wishing to reassert an ecclesiastical domination over

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education in secular disguise. Elaborate provisions for a system of centralized inspection lent credence to the suspicion. There is no evidence of sinister intent, however. The reason for the emphasis on organization may simply have been that the three sponsors thought like the episcopal bureaucrats they had once been. What is clear is that none of them had any feeling for the transformation Condorcet would have wrought in national education, whether with respect to its universality, its scientific basis, its provision for higher education, or its independence from the political system. They barely mention the curriculum, preferring to leave questions of content and method to professional educators. The state should establish primary schools only, for boys and girls, and attendance should be voluntary. Secondary and higher education should be left to private enterprise except that government might properly provide scholarships for talented youngsters from needy families. Incitement of public spirit throughout the mass of the people was to be the main function of the educational authorities. The civic calendar was to be as liberally studded with festivals as the Christian calendar with saints’ days. There would be forty holidays annually, five celebrated nationally, ten in the departments, ten more in the districts, and fifteen in the cantons. Among village rites were to be festivals of the opening of the agricultural year, of its closing, of youth, of marriage, of old age, of the invention of writing, of navigation and fishing, and of domesticated animals (“celle des animaux, compagnons de l’homme”), which excited one of the rare laughs to be heard in the hall of the Convention.83 The plan was taken seriously by no one. “Let us take care,” warned Hassenfratz, with whose utterances it is not always easy to sympathize, “lest while we are organizing our holidays, our neighbors organize their industries and destroy our trade and manufactures. It’s not by means of holidays that the English have succeeded in acquiring a great preponderance in the political balance of Europe.”84 The Convention rejected the proposal on 3 July, whereupon Sieyès lowered his profile to the invisibility through which he survived the Terror, to reemerge in the guise of political scientist under the Directory. Daunou, arrested in October 1793 for protesting execution of the Girondists, came forward again after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, an architect then of learned institutions. Lakanal, on the other hand, went on to momentary prominence. Membership of the Committee of Public Instruction permitted him in the ensuing weeks to put himself forward, it might be said to posture, as the political champion of arts, science, and culture amid the liquidation of the old order. 83

On the Sieyès plan, see PVCd’IP 1, pp. xliv–lvi, 507–516. Sieyès published and defended the plan in Journal d’instruction sociale (1793), no. 3 (22 June), pp. 81–104; no. 4 (29 June), pp. 97–104; nos. 5 & 6 (6 July), pp. 145–65. 84 J.-H. Hassenfratz, “Réflexions sommaires sur l’éducation publique,” ibid., p. 580.


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By contrast to the insipid Sieyès scheme, the education of republican youngsters imagined by Michel Le Peletier aroused intense if momentary enthusiasm on the left. His very style was lean and nervy rather than drab and doctrinaire. With respect to public instruction, he found the committee’s plan—i.e., Romme’s—altogether satisfactory. The three higher levels would provide admirably for the preservation, propagation, and advancement of knowledge. Those features he would have had the Convention adopt forthwith. Cultivated himself and scion of a great family, Le Peletier was unworried over the prospect of some intellectual aristocracy. Even for primary schooling, the committee’s arrangements for the merely instructional aspects were all to the good. But that was only half the story. The flaw, which he would repair, was that “it has not even touched on education.” The model, and Le Peletier did not need to say so, was Sparta. Education could not, unfortunately, begin at birth. There was no choice but “to abandon infancy to the care of mothers.” Such is the will of nature. Childhood, however, would belong to the Republic. “At five years of age, then, the fatherland receives the child from the hands of nature; at twelve it returns him to society.” All children would be removed from the nest of their families and raised together, boys for seven years, girls for six. Character would be formed, the body developed, habits of work ingrained, and instruction imparted, all this in expropriated chateaus, convents, and colleges converted into boarding schools where the offspring of rich and poor would be treated with equal and rigorous frugality. Day schools would never do. No matter how effective the teaching, pupils would go home in the afternoon and lapse into the erroneous ways of their parents and peers. “In public institutions, on the contrary, the child belongs to us in the totality of its existence. The material, if I may so express myself, never leaves the mold. No external object intrudes to deform the shaping you give it. Prescribe a measure: its execution is certain. Imagine a good method: it is followed instantly. Create a useful conception: it is put into practice completely, continuously, and without effort.”85 Thus fully formed morally and politically prior to the age of adolescence, the young citizen could be trusted to proceed to higher education, should he be one of the few whose talent led that way, or into whatever republican walk of life his footsteps might take him. The circumstances in which the Le Peletier plan was presented heightened enthusiasm in the Convention. Elected to the States-General by the nobility of Paris, Louis-Michel Le Peletier, marquis de Saint-Fargeau, had renounced his title and championed the popular cause from the outset. With the majority of the Convention he voted death for Louis XVI. In the 85

“Plan d’éducation nationale de Michel LePeletier,” PVCd’IP 2, pp. 38, 45–46.

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evening of 20 January 1793, the day before the King’s execution, a member of the royal bodyguard, one Pâris, stabbed Le Peletier to death while he was dining at Février’s, an excellent restaurant in the Palais-Royal. Dramatic funeral rites elevated him to the rank of revolutionary martyr. Among Le Peletier’s papers was the draft of his educational proposal, dashed off during the preceding weeks of debate on the Romme plan. His brother, Félix, let it be known in the course of the spring that such a document existed. The Convention followed its rejection of the Sieyès plan on 3 July by accepting a proposal, moved by Robespierre, that would permit bypassing the Committee of Public Instruction, whose Girondist orientation and interminable procedures had produced gathering frustration in the Jacobin Society. The measure called for naming an ad hoc Commission of Public Instruction to consist of six members charged with developing a plan for national education within a week. Among the six were Lakanal and the abbé Grégoire. Saint-Just and Jeanbon Saint-André were to have been commissioners but had to withdraw since they were elected to the Committee of Public Safety on 10 July. Robespierre did serve in what was his last engagement before election to the Commmittee of Public Safety on 27 July. In the course of these debates Fran¸cois Chabot, the former priest turned sans-culotte who on 8 July denounced Condorcet to the Committee of General Security, proposed that Félix Le Peletier be invited to give a reading of the educational plan said to have been left by his brother. Thereupon, Robespierre prevailed on Félix to lend him the text. Instead of returning it as, according to Félix, he had promised, he preempted disclosure of the Le Peletier plan by reading it himself before the Convention during the session of 13 July, the very day on which Charlotte Corday dispatched Marat to join its author in the revolutionary pantheon. He presented the work “to the nation and to you in guarantee of the principles” that guided the Commission of Six. Gathering applause interrupted Robespierre at every mention of virtue, patriotism, manliness, and the Republic throughout what is in truth an eloquent piece of writing.86 On more sober second thought, the Convention, and indeed the Commission of Six, found themselves divided over the practicality or even desirability of segregating children and raising them in common. Discussion of the Le Peletier plan turned on that notion, and not on the baggage of higher education it had carried over from the Condorcet and Romme proposals, let alone on the role of science. There is no need to follow all the turns taken by the debate.87 It transpired throughout the months of July, August, and September 1793, in interludes when the Convention had respite from enacting laws on saltpeter and munitions, on conscription, on price controls, on 86 87

On the circumstances, see PVCd’IP 2, pp. xv–xxv, 61–63. See PVCd’IP 2, pp. xv–xli; Palmer (1985), pp. 139–46.


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legitimation of Terror, and on revolutionary government. The spate of legislation concentrated dictatorial powers in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety in order that it might grapple with exponential inflation; with insurrection in Lyons, in Marseilles, and in the provinces; with the surrender of Toulon to the British; with defeat in the Rhineland; with invasion from the North, the Pyrenees, and the Alps. Amid all that, the education of children was of little moment. A variant of the Le Peletier plan did pass on 13 August 1793. Parents would have been allowed to choose whether or not to enroll their youngsters in national boarding schools. The measure was rescinded in October, however, when the Commission of Six merged back into the Committee of Public Instruction, and none of the alternative educational proposals emanating from the revived Committee ever went into effect. In September 1793, the flickering torch passed momentarily into the hands of politicians answerable to the population of the capital. The Department of Paris had named its own Committee of Public Instruction and set it the mission of instituting a system of trade schools in time for the beginning of the academic year 1793–94. Scandalized that the old colleges, the former Louis-Le-Grand, Quatre-Nations, Harcourt, Navarre, and others, were still staggering on, a deputation headed by the president of the Department, the engineer Louis-Pierre Dufourny, came before the Convention on 15 September to demand that these nests of medieval barbarism be converted into “gymnasiums wherein young republicans may draw on all the kinds of knowledge indispensable to the practice of the arts and trades.”88 The proposal was very summary and included nothing in the way of a curriculum, except that (even as in the Condorcet plan) there were to be three levels of instruction above the primary grades. To that end, all existing colleges together with faculties of arts, theology, law, and medicine throughout the country were to be suppressed forthwith. The Convention applauded and enacted the measure on the spot. Such was the almost accidental genesis of the law often said to have formally liquidated the whole structure of the universities of the old regime. In fact, the higher faculties, already in decline by 1789, had already ceased to operate. With regard to secondary education, it is less often noticed that on the next day further thoughts again prevailed. Application of the measure was then suspended, largely in deference to Romme’s cautioning that it would be imprudent to suppress the colleges until the institutions that would replace them should be created. Strident in opposition to the whole proposal were voices of those leveling the contrary charge. Coupé de l’Oise, Chabot again, Fabre d’Eglantine, Cambon objected that advanced education of any sort would produce an “aristocracy of savants” and “reproduce the 88

PVCd’IP 2, pp. xxix–xxx.

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academies under another name.”89 They may, in a way, have had grounds. For the departmental initiative was followed by a more considered attempt to flesh out the higher educational structure Condorcet had designed on a framework of vocational training and not of abstract science. It will be convenient, however, to consider the proposal drafted by Lavoisier in the name of the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers while discussing the abolition of the Academy of Science, for it represents the final, and finally forlorn, effort to preserve the function of such an institution in relation, at this last gasp, to an education serving technology and industry rather than science and enlightenment. 89

Ibid., p. xxxi.

CHAPTER III

The Museum of Natural History and the Academy of Science: Rise and Fall

1. NATURAL HISTORY AND THEORETICAL SCIENCE

On 8 August 1793 the Convention acted on the draft of a law submitted two days previously by the Comité d’Instruction Publique. The first article is curt and to the point: “All the academies and literary societies licensed or endowed by the nation are abolished.” The seventh and last article placed their facilities—botanical gardens, observatories, apparatus, libraries, museums, and other appurtenances—under the oversight of unspecified governmental authorities pending dispositions to be made when a system of public education should be organized. The intervening five articles, framed by friends of the Academy of Science on the committee, exempted it from the fate of the others and assured that one body a provisional existence. The Academy of Science, and it alone, was still to discharge its normal functions and to receive its annual appropriations. In addition, the courses of instruction in science and mechanical, chemical, and medical arts currently offered under the auspices of other societies were also to continue. By Article 3 the Convention was to direct the Committee of Public Instruction to bring in a measure providing for organization of a new society for the advancement of science and the arts. The Convention did no such thing. Instead, it quashed the saving articles and adopted only the first and last, thus eliminating all academies forthwith while expropriating their assets. A single speech by David, still a member of the Committee, dealt the coup de grâce. Though instancing mainly abuses in the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, he delivered a diatribe on “the absolute necessity of destroying en masse all academies, last refuge of all aristocracies.”1 The specific, and no doubt intended, effect was to eliminate the exception made for the Academy of Science. The truncated measure may be fairly described as inimical to high culture, erudition, and learning in general and to exact science in particular. The word “exact” is chosen advisedly, for the law of 8 August makes a 1

PVCd’IP 2, pp. 240–258. For the David speech, see pp. 256–258.

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III. THE MUSEUM AND THE ACADEMY

startling contrast to the provisions for natural history adopted just eight weeks previously by the same Convention, newly purged of its Girondist members. A decree of 10 June 1793 converted the Jardin des Plantes and the Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. With the addition of the adjective “National,” that is still the official name. As we shall see, a draft of the measure was framed by the staff itself in August 1790, but was never acted on by the Constituent Assembly. It called for creation of twelve chairs of natural history and vested administration of the establishment in the hands of the professors, all to be of equal rank. Such a provision was both munificent and democratic. No university in the world afforded a dozen chairs for all the sciences put together. Except for the Collège de France, no other institution of any sort for teaching and research was as yet governed by the professional staff. As for equality in the Republic of Letters under the Old Regime, it was a principle honored in the breach everywhere but among the forty immortals of the Académie Fran¸caise. Considering these events many years ago, we ventured to suggest that they exhibit the institutional expression of a sensibility formed by the romantic strain in the Enlightenment.2 Even before the Revolution, the Academy of Science was failing to project a sympathetic image beyond the perimeter of official circles. Its haughty report on Mesmer and the fad of animal magnetism in 1784 left the impression of arrogant scientists scornfully dismissing as mere illusion what had been a fascination to fashionable people everywhere and a wellspring of psychic good feeling in the experience of the widespread membership of the Societies of Harmony.3 More generally, the political class of the revolutionary years was deeply marked by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The feature of the Rousseauist mentality that loves nature and hates science was latent among them, as it probably is in varying degree in a significant proportion of temperaments in all populations throughout modern times. Any perception that the authority of science compounds abuses of authority in the large is apt to accentuate those hostile attitudes and to bring them into the open. A widespread example in recent memory was the hostility to science embedded in the countercultural movement that emerged in the 1970s, compounded out of fear of atomic energy, revulsion from deceits practiced by government to justify a failed military campaign, rejection of objectivity in favor of feelings of unity between man and nature, and romantic refusal of limits upon the indulgence of personality.4 A concrete institutional legacy further burdened the Academy. It was a corporation, a privileged corporation, one among the myriad boxes into which the old regime compartmentalized French society and kept the subjects of the king in thrall to the crown and separate from each other. Or so 2 3 4

Gillispie (1959). Gillispie (1980), pp. 261–89; Darnton (1968). The point is developed in Gillispie (1976b).

´ III. 2. MUS EUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE

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the revolutionary generation felt. That any vestige of corporatism was inadmissible was among the unquestioned givens of politics. On 22 September 1792, the day after the Convention proclaimed the Republic, it was declared “one and indivisible.” In diametric contrast, the designation “fédérés” was pejorative, an epithet tantamount to a death sentence under the Terror. No intermediate allegiances, no partitioning of sovereignty, must intervene between the individual citizen and the state which, in Rousseau’s formula, embodies the general will. A comparably holistic instinct, though with respect to nature rather than society, inspired the dream Diderot fathered on d’Alembert, “Tout change, tout passe, il n’y que le tout qui reste” (Everything changes, everything passes, only the whole remains).5 Underlying Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1754) is the notion that Everyman is in some sense a naturalist. To attain knowledge of nature we have no need of intermediaries, no need of scientists with their baggage of abstractions and artificial constructs. Such knowledge must be immediate if we are to trust it, as immediate as the relation of the gardener to the garden or of the artisan to the material he is fashioning. Even so did Diderot identify truth with craftsmanship in the Encyclopédie, wherein analysis of techniques became technology avant la lettre. Dignified in their many occupations, artisans were thereby to be “taught to have a better opinion of themselves.”6 One would not wish to argue that intellectual and cultural factors were a sufficient cause either of the suppression of the Academy of Science, or of the creation of the Muséum, or indeed of any of the myriad other events that made the Revolution what it was. In all cases, real political, social, and economic interests were in play. But latent attitudes do help explain how the Convention, preoccupied with saving a Republic beset by war, rebellion, and treason, could have taken the decisions it did in the few moments its agenda allotted to the affairs of science. An assembly of educated, articulate laymen responded favorably to a political démarche on behalf of an already popular institution of natural history. Thereupon, they responded unfavorably to the effort mounted by leaders of the scientific establishment to defend the structure it had inherited against attacks by external critics and enemies, many of them working-class, whom the Academy had dominated, offended, or excluded. ´ 2. THE MUSEUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE

Differing circumstances lay behind such different outcomes. Among aspiring naturalists, chafing at the lordship exercised by Buffon over the Jardin Royal des Plantes, resentment of official science entailed no hostility to pre5 Le Rêve de d’Alembert in Oeuvres philosophiques de Diderot, ed. Paul Vallière (1956), pp. 299–300. 6 Diderot, Article “Art,” Encyclopédie.

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cision in description or to strict method in classification. On the contrary, the widespread enthusiasm for Linnaeus among amateurs and beginners was owing to the readiness with which his system, which relied concretely on the form of the sex organs, permitted recognition and identification of plants. In the eighteenth century the practice of botany was nothing abstract. In natural history, the gradation between occupation and hobby was still a continuum, not a divide as it was in the exact sciences and had just become in chemistry. Laymen could and did participate—a Rousseau, a Goethe (who, however, disliked Linnaeus), a weekend herborizer. It is an interesting coincidence that the author of the dissenting report on animal magnetism, A.-L. de Jussieu, should have been a naturalist, although like Lamarck and Adanson (anti-Linnean all three, albeit for different reasons), Jussieu would have to be ranked among official scientists along with, or rather just under, Buffon.7 On 28 December 1787, a scant three months before Buffon’s death, five botanists joined themselves into the Société linnéenne de Paris.8 The oldest, André Thouin, head gardener of the Jardin du Roi, was an accomplished horticulturalist. The other four were youngsters, among whom only Broussonet had standing, or rather a very recent footing, in the scientific establishment. During his years in England as protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, he had become an intimate of James Edward Smith, a wealthy young physician and enthusiastic botanist who purchased Linnaeus’s natural history collections from the master’s Swedish heirs in 1784. Smith did so with the intention of building around them a botanical society, a project realized in the foundation of the highly successful Linnaean Society of London in February 1788. The Paris Society thus preceded it by several months even though the impetus came from England. Smith had made his grand tour of Europe in 1786 and sought out fellow enthusiasts in Strasbourg and Montpellier as well as Paris. Of the other three charter members of the Société linnéenne, Louis Bosc d’Antic, son of a not very successful industrial chemist of Protestant background, had minor positions, first in the Finance Ministry and then in the postal service. He had followed Guyton de Morveau’s course in chemistry in Dijon but not done well in school. Hating both Latin and mathematics, he 7

Gillispie (1980), pp. 283–284. On the Paris Linnaean Society and its membership, see Duris (1993), pp. 57–87. The procès-verbaux are conserved in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS. 4441. The same document contains a ten-page memoir written in 1821 and purporting to give the history of the society by Arsène Thiébaut de Berneaud, Permanent Secretary of a second Société linnéenne founded in that year. Duris (1993) cautions that it is untrustworthy. For further indications, see fragmentary papers in the Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, MSS. 298, 299, 300, 1998; and also at the BN. MSS. FR, NA 2760, fol. 162–63, and 2762, fol. 60. See also Actes des naturalistes, BN, Le20.826. 8


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became a passionate herborizer in his spare time and a disciple of Romé de l’Isle, himself an advocate of Linnaean classification in mineralogy.9 AubinLouis Millin de Grandmaison, a young man of letters, and of means, had been drawn to natural history by his youthful friendship with Fran¸cois Willemet, son of a famous botanist. Millin later made a certain reputation as an antiquarian and archaeologist, was a principal founder of the Magasin encyclopédique in 1795, and became the first curator of coins and medals at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Lastly, Guillaume-Antoine Olivier, a Proven¸cal, had been Broussonet’s younger comrade during their studies at Montpellier, where he took his medical degree at the age of seventeen. On his arrival in Paris, Broussonet introduced him to his patron, Bertier de Sauvigny, who engaged the young man to undertake what was then called a “statistic”— that is, a thorough survey of the topography, agriculture, and resources of the generality of Paris. At the same time Olivier developed an interest in entomology, for which science he served as editor of the volumes treating it in the Encyclopédie méthodique.10 All five—to anticipate for a moment—took a moderate part in revolutionary politics. Thouin was elected an alternate to the Constituent Assembly and Broussonet a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Bosc, an intimate of Roland and especially of his wife, joined the Jacobins early on and served as secretary of its Committee of Correspondence for a time in 1792. He and Guillaume were regulars in the salon of Madame Roland, and hence were compromised after the fall of the Girondists. Millin took the name Eleuthérophile and joined Condorcet in editing the Chronique de Paris in 1791– 92.11 The Société linnéenne held its weekly meetings in Broussonet’s lodgings. Bosc served as president and Millin as secretary, keeping the register in Latin in good Linnaean fashion. Thouin was present only rarely, whether because he was too busy, felt out of place among the youngsters, or found the presentations amateurish. Another eight or ten joined the company and attended more or less regularly. Among them were Fran¸cois de Lamétherie, editor of the Journal de physique, a bitterly unreconstructed opponent of Lavoisier and the new chemistry. Admitted as a corresponding member was 9

The 1954 Dictionnaire de Biographie Fran¸caise article on Bosc by Roman d’Amat is informative. There is an e´loge by Cuvier (1829) based on documents in the Fonds Cuvier, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MSS 186, 157. A manuscript of Bosc’s journal of his time in America, where he was vice-consul in Wilmington, N.C., and consul in New York from 1797 to 1800, is in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. See also A.-F. Silvestre, “Notice biographique sur . . . Bosc,” Mémoires de la Société Royale et Centrale d’Agriculture 1 (1829), pp. 1–27. 10 Cuvier has an e´loge of Olivier, Recueil des éloges historiques (3 vols., 1817–1827) 3, pp. 233– 66. 11 On Millin, see Krafft (1818).

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a prominent lawyer, Jacques Antoine Creuzé-Latouche, soon to be elected to the States-General. Foreign naturalists passing through Paris were occasional visitors. Proceedings consisted of accounts of investigations by the members as well as reports on their readings and on publications of various learned societies—the Academy of Science, the Royal Society, and other bodies. A fête champêtre on Linnaeus’s birthday, 24 May 1788, was the finest moment of the infant Society’s brief life. In the autumn of 1788, the frequency of meetings decreased to once a fortnight. The last was held on 26 December 1788. The demise of the French Linnaean Society in its cradle, contrasted to the flourishing of its British counterpart, has been attributed to several factors. For one thing, political preoccupations may have left little time or thought for natural history. More fundamentally, however, voluntary societies, science clubs in effect, were in keeping with the scheme of things in Britain, but not in France. The Academy of Science looked askance at the prospect for associations other than itself. Bosc and Broussonet, says Cuvier in his e´loge of the former, intended “a sort of scientific revolution.”12 All three leading botanists, Adanson, Jussieu, and Lamarck, while disagreeing with each other about method, agreed in rejecting the Linnaean system. Word went about that any who hoped for the privilege of election to the Academy would do well to dissociate themselves from the unauthorized Linnaean Society.13 Pressures, whether of this or other sorts, sufficed. Its members separated. But not for long, for among the rights of man is that of voluntary association. Linnaeus had somehow become the symbol of scientific freedom among naturalists, groaning in retrospect under the heel of Buffon. On 20 July 1790 an assembly of “almost all the naturalists in Paris” adopted an address to the National Assembly favoring the placing of monuments to great scientists in public places throughout Paris. Specifically requested was authority thus to honor Linnaeus by erecting a bust commissioned at the instance of Broussonet and paid for by popular subscription. It was to be located under the cedar of Lebanon in “the public Jardin des Plantes, an establishment that we all want to see nationalized, which is to say sheltered from all influence foreign to your own.”14 There were ninety-two signatories. Besides the original Linnaeans, the petition was signed also by Lamarck, Lacepède, and Fourcroy, the latter two longtime members of the staff of the Jardin des Plantes; also by leading pharmacists, notably Pelletier and Bayen; also by important instrument makers, Miché and Lenoir; also by the flower E´ loge historique de M. Bosc, read on 13 July 1829. According to the account of Thiébaut de Berneaud, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MSS 4,441, cited in n. 16. 14 Adresse des naturalistes a` l’Assemblée Nationale du 5 août 1790. BN Le29. 826. For the ceremony, see Duris (1993), pp. 77–87. 12 13


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painter Redouté, “Raphaël des Roses”; also by others on the margins of science, Lamétherie, Sage, and Hassenfratz; also by two who would figure prominently in the educational debate, Gilbert Romme and Lanthenas; also by a future terrorist, Jean-Claude Vincent; and finally by several deputies, foremost among them the abbé Grégoire. Permission granted, a plaster bust (the bronze was never cast) was unveiled in the presence of a great throng on 23 August 1790. The manifestation was expressly political in intent. It was clearly by design and not by chance that this very public celebration of natural history should have been staged at the very moment when the question of the Jardin des Plantes was before the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. Nationalization was a step desired, not merely by the nature lovers of the capital but by the very members of its staff, who were even then engaged in the negotiations that ultimately brought it about.15 Nestor of the establishment and curator of the “Cabinet,” or natural history gallery, was Daubenton, whose title was Demonstrator. He had put behind him animal husbandry and the zoological anatomies he had performed to illustrate Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. An old man, he now focused his interest on the arrangement of the mineralogical collection and its exhibition to the public. Three colleagues held professorial chairs, Desfontaines for botany, Portal for anatomy, and Fourcroy for chemistry. Three others had posts as demonstrators, Jussieu in botany, the elderly Mertrud in anatomy, and A.-L. Brongniart in chemistry (Brongniart, a pharmacist, is not to be confused with his brother Théodore, a prominent architect, nor with his nephew Alexandre, one of the original Linnaeans and a future geologist.) Lacepède’s title was assistant keeper of the gallery and assistant demonstrator in natural history, while Faujas de Saint-Fond was adjunct keeper. Those names figure in a salary schedule compiled for the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly early in 1790. André Thouin, head gardener, is listed in a different section below the colleagues who had teaching responsibilities.16 The name of Lamarck does not appear. Although a member of the Academy of Science and widely known for his Flore fran¸caise (1775), he received no stipend. In the late 1780s Lamarck, descendant of an impoverished noble family, eked out a meagre living for his future wife and their five children by editing the botanical dictionary of the Encyclopédie méthodique. Previously he had served Buffon privately as tutor to his son and in 1781 was appointed correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, a distinction carrying honor but no 15

The important documents bearing on the transformation of the Jardin du Roi and Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle into the Muséum were published with a useful introduction by E. T. Hamy on the occasion of the centennial (Hamy 1893). 16 Ibid., pp. 75–78.

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honorarium. The crystallographer René-Just Haüy, also a member of the Academy of Science, was another familiar of the institution through Buffon’s grace and favor. In holy orders, he had no official standing there at all. Neither did Déodat de Dolomieu, Daubenton’s correspondent in the Academy, a nobleman, investigator of vulcanism, and one of the founders of geology. The salary distribution among the nine naturalists who did hold posts was haphazard. What appear to have been the lower positions paid better than the higher ones. Faujas and Lacepède received 2,000 livres, Brongniart 1,500 plus a supplement of 500, Mertud 700 with a supplement of 1,000, while the three professors had salaries of 1,500 each. Jussieu, arguably the most distinguished of the lot, had to make do with 1,200. Van Spaendonck, painter and illustrator, earned a salary of 600 and fees of 700, while Thouin, the linchpin of the whole establishment, was paid 2,400. Finally, the intendant, Auguste-Charles-César Flahault, marquis de la Billarderie, received 6,000 in salary plus 6,000 in honorarium. The identity of the intendant, Buffon’s successor, was an even sorer point than were his emoluments. In 1771 Buffon, who took a feudal view of his office, had entered into an agreement about the succession. His son, then seven years old, was to be second in line after the comte d’Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi. The latter’s motive was to reserve a dignified post in which to retire from ministerial responsibility for science, art, and culture. In April 1788 Buffon, his demise near, sought to secure the immediate succession to his son, by then a ne’er-do-well officer in the Angoumois regiment. The maneuver failed, but meanwhile d’Angiviller had transferred his right to an older brother, head of the noble and impecunious Flahault family. Thereafter the reversion was to go to Condorcet, who would thus be in a position to align the operations of the Jardin des Plantes with the undertakings of the Academy of Science.17 The latter provision was unknown to the staff of the Jardin, though there is no reason to think it would have gone down well, while the former dismayed them. In their eyes, administrative experience and influence at court might have justified d’Angiviller’s appointment, even in the absence of competence in natural history. His elderly brother had none of those qualities. His only contribution, it may be said, was to create a supernumerary post for Lamarck, who was a distant kinsman. In June 1789 he named Lamarck Royal Botanist and Keeper of the Herbarium, not in the garden itself, but in the natural history gallery. The step mollified no one, not even the recipient. The salary was to be a mere 1,000 livres. In the shock of La Billarderie’s appointment, Thouin, the one member of the staff whose whole career lay within the borders of the garden, assumed the role of spokesman. A document written in his hand, intended for the 17

Ibid., pp. 5–10.


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guidance of their unwelcome intendant and ultimately of his brother, the minister, sets forth the staff ’s sense of their mission.18 Drafted in October 1788, it amounts to a cahier des doléances of naturalists that, in the revolutionary event, served as a blueprint for the reorganization that he and his colleagues proposed to the Constituent Assembly in August 1790. What precipitated matters was the budget. The financial condition of the Jardin Royal des Plantes et Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle du Roi at the end of the old regime reflected that of the monarchy in zoological, botanical, and mineralogical microcosm. Casting up the accounts of the institution through 1789, the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly uncovered accumulated debt amounting to 606,026 livres, 16 sous, and 6 deniers. At this early stage of revolutionary politics, financial austerity was in principle the order of the day. On 29 January 1790 a general overview of national expenditures envisaged an appropriation of 72,000 livres for the Jardin des Plantes, less by 45 percent than the 129,000 spent in 1789. One member of the late Société linnénne was now a deputy and a member of the Finance Committee. Jacques-Antoine Creuzé-Latouche was a lawyer and former magistrate from Poitou whose politics moved from left to center in the passage of revolutionary time. At this early stage, he was an active and influential Jacobin. His was the opinion that carried weight whenever the budget of the Jardin des Plantes was before the Finance Committee. In the course of its deliberations in the spring and summer of 1790, he succeeded in softening the projected cuts so as to leave the institution 92,222 livres, still down by almost 27,000 from the previous year. The chairman, Charles-Fran¸cois Lebrun (the same who was to be Bonaparte’s choice for Third Consul in 1799), submitted that figure to the National Assembly on 17 August in the draft of a law concerning all the academies as well as other institutions of science and learning. Among economies to be realized in the Jardin du Roi, Lamarck’s new post was to be eliminated along with that of Faujas de St.-Fond, and the intendant’s salary was to be slashed from 12,000 to 8,000 livres.19 Evidently informed of the tenor of the committee’s discussions, almost certainly by Creuzé-Latouche, the staff was ready with its own petition when the Assembly took up the proposed reforms on 20 August. Regnaud de St.-Jean d’Angély opened debate with a defense of the two naturalists to be dismissed. Thereupon Dupont de Nemours, who was in the chair, read out the address he had just received signed by the ten naturalists on the staff styling themselves “Officers of the Jardin des Plantes et Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle.” A brief and eloquent declaration of the rights of scientists, it 18 Mémoire sur le Jardin du Roi. BMHN, MSS 1934. For a full account, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 183–184. 19 Hamy (1893), pp. 23–30.

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made the case for the importance of natural history; reviewed the contributions of the institution to knowledge, education, medicine, agriculture, industry, and the quality of life; and concluded with a deferential request that the staff be granted a few days in which to prepare their own plan for reorganization. Impressed, the deputies accepted these “wise views” and referred the proposed reform back to committee. It was given a month to resubmit a set of regulations to be drawn up by the signatories.20 This initial petition indicated the staff ’s concerns in passing—unequal salaries, inability to name their colleagues, an incoherent teaching program—but discreetly said nothing of the intendancy. La Billarderie, for his part, also had had wind of the Committee’s intentions. In the preceding weeks a series of abject letters to Condorcet begged the good offices of his prospective and still influential successor. Worst of all, during the debate on August 20—so a friend told him—one deputy had observed that the positions of Lamarck and Faujas could be salvaged together with an additional economy of 4,000 livres by eliminating the office of Intendant altogether. In a last-minute, desperate appeal to Condorcet, ostensibly in their mutual interest, La Billarderie confided that, all things considered, the positions of his two subordinates were dispensable, the more readily in that he had created the post for Lamarck for charitable reasons. Pray, he went on, either burn my letter or send it back after reading. Condorcet was not a shredder of documents, and this one survives among his papers. There is no evidence of an answer. Virtually nothing then remained confidential, however, and apprehensiveness lest he might intervene noticeably cooled relations between the staff of the Jardin and the Permanent Secretary of the Academy.21 Creuzé-Latouche refrained from participating in the discussion on the floor of the Assembly since the time allotted the affairs of science, arts, and letters was very brief. He did, however, and this was often the way to exert influence, come into the open about the Intendancy of the Jardin des Plantes in a pamphlet giving his opinion on the disposition to be made of all academies. With respect to the Jardin, the greatest abuse, requiring the most urgent reform, precisely was its governance by an intendant. The very name, the very nature of the office, was inadmissible. “You will see,” he continued, “the present intendant, to whom any sort of natural history is totally foreign, receiving the emoluments of a place (already, by a further abuse worthy of the old regime, assigned to a successor), receiving, I say, the emoluments of a place whereof it is impossible either to divine what use he is or to conceal the harm he does, since nothing after all is more damaging to science, nor more discouraging to those who cultivate it, than the intrusion of the power of government.”22 The staff ’s Procès-Verbaux are in AN, AJ1596. Hamy (1983), pp. 30–35. 22 Opinion de M. J. A. Creuzé-Latouche . . . au sujet du Jardin des Plantes et des Académies. 1790. BN, Le29.868. Reprinted in part in Hamy (1893), pièce 10, pp. 93–97. 20 21


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The officers, as they continued to call themselves, of the Jardin des Plantes, lost no time. A committee of the whole assembled on 23 August 1790, the very day on which the bust of Linnaeus was unveiled in the labyrinth, a fossil stone’s throw from their windows. At once they elected Daubenton to preside, thus snubbing La Billarderie, who was present but thereafter ceased to attend. Immediately delegated to draft a charter were Fourcroy, Lacepède, and Portal. They and their colleagues knew their minds professionally. In three days’ time they produced the first democratic constitution for a fully modern scientific organization ever written.23 No longer to be partitioned between a botanical garden and a a collection of plants, minerals, and zoological specimens, the institution was to be one: Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. A national institution, its purpose was to be research and teaching over the whole field of natural history with particular attention to the improvement of agriculture, arts, and trades. All its officers would have the title of professor and would enjoy equal rights and equal salaries. Administration of the establishment would be in their hands. The responsibility would be exercised by a director elected from among their number to serve for a term of one year. He might be reelected once, but not again for at least two years. As to its teaching, the Muséum was to resemble the Collège de France in certain respects. Courses of instruction were to be open to all comers, French or foreign, free of charge. Forming no part of the university, it would grant no degrees. Students would be there simply to learn in a specialized manner. Unlike the practice in the Collège, however, they were to have official standing in the institution. The period of study would normally occupy three years. During that time, they would enroll in every course they wished to follow and receive a certificate from the professor provided their attendance was faithful. In even more striking contrast with the Collège, students were to have a voice in the selection of their professors, even as they would have had in Vicq d’Azyr’s plan for medical education. When a vacancy occurred, enrolled students would be invited to assemble. Those in their first year might express an opinion, but the vote would be limited to upperclassmen. Second- and third-year men would choose six of the latter to serve as electors sitting with all the professors in the nomination of the best qualified candidate for appointment by the King (this was still 1790). Twelve chairs were to be established and twelve courses offered as follows (in the terminology of the time): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 23

A A A A A

course course course course course

in in in in in

mineralogy. general chemistry. chemical arts. botany in the Muséum. botany in the country.

Hamy (1893), pp. 107–129.

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6. A course in cultivation [culture]. 7. A course in natural history of quadrupeds, cetaceans, birds, reptiles, and fish. 8. A course in natural history of insects, worms, and microscopic animals. 9. A course in human anatomy. 10. A course in animal anatomy. 11. A course in geology and training for traveling naturalists. 12. A course in natural iconography, or the art of drawing and painting all the productions of nature. It speaks volumes for what the Muséum would accomplish that within a few years modern zoological terminology such as vertebrate, invertebrate, and comparative anatomy would be in general use. Already, in the accompanying designation of the twelve chairs, the holders of the seventh and eighth were to be respectively “Professeur d’ornithologie, d’icthiologie, etc.” and “Professeur d’entomologie, d’helminthologie, etc.” Further articles spell out in greater detail than a faculty member of our day would tolerate exactly what each course was to contain and how it was to be taught. Regulations are laid down for the use of the amphitheater and the disposition of the botanical garden. Provision is to be made for the installation of laboratories, a menagerie, and a library. Correspondence is to be maintained and specimens to be exchanged with appropriate institutions in the provinces and abroad. A security officer is to assure maintenance of order throughout the establishment. An appended budget accords with the appropriation of 92,222 livres approved by the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. Only there, almost as an afterthought, do the identities of the prospective professors appear. In the order of the above chairs they were to be Daubenton, Fourcroy, Brongniart, Desfontaines, Jussieu, Thouin, Lacepède, Lamarck, Mertrud, Portal, Faujas, and Spaendonck. The uniform salary was to be 2,500 livres with a few temporary exceptions. Lemonnier and Petit, former professors of botany and human anatomy, were to share in the stipends of those chairs. Thouin was to have an extra 500 livres so as not to be penalized. By a similar though larger token, Daubenton, venerated among his junior colleagues as co-founder with Buffon of the gallery, must not lose by the change and was to receive a supplement of 3,500. The most interesting feature of the list is this, however. Since the two chairs in botany were preempted by the prior claims of Desfontaines and Jussieu, Lamarck at the age of forty-six was constrained to move from the field in which he had distinguished himself to invertebrate zoology. He did have a considerable collection of shells that he had amused himself by classifying, but otherwise had never studied any element of the subject he


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was now to teach.24 Instead, he went on to become its founder as a systematic discipline. On 9 September the definitive text was read out by Fourcroy, adopted unanimously, and printed forthwith.25 He and Thouin were delegated to wait on the president of the National Assembly and to ask permission for the entire staff to appear there on the sixteenth, four days before the deadline, in order to present the proposal they had been invited to make. No record of their being received survives. Nor did the Constituent Assembly find time to take further action. Expectations thus dashed, the staff returned to the uneven tenor of their ways, still officially subject to La Billarderie’s authority. Meanwhile, on 27 August, the day after Fourcroy’s draft was ready, former members of the defunct Société linnéenne, naturalists at large who had orchestrated the unveiling of Linnaeus’s bust on the twenty-third, reorganized themselves as the Société d’histoire naturelle. Theirs was now one among a raft of “sociétés libres” of all types springing up throughout the country in the heady air of freedom. For the purview had widened beyond the Linnaean inspiration. The attraction of membership in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle in 1790 bespeaks, not adherence to Linnaean taxonomy, but an opening of science, whether prudential or genuine, toward a public of all interested parties.26 The shift toward political activism may have been the reason why Broussonet never joined the new society. One thin volume of Actes appeared in 1792. Sixty-three resident members of the Society and ninety associates, many of them foreign, are there listed in order of their joining. Far down on the list are the names of La Rochefoucauld, Roland, Parmentier, and Lavoisier, who may by then have thought membership to be politic. According to a prefatory note, another volume of Actes was ready for the printer and would appear if the public response to this first offering warranted. Evidently it did not. The Society published nothing further until 1799, when a single volume of Mémoires appeared containing papers presented to the Institut de France in the later nineties. From a historical point of view, three among the twenty-seven articles in the 1792 Actes are noteworthy. A paper on the African hornbill was the earliest publication of Etienne Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. A twenty-year-old 24

His first memoir on shells was “Prodrome d’une nouvelle classification des coquilles, comprenant une rédaction appropriée des caractères génériques, et l’établissement d’un grand nombre de genres nouveaux,” Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris 1 (an VII, 1799), pp. 63–90. Lu a` l’Institut de France le 21 fromaire an VII. 25 Adresse et projet de règlement présentés a` l’Assemblée nationale par les officiers du Jardin des Plantes et du Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle (1790). 26 The Procès-Verbaux of the Society may be consulted in the Bibliothèque Centrale of the Muséum, MS. 464.

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pensionnaire at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine, he is “Geoffroy fils” in the table of contents.27 Second, a piece by Lamarck takes J. F. Gmelin to task for his edition of Linnaeus’s Systeme Naturae. The publication teems with the “grossest errors,” which Lamarck devotes his review to identifying.28 The third, and by far the most substantial and interesting of the memoirs to be noted, is by Philippe Pinel, who served as Secretary from 30 December 1791 until 29 June 1792. It is an exercise in the comparative anatomy (his term) of quadrupeds and has nothing to do with the nosology or neurology for which he became celebrated. Both the method and the spirit prefigure Cuvier and may well have served him as a model. It is no longer sufficient, runs Pinel’s argument, to characterize genera and species on the basis only of external and often arbitrary appearances. To establish “natural families” among large animals and to “grasp the gradations that link them one to another” requires determining “the immutable interrelations of the mechanical structures that the skeletons of these animals never fail to exhibit. For the advantage of the exact sciences is to introduce rigorous precision and a sort of invariability into the working of the human mind.” In Pinel’s analysis the arrangement of the bony parts of the lower jaw gives the key to such a classification.29 Despite the failure of the Constituent Assembly to act on the reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes in 1790, La Billarderie’s position in the intendancy gradually became untenable. On 1 October 1790 Condorcet’s journal, Chronique de Paris, printed an editorial welcoming the brochure in which the staff published its plan of reorganization. A month later, in November, La Billarderie’s brother, d’Angiviller, was accused on the floor of the National Assembly of having misappropriated the funds he had once disbursed as Director of the Batiments du Roi. The allegations were false, but he was indicted nonetheless. In June 1791 d’Angiviller’s arrest was ordered, his property was seized, and he fled France to take refuge in Russia at the court of Catherine II. Having already ceased to function as intendant, La Billarderie formally resigned in September 1791 and retreated to his native Picardy early in 1792. Implicated in some scheme of counterfeit assignats in January 1793, he died on the scaffold in Arras at an undetermined date during the Terror. Left to their own devices, the staff of the Jardin des Plantes chose Daubenton, Thouin, Lacepède, and Desfontaines to constitute an interim commission pending a regularization of their situation. In practice Thouin ran 27 “Buceros Africanus: Le Calao d’Afrique,” Actes de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris 1 (1792), pp. 18–20. 28 ´ “Sur les ouvrages généraux en Histoire Naturelle; et particulièrement sur l’Edition du Systeme Naturae de Linnaeus que M. J.-F. Gmelin vient de publier,” ibid., pp. 81–85. 29 “Recherches sur une nouvelle méthode de classification des quadrupèdes, fondée sur la structure mécanique des parties osseuses qui servent a` l’articulation de la mâchoire inférieure,” ibid., pp. 50–60.


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the Jardin des Plantes while Daubenton handled the much smaller matter of the gallery. Life went on. The botanical collections of assorted emigrés were expropriated and added to the stock. Fourcroy, Portal, Brongniart, and Jussieu gave their courses. The Paris section that took its name from the Jardin des Plantes assumed responsibility for security. Its voters further elected Jussieu to represent them in the General Assembly of the Commune of Paris, where his duties were an unwelcome distraction from his botanical studies. In collaboration with Jean-Guillaume Bruguières, a friend who was a specialist, Lamarck set about mastering the field he would later teach.30 He also began writing the first of the speculative works on the nature of physical reality that both damaged his later reputation in the scientific community and led to his theory of transformation of species.31 All this while, from 1790 into 1793, he and his colleagues were awaiting enactment of their Plan of Reorganization. That failed to happen, even though one of the principal authors, Lacepède, was a deputy in the Legislative Assembly and a member of the Comité d’Instruction Publique. The Ministry of the Interior was a revolving door in 1792. After dismissing Roland on 13 June, Louis XVI appointed Terrier de Monciel, an able man who lasted but a month in office. What was the dismay in the Jardin des Plantes when, in this last gasp of the monarchy, the King at Terrier’s instance filled the vacant intendancy by naming the enormously prolific and widely read nature writer, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, author among much else of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière indienne. To read those tales nowadays as anything but caricatures of Rousseauist sentimentality at its most saccharine requires an enormous, and perhaps unsustainable, effort of historical will power. In his own eyes, and those of his readers, however, Bernardin was no mere fabulist. He was a literary naturalist, the continuer of Buffon. Such lay readers as Terrier de Monciel, and indeed Louis XVI, could deem it appropriate to appoint him Buffon’s successor. They could also be certain that his nomination would be popular. The subtitle of an American abridgment conveys the gist of his immense ´ Etudes de la Nature: “Containing a Vindication of divine Providence, derived from a philosophic and moral survey of nature and of man.”32 Sympa30

His earliest paper on invertebrate zoology, “Sur les genres de la Sèche, du Calmar, et des Polypes vulgairement nommés ‘Polypes de la Mer,’ ” appeared in 1799 in the one-volume Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris (prairial an VII, see above, n. 24). It was read in two installments to the Institut de France on 21 floréal and 26 prairial an VI (10 May and 14 June 1798), PVIF 1, pp. 395, 407. 31 Recherches sur les causes des principaux faits physiques, 2 vols., an II (1794). See Gillispie (1956a), Burkhardt (1977), Corsi (1988). The sequels were Réfutation de la théorie pneumatique ou de la nouvelle doctrine des chimistes modernes (1796) and Mémoires de physique et d’histoire naturelle, établis sur des bases de raisonnement indépendantes de toute théorie (1797). 32 Bernardin de St.-Pierre, Studies of Nature (Boston, 1801).

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thetic scholarship has recently sought to rehabilitate Bernardin’s writings on natural history by considering them in the current light of ecological sensitivity and opposition to experiments on animals.33 His future associates could only fear, however, lest he seek to realize fantasies of the sort he had published within the precincts of the Jardin des Plantes. On the contrary, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who had been trained techni´ cally in the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées before becoming a writer, proved to be an able advocate of the interests of the institution and its staff throughout the early months of the Convention. He saw to the completion of the great greenhouse that shelters a miniature tropical rain forest to this very day. He had the courage to address the problem of preventing the people from picking the flowers even though the flowers now belonged to the people.34 He sought to organize a second natural history expedition to America to be led by the botanist Joseph Dombey, who had explored the natural history of Peru, Chile, and Brazil from 1778 to 1784, and who died of mistreatment in a British prison on the island of Montserrat in 1794.35 Bernardin’s most signal initative was a pamphlet calling for attachment of a menagerie to the Jardin des Plantes. The immediate occasion was the desirability of making some provision other than slaughter or starvation for the animals barely surviving in the ci-devant royal menagerie at Versailles— a rhinoceros, a hartebeast, a quagga, a tufted pigeon from the isle of Banda, and a lion with its faithful companion, a dog. To build a new menagerie around these forlorn creatures would hold an intrinsic advantage for the Jardin des Plantes. What still attracted scientists no less than general readers to Buffon’s great work was his treatment of the character and behavior of animals. Mere anatomy is insufficient. Only the study of living animals yields an intimate understanding, to which end their captivity must be made as natural as possible: “The relations of animals with the plants of their native country may there be studied. Only by that dual harmony can they be naturalized. . . . At the sight of the vegetation among which they were born, they will give themselves over to love-making under the illusion of being at home.”36 Zoologists would thus be afforded a window onto the life of their subjects, artists would be able to draw animals from nature, and throngs of visitors would bring prosperity to one of the poorest quarters of Paris. In a positive report on the proposal read before the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, a committee consisting of Millin, Pinel, and Brongniart went further than Bernardin intended. Zoo animals, they argued, could serve the purposes of an experimental physiology. Only some ten months later, in 33

Rey (1992). Hamy (1893), p. 55. 35 Ibid., p. 63. On Dombey’s life and career, see Hamy (1905). 36 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire sur la nécessité de joindre une ménagerie au Jardin national des plantes de Paris (1792), quoted in Rey (1992), p.318. 34


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November 1793, was the nucleus of a menagerie actually installed at the Jardin des Plantes, and then in consequence of the arrest of several entertainers, proprietors of sideshows without a circus, who were exhibiting caged animals in public places. The impetus, however, had come from Bernardin.37 It also fell to Bernardin to appoint to the staff Etienne Geoffroy SaintHilaire, one among the trio, the others being Lamarck and Cuvier, in whose later work natural history made the transition to modern biology. We have just seen how it was for institutional reasons that Lamarck moved into invertebrate zoology. Cuvier, a year younger than Geoffroy, was still unknown to the scientific community in Paris. In 1792 and 1793 he was serving as tutor in a noble Protestant family, the d’Héricy in Normandy, where he occupied his leisure hours in the study of molluscs along the seashore. Geoffroy’s opportunity, the most inadvertent of all, was owing to an adventure worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Twenty years old in 1792, Geoffroy was following a medical course, mainly to please his father, while greatly preferring Daubenton’s lectures on mineralogy at the Collège de France and those of Fourcroy and Jussieu in the Jardin des Plantes. Having completed his general education at the Collège de Navarre, he was now a boarding student in the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine. Foremost among the resident masters, all non-juring priests, was the abbé Haüy, the crystallographer, himself a onetime pupil of Daubenton and also an alumnus of the Collège de Navarre. Drawn together by common interests, master and pupil had become friends when, in the immediate aftermath of the rising of 10 August, Haüy and the entire collegial staff were arrested and jailed in the neighboring Saint-Firmin seminary, converted into a prison. Resolved to save his teachers, Geoffroy ran first to Daubenton, then to all the other scientists he could reach, and managed to enlist the support of enough influential people to secure an order for Haüy’s release on 14 August. Others of the collegial staff were still incarcerated at the onset of the prison massacres in September. On 2 September, the day the murders began, Geoffroy got himself up in the garb of a prison guard with a fake identity card, made his way into Saint-Firmin, but failed to persuade his masters to leave their brothers and follow him out of danger by a back way. Watching from his room that night, he saw an aged priest hurled to his death from a window across the alley. Desperate, Geoffroy found a ladder, propped it in an angle of the wall of Saint-Firmin, and climbed to a second-story window. One after the other he helped twelve elderly priests, one of whom sprained an ankle, clamber down to safety from what must have been a very low security prison. Enormously grateful, Haüy begged Daubenton to facilitate his young savior’s eagerness to shift from medicine to natural history. Opportunity arose 37

On the menagerie, see Burkhardt (1997).

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in March 1793. Like many other political moderates of good family, Lacepède, comte de La Ville-sur-Illon by birth, thought it the better part of valor to leave Paris and take shelter in his own country for a time. At once Daubenton proposed that Geoffroy be named to fill the vacancy. Bernardin readily agreed, and on 13 March nominated Geoffroy for appointment to the Natural History Gallery. Given his youth, his rank was Assistant Keeper and Assistant Demonstrator. So it happened that on 10 June 1793, when the Convention finally adopted the measure transforming the Jardin des Plantes into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, its first professor of vertebrate zoology was not Lacepède, but Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a mere college student three months since, who knew even less of his science than did Lamarck of its invertebrate branch.38 Bringing the staff ’s three-year-old plan for reorganization out of limbo and onto the floor of the Convention was the most fruitful of the tasks that Joseph Lakanal took on himself as lobbyist and legislative champion of science. His self-justification, published many years later, opens with this sentence: “I was not unaware that men of letters are as a rule illustrious and needy, and that they have to be supported and succored. I was not unaware that, failing such support and assistance, they will leave for other countries where they will be welcomed by neighboring governments which know that science repays its benefactors with immortality.”39 Elected to the Comité d’Instruction Publique in January 1793, Lakanal first intervened in the proceedings of the Convention on 16 February with a request that the Comité d’Instruction Publique and the Comité des Finances be instructed to prepare a joint report on the new organization to be given the Jardin des Plantes. The motion passed with no discussion, but nothing happened. In the course of an unrelated mission in the departments north of Paris, on 24 March Lakanal stopped by the chateau of Chantilly, former seat of the princes de Condé. Amazed by the profusion of works of art and objects of scientific interest, he proposed that a commmission be named to take an inventory and to arrange for transporting everything of value to Paris. The obvious place for the natural history collection was the Jardin des Plantes. That was the reason, according to Geoffroy’s account, why Lakanal called on Daubenton on 9 June, at three o’clock in the afternoon. In company with his young protegé, now a colleague, the venerable mineralogist received the visiting deputy, whom neither he nor Geoffroy had ever met. The occasion proved a windfall for both parties. When Lakanal inquired about the general needs of the establishment, Daubenton seized the unex38

Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1847), pp. 7–23. Lakanal, Exposé sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal . . . pour sauver, durant la révolution, les sciences, les lettres, et ceux qui les honoroient par leurs travaux (1838), p. 1. 39


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pected opportunity and pressed into his hands the brochure containing the Reorganization Plan of 1790. Lakanal, who had yet to make a mark in the Convention, thus found himself provided with a piece of legislation ready made. He took the text home, pruned the rhetoric of Fourcroy’s preamble, and the next morning secured the agreement in principle of the Comité d’Instruction Publique. Its members could scarcely have had time to read it. No trace remains in their minutes. During the session of the Convention that very evening, 10 June, Lakanal was given the floor. “Is the tree of liberty to be the only one not to be naturalized at the Jardin des Plantes?” asks his report.40 The accompanying legislation passed at once, with no discussion among deputies whose minds were on other things—on the sieges of Valenciennes by the Austrians, of Perpignan by the Spaniards, of Mainz by the Prussians, on the capture of Saumur by the Vendéens, on the anger and dismay provoked in provincial centers by the proscription of the Girondists.41 In this fashion, without debate and largely unnoticed, did the onetime Jardin et Cabinet du Roi officially become the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. The intendant’s post being abolished, Bernardin took the transformation in good part and retired, gracefully enough and with an indemnity. Specification of the courses to be taught is contained in the law itself, the text of which is relatively brief.42 Apart from trivial changes in terminology, the only difference from the 1790 draft was provision for a second course in what would soon be called vertebrate zoology, the purpose no doubt being to reserve a place for Lacepède alongside Geoffroy whenever the former might return. Only after passage of the law, which none of the staff had foreseen, did a committee consisting of Fourcroy, Thouin, and Jussieu draw up regulations that would govern the establishment in detail. Here there was a signal modification of the original proposal. After three years of revolution, the new bylaws were markedly less democratic. There was now no question either of student power or of participation by students in the selection of their professors. Indeed, the prospect for formal enrollment in the institution and for a coherent three-year curriculum was abandoned. The only provision for students appears in a single sentence of a lengthy document: Those among them “who need verification of their presence in various courses will inscribe their name and address in a register kept for each course and will receive a certificate of attendance from the professor.”43 40

PVCd’IP 1, p. 480. Ibid., pp. 479–481; Hamy (1893), pp. 63–66. 42 Ibid., pp. 483–486. 43 Chapitre deuxième, article XVI, “Projet de règlement pour le Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle présenté par les professeurs au Comité d’Instruction Publique de la Convention Nationale d’après le décret du 10 juin 1793.” Hamy (1893), pp. 146–160, p. 151. 41

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3. THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY CLIMATE

Lakanal’s role with respect to the Academy of Science was an altogether more parlous affair and ended, though not through his doing, with its abolition. Its eventual suppression, even like the reform of the Muséum, was preceded by formation of a society of scientific amateurs, the Société Philomathique. Among the “free” or voluntary societies, it proved to be the only one to survive the revolutionary ferment. As matters fell out, the Socie´té Philomathique found a niche wherein it continues to prosper in the evolving environment of science.44 At first glance, its members had much in common with the original Linnaeans. They initially foregathered on 10 December 1788, a couple of weeks before the Linnaeans held the last meeting of their abortive society. Both groups were started by enthusiasts for all that natural knowledge might hold for young men of their generation. The moving spirit of the Société Philomathique (at first called “Gymnastique”) was Augustin-Fran¸cois de Silvestre, student and scion of a family in the service of the comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII. Assigned the job of cataloguing the royal patron’s library, Silvestre is said to have set himself to reading mathematics, physics, chemistry, and natural history in order to understand what was in the books. Associated with him were five comrades: Alexandre Brongniart, future geologist and son of a famous architect; Claude-Antoine Riche, naturalist and younger brother of Gaspard Riche de Prony, mathematician and civil engineer of note; Charles de Broval, a student of mathematics and physics who dropped from view in the early 1790s; and two young doctors, both of whom died in 1790. Silvestre and Brongniart, the two seniors, were twenty-six in 1788. The formalities were very similar to those of the Société linnéenne. At the weekly meetings members gave papers reporting on their reading, occasionally on their investigations, and regularly on the proceedings and publications of the Academy of Science, the Royal Society, and other principal scientific bodies. There was considerable overlap in membership. The two groups played cox and box in the same modest quarters on different evenings and divided the rent. Indications are that the Philomathes gravitated toward natural history and away from the exact sciences that originally pi44

The indispensable source for the foundation and early history of the Société Philomathique is the thesis, unfortunately still unpublished, of Mandelbaum (1980). What follows derives entirely from his account. It is based primarily on a thorough exploitation of the archives of the Society, which are conserved in the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, where I was able to examine them in a cursory way many years ago. Mandelbaum gives not only a narrative account of the founding and development of the Society to 1835, but also a prosopography of all the members, chronologies of the meetings and of the issues of its Bulletin, and a bibliography of published sources as well as a listing of other libraries containing documentation.

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qued their curiosity. The specification of eleven fields of interest drawn up in 1788 began with general physics and mathematics, astronomy, and experimental physics, in that order, and ended with botany and zoology. In 1791, by contrast, the by-laws stipulate nine fields. Natural history and anatomy were now at the head of the list with mathematics and archaeology at the bottom. It is unclear whether the new ordering reflects the revolutionary tilt from the exact to the life sciences, or (which may come to the same thing) the readier accessibility of the latter. However that may be, the Philomathes went their own way in other and more important respects. Unlike their naturalist counterparts, the members not only perused books and memoirs, they repeated and occasionally initiated experiments on problems in chemistry and physiology. By May 1791 the Society had attracted a select circle of correspondents, fourteen in number, to whom it sent word of what was being learned by way of a monthly newsletter. The Bulletin, as it was called at the outset, contained accounts of new discoveries, important items of scientific novelty in general, and a summary of the Society’s own work. Fifteen issues composed the first series. A clerk transcribed eighteen copies of each in order that the manuscripts might be circulated, but only to the correspondents. Resident members were not allowed to receive them lest they be tempted to skip meetings. Beginning in late 1792 the Société Philomathique had its Bulletin printed. Unlike the publications of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, the new journal survived the confusion of the times and under the Directory became one of the important periodicals in the new scientific dispensation. Like its parent society, the Bulletin filled a need. It was neither the organ of a newly specialized discipline, like the Annales de chimie, the Journal des Mines, and the Annales du Muséum, nor was it, like the Journal de physique, the production of a single editor who published often lengthy memoirs by persons not of the Academy of Science. In keeping with the self-educational purpose of the Society, the Bulletin reported current work at the forefront of science. To that end, articles were concise and publication rapid. In the later 1790s leading scientists themselves took advantage of those features. Laplace, for example, rather than wait out the year or two before a lengthy memoir could appear in the Mémoires of the Institute, often published abstracts in the Bulletin de la Société Philomatique. Its place may be compared to that of Science and Nature today. The editorial purpose was timely reporting, not popularization. Two further features differentiating the Philomathes from the Société d’Histoire Naturelle were limited membership and a low political profile. Initially, resident members were to number no more than twenty. Although the ceiling was lifted in 1791, the membership increased only slightly prior to the suppression of the Academy of Science in August 1793. In 1797 it was fixed at fifty. “Libre” the Society might be, but it was also selective. Candi-

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dates had to be elected but might be black-balled, at first by two, and later by three, negative votes. Only serious people were welcome, none of whom betrayed a trace of resentment over the exclusiveness of the Academy of Science. In their eyes it was the main source of the knowledge that they had joined together in order to improve themselves by sharing in it. The Société Philomathique, in short, took no part in the mounting campaign against official science, or in politics at large. In that as in most respects, it followed the example of the Academy of Science, which eschewed consideration of political matters. The earliest indication in the Procès-Verbaux of the Academy that the Revolution was occurring appears in the minutes of the meeting of 4 July 1789, when a resolution to congratulate Bailly on his conduct as president of the National Assembly carried unanimously. In the same meeting Laplace came forward with the first suggestion of his career for a reform reaching beyond the formulations of celestial mechanics, probability, and physics. His proposal went dead against the current of the times. It stipulated that henceforth the Academy would require an elementary knowledge of mathematics and mechanics on the part of artisans seeking a brevet, or official license. His colleagues, most of them more sensitive to political realities, postponed discussion of his motion. The next day a large majority prudently voted to require nothing and simply to record a “preference” for licensing technicians versed in those subjects. Laplace’s next intervention was more in character. On 18 July, four days after the fall of the Bastille, he read a paper on the inclination of the ecliptic.45 An informal record of the proceedings of the Academy kept privately by Fougeroux de Bondaroy is also devoid of political allusions. He notes that he was absent on 15 July, and that only twenty-three members were then present, but does not say why.46 Only late in 1789 did the Academy begin to question the conformity of its own regime with the revolutionary order of things. The issue was raised, not by any future Jacobin among the company, but by the foremost of its honorary members. The Academy returned from its annual recess on 14 November. On the eighteenth the Duc de La Rochefoucauld opened the first regular session of the new term with an address urging a thorough revision of the statutes. Citing the example of the night of 4 August, when liberal noblemen in the Constituent Assembly (and he among them) renounced their feudal rights, La Rochefoucauld called on the Academy to purge itself of the taint of the past by itself framing a constitution that would eliminate every feature of its organization and procedures smacking of inequality or privilege. Even like the three estates of the body politic, the 45

PVAS, 4 and 8 July 1789. The manuscript notes covering the meetings of the Academy from 22 April to 29 August 1789 are in the library of Princeton University, MSS Collection, AM1999–34.CO199. 46


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four grades of honoraire, pensionnaire, associé libre, and associé, which he now called orders, must be merged into one. Eligibility for a pension, or stipend, must depend only on seniority and no longer on status. All members of the Academy would have the same voice in its affairs. Any distinction between academicians was inadmissible, except that provision should be made for a class of members—he meant but did not say amateurs—whose responsibilities precluded their making science their occupation. The crown would have no voice in the election of new members and officers, which would henceforth pertain entirely to the Academy. It would exercise its civic responsibilities subject to the authority of the National Assembly, and the role of the King would shrink to a formality.47 La Rochefoucauld’s démarche was not, on the whole, welcome to his colleagues. For one thing, his own status was such that the move could scarcely be felt to come from one among equals. For another, the Academy had just been through a reorganization in 1785, while Lavoisier was Director. Though disciplinary rather than political in nature, the reform had been a wrenching episode.48 La Rochefoucauld had even then weighed in heavily favoring the change. Finally, members of the Academy were far from being of one mind politically. Their opinions ranged from the incipient radicalism of a Monge and a Fourcroy through varying degrees of liberalism, indifference, insensitivity, and conservatism to the royalism of Cassini IV, behind whose name the numeral signified a tenure as Intendant of the Observatory no less hereditary in practice than the lordship of any manor. Nevertheless, the Academy had little choice but to appoint a commission charged with drawing up an appropriate proposal. On 10 March 1790 it brought in a draft of regulations consisting of some seventy-four articles conforming in most respects to La Rochefoucauld’s recommendations. Equality and citizenship within the academic body politic were the main motifs. There was to be no distinction among members except that arising from ability to attend and participate regularly. The role of the disciplinary sections was to be subordinated to that of the Academy as a single entity. Seniority carrying the right to a stipend was to accrue within the body as a whole rather than section by section. An executive committee was to handle nominations for the entire company. Procedures in general were to be simplified.49 Discussion ensued in an academic rather than a revolutionary tempo. Almost two months elapsed before the Academy took up the reform at all. 47

Hahn (1965) gives the text of La Rochefoucauld’s address, the draft of which is in the Archives de l’Académie des Sciences. For further discussion of the proposed reform, see Hahn (1971), pp. 167–173. 48 Gillispie (1980), pp. 80–81. 49 PVAS, 10 March 1790, p. 74. Printed in OL 4, pp. 597–614, where the editors misidentify the text as that of the 1785 reform.

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Not until the meeting of 2 June 1790 was the first part of the new “règlement” formally read out. Thereupon, the Academy proceeded to consider one article at a time in weekly meetings. At that rate it might have completed its deliberations in a year and a half, say by the end of 1791! Impatient at this snail’s pace, the Constituent Assembly demanded on 20 August 1790 that all academies submit new constitutions within a month. The session was the same in which the Assembly also, but in a very different tone, invited the officers of the Jardin des Plantes to frame a set of regulations for their institution. The contrast in their political credit is already apparent: the Assembly treated the naturalists with consideration, the academicians with asperity. Thus put to it, the Academy scheduled four extraordinary sessions every week and managed to finish its deliberations with seven days to spare on 13 September 1790, four days after the naturalists completed theirs.50 Creuzé-Latouche, the member of the Finance Committee who championed the naturalists and attacked their Intendant, had hard words in the same pamphlet for the Académie Fran¸caise and the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He contrasted the inanity of the former with the insufficiently appreciated utility of the Society of Agriculture, and considered the latter to be “founded on principles of tyranny and servitude,” which systematically humiliated a crowd of estimable artists. About the other academies in themselves he had nothing adverse to say, though the National Assembly would certainly need to examine their relation to the Constitution and the law. Creuzé-Latouche directed his criticism not at their procedures, but at his chairman, Lebrun, who considered that they must remain under the immediate patronage of the King. Only royal largesse, in that view, could assure the disinterested flourishing of science, art, and letters, in the future as in the past. Not so, countered Creuzé-Latouche, with some passion. Those times are past. Having adopted the principle of separation of powers, the Assembly would surely not commit the fatal error of assigning the agencies bound to have the greatest effect on public opinion to one of those powers. All institutions of government responsible for science, arts, letters, and public education should be declared “National.” They must, insisted Creuzé-Latouche (not quite consistently with Montesquieu’s principle of separation), be subject to the legislative power, and he specifies the institutions he has in mind: the Académie Fran¸caise, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Société Royale de Médecine, the Société Royale d’Agriculture, the Jardin des Plantes, the three chairs of chemistry, ´ anatomy, and natural history at the Collège de France, the Ecole Véterinaire ´ d’Alfort, the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Ecole Gratuite de 50

PVAS, 13 September 1793, fol. 210–211.


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Dessin, the Académie d’Architecture, and the Bibliothèque du Roi. The Assembly should appoint a special committee to review the reorganization plans that its decree of 20 August 1790 required from the whole lot.51 That happened only under the Legislative Assembly with the creation of its Comité d’Instruction Publique. In the meantime, members of the Academy of Science agreed with Creuzé-Latouche about the importance of the role of the Crown, but disagreed with each other over what it should be. In their deliberations that was the most divisive issue. Should the King or the National Assembly be the authority to pass on the election of new members and officers? Fourcroy spoke for the radicals, Jussieu and Cassini for the royalists within the academy. Proponents of its responsibility to the Assembly and the nation carried the day, though barely. Only the designation “Royale” was to be retained.52 Neither the initial foot-dragging nor the concluding discord enhanced the standing of the Academy of Science, whether in the eyes of the politicians, in those of the public, or in its own. Practically, however, the outcome was of no more moment for the Academy than for the Jardin des Plantes. The Constituent Assembly failed to ratify either set of regulations. Even while exchanging projects for reform with its fellow Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of Architecture, the Academy of Science, like the Jardin des Plantes, continued to operate in accordance with its old procedures, albeit with one cosmetic change. A resolution of 19 February 1791 prescribed that henceforth academicians would sign the register in order of seniority and without distinction of status.53 Under the Legislative Assembly the whole question of reformed regulations became moot. At the outset Condorcet was in the chair of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, which now had the mission, originally evoked by Creuzé-Latouche, of preparing legislation to regulate all learned and cultural institutions. The conflict of interest with Condorcet’s post as Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science was obvious. On 21 November 1791 he requested the Academy to choose a vice-secretary to serve throughout his own term in the National Assembly. Reluctant to make a continuing commitment in such uncertain circumstances, his colleagues named Fourcroy for a three-month stint, replacing him successively with Haüy, Cassini, and Lalande at like intervals throughout 1792. As we have seen, Condorcet would have transformed the Academy into a 51 Opinion de M. J.-A. Creuzé-Latouche au sujet du Jardin des Plantes et des Académies (1790), BN, Le29.863, pp. 11–14. For the proposal submitted by the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture, see AN ADVIII, II, pièce 3; and for those submitted by the Académie Royale de Chirurgie and the Société Royale d’Agriculture, see AN F171310, dossier 14. On this debate, see Hahn (1971), pp.194–200. 52 On these disputes, see Hahn (1971), pp. 171–2. 53 PVAS, 19 February 1791, fol. 257.

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Society for Science and the Arts and elevated it to the apex of the national system of education. Thus would he have fleshed out the scholarly curriculum on the backbone of science, subordinated the classroom to the high oversight of scientists, while reciprocally sheltering the essential scientific functions of the Academy within the citadel of an apolitical educational framework. So far as the minutes show, the Academy never formally discussed the Condorcet proposal either before or after its submission to the Legislative Assembly in April 1792. There must have been discussion in the corridors, however. Evidence comes from the astronomer André Méchain, who ran the survey of the southern sector of the meridian that would serve as basis for the metric system. Between May 1793 and September 1794 Méchain was first marooned and then, by the misfortunes of war, interned in Barcelona. In all that interval he could receive no direct news from Paris. A long and plaintive letter to Borda of 10 January 1794 reports how people tell him that the Academy of Science has been destroyed, that all its members are scattered, and that his mission no longer serves any purpose. He cannot believe such tidings, however: “No doubt we are wrongly informed. I presume that the Academy of Science has been combined with the National Institute conformably with the project to that end already formed in the spring of 1792.”54 To all appearances Condorcet’s colleagues were accepting of the prospect of their transformation into a Society and content to leave institutional matters in his hands. However that may be, the strategy miscarried. Worse, it backfired. Critics and enemies already assailing the Academy on intrinsic grounds were now joined by opponents of central aspects of Condorcet’s educational proposal, notably its exclusion of morality, civic spirit, and character building from the classroom, and its assigning responsibility for higher education and professional training to the state. What could be seen as a bid for power thus augmented the negative image of the Academy among people who did not necessarily partake of hostility to science and intellect per se, although as we shall see that strand too was wound inextricably into the noose. With the Condorcet scheme stillborn, and its author in political eclipse in the late winter and spring of 1793, the defense of a compromised, still unreformed, and formerly royal Academy devolved on others, and principally on Lavoisier, who was himself in a parlous and exposed position. More virulently than among naturalists, though there too, resentment of the Academy of Science had long festered in the breasts of others, mainly artisans, inventors, apothecaries, and laborers subject in one way or another to its authority. The most paranoid voice and the most venomous pen were Jean-Paul Marat’s.55 There is no need to repeat here the history of his at54 ´ Méchain to Borda, 10 January 1794, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 1504. 55 Coquard (1993) supersedes all earlier biographies.


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tempt to win academic approbation for the misconceived but by no means empty experimental investigations of phenomena of light, heat, and electricity that he had put before the public in the 1780s.56 He took his revenge in a forty-page pamphlet, Les charlatans modernes, ou lettres sur le charlatanisme académique, published in September 1791, concurrently with the elections to the Legislative Assembly. It had not escaped Marat—nothing political did—that the new legislature would decide the future of academies and other cultural institutions. That prospect, he explained in the foreword, made the moment right to rescue from oblivion letters he had written some years previously that would otherwise have remained private. In fact, Marat had already published a modified portion on the general iniquity of academies in his journal L’Ami du peuple following the debates, discussed above, of 17–20 August 1790 in the National Assembly on funds to be allocated to academies and literary societies.57 It is evident from allusions in Les charlatans modernes to particular episodes in Marat’s dealings with the scientific community that he must have compiled this, his version of the facts, in 1784 and 1785, before publishing his (excellent) translation of Newton’s Opticks (1787) and his last scientific effort, the incoherent Mémoires académiques (1788).58 As in other of his writings of the time, Marat indulges in the conceit that the author is someone other than himself, a person whose identity he is bound not to divulge. The form is epistolary. A series of eleven letters purports to be addressed to an intimate friend, one Camille. The pose Marat affected in the 1780s is still his standpoint. No enemy he of reason and knowledge: No, No! Defender of these instruments of enlightenment, he will face down official, and corrupt, pretenders in the pay of men in place and power. “In a century said to be philosophic and amid a nation calling itself free, can it be thought a crime to unmask academic charlatanism, and to repudiate the epoch of barbarism that its ensconced adepts seek to revive!”59 Thus the exordium. The source of the credulity that dishonors the current generation—so runs Marat’s argument—may be traced to the marked preference shown for science over letters. Literature speaks directly to the heart and mind. What purports to be science, instead of imparting direct knowledge of nature, disguises it in jargon and only encourages the credulous in their fascination with the marvelous. Hence the ease with which such mountebanks as Mesmer and Cagliostro could dupe the public, even enlisting in their impostures the participation of certain luminaries of the Académie Fran¸caise. That members of the Academy of Science and the Society of Medicine had con56

Gillispie (1980), pp. 290–330. See also Marat, homme de science?, ed. Jean Bernard, J.-F. Lemaire, and J.-P. Poirier. Collection les empêcheurs de penser en rond. 57 L’Ami du peuple no. 194, 17 September 1790. 58 For a thorough discussion of Marat’s optical research, see the annotation in Michel Blay’s edition (Christian Bourgeois, 1989) of Optique de Newton, traduction nouvelle par M. ***. 59 Marat, Les charlatans modernes, Notice de l’éditeur.

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demned these fads was nothing to their credit. Charlatans themselves, they acted only out of professional jealousy and fear of being eclipsed. Further letters take the chemists to task for perpetually multiplying entities, particularly in the case of novel gases. Science is no better than fashion, an affair of “perpetual revolutions,” of which the current chemical instance represents a reversion to occult ideas of the scholastics. To be preferred are the procedures of “physicists” who seek to reduce phenomena to the manifold operations of a basic principle. Marat has in mind, obviously, his own claims, and others like them, for fire, light, and electricity, but the main gist is denunciation of the scribblers who, aping Voltaire and Diderot, took their cue from the spirit of destructive criticism given off by science in order to undercut the sensibility awakened by Rousseau. Thence Marat proceeds to the venality of scientific institutions. Stipends paid gratuitously to academicians form part and parcel of the generalized scandal of pensions lavished on courtiers at the expense of the people. Such corporatism among the favored few, preceded by ruthless competition for advancement, do not at all encourage scientific productivity. On the contrary, these practices stifle true creativeness. In science as elsewhere only the innocent inquirer working and thinking alone happens on those things of truth and beauty bare that are their own reward. Not by rigged prize contests will such discoveries be elicited. Nor, when free inquiry does achieve success, will its fruits be communicated through the medium of a monopolistic official press. These, the standard complaints against the establishment of science, arts, and letters, had been aired by others in the 1780s but not by Marat, who then aspired to join the system. Released from that ambition by the Revolution, he turned the extraordinary journalistic talent he discovered in himself to overthrowing the Academy, among other things. To that end he published the griefs he had long been harboring. Interpolated passages and pointed footnotes throughout the text of Les charlatans modernes bring the general strictures up to date. Only in letters X and XI, however, did his proxy correspondent get down to personal cases and pillory those whom Marat considered his erstwhile tormentors. These were members of a body that took the radiant sun for its symbol and for its logo “this modest epigraph, Invenit et Perfecit: Not that it had ever made any discovery, or had ever perfected anything, for all that has ever come out of it is a heavy collection of aborted memoirs that serve sometimes to fill up empty space in large libraries.”60 Among the astronomers, Lalande is no less famous for his grotesque gallantries than for his incorrect weather forecasts and implacability against innovators. Cassini is mainly known for having mistaken the iris in the lens 60

Ibid., p. 32.


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of his telescope for a colored star. His inferiority to his ancestor Dominique shows that importing a race of astronomers has not worked as did importing a race of hound dogs. Among physicists, Rochon never invented anything but does have the merit of appropriating the discoveries of others. LeRoi is the roving reporter for all the errors, all the stupidities, all the extravagances published in the last two centuries. The best of the mathematicians are La Place, Monge, and Cousin. All three are automatons in the habit of following certain formulas and applying them blindly, like a workhorse that turns a millwheel a certain number of times before stopping. Monge is famous for his good luck in getting the job of examiner of pupils in the engineering corps through having taught the maréchal de Castries how to count. (Marat has this wrong—Monge was examiner of naval cadets.) Cousin is famous for the theory of crocheting and for a cast-iron digestion. Laplace is famous because of his pretty better-half and for his linx-eyed gaze, which could penetrate a depth of 15,000 leagues in order to perceive that the nucleus of the earth is of middling density. Condorcet, a literary cad (faquin), is the Academy’s panegyrist who demands for himself, so say his colleagues, the eulogies he pronounces on others. Of the many stories about him, one would do. Pretty or not, his patroness (Julie de Lespinasse) had been the mistress of the marquis de Ker. Since any service is worth a salary, she got a legacy of 30,000 livres on Ker’s death. When his heirs contested it, Condorcet fixed the procurator of probate, and has drawn quarterly income ever since from the fruits of his patroness’s labors. If he had been a year older, people would have taken him for the gentleman’s son, but given the good lady’s tastes, he might well be descended from any passing Turk. Lavoisier, finally, is “ever the father of des petites maisons” (the reference is to the report on sanitation in theaters and hospitals)61 and author of “all the discoveries that make a noise.” Lavoisier, indeed, has to be put at the head of the whole sorry list. Since he has no ideas of his own, he takes over those of others, but since he almost never knows what to make of them, he abandons them just as easily and changes systems as he does shoes. In the space of six months I have seen him cotton on to new doctrines of the principle of fire, of igneous fluid, of latent heat, one after another. In an even briefer time, I have seen him take up pure phlogiston and pitilessly proscribe it. A short while ago, following Cawendish, he found the precious secret of making water with water. Again, having dreamed that this liquid is only pure air and inflammable air, he metamorphoses it into the king of combustibles. If you ask me what he has done to be so extolled, I shall reply that he has procured himself an income of 100,000 livres, that he formed the project of turning Paris into a vast 61

Gillispie (1980), p. 246.

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prison, and that he changed the name of acid to oxygen, of phlogiston to nitrogen [Marat has this wrong too], of marine to muriatique, of nitrous to nitric and nitrate. There are his claims to immortality. Proud of these great things, he now sleeps on his laurels while his parasites praise him to the skies and his two-bit disciple Fourcroy runs all over Paris spreading his discoveries.62 To this settling of old scores, this scratching of old sores, Marat tacked on a twelfth and last letter, said to come from “another pen,” and obviously scribbled down amid the fury of current politics. His reader is reminded of the enthusiasm aroused by the flight of the first balloons in 1783 and of the grant of 1,200 livres made to the Academy of Science to develop a method of aerial locomotion.63 And where had the money gone? Into the pockets of savants frequenting the Rapée, the Opéra, and the whores. Turning to the Academy to propose a method for equalizing weights and measures was a still greater folly. What had they come up with? They had cribbed their proposal for measuring the meridian word for word from the account Romé de l’Isle (whose name they took care not to mention) had given of the ancient Egyptian system based on the pyramids, than which no determination could be more accurate. And for that piece of plagiarism they have got the Minister to hand over 100,000 ećus—“a little piece of cake to be shared among the brotherhood. “Judge from that the utility of academies and the virtue of their members . . . vile henchmen of despots, cowardly boosters of despotism.”64 In such wise did this sick, clever, and angry man, once a doctor and now the most powerful journalist of the day, set about preparing public opinion to consider the disposition that the Comité d’Inscruction Publique, with Condorcet at its head, would propose for the Academy of Science as part of a new educational system. In great measure public opinion was already prepared. Jean-Claude Delamétherie, editor of Journal de physique and, in company with Lamarck and the pharmacist Demachy, one of the most bitter opponents of the new chemistry, lost no opportunity to castigate the crushing of fresh talent by the academic juggernaut. Far more widely read, Bernardin de St-Pierre’s best-selling fable, La chaumière indienne, has a learned emissary of the Royal Society traveling the world in search of truths answering to the ills of humanity. At the far point of his journey in India he encounters a Brahmin high priest, who in the most condescending manner explains that truth is reserved to Brahmin sages, for which read academicians. They alone can read the recondite language wherein it is contained, for which read mathematics or Lavoisier’s new nomenclature. 62 63 64

Ibid., pp. 36–37. Gillispie (1983). Ibid., p. 40.

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4. ARTISANS AND INVENTORS

Beyond such manifestations of personal pique and literary attitudes, real interests were at stake in a sector of the public whose opinion was now important. Leaders among the class of artisans set out to reverse the aphorism according to which science governs the mechanical arts. Among the manifold rebellions comprising the Revolution as a whole figures a gathering revolt of technology, moderate at the outset and finally extreme. To follow its course is to move down into obscure places among small but solid people, mechanics, craftsmen, artisans, inventors, and minor manufacturers, solid citizens for the most part, among whom fermented a leaven of cranks and malcontents. Their history is hard to come by. Nevertheless, traces remain of groups they formed to articulate and secure their interests, even as the naturalists had done in organizing the Société d’Histoire Naturelle. Early in the field was the Société des Inventions et Découvertes, which originated in the summer of 1790 as an informal lobbying group of leading artisans. A minor nobleman joined the effort, one Reth de Servières, whose family had a tradition of patronage of the mechanical arts. Their first purpose was to frame and secure passage of patent legislation. It was not a new idea in France that an innovator should be authorized to profit from exclusive control over his discoveries for a certain time and that society should eventually benefit from their dissemination. The practice of the old regime accomplished the essential purpose of a working patent system.65 An inventor whose idea passed muster before an academic commission would often be granted monopolistic control over exploitation of his invention for a period of years provided it then come into the public domain. The principle on which the modern system is based is fundamentally different, however. The old “brevet” was an ad hoc privilege conferred by the Crown, whereas in the climate of the Revolution any notion of privilege, other than one stemming from nature, was inadmissible. That a man has a natural right of property in the product of his mind and hand no less than in his real estate is axiomatic in the French theory of patents. It was first developed in a “Pétition Motivée” that the “Artisan Inventors,” not yet formally organized into a society, presented to the Constituent Assembly in August 1790. Their case rested on Article 17 of the “august” Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen establishing the inviolable and sacred rights of property, in which are to be included the “fruits of inventive genius.”66 On that basis, the inventors solicited enactment of legislation conformable to English patents (which in fact had nothing to do with natural law), 65

Isoré (1937). “Respectueuse Petition des Artistes Inventeurs,” AP 24 (Séance jeudi, 7 avril 1791), pp. 641–644, summarizes the original petition. 66

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and attached the draft of a decree to their petition. On 6 September 1790 it was referred to the Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce.67 Named to prepare a report was the chevalier Stanislas de Boufflers. The choice could scarcely have been more incongruous or more fortunate. Adventurer and man of minor letters, Boufflers was a gay blade of the Enlightenment. Born untimely in a carriage when his mother, the marquise, was en route from Lunéville to Nancy, he was a younger son, intended for the Church. A clerical career became impractical when he composed a salacious, if not quite pornographic, fable, Aline reine de Golconde, while a seminarian at Saint-Sulpice. The young man salvaged an income dependent somehow on celibacy by taking vows in the order of Knights of Malta. Not to follow his peregrinations as a soldier of fortune, litterateur corresponding with Voltaire and Grimm, and enlightened colonial administrator in Senegal, it is enough to note that the nobility of Nancy elected Boufflers to represent them in the States-General. With characteristic agility, in June 1789 he spoke first against and then in favor of unifying the three orders.68 Boufflers was anything but an assiduous politician. The only mark he made in the Constituent Assembly was championing the cause of artisans and inventors. Their leaders put before him a carefully assembled mass of documentation—memoirs of grievances, examples of French inventive genius frustrated by officialdom, attribution of English industrial prowess to the rewards assured inventors by its patent system. Boufflers listened. He read. He transformed their heavy-handed, literal, self-praising, and self-pitying expositions into a light, engaging essay, delightfully written and clearly serious. In his report, read before the National Assembly on 30 December 1790, the French language is at its most pleasing and persuasive.69 The accompanying draft, enacted the same day with only minor modifications, received the royal assent and became law on 7 January 1791. Its preamble is forthright. Since any new idea that may be useful to society belongs in the first instance to its originator, it would be an affront to the rights of man not to treat an industrial discovery as the property of its author. Failure to recognize that truth may well have contributed to discouraging French industry, to have led distinguished artisans to emigrate, and to have expatriated a large number of inventions from which France should have had the initial advantages. Hence, by Article I, “Every discovery or new invention, in all types of 67 Gerbaux and Schmidt, Procès-Verbaux des Comités d’Agriculture et de Commerce de la Constituante, de la Législative, et de la Convention, 1 (1906), p. 524 (hereafter PVCA&C). On British patent law, see Boehm (1967). 68 Maugras (1907). 69 Rapport fait a` l’Assemblée Nationale au nom du Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce . . . sur la propriété des auteurs de nouvelles découvertes & inventions en tout genre d’industrie (1791). BN, Le29.1206. The title page has the motto “A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos.”


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industry, is the property of its author.” Article II stipulates that any type of improvement on existing procedures was also to be considered an invention, and Article III that whoever introduced a foreign discovery would benefit from the same advantages as if he were its inventor. Remaining articles require that exact descriptions, designs, and models be submitted, to be made public upon issuance of the patent. Provided it was exploited within two years, its protection would hold good for five, ten, or fifteen years, depending on the fee the inventor paid. Also laid down were guidelines for litigation in case of infractions. The last article states that the Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce jointly with the Comité d’Impositions would prepare a further measure fixing the amount of those fees and providing for other details of implementation.70 Immediately on passage of the law the artisans and inventors who had consulted with Boufflers celebrated their victory of principle by organizing themselves formally into the Société des Inventions et Découvertes. A delegation headed by Servières waited on the Assembly to express the gratitude of the new society. Its plan was to admit to membership “all citizens already known or who may become known for some discovery, invention or improvement in all types of industry.” To their apostrophe Mirabeau replied from the president’s chair: “The discoveries of industry and art were a property before the National Assembly so declared.”71 The new society had the further satisfaction that the Assembly struck down what had been in their eyes another barrier to innovation, unrelated except that it also derived from the regime of privilege. The law of 16 February 1791 abolished craft guilds, and with them the control those ancient bodies exercised over industrial procedures.72 The grounds were that corporatism in general, and the regulations governing the status of apprentice, journeyman, and master in particular, were incompatible with citizenship. It remained to implement the patent law and to rid inventors formally of the final great impediment, namely, the responsibility vested in the Academy of Science to advise agencies of government on the merits of novel machines or innovative processes submitted to the state in applications for subsidy or exclusive rights. So far the only hint of differences with the Academy had been a passing 70 The text follows the Boufflers report, n. 69, above. It is also printed in PVCA&C, n. 67, above) 1, pp. 655–659. 71 AP 23, p. 54, séance du 8 février 1791. Procès-Verbaux survive from two meetings of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes, those of 27 January and 2 February 1792, BN MSS Fran¸cais, ancien supplément fran¸cais 8045. They are miscatalogued as pertaining to the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers. An interesting entry in the former records that a deputation from the Cordeliers requesting them to join in signing a petition on popular education was referred to a commission consisting of Fortin and Mercklein. They replied that since the Society was concerned with the advancement of arts and crafts, and not with politics, it could not take a position collectively. 72 “Respectueuse pétition,” op. cit., n. 66 above.

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remark in the original Boufflers report. How, he asked, a` propos of the old system, could any tribunal judge fairly of an invention which, by definition, does not yet exist? And who could properly serve on such panels? “The best choice, no doubt, was scientists. But have not scientists themselves sometimes been accused of conflict of interest? Have they always been fair with the inventors? Let’s admit it: Erudition has little belief in inspiration, and men accustomed to marking out the paths that lead to knowledge have difficulty in supposing that it can be attained in a single leap [à vol d’oiseau].”73 Delayed until late March and early April, debate in the Assembly over the implementing legislation was less than harmonious. Several deputies objected to opening the door to charlatans and to the complexities of adjudicating claims and counter-claims ad infinitum. Prominent among them was Dionis du Séjour, astronomer, mathematician, member of the Academy of Science, and formerly counselor of the Parlement de Paris.74 Elected to the EstatesGeneral by the nobility of Paris, he was never a political being and intervened but seldom in the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly. His doing so on this occasion intensified suspicions among prospective beneficiaries of the patent law. In late April 1791, impatient over delay, the “artistes-inventeurs” spoke for themselves, and addressed the Committee directly, inelegantly, and bluntly. During the reign of oppression, a great concept seemed a metaphysical dream to idiots arrayed under its banner; to the jealous, a reason for persecution; to scientific bodies, an attack on their emptiness and vanity, a property to be invaded without scruple. By benefit of the revolution, the time of tyranny exists no longer; imagination is no longer captive; the only abolute royalty preserved in philosophy is that of genius; the great charter that assures it is the beautiful Law of 7 January last, of which we demand the implementation.75 Strong language prevailed. Enacted on 25 May 1791, the promised measure opens with the statement that patents are to be issued on demand “without prior examination.” Further, the Ministry of the Interior would open a Registry of Patents (Directoire des Brevets d’Invention). Servières was named the first director. Inventors thereby got what they wanted. It was now up to them to defend their rights before the courts and up to the market to determine the value of their creations. Some 750 patents were issued in the next 73

Boufflers, Rapport, n. 6, p. 12. AP 24, pp. 450–462, 482–484, 632–644; 26, pp. 76, 79–80, séances du 29 mars, 31 mars, 7 avril, 14 mai 1791. 75 Adresse des artistes-inventeurs au Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce, 11 avril 1791, BN, Lb39. 9860. 74


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twenty years.76 The most famous is number 14, covering the method by which Nicolas Leblanc, a surgeon and minor chemist, succeeded in converting sea salt into commercial soda. He applied for it on 25 July 1791. It was issued on 19 September. After many vicissitudes, culminating in the inventor’s suicide, the Leblanc process became the basis of much of the alkali industry in the nineteenth century.77 The laws of 7 January and 25 May 1791 remain the foundation of the French patent system.78 So far as patents were concerned, the question of science and industry was henceforth moot. What radicalized matters was not the dream of making money and also reputation, but money itself, right up front. In addition to monopolistic privilege for the exploitation of inventions, the industrial policy of the old regime comprised subsidies for many existing enterprises, awards for innovation of several sorts, and rewards in the form of pensions for persons who could persuade the authorities that theirs were worthy contributions to the public weal. The Academy of Science, and on occasion provincial academies, conducted prize competitions on topics set sometimes by themselves, sometimes in consultation with the Bureau du Commerce or organs of local government. The Bureau and other agencies, most frequently the Ministries of War and of Marine Affairs, might and did make grants both to established manufacturers and on a smaller scale to aspiring craftsmen, artisans, and industrial innovators of many sorts. Whatever the revolutionary commitment to unfettered rights of property, none of the beneficiaries of this largesse had any notion of renouncing it and entrusting their prospects entirely to the mercies of the market, particularly in competition with the English. By a decree of the previous year, 22 August 1790, at the very time when budgets of the Jardin des Plantes and all academies were also under consideration, the National Assembly had allocated 2,000,000 livres to be disbursed annually in awards for “useful discoveries.”79 The Patent Law of 1791 expressly left inventors the option of seeking an immediate recompense from ´ The Archives de l’Institut de Propriété Industrielle contains an Etat-G´ enéral par ordre alphabétique des brevets d’invention, de perfectionnement, et d’importation délivrés en vertu des lois du 7 janvier et 24 mai 1791 jusqu’au 1er janvier 1812. 77 Gillispie (1957a); cf. J. G. Smith (1979). Leblanc and his partner, Dizé, took advantage of a provision in the 7 January law to the effect that inventors might keep their processes secret provided they could show it necessary for political or commercial reasons. PVCA&C 2, pp. 400–401, Séance du 2 septembre 1791. 78 Plaisant (1969). The text of the 25 May law is printed in Gerbaux and Schmidt (op. cit. n. 67 above) 2, pp. 78–89. For further contemporary discussion, see two reports, “Sur les brevets d’invention,” Conseil des Cinq-Cents, Corps Legislatif 14 pluviôse and 12 fructidor an VI (2 February and 29 August 1798); and C. Costaz, “Notice sur les brevets d’invention,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 1, no. 5 (nivôse an XI, January 1803), pp. 81–85. 79 AP 30, p. 401, séance du 9 septembre 1791. 76

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this fund if they could demonstrate the value of an innovation, and if, rather than taking out a patent, they preferred the honor of releasing it directly into the public domain. Not a sou had ever been appropriated. Now, over a year later, in the expiring days of the Constituent Assembly, leading members of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes again approached Boufflers, this time on behalf of their less fortunate brethren. His report of 9 September 1791 urges the Assembly to make good its promises and to appropriate 300,000 of the intended two million livres forthwith. Such is the creativity of arts and crafts, so runs what was by now a litany, that humble, laborious, and faithful artisans are morally speaking the nation’s creditors. To repay the debt Boufflers proposed a program entailing, first, awards graduated according to the value of the contribution; second, pensions for deserving workers over sixty; and third, “gratifications” for those whom bad luck had landed in “honorable poverty.” All this, recognized Boufflers, would (unlike patents) require adjudication. How might such panels be composed? The Academy of Science had served well in former times. For his part, he appreciated that the virtue of its members was almost always on a par with their enlightenment so that artisans had no real grounds to feel anxiety. Still, he felt bound to put before the Assembly the reasons that they did. They were apprehensive about the carelessness entailed by constant repetition of the same routine, fearful of the esprit de corps that develops in deliberations of men who are always together, humiliated by the haughtiness attaching to the uninterrupted and unquestioned exercise of authority, and resentful of the excessive intelligence that judges of things at too high a level to appreciate their true merit: “The most enlightened body may be the most dreaded.” In all equity artisans, like all citizens, are to be judged by their peers. “The least eloquent of them, recognizing a companion in the ranks of his examiners, will at least be sure of finding there an interpreter.” To that end, the Committee recommended that their societies be represented along with scientists on a new Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, which would advise the Ministry on the merit of applications for grants in aid of arts, crafts, and industry.80 It was too late to allay resentment. A new society speaking for the common artisan had come into the field, the Point Central des Arts et Métiers. The first number of its journal appeared on 4 September 1791, a few weeks before Les charlatans modernes. The leading article dismisses the theoretical sciences as sophistical, and continues: The crafts [“Les Arts”] are more reliable, and their benefits more certain! How blameworthy, then, were those abusive and tyrannical pro80 Boufflers, “Rapport . . . sur l’application des récompenses nationaux aux inventions & découvertes en tous genres d’industrie,” AP 30, pp.397–401. Séance du 7 septembre 1791. Also published separately.


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cedures, which in violating the most sacred, the most basic form of property, property in thought, in inventive or perfecting ingenuity, thereby subjected the class whose privileges are from Nature, the artisans, to all these oppressive laws, to all these harsh tests, to these severe and restless censors, the primary goal of whose ignorance and inquisitorial jealousy was to take care that true talent be humiliated or brushed aside. How cruel and vexatious were the exaggerated pretentions of academic bodies! How revolting was that empire, tyrannical and destructive of industry, which the wealthy accorded to these usurious vampires, these despotic hornets always eager to devour the honey produced by the bees, who took advantage of their wealth or power, whether in order to seize hold of the hives also, or in order to reduce the artisans to fabrications of a degrading and ruinous sort and to deprive them even of the honor attaching to their work by usurping their inventions, by all sorts of discouragements that wearied and rebuffed their zeal, their courage, and their steadfastness, and finally by forcing them most of the time to abandon their ideas, or their specially successful discoveries, whether because they wounded the self-esteem of the most privileged, or because they infringed on interests in pre-existing enterprises.81 Changes in the provision for composition of the proposed Bureau de Consultation intensified suspicion. The Boufflers report called for equal representation of scientists and artisans without specifying the number. As originally drafted, however, the text of the accompanying decree stipulated election of three representatives by each of the companies “concerned with . . . the exact sciences, arts and crafts, and industry” (presumably the Academy of Science); by the civil or military corps trained in mathematics (presumably the artillery, the military engineers, and the Ponts et Chaussées); and by the voluntary societies of artisans and citizens trained in various crafts (none of them named). In the initial debate of 9 September, that article was adjourned to another day. When adopted in principle on 27 September, three days before the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the law provided for the Bureau de Consultation to consist of fifteen scientists chosen by the Academy and an equal number of men trained in different sorts of industry. The latter were to be selected from among the various “Sociétés savantes,” not by their membership, but by the Minister of the Interior.82 The reaction was immediate, sharp, and general. A gathering of “artists of every genre” called by the Point Central included not only the Society of Inventors but also the Masonic lodge of the Neuf Soeurs and the fiercely radical Commune representing creative artists, of which more in a moment. 81 82

Journal du Point central des arts et métiers, BN, 8 oct. Lc2.6381. AP 30, p. 401; 31, p. 368 (9 and 27 September 1791).

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Their joint petition, addressed to the newly elected Legislative Assembly on 11 November 1791, urged an increase in funds appropriated for the arts and a return to the spirit of the Boufflers report. Its author had battled the “machinations of an old and distinguished corporation whose hidden and subterranean ramifications even today resist with incalculable force all efforts to uproot the trunk.” The Bureau de Consultation should consist of sixty delegates. An equal number would be freely elected by the several organizations. The Academy of Science would participate “like the other societies of artists.”83 An alliance between artisans and artists rebelling against academic domination was the more natural in that the word “artiste” applied to both, as in their eyes did “génie” in its need for liberty, in its suffocation by authority. Resentment, not to say hatred, of aspiring artists for their academy broke into the open earlier in the Revolution than did overt anger among artisans. Whether or not artists are more contentious than technicians by temperament, and they may be, the judgment of quality is certainly a more subjective and personal matter in the arts than in the sciences. The writ, moreover, of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture ruling over the arts ran even more widely than did the authority the Académie des Sciences exercised in science. The former’s control over the allimportant choice of works to be exhibited in the annual Salon may be thought comparable to the latter’s oversight of publication. Its internal organization was far less communal, however. On nomination by an officer of the Academy, a young artist would submit a sample of his work in order to be recognized as an “agrée” qualified to exhibit in the Salon. Even if accepted, he had no rights of membership, however, and was ineligible to attend meetings until, on presentation of further work, he was received as an academician. Even that gave him no voice in the proceedings of the Academy. Decisions concerning the Salon du Louvre, the French Academy in Rome, the award of prizes, the distribution of royal patronage, the election of colleagues—all the affairs of the Academy were exclusively in the hands of the class of officers. They consisted of a Director, four rectors, twelve councilors, and twelve full professors with twelve adjuncts. For, in further contrast with the other senior academies, the Academy of Painting and Sculpture was not only an honorific body of leading practitioners setting standards in its field. It was also a teaching institution. Its courses in drawing, modeling, perspective, anatomy, and art history were virtually obligatory for any would-be artist.84 ´ Not for nothing was the national tradition in painting called the Ecole 83

Journal des sciences, arts, et métiers, 22 January 1792 (BN V.42735). For the history and regime of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, see Vitet (1861). 84


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fran¸caise. A young hopeful led his life under the scrutiny of former teachers as well as of established masters, who were often one and the same. The revolt against this state of things was led by one who, having prospered within the academic system, combined the talent of a great artist with the political taste of a would-be demagogue.85 Jacques-Louis David harbored resentment, it is said, over having been passed over for the Directorship of the French Academy in Rome, and further took offense at slights to the work of a protegé who had died young and unrecognized. Whether for those or other reasons, in a meeting of the Academy on 5 December 1789 he joined with a little known engraver, one Miger, in demanding a revision of the statutes. Not only so, but while purporting to speak for the whole body of academicians, the dissidents framed an address to the National Assembly and issued statements to the public.86 Attempts throughout by the Director, the long-suffering Vien, to bring the two sides together were doomed to failure. Anticipating the directive of 20 August 1790 by which the Committee of Finance of the National Assembly required all academies to submit revised regulations, the officers set to work early that month to draw up a plan under which the organization would henceforth be the Académie Centrale de Peinture, Gravure, et Architecture.87 Too little and too late, the proposed half-measures provoked a walkout. On 21 September 1790 David presided over a gathering of dissident académiciens, resentful agrées, and assorted artists of many stripes who, on the political model of the Commune of Paris, now joined themselves into a Commune des Arts embodying the liberty, equality, and fraternity of artists. No mere voluntary society, David’s Commune des Arts under Jacobin inspiration intended itself to be an anti-Academy of Painting and Sculpture.88 Throughout the remaining months of 1790 and all of 1791, it showered 85

The literature on David is voluminous. Recent biographies are Brookner (1980) and Roberts (1989). For David’s politics, see Dowd (1952) and Bordes (1993). 86 Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (10 vols., 1875–92) 10, pp. 38–39 (5 Dec. 1789), pp. 44–45 (30 Jan. 1790), pp. 45–46 (5 Feb. 1790), pp. 67–68 (3 July 1790). Hereafter PVARPS. 87 Ibid. 10, pp. 74–77 (7, 17 August 1790). The David faction’s lengthy Adresse et Projet de Réglement (1790) and the officers’ justification of their position, Esprit des Statuts et Réglements de l’Académie de Peinture et Sculpture (1790), will be found in AN ADVIII, dossier 11. 88 Mémoire sur l’Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture par plusieurs membres de cette Académie (AN ADVIII, dossier 11, pièce 5) calling for creating a Commune des Arts is signed by David, Restout, Massard, Robin, Girout, Beauvallet, Julien, Echard, Bouillard, Henriquez, Wills fils, Monot, Hyet, and Pasquier, acting as Secretary. A more extreme manscript, “Mémoire de la Commune des Arts qui ont le Dessin pour base” (AN, F171310, dossier 14, pièce 156), proposes the draft of a decree to be presented to the National Assembly. Article I reads, “L’Académie de peinture, sculpture, et celle d’architecture sont supprimées. Les artistes qui exercent les arts re¸cus dans ces académies seront libres de se réunir en une seule commune dite des arts du dessin, laquelle s’organisera selon le mode des assemblées déliberantes.” Undated, but evidently September or October 1790.

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demands on the National Assembly insisting that the Académie Royale simply be displaced. Walking out of the institution did not mean leaving the premises, however. The Commune des Arts expected and was allowed to use the Academy’s meeting rooms in the Louvre. Housed there also were the Société des Inventions et Découvertes and the Point Central des Arts et Métiers.89 In good French fashion, all three groups required shelter and subsidy as well as independence from the state. The Point Central claimed to be “composed of all true sans-culotte artists” and affected to represent the whole class.90 Its short-lived journal printed notices of the meetings of the three groups in late 1791 and early 1792. Estimates of the numbers involved can only be rough. The Commune des Arts claimed three hundred members at the outset in September 1790. At an organizational meeting of the inventors’ society on 31 October 1791, it was resolved to send the minutes to some 52 absentees. Assuming that as many again were present, the total would be about 100. Among the names in this and other papers are those of Nicolas Leblanc, of the highly skilled instrument makers Fortin, Mercklein, and Lenoir, and also of longtime plaintiffs such as the chemist Jean-Baptiste Delaplace, the dyer Dino Stephanopoli, and the engineer Jean-Baptiste de Trouville.91 Trouville was author of a scheme for damming the Seine just upstream from the Jardin des Plantes. His notion was to create a five-foot head of pressure that would somehow drive a series of vacuum tanks capable of raising 250,000 barrels of water a day without mechanical linkages. He submitted no plans, and an academic commission consisting of Monge, Condorcet, and Vandermonde made an unfavorable report on 7 September 1790. Thereupon Trouville, like many another would-be inventor, went over the Academy’s head to the National Assembly. Its Comité de l’Agriculture et du Commerce took the episode as an instance among many of academic refusal to entertain new ideas.92 ´ The Point Central des Arts et Métiers began meeting in the Eglise du Saint Sepulcre in Saint-Denis and moved to the Louvre in February 1792 (AN, F171097, dossier 3). According to an 1803 “Recueil des sociétés savantes et littéraires de la République fran¸caise” (messidor an XI), the three societies still met in the Louvre. Of the other organizations listed, those marked with an asterisk antedate 1795: with quarters in the Louvre were the Société libre des sciences, lettres, et arts, the Société Polytechnique, the Société Académique des Sciences, the Société de Médecine, the Société des Belles Lettres, and the Société Libre d’Institution. With quarters in ´ ´ ´ the Ecole de Médecine were the Société de l’Ecole de Médecine, the Société Médicale d’Emulation*, and the Société Libre d’Instruction. With quarters in the Oratoire was the Lycée des Arts*. In private, rented quarters were the Société philomathique*, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle*, the Société des Obervateurs de l’Homme, the Lycée Républicain*, and the Lycée de Paris. Bibliothèque du Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (8o Ka 13). I owe this citation to the late Maurice Daumas. 90 Le Point Central des Arts et Métiers a` la Convention Nationale, 25 September 1793. 91 Private communication from the late Maurice Daumas; Gillispie (1980), pp. 463–478. 92 PVAS, 13 January 1790 and 7 September 1790. On this long drawn-out affair, see docu89


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Scrawled on various of the manifestos of the Point Central are another hundred-odd signatures from a membership of 300.93 There is some overlapping of signatories between the Point Central and either the inventors on one side or the artists on the other. Passing mention of additional, apparently more ephemeral, groups occurs from time to time in the sources. All told, a figure of 750 to 1,000 active participants in the rebellion against academic authority would appear to be a conservative estimate of the order of magnitude. Even that would comprise only artisans and graphic artists sufficiently advanced in their trades to be articulate. The popular mass behind them, as in all important developments of the Revolution, must have been uncountably more numerous. Principal impresario of the Point Central was a former military engineer and mediocre poet, Charles-Emmanuel Gaullard de Saudray. Desaudray, as he now styled himself, made his first appearance in the Revolution on Bastille Day 1789, when he saved the Gunpowder Administrator Clouet from the rioters who had mistaken him for the Governor of the Bastille. His was the initiative, whatever his underlying motivation, that led the various popular and artisanal constituencies to campaign together against the academies until the Convention struck them all down on 8 August 1793. Fifteen months earlier, in March 1792, Desaudray published a grandiose alternative scheme, Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers. A mixture of bathos over the state of the arts and crafts and magniloquence over their merits, his preface introduced a draft of legislation proposed to the National Assembly by the Point Central with the assent of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes and the Commune des Arts. A huge document, comprising 120 articles under 13 headings, it called for abolition of all corporate associations of scientists or artisans in order that they might be reunited to compose “one and the same family.” By a complicated electoral process, primary assemblies of the arts throughout the country would choose delegates to departmental and municipal councils. Under the leadership of the Point Central acting for Paris, they in turn would select members of the national Directory of Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. Not to outline the whole cumbersome scheme, which could be read as a parody of the election of the States-General, what the sponsors had in mind was a republic of skills. Its spirit is epitomized in the new classification of the sciences which, in order to avert the slightest tinge of hierarchy, would be arranged alphabetically in twelve classes: Agriculture, Arts méchaniques, Chymie, Commerce, Construction, Dessein, ments in AN, ADVIII, 11, pièce 2; a pamphlet by Trouville, L’Hydraulique naturelle, slnd (BN, Vp.9874); a petition, Au Sénat conservateur, 30 germinal an VIII (BN, 4⬚Ln27.6041); and an anonymous “Notice sur les Machines hydrauliques de M. de Trouville,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 13 (1814), pp. 25–28. 93 AN, F171097, dossier 3.

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Géométrie et Sciences Spéculatives, Littérature et Arts Agréables, Minéralogie et Metallurgie, Méchanique, Physique, Plans et Projets.94 Cooler and more authoritarian heads prevailed during the early months of the Legislative Assembly, which took no action. Enabling legislation of 16 October 1791 had already established the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, though only for a year and on a provisional basis. On 21 November it began deliberation on procedures for distribution of the 300,000 livres allocated to craftsmen and artisans on 21 November.95 In a concession to the artisanal groups, the Minister, Delessarts, who presided over this opening meeting, had invited all organizations represented, and not only the Academy of Science, to name their own delegates, fifteen from each side. Nevertheless, the complexion of the panel was a far cry from what Boufflers had originally imagined. Among the fifteen academicians were such eminences as Berthollet, Borda, Coulomb, Desmarets, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Meusnier, and Vandermonde. Sitting with them were four members of the relatively moderate Société des Inventions et Découvertes (among them Leblanc and Trouville), two from the Point Central (Desaudray replaced one of the original choices on 21 December), and one (Lucotte) from an even more ephemeral grouping that seems to have left no other record, a Société des Arts Réunis. The Commune des Arts was not represented since a separate jury had been empaneled to recommend awards from a fund of 100,000 livres allocated to painting, the graphic arts, and sculpture. The number of delegates of the crafts and trades was thus a paltry seven among the fifteen non-academicians. When Desaudray objected, he was told that the Bureau de Consultation was never intended to represent artisans, that instead it was a commission consisting of men knowledgeable about the useful trades who were vested by the National Assembly with the respon94

Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers, avec le Projet de Décret présenté a` l’Assemblée Nationale, rédigé par la Société du Point Central des Arts et Métiers en présence des MM. les Commissaires des Sociétés des Inventions et Découvertes et de la Commune des Arts. Mars 1792. BN, Inv. Rz 3001. 95 Procès-Verbaux du Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, ed. Charles Ballot, in Bulletin d’histoire économique de la Révolution fran¸caise (1913), p. 34. Hereafter PVBCAM. The ProcèsVerbaux from 21 November 1791 to 14 floréal an III (3 May 1795) are recorded in three registers conserved in the Bilbliothèque du Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers. A fourth, covering the twelve months before its dissolution on 17 May 1795, has not been found. Ballot’s introduction, pp. 20–33, gives a guide to the documentation in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, the Archives Nationales, and the Bibliothèque Nationale. Ballot did yeoman service in publishing these Procès-Verbaux and collating them with scattered fiscal documents (n. 102 below). Nevertheless, it has to be said that somehow he or his copyist missed certain entries in the registers. The Procès-Verbaux as published do not, for example, contain the minutes in the manuscript register that record Lavoisier’s appeal from prison for a certificate concerning his service (T. 3, fol. 19, 29 germinal an II), nor those for 4 floréal (T. 3, fol. 25–26), when it was agreed to draw up the testimonial he requested (see below, chapter 5, section 5).


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sibility of making recommendations on the distribution of awards.96 So it was that the Faculté de Médecine had two delegates while there was one each from the Académie de Chirurgie (its founder, Louis, died in June 1792, to be replaced by the already famous Desault), the Société Royale de Médecine, the Société Royale d’Agriculture, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, the Société Philomathique, and the so-called Société d’Annales de Chimie. Only by a stretch could the last be called a society. It consisted of the editorial board of the journal founded in 1789 for propagation of the new chemistry. Its delegate to the Bureau de Consultation, Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, though he gravitated to the extreme left politically in 1793, was still perceived as a loyal member of Lavoisier’s scientific team.97 Relieved as the Academy clearly was to be rid of the onus of judging technology, the Bureau de Consultation could scarcely avoid the appearance of being manipulated by the long arm of authority. Those imputations came from outside, however. Poring over specifications, drawings, and models week after week, serving on subcommittees of two or three, judging of concrete mechanical devices, the scientists and technicians serving on the Bureau de Consultation appear to have developed a working solidarity among themselves. From among applications streaming in, the members in each weekly session normally forwarded the names and credentials of four or five to the Minister of the Interior recommending awards at various levels. Certain of the names are still recognizable. On 21 March 1792 the Bureau proposed Lallemand de Sainte-Croix for the top award of 5,000 livres in recognition of the techniques he had developed for filling aerostats with hot air or hydrogen and urged further that the National Assembly grant him sufficient funds to perfect meteorological studies of the upper atmosphere. On 12 May another major recompense was to go to a textile manufacturer, one Lhomond, who had invented a carding machine for cotton more compact and cheaper than the huge English models, and whose spinning machine had already narrowed the gap with English technology. On 11 July, a reward of 1,500 was advised for John Macloude. Having smuggled the flying shuttle out of England, he had now invented a loom for muslins. Without further recompense he might, it was feared, return to England. Among longtime supplicants of the former Bureau du Commerce, Dino Stephanopoli was recognized for his substitution of an oak-bark decoction for nut gall in preparation of a black dye for hats, while the claim of Delaplace to have a process of converting iron to steel by cementation was again, and finally, rejected.98 In the first year of its activity, the most serious threat to the Bureau’s 96 97 98

PVBCAM, p. 36. Séance du 21 décembre 1791. On Hassenfratz, see Grison (1996), pp. 107–110. PVBCAM, pp. 42, 43, 50, 51, 56.

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effectiveness came neither from any division between artisans and scientists within its ranks, nor from anti-academic fulminations of the Point Central and its allies, but from obstruction on high. Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière was twice Minister of the Interior, from March to 13 June 1792 under Louis XVI (whose overthrow he helped prepare), and again during the Girondist ascendancy in the wake of 10 August 1792 until 23 January 1793. Roland had risen in the administrative service of the old regime to the rank of Inspector-General of Manufactures in the region of Lyons. From there, however, he brought to government little of the quality of a “Grand ´ Commis d’Etat” on the order of a Colbert or a Turgot. His was rather the spirit of a know-it-all bureaucrat, not to say a haughty scold. The arrogance with which he treated underlings was of a piece with the disdain that the Girondist deputies who frequented Madame Roland’s salon felt for the ignorance of working people, the sans-culottes from whom their Jacobin opponents drew strength. Considering himself an expert on industrial processes, editor of the volumes on manufacturing, arts, and trades in the Encyclopédie méthodique, Roland made no doubt that he was a better judge of technology than the illassorted members of the Bureau de Consultation.99 He began interfering with their procedures from the outset of his first ministry. In early June 1792, a few days before the King dismissed him from office, he proposed to evict the Bureau from its quarters in the Ministry and to expel the various Sociétés Libres from their rooms in the Louvre. Restored to office after the overthrow of the monarchy, Roland on 30 September 1792 closed the new Registry of Inventions, dismissed the Director, Servières, with all his staff, and transferred its functions to one of the offices in his ministry. Turning to the Bureau de Consultation, he sent a memoir to the Convention on 13 November in which he pointed out that the law of 16 October 1791 had instituted the Bureau provisionally for one year. Its legal standing had thus already expired. Nevertheless, since its first meeting had occurred on 19 November, he had continued to correspond with it. After that date, he would consider it defunct and would honor no further recommendations for grants unless the Convention saw fit to renew its mandate. He felt bound to observe, however, that many of its judgments had been ill advised. Its scientific members, he recognized, were men of integrity and great knowledge, but more important commitments prevented their attending regularly. The others had nothing like the competence or impartiality to discharge their duties properly. He would, therefore, implement no further recommendations from the Bureau pending action by the Convention. In order that 99 Dictionnaire des manufactures, arts et métiers (3 v., 1784–1790). For Roland’s attack on the Bureau de Consultation, see PVBCAM, pp. 70–80, PVCd’IP 1, 105–119; Bernardin (1964), pp. 236–243.


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deserving artisans not suffer in the meantime, he requested authority to make appropriate grants himself from the balance of the fund allocated for the year.100 To that end he had the files of the Bureau de Consultation transferred to his own office. Roland’s offensive had the effect of obviating the few complaints about the Bureau that the popular groups had lodged and equally of cementing relations between its scientific and artisanal elements. The Sociétés Libres collectively adopted a memoir denouncing the Minister’s high-handedness and heaping praises upon the Bureau’s even-handedness, generosity, and concern for their welfare. All twelve members present at its meeting of 30 November, among them Lavoisier, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Borda, and Coulomb, addressed a letter to the president of the Convention urging legislation to give the Bureau permanent standing. In support they attached a memoir reviewing its record and rebutting Roland’s charges. The next day a deputation from the Bureau waited on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, which agreed to take up the matter forthwith.101 Roland had in effect overreached himself. Although the Convention never found time for new legislation, on 4 January 1793 it enacted the decree proposed by the Comité d’Instruction Publique. That measure maintained the Law of 16 October in effect until otherwise ordered, required that all its recommendations be implemented, and forbade the Minister of the Interior to make any awards on his own.102 Thus reprieved, and despite the eventual loss of Meusnier to the war, of Lavoisier to the Terror, and of other members to death or retirement, the Bureau de Consultation exercised its responsibilities throughout the life of the Convention. On 9 prairial an IV (28 May 1796) the Directory dissolved it on the grounds of redundancy. Henceforth the Institut de France, like the Academy of Science before it, was to be responsible for giving the government technological advice. In the four and a half years of its activity, the Bureau de Consultation had prepared 389 reports and recommended awards totalling 1,157,700 livres to 279 artisans in all. Taken together, the records of its grants and the list of patents registered in the same interval amount to an index of artisanal activity and inventiveness throughout the critical years of the Revolution.103 100 Ministre de l’Intérieur au Président de la Convention, 12 November 1792, PVCd’IP 1, pp. 106–107. 101 PVCd’IP 1, p. 105, 1 December 1792. 102 PVBCAM, p. 80; PVCd’IP 1, p. 225, n. 1. 103 Letter of transmittal to Institut National, PVBCAM, pp. 28–29. For the brevets d’invention, see n. 76 above. There is no single summary of the Bureau’s awards. Ballot consulted a “Tableau des récompenses, gratifications, encouragements accordés par le Bureau de Consultation” in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. It runs from 1 vendémiaire an IV until its dissolution on 30 prairial an IV. Other reports are contained in fiscal documents in the Ar-

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5. THE LAST YEAR OF THE ACADEMY

However turbulent the external atmosphere, no overtly political dispute occurred within the ranks of the Academy of Science prior to 25 August 1792, when it had just under a year to live. In its regular meeting of that Wednesday, two weeks and a day after the overthrow of the Monarchy, Antoine Fourcroy took the floor to announce that the Société Royale de Médecine had expelled several of its members who had emigrated and who were known for counter-revolutionary sentiments. He moved that the Academy of Science take the same action with respect to those of its members known for lack of civic spirit (incivisme) and that the roll be called in order to proceed then and there to their expulsion. Taken aback, several of those present, among them Cassini, objected to the démarche. The Academy, they observed, had no right to exclude any members. The advancement of science being its sole occupation, their personal conduct and political opinions were none of its business. Only the National Assembly, which was on the point of giving the Academy a new organization, would have the right to remove from its roll any who, in the judgment of legislators, should be excluded. Fourcroy persisted. His colleagues need merely invoke the rule that those absent without leave for more than two months forfeit membership. When read out on the floor, however, that regulation was seen to apply only to the class of pensioners. In any case its enforcement pertained not to the Academy, but to the Ministry. After long discussion, a vote on Fourcroy’s unwelcome motion was postponed. The next meeting, on 29 August, opened with an announcement from the chair that certain busts that might give offense had been removed from the hall. Thereupon another member, speaking to Fourcroy’s motion, again pointed out that the progress of science was their only proper concern, and that all organizational matters had always been dealt with in consultation with the Ministry. Accordingly, he moved that the current question be referred there, in effect to Roland, while the Academy turned to more interesting subjects. His motion carried, with the further provision that Cousin, the mathematician currently serving the Commune of Paris as administrator of chives Nationales (F42328, F42556, and F12*110). The publisher, one Chemin, of Journal des sciences, arts, et métiers (n. 83 above), attempted to report the proceedings of the Bureau de Consultation, but complained of its failure to furnish information. Altering his plan, he undertook a comprehensive coverage in Mémoires du Bureau de Consultation des arts, ou Journal des inventions, découvertes, et perfectionnements dans les sciences, arts, et métiers, accompanied by a twelve-page Supplément pour l’explication des planches (1793). A second volume with a reduced title, Journal des inventions, déouvertes (an III), contains only two numbers. The members of the Bureau de Consultation found these accounts very imperfect. The only copies Ballot could find are in the library of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (4 Oct. Ky 2).

III. 5. L AST YEAR OF THE ACADEMY

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the food supply, be asked to accompany the deputation from the Academy in waiting upon the Minister. Evidently Roland promised to take the matter under advisement and to reply by letter. Preoccupied by more urgent matters—the September massacres were under way—he returned the membership list with certain names eliminated after three months, on 21 November.104 By then, he had no need to expunge the name of La Rochefoucauld, who was murdered on 4 September. We do not know whom he did rule out—presumably honorary members who had emigrated. Perhaps that was all Fourcroy had had in mind. Perhaps not, however. He was even then planning to stand for election to the Convention. Apart from the work of its commissions, of which the most important was occupied with preparation of the metric system, the Academy of Science treaded water throughout the autumn, winter, and spring of 1792–93. The sands were clearly running out. Attendance at the twice-weekly meetings fell off markedly. A decree of the Convention on 28 November 1792 forbade all academies to nominate new members until further notice. The Procès-Verbaux for 1793 report no minutes for any of the sessions. The register contains mainly the record of occasional requests from the Ministries of War and the Navy for reports on the design of novel muskets, cannon, military fabrics, ambulatory hospitals, and so on, all of which were referred to appropriate commissions. Only four scientific memoirs were submitted in the seven months remaining to the Academy in the first year of the Republic, none of any importance. As we have seen, Condorcet’s plan to turn the Academy of Science into a National Society at the head of the educational system stood no chance of enactment by the Convention. Consumed by his efforts to draft a Republican constitution in its opening months, Condorcet was marginalized in 1793 before being forced into hiding in June. Defense of the interests of science thus fell largely upon the shoulders of Lavoisier. His strategy emphasized, not the elegance, range, and depth of French science, features that were seldom mentioned, but its utility to the public, its service to the state, and its involvement with responsible practices in the arts and crafts. On retiring under fire from the Treasury in February 1792, Lavoisier had resumed his post in the Gunpowder Administration. Immediately after the French declaration of war against Austria in April, he addressed himself to resolving the chronic dispute that over many years had poisoned relations between the Gunpowder Administration and its working class suppliers, the Saltpetermen of Paris. They earned their meagre living scavenging the saltpeter encrusted on cellar walls, damp foundations, and waste masonry throughout the city. At issue in every transaction was the quality of the crude saltpeter they delivered fortnightly into the receiving yard of the Arse104

PVAS, 25 August, 29 August, 5 September, 21 November 1792. See also Devic (1851).

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nal, there to be refined into the pure grade required for gunpowder. Obliged to take what they could get in the Old Regime, laborers now had leaders who knew how to make grievances felt. Determined to get to the bottom of the problem in the interest of all concerned, Lavoisier set to work on a scale at which no chemist had ever done experiments, that of the workmen themselves. We shall defer an account of the simplified method of refining that he proposed to a later chapter, in a discussion of war production in general.105 Suffice it to anticipate and observe here that in the six months before resigning definitively from the Gunpowder Administration after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, he developed simplified procedures that made possible the revolutionary production of saltpeter and gunpowder throughout the Republic in the year of Terror at home and victory abroad. One further commission from government awaited Lavoisier. There having been no previous experience with paper money, it was inevitable that counterfeiting should accelerate the depreciation of assignats. In February 1793 the currency committee (Comité des Monnoies) of the Convention requested the Bureau de Consultation to investigate methods for fabricating bills that would be proof against faking. Deeply though the economist in Lavoisier deplored recourse to assignats, the scientist in him took on the technological aspects of the problem. Nothing in his career was more characteristic than his mode of formulating the problem. What he expressly calls the theory of fabricating valid assignats depends on four principles, all of which turn on quality. First, highly skilled artisans must be employed in all operations. Second, these imaginative designers, fine engravers, excellent printers, and top-grade papermakers must work as a team. Such persons are in short supply to begin with, and few among them would wish or need to engage in false purposes. The rules of probability thus make it virtually impossible for a counterfeiter to find and then to assemble all the talented craftsmen he would need from different trades. Third, the design of bills must be simple and striking enough to be recognizable by people of no education. Fourth, the design of all notes of the same denomination must be rigorously uniform. Though warned at the outset, the Finance Committee of the National Assembly had ignored this last, fundamental point. Before making specific recommendations, Lavoisier’s assignat commission conducted a comprehensive survey of the entire paper industry. The best techniques for watermarks, the optimal mix of rags from different fabrics for pulping, the method for coloring the pulp and shading paper used by the Montgolfier mill in Annonay, the laminated paper turned out by the rival firm of Johannot, the advantage of polytyping rather than printing the 105

Below, chapter 6, section 4.


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sheets from ordinary type—all these and other proposals were submitted by the leading entrepreneurs in each genre of industry. The commission examined and prepared reports on every one. There is no need to follow the detail, however. On none of it did the Convention take action. The recommendations might have guided the Treasury in the manufacture of paper currency in stabler times, but nothing was published of Lavoisier’s investigation, the last he ever made.106 Still Treasurer of the Academy, though free of other administrative responsibility, Lavoisier devoted his best efforts throughout the spring and summer of 1793 to a would-be association of the interests of science with those of arts and trades. He was assiduous in attending to his duties on the Bureau de Consultation, where he and Desaudray met twice a week as colleagues until Lavoisier’s arrest on 28 November. So far as the record shows, Lavoisier kept his own counsel about the latter’s egregious Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers of March 1792. Rather than contemn it, he entered fully into an enterprise in adult education that Desaudray now launched with a view to accomplishing the same ends by other means. Planning for ´ an “Ecole Athénienne” to be called Lycée des Arts had begun in June 1792. Earlier ventures answering to the vogue for self-improvement offered precedents. The Société linnéenne and the Société Philomathique were formed in that spirit, not to mention Freemasonry and the Mesmerist Société de l’Harmonie Universelle. The name “Lycée” brought immediately to mind the model of another organization of that ilk which had catered successfully to the cultural appetite of a clientele more fashionable than any Desaudray had in mind. Founded as a popular science establishment in 1781 by the daredevil balloonist Pilâtre de Rozier, the lycée in the rue de Valois became instead a literary salon after 1785, when the would-be aeronaut met his death in the first air crash in history.107 The organization was similar to that of an eighteenth-century library association. Members who bought shares in the company enjoyed its sociability as well as the formal lectures—La Harpe’s on literary topics, Garat’s on history and political philosophy, Fourcroy’s on chemistry—which were also open to a wider public for a fee. In 1790 a reorganization was undertaken in order to rid the lycée of its elitist tinge and of the onus attaching to its erstwhile patronage by the comte de Provence. Lavoisier, La Rochefoucauld, and Fourcroy then bought in as shareholders, as did A.F. Silvestre, secretary of the Société Philomathique. Nevertheless, attendance dwindled, and at the shareholders’ meeting on 4 November 1793 Fourcroy proposed, as he had done in the Academy the previous year, that the mem106 “Rapport sur la fabrication des assignats,” OL 4, pp. 669–712; “Rapport a` la commission des assignats,” which concerns proposals on polytyping (OL 6, pp. 706–710). 107 Gillispie (1983), pp. 118–120.

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bership be purged of unpatriotic elements in order to win favor with the government.108 In Desaudray’s Lycée des Arts, nothing if not patriotic, no time would be wasted on literature. Half the courtyard of the Palais Royal was then occupied by a large rotunda containing an auditorium, promenade, and reception rooms, all largely unused and fallen into disrepair. Desaudray formed a “Société d’Artistes” to take a twelve-year lease, which they financed by renting out the shops in the surrounding arcade. The purpose: To found in the heart of the capital, in the center of taste and talents, a sort of Free and Primary Assembly of Artisans;—To ensure that men of value be judged only by their peers;—To shield them thereby from the slow and abusive formalities of academic censorship;—To remind them constantly of their dignity in service to the single principle of common utility;—To establish a pattern of recognition the more pleasing in that general esteem alone will confer it;—To assist them in the implementation of their discoveries;—To put their talents on display and win the support of public opinion;—To combine in their interest, finally, a new plan of free education with powerful methods of incentive and support, even while tempering these serious undertakings with diversions and resources to be offered by the kinds of talent that give pleasure:—Such is the purpose of the new Lycée to be founded on the principles of the ancient Athenian School.109 Eighteen public courses would be offered, tuition free, on all fields of applied science and “technologie” (this may be the coinage of that word). The design of the curriculum followed the classification of science Desaudray had devised for his Nouvelle Constitution des Sciences, Arts, et Métiers. Circuses would leaven the bread, however, and entertainments would be offered. There would be a weekly lottery. Women might subscribe to the programs as well as men, though at a different location. Exhibitions of machines, of new inventions, of natural history, and of chemical and physical objects and apparatus would occupy side rooms. Regular ceremonies would be held for the award of gold and silver medals in recognition of inventions judged to be the most useful.110 Only in April 1793 were renovations of the premises complete. The grand opening on Sunday the seventh attracted a great throng. Among them were members of the Academy of Science who had followed Lavoisier’s example 108 On the Lycée de la rue de Valois and the Lycée des Arts, see Dejob (1889), Smeaton (1955). On 4 May Lavoisier gave an interesting account of the new Lycée to the old one: “Sur le Lycée des Arts,” OL 6, pp. 559–569. 109 ´ Etablissement d’une E´ cole Athénniene, sous le nom de Lycée des Arts et Métiers (1792), pp. 2– 3. BN, Rz3008. 110 Details were printed separately from the general prospectus under the title Lycée des Arts (1790). BN Rz3007. For a slightly different version, see AN, ADVIII, 29.


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in joining the Lycée des Arts. According to the first issue of its journal, all present were struck with astonishment by the taste that had governed the decoration in Gothic style of the auditorium, shaped like a bowl with the dais in the center. Fourcroy there presided, flanked by four deputies from the Convention. Behind them could be seen a relief plan of a proposed canal passing through Saint-Maur. Also in places of honor were representatives of the Commune of Paris, of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and of the several societies who had joined to elect the Directoire des Arts. Fourcroy’s address, eloquent as always, dealt with utility as the object of science. Hébert next took the floor to speak for the Commune and urge that the sanctuary of arts be invested with the spirit of liberty. A. L. Millin, secretary of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, then gave the one substantive talk of the evening, a report on the works of a specialist in silkworms, Salvatore Berthesen. Prizes went to two engineers who had designed the Canal of Saint-Maur. The formal session closed with a concert featuring a hymn to Apollo composed by none other than Desaudray himself. A festival for wives of members in the evening started with a performance by Citizen Val, who gave “des tours de Physique Amusante.” Regular courses held every weekday evening began on 15 April. The schedule was a good deal less ambitious, and also less artisanal, than the prospectus had foretold: natural history taught by Millin on Mondays, amphibians by Brongniart on Tuesdays, mineralogy by Tonnelier on Wednesdays, vegetable physics by Fourcroy on Thursdays, technology by Hassenfratz on Fridays, and physiology by Sue on Saturdays.111 Lavoisier sat on the governing board, the Directoire, of the Lycée des Arts and served a term as president in June 1793. His report on the work of the scientific societies during the preceding two months sounds weary. Engrossed in their work, scientists are scarcely aware of contributing to their larger cause, the general advancement of knowledge. They would feel themselves to be standing still if the weight of ignorance, stupidity, and attendant prejudices did not provide a fixed frame of reference against which the common movement forward may be detected. The Directory of the Lycée des Arts is placed between the scientific societies and other classes of society. Its purpose is to take from the one and communicate to the other, to seek to follow this slow march of science ever directed toward the progress of human reason. It must strive to open to all the benefit of the treasures that a small number seem to have kept to themselves.112 The strategy for saving the Academy of Science at the expense of the 111

Journal du Lycée des Arts, no. 1, 15 April 1793. BN, V28667. For the further development of the Lycée des Arts, see its Annuaire, an III (BN R26689), an IV (BN, V25851), an VI (BN, V25856). No Annuaire was published in an V (1796–97). The rotunda burned down in 1798, and the lycée was transferred to the Oratoire, where it languished and died. 112 Lavoisier, “Notice sur les Travaux des Sociétés Savantes de Paris pendant le mois d’avril 1793 et une partie de mai dernier,” Journal du Lycée des Arts, 22 June 1793.

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others originated in the collaboration between Lavoisier and Lakanal, the go-between who was even then busying hinmself in the legislative transformation of the Jardin des Plantes into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. In April Lavoisier addressed a report to the Comité d’Instruction Publique to the effect that the personnel of the Academy, reduced in number by current circumstances, were unequal to the many undertakings assigned to it in the public interest, beginning with the reform of weights and measures. Might the committee “in its wisdom” consider whether the national interest does not require exempting it from the decree (of 25 November 1792) forbidding all academies to nominate new members? The démarche worked. The committee did so consider. On 17 May Lakanal presented such a measure to the Convention, which adopted it.113 Amid the political turmoil of the summer of 1793, no further members were ever elected. The Convention (it will be recalled) expelled the Girondist deputies in the wake of the uprising of 31 May. On 1 July David launched a renewed attack on the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture. Responding to his demand that it be dissolved, the Comité d’Instruction Publique resolved to take under advisement the long-simmering question of all academies supported by the nation. Charlotte Corday thereupon provided David with the subject of the most dramatic of his paintings by assassinating Marat on 13 July. On 17 July Lavoisier addressed a letter to Lakanal hastening to supply observations the latter had requested on the need to preserve the Academy of Science. Lavoisier hopes his memorandum is not too long. Perhaps Lakanal will think he omitted something essential. In his haste he has overlooked mentioning the Academy’s representation on the Bureau de Consultation, and is adding a postscript. At first he intended to include the names of everyone serving on all the different commissions on Weights and Measures, but thought better of it since that great enterprise belongs to the whole Academy. He has not mentioned Lakanal’s request to any of his colleagues. There is no use spreading alarm. Anyway, nothing is hopeless as long as Lakanal is there to defend so good a cause. The memorandum develops two points of view from which to judge of the Academy. In the one, it is a company of savants working for the advancement of science, the progress of arts and trades, and the stability of the human mind. In the other, it is a reference commmission available to the government in all matters requiring technical expertise. He will not list all its services. What must be appreciated is that science is not like literature. A man of letters finds all the material he needs in the larger society. Not so science, which cannot be cultivated in isolation. The mathematician would 113

Lavoisier, “Rapport au Comité d’Instruction Publique sur l’Académie des Sciences,” OL 6, pp. 59–60; PVCd’IP 1, pp. 463–464.


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perform only hypothetical computations if astronomers and mechanicians did not provide him data. Chemists, physicists, and astronomers would draw no benefit from their experiments if mathematics did not supply analysis. Also, science is expensive. Government support is indispensable for navigation, observatories, instruments, and other facilities. Finally, criticism of memoirs in scientific meetings is essential to perfecting them. Does the Convention wish to end all this, the progress of science, arts, and trades? Does it wish to terminate the operations it has ordered? Or, does it on the other hand wish to assure France a lasting predominance among the industrious nations of the world?114 A second letter, sent in near panic, went off to Lakanal the next day. He lacks information, writes Lavoisier, about the projects being presented for suppression of the Academy and cannot tell whether his observations of yesterday are what Lakanal wants. He has heard, however, that there is a proposal to transform the Academy into a Society of Arts and Crafts (Socie´té des Arts). He is appalled (but does not say that he had never imagined that association of the interests of science and industry would thus end with their identification): The spirit that animates scientists, if you allow me to remind you, is not at all that which animates, and should animate, artisans. The scientist works only for love of science and to increase his reputation. Should he make a discovery, he publishes it, and his object is fulfilled if he is assured that it belongs to him . . . ; The artisan, by contrast, whether in his research or in the application he makes of the discoveries of others, always has in view the chance for profit. He publishes only what he cannot keep to himself and reveals only what he cannot hide. Society benefits from both, from the scientist’s disinterestedness and from the artisan’s quest for profit. Mix them up, and each loses its proper spirit. The scientist would become a speculator, working neither for reputation nor for the advancement of knowledge, but for his own profit. In that case, “The noblest of associations, where morality, simplicity, and virtue prevail in the highest degree, the Academy of Science, is no more.”115 So it came about, though not for that reason. Lakanal’s and Lavoisier’s maneuver to exempt the Academy of Science from the impending repudiation of the whole academic structure succeeded in the Comité d’Instruction Publique. As we have seen at the opening of the current chapter, however, the provision failed to withstand David’s onslaught on the floor of the Convention on 8 August 1793. 114 Lavoisier to Lakanal, 17 July 1793, accompanying “Observations sur l’Académie des Sciences,” OL 4, pp. 615–623. 115 Lavoisier to Lakanal, 18 July 1793. OL 4, p. 624.

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Never one to let go, Lavoisier met with other members of the former Academy on 10 August. They then resolved to take advantage of their constitutional right to form a voluntary society, a “Société libre et fraternelle pour l’avancement des sciences” in order to carry on their work. Writing to Lakanal for approval of this course, Lavoisier now spelled out in what he meant to be overpowering detail the nature and state of all the projects entrusted to the Academy: the Academy was trustee of expensive astronomical instruments and has begun the construction of new ones; Vicq d’Azyr has undertaken an anatomical treatise, for which 6,000 livres have already been expended; the Academy intended to publish the voyage of Desfontaines along the coast of North Africa, financed by the nation; Desmarets has been assigned funds for a mineralogical map of France; money has been awarded to Fourcroy for research on alkalis, to Berthollet for work on dyes, to Coulomb for investigations of magnetism, to Sage for mineralogical experiments, to Haüy for studies of crystallography; the entire section of chemistry has a grant for work on the combustion of diamonds; agreements have been made for publication of many manuscripts; the Academy’s own Mémoires are three years in arrears, and the work will be lost if it is not printed. Most important of all is the great project on Weights and Measures. Contracts have been signed with many artisans, whom the Convention will surely not disappoint. Standard weights and measures are under construction. The survey of the meridian is in progress.116 It is unthinkable that all this will simply be abandoned.117 If, however, the government does indeed intend to take over the direction, will it please send precise instructions covering every particular? And for a fleeting moment this last-ditch strategy seemed auspicious. The Société libre was authorized on 14 August. On the seventeenth, however, Lavoisier found the door locked. That morning the authorities had placed the papers of all members under seal.118 By 1 September Lavoisier had nearly despaired. His colleagues, he wrote in his last letter to Lakanal, dared not proceed even on a voluntary basis. To do so would flout the dominant opinion in the Comité d’Instruction Publique and the dominant party in the Convention. He has little hope for a further report promised by the Committee. He fears it impossible to reconcile the interests of science with the politics of the moment. “We are in a position where it is equally dangerous to do something as it is to do nothing.”119 116

Lavoisier to Lakanal, 10 and 11 August 1793, PVCd’IP 2, pp. 314–317. Lavoisier to Delambre, 8 August 1793. This letter should appear in a forthcoming volume of the Correspondance de Lavoisier. Many years ago the late M. René Fric, the initial editor, kindly allowed me to read through copies of the letters he was preparing for publication. 118 PVCd’IP 2, 14 August 1793, p. 319; Lavoisier to Comité d’Instruction Publique, 17 August 1793, PVCd’IP, p. 320. 119 PVCd’IP 2, pp. 331–332. 117


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He had nearly despaired, but not quite. One move remained. As a last resort, Lavoisier reverted to Condorcet’s strategy of sheltering the essential functions of an academy within a new educational system, but with a difference. Lavoisier’s scheme was calculated to elicit support in the artisanal circles that Condorcet had ignored and alienated. At the 10 July meeting of the Bureau de Consultation, an unidentified member called attention to the importance of establishing a system of primary education for children who would become artisans and craftsmen. The Convention had received a petition to that effect on 5 July from a group of artisans whose spokesman was Hassenfratz. A similar petition was known to be under discussion in the Lycée des Arts, which submitted it to the Convention on 21 July. Not to be left out, the Bureau de Consultation named its own commission consisting of Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Desaudray, Hassenfratz, and Borda. By the next meeting, 24 July, a draft “Mémoire sur l’Education Publique” was ready. Meanwhile (it will be recalled) the Convention had named an ad hoc Commmission of Six to take over the issue of public education from the Comité d’Instruction Publique. Currently before it was LePeletier’s Spartan educational plan, which Robespierre, who was a member, had coopted and presented as his own.120 The Bureau de Consultation must make haste, one member pointed out, if the Convention were even to hear its views. Accordingly, it voted to adopt and print its own memoir forthwith and to distribute copies to all members of the Commission of Six, the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and the Convention.121 Entitled Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique présentées a` la Convention Nationale par le Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, the memoir came off the press at Dupont de Nemour’s printery. No name appears on the title page, but Lavoisier was almost certainly the author.122 An initial octavo edition of 2,000 copies was printed on 5 August. It sets forth commonplace pedagogical principles of the associationist psychology and outlines an educational program. One hundred copies of a second quarto edition were ready a month later, on 2 September, and another 2,000 on 13 September. In this, the definitive printing, the “Réflexions” are merely the preamble to an elaborate Projet de Décret, a blueprint for an entire educational system.123 120

Above, chapter 2, section 7. Here as in several other instances, Ballot’s transcription of PVBCAM is incomplete. Full transcriptions of the minutes concerned with the educational proposal that emanated from the Bureau de Consultation are given in PVCd’IP 2, pp. 902–907. 122 “Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique, présentées a` la Convention Nationale par le Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, suivies d’un Projet de Décret,” OL 6, pp. 516–558. A slightly different and clearly preliminary draft left in manuscript is printed in OL 4, pp. 649– 668. K. M. Baker’s and W. A. Smeaton’s argument that the resemblance to Condorcet’s proposal casts doubt on Lavoisier’s authorship has not proved convincing to later scholars (1965). 123 Guillaume printed a transcription of Dupont’s bills in PVCd’IP 2, p. 907. 121

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In the meantime, the Academy had gone under. Evidently, therefore, Lavoisier had spent the interval contriving, in a detail he could not possibly have assembled in time for the hasty 5 August printing, yet another way in which the wreckage might be salvaged. The structure and much of the terminology come straight out of Condorcet. The four levels of primary school, secondary school, institute (high school), and lycée (higher education) are the same. The tables of organization and teaching programs for every school are adaptations of Condorcet’s, and no less detailed. In Lavoisier’s scheme, however, the spirit and content of education would be different. Condorcet made no provision for manual training. He would have pupils learn principles, not skills. Even in courses on applied science, mechanical arts were to be considered only in relation to the appropriate theory. The purpose of education was to produce citizens steeped in truth, not workers. In the plan Lavoisier fathered on the Bureau de Consultation, nothing is said of inculcating truth through principles drawn from nature. Nor is there any question of insulating education from politics. Out and out vocational training was what he had in mind. Primary schools would teach the three R’s. At the secondary level, youngsters would confront a parting of the ways between those headed for public service, who learn languages, science, and literature, and those destined for mechanical arts. Traditional education had made some provision for the former, but none at all for people who would earn their livings in agriculture, industry, navigation, or manual labor. Certain topics, notably drawing and design, are common to all crafts. They may be considered a language that all should learn. Beyond that, the trades fall into two broad classes, mechanical or chemical in basis. For the former, people need instruction in the art of machines and the elements of statics and dynamics, for the latter instruction in the properties of natural substances and the operations involved in analyzing, dissociating, and combining them. All students, moreover, should follow a course in political economy. There is no need to trace the bent toward practice up through the two higher levels of education to the programs of professional training Lavoisier lays out for experts in every field. The orientation toward trade and commerce is consistent. In further contrast to Condorcet, Lavoisier had no notion of some governance by science in the administration of the school system. Public education in the elementary and secondary schools would be supervised by boards composed of selected teachers, while the institutes and lycées would be under the oversight of a General Council of the Professors, who would elect an executive committee. It would be up to the National Convention to specify the authority to whom they would report. The Academy having just been abolished, institutionalizing its functions in a new form was a far more immediate motivation for Lavoisier than for


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Condorcet. Instead of placing an equivalent organization over the educational system, he would make it a coordinate branch in a tripartite division. Teaching and learning at all four levels would be the work of the first division. The advancement of science and the arts would be the responsibility of the second. The program of support for science, arts, and industry would occupy the third. The second division, in effect a resuscitated Academy, would be called “Société Nationale des Sciences et des Arts.” It would thus be flanked by the school system on one side and a “Jury des Arts,” a continuation of the Bureau de Consultation on the other. Citizen representatives—to paraphrase the peroration—the future of the Republic is in your hands. Organize a national education! Vivify Science and Technology. Consider neighboring nations, our rivals, busying themselves with the means of augmenting productivity. A nation in which science and industry languish will fall behind, little by little, into stagnation ultimately, and will eventually see its wealth, its territory, its resources invaded by its neighbors.124 Lavoisier’s final plea went unheard, not only by the Convention, which never received it, but by his colleagues on the Bureau de Consultation, who failed to send it there. The last mention in their minutes is at the meeting of 4 November, when it was decided to postpone action. Lavoisier entered prison on the twenty-eighth. The concluding word was not his, therefore. It came rather from Desaudray and the Point Central des Arts et Métiers. On 26 September 1793 that organization resubmitted its New Constitution for the Arts and Trades to the Convention along with its congratulations on having delivered the Academy of Science its “death certificate in good form:” From the summit of their Mountain our Legislators are on guard. They gaze down. They are on the watch for malevolence everywhere, and if in one hand they hold thunderbolts always on the ready to strike down traitors, from the other they dispense benefactions. We can thus be assured that neglect of the arts and crafts will not elude their vigilance. . . . Leave it to the Voluntary Societies to take care of expanding the limits of our knowledge by improving it! Let practical industry gather true artisans in primary assemblies of the arts and trades, and let them freely choose provisional commissions for all parts of the new administration! Liberty will do the rest, and the fruits, make no doubt of it, will be abundant. . . . By sustaining the Fathers of Arts and Crafts, by having them serve in public education, you will engage, you will steel those in ardent youth whose spirits must be readied above all for the prime duty of the citizen, that of being useful to his fatherland.—There is the true republi124

OL 2, p. 532.

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can morality!—Hypocritical priests say: “Know how to control your passions,” and call that morality. The fiery and active republican should say: “Leave men their passions, but know how to direct them.” Passions are what give him energy. A man without passions is only a moderate federalist, or a hypocritical liberal, incapable of great things. The true Sans-Culotte is he who works.125 Or, as even the abbé Grégoire put it in the heat of the moment, “Real genius is almost always sans-culotte.”126 To be fair, be it quickly said, the statement cited in the opening of our next chapter is more characteristic of Grégoire. It introduces consideration of the one enterprise, preparation of the metric system, that the Convention did exempt, albeit provisionally and only for a time, from its prohibition of academic activity. 125

AN, ADVIII 40, T. 1, pièce 18. In the report accompanying the draft of the decree suppressing academies, 8 August 1793, PVCd’IP 2, p. 255. 126

CHAPTER IV

The Metric System

1. BACKGROUND The genius of liberty has at last made its appearance, and has put this question to the genius of science: What is the unit that is fixed and invariant, independent of any arbitrary element, a standard such that there is no need to move it from place to place in order to know its value, and such that it may be verified at any time and place? Estimable scientists, it is through you that the Universe will owe this benefit to France. You have drawn your theory from nature. Among all the lengths that have been determined, you have chosen two, the measurement of the pendulum and above all the measurement of the meridian, the only two for which the combined result is most absolute. Relating thus the one to the other, your zeal has matched your sagacity in the dual comparison of time with the dimensions of the earth. By virtue of their mutual confirmation, you will have won the glory of discovering for the benefit of the whole world this stable unit, this beneficial truth, which will be a new boon to all nations and one of the most useful conquests of mankind. Response of the abbé Grégoire to the Academy of Sciences, assembled before the bar of the Convention, 25 November 1792.1 The father of a family may take a certain pleasure in being able to say to himself, “The field that enables me to support my children is such or such a fraction of the world. I am to that degree a co-owner of the world.” Address delivered before the Legislative Body in the name of the Institute, 4 messidor an VII.2

In the regular doings of scientists and other people, the metric system of weights and measures remains the most pervasive legacy of the French Revo1

PVCd’IP 1, pp. 241–242. Cited in Delambre, Base du système métrique décimal (3 vols., 1806–10), 3, 582. Hereafter cited as Base. 2

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lution. Its units serve requirements of three sorts: standardization, decimalization, and a particular definition of the meter, the basic magnitude. Standardization governs every activity involving measurement throughout the modern world. The scope of decimalization, though large, is limited by certain exceptions. Angular and temporal subdivisions everywhere continue to be sexagesimal. More parochially, in the United States and much of the British Commonwealth, ordinary transactions are still conducted in avoirdupois, while the metric system, which answers general purposes throughout the rest of the world, is largely reserved to science. With respect to definition of the magnitudes, it will be well to begin by recalling the main features of the linear, volumetric, and gravimetric units that American children encounter when they leave inches, feet, pints, and pounds at home and enter the school laboratory. The basis, so they learn, is linear, the meter being approximately 39 inches in length. They are not often told that the original specification was that it should measure one tenmillionth of the quadrant of the meridian of the earth. Larger and smaller units are in decimal multiples or divisions, 1,000 meters to the kilometer, 100 centimeters and 1,000 millimeters to the meter. Units of area and volume are derived by squaring and cubing, the hectare being 10,000 square meters and the liter 1,000 cubic centimeters. Units of weight, finally, are obtained by assigning the value of one gram to one cubic centimeter of water at 4⬚ Centigrade, the temperature at which its density is a maximum, so that a cubic vessel ten centimeters on a side holds one liter at a weight of one kilogram. Generally adopted throughout the scientific world by the end of the nineteenth century, and largely so in the civic world throughout Europe, the metric system has been much praised in French textbooks as a scientific incarnation of the values of universality, equality, and naturalism, at once Cartesian and revolutionary. Nothing is sacred, however. The bicentennial of the Revolution itself produced a spate of revisionism rather than celebration. Mingling political skepticism with populist social sympathies, certain historians formerly of a leftist persuasion came half circle to what were once counter-revolutionary tenets and tend to deplore the actions of the revolutionary protagonists.3 The great programs, whether constitutionalist, Girondist, or Jacobin, are held to have imposed a set of political and economic abstractions upon a populace whose real interests are better grasped in categories of anthropology than in those of political theory. So it is with the metric system, for much historiography of science has become as sociopolitical in vein as ordinary history, and certain of its practitioners discount the claims of science to be the rational mediator between humanity and nature. Instead, such authors explain the success or failure of 3

For a review of the historiography of the bicentennial, see Kaplan (1993), part 4.

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theories as a function of the structure of power and attribute the choices scientists make, not to technical factors, which are taken as pretenses to be seen through, but to their interests, more or less disguised. The metric system has thus come to have something of a bad press, both politically and technically.4 The instance of modern America shows that it is not essential to the functioning of a modern economy and of a scientific enterprise that they make use of the same system of measurement. Both commercial and scientific units are standard, however. Not so in commerce or in agriculture in the old regime, and not altogether so in science: “In France,” wrote Arthur Young in 1787, “the infinite perplexity of the measures exceeds all comprehension. They differ not only in every province, but in every district, and almost in every town, and these tormenting variations are found equally in the denominations and contents of the measures of land and corn. To these sources of confusion is added the general ignorance of the peasantry, who know nothing of the Paris arpent or the Paris septier, the most commonly received measure of the Kingdom.”5 The contemporary attribution of this “Gothic diversity of our measures,” as Bureaux de Pusy called it, to that “feudality which no one longer dared defend” (Delambre’s words) was perfectly correct as far as it went.6 Only in the matter of coinage had the French monarchy succeeded in gathering into its hands the manifold juridical, fiscal, and administrative functions that pertain to sovereignty in the modern state, as the crown had done in England since Tudor times. Compounding feudal particularism, manorial custom in the countryside and the corporative practice of guilds in towns had produced agrarian and commercial as well as political layers of dimensional discrepancy. The size of a unit, the aune or ell for cloth, the boisseau or bushel for grain, and many another, varied not only with the locality but with the commodity being measured, often very considerably. These manifold conventions, this complexity of measures, put a greater premium on 4

The revisionism was anticipated by Favre (1931). John L. Heilbron, “The Measure of Enlightenment,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider (1990), pp. 207–242, is the clearest and most comprehensive brief account. The classic social history of weights and measures is Kula (1970), translated into French (1984) and English (1986). Two recent French collections, both examples of the anthropological trend in current social history, contain much detail on particular practices: Garnier, Hocquet, and Woronoff (1989); Garnier and Hocquet (1990). Another, very useful, collection, Débarbat and Ten (1993) contains papers on the Spanish operations as well as those in France. 5 Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789 (1792), quoted from Cambridge University Press edition (1929), pp. 406–407. For a modern overview, see Zupko (1978). 6 Bureaux de Pusy in an opinion attached to marquis de Bonnay, Rapport fait au nom du Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce sur l’uniformité a` établir dans les poids et mesures(6 mai 1790), BN, Le29.633; Delambre, Base 1, p. 14.

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knowing one’s business than can well be imagined nowadays when lengths, weights, and volumes are everywhere standard. Clearly, however, the traditional measures did work after a fashion, the fashion of the old regime, in which commerce and science both did well, after all. It is to this that apologists for those usages point, taking up in the modern literature a refrain among its artisanal defenders. The apology goes deeper into life than the mere practicality of sticking to workable conventions, and partakes of the anthropological penchant for discerning the wisdom embodied in folkways. Not only did linear units take their dimensions from the measure of man, the foot, the ell, the six-foot toise, and so on. Beyond that, which is obvious, the magnitude of agrarian and commercial units was functional in origin. The extent of a tract of forest would be estimated in terms of the number of quarter-hours it took to walk around the perimeter. A journal of arable land would be the area that a man could sow, or plow, or scythe, depending on local custom, in a day. It would vary in size according to the crop and the fertility of the field. A similar logic deriving from conditions of transport and marketing underlay other apparent inconsistencies. If the minot of wheat contained three bushels and the minot of oats five, it was because the densities of the two grains are such that a minot of either weighed the same, 27.3 kilograms in each case. And so on indefinitely if not ad infinitum.7 Inconvenience and uncertainty thus afflicted economic exchanges at all levels, and standardization was among the most prominent reforms demanded in the cahiers de doléances drawn up in the constituencies prior to convocation of the Estates-General convened in April 1789: “One King, One Law, One Weight, One Measure.”8 What practical men had in mind was not a scientific system, but a fair and honest one. That the portion of grain owed to the lord of the manor should be measured out in the lord’s standard bushel, for the use of which the peasant had to pay a fee (and which was commonly suspected of growing in capacity over time); that persons in authority buying or taxing oats should decide whether a container in such or such a transaction should be filled flat, rounded, or heaped; that the value of wheat sold to the miller, of cowhides to the tanner, of leather to the shoemaker, of wine to the wine merchant, of pig-iron to the blacksmith, in short that the worth of all commodities, both agrarian and manufactured, should be determined by weights and measures of arcane definition in the hands of the most powerful of the parties to the affair, whether tax-collector, lord, or great merchant—all this was of a piece with the presence in manorial muni7

For excellent summary discussions, see E. Gruter, “Le concept de mesure,” in Garnier, Hocquet, and Woronoff (1989), pp. 3–42; and J.-C. Hocquet, “Introduction,” in Garnier and Hocquet (1990), pp. 9–20. 8 Kula (French edition, 1984), pp. 170–210. Such demands may be sampled in AN: F12.1288.

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ment rooms stocked with inscrutable registers, deeds, and charters containing the record, unverifiable by the peasant, of everything owing to lord and overlord, clerical and secular. According to legend, uniformity of weights and measures had obtained throughout the Carolingian empire, and before that in the metric golden age of ancient Rome and Egypt. From the time of Fran¸cois Ier, successive royal edicts imposing such standardization throughout the realm largely failed of effect beyond the Ile-de-France.9 The official weights and measures employed in Paris itself, to which the seigneurial and municipal standards in the provinces would in principle have been subordinated, were of haphazard definition. Legally the fundamental linear unit was the pied du roi, contained six times in the cubit, the Toise de Paris. In the eighteenth century the actual standard was a graduated iron bar, the Toise du Châtelet, mortised into the wall at the foot of the great staircase in that edifice. It served the public for the verification of appropriate measuring rods and rulers. There it had been emplaced in 1668, an improvement upon an ancient standard, which had buckled with the settling of the pillar. Over the years the Toise du Châtelet, a trifle shorter than its predecessor, rusted in its setting. In 1759 an alert and civic-minded laborer, noticing that it had worked loose, took a sledge and pounded the ends back into the masonry. Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, of the Academy of Science, found it bent firmly into position, reported the curvature to the Academy, and returning to verify the situation, saw that in the meantime it had been further secured by hammering along the lower flange. Fortunately, La Condamine had had a duplicate made prior to the expedition he led to Peru in 1735 in order to survey the length of a degree of latitude at the Equator. On 16 May 1766, acting on advice tendered by the Academy of Science eight years previously, the government ordered eighty replicas made of this Toise de Pérou. Marked off in feet and inches, the bars were distributed about Paris and to the provincial capitals, where they might or might not be respected and utilized. They served officially, therefore, as the final linear referent of the old regime.10 The standard of marc weight had known fewer vicissitudes. It consisted of a Chinese nest of cylindrical weights totaling fifty marcs, or twenty-five pounds. This Pile de Charlemagne, which in fact dated from the fifteenth century, was kept at the Mint, along with the dies for coinage.11 As for units 9 J.-B. Hocquet, “Le Roi et la réglementation des poids et mesures en France,” and M. Touzery, “Contribution a` la géographie des mesures agraires: Le travail des arpenteurs de Bertier de Sauvigny, 1776–1790,” in Garnier and Hocquet (1990), pp. 23–34, 63–84. 10 Charles Marie de La Condamine, “Remarques sur la Toise-étalon du Châtelet,” MARS (1771/Pt I, 1774), pp. 482–501. 11 M.-C. Chabalian, J. Forien, B. Garnier, “Balances et poids,” in Garnier, Hocquet, and Woronoff (1989), pp. 101–167.

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of capacity and of yardgoods, and those such as the dram, the carat, and the grain, which pertained to highly skilled trades, the appropriate guild corporations, the Mercers, the Grocers, the Apothecaries, the Jewelers, and so on had the standards in their (very jealous) keeping, the more important of them in quarters assigned to the respective Jurés-mesureurs in the Hôtel de Ville. Like the juridical procedures in which it was embedded, such metrical practice derived from precedent. Even so, it was little if at all detrimental to the conduct of most of science in the eighteenth century. Only in geodesy, of which the Cassini map of France was the grandest achievement, did it matter that measurements from scattered places be referrable to a common, invariant standard. In the experimental or observational practice of a Franklin, of a Nollet, of a Herschel, even of a Lavoisier or a Coulomb, the reliability of a single instrument or set of instruments was essential. As long as Lavoisier’s weights were faithful to themselves, it did not signify what proportion they bore to the components of the Pile de Charlemagne, whereas the necessity to convert into his terms units employed in London or Uppsala was at worst an inconvenience attending the repetition of experiments. Thus it was no accident that the movement for a general scientific reform of weights and measures should have taken its impetus from the geodesists, from La Condamine, specifically, on his return from Peru. Adopting a suggestion by Huygens in Horologium oscillatorium (1673), La Condamine read a memoir at the public meeting of the Academy of Science in April 1748, in which he outlined a project for basing a universal system of measures on a unit to be determined by the nature of things.12 The most convenient magnitude would be the length of a simple pendulum that beats seconds at the equator. Nothing was done. The idea remained in the air, however, and although the decision ultimately taken based the meter rather on a fraction of the length of the meridian, the geodetic survey undertaken in 1792 to establish its value was in effect a resumption of the operation of triangulation through which La Condamine’s successors, both French and British, linked the observatories of Paris and Greenwich in 1787 and with them the Cassini map of France to what became the Ordnance Survey of Britain.13 In contrast to the clarion demands for uniform and honest standards of commercial measurement contained in the cahiers de doléances at the outset of the Revolution, the initial indications of scientific interest in metrical reform, as in other political questions, were tentative and muted. An entry in the register of the Academy of Science for 27 June 1789 records appoint12 La Condamine, “Nouveau projet d’une mesure invariable propre a` servir de mesure commune a` toutes les nations,” MARS (1747/1752), pp. 489–514. 13 Gillispie (1980), pp. 122–130.

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ment of a committee composed of Lavoisier, Brisson, Laplace, Tillet, and Leroy “for a piece of work on weights and measures.” No record remains of their deliberations, if any, and the subject received no further mention in the Academy until 14 August, ten days after the night-long session of the Constituent Assembly in which noble members renounced their privileges. On that date Leroy urged that the moment was ripe to erect a properly scientific structure of weights and measures on the ruins of feudal diversity.14 Whether he was speaking for himself or for the committee is unclear. Jean-Baptiste Leroy, an experimentalist in electricity and champion of Benjamin Franklin’s one-fluid theory, was the son of a famous clockmaker and himself less noteworthy for his science than for his articles on scientific instruments in the Encyclopédie. His more prominent colleagues who had given serious thought to metrology, notably Condorcet, Lavoisier, and Laplace, preferred to operate behind the scenes for the time being, where (as will appear) they were developing the scheme that Talleyrand, acting as the spokesman of enlightened science, presented to the Constituent Assembly on 6 May 1790. By that time a number of other proposals had already been submitted. Since it was assumed, at this initial stage, that weights and measures pertained primarily to commerce, all such projects were referred routinely to the Committee on Agriculture and Commerce.15 The two most interesting among them, in part because of the authorship, were a memoir by a pair of veteran civil servants, L.-P. Abeille and Matthieu Tillet, writing on behalf of the Royal Society of Agriculture, and another by Claude-Antoine Prieur, future member of the Committee of Public Safety. The former was submitted to the Constituent Assembly on 6 February 1790. Evidently, the Committee had requested the opinion of the Society of Agriculture on a still earlier discussion of uniform weights and measures by one Villeneuve, who was concerned mainly with public order. Rather than limiting themselves to that, Abeille and Tillet seized the moment to review the entire subject of metrology from a practical point of view.16 Abeille was seventy years of age in 1789. He had served as private secretary to Vincent de Gournay, the Intendant of Commerce in the 1750s whose precepts had been the inspiration of economic liberalism at mid-century. Converted by later 14

PVAS, 27 June and 14 August 1789, fol. 170, 207. For the proceedings, see Fernand Gerbaux and Charles Schmidt, eds., Procès-verbaux des Comités d’Agriculture et du Commerce de la Constituante, de la Législative, et de la Convention (4 vols., 1896–1910). Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire ećonomique de la Révolution fran¸caise. Hereafter PVCA&C. 16 Observations de la Société Royale d’Agriculture sur l’uniformité des poids et des mesures (Le 4 février 1790). BN, Vz 1685 and Vz 1792. To this pamphlet is appended an attack by the astronomer Lalande, always something of a maverick, upon “the new system of measurement” that his colleagues intended to propose. 15

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experience of office to belief in the need for moderate regulation, Abeille was one of the founders of the Royal Society of Agriculture in 1761. He remained a principal figure in its counsels until his death in 1807. Tillet also had been of the circle of agronomists that included Duhamel de Monceau, Fougeroux de Bondaroy, and Broussonet, then serving as Permanent Secretary of the Society of Agriculture. Tillet had the further qualification of long service as Director of the Mint at Troyes. In 1774 Turgot had commissioned him to collaborate with the young Condorcet in what was, in effect, the latter’s introduction to the subject, preparation of a plan for standardization of weights and measures. The project was one among many for which the statesman’s scant two years in office failed to suffice. That abortive experience, it may be conjectured, is likely to have reinforced if it did not generate Tillet’s distrust of abstract approaches to concrete practices. In composing their Observations, Abeille and Tillet were well aware that a scientific plan was in the making. They begin by opposing anything of the sort. If only there were an immutable natural standard, it would indeed provide a bulwark against error, whim, and chicanery. But no such object is known. To be sure, scientists of a rational disposition do aspire to measure the length of the seconds pendulum for that purpose. “It is in the character of genius to reach for distant prospects, often beyond the limits of our grasp, and not to hesitate to flatter itself that success is near and will be complete.”17 However attractive, the notion of a natural standard is altogether visionary in present circumstances. The nations of the world would never adopt such a scale. Consider how many centuries elapsed before they agreed on the Gregorian Calendar. In any case, determinations of the pendulum are susceptible of nothing like perfect precision. The force of gravity varies from place to place, and may also be inconstant at a given location. Even were gravitational force assumed to be invariant, different observers would never arrive at precisely the same figure for a pendulum of unit length. Still, suppose for the sake of argument that an absolute value could be established. Fabricating perfect replicas would still prove impossible. The only practical recourse, therefore, must be to standards agreed upon as pure conventions. Most obviously is that true of the manifold exchanges of commerce and daily life. Why regret it? Such transactions require nothing more exact than the approximations that suffice for ordinary buying and selling. The important thing is that people should know what quantity to expect in this commodity bought at that price, that they should be able to calculate by rule of thumb how much flour they will obtain from so many bushels of wheat, and so on and so on.18 “The idea of buying and selling, of 17 18

Ibid., pp. 9–10. Ibid., pp. 25–26.

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weights, of measures, always entails the comparison of the thing bought or sold with the standard of measurement or weight that serves to fix the price. Into what confusion would it throw people who have constantly to be buying and selling if they were suddenly to be deprived of their accustomed means of comparison.” The essential thing is immediately to establish a uniform and usable system without disrupting the operation of the market. Nothing more is needed than to standardize the existing weights and measures of Paris throughout the kingdom, and nothing more should be attempted. “Let us scrupulously distinguish our everyday measures from our scientific measures.”19 Let us reflect, even with respect to the latter, that absolute perfection, of whatever sort, always escapes our efforts. So far, Abeille and Tillet sound very like a preview of the modern-day critique of the conception of the metric system. When their essay is read straight through, however, inconsistencies appear. They too were men of their time, after all, and it turns out to have been on the score of practice, important though that was, that they were taking unnamed scientists to task. As to principle, they entirely agree that units should ultimately be referrable to nature. Their argument is simply that this was already true of the Toise of Peru. The prototype of that bar had been employed in measurements of the pendulum, at Quito and at Paris. Those had been scrupulous determinations. Units currently in use need only be calibrated against the original standard, itself a natural magnitude. Abeille and Tillet recommend that the ratio be engraved on each of the replicas distributed to all the main cities. Beyond that, study of the literature has persuaded our authors that, despite all the confusion, it may well be true, as certain learned scholars hold, that a universal metric system had indeed existed in antiquity.20 Everything leads them to believe that what German counterparts would have called this Ursystem still underlies the corrupted usages of the moderns. If so, it will suffice to scrape away the rust. It would then appear that the peoples of antiquity “made use of weights and measures of which the standard of reference, taken from nature, has always been the same.”21 As their final recommendation, Abeille and Tillet propose that a joint commission of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the Academy of Science be named in order to investigate the question. If the proposition should turn out to be true, it should not be difficult to recover the elementary prototype of the measures of the peoples of Europe, and perhaps of all peoples living in organized societies. 19

Ibid., pp. 25–26. They cite A.-J.-P. Paucton, Métrologie, ou traité des mesures, poids et monnaies des anciens peuples et des modernes (1780), and Jean-Baptiste Romé de l’Isle, Métrologie, ou tables pour servir a` l’intelligence des poids et mesures des anciens (1789). 21 Abeille and Tillet, op. cit., n. 16 above, pp. 118–119. 20

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Abeille and Tillet submitted their report on 6 February 1790. Prieur followed them by three days, presenting his memoir on the ninth. Having composed it in Dijon, at a provincial remove from Paris, he was probably unaware that a scientific project was in the wind. Only two months later did he send a copy to the Academy of Science, apparently as an afterthought.22 A graduate of the Royal Engineering School at Mézières, Prieur calls himself “ci-devant du Vernois” on the title page. For he had not quite consigned to oblivion the style that he, a favored nephew, had appropriated from an aunt married into the minor nobility, nor had he yet adopted the designation “de la Côte d’Or.” He was a twenty-seven-year old first lieutenant in 1790, a slightly lame young man, the impecunious son of a spendthrift father.23 Despite the insecurities of his personal situation, Prieur betrayed little or nothing of the frustration experienced by fellow officers in the Corps of Engineers, intellectually in the case of Coulomb, professionally in that of Lazare Carnot.24 He was a generation behind the one, and ten years younger than the other, and perhaps he did not feel thwarted. For he had proved less than assiduous in his duties, even by the relaxed standards of the Corps. He spent barely three months annually on post in the several garrisons to which he was assigned. A native Burgundian, Prieur passed most of every year in Dijon. There he formed a life-long liaison with the grocer’s wife with whom he lodged and by whom he had a son. It happened that his father and Guyton de Morveau were cousins. Having abandoned the law for chemistry in the 1780s, Guyton was the leading figure scientifically in the Royal Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters of Dijon. The youthful Prieur assisted his eminent cousin in preparing the famous balloon ascent of 1784, the first to be tried outside Paris after the maiden Montgolfier flights of the previous autumn. He improved what he had learned of chemistry at Mézières by attending Guyton’s course of lectures. Prieur was himself elected to membership in the Academy, the forum for the vigorous cultural and scientific life that distinguished the Burgundian capital where, as in Bordeaux, in Lyons, in Toulouse, in Montpellier, in still other provincial centers, the literary, the scientific, and the social strains of thought commingled in preparing minds all ignorant of the immediate future for the events of 1789.25 Prieur, outwardly a dilettante, inwardly a well-trained engineer, made his entrance into those events by writing his pamphlet on weights and mea22

PVAS, 17 April 1790, fol. 91. The commissioners were Laplace, Coulomb, Lavoisier, Borda, and Tillet. There is no record of a report. 23 The standard biography is Bouchard (1946). 24 Gillispie (1980), pp. 529–533. 25 For the provincial academies, see Roche (1978), who is concerned entirely with their social role, however, and not at all with their actual proceedings.

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sures. He did so, he acknowledged, at the suggestion of Monsieur de Morveau, who had provided valuable advice and information. In accordance with legislative usage, the title does the work of an abstract: Memoir on the necessity and the means for rendering uniform throughout the kingdom all measures of extension and of weight; for establishing them on fixed and invariant bases; for regulating all multiples and subdivisions according to the decimal order; finally, for assimilating all moneys in circulation to the new order of things. And as a consequence of this reform to simplify accounting and calculation, in the physical sciences as well as in finance and commerce. Prieur nowhere pretends to originality. He has drawn the material together from the writings of “true scientists” with a view to familiarizing the layman with the best thinking on the subject. Scientists, he says, had always wanted a universal system of weights and measures, but particularly so “since they have committed themselves to bringing the greatest precision into the physical sciences.”26 Until now science has perforce made do with units drawn from commercial practice. The central thrust of Prieur’s proposal, and the basic wish of the scientific community, is to reverse that dependency, to the benefit of all parties. Units of measurement are of five sorts. Those of the first class depend on conventions yielding values that are merely relative, such as the gradations on the scale of a thermometer, the degrees of a circle, and the number of carats indicating the hardness of jewels and the purety of gold. Those of the second type mark the passage of time in hours, minutes, and seconds. Beyond observing that decimal subdivision would be a convenience, Prieur has nothing to say about these intensive, angular, and temporal magnitudes, for the reason that they were already standard throughout Europe. His main concern is with measurements of extension and of weight, the third and fourth types. It was there that confusion reigned. There, too, lay the clearest opportunity for reform, since linear and gravimetric units are indeed capable of absolute and not merely relative or arbitary definition. Prieur cites Bailly’s Histoire de l’astronomie moderne as his authority for the belief that the units of antiquity had been referred to the length of a degree taken along a meridian of the globe.27 That possibility remained the first of two alternatives on which a natural system might be founded. Surveying the base would be difficult and expensive, however, and it was uncertain how accurately the job could be done. For these reasons, Prieur preferred the second option, the length of the seconds pendulum. It would be for the 26 Prieur, Mémoire sur la necessité de rendre uniforme . . . toutes les mesures d’étendre et de pesanteur (1790), pp. 9–10, n. 2. 27 3 vols. (1779–82), 1, p. 154.

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Academy of Science to decide where that value should be determined, but the most convenient spot would seem to be the Observatory of Paris. The location was known very exactly, and the temperature of the cellars always held steady at a constant 10⬚. The new linear standard would then be divided into thirds to give a unit very close to the pied du roi. The “national foot,” it could be called. No doubt foreigners would name it the French foot—no matter, “Scientists will make it a universal foot.” There is no need to fear, as La Condamine had done, lest the jealousy of other nations impede adoption: “Liberty, advancing day by day across our globe, makes all men cosmopolitan.” The foot would be divided decimally into inches, lines, and points. Gravimetric standards would then be derived from linear units by defining the pound as the weight of ten cubic inches of water.28 Prieur apologizes for, or rather justifies, the proposal to retain the word “foot.” He recognizes that ideally names should express things. Guyton, after all, was a principal author of the reform of chemical language. “Today,” acknowledged Prieur, “the most distinguished scientists are convinced that the improvement of the sciences is inseparable from that of their nomenclature.”29 But it was no less important to spare popular sensibilities so far as was consistent with the substance of needed change. For that reason he advocated writing decimals as 4pi,89 rather than 4,89. People want to know what is being numbered. Prieur was equally circumspect with respect to money, there too without sacrificing decimal reform to duodecimal habit. In the old system, there were 20 sous to the pound and 12 deniers or pennies to the sou. The smallest coin in circulation was the liard, worth three sous. He would call the new sou the demi-dixième, half a tenth of the pound, and the two-sou piece the dixième. The liard would be replaced by a centième, trivially different in value at a hundredth rather than an eightieth of the pound. The Prieur pamphlet may be taken as an index to what would have satisfied the general run of technically informed opinion. The essential matter was uniformity, of equal importance commercially and scientifically, rather than a generalized reform. The basis, however, should be a natural magnitude determined by scientific procedures, and not a mere convention. Only so could verification and correction of standards be conducted independently of the play of special interests of any sort, whether national, regional, commercial, or vocational. Finally, multiples and fractions must be decimal. Facilitating calculation generally was incomparably more important than the shopkeeper’s preference for the base twelve because of its divisibility into halves, thirds, and quarters. 28 29

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 19, n.3.

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2. PROPOSALS

These considerations, or most of them, inform the proposal that the National Assembly initally enacted into law. It was presented, not by some drudge of a functionary, such as Tillet, nor by an unknown aspirant for notice, such as Prieur, but by one among the luminaries of that body, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, bishop of Autun. The intervention of a noble prelate in the discussion over weights and measures was less incongruous than might appear. At this juncture in his protean career, Talleyrand was among the aristocrats, along with La Rochefoucauld, Noailles, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and for that matter Condorcet, who championed the early Revolution in a show of enlightened noblesse oblige. As we have seen, he was also the author, a year later, of the first comprehensive plan for a national system of education.30 Throughout the 1780s, the leadership of the Academy of Science had normally enlisted aristocratic participation in its several ventures into reforms affecting public policy. It has long been supposed, and was at the time, that Talleyrand had received coaching for his report on weights and measures. He acknowledges having consulted “as was my duty” practical men, “les personnes de l’Art.” He is aware, however, that their knowledge is insufficient, and he presumes that the National Assembly will not wish to proceed without first ascertaining the views of the Academy of Science, “to which so properly belongs the right of determining opinions in matters of this sort.”31 Who might his principal interlocutor have been? On the specific subject of the integration of gravimetric with volumetric and linear units, he cites Lavoisier’s procedure for determining the weight of a given quantity of distilled water at standard temperature. More generally, in discussing the background he notes that Turgot had intended unification of weights and measures: “You will accomplish today what this great man to his regret did not achieve.”32 Since it was Condorcet whom Turgot had commissioned to study the problem, it is reasonable to surmise that he, rather than Lavoisier, may have been the one at Talleyrand’s elbow. So, indeed, he proves to have been: recent research among Condorcet’s manuscripts has uncovered a fragment so close in phrasing to a lengthy passage in Talleyrand’s proposal that the similarity can scarcely admit of mere coincidence.33 Talleyrand was too tactful to 30

Above, chapter 2, section 3. Talleyrand, Proposition faite a` l’Assemblée Nationale, sur les poids et mesures, par M. l’évêque d’Autun (1790) (BN, Le29.632). The Avertissement containing these preliminary observations ⬘ série, 12, pp. 104–108, which is not contained in the text printed in AP (9 March 1790), 1ere gives the body of the proposal and the draft of the law. ⬘ 32 AP, 1ere série, 12, p. 105. 33 Champagne (1979), pp. 133–134. The two texts are printed side by side in this doctoral 31

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tax the patience of his fellow deputies by actually reading his proposal on the floor of the National Assembly. Instead, he had it printed prior to presenting it formally on 9 March 1790. Opening with the contrast between the orderly glories of antiquity and the scandals of the present, Talleyrand overwhelms any petty concern for respecting usage and insists on the necessity of a clean break with the corruptions of the past. The revolutionary moment was to be seized. A fundamental reform based upon nature would be true to the general cause of submerging all relics of feudal diversity in national uniformity. The Assembly had already accomplished the task with respect to other sectors of governance such as taxation and legislation. Let the suppression of feudal rights and privileges clear the way for naturalizing weights and measures. (Though he does not mention it, Talleyrand clearly had in mind the law of 15 March 1790, which specified the dues to be eliminated in implementing the general abolition of feudalism decreed on the night of 4 August 1789.) How, then, define the linear basis for a natural system of units? The first of two possibilities would be the sixty-thousandth part of the length of a degree of latitude measured along the meridian and bisected by the fortyfifth parallel. That distance, as determined by Lacaille in the 1740s, was 57,030 toises. The new unit would thus differ only slightly from the old. Talleyrand calls it the milliaire since one thousand would constitute the mille. That is as far as he goes with either nomenclature or decimalization. Three miles would make a league, so that there would be twenty leagues to the degree, while the milliaire would be divided into six feet. Surveys were complicated to run, however, and they involved an irreducible margin of error, which expert estimates placed at 34 toises per degree of latitude. (This figure was a gross exaggeration, and can scarcely have come from Condorcet or Lavoisier.) For those reasons, Talleyrand opted for the simpler alternative of the seconds pendulum. Its length, calculated to be 36 inches, 8.52 lines at the 45th parallel, was to be verified at that latitude. The most convenient site would be Bordeaux. This natural dimension would henceforth define the aune and be contained twice in the toise, which was to be subdivided in the conventional manner into feet, inches, and lines. The pound, also close to current values, would be defined, and this is where the Lavoisier determinations come in, as the weight of distilled water at the temperature of 14.4⬚ Réaumur filling a cubic vessel three inches on a side. In effect, then, the Talleyrand proposal was modest enough. Stripped of the rhetoric of clean breaks, it limited the reform of weights and measures to unification and naturalization. Did he ignore Condorcet’s advice in thus dissertation, the purpose of which is to specify the contributions of Condorcet, Laplace, Lagrange, Legendre, and Monge to the creation of the metric system. Besides accomplishing that purpose, it is a mine of precise historiographical detail.

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eschewing decimalization and renaming? Was it with an eye to popular sensibilities that his system was radical only in principle, reducing in practice to the conventional? Or was it in order to bring in the British? Or for both those reasons? Ever the diplomatist, he attached great importance to the latter consideration. Talleyrand made no doubt that England would join in. Her astronomers had already collaborated with Cassini in the 1787 survey linking the observatories of Paris and Greenwich.34 Commercial relations strengthened the common interest in a unification of weights and measures to be based on a joint determination of the seconds pendulum. The enterprise would be an example to all Europe: “Perhaps it is even permissible to see in this cooperation of two nations investigating nature together . . . the principle of a political union brought about through the intermediary of science.”35 As for implementation, commissioners were already engaged in organizing the reformed system of local government throughout the country. It would be easy for them to inform the Academy of Science concerning the standards everywhere in use. The Academy would meanwhile appoint a commission with the task of determining the precise ratio of the new standards to the myriad old units. Copies of the former would then be distributed to the local authorities, along with instructions for making the conversion. It was a foregone conclusion that Talleyrand’s would be the proposal preferred by the Committee on Agriculture and Commerce. Occupied with grittier, more immediate matters, it never so much as considered any of the others. When the chairman of the ad hoc subcommittee, the marquis de Bonnay, brought in his report, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 8 May 1790, the terms were an entire endorsement couched in language even more extravagant than Talleyrand’s.36 To all appearances, then, the issue between standardizing customary units and determining scientific units from a natural magnitude was settled in favor of the latter solution, while the new metric system was to be based on the seconds pendulum. So it proved with respect to the naturalistic principle. Not so with respect to the linear base. Ten months elapsed. On 19 March 1791 the Academy of Science sent the Assembly its own recommendation. Still in the role of 34

Gillispie (1980), pp. 117–130. Ibid., p. 107. 36 Charles-Fran¸cois marquis de Bonnay, Rapport fait au nom du Comité d’Agriculture et du Commerce sur l’uniformité a` établir dans les poids et mesures, to which is annexed Opinion de M. Bureaux de Pusy sur le même sujet, the two printed together by order of the National Assembly, 6 May 1790. A copy is in AN: ADVIII, 36. A military engineer and contemporary of Lazare ´ Carnot at Ecole Royale du Génie at Mézières, Jean-Xavier Bureaux de Pusy was much occupied with the division of France into departments and with reorganization of the Corps of Engineers. 35

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spokesman, Talleyrand read out the covering letter written by Condorcet as Permanent Secretary.37 Condorcet was also the author of the report itself, which was enacted into law without change on 26 March. This was the central provision: “The quadrant of the terrestrial meridian . . . will be taken as the real unit of measurement, and its ten-millionth segment will serve as the practical unit.”38 Such was the change of mind, not indeed unauthorized by the decree of 8 May 1790, but certainly unanticipated, which has exposed the Academy to charges of bad faith, both then at the hands of disgruntled persons whose own projects were passed over, and since by critics who take a certain pleasure in catching science out playing politics on feet of clay.39 Together with Condorcet, the members of the Commission that drew the report were Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, and Monge, an experienced navigator and seacaptain and three eminent mathematicians. They must certainly have understood (it is said) that any standard unit is a convention, that what matters is definition and agreement, and that there is no such thing as a naturalistic metrology. This general point is simply incorrect. It was the hallmark of the Enlightenment, and theirs was its last generation, that reasonable people really did believe that true standards of all sorts, moral as well as physical, are to be found in nature. The business of science is to obtain knowledge of how things fit. That scientists and mathematicians were not so naive as to suppose that perfect knowledge is attainable, or that the meridian, or the seconds pendulum, or anything else, is capable of a perfect determination, does not make them crypto-positivists. Truths are to be approximated and error reduced so far as technically possible. Sir John Riggs Miller, the foremost advocate of metrical reform across the Channel, can have had no interest in deceiving the French National Assembly. Yet his reasoning is exactly that of the academicians in Paris: The qualities of a Standard are of two kinds, viz., those which are essential, and those which are only eligible. The essential qualities, which every Standard should possess, are, that it should be taken from Nature, or connected with something in Nature, and not from any work of art, which must necessarily decay, nor from anything that is merely arbitrary, and which has no other right to be a standard, than ⬘ AP, 1ere série, 24, Séance du 26 mars 1791, p. 379. ”Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences sur le choix d’une unité des mesures,” HARS (1788/91), pp. 7–16. 39 Marat, Les charlatans modernes (1791); on Cassini’s attitude, see Devic (1851), pp. 155–159. For modern critics, see Favre (1931), 114–130; Heilbron, “The Measure of Enlightenment,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider (1990), pp. 207–242; Dhombres (1992), pp. 26–30. 37 38

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that it is kept in a house, which is called the Exchequer or Guildhall and which has certain marks upon it, and a certain name given to it.40 Still, the pendulum would have satisfied those requirements, and the question remains, why another survey of the meridian? The concealed motivations for this otherwise gratuitous enterprise, so say the skeptics, were, first, the desirability of improving the geodetic data relevant to calculating the shape of the earth, a favorite problem in celestial mechanics since the launching of the expeditions to Lapland and Peru in the 1730s; and, second, the opportunity to make trial on a global scale of the surveying instrument, the repeating circle, invented by Borda and used with great success by the French team in the 1787 Paris-Greenwich triangulation.41 That the former was the main reason was stated by Laplace’s disciple, Jean-Baptiste Biot, writing in 1803.42 In 1790 Biot was a sixteen-year-old pupil reading the classics at the Collège Louis-le-Grand and can hardly have been party to the deliberations of the commission. He gravitated into La´ place’s orbit after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1797. It is plausible to suppose that what he had been told then or surmised later was correct, and that the prospect for improved data regarding the shape of the earth had indeed been a factor in the preference for a geodetic survey. The matter was extremely technical. In a memoir of 1785, Laplace had obtained expressions (since called Laplace’s functions) which permitted comparing the value for the force of gravity measured by means of the pendulum with that calculated from the inverse square law of attraction. The comparison could be made at any point where geodetic measurements along the meridian permitted determination of the radius.43 40

Riggs Miller, Speeches in the House of Commons upon the Regulation of the Weights and Measures of Great Britain (London, 1790), pp. 37–38. 41 Gillispie (1980), pp. 122–130; Sven Widmalm, “Accuracy, Rhetoric, and Technology: The Paris-Greenwich Triangulation, 178–88,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider (1990), pp. 179– 206. 42 Jean-Baptiste Biot, Essai sur l’histoire générale des sciences pendant la Révolution Fran¸caise (1803), p. 36. Biot changed his tune when he was invited, along with Arago, to extend the survey of the meridian from Barcelona to the Balearic Islands. Their data, completed in 1807, gave a value for the meter that agreed with the official determination to within 0.0001 lignes. “This agreement,” he now concluded, “proves that the meter as deduced from the size of the earth is henceforth well known, and that whatever operations of this sort are made in the future, if indeed anything so considerable is ever undertaken, could not require any change.” Recueil d’observations géodésiques, astronomiques, et physiques (1821). For the Biot-Arago expedition, see below, chapter 7, section 3. 43 ”Théorie du mouvement et de la figure elliptique des planètes,” MARS (1782/85). Laplace read the memoir before the Academy on 11 August 1784. He incorporated it with little change into Mécanique céleste (Book III, chapters 1–4), where he made no use or mention of data obtained in the metric survey. See Gillispie (1997a), pp. 113–123.

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As for Borda’s repeating circle, it is true that Jean-Baptiste Delambre, the astronomer upon whom fell the lion’s share of the labor, later mentioned having suspected that one of the reasons for preferring the quadrant had been a desire to enhance the reputation of that novel and very clever device.44 Only a single such instrument existed in 1790–91, the one used in 1787. At least one other, and preferably several, would have to be commissioned for the metric survey.45 Delambre never suggests or even implies, however, that instrumentation was the compelling, and certainly not the only, consideration motivating the academic inner circle to measure the great circle of the earth rather than to calibrate a pendulum oscillating at the seashore near Bordeaux. Not that the latter project was abandoned—in tacit accordance with Laplacean theory, the project called for verifying the two sorts of determination, one against the other. In short, the charge of duplicity is probably unfair. Those who actually ran the survey, Delambre and Méchain, had little to gain, having already proved themselves, and much to lose—time, domestic peace and quiet, quite possibly their lives. Also, even if the sponsors left certain, highly technical considerations unstated, it does not follow that the reasons of a more general sort that they did advance, which were suited to the comprehension of the legislators who composed the Constituent Assembly, were either factitious or insincere. Honorable people may well believe what they say, after all, while not finding it politic to say all they believe. It does, on the other hand, have to be admitted that the language of Condorcet’s report is unconvincing in hindsight and must have been unclear at the time. He rehearses (less cogently than Riggs Miller) the importance of excluding everything arbitrary from the determination of a natural unit. The objection to the seconds-pendulum is that its determination depends on a parameter in time, which is both arbitrary and extraneous: arbitrary because the second is simply the 86,400th part of a day; extraneous because even if it were agreed to resort to the hypothetical pendulum with a frequency of one oscillation per day (the day being the smallest natural unit of time), and then to divide that length by ten million for the basic unit, even so the linear determination would depend on the force of gravity at the surface of the earth. Now, if it were possible to have a linear unit which depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements which in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such for example as the distance 44

Grandeur et figure de la terre, p. 203. Observatoire de Paris, MSS du Bureau des Longitudes, MSS Delambre, Z 137 (2). Undated note. 45

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between two places or the area of some tract. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle on the earth than to the length of a pendulum. . . .46 As usual when the question partook of technicality, Laplace expressed himself more clearly than did Condorcet. In April 1795, at which time the metric survey had been resumed after being interrupted, as we shall see, ´ under the Terror, he put the point very simply in a lecture before the Ecole Normale: The length of the pendulum and that of the meridian are the two principal means offered by Nature for fixing the unity of linear measures. Both being independent of moral revolutions, they can undergo no detectable alteration short of enormous changes in the physical constitution of the earth. The first method is easily applicable, but has the disadvantage of making the measurement of distance depend on two elements that are heterogeneous to it, gravity and time, the division of [the latter of] which, moreover, is arbitrary. It was decided, therefore, to adopt the second method, which appears to have been employed in early antiquity, so natural is it for man to relate the units of distance by which he travels to the dimensions of the globe that he inhabits. In moving about this globe, he may thus know by the simple denomination of the distance the proportion it bears to the entire circumference of the earth. This has the further advantage of making nautical and celestial measurements correspond. The navigator often needs to determine, one from the other, the distance he has traversed and [the length of] the celestial arc lying between the zenith at his point of departure and that at his destination. It is important, therefore, that one of these magnitudes should be the expression of the other, with no difference except in the units. But to that end, the fundamental linear unit must be an aliquot part of the terrestrial meridian, which corresponds to one of the divisions of the circumference. Thus, the choice of the meter came down to that of the unity of angles.47 46

“Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences sur le choix d’une unité des mesures,” HARS (1788/91) 7–16, pp. 9–10. The later observations of J.-G. Tralles, a Swiss mathematician who was a member of the international commission on the meter in 1798–99 (below, chapter 7, section 3), convey the thinking of contemporary physicists. “The length of the pendulum is too complex an idea to serve as the unit of length. In making that determination it is impossible to avoid considering the period and motion of the earth’s rotation. A thing entirely determined in nature is thus made complicated and in part arbitrary. That would be to follow an unsystematic course contrary to the spirit of exact science, because what is purely geometric would be preceded by mechanical and astronomical considerations. Force and time would be the fundamental quantities, and they would have to be known before length could be defined. “Rapport . . . sur l’unité de poids,” Base 3, pp. 559–560. 47 For the text of Laplace’s lecture, see Dhombres (1992).

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Laplace can have had no interest in deceiving the students assembled on the benches of that portentous if abortive institution. That the reasoning had been shared among his colleagues is confirmed by a manuscript of Lagrange, still less open to the imputation of special pleading since it remains unpublished: “We judged that the length of the meridian was preferable [to the pendulum] with respect to itinerary distances and to maritime measures, because it will give immediately and without any reduction the route travelled as parts of the meridian, and consequently the difference in latitude of departure and arrival.”48 In the previous November, as we know from a letter of Condorcet to the President of the National Assembly, the Academy was still planning to base the system on the pendulum.49 The commission that recommended the change, those named above, was appointed on 16 February 1791. It was one of several ad hoc committees of the Academy that considered the elements of metrical reform throughout the year following the decree of 8 May 1790, and its shift from the pendulum to the meridian was only one, albeit the most important one, among the modifications and implementations enacted by the National Assembly.50 The decree of 8 May 1790 was, indeed, an enabling law, never taken to be the last word. For one thing, it contained no provision for decimalization. For another, probably related, its terms presupposed British participation. That never happened, despite the efforts of Riggs Miller, whether because of recalcitrance on one side of the Channel or chauvinism on the other. Only on 22 August did the 8 May law receive royal assent. Its main significance in practice was to shift responsibility for bringing in a reform from the Committee on Agriculture and Commerce to the Academy of Science. On 25 June the Committee accepted the motion of the marquis de Bonnay to forward the entire file to the Academy.51 Apparently Prieur’s memoir had languished in a folder, as did some twenty others, for five months until it was singled out for examination by a commission composed of Laplace, Borda, Coulomb, Tillet, and chaired by Lavoisier, who began a reading before the Academy of Science on 13 July 1790.52 Lavoisier, again, took the lead in making arrangements with local authori48 Quoted in Champagne (1979) from Manuscrits de Lagrange, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Mss. 910, fol. 3v. 49 Condorcet to the president of the National Assembly, 11 November 1790. AN, ADVIII, 36. Jefferson, he goes on to say, had agreed to accept a determination at the 45th instead of the 38th parallel, and Spain had sent an envoy to Paris to follow the work in order that a comparative determination might be undertaken at a latitude of 45⬚ south in the New World. 50 PVAS, 29 September; 6, 13, 20 October 1790, 109, fol. 224–225. 51 PVAC&C, 359. 52 PVAS, 13 July 1790, 109, fol. 143. For a collection of these proposals, see AN: ADVIII, 36.

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ties for submitting their standards to Paris for verification.53 The administrators of the Department of La Nièvre, for example, objected (as did their colleagues elsewhere) that it would be impossible to collect and send all the weights and measures currently in service. Lavoisier agreed. The Academy, he replied, recognized the impracticality of a literal interpretation of the 8 May decree and would seek permission to collect one standard of each type.54 On Condorcet’s request, the National Assembly enacted the recommendation into law on 8 December 1790.55 In that connection, Mercklein fils devised and won approval of an instrument for precise calibration of linear measures.56 Despite his opposition in principle, Tillet, still an official of the mint at Troyes, took an active and apparently constructive part throughout the deliberations, particularly with respect to the integration of monetary reform with metric reform. Among the provisions of the decree of 8 May was a request for the opinion of the Academy on the regulation of coinage and on the most appropriate scale of division for money, and also for weights and other measures. The commission appointed to draw up a response consisted of Borda, Lagrange, Lavoisier, Tillet, and Condorcet. Lavoisier knew finance. Tillet and Condorcet knew the Mint. The questions concerning coinage (no doubt planted in advance) were whether the proportion of precious to base metal in the alloy should be held constant, so that coins would differ only in their weight, and whether the tolerance in composition (le remède) should always be in excess rather than sometimes in defect of the reputed fineness. Submitting its report on 27 October 1790, the Commission came down, predictably enough, on the side of sound money and consistency.57 Explaining the technical reasons for the very slight uncertainty of composition of the alloys—between two to three parts in 576 for silver coins and one to two parts in 768 for gold—the commissioners suggested in a footnote that the use of pure metals would simplify matters. The supposition that the alloys, being harder, are more durable had never actually been tested, and the Academy initiated a series of experiments to decide the question.58 Preliminary results indicated that me53

PVAS, 10 November 1790, 109, fol. 233. Lavoisier to Conseil du Departement de la Nièvre, 7 December 1790. OL, Correspondance 6, pp. 205–206. 55 Condorcet to the president of the National Assembly, 11 Nov. 1790, AN, ADVIII.36; AP 21, p. 323. 56 PVAS, 15 December 1790, p. 109, fol. 258. 57 “Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences, par MM Borda, Lagrange, Lavoisier, Tillet, et Condorcet,” le 27 octobre 1790, HARS (1788/1791), pp. 1–6. 58 The commission consisted of Borda, Coulomb, Darcet, and Lavoisier together with Tillet, who made the tests. See PVAS, 15 January 1791, 109, fol. 267. 54

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tallic discs of pure gold or silver resisted friction better than alloys when rubbed together but less well when jingled against coins currently in use. Turning to subdivision, the immediate problem was the monetary system of the old regime that, like its British offshoot of pounds, shillings, and pence, derived from Carolingian times. There were 20 sous in the livre and 12 deniers in the sou. Higher denominations were the silver écu and the gold louis d’or, worth 6 and 24 livres, respectively. The term franc—if we may look ahead for a moment—was coming into use before it officially replaced the livre by the law of 18 germinal an III (7 April 1795). A further measure of 15 August 1795 fixed the value at 5 grams of silver. Anticipating these changes, the Convention on 7 December 1793 had already decreed the subdivision of the livre into décimes and centimes. Thus, the earliest, indeed much the earliest, application of the principles of the metric system was to money, and—to return now to the monetary commission of 1790—that was the connection in which the Academy first made the case for decimalization in general. Its report calls for adoption of the “arithmetical” (or decimal) scale for subdivision of all units, whether of money, length, surface, volume, weight, or capacity. The simplification of procedures would be enormous. As it was, the man who could reckon his sous and deniers was not thereby able to figure in toises, pieds, pouces, and lignes, let alone in livres, onces, gros, and grains. Anybody used to calculating in any of these systems would easily learn to use decimals, while the converse was certainly not true. Certain experts had urged the duodecimal scale, since the base would be evenly divisible into thirds and quarters as well as halves. But the disadvantages were formidable. Two extra digits would have to be denominated. People unaccustomed to calculation, in other words the whole population, would have to be trained to think in steps of twelve instead of ten when combining numbers. Anyway, division by four was no serious impediment to use of decimals. Shoppers buying a quarter of a pound would easily grow accustomed to receiving two ounces five gros. The indivisibility of ten into thirds remained awkward. Still, the inconvenience would be trivial compared to the massive confusion into which a novel arithmetical scale would plunge the public. The National Assembly did not act separately on this report, which was sent to it on 27 October 1790. Instead, decimalization became incorporated, not to say smuggled, into the metric reform as a corollary of the law of 26 March 1791 basing the system on the measurement of the meridian. The report points out in the opening passages that defining unit length as the ten millionth part of the quadrant necessarily entails abandoning the traditional partition of the arc into degrees, minutes, and seconds. The justification is that sexagesimal division could not be retained “without vitiating the

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unity of the system of measurement, since decimal division, which corresponds to the arithmetical scale, is to be preferred for all purposes.” The reasoning would appear to be a classic, and perhaps unconscious, example of answering a question by begging it, or reaching a solution by assuming it, for no authority higher than the Academy had prescribed the preferability of decimals. Nothing in the system is arbitrary, the commissioners insist, except the choices, first, of the arithmetical scale, and second, of water as the substance of which the specific gravity would define unit weight. The latter is dictated by physical convenience, and the former “by the fear lest any change there, added to all the others, would jeopardize the success of the entire operation.”59 A new survey, the report acknowledged, would cover the same ground that the abbé Lacaille had traversed half a century before in measuring the meridian from Dunkerque to Perpignan.60 So much the better. Redoing his triangles (nearly 800 in all) would either confirm or improve the accuracy, while extending them the relatively short distance across the Pyrenees and down to Barcelona would anchor both ends at sea level. Meanwhile, new and precise determination of the length of the seconds pendulum would yield a standard for comparison permitting ready verification of the new and still unnamed unit. The merits of both alternative bases for a natural standard would thus be combined in one. Finally, the report alludes to, though without emphasizing, the most material of the considerations behind the preference for the meridian. Reverting to and perfecting the Lacaille triangulation would make of the new scale a grid to be laid conformably over the map of France. Completed, except for Brittany, the Cassini Map of France had, in effect, been fleshed out on the skeleton, or rather the spinal cord, of the Lacaille survey. That great compilation had already stood the Revolution in good stead politically and administratively. The cartographers who in 1790 partitioned the country into 83 departments, and the departments into cantons and districts, worked their task on the surface of its 170-odd sheets. Now it might serve in the finer, more intricate, and more contentious detail of land registry and tax assessment. There had never been a Domesday book in France. No national registry recorded the boundaries, the type of exploitation, and the revenue of landholdings, and no basis existed for equitable assessment of land taxes. A cadastre, as such an instrument was called, had been assembled in certain 59

Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, and Condorcet, “Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences, sur le choix d’une unité de mesures,” 19 March 1791, HARS (1788–1791), p. 11. On decimilization, see Heilbron (1998), pp. 96–97. 60 Gillispie (1980), pp. 114–115.

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pays d’état, in Dauphiny in the fourteenth century, in Provence in the fifteenth, and in Languedoc in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These documents were merely descriptive, however, tabular rather than graphic in form, and provincial in scope. Throughout the country, the incidence of taxes on real property varied enormously from region to region, and from one locality to another, often nearby. As in other aspects of the relevance of science for administrative reform, Turgot had anticipated revolutionary developments in basing a cadastre for the Limousin, where he was intendant in the 1760s, on a proper set of surveys. Demands for nation-wide rationalization appeared in many cahiers de doléances in 1789. The initial call in the Constituent Assembly for creation of a thorough and uniform cadastre came from Pierre-Fran¸cois Aubry Dubochet during a debate on taxation generally in September 1790. Something of a specialist in government finance, he was a member both of the Committees of Finance and of the Constitution. He had spent the previous six months with a team of technicians verifying the detail of the new departmental and district subdivisions on the map of the Academy, as the Cassini map was generally called. Its excellence was everywhere recognized, although in Aubry’s plan new sheets at double the scale would have to be drawn for a cadastre.61 His ideas were systematic and in no way original. Informed opinion simply assumed that a set of proper maps was a precondition to equitable assessment of land tax in a post-manorial countryside. Aubry supposed that a provisional cadastre could be set up within a year, but that institutionalizing such a bureau, equivalent to a ministry of state, would require seven years. Meanwhile the Treasury needed money. Pending a thorough-going reform, the Constituent Assembly on 1 December 1790 voted a general tax to be levied on all real property, rural and urban, in proportion to the net revenue produced. The law required owners to declare the extent and value of their holdings. Assessments were thereupon to be set by municipal officials out of their sense of fairness (“en leur aˆme et conscience”).62 At the same time, every declaration was to be open to inspection by any taxpayer in the community. Like the procedures of the old regime, the measure thus depended on the participation of taxpayers controlled by the jealous scrutiny of neighbors. It was meant to be a stopgap. Legislation establishing the Bureau du Cadastre was ready for passage on 16 September 1791.63 Named Director on 5 October was the brightest among the rising lights in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, Gaspard Riche de Prony. He had, evidently, been conferring regularly throughout months of ⬘ AP (23 Sept. 1790), 1ere série 19, pp. 148–155; the full text of Aubry’s proposal is an annex to the session of 15 December, 20, pp. 493–507. ⬘ 62 AP (23 Nov. 1790), 1ere série, 20, pp. 698–721. 63 Dreux (1933), p. 16. 61

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preparation with officials of the Ministry of Finance (Contributions Publiques), with his own colleagues among civil engineers, and with the Academy’s Commission of Weights and Measures. A memoir of 10 October gives a comprehensive and detailed plan fully developed at the very outset.64 A thorough cadastre would be an exact instrument of national self-knowledge, demographic, topographic, fiscal, and economic. It would comprise precise information on the population, on the productivity, and on the boundaries of all territorial divisions from the departmental level right down to every piece of property in every commune. As to demography, the place to begin would be the remarkable series of memoirs on the population of France published by the Academy of Sciences at the end of the old regime.65 The estimates would have to be transposed to accord with the new subdivision of the country. With regard to natural resources, regional productions, agricultural particulars, and transportation, getting a handle on the immense mass of existing information was more urgent than accumulating more facts.66 Since the Cassini map was to be the framework of the whole enterprise, the most fundamental task would be to verify the location of the church steeples and other vantage points which had served as posts of observation. The detail, moreover, was insufficient. The areas triangulated were too large for a cadastre and the scale too small for showing property lines. Local surveys would be needed covering every canton. Piecing them together, the central office would insert a fine-grained network of secondary triangles into the master plan of a corrected Cassini map. All baselines would be measured with full astronomical accuracy. Finally, the cadastre would necessarily be correlated with the metric system, since the new measurement of the meridian would perfect the entire chain of primary triangles. Meanwhile, the data, the instruments, the surveyors, everything and everyone still depended on the old units, and Prony began thinking hard about the problems of conversion. The thorniest turned on the standard tables of trigonometric functions that had been calculated from the sexagesimal division of the circle. Prony engaged personnel, installed an office, and early in 1792 prepared a provisional Instruction laying out the above task in general. He submitted it in the first instance to the Minister of Finance, Etienne Clavière, who, as was normal procedure, requested the opinion of the Academy of Science. It named a commission consisting of Laplace as chairman together with Borda, Lagrange, and Monge. This was the point at which Laplace took over scientific leadership with respect to the metric system, a role that he resumed ´ “Réflexions sur la carte et le cadastre de la France, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées,” MSS 2147. 65 Gillispie (1980), pp. 45–47; Brian (1994), pp. 256–286. 66 Ms. cited n. 64, and also a later report, “Situation du travail du Bureau du Cadastre et Transport au 30 frimaire de l’an deuxième,” loc. cit., MSS 2402. On the work of the cadastre, see below, chapter 7, section 3. 64

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after the interruption of the Terror, and maintained in later years. His commission held several meetings with deputies in the Legislative Assembly, which had named an expert on taxation, Jean-Baptiste Jolivet, to report on the cadastre. A preliminary recommendation was ready on 12 May 1792. Since comprehensive verification of Cassini’s points of reference would require the utmost accuracy and take a long time, the commission confined itself to the most urgent matters within its competence. These were the geodetic and trigonometric procedures to be employed in local surveys, which were already being demanded in adjudication of tax claims. Laplace and his colleagues approved Prony’s intention to make use of a new instrument, which combined the advantages of a theodolite with those of Borda’s circle by permitting reduction of angles to the plane of the horizon and repetition of measurements at all points of the circumference. The commission further noted Prony’s intention to measure bases by means of chains similar to the ones used on Hounslow Heath and Romney Marsh in 1787, though less expensive. They would be six toises in length, and divided decimally in order that measurements might be mapped on a scale of 1:20,000. But, objected the commission, since these plans would long outlast the reform of weights and measures, “what is to prevent fabricating them as of now on the scale to which they will soon have to be reduced?” The distance between the latitudes of Perpignan and Dunkirk was sufficiently well known so that the forty millionth part of the circumference of the earth along the meridian could serve as the unit with all the accuracy needed for these local surveys. And the Commission asks that Prony be so advised and the Instruction modified accordingly.67 If the new unit were to be used, however, it would have to have a name, and that is the main subject of the full recommendation. Laplace presented it on 11 July 1792. The Academy, runs his draft, strongly desired that the units of measurement employed in the great operation of the cadastre should be drawn from the universal standard. For that purpose, and in order that they might pass into general use, the Academy was seizing the occasion to define and name them. The Academy has therefore resolved that the linear standard shall be called the mètre. In the reckoning of long distances, the millaire, a thousand meters, would replace the league. Since intervening multiples of ten and one hundred served no useful purpose, they need not have names. The subdivisions were another matter, for they would be in constant use. The Commission recognized that there was an argument for coining easy, one syllable words. Such terms could only be arbitrary, however, whereas general principles of scientific nomenclature called for express67

PVAS, 12 May 1792, 109 (2), fol. 147–150.

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ing the thing in the name. Accordingly, the Commission chose decimeter, centimeter, and millimeter. Similarly, an area 100 meters square would be an are, subdivided into deciaires and centiares. “We settled finally for this latter approach as the simplest, and because by our adopting it for measures of area, volume, capacity, weight, and money, the entire system of denominations would be uniform for all measures and composed of the least possible number of arbitrary words.” It was to be hoped, for these same reasons, that other peoples might equally accept the terminology, with whatever trivial variations differences of language should require.68 The example of the new chemical nomenclature showed how readily words catch on with use. In the same way, the operations for the cadastre, involving a large number of intelligent people, will soon spread the new system throughout the country and greatly facilitate its applicability to dimensions other than those of line and surface. For that reason, the Commission concludes, it had decided to postpone further denominations until the ground should be thus prepared. That decimalizaton should have been introduced in connection with the currency, and nomenclature with the cadastre, is evidence that the dimensions of the metric system were to be coextensive with the whole polity. The prospect of a set of simple standards, drawn from and referrable to nature, and adapted to transactions of every sort, not only buying and selling in the market, nor merely weighing and measuring in the laboratory, but also those involving finance, taxation, navigation, cartography, land registry, and demography—that vista unfolded before successive commissions of scientists dealing with the several aspects throughout the two years of discussion that ensued between preparation of the Talleyrand plan in the summer of 1790 and the Laplace report in the summer of 1792. In such a comprehensive scheme, citizen calculators would move from the angular observations of astronomy to linear measurements of the earth’s surface by a simple interchange of units involving no numerical conversions; from these to units of area and capacity by squaring and cubing; thence to units of weight by means of the principle of specific gravity; and finally from amount to price by virtue of the value of gold and silver in alloys held invariant in composition through a rigorous fiscal policy. The goal of a unified metric in a science bent on maximizing the fit with nature while minimizing the arbitrary in all things may, perhaps, be likened to the dream of a unified communications network in a science bent on information for all and all for information. It may have been visionary, naturalistic rather than realistic. Indeed, it was. But not discreditable. 68

PVAS, 11 July 1792, 109 (2), fol. 204–207. The report is in the pochet for that session.

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3. METHODS AND INSTRUMENTS

Effecting the reform of weights and measures had in common with other enlightened programs initiated in the revolution, whether social, political, constitutional, economic, educational, moral, or technical in nature, that nothing went smoothly, that circumstances forced compromise, that suspicion bred violence, that habits changed more slowly than principles, but that, nevertheless, the outcome taken all in all fitted into the foundations of the way we live now. Upon passage of the definitive law of 26 March 1791, the Academy received a grant of 300,000 livres to carry out the metric project. On 13 April it named five subcommittees on weights and measures, assigning to each a set of the tasks to be accomplished.69 The first, and by far the most important, was to survey the length of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Initially appointed were Cassini, Méchain, and Legendre, the team that had joined Calais to Dover in the triangulation linking the observatories of Paris and Greenwich in 1787.70 Legendre, the complete mathematician, had no wish to go into the field again, and withdrew on 17 March 1792.71 Cassini, out of tune with revolutionary politics, also begged off and was replaced by Jean-Baptiste Delambre on 5 May 1792.72 Once the operation was under way Delambre and Méchain shared the danger equally, but it was Delambre, coming on stage only toward the end of the prologue, who turned out to be the protagonist in the whole metric drama. Delambre was in his forty-fourth year, and newly elected to the Academy of Science, when he replaced Cassini on the Commission of Weights and Measures. His career until then might seem that of an astronomical journeyman. Thus, Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, while Delambre computed the elements of its motion in competition for a prize set by the Academy in 1790. Similarly, he followed in the wake of Laplace’s theoretical resolution of the planetary inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn, and of his theory for the satellites of Jupiter, by constructing the tables of motion for those heavenly bodies, and also for the sun. There is a whole sociology of science implicit in Delambre’s appreciation of his colleague, Méchain, a` propos of what they both took for granted—that only people of means could enjoy an observatory: “Observation is a recreation for the astronomer, in spite of its fatigues. Computations are far longer and above all more boring. They require a different vocation, a type of courage not very characteristic of men who have some fortune.”73 69

PVAS, 6, 9, 13 April 1791, 109 fol. 318–321. Cf. HARS (1788/91), pp. 17–20. Gillispie (1980), pp. 122–130. 71 PVAS, 17 March 1792, 109 (2), fol. 101; cf. Gillispie (1980), pp. 126–127. 72 PVAS, 5 May 1792, 109 (2), fol. 139. 73 Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie au dix-huitième siècle (1827), vol. 6 of his Histoire de l’astronomie. 70

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The opportunity for such recreation was afforded Delambre by generous patrons, the d’Assy family, whose son he tutored and who installed an observatory for him (it still exists) in their Paris townhouse, rue du Paradis. The son of a clothier in Amiens, he had excelled in Greek and Latin in the local college. Delambre’s teacher, the abbé Delile, recognized his quality and encouraged the boy to pursue classical studies at the Collège du Plessis in Paris. Lalande’s course on astronomy at the Collège de France thereupon opened the avenue along which the young Delambre escaped the lot of a clerical schoolmaster. His education stood him in good stead. The history of astronomy in six volumes that he composed in later years is the work of an accomplished Hellenist and Latinist no less than an astronomer, a scholar intent on getting things right.74 His Base du système métrique, appearing in three large volumes between 1806 and 1810, contains his narrative of the survey together with the record of the observations from his registers. Anyone who wishes to verify the computations, or to recalculate the original meter, will find the data there.75 Five years older than Delambre, Méchain also came from modest circumstances, his father having been a master plasterer. He too had had a minor career prior to the metric survey. Another protégé of Lalande, and one who drew closer to their patron than Delambre ever did, Méchain came to astronomy by way of mapmaking in the naval bureau of hydrography. The dramatic return of Halley’s Comet on schedule in 1759 had set astronomers to wondering whether other comets might exhibit an equally interesting periodicity. Two in particular, observed in 1532 and in 1661, seemed to differ sufficiently little in their elements that they might be one and the same. In 1780 Lagrange proposed a new method for calculating perturbations, and the Academy set a prize for an analysis of the two paths in question. Méchain won the contest with a proof that the comets of 1532 and 1661 were not identical, and that no return could be expected in 1790. The event, or rather its absence, proved him right. In the meantime, he had served under Cassini and Legendre as the junior member of the team of 1787, assigned to use a quadrant for the angles that they measured with the Borda circle. The purpose was to test the superiority of the latter.76 Beginning in 1785, Méchain edited Connaissance des temps and lodged with his wife and three children in very cramped quarters at the observatory. 74 Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie (1817–27). The title varies from volume to volume so as to specify the period covered. 75 Delambre also gathered materials for an uncompleted history of geodetic surveys intended to be volume 7 of Histoire de l’astronomie. Edited by G. Bigourdan with the title Grandeur et figure de la terre (1912), it contains several confidential bits of information that he would have been indiscreet to publish in Base du Système Métrique, which was conceived by Delambre to be at once the completion of his task and its history. For a catalogue of Delambre’s manuscripts, see Michelle Chapront-Touzé (1985). 76 Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie, 6, pp. 756–757.

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The assignments of the remaining four subcommittees were auxiliary and less arduous than the prospect for Delambre and Méchain. No great urgency was felt, there being no need to complete these supporting measurements before the survey of the meridian should be well advanced. Monge and Meusnier were to measure the two bases to which the triangulation would be referred, and of that more in a moment. Borda and Cassini, who replaced the aging Coulomb, were to verify the length of the seconds pendulum. They ran those experiments at the observatory between 15 June and 4 August 1792. The technique consisted of comparing the oscillation of a bob suspended on a twelve-foot wire with those of a pendulum clock accurately beating seconds. Equipped with a spotting scope, Borda observed and timed the coincidences of the bob and the clock pendulum at the low point. Since the frequency of the bob was slightly less than half that of the clock, the coincidences were widely enough spaced so that the times could be recorded accurately. The length of a simple seconds pendulum could then be readily deduced from the duration of the interval between coincidences. It came to 440.5593 lignes, or 3 feet, 8.5593 lignes.77 Lavoisier and Haüy refined determinations of the weight of a unit volume of water at fixed temperature, reporting their results in January 1793.78 Finally, Tillet, Brisson, and Vandermonde were to carry through a comprehensive comparison of provincial measures to standard units of Paris, as called for by the legislation. Tillet died in December 1791, Vandermonde in 1796, and no systematic inventory was ever made. Nothing could begin in the field before Etienne Lenoir had constructed the instruments both for triangulation and for determination of the linear bases. The repeating circle of 1787 was divided sexagesimally and was, in any case, in a bad state of repair. The Academy ordered four new circles, to be graduated in 4,000 angular units, 1,000 to the quadrant as compared to the 5,400 minutes of the old instrument.79 In addition, Borda designed rules of an altogether new type for measurement of the bases. Like the circles, these instruments were very beautiful. The greatest source of inaccuracy in previous surveys was the expansion or contraction of measuring rods with rise or fall in temperature. One that was a certain length in 77

“Expériences pour connoˆıtre la longueur du pendule qui bat les secondes a` Paris, par MM Borda et Cassini,” Base 3, pp. 337–401. 78 “Expériences de Lavoisier et Haüy, du 4 janvier 1793,” Lavoisier, OL 6, pp. 683–685. This is a very summary report. A more complete one by Borda, Lagrange, Condorcet, and Laplace appeared in “Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences, le 19 janvier 1793, sur l’unité des poids et mesures & sur la nomenclature de ses divisions,” Annales de Chimie 16 ( Jan. 1793), pp. 267– 282. 79 Though not given in the Procès-Verbaux, Borda’s report was printed in Extrait du registre ⬘ de l’Académie Royale des Sciences du 2 mai 1792, BN Le33.3U. Also AN, ADVIII, 36; cf. AP, 1ere série, 43, pp. 260–263, séance du 11 mai 1792.


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the cool of a summer morning would be longer by noon and shorter in the winter. It was for this reason that General Roy had preferred glass rods on Hounslow Heath in 1787. Borda’s solution exhibited, as did the principle of his repeating circle, the elegance of accepting a problem rather than the ingenuity of circumventing its effects. His rules were to be made of platinum, the least expansible of metals. Each was twelve feet long by six lines (half an inch) wide by one line thick. (It would have begged the question to define them metrically.) He enclosed the platinum strip, almost as flexible as a piece of wire, in a snug sleeve of copper six inches shorter. The platinum core and the copper casing were attached at one end. The other end of each was free to move according to the coefficient of expansion of the metal. As the day grew warmer, the surveyor could read the extent to which the copper crept along the platinum off a scale on the platinum strip that, together with a vernier on the copper sleeve, made the device in effect a thermometer, indicating the temperature at any moment by the excess of the dilation of the copper over the platinum. He could then reduce the differential expansion of the two to the absolute expansion of the platinum. The measuring rods would thus be self-correcting for variations in temperature. Each was equipped with a coupling to attach it to the next so that they might be laid precisely end to end. Lenoir constructed four such rules, two for each of the bases to be measured, together with a fifth of simpler design for the determination of the seconds pendulum. He also built an elaborate measuring table on which to establish the zero of each rule, the coefficients of expansion of the metals, and the correction to be applied to the verniers and couplings.80 The construction required over two years. Lavoisier then joined with Borda and Lenoir himself in calibrating these fine instruments. On leaving the Arsenal he had taken a house at 243 boulevard de la Madeleine. Lenoir installed his equipment in the garden.81 There they labored on a task requiring the utmost precision throughout the last week of May and the first week of June 1793. Midway through their labors, the streets around them filled with the crowd that forced the Convention to expel its Girondist members on 1 June. This was the last scientific determination Lavoisier ever undertook. By then Monge and Meusnier were no longer available to make the measurements assigned to them at the outset. Monge had long since been drawn into politics and briefly into government. He was Minister of the Navy for eight months, from the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 until 80 Borda, “Expériences sur les règles destinées a` la mesure des bases de l’arc terrestre,” in Base 3, pp. 313–335. Cf. Delambre’s account of measuring the bases, 2, pp. 1–62. He gives drawings in Plates I–V. 81 Base 1, p. 21; Borda, “Expériences sur les règles destinées a` la mesure de l’arc terrestre,” Base 3, pp. 313–336.

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A

B

a C

b D c

E

F

d

Z

10 April 1793, while Meusnier, called to active duty with the Corps of Engineers, died on 17 June 1793 of wounds sustained during the Prussian siege of Mainz. Determination of the bases eventually devolved on Delambre along with the major part of the triangulation. Not everyone, perhaps, is familiar with the elements of surveying, and a brief reminder of the trigonometric principles presupposed by such operations as those of Delambre and Méchain may be in order. AZ represents the distance to be determined along a segment of the meridian. The surveyor’s first step would be a reconnaissance in order to find elevated vantage points, B, C, D, E, etc., on either side of AZ from which to measure the angles of the triangles ABC, BCD, CDE, etc. Each of the stations at the corner of each triangle had to be visible from the other two. In most locations, of course, the choice fell on a church steeple. Otherwise a turret or roof corner on some other structure would be picked, for terrain features were seldom well enough defined. Setting out with his instruments, the surveyor would measure the angles of the triangle ABC. He would then check his accuracy by verifying that the triangle closes, which is to say that the sum of the interior angles is 180⬚. Before moving on to the next triangle, BCD, he would determine the azimuth, or direction with respect to the meridian, of one side of ABC. He


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would also determine the latitude of A, the beginning of the chain. When all triangles were completed, he would have to anchor the entire network to a measured distance by actually taping the length of a base on the ground. In principle one side of any triangle in the chain might serve. In practice difficulties of terrain normally dictated running an auxiliary triangle of which one side would lie in relatively level, open ground. Finally, knowing the length of the base, and all the angles in the chain, the surveyor could calculate the distances Aa, aa, ab, bc, etc. along the meridian. In the case of a large survey, two bases would be measured, one near either end. The length of each would then be calculated from the other, and the closeness of agreement would indicate the degree of accuracy of the whole operation. Verifying latitudes and azimuths at intervals along the line provided a series of interim controls. Given suitable terrain, trigonometry, patience, endurance, accuracy, adequate funds, and instruments, a surveying team might multiply triangles as far as desired.82 That is a mere schematization. In practice none of these measurements was a simple matter of looking at two steeples through a telescope and reading the angle between them off a scale. Delambre’s account of the actual manipulation of Borda’s intricate, finely tooled, and very ingenious instrument occupies eighty closely written quarto pages of the Base du système métrique.83 He there covers only the instructions an astronomer would need for using the repeating circle. An artisan would require a whole volume of drawings and specifications in order to make one. As for us, it is scarcely possible to appreciate the seriousness of the metric survey without a sense of the steps required to establish each type of determination among the thousands it entailed. In sextants and quadrants of a traditional sort, the instrument maker could improve precision only at the expense of portability. The splendid theodolite constructed by William Ramsden for the junction of the Greenwich and Paris observatories in 1787 weighed 200 pounds. Not so the Borda circle, a foot in diameter, 18 inches high, 15 pounds in weight, which achieved accuracy by permitting multiple but independent observations of the same angle. Two traversing telescopes were mounted on the shaft, one centered above a graduated limb or circle and the other attached excentrically beneath it. Either or both might share the rotation of the circle. Suppose that BAC (fig. 1) represents the angle between the directions of Watten (B) and Cassel (C) that Delambre is measuring from the tower at Dunkirk (A). Setting the upper scope at zero on the circle, he takes a sighting on the steeple (B) to his right, at Watten. With the upper scope fixed at that point on the circle, he shifts his eye to the lower scope and sets it on the turret at Cassel (C) to 82 83

Adapted from Bigourdan (1901), pp. 109–113. Base 2, pp. 160–240.

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his left. But contrary to what might be expected, he takes no reading. Instead, he turns the circle carrying both scopes clockwise until he has (B) at Watten in the lower scope. The whole head has thus traversed the angle to be measured. Only the positions of the upper scope may be read off the scale, however. His last step, therefore, is to free the upper scope, and turn it counter-clockwise past (B) at Watten to (C) at Cassel, swinging it back through twice the angle. The reading would thus be double the value to be determined. He then repeats the same steps to measure quadruple the angle, sextuple the angle, and so on around the circle as many times as he desires, diminishing observational error progressively with every multiple. Readings made with a conventional quadrant or sextant could be repeated only after returning the setting to zero. That might verify but did not improve an observation. Moreover, measuring angles wider than 60⬚ or 90⬚, respectively, required moving the instrument. Doing so displaced its center with respect to the center of the observation post, whereas the center of the Borda circle remained fixed. The Borda circle suffered from only one important disadvantage. Repetition of angles was of no avail in perfecting direct astronomical readings of azimuths. For that purpose Delambre would have preferred a quadrant of much larger radius, the more so that only at five locations did he and Méchain need to measure the azimuth of one side of a triangle, at Dunkirk and Montjouy, the northern and southern termini of ´ the survey, and, for verification, at three points in between, Paris, Evaux, 84 and Carcassonne. The inclination of the plane of every triangle in the chain had to be determined by observations at each station, however. In that operation, too, the Borda circle was preferable. The head could be tilted 90⬚ for measurement of vertical angles. A bubble-level that does not show in the illustration sufficed to establish the horizontal for these observations, though Delambre insisted on a plumb bob when shooting the North Star and other circumpolar stars in the critical determinations of latitude that accompanied the azimuthal measurements at the same five locations. So much in brief for the instrument. That was only the beginning. The raw data had to be corrected by measurements and calculations of three sorts. The first, as just indicated, involved variation in altitude. For this purpose, a series of ten readings at each position normally sufficed. After determining the angle that every side of every triangle made with the vertical (“the distance to the zenith”), Delambre reduced his values for the internal angles of each triangle to those of the corresponding figure in the plane of the horizon. A by-product of the metric survey was thus a series of values for the altitude of all stations in the chain of triangles. Méchain could observe the horizon of the Mediterranean directly from most of the Catalonian 84

Grandeur et figure de la terre, pp. 202–203.


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stations. For Delambre only Dunkirk, Cassel, and Wattel were within sight of the Channel, and so hazy was it that he relied on an engineering survey of the altitude of the base of the Dunkirk tower above the beach at low tide. He then calculated the difference between each station and the succeeding ones down the entire length of the meridian. In the event, the values agreed almost exactly with altitudes computed from Méchain’s end. Precision was of still greater moment in the triangulation itself. Under the most favorable conditions Delambre and his team regularly made twenty readings of each angle in the chain, and took correspondingly more where conditions were adverse, as they often were. Here the most important correction concerned the exact location of the point of observation. All too rare were the stations in which the repeating circle could be located exactly at the point to be observed from the other two corners of the triangle. That was never possible in a belfry—the bells were hung right under the spire. “Reduction to the center” was the second type of correction to be applied to each set of readings. Delambre was especially proud that his and Méchain’s was the first geodetic operation in which these corrections were laid before the public. His predecessors had given only adjusted figures, with no indication of how they had been obtained.85 The third set of reductions was also unprecedented except in the case of the Anglo-French expedition joining the observatories of Paris and Greenwich in 1787, of which the metric survey was, technically speaking, the continuation and completion. Prior to that, surveyors had employed plane trigonometry, in effect treating their data as if the earth were flat and neglecting the inconvenience that the sum of the angles of a spherical triangle is greater than 180⬚. Less easily satisfied was Legendre, the mathematical member of the French team, whose analysis of the operations served Delambre and Méchain as the theoretical basis of their work. Legendre there proves a theorem concerning spherical triangles of which the sides are very small by comparison to the radius of the sphere. If one-third the excess of the sum of the three angles over 180⬚ be subtracted from each angle, the angles thus diminished may be considered those of a rectilinear triangle.86 Delambre took advantage of this finding to construct tables that permitted systematically adapting the formulas of spherical trigonometry to the flatland of geodetic problems. The error amounted to less than two feet over an arc of four to five degrees.87 85 For these corrections in general, see Base 1, pp. 112–145, and for the correction tables Delambre constructed and used, 1, pp. 167–175. Delambre gave an account of his mathematical techniques in Méthodes analytiques pour la détermination d’un arc du méridien (An VII, 1799). 86 “Mémoire sur les opérations trigonométriques dont les resultats dépendent de la figure de la terre,” MARS (1787/89), pp. 352–383, on p. 358. Cf. Itard, “Legendre,” DSB 8, pp. 135–136. 87 Base 1, pp. 176–180; 2, pp. ix–xiii, 683–712.

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It is not necessary to have run a traverse in order to imagine the quality of those moments when the surveyor closes a triangle. Does it check out? Or was the mist too thick? The wind too strong? His fingers too cold? The twilight too deceptive? The signal from the next station too faint after night had fallen? Or did the inadvertent jolt knock the instrument off center there in the last steeple, where he had had to corkscrew himself between the joists to get at the eyepiece? Infinitely more tense is the final verification of one base from the other. In the case of the metric survey, as will appear, it was not until 1798 that it proved possible to measure both bases using Borda’s rules. Aided by Laplace, Delambre completed the northern base at Melun after six weeks of work on 3 June 1798. He then traveled the 850 kilometers to Perpignan and measured the southern base on his own between 22 July and 21 September 1798. Each was just over 6,000 toises or about ten kilometers in length, and (if an anticipation may be pardoned) the length of the Perpignan base calculated from that at Melun differed from the measured value by ten to eleven inches. That is to say, the linear error was on the order of one part in 37,000. In the angular measurements the average departure from the mean was 1.3 seconds. This result is to be compared to the best experience of previous surveys, except again for the Paris-Greenwich junction of 1787. In no other was the average angular error less than ten to thirteen seconds, about ten times as great.88 Perhaps that may dispose of the question whether the entire project was a lengthy redundancy. 4. OPERATIONS IN THE FIELD

The length of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona subtends an angle of just over nine degrees. Planning called for Delambre to take the northern portion from Dunkirk to Rodez, and Méchain the southern from Rodez to Barcelona. It was estimated that the respective distances would be about 380,000 and 170,000 toises, roughly 750 and 335 kilometers, respectively, and the division of labor about equal. Delambre would be triangulating ground that had already been covered twice, by Cassini II in 1718 and Lacaille in 1739–40. He would thus be making his observations from stations most of which were identified in advance, whereas the Spanish part would be entirely new and the Pyrenees difficult. On 25 June 1792, barely a month after Delambre’s appointment, Lenoir put the final touches on three of the four circles ordered over a year earlier. Méchain, with farther to go, departed Paris that very day with two of the instruments. Delambre elected to use the third for the stations in and adjoining the capital rather than to await completion of the fourth. 88

Base 1, p. 93; 3, pp. 415–433. For the measurement of the bases, see below, chapter 7, section 3.

The Borda Repeating Circle (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 2, pl. 7)

The Borda Repeating Circle Set to Take a Vertical Angle (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 2, p. 8)

Survey of the Meridian of Paris, Dunkirk to Paris (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 1, pl. 4)

Survey of the Meridian of Paris, Paris to St. Saturnin (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 1, pl. 5)

Survey of the Meridian of Paris, St. Saturnin to Rodez (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 1, pl. 6)

Survey of the Meridian of Paris, Rodez to Peak of Bugarach (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 1, pl. 7)

Survey of the Meridian of Paris, Peak of Bugarach to Barcelona (Reprinted from Delambre, Base du système métrique, vol. 1, pl. 8)

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Both parties were furnished by Roland, Minister of the Interior, with documents identifying them as members of the Academy of Science, authorizing them to requisition supplies in the name of government, and bespeaking the cooperation of local authorities. They also carried a proclamation signed by Louis XVI and dated 10 June. Copies had preceded them to the chief cities of the departments they would traverse. The timing could hardly have been worse. The King and royal family survived the rising of 20 June and the mob invasion of the Tuileries only by taking refuge with the National Assembly. In the remaining weeks before overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August, the political temper of Paris and the surrounding region alternated between the fever of patriotism and the chill of suspicion. At the outset Méchain was more fortunate than Delambre. True, he was arrested the very first day, at Essonne, compromised in the eyes of vigilant patriots by the mysterious instruments in his carriage. The authorities did respect his papers, however, and managed to secure his release. Thereafter, his difficulties diminished in proportion to his distance from Paris, until he arrived in the Pyrenees. He had left Paris with two assistants. The first was a cartographer and civil engineer called Tranchot, who had run the survey of Corsica for the Cassini map of France. The second, Esteveny, was a skilled artisan in charge of maintaining the instruments. The Academy had arranged that they should be joined at the border by two Spanish military engineers, Alvarez and Planez. On the French side popular distrust again fermented, heightened by the presence of these foreign officers. Méchain thought it prudent to defer the frontier stations until the political weather should clear and to begin in Spanish territory. There they met with no trouble whatever. This was new ground altogether, never before surveyed or mapped scientifically. The party of five worked very fast among the mountains and down into the Catalonian plain. By the end of September 1792 they had reconnoitered their route, chosen stations for triangulation, and constructed observation towers, erecting stone cairns in the mountains and scaffoldings of timber wherever no church or castle offered in the flat country. By 29 October they had surveyed their way down the nine stations they needed in order to reach the southern anchor of the entire meridional chain of triangles. That was the fortress of Mont Jouy, or Jouich, on the coast just south of Barcelona. There Méchain decided to settle in for the winter of 1792–93, taking advantage of his leisure to make precise azimuthal measurements and determinations of latitude in the season of the winter solstice.89 He fixed on three stars in addition to the sun in order to measure their respective distances from the zenith along the arc of the meridian. His choices were Polaris, Beta 89

Méchain reported his observations in a letter to Borda, 13 February 1793, of which a copy ´ is conserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS. 1504.

IV. 4. OPERATIONS IN THE FIELD

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of Ursa minor, and Alpha of Draco. The resulting figures for latitude agreed to 0.2⬙, giving him 41⬚21⬘45.06⬙ for Montjouy. He later trained the scope of his circle also on Zeta of Ursa major. That figure was 41⬚21⬘40.97⬙, a difference of 4.09⬙. Still, that star passed across the meridian at an altitude of only 7⬚15⬘, at which height Bradley’s formula for refraction was accurate only to 8⬙. Méchain thus decided to ignore that finding in favor of the close agreement among his three primary series of observations. Méchain also explored the feasibility of a favorite project taking form in his mind. This was to exceed the terms of his mission by extending the survey of the meridian out into the Mediterranean as far as the Balearic Islands. He made a few experimental sightings of Majorca from points further down the coast, the last of them on 2 April 1793. By then it was time to return to the Pyrenees in order to complete the junction with the frontier stations he had skipped in France, and thence to work north to his goal at Rodez. There are only nineteen stations in the completed work, not counting the two in the base at Perpignan. Most of the ground had been covered by the surveys of 1719 and 1740. He should easily have finished by the end of the summer of 1793, and might well have advanced into the segment assigned to Delambre and met his colleague somewhere between Rodez and Paris. He suffered, instead, a grievous accident. Méchain had made friends with a physician in Barcelona, an enthusiast for mechanical inventions who had been kind to him throughout the lonely winter, and whom he could not disappoint. For months the doctor had been pressing Méchain to visit the country house where he had installed a new type of pump. A day was fixed for the expedition, 1 May 1793, on the brink of Méchain’s intended departure for France. Nothing was ready. The horses that were to supply power were nowhere to be found. In gallant Spanish fashion, the doctor and his servant undertook to manhandle the machine. They placed Méchain at a point of vantage and set to turning the capstan. Méchain admired the vast flow of water. It was too vast. He heard cries. The back pressure had overpowered the two men, who were in danger of being drawn into the gears. Méchain sprang to their help even as they let go. A spoke of the capstan whipped around and knocked him to the wall, where he lay in a bloody heap, unconscious, with three ribs broken, his collarbone smashed, and the appearance of a fractured skull. After three days he came to his senses, running a high fever and in agonizing pain. For months he had no use of his right arm. In June he tried shooting the sun left-handed at the summer solstice. The effort put him into a faint. He took the baths at Caldas. Only in September was he fit enough, and then barely, to set out for the Pyrenees in order to complete the border stations he had postponed in the threatening political climate of the previous autumn. It did not simplify his prospects that in the meantime, on

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1 February 1793, the French Republic had declared war on the Spanish monarchy along with England and Holland. Nevertheless, General Ricardos, commanding in Catalonia, at first made no difficulty about Méchain’s resuming operations in the field. On the contrary, he urged that the task be brought to completion. Equally accommodating were the officials of the Department of Pyrénées-Orientales in Perpignan, where Méchain had the good fortune to be acquainted with the Procurator-General, one Lucier. Permissions were forthcoming from both sides. Méchain was to undertake the Puy Camellas just south of the border, and Tranchot to make the more strenuous climb to the top of the Puy de Stella in the French Pyrenees. Trouble arose, not this time with vigilant patriots, but with mountain brigands. A band of miquelets took Tronchet prisoner and led him, hands bound, to the nearest town. The local authorities transported him to Perpignan, where the president of the Department had him released forthwith. Tranchot was immediately authorized to erect the signals needed for the next triangles to the north on the peaks of Bugarach and Mount Forceral and then to return to Puy de Stella and afterward to rejoin Méchain in Spain. He wound up his observations at Puy de Stella on 3 December 1793, the same day that Méchain completed his at Camellas. It remained only to measure the angles at Perpignan, Bugarach, and Forceral, and the junction between French and Spanish triangles would be complete. Tranchot, Méchain, and their assistant Esteveny thereupon made their way back to Barcelona to gather up their effects, expecting to take their ´ leave of Catalonia and proceed northward to Evaux, where they hoped to observe the distance of the key stars from the zenith at the winter solstice. Should all go smoothly, they might still advance the chain of triangles beyond their original terminus at Rodez as far as Sermur, or even Bourges, and join up with Delambre early in July. Thus would the great operation be completed in the span of two years, despite all the accidents and delays. That was not to be. General Ricardos had had second thoughts, or perhaps his superiors in Madrid had them for him. On returning from the Pyrenees to Barcelona in early December 1793, Méchain and his party were met with orders interning them for the duration of the war. The knowledge they had acquired of the frontier might, it was suddenly feared, prove useful to the enemies of Spain.90 Let us turn attention back to Paris now, and to Delambre. He for his part had set out the day after Méchain, on 26 June 1792. Lenoir had still to complete the second of his Borda circles as well as the parabolic mirrors for night signals. Rather than waiting for everything to be ready, Delambre 90 Méchain to Borda, 21 nivôse an II (10 January 1794). A copy of this important letter is ´ ´ in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 1504. Cf. Delambre, “Eloge de Méchain,” MIF 6 (1806), pp. 11–14.


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decided to begin with a reconnaissance of the stations in Paris and its surroundings and a preliminary verification of the angles of Picard’s survey in 1668–70 and of Cassini’s and Lacaille’s in 1739–40. His party consisted of two assistants, one Bellet and Lefran¸cais de Lalande, nephew of the astronomer, and a servant, Michel. Besides the single Borda circle, they were equipped with a telescope, two magnifying glasses, a tripod with plumb bob, two levels, two clocks, one with a second-hand and one with a bell, two barometers, two copper-mounted and two glass-mounted thermometers, four lamps, tools for maintenance, and two cases of reference books, one of them in English. Two carriages were needed, one for the instruments and one for themselves. Climbing the bluff of Montmartre to what should have been the very first station, he was dismayed to find that the belfry that had afforded a 360⬚ view of the countryside in 1739 had been demolished. His first thought was to shift to the Panthéon, but La Rochefoucauld, president both of the Academy of Science and also of the department of Paris in these last days of the monarchy, warned that alterations were pending on the dome. Returning to Montmartre, Delambre thought he could use the belvedere Flécheux recently constructed on the brow of the hill. Moving next to stations south of the city, he found the tower at Montlhéry in much the same state as in the time of Cassini and Lacaille. Since the mass was too irregular and too wide to be sighted accurately, he had a carpenter construct a twelve-foot pyramid of scaffolding on the top. It was destroyed the same day, and though the procurator of the commune made the vandals rebuild it at their own expense, someone knocked it over again and chopped it into pieces a few days later. At Malvoisine the trees had grown and obscured the farmhouse chimney that had served Lacaille in 1739. After his experience at Montlhéry, and Méchain’s at nearby Essonne, it seemed unwise to erect anything on the roof, and Delambre contented himself with having the flue raised a good six feet. No obstacles arose at Torfou or Brie, but at Montjai the tower had been so ruinous over a century before, in 1670, that Picard had not dared climb it a second time to correct a ten-inch error in the closing of his triangle. Again Delambre engaged a carpenter to put up a pyramidal scaffolding atop one corner of the ruins. Armed with muskets, the villagers drove him off, and here the authorities dared not intervene. By 15 July Lenoir had the second circle ready. In view of the difficulties of his reconnaissance to the south, Delambre decided to begin definitive observations with the stations north of Paris. On the eighteenth he arrived at Jonquières, his first stop. The mayor seemed cordial. Delambre took the precaution, nevertheless, of seeking out an old man in the village who remembered Lacaille’s operation in 1740, and had him tell of it in the square as the villagers came trouping around. Delambre found the recital naive and

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charming, but it failed of the desired effect. At sight of the instruments the people began murmuring, and the municipal representatives asked Delambre to desist until he could obtain clearance from the departmental authorities at Beauvais. Returning the next day, he moved on to Clermont. The fine 67-foot steeple of earlier times had fallen, and he had to make do with a miserable 81⁄2 foot turret at the corner of a wall some 42 feet distant from the previous station. At Saint-Christophe everything went smoothly. Not so at Dammartin, where the church had been sold. The new owner was about to demolish it to make room for something profitable but did allow Delambre to make his observations. There it became immediately apparent that at a distance the belvedere Flécheux was indistinguishable from the neighboring houses on Montmartre. Off to Paris went Lefran¸cais Lalande with the purpose of shining a reflecting lamp from the belvedere the next evening. The date was 10 August. Neither he nor Delambre could know what was occurring in the Tuileries. Delambre watched from the condemned belfry in Dammartin until ten that evening, seeing only the glow of houses on fire in the Carrousel. Lefran¸cais Lalande had encountered no trouble in entering Paris, but Montmartre was then a suburb, and no one was allowed to leave the city. The colleagues whom he asked to intervene with the Commune thought him out of his mind. He did obtain a permit the next day, however, and managed a faltering light about 8:30 in the evening of the eleventh. On the twelfth and thirteenth Delambre saw nothing. Only on the fourteenth was his young assistant able to make another flickering signal. Two other reflectors would have been needed in order to complete the triangle, one at Saint-Martin-duTertre and one at Saint-Christophe, and Lenoir had not yet furnished those. It was fortunate he had not, noted Delambre later. There was no telling what might have been the consequences of such imprudent observations. Montmartre thus eliminated, he needed another objective in Paris and decided to try the Invalides. The next station south of Dammartin should have been Montjai, the site where the inhabitants had already prevented construction of a scaffolding on the roof of the old tower. Delambre’s appeal to the district authorities at Meaux failed to overcome their resistance, and he moved to the nearby château of Belle-Assise, where the steep pyramidal roof of an outbuilding seemed made to order. Before being noticed, his small team succeeded in measuring the angles that the direction of the Invalides made with the directions of Dammartin and Brie, respectively. Luck failed to hold. As they were packing their gear to move on, a detachment of the national guard arrived from Lagny, recognized them as the suspects who had tried to make a signal at Montjai, and demanded their passports. Dated in May, these documents produced no good effect. Still less did the proclamation of the King, from which Delambre read out passages.


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Delambre tells how this was received in a letter to his patroness, Mme d’Assy. “A good sans-culotte took offense at our title of Academician. ‘There is no more Cademy’ he said [anticipating its suppression by almost exactly a year], and kept repeating ‘Plus de Cadémie: everybody is equal. You come with us.’ ”91 It had begun to pour. Off they were marched across muddy fields to Lagny to be incarcerated at midnight in an inn called l’Ours. Two musketeers were stationed at their door. A special delivery letter to the district authorities at Meaux secured their release, with apologies, the next day. The sequence of their operations called for making their way next to Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, passing through the ancient pays de France to the north of Saint-Denis. Every commune along the route was in the same state of permanent alert. Arrested in one after the other, they realized that it would be impossible to proceed without republican passports. Again Lefrançais Lalande repaired to Paris on that errand. Delambre dared not appear in the capital lest he be told to postpone the whole enterprise until more tranquil times. Should that happen, he feared, it might never be resumed. Instead, he requested interim credentials from the district officers at Saint-Denis, who gave him a paper readily enough while warning it would ´ not take him half a league. They were right. He was stopped in Epinay. Again the instruments were what alarmed. Watchful patriots found them insufficiently described in his passport, and required Delambre to demonstrate the construction and operation of the Borda circle in the public square. No one understood him. Even so, he was made to begin over each time some new citizen joined the throng. In vain did he seek to enlist the support of two professional surveyors among the crowd. After three hours of debate, his party was ordered into its carriage and conducted under guard back to Saint-Denis. “Vive la nation,” cried the escorts as they arrived before the District offices, “Voici des aristocrates.” Volunteer soldiers surged about in the square, awaiting the muskets to be issued them before flying to the defense of the frontiers. Delambre and his team were delivered over to the very ProcuratorGeneral who had warned of the inefficacy of his protection. That official disappeared to enlist the support of higher authority, showing Delambre the back door and advising him to escape if he, the procurator, should be long delayed. Delambre was summoned instead to the square again and required ´ to resume the course in geodesy he had begun in Epinay. I was not very favorably heard. Evening began to draw on. It became almost too dark to see. The audience was very numerous. Those up front heard without understanding. Further back they could see less and hear nothing at all. Impatience began to rise and murmurs to circulate. Several voices rose above the crowd suggesting one of those 91

Delambre to Madame d’Assy, 5 September 1792, in Bigourdan (1901), pp. 119–122.

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expeditious solutions often resorted to at the time, which cut through all difficulties and put an end to all doubts.92 Fortunately, the president of the district had presence of mind. Taking advantage of the darkness, he proposed delaying further examination of the instruments until the morning. All this occurred on 6 September. Delambre and Bellet slept that night in an armchair in the procurator’s office. They had contrived to send the servant, Michel, to Paris with a letter to the president of the National Assembly. The zoologist Lacepède was serving at the moment on its Comité de surveillance. He succeeded in eliciting from that committee a decree in the name of the National Assembly enjoining “administrative bodies, municipalities, and national guards, in all localities where Delambre and Méchain feel they should pursue their operations, to ensure that no obstacle impede their work, to guarantee free transportation of whatever instruments they need to use, and to procure them all the facilities in their power, in order that they may the more speedily conclude the mission with which they are entrusted.” That sufficed, together with the publicity that attended the arrest. On the tenth Delambre was back in Paris, regrouping. On delivery of the new, republican papers, the entire team set off again for Saint-Martin-du-Tertre. The belfry in that dismal village had fallen into wobbly disrepair since the 1739 survey. Worse, the sighting from Paris had evidently confounded some other object with the steeple, for the dome of the Invalides was masked by a rise in the ground. The Panthéon was perfectly visible, however, and although that meant redoing the observations at Dammartin and Belle-Assise, there was no alternative. Moving on south to the stations reconnoitered in the summer, Torfou and Montlhéry, Forêt and Tour le Craye, the party was impeded by the rains and fogs of October and November. The direction of Boiscommun from Chappelle-la-Reine was the last determination Delambre proposed to make before stopping for the winter. For four days he strove to discern the steeple by the dull light of late December—in vain, until its image rose to view in the momentary clearing of the sunset, a vertical thread visible above the horizon for a few minutes. Five rainy days passed before the reading could be verified. Then the fugitive steeple reappeared fleetingly, again as dusk fell. The phenomenon reminded Delambre of the refraction of rays from the setting sun in the surface layer of the atmosphere that on an occasional evening brings the mountains of Corsica into view from Genoa and from coastal points in Provence. Now that the Pantheon was to be the station in Paris, it was urgent to take the directions of Dammartin and Malvoisine from there before the 92

Base 1, 33–34. For Delambre’s narrative of this phase, see also Grandeur et figure de la terre, pp. 210–212.


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church should be demolished at the former and the raised chimney tumble at the latter. What, therefore, was Delambre’s dismay on returning to Paris from Chappelle-la-Reine in early January 1993 to find the cupola gone. The alterations of which La Rochefoucauld had warned were under way, one of the few items of public works to transpire on schedule that winter. Constructing a temporary observation platform on top of the dome consumed another month, and not until 28 February 1793 was Delambre able to finish those observations. Thus, it had taken him eight months, from June 1792 until March 1793, to complete the fourteen stations on either side of the capital, while Méchain, working under the Catalonian sun and in the security of monarchical Spain, had got through his first nine stations in less than two. Ready at last to move north, Delambre requested passports from the Ministry of the Interior. By then, however, the Commune of Paris had arrogated such functions to itself. Unanimously it rejected his application. For six weeks he lobbied. Eventually a colleague, the mathematician Cousin, serving on the municipal Comité des subsistances, proved able to exert influence. Papers were delivered on 3 May at noon, and at two o’clock Delambre ´ and his party were on their way, past Saint-Denis and Epinay to the more tranquil regions of Picardy and Flanders, partially insulated by a little distance from the high political tension of the capital in a country where security was threatened mainly by war. Delambre carried a letter commending his operations to the protection of the general commanding the Army of the North, Philippe Custine, with whom he lodged for several nights in Béthune. This was, he later said, the most agreeable part of the whole survey. The belfries were in good repair across that cultivated land. Its gently rolling prospects were unobscured by forests. Repeating and perfecting the triangulation of 1740 was a pleasant chore throughout the spring and summer of 1793. That was just the time when Méchain was recuperating from his accident and preparing the operations in the Pyrenees that culminated in his internment in early December. Though restricted to Barcelona, he was free to move about within the city and took rooms in the Fontana de Ora. The inn was comfortable. Not so his situation. His injuries still ached. No money could come from France. His remaining funds were sequestered as enemy property in the bank where he had deposited them. A long letter of 21 nivôse an II (10 January 1794) addressed to Borda, chairman of the Commission of Weights and Measures, is part cri de coeur and part report on the mission thus aborted by his internment.93 On 17 July he had received a letter 93 On 30 November 1793 Méchain sent a detailed accounting to Lavoisier in the latter’s capacity as Treasurer of the Commission of Weights and Measures. Lavoisier could never have seen it, for he had been arrested the previous week, on 24 November. Méchain summarized it

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from Lavoisier authorizing him to complete the operations in Catalonia. It was dated 15 June. He had heard nothing since from Paris. He is apprehensive lest the long delay be attributed to sloth on his part or to some putative reluctance to return. Were his continuing absence to be thus misinterpreted, he fears for the situation of his wife and children and for his own position at the Observatory as well as his job with the Navy. “I put my cause in your hands,” he writes, begging Borda to explain his predicament to the Commission of Weights and Measures, to defend his interests, and to protect and comfort his family.94 If nothing could be done for him by diplomatic channels, could not something be attempted for his associates, Tranchot and Esteveny? Esteveny was not even an educated man. Concerned only with the instruments, he had made no observations. The thousands of shepherds who follow their flocks freely back and forth across the border know the passes far better than he, or indeed his superiors. As for more general matters, Méchain reads alarming reports in the Spanish press about bloody scenes in Paris. He hears rumors to the effect that the Academy of Sciences has been abolished and its membership dispersed, that their mission no longer has any object, that if unity of weights and measures is achieved, it will be on the basis of the seconds pendulum, and so on. But enough—Méchain pulls himself together and turns to reporting on what he has accomplished. With this letter he enclosed a table giving the angles of all his triangles from Montjouy to Forceral and Bugarach. The ten Catalonian triangles were complete, the two requiring observations at Perpignan, Forceral, and Bugerach were incomplete, and the whole chain was based on the latitude determined at Montjouy in December 1792. Until he should be released from detention, there was nothing more Méchain could do to fulfill his mission. In order to while away the time and render his “slavery” useful at least to astronomy, if not to the metric survey, he was, so he informs Borda, putting in hand observations to determine the obliquity of the ecliptic. He would then compare his results with the value he had found the previous year at Montjouy. The only observation post available to him was the terrace of the Fontana de Oro. Montjouy being a military installation, he was no longer permitted to visit the tower there and would need to determine the small difference in latitude trigonometrically. Only after sending off his report to Borda did Méchain complete these observations. The first results were gratifying. Two of the three circumpolar stars that had agreed so beautifully for the latitude of Montjouy, Polaris and Beta of Ursa Minor, were equally in accord for Barcelona. He decided that the third, in Draco, would be superfluous. What was even more reassuring, Zeta of ´ in his letter to Borda of 14 January 1794. (Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS. 1504.) 94 Ibid.


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Ursa Major exhibited the same anomaly as at Montjouy, minus about four seconds. Now came another shock, the worst yet, difficult though it is to imagine that any blow could be more severe than those Méchain had already suffered. So it was, however, for this one was astronomical. Triangulation showed the Fontana da Ora and the citadel of Montjouy to be 1094 toises apart. The difference in latitude was 949.80 toises, a bit over a mile, or in angular terms approximately 1 minute of arc. Calculated from the data of December 1992 for Montjouy, the latitude of Barcelona should have been 41⬚21⬘45.06.⬙ Calculated from the observations of Polaris and Ursa Minor on the terrace of the Fontana de Oro, it was 41⬚21⬘48.37,⬙ a scandalous 3.31⬙ higher than predicted. This was no single slip. Méchain had made 326 and 288 observations, respectively, of the two stars in question at Montjouy and 208 and 226 of each at the Fontana de Oro. Méchain made renewed, and now desperate, appeals to be allowed to revisit the tower on Montjouy and to redo his observations there, though without acknowledging that they were the anchor for the entire chain of triangles he had just sent off by a special, confidential route to Paris. He was refused. There was no way to resolve the anomaly. His state of mind can be imagined. He was at best a timid man, in Delambre’s account, self-doubting and secretive, a superlative observer and a good calculator, so obsessed with precision that he would never use the labor-saving formulas Delambre had devised for the reduction of angles. Nor would he let anyone see his raw data. His registers contain only the average of the many observations he made on every sighting. With such a temperament, Méchain kept the dreadful secret of his results for Barcelona to himself, determined that no one must know, not even his assistant Tranchot, until he should somehow find a way to return to Montjouy to redo his initial observations. He never managed that, and eventually died in the attempt, in 1804. Delambre learned of the Barcelona data only thereafter, on Madame Méchain’s turning over to him her husband’s papers some time after his death in 1804. Six years previously, in 1798, the nations of Europe had gathered in congress in order, so went the rhetoric, to accept the meter from the hands of France. Thereupon Delambre composed and saw through the press the first volume of Base du système métrique, knowing and using only the figures that Méchain had communicated for Montjouy, the southern terminus of the survey. Fortunately, as it turned out, those figures were beyond reproach. When Delambre learned the facts, he recalculated all the Barcelona data to see whether he might resolve the discrepancy. He could not, and reports his attempts in the second volume of his great book on the basis of the metric system, published in 1807. He could only speculate about the reason. Local variations in the force of gravity resulting from irregularities in the crust of the earth may affect the plumb bob and the level. The refractive properties

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of light may be slightly different over sea and over land. Possibly, and this seems a startling suggestion for the time, it may be gratuitous to suppose that light always travels in straight lines.95 At all events, he concluded, not only had the agony of Méchain’s last years been quite unnecessary, it was a shame that he had not called attention to so interesting an anomaly instead of hiding it. Others might have been inspired to undertake investigations that would have explained it. Taking every occasion to praise Méchain’s accuracy as an observer, Delambre wrote charitably of the misfortunes that had overtaken his colleague in the wake of that unlucky pump handle.96 Perhaps, he suggested, Méchain could have told himself that the Barcelona observations were not part of his mission, since he had performed them on the side, to fill in time during his confinement and to satisfy his own curiosity. Perhaps. In any case, “The good fortune that had accompanied him for the first nine months seemed to have abandoned him forever, and the four years that followed his accident brought him only a series of contretemps, cross-purposes, and afflictions, which transformed him into an extremely unhappy man.”97 At the end of the summer of 1794, Méchain finally succeeded in getting passports for Tranchot and himself, though for Italy, not for France. Barely escaping the Barbary pirates, their ship took them to Livorno, whence they made their way to Genoa in September 1794. There he lingered in a state of indecision extremely puzzling to his family and colleagues, who thought to welcome him momentarily back to a Paris no longer in the grip of political Terror. But at least his mission did not suffer from these particular hesitations. For the metric survey had in any case been in abeyance since the start of the (old-style) year 1794. It was put in that state by one of the very few decrees of the Committee of Public Safety to touch science directly:98 Extract of the Register of the Committee of Public Safety of the National Convention. The third day of nivôse in the second year of the French Republic, one and indivisible. The Committee of Public Safety, considering how essential it is for the improvement of public spirit that those who are entrusted by the government neither delegate functions nor give missions except to men 95

Base 2, pp. vii–x, 563–631; Grandeur et figure de la terre, p. 234. He was less charitable in the memoir published long after his death, where he expresses the bitterness he privately felt over Méchain’s secrecy and the delays caused in 1796 and 1797 by his then inexplicable efforts to return to Barcelona instead of cooperating in the completion of the triangulation in southern France and in the measurement of the base at Perpignan. Grandeur et figure de la terre (1912), pp. 219–225. 97 Base 1, p. 41. 98 AN, AF*56, 噛8; printed in PVCd’IP 3, p. 239. 96


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worthy of confidence through their republican virtues and their hatred of kings; after having consulted the members of the Committee of Public Instruction particularly concerned with weights and measures, decrees that from this day on Borda, Lavoisier, Laplace, Coulomb, Brisson, and Delambre shall cease to be members of the Commission of Weights and Measures, and shall immediately deliver to the remaining members the instruments, calculations, notes, memoirs, and in general everything in their hands related to the operation of measures, together with an inventory; And decrees, in addition, that the members remaining to the Commission of Weights and Measures inform the Committee of Public Safety as soon as possible which persons are indispensably needed to continue its work, and that it communicate at the same time its views on the means for giving all citizens the use of the new measures as quickly as possible, taking advantage of the revolutionary impetus. The Minister of the Interior will see to the execution of this decree. C.-A. Prieur, B. Barère, Carnot, Billaud-Varenne, R. Lindet. The old-style date was 23 December 1793. Delambre had completed his triangles in the north by the end of September. Doubling on his tracks, he then made his way south of Paris, reaching the Loire Valley by the end of the autumn. He reported throughout to the Commission of Weights and Measures named by the former Academy of Science, redesignated Commission Temporaire on 18 September, following the suppression of the Academy on 8 August. After the purge on 23 December, the rump Commission consisted of Lagrange, Monge, Haüy, Vandermonde, and (in absentia) Méchain. Haüy continued as Secretary, and an unnerved Lagrange replaced Borda in the chair. Meeting on the very day of the decree, the survivors requested that Prony and Hassenfratz be joined to their number. Five days later, the Committee of Public Safety gave a limited consent, stipulating that they might be added, but only as “cooperators.” They would draw the same retainer as the others, 10 livres per day, when actually performing duties.99 Also named to the Commission, for political reasons and as a full-fledged member, was Jean-Nicolas Pache, Hébertist mayor of Paris, and intimate friend of Monge. To Prony fell the ungrateful task of informing Delambre that he was to be relieved of his duties. A letter of 29 December, directing Delambre to put his papers, accounts, and instruments in order and to terminate his operations, reached him at Vrigny, in the Department of Loiret. He was in the midst of joining Pithiviers and Boiscommun with Orléans and Châteauneuf. 99 8 nivôse an II. The decree is signed by Carnot, Robespierre, Barère, Billaud-Varenne, R. ´ Lindet, and Couthon. A copy is in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS. 724.

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Having just had a fifty-four-foot observation tower constructed in the Forest of Orléans, he was halfway through the observations required there and also needed to measure the angles at Pithiviers, Orléans, and Châteauneuf. His reply of 2 January 1794 asks to be allowed to complete those triangles. Prony arrived on the scene a few days later.100 Delambre’s account identifies him only as a member of the Commission, one who was tactful enough to hover about noncommittally until observations at those stations were finished. Their encounter appears to have been altogether correct and collegial, even cordial. That someone else, no doubt Prony himself, would continue the work, was assumed on both sides. Having had to do the calculations at night for the most part, Delambre would require three months of hard work to complete them and to put his registers in final order. He supposed he would be accorded that time. “Pray submit these reflections to the Commission of Weights and Measures and kindly inform me of their decision as soon as possible. If you should have only a refusal to impart, it will be much softened by the pleasure of receiving another letter from you. I am much touched by the sentiments you were good enough to express to me. I salute you and embrace you fraternally.”101 The formal instructions Prony carried were of a different order. The triangles once completed, he delivered a sealed packet into Delambre’s hands to be opened on his departure, and left forthwith. The envelope contained a copy of the decree of 3 nivôse (above) with a covering letter from the Commission dated 7 January 1794. The message was, Delambre remarked, “in the style of the times.”102 15 nivôse an II Citizen, The Commission of Weights and Measures has instructed one of its members to deliver to you the decree of the Committee of Public Safety which concerns you, and to concert measures with you for closing out your operations in such a way that the signals will remain useless. It invites you to finish up your calculations and to copy your observations, as you have proposed. 5. THE PROVISIONAL METER

The draft of the 3 nivôse decree is in the handwriting of Prieur de la Côted’Or. His own early proposal for weights and measures, discussed above, had 100 Base 1, p. 49. Prony’s orders from Paré, Minister of the Interior, are dated 18 nivôse an II ´ (7 January 1794). Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 724. 101 ´ Delambre to Prony, 13 nivôse an II, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 7211. 102 Base 1, p. 49.

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been one among the many to which, after hearing Lavoisier read it out in July 1790, the Academy had preferred its own design.103 He was twenty-nine years old when he eliminated the leading scientists of France from the metric Commission, having been a member of the Committee of Public Safety for four months. To understand how that came about, it will help to look back briefly at the political history of the metric project during the time since its enactment by the Constituent Assembly on 26 March 1791. Prieur had been elected a deputy to the Legislative Assembly in September 1791, and served on its Committee of Public Instruction. His earliest official involvement with the metric system was in that capacity. In April 1792 Roland, Minister of the Interior, impatient that over a year had elapsed with nothing to show for it, proposed to the Assembly that, pending completion of the academic system, provisional standards be adopted to facilitate circulation of grain and other commodities. A deputy thereupon moved that the Executive require an account of the state of the Academy’s work, begun “a long time ago.” In response to Roland’s memoir, the Academy prepared a propitiatory extract to be published from its minutes.104 It could do little else, for Delambre and Méchain were not yet in the field. The Committee of Public Instruction thereupon named Prieur to examine all these papers.105 The Academy improved the situation as soon as word from Méchain on his first rush of triangles down through Catalonia provided concrete evidence of progress toward “equality of weights and measures.”106 On 25 November 1792, a deputation from the Academy came before the Bar of the Convention, submitted a report by Borda on the organization and progress of the metric system, and offered in homage the entire collection of the Academy’s publications from the beginning. In all this, said Lalande, who made the presentation, “the Academy has shown a consistent preference for everything that promises immediate and tangible utility.”107 To which bit of special pleading the representatives of the nation replied, through the person of the abbé Grégoire, their president, in words that stand at the head of this chapter. Further moves in the displacement of scientific by political authority took place a little over three weeks later, on 21 December 1792. The Committee of Public Instruction then designated four of its members to join with the commissions of the Academy concerned respectively with the reform of the calendar and of weights and measures. The calendar, politically the more sensitive topic, will have to await the next chapter. As for weights and mea103

Above, section 2. AN, ADVIII, 36; also F17.1095, dossier 2, pièce 3; PVAS, 21 April 1792, fol. 119; also 2 May 1792, fol. 138. 105 PVCd’IP (L), 14 May 1792, pp. 294–295. 106 PVAS, 17 November 1792, fol. 295. 107 PVCd’IP 1, p. 241. 104

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sures, assigned “to join in the work of the Academy of Sciences” were Prieur again and the Strasbourg mathematician L.-F.-A. Arbogast.108 Although Prieur did not lose interest, indeed far from it, he rotated off the Committee in January 1793, leaving Arbogast to exercise the authority of Representative of the People in the Academy’s Commission of Weights and Measures. The same day, 21 December 1792, also brought the Academy an inquiry from the Convention’s Committee on Assignats and Currency. In concert with the ministerial commission on the Mint, its members were framing the monetary system. They say nothing either of the Academy’s October 1790 memoir on that subject, or of the July 1791 report on the cadastre. They may not have known them, for they ask about matters already covered in those documents, namely the denominations of the new linear units, their relationship to units of weight, and the ratio of the latter to the pound-weight and the marc. They had read Borda’s report of three weeks previously, however, and were especially struck by his experiments on the seconds pendulum. Had the work advanced sufficiently to provide an invariant monetary standard?109 This was an inquiry that was bound to throw the Academy into a dilemma. On the one hand, its commissioners had themselves tied the justification for the meridional survey to monetary reform by way of decimalization and to the cadastre by way of nomenclature and angular measurement. On the other hand, they could scarcely expect France to await a proper monetary system or a fair tax base until such time as Delambre and Méchain should have completed their work. At that moment, Delambre was still extricating himself from the toils of revolutionary Paris while Méchain would soon be interned in Barcelona. Only on one subsidiary item was the Academy in a position to respond definitively in short order. This inquiry was what prompted Lavoisier and Haüy to perform their determinations of the density of water.110 Working more rapidly than usual, the Academy’s Commission of Weights and Measures returned its reply on 19 January 1793. Its members had decided to compromise on the basis of the metric system in order to save its structure. A provisional meter, they reported, could be based on Lacaille’s data from the 1740 survey. Its length would be three feet, 11.44 lignes. The probable error would be approximately one part in 4,500, less than onetenth of a ligne in the meter. To the main question, which concerned monetary standards, the academic commission responded with a lengthy account of the determination, which Lavoisier and Haüy had hastened to perform, of the weight of a cubic 108 109 110

PVCd’IP 1, p. 227. PVAS, 21 December 1792, fol. 323–324. For Borda report, see above, n. 77. Above, n. 78.


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foot of distilled water. Reducing that value to the weight of a cubic decimeter (liter), they found that the grave, as unit weight would be called, would equal two pounds, zero ounces, five gros, and five grains of marc weight, and that the margin of error in the measurements could not exceed one part in twelve hundred, or three and five-sixths grains per marc. That degree of precision would amply suffice for founding the denominations of a new monetary system on the value of a fixed weight of metal. The Academy proposed the silver décigrave, as it would have been called, equivalent to 40 sous, 10.6 deniers of legal specie. The Commissioners improved the occasion by suggesting that the existing monetary system be decimalized forthwith. Let the Convention simply decree that after a certain date, say 1 October of that same year, all public accounts and all government contracts be framed in livres, dixièmes, et centièmes instead of livres, sols, et déniers. Monetary reform would thus prepare the way for the changeover in weights and measures generally when the metric system should be ready for application.111 These abstruse considerations can scarcely have won much attention in the anterooms or on the floor of the Convention. They were submitted to the Committee of Public Instruction on 19 January 1793. The Convention was in the midst of the debate over the execution of Louis XVI. The King’s sentence had been voted two days previously and was carried out two days later. Forwarded on to the Committee on Assignats and Money, the Academy’s reply to its inquiry nevertheless proved satisfactory. It was the foundation for the scheme of monetary reform, modeled arithmetically on the new monetary system of the United States, that was brought before the Convention on 17 April 1793.112 A week later, on 10 April 1793, Borda, Lagrange, and Monge delivered a report on the entire metric project before the springtime open meeting of the Academy, destined to be the last of its public sessions. The Academy was on the defensive. Political tensions were running high. Monge resigned as Minister of the Navy that very day. Addressing themselves to the educated public, he and his colleagues insisted on the importance of decimalization and emphasized its convenience for navigation and geography. They re111

Rapport fait a` l’Académie des Sciences, le 19 janvier 1793, sur l’unité des Poids & sur la nomenclature de ses divisions. PVAS, 19 January 1793, fol. 327–335. Never printed by the Academy, this report was published in Annales de Chimie 16 ( Jan. 1793), pp. 267–282. 112 Précis historique sur l’uniformité des poids et mesures, suivi de deux projets de décret et de quinze tables propre a` faciliter l’application du Systême Décimal, aux Poids, aux Mesures, aux Monnoies, et aux Temps. The authors of this interesting pamphlet were two deputies, Frécine of the Loire-et-Cher and Loysel of the Aisne. It goes further than any of the scientific texts in giving a detailed tabulation for converting hours, minutes, and seconds into decimal subdivisions of a ten-hour day, 100 minutes to an hour and 100 seconds to a minute. The only copy I ´ have seen is in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 2149.

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peated the 19 January finding, based on analysis of the Lacaille survey of 1740, that the length of the meter would be 3 feet, 11.44 lignes. For this audience they did not even mention that the figure was an approximation. On nomenclature they beat a retreat. Given the temper of the public, it has to be thought a tactical, though not a strategic, retreat. The Academy had been discussing fine points of terminology since the previous July, when the Laplace report on the cadastre introduced the term “meter.” The system that had emerged from these deliberations was logical and Condillacian. That approach has prevailed, although many of the words were changed in 1795—gram and kilometer replaced grave and millaire, for example. Nevertheless—so report Borda, Lagrange, and Monge—the Academy had had second thoughts. It would require mental gymnastics, they now acknowledge, for people to seize the meaning of words such as centimeter and millimeter. The Academy had also given consideration to an alternative possibility, one that would accommodate the common understanding, and which it now preferred. That scheme preserved the essentials of the metric system—its basis in the meridian, its decimals, and its meter—while avoiding abstract neologisms. The units would bear one-syllable names, some suggestive of their magnitude, such as palme for decimeter, doigt for centimeter, trait for millimeter, and mille for 1,000 meters; some simply traditional, such as pinte for a cubic palme (liter) and livre (kilogram) for the weight of that volume of water. According to the 10 April report, the Academy then reversed its earlier position and adopted this alternative. There is no formal documentation to that effect, but the records for those months are very spotty, and it may indeed have done so. What appears more likely is that the full Commission of Weights and Measures, recognizing that the locus of power had shifted on matters once within the purview of the Academy, decided to play safe and leave the decision to higher authority. On 29 May the commissioners forwarded both systems to the Comité d’Instruction Publique in order that it might choose which one to propose to the Convention. Rationalism still prevailed on that Committee. On 4 July it opted for the abstract and denotative nomenclature that the Academy had originally preferred.113 In the activist summer of 1793, it had become politically inadmissible that there were as yet no things, no workable units, to which these new words might be attached. Amid the urgency of that season Arbogast, in effect deputy on mission to the Commission of Weights and Measures, preempted the initiative from the academicians among whom he had been 113 PVCd’IP 2, pp. 9, 17; No record of the Borda, Lagrange, Monge report is to be found in the Procès-Verbaux of the Academy. It was printed in Annales de Chimie 18 ( July 1793), pp. 137–162. The authors do not state that the report was delivered at the séance publique on 10 April, but a reference by Delambre, Base 1, p. 59, makes it virtually certain that such was the case. For the initial rejection of this alternative scheme, see above, this section.


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sitting since early in the winter. He may well have been fortified by Monge in thus taking matters into his own hands. The elements of a policy lay ready to hand. Almost a year had passed since Roland in his impatience had suggested the notion of a provisional standardization. The Academy had gone back to the Lacaille data of 1740 and calculated the approximate length of the meter for its 19 January reply to the Convention’s Committee on Assignats and Currency. On 30 July Arbogast handed up to the Convention on behalf of the Committee of Public Instruction the draft of a law adopting that length as the provisional meter. It passed on 1 August. The accompanying report rehearses the advantages of uniformity and natural lengths: Your Committee of Public Instruction comes before you to fix the attention of the Convention for a few moments on an object of universal beneficence. The uniformity of weights and measures has long been desired by philanthropists. It is required both by science and the arts, both by commerce and the useful man who lives by the work of his hands, and who, being the most exposed to fraud, is least of all in a position to withstand its effects. This new means of cementing the unity of the Republic offers still further occasions for esteem and liaison between the French and other peoples, between the present generation which confers the benefit, and that posterity which will enjoy it, or verify its basis.114 The last clause carries the thrust, and Arbogast goes on to pay lip service to the Academy’s public spirit and zeal in geodetic and astronomical operations: But this work, which will imprint upon the determination of the new units the ultimate degree of precision, is of such a nature that it cannot be completed promptly. Nevertheless, the interests of the Republic and of commerce, the projects under way on reforming the currency and on the cadastre of the whole of France—all these matters require that adoption of the new system of weights and measures be no longer delayed.115 Eight days later the Academy was suppressed, in circumstances that will concern the next chapter. Those of its responsibilities deemed to be in the public interest devolved upon the Committee of Public Instruction. “I do not know,” wrote Lavoisier to Delambre, then at Amiens, “whether I still have the right to call you my colleague,” assuring him, however, that some way would be found to continue the survey.116 On 11 September, as we have seen, the ci-devant Academy’s commission was redesignated the Temporary 114 115 116

PVCd’IP 2, pp. 14–20. Ibid., p. 15. Lavoisier to Delambre, ca. 9 August 1793, Fric copy.

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Commission of Weights and Measures. Reporting henceforth to the Executive Council of Ministers, it was assigned quarters near the Convention in order that deputies might keep it under surveillance.117 In principle the Commission was to consist of all those members of the Academy who had been concerned with weights and measures. Tillet and Meusnier were dead. Condorcet was in hiding. Those remaining until the December purge were, to recapitulate, Borda, Brisson, Cassini, Coulomb, Delambre, Haüy, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Méchain, Monge, and Vandermonde. Sitting for the Committee of Public Instruction were Arbogast and Fourcroy, the latter a former academician. Finally, Prieur de la Côte d’Or, now the member of the Committee of Public Safety who was taking technology for his province, joined himself to their deliberations to represent the regime.118 There Prieur sat, then, a colleague of Lavoisier, Laplace, and Lagrange. The Temporary Commission elected the same officers as formerly, Borda to be chairman, Haüy to be secretary, Lavoisier to be treasurer. Never one to shirk responsibility, Lavoisier had had custody of the funds granted for the metric system since September 1791. His arrest along with the entire company of Tax Farmers came on 24 November 1793. At the instance (almost certainly) of Borda, the Temporary Commission dared intervene on his behalf. On 18 December it addressed a petition to the Committee of General Security asking that Lavoisier be paroled during the mornings under the guard of a gendarme in order that he might continue his collaboration in the work on weights and measures.119 There is no evidence that Prieur opposed the move in open committee. In Delambre’s view, however, and in that of his colleagues, the purge of the Temporary Commission five days later on 23 December was retribution for this démarche: The secret reason was that Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, member of the Committee of Public safety and a man altogether worthy of the confidence of the government of which he was a part, had taken some share in the initial work of the Commission, that he had even presented a nomenclature for the new decimal system, and that he attended all the meetings that were held at Lavoisier’s house; that after these conferences, it often happened that they would talk politics; that rather sharp debates arose between those who no longer merited any confidence and the member of the Convention who has distinguished himself by his 117

PVCd’IP 2, pp. 384–385. Ibid., pp. 386–387; Bouchard (1946), pp. 294–298. 119 PVCd’IP 3, p. 237. On 21 December, the Convention’s Comité des Assignats et Monnaies petitioned the Committee of Public Safety in the same sense, acting (it would appear from the text) at the instance of the Commission Temporaire (PVCd’IP, 3, 238). 118


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hatred for kings; that in these discussions Prieur would most often find himself alone against everyone and that the force of the reasons that he opposed to his adversaries did not sufficiently repair his disadvantage in point of numbers; in consequence he nourished a profound resentment, especially against Lavoisier and those of his colleagues who, like Borda and Coulomb, had shown themselves most ardent, most intelligent, or wittiest in the disputes. Such were the motives that dictated to Prieur the decree which has just been cited and which for the sake of form, he dressed out with the signatures of his colleagues Barère, Robespierre, Billaud-Varenne, etc., whose names appear after that of Prieur de la Côte-d’Or.120 It is to be noted, in deciding what credence to give these suspicions, that Delambre had not been present at the gatherings in question. He attributed the honor of finding himself in such distinguished company to the intention, already hinted in the law of 1 August, to abandon the survey of the meridian altogether and to adopt the provisional meter as definitive. Perhaps the intention does not much matter, however. For in effect the purge of the Temporary Commission brought a halt, or at least a hiatus, not only to the meridional survey, but to the policy of a provisional reform. The very day of the purge, Prieur himself was sent on an information mission to determine the needs of the Army of the North and to take measures of general security at his discretion.121 Left to the passive chairmanship of Lagrange, the “regenerated” Commission, as Monge called it in a report thanking the Committee of Public Safety, lapsed into inactivity, and the execution of the law of 1 August calling for a provisional meter fell into abeyance along with the survey of the meridian between “Barcelona and Dune-Libre.”122 120 Grandeur et figure de la terre (1912), p. 213. Note that in fact the signatories were Prieur, Barère, Carnot, Billaud-Varenne, and Lindet (above, section 4). Delambre in Base 1, pp. 49– 50, gives them as “Barère, Robespierre, Billaud-Varenne, Couthon, Collot d’Herbois, etc.” He now says, “In transcribing the text of this decree, . . . I suppressed the signatures of those who were still living, while reserving the intention of disguising nothing if I should one day have occasion to write the full history of our survey.” This may explain the omission of Prieur, Carnot, and Lindet in the earlier account, but not of Carnot and Lindet in the later, nor the inclusion of Robespierre, Couthon, and Collot d’Herbois in either of them. 121 AN, AF*56, 噛8. 122 Monge, “Adresse de la Commission des Poids et Mesures a` la Convention Nationale,” PVCd’IP 3, pp. 249–252.

CHAPTER V

Science and the Terror

1. TERROR AND EXPROPRIATION “The mainspring of the revolutionary government of the people is Virtue and Terror: Virtue without which Terror is deadly; Terror without which Virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland. . . . “The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” Maximilien Robespierre, 5 February 1794.1

The inescapable human and political scandal of the French Revolution is that such an apologia for the uses of power should have been seen as appropriate in the eyes of the foremost person exercising it a scant four years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. That Robespierre and his Jacobin confidants perceived no inconsistency between natural rights and terror is a dismaying instance of the dictum that hypocrisy is a relatively rare quality and self-deception very common and infinitely more dangerous. This book is not the place, nor is its author the person, to essay yet another analysis of how the Terror was possible.2 Still, there is no dodging the facts. No historian of any aspect of the French Revolution can avoid reckoning the toll the Terror exacted in the sector under scrutiny. First, the brute events in bare summary. Overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 set the stage. Widespread arrests by agents of the Commune of Paris and trials by kangaroo courts proved to be a dress rehearsal. It culminated in the September massacres. After proclamation of the Republic by the newly assembled Convention on 22 September, a cloak of legality covered acts of government until the expulsion of the Girondists on 2 June 1

Robespierre, “Sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention Nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République,” le 17 pluviôse an II, Oeuvres 10 (1967), p. 357. 2 For recent thinking on the problem, see Furet (1978); Jaume (1989); Higonnet (1998).

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1793. In order to dominate the purged Convention, the victorious Montagnards relied on support by the direct democracy of the Paris sections, which is to say on the leaders’ ability to call out the mob. In the country at large the silenced majority sympathized with the proscribed Girondists, and in certain regions, notably the rural western departments, with the royalists. Lest provincial “federalists” (synonymous with traitors) prevail against the people’s general will vested in patriot Paris, the Committee of Public Safety improvised extra-legal, para-governmental methods for controlling the country. The network of popular societies was ever at the service of deputies on mission sent out from Paris to deal with trouble spots, both military and civilian. Outgrowths of the Jacobin clubs, the local pressure groups now served for all intents and purposes as a political police, the first in modern history. On 5 September 1793, a decree of the Convention formally declared Terror to be the order of the day. In accordance with the Law of Suspects of 27 September, people whose loyalty was put in doubt were to be imprisoned. Denunciation became a civic duty. The Jacobin clubs set the example by progressively purging themselves of moderate or half-hearted members. The Committee of General Security, almost equal in authority to the governing Committee of Public Safety, smelled out enemies of the people in every walk of life. The Revolutionary Tribunal tried the charges. Exceptional in its jurisdiction, the court was untrammeled by rules of evidence, presumptions of innocence, or cross-examination. To fall under suspicion was tantamount to guilt. To be brought to trial was the prelude to conviction. All this took place in the name of virtue and the sovereign people, whose general will it was immoral to impede. Thus on 5 April 1794 Danton and his followers, erring rightward, mounted the scaffold in the wake of Hébert and his ultras, guillotined on 24 March for erring leftward. Still beset by imagined villains on every hand, Robespierre greatly amplified the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Tribunal by the law of 22 prairial (10 June 1794). This ultimate in draconian legislation expedited procedures to the limit and inaugurated the Great Terror. In the remaining weeks of June, the guillotine, moved from Place de la Révolution to Place du Trône Renversé (now Place de la Nation), kept elements of the populace of Paris entertained on the average of six hours a day with the spectacle of some 2,000 beheadings. All told, it is estimated, over 16,500 people were executed in the Terror, half a million were imprisoned, and another 300,000 were placed under house arrest.3 The proportion of the population in confinement was comparable to that of the Soviet gulag and greater than that incarcerated as criminals in the United States two hundred years later. Before a judgment is reached, other things need to be said. During the 3

Greer (1935).

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V. SCIENCE AND THE TERR OR

year of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety turned military defeat into victory abroad and ended the many rebellions amounting, in the West, to civil war. Generals who lost battles against foreign foes were executed as traitors. On the home front, over 2,000 suspects were loaded onto barges in Nantes and deliberately drowned in the Loire. Starved into surrender, dissident Lyons was sacked and renamed Ville Affranchie, or Liberation City. The pacification of the Vendée would have been called genocide in a later century. Whether the governing Committee could have saved the Revolution without Terror can never be known. That the ends did not justify the means is easier for moralists to say in retrospect than it was for embattled leaders to accept when encompassed by the dangers of the time. For the dangers were real. Had the armies allied against France prevailed, their train swelled by Louis XVI’s two brothers and thousands of e´migrés, they would have imposed a restoration of sorts. The political, material, and civic gains of the Revolution would have been undone. At no point between the oath of the Tennis Court on 20 June 1789 and the fall of the Monarchy on 10 August 1792 had any of those gains been accomplished in a regular give and take of politics. If force is the strategy of last resort, and at each crisis it had to be, obdurate resistance to change is at least as responsible as its advocacy. There can, of course, be no doubt that force spilled over systematically into violence, or that many a psychopath and many a sadist stepped out in front of the revolutionary mobs. Every popular celebration partook in no small measure of Schadenfreude. It may be that deeply layered injustices in the social structure of the old regime provoked latent resentments more virulent than in other countries, say in England or in Italy. One thinks of the recurrent outbreaks of peasant risings, or jacqueries, throughout French history, of the sacking of the Réveillon wallpaper factory in April 1789, of the burning of manor houses in the Great Fear of that summer, of the sudden surfacing of hatred and suspicion mingled with the euphoria of the first days of Revolution, of the assassination of La Rochefoucauld. As to individual actors, the mentality of Marat, of Robespierre, of others among their cohorts clearly exhibited symptoms of paranoia. But because a paranoid suspects the existence of plots does not mean there are none. Plots there were a-plenty, from the King’s flight to Varennes, through the hidden designs of Mirabeau, to the treason of Dumouriez and beyond. Still, when every allowance is made, the linkage of political ideology to the apparatus of a police state began historically with the Jacobin dictatorship exercised by the Committee of Public Safety under the inspiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the collective name of the French people. The relation of the Volk to the Gestapo in the Third Reich and of the proletariat to the NKVD in the Soviet Union was similar. All that can be said in extenuation, and it is significant, is that this first chapter in the history of


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modern ideological tyranny was a brief one. It was over within a year. To call ensuing episodes of reckoning a White Terror is a misnomer. Though vengeful, they were neither systematic nor ideological. Napoleon’s despotism was also another matter. His was a military and nationalistic but not an ideological dictatorship. Furthermore, French polity proved capable of ending the Terror on its own, not in consequence of suffering military defeat like the Nazis or economic disintegration like the Soviets, but amidst military victory and a certain economic stabilization. The central mass of deputies in the Convention, the Plain, cowed if not persuaded from September 1793 until 27 July 1794, grew more and more fearful lest they too be purged in the wake of their Girondist, Hébertist, and Dantonist colleagues. On 9 thermidor they rose up and ordered the arrest of the triumvirate of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just. Finally, and this is the most significant point, ideology, the police state, and genocide are far from defining the historical import of the French Revolution, whereas those features largely do define the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Abolition of the Academy of Science on 8 August 1793, four weeks before the formal declaration of Terror, had already made clear that the Jacobin mentality reserved no place for any pretended autonomy of science, let alone for any cultural preeminence. A century later the notable chemist, Marcelin Berthelot, writing in the ambiance of the Third Republic, argued that the fledgling and voluntary Société Philomathique had sheltered the community of science pending its reorganization in the Institut de France in 1795. True, some seventeen academicians were already members of the society before 8 August 1793, and another ten, Lavoisier and Laplace among them, were elected that autumn.4 There is, however, no record of any research of significance presented there. As we have seen, before his arrest Lavoisier joined forces with Desaudray, Fourcroy, and Hassenfratz in the Lycée des Arts and attempted to prolong the life of science in the guise of popularization. Sponsored by the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, Lavoisier’s hopeless move to enlist and thus preserve institutional science in service to education marked the final failure in the series of efforts to that end begun by Condorcet. With the exception of war work, organized scientific activity ceased during the Terror and its immediate Thermidorean aftermath.5 Concern for the cultural patrimony did survive, however. It took the form of the principle that property of enemies of the people rightfully belongs to the nation. Expropriation of the possessions of church, monarchy, 4

Berthelot (1888); Mandelbaum (1980), pp. 65–69. Despois (1868) and Pouchet (1896) give conflicting and polemical views on science and the terror. For contemporary testimony, see Biot (1803) and Cassini (1810). Hahn (1974) reviews the historiography of the issue. 5

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and e´migrés dated back to 1790. The Constituent Assembly then established a Commission des Monuments. Its job was to take stock of objects of science and art in all such establishments and to arrange for preserving items of value in appropriate repositories. In early September 1792, at the outset of Roland’s second term of office in the Ministry of the Interior, André Thouin, head gardener in the Jardin des Plantes, called his attention to the botanical wealth contained in the gardens of Versailles and other royal and noble estates vacated by their former owners. Roland responded on 13 September with a letter giving Thouin blanket authority to canvass the gardens of the Trianon, Rambouillet, Bellevue, and Bagatelle, and any others in nationalized properties, and to transplant, before winter set in, whatever plants might be useful. He might use the Trianon if there was not room at the Jardin des Plantes, and was to keep a careful accounting. It was important to salvage as many specimens as possible in order that provincial botanical gardens be enriched against the day when public education would be under way.6 Throughout the autumn and early winter of 1792–93, Thouin enlisted the services of several colleagues, notably Desfontaines and Faujas de SaintFond, and on occasion Lamarck. Bypassing Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, still officially intendant, much to the latter’s annoyance, Thouin reported directly to Roland on acquisitions in the region surrounding Paris. Upon creation of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in June 1793 and elimination of all academies on 8 August, the disposition to be made of the scientific resources of the nation became a far wider and more urgent task than simply enriching the Jardin des Plantes. Having ordered premises of the academies sealed, the Convention named four of its members, among them David and Romme, to take inventory and see to safeguarding the contents. The task was enormous, and required coopting the services of auxiliary commissioners familiar with the work of the condemned institutions. Initially in charge was the instrument maker, Nicolas Fortin.7 The responsibilities partly overlapped and largely conflicted with the purview of the existing, not very active, Commission des Monuments. After much friction, the Convention by a decree of 28 frimaire an II (18 December 1793) abolished the former body and concentrated all oversight of the cultural patrimony, artistic, literary, and scientific, in the hands of the new Commission Temporaire des Arts.8 Formally a subcommittee of the Comité d’Instruction 6

Roland to Thouin, Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, MSS 1998, pièce 248. For Thouin’s report, see MSS. 306. Further Roland-Thouin correspondence is in AN, F171227, dossier 2. 7 PVCd’IP 2, p 508. Directive of J.-F. Paré, Ministre de l’Intérieur, 28 August 1793, accompanied by the initial list of members of the Commission des Arts. 8 PVCd’IP 2, p. 490 (26 September 1793), p. 600 (8 October 1793); 3, p. 8 (25 November


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Publique, it acted throughout with a large measure of autonomy, keeping its own minutes, employing its own staff, and dealing directly with the Ministries of the Interior and War and with the Committee of Public Safety.9 The organization was elaborate. Some fifty competent people were distributed among fourteen divisions. Five teams (natural history, physics, chemistry, anatomy, and geography) occupied themselves with scientific materials, and one each with civilian technology, military technology, and civil engineering (Ponts et chaussées). The remaining categories were medals and antiquities, bibliography, painting, architecture, sculpture, and musical instruments.10 Among notable names, Honoré Fragonard served in two sections, Anatomy and Painting. The physicist Jacques Antoine Charles, inventor of the hydrogen balloon and an early aeronaut, later noted that the foremost people, such as Monge, Berthollet, and Vandermonde, were far too busy with war work to take an active part, and that the lesser known specialists on the staff proved perfectly capable of conducting the innumerable investigations and recommending appropriate dispositions of the manifold objects and resources they identified.11 The mandate of the Commission Temporaire des Arts, like that of its parent, the Comité d’Instruction Publique, expired at the end of 1795 simultaneously with that of the Convention, from which legislative body their authority derived. Only in its first six months, from February through July 1794, did it operate in the climate of the Terror. In that time the Commmission concentrated its efforts on identifying, assembling, and safeguarding objects of artistic, literary, and scientific value from what, immediately after the overthrow of Robespierre, was called vandalism. The wealth of French museums and libraries and the surviving heritage of many private collections of manuscripts, books, furniture, and art, both in Paris and the provinces, bear witness to its considerable efficacy. A reminder that success was far from complete was the recent discovery of fragments of the kings of Judah from the fa¸cade of Notre Dame used as fill in an excavation next door to a bank in central Paris. So long as Jacobins remained in power, the Commission’s ostensible motivation was to serve the purposes of public education. In charge of drafting a detailed set of procedural regulations was Vicq d’Azyr, named to the section of anatomy, who could draw on 1793), 3, pp. 589–592 (17 March 1794); and for the text of the decree establishing the Commission Temporaire des Arts, 3, pp. 169–182 (17 December 1793), separately printed, BN, Le38.611. A further decree of 6 February 1794 named the initial roster of commissioners and specified a table of organization of twelve sections (soon enlarged to 14 [see n. 7 above]). 9 Louis Tuetey, ed., Procès-Verbaux de la Commission Temporaire des Arts (2 vols., 1912–18). Hereafter PVCTA. 10 PVCd’IP 3, pp. 502–503 (25 February 1794). 11 PVCTA 1, p. xxviii.

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his experience as a systematist in matters of public health and in editing the medical volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique.12 It gives a rough indication of the extent of the work to note that the index to the published Procès-Verbaux requires nine closely printed doublecolumn quarto pages merely to list the properties and collections inventoried in Paris and the surrounding country. Thereafter meticulous care was taken in restoring as much of private property as was possible, then or eventually, to the rightful owners. Among the structures saved from razing were the chateaus of Chantilly and Ecouen, the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris, the basilica of Saint-Denis, and the Saint-Maclou tower in Mantes. Had it not been for the Commission, the lead roofing of the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens and the pipes of all church organs in Paris would have been melted down for ordnance. That did happen to church bells and much bronze sculpture all over France. In order to accommodate the volume and variety of objects retrieved, the Commission turned vacated townhouses, abbeys, and convents into warehouses. Besides the Petits-Augustins and the Hôtel de Nesle, two repositories were filled with apparatus of physics and mechanics, three with books from ecclesiastical libraries, five with books that had belonged to the royal family, condemned prisoners, and e´migrés, one with manuscripts from both ecclesiastical and private libraries, and one with musical instruments, books, and manuscripts—some fourteen improvised warehouses in all. Three laborers toiled full time in transporting the myriad objects to be safeguarded.13 Beyond thus noting the importance of these, the Commission’s main preoccupations, we shall not be further concerned with them. The aspect that is germane to this history occupied but a minor share of its attention and, whatever may be thought of it in hindsight, did not fall under the contemporary definition of vandalism. Among the eight naturalists initially named to the Commission Temporaire des Arts were Thouin, Desfontaines, and Lamarck. Under its aegis, and with the express approval of the Committee of Public Safety, Thouin pursued his acquisition of botanical specimens from estates in Picardy and the North of France throughout the winter and spring of 1793–94.14 A related decree of the governing Committee of 24 floréal (13 May 1794) called for creation of “Commissions d’Extraction près

12

Instruction sur la manière d’inventorier et de conserver dans toute l’étendue de la République, tous les objets qui peuvent servir aux arts, aux sciences, et a` l’enseignement, sd. 88 pp. AN, ADVIII, 40, T. II, pièce 1. 13 The introduction to PVCTA gives a summary account. 14 Extrait du Registre du Comité de Salut Public, 17 May 1794; AN, F171223–1224, dossier 7 3; F1 .1229, dossier 8; F17.1336; F17.1337, dossier 4; For the collection at Chantilly, see AN, AJ1 0.15, Liasse 1, D. 24. Guillaumin (1944b) summarizes everything expropriated by Thouin and his colleagues in France.

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les Armées” to arrange for appropriation of objects of science and art in enemy countries.15 2. THE REPUBLICAN CALENDAR

The design of the revolutionary calendar perfectly exemplifies the bornagain civic spirit identified with virtue in the politics of the year of Terror. Its architect was Gilbert Romme. To no one could the task have been more congenial. Regeneration of the nation was to transpire in a new and natural birth of time. Romme opened his report to the Convention on 20 September 1793 by reminding the legislators that they had undertaken a project of the greatest importance to the progress of the human spirit and of the arts and trades: eliminating the diversity, incoherence, and imprecision of weights and measures that had ever impeded industry and commerce. Only in a revolution would it have been possible thus to clear the decks and fix the unique and invariable basis of a new system in the dimensions of the earth. The liberal arts and history, for which the scale is temporal, now in their turn require new coordinates equally to be freed from the errors stemming from the centuries of ignorance. The Vulgar Era arose among an ignorant and credulous people amid the troubles preceding the fall of the Roman Empire. For eighteen centuries its designations of the duration of time have been entwined with the progress of fanaticism, the debasement of nations, the scandalous triumph of pride, vice, and stupidity, the persecution and humiliation visited on virtue, talent, and philosophy by cruel despots or by those permitted to act in their name. Shall we see engraved on the same tablet, formerly by means of a corrupt burin and now by a free and faithful burin, both the crimes once honored by kings and the execration they incite today, both the impostures religiously revered by certain priests and the opprobrium now justly attached to infamous and astute confidants of the corruption and brigandage of courts? No: the Vulgar Era was the era of cruelty, of deceit, of perfidy, and of slavery. It ended along with Royalty, the source of all our ills. The Revolution has retempered the souls of the French. It forms them every day in the mold of Republican virtue. Time opens a new page in history, and in its new course, as simple and majestic as equality, the annals of a regenerated France must be engraved with a new and vigorous burin.16 15 16

AN, F17.1276, dossier 1. “Rapport sur l’ère de la République,” PVCd’IP 2, p. 440. Séance du 20 septembre 1793.

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As if in keeping with sidereal destiny, the Convention had convened on 21 September 1792. Its abolition of the Monarchy was announced in Paris on the twenty-second. On that very day, at eighteen minutes and thirty seconds after nine o’clock in the morning, the sun crossed the equator. “Thus was the equality of day and night observed in the heavens at the same time that civil and moral equality was proclaimed by the representatives of the French people as the sacred foundation of its new government.”17 The Convention had further ordered that henceforth all public acts were to be dated in the First Year of the Republic. The calendar he is now proposing for the Republican Era, in accordance with which the opening of all successive years will coincide with the equinox, is the implementation of that decree. Division of the year into twelve months is in keeping with the annual frequency of lunations. There is no excuse, however, for inequality in the number of days per month. The Republican calendar would follow the sound Egyptian example of twelve months of thirty days each with an addition of five complementary days. Adding a sixth every four years would be reminiscent of the Greek Olympic games. Let it be named the French Olympiad, and let the Convention decree its observance as a holiday featuring gymnastics and celebrating acts of talent, virtue, and courage. The seven-day week, in Romme’s account, had been invented by Egyptian astrologers, who wished the world to have been created in as many days as there are planets. It divides evenly neither into the month nor the year and serves only to extend sacerdotal influence over the supposed day of rest. The Convention would surely not hesitate to eliminate it. The new calendar must be free of all religious practices and matters of opinion. Since legislators had appreciated the convenience of decimalization in the design of the metric system, Romme and his colleagues now propose to introduce it into the division of time. The new month would be divided into three parts of ten days to be called décades. The year would thus consist of thirty-six and a half décades or seventy-three demi-décades. In popular usage, each day of the demi-décade could then be identified with one of the fingers of the hand. Sexagesimal subdivision of the hour and minute being extremely inconvenient, the Committee would partition the day into ten equal intervals, each interval into ten submultiples, and so on down to the smallest observable unit. Experimental watches so constructed indicate the hundred-thousandth moment of a day, equivalent to the pulse of a healthy man of average build doing the military quick-step. Such a scale permits division into quarters, twentieths, and fortieths and thus offers almost all the advantages of division by twenty-four and many that the latter lacks. Romme’s one concession to everyday reality was very modest. Since the change in time-keeping would require replacing all clocks and watches, its 17

Ibid., p. 442.


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observance in civil affairs would become obligatory only in the year III— that is to say, one year hence! The day of rest would come at the end of every décade. (Had he opted for counting on five fingers and the demidécade, his ideas might even have caught on among the working class.) The calendar was nine months in gestation. In addition to Romme, the Comité d’Instruction Publique named Charles-Fran¸cois Dupuis and ClaudeJoseph Ferry to the commission on 21 December 1792. On 10 January 1793 Romme addressed a letter to the Academy of Science requesting it to designate those with whom he and his colleagues might confer. Apparently Lagrange, Guyton de Morveau, Monge, and the astronomer Pingré agreed to be available.18 No record remains of their deliberations, although jottings by Lalande, a not entirely reliable gossip, recall that the collaboration was an uneasy one. According to his notes at the time, Lagrange was too timid to tell Romme that the equinox does not always fall on the same date, or that quadrennial intercalation of an extra day would not accommodate the seasons to the solar year through all eternity.19 With respect to the division of the day, Romme appealed not to the astronomers, but to Lavoisier as Commissioner for Weights and Measures, apparently at the last moment. A frantic letter of 11 September 1793, a bare nine days before Romme delivered his report, requests help in completing “a general work on the division of time.” Who among members of the former Academy of Science, he asks, had proposed dividing the day into ten or twenty hours instead of twenty-four? He needs to know precisely what the proposition was, what the reasons for it were, and what success might be expected for it.20 The Convention adopted the chronological and chronometric provisions of Romme’s proposal forthwith on 5 October 1793. His nomenclature was another matter. The twelve thirty-day months, the first beginning on the old 22 September, would be named Republic, Unity, Fraternity, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Regeneration, Reunion, The Tennis Court, the Bastille, the People, and the Mountain. The ten days of the décade would be Day of the Level (Niveau), of the Red Bonnet (the Phrygian cap), of the Cockade, of the Pike, of the Plow, of the Compass, of the Fasces, of the Cannon, of the Oak, and of Rest, while the five complementary days would be of Adoption, Industry, Rewards, Paternity, and Old Age. The sixth day in leap years would be Olympic Day. Thus Tuesday, 20 February 1794, would be Red Bonnet Day, Justice, year II. 18

Romme to the Academy of Science, 10 January 1793, PVAS; PVCd’IP 1, pp. 227–228; cf. PVCd’IP 2, pp. lxxxvi, lxxxviii (errata). 19 Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire, MSS B-5, 7. 20 Romme a` Lavoisy [sic], commissaire pour les poids et mesures, 11 septembre, l’an II de la République. Consulted in the Fric collection of Lavoisier correspondence, currently in course of publication.

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Those names did not go down well. A deputy from Calais, Pierre-Joseph Duhem, won applause with his objection that episodes of the Revolution were not for all seasons, that the designations would take on an air of political sanctity as specious as those commemorating saints and martyrs, and that a new calendar must be for all peoples. Accordingly he proposed simply numbering months, days, and hours. But, Romme complained, all moral impact would be lost. Another, unnamed deputy then moved consideration of an alternative scheme according to which moral virtues, which are the same for all peoples, would replace Romme’s political denominations. First in each décade would come the day of Virtues, second the day of Spouses, third the day of Children, and so on. Albritte saved the Convention from an inclination toward making that choice by exciting one of its rare laughs with the observation that every day is Spouse Day. Referring the problem of nomenclature to a new commmission, the Convention opted for a numeral interim solution—first month, first day, and so on—pending a further recommendation.21 Assigned to the new commission in addition to Romme were David, the ´ poet Fabre d’Eglantine, and Marie-Joseph Chénier, younger brother of a better poet. Having already suggested a naturalistic in lieu of a historical ´ source of vocabulary, Fabre d’Eglantine took the chair and brought in their report in three décades on the third day of the second month of the year II (24 October 1793).22 Coined at the climax of the revolutionary drama, his names characterizing the months—for the autumn, vendémiaire, brumaire, frimaire; for the winter, nivôse, pluviôse, ventôse; for the spring, germinal, floréal, prairial; for the summer, messidor, thermidor, fructidor—these words remain evocative in popular as in historic memory, however ephemeral the Republican calendar in practice, and however shallow its penetration into actual usage by the people. ´ As for days, Fabre d’Eglantine thought it would be easier to remember where each falls in every décade if the designations were numerical, thus primidi, duodi, tridi, and so on to décadi. The five complementary days would be the sans-culottides. Beyond simple location in the year, however, the calendar must serve the larger purpose of seating awareness of its passage, not in the sequence of days commemorating pretended saints, but in the work of cultivation instead of the impostures of a cult. To each décade, therefore, he assigned an agricultural instrument, the same that a laborer takes in hand at that season after his day of rest. With each demi-décade, or quintidi, is associated a domestic animal. These, our faithful servants, are doubtless more precious creatures than “the beatified skeletons pulled out of the catacombs of Rome.” Every day in the year, finally, is marked by the 21 22

PVCd’IP 2, pp. 584–587. Séance de la Convention du 5 octobre 1793. PVCd’IP 2, pp. 697–713.


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plant or flower then at its height, and in the winter by a mineral. To assist ´ in identifying which species goes where, Fabre d’Eglantine in his turn enlisted the help of science and turned to André Thouin in the Jardin des Plantes. It cannot be said that all this symbolism in daily detail produced quite the effect its author thought it could not fail to have, which was “to touch the hearts of our cultivators and finally bring home to them that with the Republic, the time has come when a laborer is more esteemed than all the kings of the earth together, and agriculture is counted as first among the arts of civil society.”23 Instead, peasants hated it, of course, and the retrospect afforded Richard Cobb, past master of earthy irony, occasion to note how the Hébertists were executed on the day of the tulip, 4 germinal, how the Dantonists went to the guillotine under the shade of the beech tree, 14 germinal, and how camomile presided over enactment of the law of suspects ´ on 22 prairial. He might have added that Fabre d’Eglantine perished with the Dantonists, and that Robespierre was overthrown and the Great Terror ended under the sign of an herb called Mûres on 9 thermidor (27 July 1794).24 All Jacobin passion spent, it remained to Romme to attempt a repair of a grave defect that Delambre, compiler of astronomical tables par excellence, had pointed out to Lalande and Laplace before it would have been prudent to acknowledge it. If the year were always to begin on the day of the true equinox, three episodes of five-year spans between leap years would occur at irregular intervals in each century. Delambre advocated abandoning that provision of the law in favor of a regular sequence of quadrennial leap years. A further modification, equally dictated by astronomical reality, would stipulate that only in every fourth century should the last year be a leap year and further that the final year of every fortieth century should be of 365 days. Pressed by astronomers now free to speak their minds, the thermidorean Comité d’Instruction Publique called on Romme, no longer a member though still a deputy, to consult the experts and bring in a report on the leap-year problem. On 29 germinal an III (20 April 1795) he held a meeting with Delambre, Lagrange, Laplace, Lalande, Pingré, Messier, and Nouet. One layman, Joseph Garat, then commissioner of education, also attended. Presented to the Comité d’Instruction Publique three weeks later, on 19 floréal (8 May 1795), the proposed reform followed Delambre’s advice to the letter. The Committee adopted its recommendations forthwith and forwarded it to the Convention for passage into law. That body never acted. 23

Ibid., p. 703. The typescript of an interesting lecture, “André Thouin et sa participation au calendrier républicain,” given by Léon Bultingaire on 19 February 1944 before the Mon´ tagne Ste. Geneviève Comité d’Etudes Historiques is in the Bibliothèque du Muséum National d’Histoire Nationale, B6676. 24 On the symbolism of the calendar, see Mona Ozouf, “Calendrier,” Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution Fran¸caise, ed. Fran¸cois Furet and Mona Ozouf (1988), pp. 482–491.

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Implicated in a popular rising on 1 prairial (20 May), Romme was arrested the same day and condemned by a military tribunal. Preferring suicide to the guillotine, he and five fellow victims of the attenuated White Terror stabbed themselves to death on 29 prairial (17 June 1795).25 Nine years later Laplace, in his report to the Napoleonic Senate recommending return to the Gregorian Calendar as of 1 January 1806, spoke appreciatively of Romme’s final deference to the scientists.26 3. THE OBSERVATORY OF PARIS

During the Terror the Observatory of Paris continued to function after a fashion, albeit revolutionized, or, in the language of the time, regenerated. The last director in the old regime, Jean-Dominique Cassini, held what amounted to a hereditary post. Great-grandson of the first astronomer appointed by the crown, he styled himself “comte” and took a lordly view of his responsibilities. Succeeding his father in 1784, Cassini IV addressed himself like his ancestors rather to the services astronomy could render than to astronomical research. The sheets of the Cassini map of France being largely completed (except for Brittany), he promoted their sale for the benefit of the fifty wealthy shareholders who had furnished the capital. His was the leading part in mounting the 1787 triangulation that linked the positions of the observatories of Paris and Greenwich by a chain of triangles. That was the operation, it will be recalled, in which the design of the Borda repeating circle used by Delambre and Méchain in the metric survey first proved its accuracy.27 Most important of all, in Cassini’s eyes, he raised the funds to begin refurbishing a once splendid establishment grown shabby over the years. He replaced obsolescent equipment with state-of-the-art apparatus. He formed a corps of instrument makers whose skills might end dependence on such English masters as Ramsden and Dollond. A royal ordinance of 1785 regularized procedures. Hitherto the Observatory had accommodated individual astronomers, each with his particular program of more or less assiduous observation. The elderly and cranky Jeaurat was the last of that ilk. Henceforth a staff of three “élèves” (pupils—a condescending term that the Academy of Science simultaneously dropped for its junior members) was to serve under Cassini’s direction and conduct a program of round-the-clock astronomical, meteorological, and magnetic observations every day of the year. 25

For the Romme report and the preceding discussion, see PVCd’IP 6, pp. 179–188, and for further consideration of the calendar, pp. 207–213, 488, 501, 583. 26 Rapport sur le projet du sénatus-consulte portant rétablissement du calendrier grégorien. AP, 2nd series 8 (an XII–XIII), pp. 722–723. 27 On the Observatory and the Greenwich-Paris triangulation, see Cassini (1810), Wolf (1902), Gillispie (1980), pp. 99–130.

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Cassini’s growing hostility to the Revolution came out clearly in the discussion over the reform of the Academy of Science in 1790–91, when he opposed its subordination to the National Assembly instead of the Crown. His initial misgivings about the events of 1789 were briefly allayed in 1790, when the new departmental subdivision of France was perforce delineated on the sheets of the Cassini map. The operation increased both its utility and profitability.28 Inevitably, however, the Observatory was the object of political attentions. The imposing architectural statement it makes bespoke the onetime authority of royalty less inimically but more proudly than had the Bastille. Nor was the appearance altogether innocent. All Paris was aware of the mysterious network of unplumbed catacombs underlying the foundations. Moreover, the Luxembourg quarter, seat of the Cordeliers club, was among the most radical in the capital. On 16 July 1789, in the immediate aftermath of Bastille Day, a patrol from the Val-de-Grâce district searched the caverns for gunpowder and weapons. Three months later, amid the bread shortage that provoked the October days, a company of the National Guard ransacked the cellars looking for stores of flour said to be hoarded there. On 31 July 1793 a posse from Saint-Germain-des-Prés acted on an anonymous (and false) allegation that the Girondist ex-minister Roland was hiding in the Observatory.29 Some modification of its regime was inevitable after the abolition of the Academy of Science, to which the Observatory had been attached at the time of its foundation. What envenomed matters was the situation of the three so-called “élèves,” who did the donkey work of routine observation. The senior, Nicolas-Antoine Nouet, was an unfrocked Cistercian monk, born in 1740. In 1780 his superiors in the abbey of l’Isle-en-Barrois thought to establish a school for young noblemen at Morimont in Champagne. Needing a teacher of astronomy, they sent Dom Nouet at the age of forty to Paris to learn the science. Cassini found him to be conscientious and competent, and took him on as chaplain of the Observatory instead of sending him back to the country. In 1784–85 Nouet served as astronomer in the expedition that General Chastenet de Puységur led to Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where his job was to correct the maritime map of the colony. During his absence Cassini appointed him first of the three “élèves” in the newly created posts. The Connaissance des temps for 1787 contains tables for the orbit of Uranus that he calculated by Laplacian methods. Discovered by Herschel in 1781, the planet was at first mistaken for a comet.30 In 1787 Nouet computed the latitudes and longitudes of the chief cities of France on the basis of the Paris-Greenwich survey. Released from his vows by the sup28 29 30

Devic (1851), p. 147; Cassini (1810), p. 117. Documents in Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire, D-5, 30. On Nouet, see Bret (1993a), and on Uranus, Gillispie (1997), p. 100.

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pression of monastic orders, he married the daughter of an impoverished former nobleman in 1793. Less is known of the background of Cassini’s other two satellites, J. Perny de Villeneuve and Alexandre Ruelle. Their job was to conduct the nightly and daily observations at the Observatory and prepare the data for publication annually. The title page of the first volume credits “M. le comte de Cassini, directeur; MM de Villeneuve [Perny] et Ruelle, e´lèves.”31 Perny, a Parisian, was born in 1766. A protégé of Jeaurat, he began his service at the Observatory in 1785. In 1791, when the Revolution interrupted the series, he published two elementary books on his own.32 Ruelle, born in Blois in 1756, was said to be a deserter from a regiment of dragoons. In 1783 he hid out from military justice with a cousin or uncle, the clockmaker Boucher, who had a lodging in the Observatory. Ruelle there learned practical astronomy. His one publication was a beginner’s manual of the constellations.33 Like many discontented young men in all walks of life, Perny and Ruelle joined the radical political club of their quarter. Returning one night after too convivial a dinner, Perny—it was reported—beat on Cassini’s door in a drunken rage and threatened the life of the despotic Director. He was subdued, and the matter hushed up for the moment.34 Trouble came into the open over wages, which, like those of Buffon’s retainers in the Jardin du Roi, were unequal and low. In August 1790 the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly took up the budget of the Observatory along with those of the academies, the Jardin des Plantes, and other cultural institutions. On its recommendation, the Assembly on 19 September 1790 appropriated 8,700 livres to support the Observatory. The amount was what it had been each year since 1784, when Cassini succeeded his father as Director. His salary accounted for 2,700 livres and maintenance of the building and instruments for 3,000. From the remaining 3,000, Cassini, following his past practice, set aside 600 livres for the cost of paper, firewood, and light in the workroom of his assistants and assigned the three of them 900, 700, and 600 livres, respectively, leaving 200 for tips to reward whichever of them worked the best.35 The arrangement, which held good in 1791 and 1792, was bound to be unacceptable to the egalitarian spirit of the Convention. On 8 March 1793 the Minister of the Interior, Garat, astonished by Cassini’s estimates, re31

Extrait des observations astronomiques et physiques faites a` l’Observatoire (7 vols., 1785–91). Planisphère monographique projeté sur l’horizon de Paris (1791); Guide astronomique, ou Calendrier a` l’usage des amateurs de l’astronomie (1791). On Perny and Ruelle, see Devic (1851), pp. 210–216. 33 Nouvelle Uranographie, ou méthode très facile pour apprendre a` connoˆıtre les constellations (1785). 34 PVCd’IP 2, p. 475, n. 1. 35 AN, F171065A, dossier 3. 32


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turned them with a memorandum to the effect that the intent of the 1790 allocation had clearly been to pay the three e´lèves 1,000 livres each. Cassini objected that the law contained no such provision. What he failed to mention in 1793 was that the original 1790 draft had specified 200-livre raises for each of his aides. If that had gone through, he complained at the time to the chairman of the Committee, C.-F. Lebrun, he would have had to pay the cost of running the office from his own salary or take it out of maintenance.36 In any case, he now told Garat, his three assistants were unequal in seniority and merit. Far from satisfied, Garat placed the matter before the Convention on 9 June 1793. The next day, 10 June, that body adopted the statute basing the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle on the principle of the equality and self-governance of naturalists. On 12 June, the problem of the Observatory was referrred to the Comité d’Instruction Publique. This was precisely the juncture at which the standing committee had been temporarily marginalized in favor of the Commission of Six dominated by Robespierre before his election to the Committee of Public Safety. Sensing what lay ahead, Cassini composed a long memoir reviewing the entire history, in effect a family history, of the Observatory and its current status. He does not name the member of the parent Committee to whom he addressed it, and in whom he felt confidence.37 Whoever the recipient was, he was appalled. He could not possibly transmit to his colleagues a document lavish in its praise of past royal patronage and scornful of republican values and practice. He feared lest it cause Cassini grave damage, and advised him to avoid anything politically offensive. Accordingly, Cassini drew up a simple project for organizational reform, to which he could not resist attaching a preamble warning against the abuse of sound principles. However equal the worth of scientists, he noted, someone must be in charge of the Observatory for the same reason that a ship needs a master. Two sorts of scientists are required to navigate the heavens, astronomers and observers. In order to gather data effectively, the latter must have direction by the former. The Observatory has nothing in common with the Jardin des Plantes. The twelve professors there assembled all have their specialties. Not so in the Observatory, where the staff forms a team that cannot function without a captain. The Commission of Six ignored these observations. As soon as the Academy of Science was dissolved, it named Lakanal to serve as liaison with the Observatory. On 31 August the Convention adopted the measure he drafted. It consisted of four sentences. The establishment was henceforth to be named Observatory of the Republic. All four astronomers were to be equal 36 37

Cassini to Lebrun, September 1790, Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire, D-5, 40. Cassini (1810) gives the full text, 182–208.

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in rights and salary. They were to choose one of their number to serve as provisional director. They were immediately to draw up regulations based on principles of equality and liberty for approval by the Commission of Six. An eclipse of the sun occurred a week later, on 6 September. Cassini took the occasion to place his resignation in the hands of Arbogast and Grégoire, who had come to the Observatory to watch. Thus ended over 120 years of Cassini administration of the institution. The three erstwhile “élèves,” calling themselves professors in emulation of their counterparts at the Muséum, chose the twenty-six-year old Alexis Bouvard to replace Cassini IV and named Perny acting director.38 Cassini had behaved badly by any standards except his own. He was treated worse. There is no need to follow in detail the indignity of his eviction from the premises by the (in his view) protégés, who for their part felt he had exploited and also denigrated them. In what he had supposed to be a confidential conversation with Lakanal a few days before resigning, Cassini had said that the Commmission of Six should know that none of the three was capable of becoming a theoretical astronomer. That word got back to them. Among the first acts of the acting director was to give his former mentor a week to clear out of his official residence. If any furnishings or equipment belonging to the Observatory were found to be missing, Cassini would be reported to the revolutionary committee of the section. Appealing by note to Lakanal, whom he mistakenly thought to be sympathetic, Cassini was informed that the Representative of the People, in the Observatory on official business, had no time for private matters, and that in any case persons who wished an audience came to him, not he to them.39 Cassini moved with his family to lodgings near the Observatory. Four months later, during the evening of 14 February 1794, he was arrested there along with a cousin who lived with the family, Mademoiselle de Forceville. His children were left alone with their grandmother and two servants. The local Revolutionary Committee had received a denunciation, not from the quarter, but from Beauvais. His cousin’s country property was in that region, as was the estate of Thury, from which his father had taken their title of nobility. The two were remanded to a relatively low security prison, the former convent of the Benedictins Anglais. Evident counter-revolutionaries were not jailed there. Cassini had a cell to himself, as did his cousin. For the most part the inmates were kept under surveillance without trial—petty criminals, people of quality, lukewarm citizens, foreigners suspected of spying, English merchants overly loathe to abandon their businesses. Every detainee’s status might change at any moment, however. In the case of Mademoiselle de Forceville, it did. On 6 June, she was 38 39

PVCd’IP 2, pp. 218–227. The episode is documented in PVCd’IP 2, 477–486.


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transferred to the Conciergerie, indicted before the revolutionary tribunal, and the next day guillotined at the Porte Saint-Antoine. Six weeks previously Cassini had learned of the execution of his colleague, Bochart de Saron, whose researches in mathematical astronomy had been among the most valuable contributions to science itself by an honorary member of the Academy of Science. Prime President of the former Parlement of Paris, Saron was arrested on 18 December 1793 in company with all members of the sovereign courts who had had the temerity and imprudence to remain in Paris. During his incarceration in La Force he calculated the orbitary elements of a newly discovered comet. He and twenty-six former magistrates were removed to the Conciergerie on 19 April. They appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal on Easter Sunday. Throngs lined the way to the Place de la Révolution, where more than a thousand Parisians awaited the spectacle. The last in line, Saron observed the decapitation of all his colleagues. On 8 May Perny, in his capacity of acting director, notified the Comité d’Instruction Publique that among Saron’s former possessions, now the property of the Republic by virtue of his condemnation, were many instruments and other objects useful for astronomy and much needed by the Observatory.40 With the fall of Robespierre the wind changed. On 8 August 1794, twelve days after the end of the Terror, Perny submitted a petition to the Committee of General Security calling for Cassini’s release from prison. It was honored on the fifteenth. The previous day Perny joined Nouet in charging their colleague Ruelle with having falsified observations of the passage of the sun across the meridian on 27 April. Ruelle, the most radical of the three, had already been denounced by the thermidorean Revolutionary Committee of the section for having joined in an attempt to raise a band of armed citizens to march on the Hôtel de Ville in defense of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just after the overthrow of the triumvirate on 9 thermidor. He was arrested as a terrorist on 24 August and imprisoned for over a year, after which he successfully claimed payment of his back salary. Ruelle never returned to astronomy, however, and disappeared from view after joining in the last gasp of the sans-culottes, Babeuf ’s Conspiracy of Equals in 1796. Nor did Cassini return to astronomy. He refused election to the Institute in 1795, and lived out his days as squire of Thury writing his memoirs and seeking, with minimal success, to recover his and the other shareholders’ investment in the map of France.41 Perny continued in the post of acting director until 17 May 1795, when the thermidorean Committee of Public 40

PVCd’IP, 8 May 1794 (13 floréal an II), 4, p. 373. The committee relayed the information to the Commission Temporaire des Arts. 41 Cassini, Réclamation en faveur de la compagnie des associés pour la confection de la Carte Générale de la France (1818), BN, Fp.2552 and 4589.

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Safety put him in charge of a surveying mission to link Belgium and Holland to the meridian of Paris by a chain of triangles. The Cassini map could then be extended to cover the newly conquered territories. Lalande, who ´ had kept a low profile all the while in his observatory at the Ecole Militaire, replaced Perny as acting director, pending creation of the Bureau des Longitudes, which has overseen the Observatory since 1795. At that juncture Nouet, more active professionally and less so politically than either Ruelle or Perny, was also removed from the Observatory and assigned instead to the Dépot Général de la Guerre, the important cartographical bureau of the War Department.42 His first job was to triangulate the Rhineland. In 1798 Nouet reached what proved to be the high point of his career. He was named to the scientific commission that accompanied Bonaparte’s expeditionary force in the invasion of Egypt. Bouvard, finally, whose unwitting preparation to be Cassini’s replacement had consisted of Cousin’s course in applied mathematics at the Collège de France, eventually won his predecessor’s accolade for having proved himself worthy to serve in any leading observatory.43 He must have learned the practice of his craft precisely during the year II, when the other three “professors,” Perny, Ruelle, and to a lesser extent Nouet, were signing the many manifestos and political, institutional, and administrative petitions, among them a request for a raise in salary, that they addressed to various revolutionary committees and to the public. His name appears but seldom in these documents. An indefatigable calculator, he alone continued in the service of the Observatory throughout a long and useful career.44 What of astronomy itself all the while? Among the four comets (one spotted by Méchain in Barcelona) that Lalande reports having been discovered in 1793 was a tiny body that Perny detected traversing Cassiopeia on the night of 24 September. Naming it the Republican Comet, he dedicated it to the Comité d’Instruction Publique. That was the one for which someone furnished Saron the data so that he might calculate the elements of its orbit while in prison. Before his execution he had the satisfaction of learning that Messier’s observations of its further positions lay along the trajectory he had predicted. The Committee commended Perny, and accepted a request that the Observatory be authorized to purchase a twenty-two-foot equatorial telescope of novel design fabricated by a leading instrument maker, one Hautpoix, whom the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers had rewarded with a maximum grant.45 All four staff members maintained the routine program of magnetic, me42

Bret (1991b). Cassini (1810), p. 2. 44 On Bouvard, see A. F. O’D. Alexander, DSB 2, pp. 359–360. 45 Lalande (1803), p. 724; PVCd’IP, 7 frimaire an II (17 December 1793), 3, pp. 166–167; 7 ventôse an II (7 March 1794). 43


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teorological, and astronomical observations begun under Cassini. Following the interruption of his annual report in 1791, however, the information remained unpublished until Lalande resumed the series in 1801.46 In the chronology that Lalande appended to his Bibliographie astronomique, he chats along about the astronomical news of the world while alluding to political turmoil, for the most part in a low-key manner. The losses suffered by astronomy in 1793–94 included Bailly, Saron, and Lavoisier to the guillotine, Cassini to arrest, the Academy of Science to political hostility, Pingré to old age, and Dionis du Séjour to illness. A scion of the judicial nobility, deputy in the Estates-General, and member of the Academy of Science, Dionis du Séjour had contributed to mathematical astronomy in as signal a manner as Saron. Disaffected by the course of events in the Constituent Assembly, he withdrew from the public arena. In Lalande’s account, Dionis du Séjour too is to be counted a victim of the Terror, albeit indirectly. Gathering anxiety throughout the year II so weakened his normally robust combustion that a trivial fever contracted in August 1794 carried him off. In the face of all this, Lalande, a survivor but not a stalwart, consoled himself amid the stars and felt tempted to say with Horace, “Exegi monumentum aere perrenius.”47 Lalande makes evident in passing that political circumstances did facilitate one positive development, and in an altogether novel field that would now be called mathematical geophysics. He mentions that at his request Monge, while serving as Minister of Marine Affairs, ordered the naval commandant at the port of Brest to carry out daily observations of the ebb and flow of the tide. Lalande himself had stressed the importance of that in 1771 when publishing a corpus of early eighteenth-century tidal observations at Brest that Cassini had discovered among the papers of his grandfather, Cassini II. Laplace’s was the work that benefited. The first of his analyses of tidal motion, published in 1778–79, was a highly abstract, purely theoretical affair. Returning to the subject in 1790, he noted that what was missing from the data were observations on the rate, and not merely the extent, of the rise and fall of the sea. He revised and published the memoir he read then only in 1797, by which time he had precisely the data that, though he never says so, must have been collected on Monge’s orders in 1793.48 Among his many services, Lalande edited the almanac Connaissance des temps, for which Méchain performed the calculations. Normally it was published two years in advance of the year for which it reported the ephemerides. Thus, the issue for 1791 was available in 1789 and that for 1792 in 1790. Thereafter the schedule slipped. The number for 1793 appeared only 46 Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire, Journal des observations faites a` l’Observatoire de Paris, 1683–1798, MSS D-3. 1–30; D-4, 1–28; Journal des observations météorologiques et magnétiques, 1785–1798, MSS F-1, 9–15. 47 Lalande (1803), p. 719. 48 Ibid., p. 729. On these papers, see Gillispie (1997), 162–165.

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in 1792. No issue ever did appear in 1793. When Méchain was interned in Barcelona, the Comité d’Instruction Publique assigned responsibility for the calculations, and also for publication, to his superiors in the Temporary Commission of Weights and Measures, chaired by Borda. Cassini’s detention further impeded matters. Among the papers in his apartment, sealed from access, were the data required for calculating the ephemerides for 1795 and 1796. Not until 13 March 1794, a month after his arrest, did the Committee of General Security grant the request from the Comité d’Instruction Publique that the seals be lifted long enough for the Commissioners of Weights and Measures to obtain those papers, and also that Cassini be present under guard to deliver them himself into the hands of Prony and Arbogast.49 The volume incurred additional delay and expense by the need to “republicanize it as much as possible.” Though already set in type, the pages had to be corrected so as to eliminate the names of saints and other vestiges of the old regime, such as the appelation “Monsieur.” Finally Borda kept the proofs a long time, despite the injunction to accelerate publication as much as possible.50 In the end, the Connaissance des Temps for the year III (1794–1795) appeared late in 1794, months after the end of the Terror, and also after the earlier of the astronomical events it predicted had already occurred. ` 4. THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE

It had already fallen to Lalande to steer the Collège de France through the rapids of revolutionary politics. In the language of the jubilee volume published on the four hundredth anniversary in 1930, it was the sole scientific or learned institution to be “spared by the Revolution.”51 That such would prove to be its fortune was far from clear at the time. Lalande replaced the abbé Garnier, professor of Hebrew, in the dual post of Inspector and Syndic in July 1791, since the latter was unwilling to swear allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The Collège de France was then far from having attained the zenith of eminence in the French scholarly and scientific firmament that it reached in the nineteenth century. There were nineteen chairs in 1789, eight of which had been assigned to scientific subjects since reform of the curriculum in 1773. The names of Lalande, Darcet, Daubenton, Portal, and perhaps Cousin come readily to mind among historians of eighteenth-century science, but not among their successors in the respective disciplines of astronomy, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, and mathematical physics. The remaining three, Mauduit in 49 50 51

PVCd’IP 1er and 23 ventôse an II (19 February and 13 March 1794), 3, pp. 478–479, 564. PVCd’IP, 1 ventôse an II (19 February 1794); Lalande (1803), pp. 629–630. Le Collège de France (1932), p. 5.

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mathematics, Charles Le Monnier in astronomy, and Lefèvre-Gineau in experimental physics, are largely forgotten altogether, the latter two unjustly. Their colleagues in the humanities, M.-A. Laget-Bardelin, M.-A. Bouchaud, and J.-B. Gail; J.-F. Vauvilliers, E.-F. Bosquillon, and Jacques Delille; J.-J.-A. Caussin de Perceval, P.-J.-M. Ruffin; P.-S. Lourdet and J.-B. Lefebvre de Villebrune; Antoine Cournand; J.-F.-H. Dutemps and Charles Levesque—these and others left few if any traces in the annals of classics, oriental languages, Hebrew, literary history, and historiography. Writing in January 1791, Jean-Fran¸cois de La Harpe, literary editor of the Mercure de France and self-styled successor to Voltaire, represented the Collège Royal as a once great institution in irretrievable decline. In a series of articles on public education La Harpe called for drastic reform of schools, colleges, universities, and the Académie Fran¸caise (of which he was a member). Liberal, but far from radical in his sympathies, he insisted on the preservation of these institutions. Latin, its teaching transformed, also must remain the basis of a humanist education. Beyond repair, however, was the Collège Royal, “which sets up to give lectures on all the sciences, which teaches so little, and where no one learns what is taught there.”52 Consisting of a mere three hours a week, its courses were often not offered, whether for lack of a professor or lack of auditors. The scientific subjects, he allowed, might be all very well. Geometry, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry, natural history—these are materials that need to be taught. La Harpe regarded Greek also as a science, and acknowledged that the oriental languages are difficult, little known, and important for political reasons. But those chairs could simply be attached to a renovated university, where instruction in technical matter would need to be far more intensive. The motivation of La Harpe’s criticism was pedagogical and literary, not political. An accomplished and widely read man of letters, he despised the very notion of professors expounding literature, poetry, and history. Books are to be read, not taught. As for morality—half of the “histoire et morale” chair—it is to be lived. Nevertheless, whatever the shortcomings in practice, the Collège remained the one institution defined in principle by the combination of teaching with research in service to all knowledge: omnia docet remained and remains the motto.53 Various adaptations of the model displaced the role of universities in the educational plans of Talleyrand, Condorcet, and Romme. It is, moreover, not redundant to say that its professional appeal was such 52

From La Harpe’s review of an educational tract, L. Rivière, Palladium de la Constitution politique (1790) in Mercure de France (3 October 1790), 35–46, p. 45; for the rest, see “Plan ´ sommaire d’une Education publique,” 22 January 1791, pp. 131–152; and 29 January 1791, pp. 167–187, esp. 178–183. 53 For the regime of the Collège de France see Gillispie (1980), 130–143, and, for bibliography, p. 131, n. 175.

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that revolutionary incumbents at the Jardin des Plantes and the Observatory took unto themselves the title of professor. Conversion of the former into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle on 10 June 1793 posed another threat, however. Since Daubenton and Portal also taught there, it was proposed to transfer their chairs of natural history and anatomy from the Collège to the Muséum. Desperate for all the instruction they could get, the surgical and medical students who thronged the capital in 1793–94 signed a petition to the Minister of the Interior demanding that both courses be maintained. Their objection succeeded.54 Although Daubenton, in deference to his age and infirmities, was allowed to give his two courses in the Muséum, the teaching of natural history returned to the Collège on Cuvier’s succession in 1799, while Portal continued to lecture there until his death in 1833. It does not appear that popular hostility to academies rubbed off onto the Collège. Simply a company of colleagues, it did not incur the odium of a corporation. Though linked to the university in 1772 for financial convenience, the Collège de France was a secular establishment. It had even been anti-clerical at the time (1530) when Fran¸cois 1e`ne created the first chairs. The lectures had been open to all comers ever since. Attendance conferred nothing in the way of privilege, or qualification for degrees, or overt distinctions of any sort. The subjects were recondite and never touched lives in the artisanal, let alone the laboring classes. Nevertheless, as the campaign against learned institutions in general gathered force, the staff could hardly fail to be apprehensive. In their monthly meeting of 21 July 1793, Cousin, Mauduit, and Levesque were designated to draft a memoir for submission to the Comité d’Instruction Publique concerning the liaison and utility of the different courses. It is an eloquent document on behalf of the entire company pleading their collective sense of the unity of knowledge and the consequent indivisibility of their work. Theirs was the only establishment in the entire Republic to embrace the entire circle of the sciences. To divide it in any way would break the links of a continuous chain connecting knowledge of external nature with knowledge of ourselves and our place in society. Summaries outline the coverage of each chair and its relation to the others. Particularly interesting, and virtually prophetic, is the passage on the “true method of studying nature” (drafted no doubt by Cousin), which counters the tendency for fragmentation into specialties. Common to the study of astronomy, physics, and chemistry, the unifying method consists in precise study by means of mathe54

Registre des déliberations prises aux assemblées des lecteurs et des professeurs du Roi au Collège Royal de France, 3, fol. 72 (30 pluviôse an II, 29 January 1794). The minutes of these meetings were recorded in three registers, which are kept in the Archives of the Collège. The third runs from 9 June 1780 through 1822. For the text of the petition, see AN, F17.3854.

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matical analysis. All natural phenomena, whether chemical, electrical, or astronomical, can be reduced to problems in mathematics. For in those fields, the curriculum had the mission of preparing students for scientific careers, if not for diplomas. After a prior year at the secondary level in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, a young man might complete a training in mathematics and the physical sciences in a two-year sequence at the Collège de France.55 There is no record that the Comité d’Instruction Publique took the slightest notice of this professorial memorandum. Thereafter, Lalande’s defense of the Collège in the year of the Terror was anything but high-minded. He resisted nothing. He objected to nothing. He argued with no one. Even had he dared to do so, there was no clear locus of administrative authority. Prior to the Revolution, the Collège Royal had depended directly on the Ministry of the Royal Household. The law of 8 March 1793 nationalized its property, however, along with that of all colleges. For everything to do with real estate and associated budgetary items, Lalande had now to deal with the Directory of the Department of Paris. With respect to salaries and other expenses, he reported mainly to the Ministry of the Interior, but sometimes also to the departmental authorities while depending ultimately on officials in the Treasury. Finally, the program of course offerings each semester, and whatever else concerned educational content and planning, had further to be submitted to the Comité d’Instruction Publique acting under the authority of the Convention. Its point man for science, Lakanal, busying himself with the Jardin des Plantes, the academies, and the Observatory, took very little interest in the Collège de France and confined himself to informing the staff that the matter of their salaries was difficult.56 In all this Lalande formulated nothing in the way of broad policy. With one exception, to be noted below, the minutes of staff meetings that he kept faithfully in his tiny, crabbed, virtually illegible penmanship contain no overt allusions to high politics. His dealings were with bureaucracy. The register records a tangle of low- to middle-level frustrations—reports, attestations, vouchers, certificates of civism and residence, formalities of all sorts. Salaries were two years in arrears. Petitions for their payment went unanswered, or if answered, unfulfilled. The professors went on lecturing anyway, most of them, even though there was no firewood to heat the classrooms. First the Departmental Directory said that no real estate taxes were 55 Mémoire des Professeurs du Collège de France, sur l’indivisibilité de leurs travaux (août 1793), BN, Mss. fran¸cais, 12,273, fols. 213–222. The preceding deliberations are recorded in the minutes for 21 July 1793 (Registre cit. n. 54, 3, fol. 69). My note 178, on p. 132 (Gillispie 1980), errs in attributing the memoir to Lalande, who only communicated it. It was drawn up by the three mentioned above on the basis of essays drafted by themselves, Bouchaud, and Bosquillon. 56 Registre, cit. n. 54, 6 May 1793, 3, fol. 68.

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due from a nationalized property. Then it said they were. There was no money to pay them. The cellars had to be ransacked for saltpeter in June 1794. Darcet (chemistry) undertook to oversee the crystallization, but Lalande had to find money to pay for it. On 17 September the chemistry and physics lecture rooms were placed under seal pending the inventory of all scientific apparatus ordered by the Committee of Public Safety after the dissolution of the Academy. Such were the daily, weekly, monthly concerns of running the Collège in the year II of the Republic. On 21 July 1793 the course program was decided for the semester that would begin in November. Delille (Latin poetry), Portal (anatomy), Cournaud (modern language and literature), Cousin (mechanics), Gail (Greek), Levesque (history and moral philosophy), and Bosquillon (Greek)—those seven undertook to give talks at the formal opening session, scheduled for 11 November. In the course of the autumn, the executive Commission d’Instruction Publique decided that the Collège should hold its public “rentrée” as usual. At the first staff meeting after the annual vacation, held on 29 October, the majority of professors judged it more suitable not to do so. Courses were given, however, not always as planned, but in one way or another. Some sixty medical students attended Portal’s lectures regularly. What attendance may have been in other courses is impossible to know with any confidence.57 Staff meetings occurred once a month as usual, though the number of professors dwindled unsteadily from the twelve to fifteen who would be present in normal times to the three brave or foolhardy souls, Lalande, Levesque, and Gail, who went through the motions on 29 May and 28 June 1794 at the height of the Terror. Lalande’s main task, through all these months, was to find substitutes for his colleagues, for which he had to obtain the approval of the Committee of Public Safety. Villebrune (Hebrew) was named librarian of the Bibliothèque Nationale and resigned in October 1793. His suggestion of a foreigner, a Polish rabbi called Zalkind Horowitz, to supply his teaching was rejected. Arrested were Cousin (mathematical physics) in January 1794, Poissonier (medicine and “doyen”) in February, Mauduit (mathematics) in June, Bouchaud (natural law and human rights) in July. In April the decree exiling former nobles from the capital forced Bosquillon (Greek and Hippocratic medicine) to leave Paris. Delille (Latin poetry), Ruffin (Turkish and Persian), and Raulin (medicine) took leaves of absence. A noted career began in those months. On 10 June 1794 J.-V. Corvisart replaced Raulin’s substitute in a chair of medicine, one Reitz, who had died. On 7 July Lalande submitted a memoir to the Commission d’Instruction Publique proposing the 57 AN, F17.3854. The register (1776–1809) in which students signed “present” at lectures is very spotty for 1793–94 (Collège de France, Archives A XIV, 8). The Affiches announcing courses (1711–94) may also be consulted in the archives of the college.

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program of courses for the following academic year, and requesting authority to name substitutes for absent and imprisoned members of the staff. The Commission promised him every assistance on the part of two members of its clerical staff, Thomas-Pascal Fourcade and Joseph-Fran¸cois Payan, but Fourcade was arrested and denounced Payan and his brother Claude. Claude Payan went to the guillotine on 10 thermidor. Fran¸cois fled Paris that day. On 29 July 1794, the same 10 thermidor, appears the only entry in Lalande’s minutes that mentions politics. It consists of a single sentence, written for once in bold letters: “The Revolution of 9 Thermidor and the Execution of the Tyrants Prevented the Meeting of 10 Thermidor.”58 Festivities amid huge relief marked the rentrée of 1 frimaire, the opening ceremony of the year III, held on 21 November 1794. 5. INDIVIDUAL DESTINIES

Apart from the eight to ten scientists whose mobilization forms the subject of the next chapter, most members of the scientific community were primarily preoccupied with their personal safety during the year of the Terror. Even among those engaged in war work, several, notably the mathematician Vandermonde and the chemists Guyton, Darcet, and Chaptal, were also in jeop´ ardy at moments. So, too, was Balthazar-Georges Sage, founder of the Ecole des Mines in 1783. It is possible that incompetence rather than scientific fraud was responsible for the negative esteem in which he was held within the Academy of Science. Neither faulty experiments, however, nor (what he suspected) the enmity of dominant chemists was responsible for his incarceration in the prison of l’Abbaye from 11 November 1793 to 3 February 1794. He was arrested because he had been well connected at Versailles and owed his election to the Academy of Science to the intervention of Louis XV.59 Of major figures, Jussieu and Lamarck in the life sciences, and Lagrange and Legendre in the exact sciences, appear to have traversed the entire Revolution unmenaced.60 Laplace was foremost among those who took the simple precaution of absenting themselves from Paris. Married in 1788, Laplace and his wife had two small children by late 1792. He too had been vilified by Marat in Les charlatans modernes, though less virulently than Lavoisier. As 58 All the above from the Registre, n. 54 above. See also AN, F17.3854 and F17.1337, dossier 4; F17.1219, dossier 3, for inventory of the chemistry and physics instruments. 59 There is a judicious article in the DSB by Henry Guerlac, 12 (1975), pp. 63–68. On Sage’s imprisonment, see AN, F7.47737. 60 Outram (1983) attempts a “prosopography” of scientists during the Terror. The figures would be more convincing if they did not include a number of people whose connection with science was honorific, and the argument that a “vocation” of science was a refuge from politics would carry more weight if some attention were given to the quality and content of science done before, during, and after the year II.

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early as 1782 Brissot had caricatured him as the haughty Newtonian idolater scorning the humble efforts of hands-on-nature experimenters such as Marat.61 Laplace was present for the last time at a meeting of the Academy of Science on 21 December. Soon thereafter, he moved his young family to a house he rented in Melun, thirty miles southeast of the city. He had thus been living away from Paris for the better part of a year when, on 8 December 1793, he was removed from the Metric Commission along with Lavoisier, Delambre, Borda, and Coulomb. It appears probable, and has sometimes been said, that this retreat enabled him to start the job of integrating the particular astronomical researches that had made his reputation into Traité de mécanique céleste, the Summa of theoretical astronomy, of which the first two volumes appeared in 1799. Concurrently he began summarizing the work verbally in the book that won him a worldwide public, Exposition du système du monde (1796).62 Only in 1795 did Laplace return to Paris in order to participate in founding the Institut de France and the Bureau des Longitudes. Immediately after the purge of the Metric Commission, Borda (a nobleman by birth) and Coulomb also removed themselves from Paris. Close friends and involved in each other’s research, they retired to a country house near Blois. The property, which Coulomb had purchased earlier in the year from Lavoisier, was situated in the southern reaches of the manor of Freschines.63 At the Jardin des Plantes, it will be recalled, the young Geoffroy SaintHilaire had barely rescued Haüy from the proto-Terror of the September massacres in 1792. The chair to which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was named when the Jardin was transformed into the Muséum in June 1793 would normally have gone to the veteran Lacepède, who had been forced to depart in March in accordance with the law exiling former noblemen from the capital. He withdrew to the country, there to continue the work on fish and amphibians that completed the life work of Buffon, his master and patron.64 During the September massacres, the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu also encountered what the Revolution he had initially supported held for priests such as Haüy and aristocrats such as himself. He was traveling with La Rochefoucauld-d’Enville, and the latter’s mother and wife, when the duke was dragged from their carriage near Gisors and assassinated while they watched. Dolomieu, an intimate of the household for many years, elected to remain at La Roche-Guyon to lend the ladies what protection he could for 61

J-.P. Brissot, De la vérité (Neuchâtel, 1782), p. 335. Gillispie (1997), pp. 166–175, 184–198. 63 Gillmor (1971), pp. 75–76. 64 Hahn (1975) gives an account of Lacepède’s rustication. The Fonds Cuvier, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, 209, contains an account of Lacepède during the Terror written by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire for Cuvier’s use in composing his e´loge. 62


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the next two years, until late in 1794.65 From there he contributed papers to the Journal de Physique and worked on a number of memoirs to be published in later years. Also of aristocratic, albeit illegitimate, birth, the abbé Pierre-André Latreille was barely at the beginning of the work in entomology that led from participation with Bosc and Olivier in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle to eventual collaboration with Cuvier in furnishing the third volume of Le Règne animal.66 Thinking to shelter himself in his native Brives during the Terror, he was nevertheless arrested as a non-juring priest, imprisoned in Bordeaux, and sentenced to deportation. He owed his release to the intervention of Bory de Saint-Venant and other local naturalists who (it is said) appreciated his identification of an unknown species of beetle in his cell.67 Cuvier, for his part, was yet but little known in the institution, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, that he came to dominate after his appointment in 1795. He became a French citizen involuntarily in 1793, when the Convention annexed the Lutheran enclave of Montbéliard, where he had been born. Educated in Stuttgart, Cuvier served the Norman family of d’Héricy as tutor from 1788 through 1794. During the years of revolutionary turmoil, he spent the summers on the beach at Fécamp collecting and dissecting the marine creatures with which he started his study of comparative anatomy. Like the Société Philomathique, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle held meetings regularly throughout the Terror, despite the absence of founding members of the Linnaean Society, its predecessor. For the most part they were well-born amateur naturalists with provincial roots whose sympathies had generally lain with the Revolution throughout its Girondist phase. Millin de Grandmaison, first secretary of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle and future librarian of the Bibliothèque Nationale, records working on a survey of natural history while his friends and fellow-prisoners, among them André Chénier, went to their deaths in the spirit of Socrates.68 Among those who had launched the Linnaean Society, Broussonet had the earliest shock. On 22 July 1789 he was with his patron, Bertier de Savigny, in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville when the latter was assassinated and decapitated. Broussonet served as a Girondist deputy in the Legislative Assembly and remained in Paris until the September massacres in 1792. He then thought it safer to return home to Montpellier. Local Jacobins thereupon accused him of federalism, and he spent a few days in prison. Released but insecure, he joined his brother, a military doctor with the army of the 65

Lacroix (1921) 1, pp. xxvi–xxviii; 2, pp. 53–54n. 4 vols., 1817. 67 Nussac (1907), 25–43. It behooves me to correct a “faux ami” that escaped the editorial process in the DSB, where the excellent brief article “Latreille” has him arrested as a priest who had never preached a sermon (“prêter serment”). 68 ´ Eléments d’Histoire Naturelle,” Magasin encyclopédique 3 (1795), 14–22. 66

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Pyrénées-Orientales, and crossed the border on 19 July 1794. Spanish naturalists welcomed him, and Sir Joseph Banks, his first patron, sent money from London. Earlier e´migrés considered him a revolutionary, however, and excluded him from the society of exiles. Somehow he came to know the American consul in Gibraltar, one Simpson, who in the course of a diplomatic mission in Morocco appointed Broussonet to be staff physician. There he remained, studying the flora, until his return to France in 1795. So fascinating did he find the country that he went back as French vice-consul in Mogador in 1797 and embarked upon the next phase of his career, which consisted of botanical explorations in North Africa, the Canary Islands, and the Cape of Good Hope. In a similar way, Bosc d’Antic found himself drawn into politics and diplomacy incidentally rather than by design. Owing to intimacy with the Rolands, he was named Postal Administrator under the Girondist ministry in the spring of 1792, at which time he also served a term as secretary of the Jacobin Club. Arrested on 31 May 1792, the day of the rising against the Girondists, Bosc was released within the week. He managed to hide Roland briefly and to arrange his escape from Paris, but not to prevent Madame Roland’s arrest. He then took refuge in a property he owned at SainteRadegonde in the forest of Montmorency. To ease his mind he worked on an account of the spiders in those woodlands.69 Before her execution, Madame Roland entrusted him with her memoirs and also with her thirteenyear-old daughter, Eudora.70 At first simply the girl’s protector, he proceeded to fall in love, though not she with a guardian old enough to be her father. Much cast down, Bosc sailed for Charleston, South Carolina, in 1796, thinking to collaborate with André Michaux on American botany. In June 1798 the Directory named him consul-general in Wilmington, North Carolina. What with the Citizen Genêt affair, President John Adams refused to accept his credentials. Disappointed again, Bosc returned to France in 1799, married a cousin, and resumed the career of a minor botanist throughout the Napoleonic regime and into the Restoration.71 Although the future Napoleonic prefect, Louis-Fran¸cois Ramond de Carbonnières, was active in topography, mineralogy, and botany, he appears to have refrained from joining the Société d’Histoire Naturelle. Like Brous69 His manuscript, “Araignées de la forêt de Montmorency décrites et dessinées pendant que j’étais caché a` Radegonde,” is conserved in the Bibliothéque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, MSS 872. The Fonds Cuvier, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, contains a manuscript autobiography. 70 Mémoires de Madame Roland: nouvelle édition critique, ed. Claude Perroud (2 vols., 1905), 2, pp. 455–459. 71 The Bosc dossier at the Archives of the Academy of Science is relatively informative. His papers are conserved at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and include a journal of his American misadventures.


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sonet, he was elected a deputy to the Legislative Assembly. A reluctant politician, he fell into disfavor with the left over his support of Lafayette as commander of the National Guard, and was further compromised by his ties to the princely cardinal de Rohan, whom he had served as private secretary in Strasbourg. Ramond left Paris for Barèges, the scene of his natural history of the Pyrenees, immediately after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792. There he resumed field work until he was arrested in Tarbès early in 1794. His is an eloquent testimonial to the consolations of natural history during the ten months he spent in a confinement that might end at any moment on the scaffold.72 A fellow Strasbourgeois paid a heavier price for his links with Lafayette. Philippe-Frédéric, baron de Dietrich, was first a corrrespondent and in 1786 associate member of the Academy of Science by virtue of his work in mineralogy. Locally a notable, he was elected first mayor of Strasbourg in 1790. A dinner he gave in honor of officers of the garrison afforded Rouget de l’Isle the first opportunity to perform the Chant de l’armée du Rhin, soon to become the Marseillaise. By conviction a constitutional monarchist, Dietrich protested the rising of 20 June 1792 in Paris and the overthrow of the monarchy that followed on 10 August. Denounced by the Jacobins, he was acquitted by the tribunal in Besan¸con. Robespierre considered him dangerous, however, and at his express instance Dietrich was transferred to Paris and condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 29 December 1793. Bailly yielded the mayoralty of Paris to Pétion on 18 November 1791, but could not quite bring himself to leave the political arena altogether. He served briefly as a member of the administrative council of the Department of Paris while also recording his Memoirs in the semi-retirement of life at home in Chaillot.73 The unfair blame he shared with Lafayette for the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars on 17 July 1991, exacerbated by journalistic jabs reminding the public of his pompous bearing while in office, blackened his image throughout the winter and spring of 1792. Lafayette went over to the Austrians in August 1792. Unwilling to appear guilty, Bailly rejected advice that he emigrate to London. Nevertheless, so menacing had the atmosphere become by June 1792 that he and Madame Bailly decided to absent themselves from the capital until the air should clear. Not knowing where they would alight, they set off in a carriage loaded with books and personal treasures. After days of wandering, they settled on Nantes, where the scientist and hero of the Oath of the Tennis Court was at first welcome. He was not forgotten in the Jacobin Club of Paris, however. In September 1793 the Convention included him in a list of counter-revolu72

Déherain (1905); cf. Outram (1983), p. 270, n. 18. Mémoires de Bailly (3 vols., 1821–22) in Collection de mémoires rélatifs a` la Révolution fran¸caise, ed. Berville et Barrière, vols. 8–10. See Fling (1902). 73

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tionaries to be kept under surveillance. As if on parole, he reported weekly to the Procurator-Syndic of Nantes. The Municipal Council of the Commune of Paris thereupon confiscated the quarters that four generations of his family had occupied in the Louvre. It further resolved that he owed back real estate taxes on his official residence as Mayor. Only by selling his library, the fine collection of an enlightened philosophe, could he pay the assessment. On 25 October an orator in the Jacobin Club demanded his head. Fearing lest he compromise his hosts, and also perhaps lest he be implicated in the revolt of the Vendée, Bailly resolved to leave Nantes in July 1793. Whether Laplace offered him asylum at Melun, or whether he asked for it, is uncertain. There, however, he and his wife repaired and rented a neighboring property. Two days later he was under house arrest. The Committee of Public Safety ordered him imprisoned in September. He was confined first in the Madelonettes, then in La Force, finally in the Conciergerie. Formally he was being held as a witness in the trial of Marie Antoinette. Her indictment included the (false) charge that Bailly had joined in plotting the escape of the royal family. In fact his own trial was a foregone conclusion. Anticipating the inevitable, Bailly spent his last days composing a memoir, J.-S. Bailly a` ses concitoyens. He there attests his belief in the rule of law. But “What then! Are magistrates to be prosecuted for having executed the laws? And who is the man who would dare serve as magistrate? What risks are you not running yourselves, my dear Fellow Citizens?”74 His trial was staged on 11 November. In short order Bailly was found guilty of conspiring with Louis Capet, Widow Capet, and others to disturb the peace, excite civil war (the reference is to Nantes), and subvert liberty. The Revolutionary Tribunal further ordered the guillotine moved to the Champ-de-Mars for his execution. Installing the machine on the ground of the massacre would have been a desecration. Instead, workers erected the scaffold in a muddy ditch alongside the terrain. An onlooker at the front of the hooting mob jeered, “You’re trembling.” Having shivered in the chilly rain for two hours, Bailly replied, “My friend, I’m cold.”75 Of the three most influential members of the Academy of Science at the end of the old regime, Vicq d’Azyr, Lavoisier, and Condorcet, none survived the Terror. The constitutional phase of the Revolution had, nevertheless, enabled Vicq d’Azyr to promulgate the charter for modern medical practice. The very wording of the Nouveau Plan de Constitution pour la Médecine en France bespeaks the impetus of 1789.76 His well-being ended with the presen74 BN, L41.b.862. A printer’s error gives the date as 1792 instead of 1793. Also in Mémoires 1, pp. 396–412, p. 410. 75 Mémories, 1, p. xxix. There are several versions of the anecdote, but the exchange is well attested. For Bailly’s last years and trial, see Smith (1954), 516–518; Kelly (1982), 198–210. 76 Above, chapter 1, section 4.


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tation of that document in November 1790. He had been named first physician to the Queen in 1788, having long served the comte d’Artois in a similar capacity. A privileged position at court gave him pleasure as well as leverage. In the Revolution it became a liability and, after the flight to Varennes, a mortal danger. However compromised, he was not the doctor who would abandon his patients, either Marie Antoinette herself or the courtiers who constituted most of his private practice. Other duties weighed upon him. Responsible for the Dictionnaire de médecine of the Encyclopédie méthodique, he saw two volumes through the press in 1790 and another three in 1791–92.77 Thereafter his main public occupation was service in the anatomy section of the Commission Temporaire des Arts, for which he became a wheelhorse. Beginning on 1 September 1793, meetings were scheduled weekly until adoption of the Republican calendar, and thereafter every décade. Members who were engaged in war work—Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, Darcet, and others—were seldom present. Vicq d’Azyr, having no other way to demonstrate civic spirit, attended assiduously. The numerous jobs he was given, few of which had anything to do with anatomy or medicine, ranged from the trivial to the objectionable. They were also onerous, often entailing an elaborate report. The minutes record some twenty-five ad hoc subcommissions on which he served in the nine months that wore him out prior to his death.78 With the model, though scarcely the content, of the Nouveau Plan in mind, his fellow commissioners named Vicq d’Azyr on 31 October 1793 to draw up a standard operating procedure.79 The first draft met with complaints on the part of a pair of ultra-Jacobins, the chemist Hassenfratz (“le Républicain”), leader of one of the anti-Girondist mobs on 31 May, and Dufourny (“l’Homme Libre”), Lavoisier’s successor as Gunpowder Commissioner, secretary of the Cordeliers Club, and a veteran of the Commission of 10 August. Vicq d’Azyr was thereupon instructed to collaborate with these two in preparing an acceptable proposal. Other assignments can scarcely have been more congenial than were such associates. One was an inventory of the manuscripts of the Academy of Science. Another, on 14 May 1784, added him to the Bibliography Section in order to examine the catalogues of the libraries of people who had emigrated or been executed. Among them were Bochart de Saron, his late colleague, and Hérault de Sechelles, the only member of the Committee of Public Safety to mount the scaffold. The purpose was to select titles suited to establishing a library for the use of the Committee of Public Safety. The same day the Commission des Arts re77

Chapter 1, section 4, n. 2. PVCTA, index. 79 AN ADVIII, 40, T. II, pièce 1. Instruction sur la manière d’inventorier et de conserver dans toute l’étendue de la République, tous les objets qui peuvent servir aux arts, aux sciences, et a` l’enseignement. See above, section 3, n. 9. 78

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solved to inquire of the prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal what had happened to the pocket chronometer, a chef d’oeuvre by Arnold of London, that Bochart de Saron was known to have been wearing when he was condemned. His guard was reported to have said that Saron had given it to the prison concierge.80 All the while the medical students, their numbers increased by the need for military doctors and surgeons, were following Pierre Desault’s clinical teaching in the wards and amphitheaters of the Hôtel-Dieu—as if voting with their feet for the new approach to medical education. It deepened Vicq d’Azyr’s chronic anxiety that Desault, even Desault, had been arrested on 23 May 1793 by order of the Luxembourg section. Only Fourcroy’s intervention, and a petition signed by fifty doctors, won his release after three days. Vicq d’Azyr attended his last meeting of the Commission des Arts on 3 June. On 20 prairial (8 June 1794), Robespierre staged his would-be apotheosis, the Festival of the Supreme Being. Vicq d’Azyr dared not stay home. He joined the march through blazing heat to the massing of the population on the Champ de Mars, there to listen to the harangue—“subir le discours” in one of the more telling of French locutions—and applaud. It was too much for him. Congestion in the lungs set in accompanied by raging fever. On 18 June the Commission Temporaire des Arts authorized another bibliographical subcommittee, this one to expropriate books from the Thierry collection, to proceed without him. He died in delirium on 20 June.81 In the matter of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, there is general agreement about three things. The first is that he was arrested as a member in the former General Tax Farm along with all other shareholders within reach of the police. The second is that academic colleagues, and he himself, failed in attempts to win an exemption, or at least a reprieve, on the grounds of his importance in technology. The third is that even in scientific circles the feeling for him among his peers partook of respect more than sympathy, while he was distinctly unpopular among lesser figures, the political class, and, insofar as he was known at all, the general public.82 On 20 March 1791 the National Assemby abolished the General Farm. The tolls, excise taxes, and customs duties it had collected and its monopoly over salt and tobacco were rescinded retroactively to 14 July 1789. The measure further required a commission of six former shareholders to close down the huge and complicated enterprise and wind up its accounts by 1 January 1793. Having been appointed a commissioner of the Treasury on 7 April 1791, Lavoisier was not party to negotiations over liquidation of the General 80

Ibid. 1, pp. 148, 178–179. Jacques-L. Moreau de la Sarthe, “Discours sur la vie et les ouvrages,” in his edition of Oeuvres de Vicq-d’Azyr, 6 vols., 1805, 1, pp. 1–88. 82 Poirier (1996), pp. 346–387, gives the fullest and most reliable account of Lavoisier’s arrest, trial, and execution. 81


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Farm. Bedeviled by recrimination, litigation, demands for refunds, and tens of thousands of claims by former employees seeking separation and pension payments, the affair dragged on past the deadline with no end in sight. Finally, on 24 November 1793, the Convention decreed the blanket arrest of onetime farmers general and associated tax collectors. They were to be confined together. Their papers were to be assembled. They were to be given a month in which to render and settle their accounts, failing which revolutionary justice would take its course. Warrants issued forthwith. Nineteen of the forty-one former farmers general were arrested the very day of the decree and incarcerated in the exconvent of Port Royal, now a prison renamed Port Libre. Lavoisier was not at first among them. On duty with the National Guard, he was absent from his apartment when the police arrived. Warned, he hid out for four days and nights, during which the usher of the Academy of Science sheltered him in its former quarters in the Louvre. From there he addressed two appeals, one to the Comité d’Instruction Publique, the second to the Committee of General Security. In both he pointed out that he had quit the General Tax Farm almost three years previously, and that he now served on the Commission on Weights and Measures. Accordingly, he requested from each committee a recommendation that the Convention exempt him from arrest, at least for the time being, in order that he might continue the latter work which, he ventured to say, was of some utility to the public. Neither committee replied. Lavoisier could simply have fled, whether to a hiding place in the country, as did certain other scientists, or abroad. He did neither. It is surmised that he felt an obligation, perhaps reinforced by his wife, not to desert her father, Jacques Paulze, who had been his patron when he first invested in the General farm in 1768, and who had also avoided arrest initially. However that may be, Lavoisier’s own temperament was such that he could never let go, nor accept that presentation of exact facts would not in the end prevail. At all events, on 28 November Lavoisier and Paulze reported to the entrance of Port Libre and surrendered. There they joined two hundred prisoners, twenty-seven of them former farmers general and a like number of former tax collectors. Conditions could have been worse. Many of the inmates were people of quality. Men and women were confined in different wards but allowed to dine together. Prisoners paid for their board, the food and wine were altogether acceptable, the company was congenial, and the atmosphere bordered on the convivial. Madame Lavoisier tipped the concierge and was able to pay visits and provide small luxuries. Lavoisier wrote reassuring notes. She must look after her own health and not exhaust herself. On the worst hypothesis, he had had a fine life while most of hers still lay before her. She had been a joy and comfort throughout—but they must still hope to be together again.

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Meanwhile, notifying the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers that he could not attend the next meeting, he offered to resign the chairmanship lest his situation compromise its standing. His colleagues in that body refused the resignation, though with the tepid response that they hoped his new occupations would not prevent his corresponding with them. The Commission on Weights and Measures, from which he expressly requested a testimonial, was more positive. Borda and Haüy addressed a petition to the Committee of General Security urging that Lavoisier’s participation in the verification of standards of measurement was indispensable to the success of the metric reform. The Committee rejected their plea, and at Prieur’s initiative (as we have seen), the Committee of Public Safety further barred that escape route by eliminating Borda, Lavoisier, Laplace, Coulomb, Brisson, and Delambre from the Commission of Weights and Measures. On 9 December Lavoisier turned to Fourcroy, once a disciple, now a deputy in the Convention, with two requests. The first had to do with unfinished business of the Academy of Science. Its safe contained over 50,000 livres, and Lavoisier alone knew the combination. In order to attend to that, he would need authorization from the Committee of General Security. He could then also give Fourcroy the file of unpublished memoirs as well as an accounting for its funds during his tenure as treasurer. It was very important that they be able to confer. The second item concerned the situation of the farmers general. They were requesting to be transferred to their onetime offices, where they would have access to the papers they required in order to settle their accounts. Lavoisier enclosed a copy of their petition and begged Fourcroy to read and support it on the floor of the Convention, or wherever appropriate. If Fourcroy answered, no record of his doing so has since come to light. The Convention did, nevertheless, order the imprisoned farmers general moved to their former headquarters in the rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré. Locksmiths had fitted the windows of the once elegant town house, now an austere office building, with impassable iron bars and secured its oaken portals with massive locks and bolts. Fourteen closely guarded carriages transported Lavoisier, his father-in-law, and their fellow financiers thither in the dark of a frigid Christmas night, 5 nivôse an II. Of amenities there were none, nor did they have any company but their gaolers’ and their own.83 Documentation there was, however, in abundance. The shareholders distributed themselves among several working parties. Each person went over the books recording collections and receipts for which he had been responsible. Working hours were 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:00 to 8:00 in the 83 ´ The daily experience of the imprisoned farmers general was vividly recorded by EtienneMarie Delahante, released at the last minute. It appears in his grandson’s account of the family, Adrien Delahante (1881) 2, pp. 263–315.


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evening, after which the entire group met daily in joint session to compare notes and report on progress. In one month the job was done. The books balanced and were ready for the Finance Committee of the Convention by 27 January 1794. On one matter the company acknowledged the appearance of a mistake. In March 1791 the National Assembly had authorized 48 million livres for the value of their warehouses and other installations. The books showed only 26.5 million livres. Lavoisier’s fellow prisoners accepted his advice to offer to repay the difference to the Treasury. All this time, they had not been told, and could not discover, what precise charges were to be leveled against them. We need not enter into that detail, which is clearly set out in the most recent and authoritative biography of Lavoisier.84 Suffice it to say that in sum the Farmers General were accused of embezzling and squandering 130 million livres, including the 21.5 million they claimed to be an honest error in bookkeeping. They were also said to have adulterated the tobacco sold to retailers by excessive moistening in order to increase the weight. Impartial scholars expert in financial history have concluded that these and lesser accusations were groundless. Tax collectors can never expect to be popular, of course. Nevertheless, shareholders in the General Farm were honest financiers and investors profiting from an entirely legal system that had become politically indefensible. In the old regime the exercise of what would later be considered public functions (of the sort which it is now, ironically enough, fashionable in certain circles to favor privatizing) were leased to capitalist enterprise. Farming out the collection of indirect taxes was simply the most odious instance of a set of practices imposed by the inability of a relatively rudimentary bureaucracy to handle the business of an early modern state. If corruption was a factor in the plight of the Farmers General, and it was, its locus was in the prosecution. Antoine Dupin, the Deputy who initiated the investigation in September 1793, had once served in the controller’s office of the General Farm. His job had ended under a cloud. Now a member of the Finance Committee of the Convention, he accused his exemployers of systematic, large-scale misappropriation of funds and moved that independent auditors scrutinize their accounts. The five auditors he named were anything but independent. Two of them had been caught stealing from cash drawers of the Farm and falsifying its books. The third was in their pay, and the other two had been minor clerks. They were to receive bonuses proportional to the sums their report would bring into the Treasury.85 The 187-page document furnished Dupin with the charges he presented to a joint meeting of the Accounting and Finance Committees of the Con84

Above, n. 59. See also Durand (1971), pp. 623–628. Poirier (1996), pp. 349–351, 361–365; Durand (1971), pp. 623–628; Durand (1976), pp. 301–308. 85

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vention on 3 May 1794.86 There is no record that the Finance Committee ever considered the accounts that the Farmers General had submitted over three months previously, on 27 January. Nor would Dupin receive the detailed and very technical memoir that in the interval Lavoisier prepared in refutation of what hearsay and gossip led his associates to surmise the charges would be.87 Instead, the joint committees put the Dupin incriminations before the Convention on 5 May 1794. At 4:30 that afternoon the Convention voted to send the Farmers General before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Wagons arrived at the door of their office-become-prison at 7:00 in the evening and carried them through dark streets and across the Pont Neuf to the Conciergerie the same night. From his cell there Lavoisier addressed his last letter to a cousin: I have achieved a fairly long career, and above all a very happy one, and I believe my memory will be attended by some regret, and perhaps a little glory. What more could I desire? The events in which I am involved will probably spare me the drawbacks of old age. I shall die in possession of all my powers, and that is another advantage I must count among the many I have enjoyed. . . . It is, therefore, true that, practicing all the social virtues, rendering important services to the country, and leading a career useful to the progress of the arts and crafts and of human knowledge, these do not suffice to avert a grim end or the appearance of a guilty death.88 The obscene travesty of a trial occupied the morning and early afternoon of Thursday, 8 May. Attended by giggling and cat-calling spectators, it occurred before a judge and two assessors, well supplied with wine, behind whose dais was displayed a copy of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen flanked by busts of Marat, Le Peletier, and Brutus. In inevitable and undue course the accused were convicted of conspiring against the French people and favoring the success of the enemies of France. The penalty was death. Others besides the original nineteen had meanwhile been apprehended, though an additional fourteen never were arrested. Tumbrils conveyed the twenty-eight Farmers General without delay across the Pont au Change and along the Right Bank quays past the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Place de la Révolution, now de la Concorde. Paulze was the third to 86 Rapport des commissaires réviseurs des trois compagnies des Finances aux représentants du peuple chargés de surveiller leurs travaux, et lu aux comités des Finances et de Comptabilité, par Motet, Châteauneuf, Jacquart, Gadot, Vernon (1794). 87 “Réponse aux inculpations faites contre les ci-devant fermiers-généraux” (1794), in OL 6, pp. 570–662. 88 Lavoisier to Augez de Villers, quoted in Poirier (1993), pp. 400–401 from Journal du Lycée des Arts (1795), no. 3, pp. 229–230.


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mount the scaffold and Lavoisier the fourth. Thirty-five minutes sufficed to dispatch them all. In the preceding months, efforts to exempt one or another of the company had succeeded in four instances. Jean-Fran¸cois Verdun de Montchiroux, the father-in-law of a member of the Committee of Public Safesty, Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, was liberated without notice from the rue de Grenelle. In the very midst of the trial a reprieve signed by the President of the Convention ordered the release of three junior associates, one of whom, Etienne Delahante, was related to the interrogating judge. Lavoisier and others had made further attempts to secure his own freedom during the weeks of uncertainty between late January and early May. His apologia is in the Archives of the Academy of Science. It opens with one sentence on chemistry, but emphasizes his agricultural experiments before enlarging on his political involvements in Orléans, the Constituent Assembly, and the Commune of Paris; his participation in the National Guard; and his services to the Currency Committee, the Public Health Committee, the Treasury, and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers.89 On 18 April Lavoisier wrote again to the latter, expressly requesting a testimonial of his loyalty. This time, meeting on 22 April, they adopted a resolution attesting his eminence in science, his contributions to technology, his reputation throughout Europe, and the honor he had brought to France.90 They limited themselves to furnishing Lavoisier with a copy of the minutes in which the resolution was entered, and did not ask for his release. In the chair was Lagrange, not a Frenchman, who rarely lent his name to anything of the slightest political import throughout a lifetime in analytical mechanics. The Currency Committee (Assignats et Monnaies) of the Convention did expressly request that Lavoisier be liberated. His counsel was essential in the effort to thwart counterfeiters.91 Two successors in the Gunpowder Administration, Le Faucheux and Jacques-Pierre Champy, also urged reprieve in order to enable Lavoisier to prepare a report on the administration of that agency, which was of cardinal importance to prosecution of the war. A couple of chemists from the pharmaceutical wing of the science, Cadet and Baumé, who had never accepted the oxygen theory, certified that Lavoisier had opposed the excessive watering of the Farm’s tobacco. At nearly the last moment a delegation from the Lycée des Arts headed by Desaudray, enemy of the Academy though he had been, arrived in the hall of the Conciergerie to present Lavoisier with a metal wreath bedecked with stars in token of his encouragement of artisans. None of this had the slightest effect. To judge retrospectively that it 89 90 91

Fonds Lavoisier, no. 1724, printed in Poirier (1993), pp. 489–490. Lavoisier, OL 4, pp. 713–715. AN, AFII.67.496, pièce 3.

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should have had poses an ethical question. Would political morality have been advanced by sparing one of twenty-eight unjustly executed people because he was a scientist? However that may be, the scientists best placed politically to succor Lavoisier were Monge, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Hassenfratz, Vandermonde, and Berthollet, all serving the Committee of Public Safety in war production, all former colleagues and close collaborators in the laboratory, all except Berthollet active and inflential in the Jacobin Club. With the possible exception of Fourcroy, none said a word or lifted a finger. Perhaps they agreed that participation in the General Farm was properly a capital offense. Perhaps they feared for themselves. Perhaps they simply averted their gaze, finance being none of their concern. Or all of the above. Guyton was sufficiently disturbed by the imputation of having condoned the death of Lavoisier that he justified himself in a letter to his German colleague, Lorenz von Crell, editor of the widely circulated Chemische Annalen. Although a deputy to the Convention, he had ever, claimed Guyton, steered clear of faction. From April until late July, he continued, he had been on a mission to the Army in Belgium perfecting the aerostatic machinery of which he had directed the development in the weapons laboratory of Meudon. Only on returning to Paris after 9 thermidor did he learn of Lavoisier’s execution, and also of the guillotining of Buffon’s son, at whose wedding contract he and Daubenton had been witnesses six months previously.92 He himself, he further discovered, had been under suspicion. Fourcroy’s actions, or lack thereof, are the most parlous case. His reputation has ever since been tarnished by the imputation, put about at the time and fixed in the literature by Lavoisier’s first biographer, Edouard Grimaux, that he never stirred to save the master to whom he owed his career and prosperity.93 Fourcroy later claimed privately to have done so, but without avail since Lavoisier’s fate was settled along with that of all the Farmers General.94 An unpublished memoir by André Laugier, a cousin, gives more detail. According to his account, on one of the two days that the farmers general languished in the Conciergerie, Fourcroy burst into the room in the Pavillon de Flore where the Committee of Public Safety was meeting, Robespierre in the chair, and set forth in a passionate and eloquent manner what an appalling loss to science Lavoisier’s death would entail. He was heard in silence, but Robespierre’s reaction afterward was so menacing that 92 Guyton-Morveau, Berichtigung wegen der angeblichen Miturheber von Lavoisier’s Tod. BN, 8 Oct. Ln27.9473. 93 Grimaux (1891), pp. 310–312. 94 ´ Palisot de Beauvois, Eloge historique de M. Fourcroy, BN, 8 oct.Ln27.7827. Also Daumas (1958), p. 274.


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Prieur followed him to the corridor and warned him never to say more if he valued his head.95 Scholars and scientists worthy of attention have found the story credible and the case for Fourcroy convincing.96 They point out that another fellow chemist, Jean Darcet, who incurred several denunciations because of his association with the entourage of the duc d’Orléans, credited Fourcroy with having incurred considerable risk in preventing his arrest.97 He was also said to have protected Vicq d’Azyr.98 All that may be so. Or it may not. The argument would be stronger if Fourcroy’s conduct generally had been marked by greater constancy. He took the lead in proposing two political purges, first of the Academy of Science in August 1792 and second of the membership of the Lycée de la rue de Valois in December 1793.99 Those initiatives, the first of which failed, were in keeping with the leftward political movement that culminated in Fourcroy’s election to Marat’s seat in the Convention. To all outward appearances, he was a thoroughgoing Montagnard prior to the fall of Robespierre. The opinions he then professed were not, however, consistent with his eloquent—he was always eloquent— lament over the loss of Lavoisier in an e´loge before the Lycée des Arts in August 1796. He there decried governance by Terror at a time when it was not only safe, but virtually incumbent, to do so.100 Fourcroy, to be fair, was far from alone in this sea change. Many other onetime Jacobins were both frightened for themselves, as he confessed to have been, and truly appalled by the monstrous implementation of principles they once had favored. In one respect Fourcroy was perfectly consistent in his politics. Under all regimes, he went with the political wave front.101 To conclude, there is a story, nonetheless canonical for being false, that the prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Fouquier-Tinville, dismissed a last appeal to spare Lavoisier with the statement, “The Republic has no need of scientists.” Lagrange’s remark the next day was not apocryphal, however, and may be taken as the last word: “They needed only an instant to cut off 95 Gillispie (1956b), pp. 54–55. The Laugier account, “Notice sur Fourcroy, ećrite par une personne de sa famille,” was furnished to Cuvier for use in the preparation of the latter’s e´loge. It is conserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fonds Cuvier, Carton I, dossier 191, pièce 2. Cuvier made no mention of the story in the published e´loge. 96 Daumas (1958); Kersaint (1966), pp. 72–74. 97 Michel J.J. Dizé, Précis historique sur la vie et les travaux de Jean d’Arcet (an X, 1802), p. 24. 98 Desgenettes to Cuvier, undated. Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fonds Cuvier, 148, pièce 3. 99 Above, chapter 3, section 5; Kersaint (1958). 100 Fourcroy, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Lavoisier, lue le 15 thermidor an IV (2 August 1796) devant le Lycée des Arts. 101 For judgments favorable to Fourcroy’s conduct, see Thibaudeau, who served with him on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, (1824) 1, pp. 75–76; Chevreul (1860), p. 50.

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that head, but a hundred years may not suffice to reproduce one comparable.”102

6. THE CALVARY OF CONDORCET

At the end of the day on 10 August 1792, the violent day that closed with the royal family in custody and the Assembly marginalized by the Commune of Paris, Condorcet made his way home to the suburban semi-retreat where he had taken the precaution of installing his family. In 1786, at the age of forty-three, still shy, ever gauche, Condorcet had astonished his friends, who had predicted for him the lifelong celibacy of a d’Alembert, by wooing and marrying the beautiful and appealing Sophie de Grouchy, twenty-one years his junior. Contrary to all malicious predictions, the marriage proved happy in every respect. Philosophic in spirit, gifted with literary taste, Madame de Condorcet presided in their apartment at the Mint over the last salon favored by liberal Paris in the old regime. It was noted for serious conversation, not for wit. There on the Quai de Conti would foregather the future idéologues, the physician Georges Cabanis, the civil servants Joseph Garat and Louis Ginguené, the arabist and historian Fran¸cois de Volney, the philosopher Benjamin Constant, in company with the reform-minded aristocrats Lafayette and La Rochefoucauld, with the Americans Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin Bache, with the British writer David Williams and with many a thoughtful foreigner passing through Paris—Cesare Beccaria, Adam Smith, Tom Paine. In the spring of 1790 Sophie gave birth to a daughter, Eliza —thus, incidentally, further confounding Condorcet’s detractors. It was some weeks after the insurrection of 20 June 1792, the dress rehearsal in effect for 10 August, that Condorcet moved his young family away from the disorders of central Paris and took lodgings in Auteuil, pleading their child’s need for fresh air and a place to play. The location was familiar in every sense. A near neighbor was Madame Helvétius, intellectual materfamilias of the Turgot discipleship. Sharing her house was Cabanis, who married Sophie’s younger sister, Charlotte, after Condorcet’s death. Though not included in the expulsion of the Girondists on 2 June 1793, Condorcet ceased to attend the rump Convention dominated by the Mountain. Instead, pertinacious to the last, not to say quixotic, he flew in the face of the gathering Jacobin dictatorship by launching, of all things, a journal of popular social science. It is difficult to imagine anything more tamely inappropriate to the circumstances in which it was published than the Journal 102

´ Delambre, “Eloge de Lagrange,” MIF (1812), p. xiv.

V. 6. THE CALVARY OF CONDORCET

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d’instruction sociale par les citoyens Condorcet, Sieyès et Duhamel (1793).103 Six numbers appeared weekly, beginning on 1 June, the day before the purge of the Girondists. Its subject matter, explained Condorcet’s prospectus, was to be the science of man in society. The new discipline had three branches, natural law, political law, and political economy. Each consisted of a body of principles together with the techniques of applying them to the sectors, respectively, of personal conduct, “the social art,” and administration. The journal would be addressed to Everyman, or at least to everyone at all given to thinking: “It will be at the level both of twelve-year olds, if their education has not been neglected, and equally of the least enlightened of men, if they are able to apply their minds enough to inform themselves”104 —thus Condorcet, a democrat ever, the common touch never, marquis in spite of himself. Adult readers would be found among the popular societies, “which have served the cause of liberty so well.” Neither true liberty nor justice could thrive in the absence of real equality, and there could be no equality in a society unless everyone had access to the knowledge needed to run one’s life: “Equal stupidity is no equality at all, for there can be none between a cheat and his dupe, and any society that is not enlightened by philosophers is deceived by charlatans.” Of that malevolent genus, always the blackest of Condorcet’s bêtes noires, the political species was the type to be combatted here. Not all were of the stature of a Caesar or a Cromwell. Still, no tyranny had ever been established, or maintained, except through error.105 How, then, did Condorcet propose to dissipate the prejudices of the past compounded by the passions of the present? What did the French people need to know that they might see through Marat? What truths were to be put before them that would preclude Robespierre’s reincarnating Cromwell? (The identity of Caesar’s surrogate cannot have yet been known to Condorcet in the person of a Corsican junior artillery officer even then making his mark in the liberation of Toulon from British occupation.) Whistling in the dark alongside Condorcet, Sieyès contributed an essay on the correlation between liberty and representative government and a three-part presentation of a further unsuccessful scheme for education, in this case the plan proposed to the Convention by the Committee of Public Instruction on 25 June.106 The third collaborator, Jules-Michel Duhamel, a specialist in linguistics, was an instructor in the school for deaf-mutes, one of the remarkable creations of medical philanthropy in the last years of the old regime. He contributed an essay on terminology in the framing of a 103 104 105 106

EDHIS has published a facsimile reprinting (1981). Journal d’instruction sociale, Prospectus, 6. Ibid., pp. 9–10. Above, p. chapter 2, section 6.

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constitutional polity together with a two-part preface to a projected work on the uses of the French language in moral and political philosophy. Close in spirit to Condorcet, Duhamel considered that once social science is founded on a basis as certain as geometry, mistaken calculation will no longer lead people astray with respect to their interests: “When a question is proposed and a solution is to be found, the only dissidents will be those who have not followed the discussion.”107 As for Condorcet himself, the first number of the journal came entirely from his pen. It consisted of three articles, on the meaning of the word “revolutionary,” on progressive taxation, and on elections. The second issue contains an essay on his favorite proposition, “That all classes of society have only one and the same interest.” Finally Condorcet composed still another abstract, a Tableau Général, of what he now called “social mathematic,” grouping arithmetic, geometry, and analysis under the singular of the covering word, and preferring the qualifier “social,” a more precise term, to the usual “moral and political.” The concluding sentence concerns the prejudices forever cropping up in political economy: “Let us dare hope that, when they are attacked by reason and calculation, we shall no longer have to fear these unexpected resurrections, these oscillations between truth and error.”108 The sixth number of this high-minded and forlorn gesture of a journal appeared on 6 July. A note on the last page advises its public that the periodical is being suspended. The publisher and authors feel that they can scarcely be held responsible, given the circumstances. Nevertheless, any subscribers who considered themselves ill-used would receive refunds. The readers, and it is hard to imagine that there were many, or perhaps any, scarcely needed to be reminded of the circumstances: the monarchical powers of Europe leagued against the French Republic; military reverses on all frontiers, in the Pyrenees, in the Alps, on the Rhine, to the North; a rallying against Paris and the Jacobins among Girondist “fédérés” in control of major provincial centers—Bordeaux, Lyons, Caen, Marseilles, Toulon; the occupation of the left bank of the lower Loire by the counter-revolutionary partisans in the Vendée; the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday on 13 July; the gathering into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety of the dictatorial powers that the same twelve members were to exercise throughout the year of Terror, from July 1793 to July 1794. Condorcet’s last months were a triumph of selflessness, courage, and intellectual integrity. Following the expulsion of the Girondists on 2 June, he and his fellow deputies from l’Aisne had drawn the suspicion of the Committee of General Security upon themselves by joining in an address to their 107 108

Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 184.


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constituents deploring in measured terms the purge of the Convention. In no way measured was Condorcet’s indignant excoriation of the travesty of a constitution approved by the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June.109 Thrown together in a week by an ad hoc committee consisting of Hérault de Séchelles, Saint-Just, Romme, Mathieu, and Couthon, none of whom had any qualification in constitutional law, it was adopted on 24 June with virtually no debate by a Convention that had ignored what he considered his own deepest contribution to the Republic, a carefully thought out Constitution based on mature reflection, expert knowledge, sound principle, and faith in the people. Condorcet did not put his name to this broadside, but there could be no doubt about the identity of the author: “Frenchmen, he who addresses these reflections to you owed you the truth, and he has said it.”110 Its publication gave his enemies the opening they had not yet found. On 8 July, Fran¸cois Chabot, a former Capuchin become a hatchet man for the Committee of General Security, demanded the arrest “of this man who, because he has sat at the side of certain savants of the Academy, thinks it his place to give laws to the French Republic: of Condorcet.”111 Deaf to the tentative objections of a single deputy pleading freedom of the press, the Convention voted the arrest of Condorcet together with one of his fellow representatives of l’Aisne, who was said to have joined in stirring up trouble there and in inciting the department to send an armed force against Paris. By a remarkable coincidence, the name of that colleague was—de Vérité! Condorcet’s intimates had several hours of warning, just enough so that the agents of the Committee of General Security failed to find him either at his pied-à-terre in Paris, 505 rue de Lille, or at home in Auteuil. Cabanis, Pinel, and Boyer, physicians all three, arranged a hiding place for him in the boarding house where the latter two had lodged as students, 21 rue des Fossoyeurs, now rue Servandoni. The street is a small one, running between Saint-Sulpice and the Luxembourg garden. Madame Vernet, the proprietress, widow of a sculptor whose cousin was the famous painter Horace Vernet, carried good sense to the level of heroism. Would she shelter a proscript? “Is he virtuous?” she is said to have asked, learning his name from Pinel and Boyer only as they left the house after installing Condorcet in the room on the court that he occupied for the next nine months. Almost old enough to be his mother—Condorcet called her his “seconde mère”—Madame Vernet was the last of the several fine women who, beginning with Julie de Lespinasse, felt his goodness and protected him. The whole story is a reminder, among many other things, that while the 109 110 111

“Aux citoyens fran¸cais sur la nouvelle constitution,” Oeuvres 12, pp. 653–675. Ibid., p. 675. Extrait du Moniteur du 10 juillet 1793, in Condorcet, Oeuvres 12, pp. 677–682.

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revolutionary drama held center stage, daily life in Paris, as in any city in time of crisis, went on behind closed doors, with men going to their work and housewives to market, with tables being set, meals provided, clothes washed and ironed, and beds made. Officialdom, in whatever form, can only be inimical to the well-being of a household and is kept at arm’s length. So it was rue des Fossoyeurs. Two other lodgers were a cousin of Madame Vernet, a minor mathematician called Sarret, and a supernumerary deputy in the Convention, one Marcoz, montagnard in his political sympathies and also a mathematics teacher by profession. Sarret could be trusted. Marcoz would have recognized Condorcet at first sight, and Madame Vernet had no choice but to take him into their confidence. He did not betray it. On the contrary, he brought Condorcet newspapers and kept him informed of events. A second, unnamed refugee and a reliable servant girl completed the ménage. Condorcet had visitors in his retreat. Cabanis and his friends, streetwise in choosing their moments, stopped in bringing him books, paper, ink, conversation. For the first months, Sophie herself, choosing a different route each time, came with news of their daughter and whatever comforts she could manage. Money was wanting, for Condorcet’s goods had been seized, and after selling her jewels, Sophie set up shop in the Rue St. Honoré as a miniaturist, specializing in proud portraits of the son of a family going off to war in the uniform of the Republic. She it was who persuaded Condorcet to put aside the bitter vindication of his conduct as a republican that he had begun composing and to devote his working hours instead to the essay he had long intended, which became Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. He regularly spent the mornings on his writing. Dinner was at mid-day. During the afternoons, he read the press, studied his favorite authors, and talked mathematics or other subjects with Sarret, Marcoz, and his visitors. The evenings between eight to ten found him back at his desk, changing off between his historical work and problems of the integral calculus, to which he had recurred from time to time throughout the years of political involvement. He then tried to relax with Madame Vernet and Sarret until bedtime. Condorcet completed the first draft of The Progress of the Human Mind in early October, constantly aware of the toils tightening around his refuge and his loved ones. Formally, he was not yet a condemned man. The warrant that sent him into hiding had been for his arrest. On 3 October, however, the Committee of General Security included him among accomplices of the Girondist deputies arrested on 2 June. The trial started before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 24 October; the thirty-two defendants were convicted on the thirtieth; beginning at one o’clock the next afternoon, they were guillotined one after the other in a spectacle that lasted precisely thirty-eight minutes. Three among them, Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet, had been close


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friends of Condorcet. All had been his fellows as founders of the Republic. Condorcet’s own status was henceforth that of an outlaw condemned to death. Hardest to bear was the blow that struck home. Persons absent from their domicile and unaccounted for after six months were presumed to have emigrated. Local authorities were then to confiscate all family property. In order that their daughter not start life a pauper, Sophie saw no alternative but to go through the formality of a divorce, devastate her though it did to request that of the husband who adored her and to whom in the same letter she swore eternal devotion, and truly so. The serenity that distinguishes the Progress of the Human Mind was an artistic effect; it reflected no counterpart in Condorcet’s own state of mind. As the Terror intensified, visitors no longer dared pay calls. The law that Saint-Just put before the Convention on 23 ventôse an II (13 March 1794) required the punishment of outlaws to be extended to anyone guilty of sheltering them. Were Condorcet to be apprehended, Madame Vernet would accompany him to the guillotine. Possession of his letters would equally inculpate Sophie. On 24 March a mysterious stranger passed by rue des Fossoyeurs, ostensibly giving notice of an impending search by saltpetermen, but seeming to mean some other kind of visitation to be expected. Condorcet resolved that, however slight his chance of escaping capture, he could no longer endanger those dear to him. In the morning of Saturday, 25 March, unknown to Madame Vernet, Condorcet slipped out the door in company with Sarret, who stayed with him as far as the plain of Montrouge, well beyond the city limits. Dressed in rough costume, he had no passport, no papers of any sort, and very little money. His hope was to find temporary shelter with old and once close friends who had a large house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, at a distance of some ten kilometers. J.-B. Suard was a scrivener rather than a writer in any creative or philosophic sense. Still, he was of the Académie Fran¸caise, wherein Condorcet and he had been colleagues. A typically eighteenth-century correspondence between Condorcet and Madame Suard, the sister of the publisher Panckoucke, has recently been published.112 It was mildly affectionate prior to his marriage with Sophie, deeply resented by Amélie Suard. The couples had further differed over revolutionary politics, the Suards adhering to the monarchy. The Saturday afternoon was well advanced when Condorcet knocked at their door. The Suards were in Paris for the weekend. Not daring to leave his name with the maid, he spent two cold March nights and all the intervening Sunday out of doors, returning on the Monday morning. His rejec112

Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et Madame Suard, 1771–1791, ed. Elisabeth Badinter (Fayard, 1988).

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tion at their hands was not, perhaps, quite as outright as has sometimes been said. They provided a meal, and Suard returned to Paris to try to arrange for identification papers with J.-D. Garat, then Minister of the Interior and a mutual friend from the old days of the Turgot circle. Condorcet was to come back to see whether the démarche had succeeded. For the Suards did fail to give him shelter. Frail and exhausted as he was, they let him go off unshaven and unwashed into the countryside. Around two in the afternoon, he stumbled into an inn in Clamart-le-Vignoble and ordered an omelette. Suspicious, the innkeeper, who was also commander of the local militia, and two other customers, one the head of the popular society, asked to see his papers. Since he had none, who, then, was he? “Pierre Simon,” mumbled Condorcet, using the name of the husband of Eliza’s nurse, which was also—was it mere coincidence?—the given name of Laplace. Whatever the reason for choosing it, he claimed to be a native of Ribemont (Aisne). Once a valet de chambre for Trudaine, the intendant of finance, and also for Dionis du Séjour, he was (he said) looking for work. Inevitably, he was arrested. His legs would no longer carry him, and his ´ captors commandeered a cart to transport him to prison in Bourg-Egalit´ e. On the second afternoon, his identity still unknown, the warder found him lifeless on the floor of his cell. His body was face down. Blood had oozed from the nostrils. In after years it was said that he had taken a poison with which Cabanis had long since provided him against just such an eventuality. The probability is overwhelming, however, and it is the general consensus, that Condorcet, never robust, completely worn out, was saved from the guillotine by a stroke. Condorcet had confided the manuscript of The Progress of the Human Mind to Sarret. It was published, in an agony of making amends, at the expense of the French Republic in 1795, a little over a year after his death. It will not do to read it, in the way that undergraduates are often made to do, merely as a text bearing quaint and pathetic witness to the optimism of the Enlightenment. Let us, instead, follow Condorcet’s example in the writing of the essay and abstract it from the circumstances, reviewing the propositions as timelessly as may be. Like the authors of certain other cardinal statements, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, say, or On the Origin of Species, Condorcet intended the essay as a preface to an exhaustive work (seldom read in Kant’s case, never written and unneeded in Darwin’s) in which the themes would be developed. The vision is of universal history over the long term. It is hardly thinkable that Condorcet’s compatriots among historians of our own day should have consciously found in him their model. Nevertheless, the full rubric of their famous organ, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, could equally well be taken to indicate the purview of his discourse, and their practice is quite consistent with his mode of presentation. There is no narrative of events (he


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supposes them to be known), nor any exposition of ideas (he takes them to be understood). Those two sets of elements are the givens of a historical analysis that Condorcet brings to bear on the relation of knowledge to power. For the distinguishing characteristics of humanity are the capacity for knowledge and the necessity of living in society, and his purpose is “to study in all countries the human race as modified by the long influence of natural causes or social institutions.”113 Periodization being to the historian what classification is to the naturalist, Condorcet divides the historic process into nine stages, each defined by the state of knowledge or, in the first three (the tribal, pastoral, and agricultural), of technique. In conclusion he extrapolates his generalizations into a tenth stage, the future. Rather than following step by step, it may be more illuminating to throw into relief the main motifs. A central theme is language, on which Condorcet is altogether more concrete and various than is the highly abstract analysis of a Condillac or of the theorists of general grammar. To be sure, Condorcet begins with what had become a banality of associationist psychology: all our ideas derive from sensations, and the capacity to communicate experience through language permits the transition from savagery to society at the dawn of history. Not for Condorcet, however, the reductionist commonplace that the ultimate science is a well-made language. Discussing the success of denotative taxonomy in natural history, he warns, “We have sometimes seen men, in their pride so very conscious of the toil these methods have cost them, take for the science itself what is merely its dictionary and its grammar.”114 In an important respect, he falls into the appearance of a contradiction. On the one hand he welcomes the replacement of Latin by the vernacular during his Eighth Stage, which covered the interval between the invention of printing and the overthrow of authority by philosophy and science: “We shall show that . . . the existence of a sort of scientific language, the same for all nations, alongside the different languages spoken by the ordinary people of each country, would have divided men into two classes, would have perpetuated prejudice and error, and would have placed an irremovable obstacle in the way of true equality in the use of reason and in the acquisition of necessary truths.”115 In another passage, on the other hand, a prophetic reverie on cosmopolitanism offers this speculation: Perhaps it would be useful today to invent a written language reserved exclusively for the sciences which would express only the combinations 113 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, tran. June Barraclough (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), p. 104. References are to this excellent edition, in the Library of Ideas series. 114 Ibid., p. 155. 115 Ibid., p. 118.

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of those simple ideas that are the same for every mind. Used only for the reasoning of strict logic and for the precise and calculated operations of the understanding, such a language could be understood by the people of every country. It could be translated into every vernacular and would not have to be altered, as happens now, when it passed into general use. So by a strange revolution this type of writing, the survival of which would only have helped to prolong ignorance, would now become, in the hands of philosophy, a useful tool for the propagation of enlightenment and for the perfection of scientific method.116 As we have seen, just such a privileged niche for science opened Condorcet’s plan for public education to the charge that the system would create a new priesthood of scientists, armed with knowledge instead of mere belief, and thus more invidious than the clergy of old. Condorcet’s thinking, it has to be admitted, gave grounds for that objection, despite a concluding passage that attempts to obviate it.117 For it was precisely by monopolization of arcane language in the first, the tribal, stage of history that priests had preempted their control over doctrine: I refer to the formation of a class of men who are the depositaries of the principles of the sciences or the procedures of the arts, of the mysteries or ceremonies of religion, of the practices of superstition, and often even of the secrets of legislation and politics. I refer to the separation of the human race into two parts; the one destined to teach, the other made to believe; the one jealously hiding what it boasts of knowing, the other receiving with respect whatever is condescendingly revealed to it; the one wishing to place itself above reason, the other humbly renouncing its own reason and abasing itself to less than human stature by acknowledging in others prerogatives that would place them above their common nature.118 The malign role of the priests is central to Condorcet’s interpretation of history. Only despotism and exploitation could be expected of rulers and feudal lords, the other two elements in the “triple tyranny of kings, warriors, and priests” under which “the people groaned” from the dark ages until the Enlightenment.119 Priests as a class are worse than oppressive, however. They are perverse. Such learning as they possess they prostitute. They propagate what is false (the rigmarole of divinity, law, and prescription) and conceal what is true 116 117 118 119

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

pp. 7–8. p. 198. pp. 17–18. p. 81.


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(the rights of man), all in service to power. A later passage puts the dichotomy of humanity this way: “Two races, the one fated to rule, the other to obey, the one to deceive, the other to be deceived.”120 The linkage of secular and clerical authority had largely succeeded, moreover, in keeping humanity in error and ignorance, the preconditions of subjection, until the light of science began to shine, into the heavens at first and eventually across all the face of nature. In order to be free, a people, all of it, must know the truth— and not merely for the sake of making informed choices in electoral procedures. That science could ever serve tyranny was as contrary to Condorcet’s very definitions as it would have been to Rousseau’s to admit that the General Will could be despotic. In the eyes of either, any such appearance must spring from error. Still, as the modern reader may reflect, any durable work of history is better than the argument that motivated it. He will find that frequent, and often unexpected, insights repay a careful reading of the Progress of the Human Mind. To begin with, Condorcet gives a very just appreciation of individual Greek thinkers. He is excellent, for example, on the almost paradoxical combination of literary charm and intellectual rigor in Plato, “a philosopher who gives rein to his imagination without allowing himself to be carried away by it.”121 With respect to oratory in Greece and Rome, he specially admires, more than a little ruefully, “the art of composing extemporary speeches in which the ordering of the divisions, the method of exposition and the imagery are all at least tolerable, of addressing an audience, without any previous preparation and yet without bewildering them with a string of disordered ideas and a rambling style, without offending them with extravagant declamation, uncouth nonsense and fantastic incongruities.”122 He respects the civilization of the Arabs, whom he calls a nation, for taking up the torch of science and learning, and he applauds their natural generosity of spirit, which “long resisted superstition and despotism in Spain.”123 He views the discoveries overseas as a disaster for the native peoples “which will have repaid humanity what they have cost it only when Europe renounces her oppressive and avaricious system of monopoly.”124 Condorcet sees that in the Middle Ages technology preceded science. His remarks on the sociological aspects of the printing and distribution of books might be reprinted as a charter for a recent research program. No less pertinent to the modern practice of social history is his contrast between the history of politics and of societies. The former has been concerned with only a few individuals, for which “it is enough to collect facts.” The history of 120 121 122 123 124

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 129. p. 47. pp. 74–75. p. 98. p. 105.

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groups, however, “must be supported by observations; and to select those observations and to fasten upon their essential features enlightenment is necessary, and, to use them to good effect, philosophy in the same measure. Moreover, these observations relate to quite ordinary matters, which lie open to every eye.”125 Finally, Condorcet is acute on the differences between the American and the French Revolutions. The one, with “no feudal tyrannies, no hereditary distinctions, no rich, powerful, and privileged corporations, no system of religious intolerance to destroy,” limited itself to the transfer of sovereignty. The other “was to embrace the entire economy of society, change every social relation and find its way down to the furthest links of the political chain.”126 The comparison serves to introduce the passage wherein Condorcet celebrates the principles of the Revolution in France while managing to say nothing of the events: We shall show in what ways the principles from which the constitution and laws of France were derived were purer, more precise and more profound than those that guided the Americans; how they more successfully escaped every kind of prejudice; how the equality of rights was nowhere replaced by the identity of interest, which is only a feeble and hypocritical substitute; how the theory of the limitation of powers took the place of that futile balance of powers which had so long been admired; and how for the first time in a great nation necessarily divided into a large number of isolated factions, men had the courage to allow the people to exercise their sovereign right—the right to obey only those laws the procedure for whose enactment is sanctioned by their direct assent, even if the actual enactment is delegated to their representatives, laws which, if the people should find them injurious to their interests or rights, they can revoke by the legitimate assertion of their sovereign will.127 Such was the reward for recognizing that the proper basis of political authority must be respect for human rights, which are grounded in nature. Substitution of that principle for the fiction of a social contract was, indeed, the principal intellectual achievement of modern history. The latter convention, while it may have protected certain subordinate (and often abusive) rights, served the interest of privilege, for it was “less a stricture upon power itself than upon those who exercised it.”128 Condorcet attributes the slow triumph of natural rights to the enlightenment of public opinion, which he defines as the body of beliefs common to educated men in general. In mat125 126 127 128

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p.

170. 146. 147. 112.


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ters of social and political science, people who hold power, whatever the regime, always lag far behind the progress of public opinion which, in turn, follows along the trail blazed by philosophers. Hence the designation of the beginning and end points—“From Descartes to the Foundation of the French Republic”—chosen to demarcate the Ninth Stage, culminating in contemporary history. The contrast between the duress of Condorcet’s situation and his vision of “The Future Progress of the Human Mind,” the topic of the Tenth Stage, has left him with the reputation for a deep fund of personal courage supporting an optimism so callow as to be a caricature of enlightenment. Certainly the moral part of the judgment stands. With respect to his idea of progress, however, a constructivist—if the expression is permissible—reading of the text may do greater credit to his meaning than the simplistic dismissal it normally receives. In the first place, Condorcet was anything but naive about what may be expected of human nature in the raw. The philosopher “is still afflicted by the spectacle of the stupidity, slavery, barbarism, and extravagance of mankind.”129 The only consolation is hope for the future. The example of science, predicting phenomena when the laws are known, gives reasonable ground for such hope. There are three sectors among which it may be distributed: abatement of inequality between nations, progress of equality within nations, and “the true perfection of mankind.”130 Condorcet’s program concerning the two aspects of equality is sensible enough. He never said the realization would be easy, and in the event much of it has come to pass. The views attributed to him under the last heading are what have opened him to charges of jejune idealism. The misreading begins with the mistranslation given above. Condorcet never supposed that mankind would become perfect. He does not employ the word “parfait.” His phrase is “le perfectionnement réel de l’homme,”131 which means that mankind really can be improved. Nor does he mean innate human intelligence, which he takes to be a constant. He has in mind the situation of man in society. How far can the human condition in that sense be ‘perfected’, or bettered? Indefinitely, says Condorcet. He has been taken to mean perfectly, or infinitely, although he expressly disavows any such implication. Instead, he generalizes from the prospect for the growth of scientific knowledge. There is no possibility that science will ever be complete. But its growth can, and on the experience of the past it must, be considered indefinite. Condorcet explains the two senses that mathematicians attach to that word: 129 130 131

Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 173. Oeuvres 6, p. 237.

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a quantity may grow in conformity either with a law such that it continually approaches a limit without ever reaching it, or with a law such that it becomes greater than any determinate quantity that may be assigned to it. The first meaning would do, but Condorcet prefers the second when the question concerns the fund of knowledge and more largely the quality, and even the length, of human life. Realizing the prospect will depend on education, of course. Throughout history, “The progress of the sciences ensures the progress of the art of education which in turn advances that of the sciences.”132 Indeed, in the very broadest sense, all history consists of the education of humanity. The educator is science, and the purpose is to increase in knowledge so that polity may be indefinitely ameliorated in accordance with the natural order of things both physical and social. 132

Progress of the Human Mind, p. 196.

CHAPTER VI

Scientists at War

Everyone recalls that prodigious and sudden effort that astounded all Europe and aroused admiration even among the enemy it thwarted. Monsieur Berthollet and Monsieur Monge were the moving spirits. It was according to their instructions that this immense movement was directed. The chemists who were commissioned to conduct tests for so many new procedures worked only by their instructions; and it is said that, if they had wished to follow up all the secrets they came upon, weapons more powerful than any we possess would have emerged from their laboratories. It would be wrong to suppose that the use of such inventions is in the final analysis as harmful to humanity as their effects are alarming. Exactly the contrary is the case. It is not only that science, in furnishing civilized peoples with these means of defense, has been the sturdiest shield of civilization. Nor is it merely that science has been able to count on the support of government only since it became one of the essential elements of the art of war. But, paradoxical though the assertion may appear, it would be easy to prove that the means of destruction furnished by science, in rendering combat more decisive, have made wars less frequent and less murderous. As for M. Berthollet, what he primarily saw in these extraordinary developments of human industry, motivated by the greatest of interests, were simply chemical experiments on a large scale. ´ Cuvier, Eloge of Berthollet1

1. THE MONGE CONNECTION

According to Madame Roland, Condorcet was the one who, amid the turmoil following the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, suggested to her husband, who then returned to the Ministry of the Interior, that Gaspard Monge become Minister of the Navy in the provisional Council of Ministers dominated by Danton at the Ministry of Justice.2 Monge held the post, 1 2

´ Eloges historiques, ed. M. Flourens (1860), pp. 301–302. Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (1966), p. 164.

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VI. SCIENTISTS AT WAR

which carried responsibility for the Navy, Merchant Marine, and Colonies, from 12 August 1792 until 10 April 1793. Only one of his original colleagues, LeBrun at Foreign Affairs, was still in office when he resigned. In effect, though not by intent, Monge thus became the center of a connection that replaced the former leadership of the Academy of Science in providing technical expertise to government. The choice of Monge for the Navy was reasonable enough. Though a stranger to politics, he was a thorough Jacobin in sentiment, and he knew the service. In becoming Minister of the Navy, he followed in the steps of the first of his great patrons, the maréchal de Castries, who had held that post in the 1780s. De Castries had singled him out for special favor in 1774, while Monge was an instructor at the Royal Engineering School in Mézières, and brought him to Paris in 1783, first as examiner of naval cadets, then as supervisor of technical training for the Navy. In that capacity, Monge spent six months of every year visiting naval schools and bases around the country. So it was that, decided though his political opinions were, he was absent from Paris over half the time in 1789, 1790, and 1791. Monge never set out to assemble an entourage. There did, nevertheless, form around him what may be better called a connection, in the sense the word then had in English polity. It there connoted a luminary and his associates in a ramification extending beyond politics into other sectors of life in society. In current parlance the term would be network. Though not a political grouping, the connection reached into politics through the Jacobin Society, where Monge himself was inscribed, in the persons notably of Pache, of Hassenfratz, of Audouin, of Vandermonde. Though not primarily scientific, it reached back ten years or more into technology in the collaborations of Monge with Berthollet, with Vandermonde, with Hassenfratz, with Meusnier. Though not based in the military, it was involved in disputes over tactics and strategy in the 1780s in the persons of Monge’s pupils in the Corps of Engineers, Carnot and Meusnier. Not, finally, an outgrowth of freemasonry, the connection partook of the enigma of the duc d’Orléans’ entourage in the instances of Berthollet and Choderlos de Laclos. Laclos and two other notables, Guyton de Morveau and Fourcroy, are to be seen not as participants of long standing but rather as fellow travelers amid the political and military crises of 1793–94. Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, finally, were at the center of affairs only after election to the Committee of Public Safety in August 1793. They then manifested the political mastery signally lacking in Monge, mathematician that he was and their onetime teacher. In the nexus of opportunity and urgency created by war and mobilization, the Monge connection provided the agency through which the technical services made their transition from the practices of the Old Regime to institutionalization under the Directory. Expertise passed, to be more precise, from Lavoisier and the Régie des Poudres through the revolutionary

VI. 1. THE MONGE CONNECTION

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´ fabrication of arms and munitions to the formation of the Ecole Polytechnique and a science with a positivist imprint bent upon it by involvement in events. It will, therefore, be well to examine these persons and developments a little closely. How did Monge appear in the eyes of his contemporaries? Testimony varies. On the part of those who knew him only in society and in affairs, all was scorn for the gaucherie of his manners and the nullity of his administration. To Madame Roland, he seemed a barbarian: Simple soul, dull-witted and awkward (pasquin), Monge was once a stone-cutter at Mézières, where the abbé Bossut detected some aptitude and introduced him to mathematics. . . . In the habit of calculating with inalterable elements, Monge understood nothing about men or administrative affairs; Ponderous and unpleasing, whenever he tried to be agreeable he always reminded me of those bears that the city of Berne keeps in its moat, where they amuse passersby with gentle gestures suited to their size and shape.”3 His biographers, his students, those who knew Monge technically, have retorted on the severity of this judgment. ´ The Eloges of Arago are to be treated with caution in matters of fact. He knew Monge well, however, and had been one of the students who loved and admired him and resonated to the touch of a teacher who, endowed with special skills, imparted techniques he himself had found and taught them to his students as a set of discoveries both determinate and applicable. He would stand before them, a hero of their own world, indeed a maker of it, his achievements a rebuke to what they too lacked—grace, deportment, ease, in a word a liberal education and the idiom for giving pleasure in the drawing room. Ever a teacher, Monge in return prized that which he thought to have instilled in younger men—talent, skill, address, ambition. He was one of those teachers who side with the rising generation against their own, and who reassure the new world by joining in subversion of the manners of the old. Enveloped in his concern for youth, immaturity merged into vigor, rebellion into pride, vulgarity into a concern for humanity. Monge combined in his temperament, observed Arago, two qualities that might seem mutually exclusive: bravado and kindliness, la fougue et la douceur.4 No less problematic were his two most important friendships, with Bonaparte and with Pache. “Monge loved me as one loves a mistress,” Napoleon 3

Ibid., p. 164. Arago, “Gaspard Monge,” biographie lue devant l’Institut de France le 11 mai 1846, in ´ Oeuvres complètes (12 vols., 1854–59) 2, pp. 427–592, p. 482. Reprinted by Editions Seghers, 1965, with an appendix consisting of extracts from Charles Dupin, Essai historique sur les services et les travaux scientifiques de Gaspard Monge (1819). 4

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is reported to have said in St. Helena.5 Of that, more later. Incommensurably less famous, Jean-Nicolas Pache was no less political a personage, and also, even like Bonaparte (and Monge himself ), of modest background. With respect to Pache, testimony is largely negative. The Tartuffe of revolutionary politics, Madame Roland called him, insinuating himself into her husband’s favor and then manipulating within the Council of Ministers the puppet figure cut by Monge.6 Speaking little and writing less, Pache is known mainly through the enemies he made.7 He was Minister of War from 18 October 1792 until 2 February 1793. Forced out of office by the Gironde on the eve of its decline, he was elected Mayor of Paris with the support of Marat and served until March 1794, when his fellow Hébertists were arrested. In earlier life his qualities had recommended him to notable people. His father, a Swiss, was concierge in the Hôtel de Castries in Paris. Impressed by the young man’s intelligence and quiet demeanor, de Castries appointed him tutor to his son and heir, the comte de Charlus. Fellow protégés of de Castries, Monge and Pache became close friends in the 1770s, often vacationing together with their families in their patron’s country estate. When his son outgrew the need for a tutor, de Castries brought Pache into the Naval Ministry, where he rose to become first secretary. It was at his suggestion that de Castries appointed Monge naval examiner in 1783. In 1788 Necker named him to be Controller in the Ministry of the Royal Household, but Pache resigned in short order. In a later self-justification, he affected to have found himself so revolted by the spectacle of royal profligacy, prejudice, and indifference that he retired—with a pension—to Zug in the pastoral heart of his ancestral Switzerland. Liberty and equality were there his unique passion, to be satisfied only by the establishment of democracy in France. On receiving news of the fall of the Bastille, he wrote Monge asking his opinion of the significance of the event. Monge’s answer led him to gather up his daughters and effects and take the stage coach to Paris. On arrival he ostentatiously renounced his pension and took lodgings in the rue de Tournon, five minutes from Monge’s address, rue des Petits Augustins, now rue Bonaparte. Resuming his old associations, he also entered into new ones, mostly political. Accounts differ about whether he or Meusnier was the founder of the radical Société populaire du Luxembourg in January 1792, but it seems likely that it was Pache, who often presided. Joining at the outset were others of Monge’s circle, Hassenfratz, Vandermnde, Audouin, and Vincent, all inscribed at the Jacobins.8 It was not 5

Ibid., p. 578. Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 107. 7 An exception is the sympathetic account given by Pierquin (1900), in an edition of the political memoirs Pache wrote in retirement. 8 Grison (1996), pp. 124–125. 6


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through Monge, however, that Pache was reintroduced to ministerial circles. Among the new friends drawn by the unassuming simplicity of his tastes and presence was one Gibert, a musical amateur known to Madame Roland from her youth. Gibert introduced his new friend to her salon in January 1792. Regular in attendance, Pache listened intelligently, talked little and to the point, and made the impression of a man dedicating to citizenship all the selflessness he could spare from the care of his children. Roland first became Minister of the Interior in the bellicose Girondist government named by Louis XVI in March 1792. The officials and clerks who staffed its bureaus were at best lukewarm to the Revolution, and many were covertly hostile. They alone knew the workings of the machinery, however. He would have to use them as tools likely to turn in the hand until they could be replaced by trustier instruments. In these circumstances Roland had need of a confidant, a man Friday, who could be his eyes and ears. The qualities of discretion thus required, he saw at once, were precisely those of Pache, who, moreover, had experienced the workings of a great department of state in the ministry of the Navy. The behavior of clerks, the tissue of influence, the texture of intrigue, the web of procedures—all would be familiar to him. Pache welcomed the assignment on the purist condition that he serve without pay. Madame Roland describes how, at once wise man and informer, he would bring a lunch of dry bread in his pocket and, given the freedom of Roland’s office, spend his days mediating between the Minister and his counter-revolutionary bureaucrats.9 War began in April 1792. On 10 May Colonel Joseph Servan, an intimate of the Rolands, took the War Ministry. With no administrative experience, and plagued by problems of fractious personnel in an even more sensitive department, he begged Roland for Pache’s services. His own staff brought to heel, Roland agreed. Dismissal of the Girondist ministers on 12 June 1792 restored Pache to private life and political activity in the section of the Luxembourg. No detailed record survives, but clearly he was among the manipulators, as was Roland, who laid the groundwork for the insurrection of 10 August. Preparations for overthrowing the monarchy were complete at the end of the previous day. Late that evening some eighty-odd representatives of twentyeight of the forty sections convened in the Hôtel de Ville, brushed aside the legally constituted Council chaired by the mathematician, Cousin, and declared themselves the Revolutionary Commune. The next morning they passed the torch to a larger assembly, over four hundred strong, which designated itself the Commune of 10 August and usurped de facto national sovereignty pending election of the Convention. Names famous in the Revolution appear in both lists. What is surprising, however, is that only four members of the Revolutionary Commune continued in the Commune of 10 9

Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 106.

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August. Still more surprising: three of those four, Pache, Audouin, and Laclos, figure in the Monge connection, while the fourth, Tallien, had served rather as secretary-general of his section than as a representative. Two others, Hassenfratz and Vincent, sat in the Commune of 10 August.10 On resuming office in the Provisional Council of Ministers, Roland offered Pache his old job in the Interior Department. Deep in the politics of the Commune, Pache declined what may have appeared a conflict of interest. He was still in Roland’s confidence a month later, however. In late September Roland thought briefly of resigning as Minister of the Interior in order to accept election to the Convention. Had he followed Danton’s example and done so, he would have recommended that Pache be the one to succeed him. The draft of a letter to that effect is among his papers.11 Pache, meanwhile, had drawn back into close association with Monge, who was floundering in the Ministry of the Navy, and who had even then appointed his old friend to be Civil Commissioner in the port of Toulon. Amid the general disarray, a rebellion in that important naval base was the most immediate problem confronting Monge as Minister. Galley slaves there, even like black slaves in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), considered that they too had a right to freedom. Breaking free of their chains, they rioted and hanged their oppressors, the administrators of the port, while the municipal authorities temporized. To the dismay of naval commanders on the scene, Pache’s resolution of the crisis consisted largely in concessions to the demands of the rebels, both sailors and civilians. While in Toulon Pache received word from the Rolands that Servan had resigned the War Office and that he was to be nominated to the Convention to fill the vacancy. Elected in absentia, Pache returned to Paris to take his place in the Council of Ministers beside Monge, who in the interim had doubled as acting Minister of War. Thus did Monge preside over the Naval Ministry and Pache over the War Ministry throughout the triumphant campaigns led by Dumouriez in Belgium and by Custine in the Rhineland during the autumn of 1792. Their maladministration may not be held responsible either for those victories or their reversal following the formation of the First Coalition in February 1793. Ministers exercised slight influence over policy in general, which the Convention controlled, though never so polemically. Their part was little greater in discussions of strategy, which was distrustfully negotiated between the dominant faction in that body, its deputies on mission to the armies, and the commanding generals. At most the irritation that Pache provoked was a factor in driving Dumouriez to desertion. In addition to near anarchy in Toulon, the problems facing the naval 10 11

Braesch (1911), pp. 222, n. 2; pp. 245–264. Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 105.


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administration would have been daunting to any Minister at the time when Monge took office. Ships of the line, frigates, and brigs were in a bad state of repair. Indiscipline was rife. When discontent reached mutiny, as sporadically it did, Monge blamed the officers and sympathized with the crews. His directives advised commanders to reason with their sailors. Here, for example, are orders for Captain Landais of the Patriot, whose sailors had rebelled at Brest: I urge Captain Landais to treat his crew with the consideration that the law calls for among free men, and I also urge the brave men who are honored to call themselves republican Frenchmen to reflect that ships of the State draw their strength only from subordination and mutual confidence. Tell my dear fellow citizens that, for their own sake and that of the Republic, they should conduct themselves well in the future. Otherwise I shall be forced to report them to the Convention.12 When not indulgent, his directives were often inconsistent. For example, he agreed to the tactic of sinking a derelict ship at the entrance to the harbor of Ostend in Belgium in order to block access. Out of consideration for the inhabitants, he ordered that machinery be installed for raising the hulk when need be. On objections from the local commander, he further stipulated that the device be disabled lest the enemy should use it. Successive decrees of the National Assembly had first emancipated the blacks in SaintDomingue and then provoked revolt by returning them to slavery. Organizing an expeditionary force to restore order in this, the most profitable colony in the world, Monge detached an entire regiment from Dumouriez’s army, but allowed the crew of a transport in Bordeaux to disembark because they were reluctant to sail on that mission. A second expedition intended to pacify Corsica, occupy Sardinia, and dominate the coast of Naples bogged down in cross-purposes. On the political side, Monge took little part in the meetings of the Council of Ministers. In company with all his colleagues except Roland, who resigned on 23 January 1793, Monge countersigned the administrative measures ordered by the Convention for the arrest, trial, and execution of Louis XVI. When a former naval officer, one Kersaint, quit the Convention over that action, Monge honorably restored him to the rank of vice-admiral and asked the Convention to exempt him from the law excluding a retired deputy from public office for six years. The request provoked an uproar, at which Monge retreated, saying he had not and would not appoint Kersaint to any command. In short, Monge was a passive, or at best a reactive, administrator. Not so Pache, a quietist in person who proved to be an activist in office. 12

Launay (1933), p. 84. For Monge as Ministre de la Marine, see chapter 3, pp. 75–100.

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In the first instance, his activity bore less on military operations than on the sector he understood, the military bureaucracy. As soon as he was installed, he set himself to ensure that his idea of the Revolution should be served in the persons of officers in the field and the clerical staff of the War Office. Only over the clerks, however, did he wield effective authority. Practiced by experience in three ministries, he systematically replaced seasoned officials, most of them counter-revolutionary in reputation, with men suited to the political temper of the time. A census exists of the personnel of the ministry under Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, the second of Pache’s successors, who held office from 4 April 1793 until the substitution of commissions for Ministers in April 1794. His workforce numbered approximately 450 clerks staffing some forty-seven bureaus, each with a specific province: pay, officer personnel, recruitment, commissariat, troop movements, uniforms, small-arms procurement, ordnance, and so on. These offices were in turn grouped into six major divisions coordinated by a secretary-general, whose task it was to carry into effect the Minister’s wishes. Of those functionaries, Pache had appointed the majority during the autumn of 1792.13 Elimination of counter-revolutionary personnel—purification in the parlance of the time—was thus Pache’s signal contribution to prosecution of the war. For a linkage between its political and more properly military and technical aspects, he drew upon others of the Monge connection whom he had come to know in the Patriotic Society of the Luxembourg. Thus Meusnier—though the evidence here is largely circumstantial—served as military and strategic counselor to a Minister quite without experience of the profession of arms. On the technological side, Pache relied on JeanHenri Hassenfratz, whom Servan had named to oversee the Division of Materiel. Politically the most excitable of minor scientists, Hassenfratz had his moment in the limelight on 1 June 1793 when, having led the sansculottes from Montmartre in the insurrection of 31 May, he headed the deputation that called on the Convention to proscribe the twenty-four leading Girondist deputies.14 Further, to confine attention to the inner circle, Pache confided the Quartermaster Office—Bureau d’Habillement—to an older member of the Academy of Science, the mathematician Alexandre Vandermonde. Monge’s senior in years and academic standing, Vandermonde here cut the figure of an adjunct. “La femme de Monge,” Madame Roland dubbed him, in a context that implied a relation both of dependence and henpecking.15 “Bureau de Déshabillement,” his office was called in the field, for the clothing failed to reach the troops. Into the post of Secretary-General, the nerve center of the Ministry, 13 14 15

Herlaut (1946), 1, chapter 2, pp. 31–102. On Hassenfratz in the Ministry of War, see Grison (1996), chapter 12. Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 170. On Vandermonde, see Birembaut (1953).


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Pache brought Meusnier’s most intimate friend, Xavier Audouin. Born in Limoges in 1766, Audouin was a parish priest in Limoges before the Revolution. He came to Paris early on, secured a living as vicar of the parish of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, and by February 1791 had taken a leading place among Jacobins of advanced temper. Like others of the far left, his preferred milieu was the Paris sections. He represented Fontaine de Grenelle in the Committee of the Sections that began sitting informally alongside the legally constituted Commune on 23 July 1792. With Tallien and Collot d’Herbois, the actor who later sat on the Committee of Public Safety, Audouin served on the commission that drafted a manifesto insisting on deposition of the King, arrest of Lafayette, and creation of a fraternal continuum between the people of Paris and the armies in the field. The latter theme Pache thought to institutionalize by appointing Audouin to make over the civilian staff in the Ministry of War. On 15 January 1793, he married Marie-Sylvie Pache, the daughter to whom her father had ever been the very model of a Rousseauist parent. Three witnesses certified the vows: Meusnier, JacquesRené Hébert, editor of the scurrilous and extremist Père Duchesne, and Antoine-Joseph Santerre, commander of the National Guard since 10 August 1792. Less than a week later, the latter, known as the Père du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, ceremoniously conducted Louis XVI to the scaffold. Monge could have watched the execution from his windows in the Ministry of the Navy. For Audouin’s assistant as Associate Director of the Bureau of Personnel, soon to be promoted Chief of a new Bureau of Replacement, Pache found a yet more exalted revolutionary, Fran¸cois-Nicolas Vincent.16 Son of the concierge in a Paris prison, he was twenty-five years old when appointed to the bureau of personnel. A tireless agitator, he was a youthful mover and shaker in the Cordeliers Club, which elected him recording secretary (secrétairegreffier). Attributed to him are bloodthirsty sayings about strangling priests, wiping out aristocrats, and devouring the flesh of his enemies, instances of the atavistic strain of savagery that threaded through the tissue of revolutionary attitudes. As Mayor of Paris following his removal from the War Office, Pache kept closely in touch with his protégés there and with Bouchotte, named to be Minister after the shock of Dumouriez’s desertion on 4 April 1793. Having promoted Audouin to the subministerial level of commissaire-ordonnateur, Bouchotte acted on Pache’s further recommendation of Vincent to be Secretary-General. Vincent concentrated his efforts on completely eliminating the “antique, powdered bureaucracy” (his words) and replacing it with solid, active, honest, upright patriots. He succeeded so well that the Ministry had become a hornet’s nest of Hébertists. By March 1794 Robespierre came to consider these left-deviationists to be not merely a 16

Herlaut (1946), 1, pp. 37–40.

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nuisance, but a danger to the governance of the Committee of Public Safety. Even while praising Vincent’s patriotism and probity, Bouchotte dismissed him on 13 March 1794 for not having exhibited “requisite wisdom” in his conduct.17 On that same day he was among the leading Hébertists whom Saint-Just denounced before the Convention. He and Hébert went to the scaffold in company with sixteen kindred spirits on 24 March. With respect to Pache, Robespierre merely secured his removal from the mayoralty, while Audouin and Bouchotte left the Ministry on its conversion into a commission in April 1794. In 1795 all three were accused of complicity with the tyranny of the Terror and imprisoned for some months. It is owing to Audouin that there survives but a fragmentary record of their service in the Ministry of War. Like many another of like persuasion, like Monge notably, Audouin eventually found in Bonaparte the leader he would follow in the more mature interest of the Revolution, and also in his own. Under the Empire he became historiographer of the Ministry of War. His Histoire générale de l’administration de la guerre appeared in four volumes in 1811. During his responsibility for the archives, documents concerning the 1792–93 democratization of the ministry disappeared.18 Let it be recorded of Pache in passing that he did not follow his son-inlaw and Monge in their new loyalty. Released from prison in November 1795, he retired to his manor of Thin-le-Moûtier in the Ardennes, where he busied himself with the local agricultural society, and kept a silence broken only by three polemical brochures. Years later, on 6 August 1803, Bonaparte spent a night in passing at Mézières. Monge was in the retinue and was sent round with a letter to his old friend there where they had met under the patronage of the maréchal de Castries. Now his mission was to affect the former mayor of Paris and Minister of War to the Bonapartist scheme of things. They talked into the night. Monge did not succeed. They never met again.19 During the four months when Pache served as Minister, he relied for professional military advice mainly on the most gifted of Monge’s onetime pupils, Jean-Baptiste Meusnier de la Place. The configuration of Meusnier’s career may be thought to prefigure the shift from ordering to acting on things that characterizes the transition between the two generations of science that concern us. Meusnier graduated from the Royal Engineering School at Mézières in 1775. Six weeks later, he stood before the Academy of Science and read a paper, a classic exercise in differential geometry, in which he

17

From the notice on Vincent in Tuetey (1890–1914), 11, pp. xxi–xxvii. See also Herlaut (1946), 1, pp. 37–40 and elsewhere. 18 Herlaut (1946), 2, pp. 297–298. 19 Pierquin (1900), pp. 157–158. Pierquin reprints Pache’s three political memoirs, pp. 29–54.


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derived a theorem on the curvature of oblique surfaces still known by his name. His was an adventurous and not merely a mathematical intelligence. The problems Meusnier found attractive were those of rational technology: pyrolitic decomposition of water, on which he collaborated with Lavoisier, Laplace, and Monge; schemes for a plant in which desalination of sea water would be powered by the energy of waves; ordering the Academy’s collection of machines, of which Vandermonde was curator, and which was eventually incorporated in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Meusnier’s most dramatic flight of technical fancy was a work of aeronautical engineering avant la lettre. Named to the Academy’s 1783 commission to report on the Montgolfier invention of balloons, Meusnier put in hand an analysis of the problems of stability and locomotion in lighter-than-air craft. He incorporated his findings in detailed specifications for construction and navigation of two hypothetical dirigibles. The blimp-size model with a crew of six would have been 130 feet long. Its companion, an intercontinental airship of twice that length, would in principle carry thirty people and provisions permitting a flight of sixty days.20 Meusnier undertook these investigations during the lengthy leaves of absence—six months annually and a full year for the aeronautical project— that the Royal Engineering Corps granted him at the behest of the Academy of Science. He was elected to be Vandermonde’s correspondent in 1776, at the age of twenty-two, and to membership in the section of geometry in 1784. Starting in 1779 he spent his time on duty in Cherbourg. Renovation, enlargement, and fortification of the port was one of the most considerable engineering feats of the reign of Louis XVI. The young Meusnier there made an important enemy. In company with colleagues in the Corps of Engineers and others from the Ponts et Chaussées, he quickly came to question the design of major constructions and the propriety of certain contracts approved by the commandant. The commandant in the ten years preceding the Revolution was none other than Dumouriez. Though a very junior officer, Meusnier took the lead in carrying these misgivings to higher authority. Both Carnot and Laclos, the one a military engineer, the other an artillerist, and at odds with each other, also came to distrust Dumouriez’s probity during brief tours of duty in Cherbourg. Meusnier’s ambitions reached higher than the Corps of Engineers, where the ceiling rank for a commoner was normally a captaincy. Still only a lieutenant in 1786, he applied for transfer to the general staff corps, on the grounds that the goal of his career was to bring the exact sciences to bear upon the arts of war. Rather than lose him, the Corps of Engineers raised 20

Gillispie (1983), pp. 106–118. On Meusnier’s life and career, see Darboux (1910); J. Laissus (1971).

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him to captain in 1786. On 19 July 1788 he was promoted to maréchalgénéral des logis, equivalent to a majority, while remaining attached to the Corps of Engineers.21 In the Revolution Meusnier moved rapidly along a diagonal, upward in rank and to the left politically. He reached lieutenantcolonel on 11 July 1789 and was named adjutant general with no advance in grade on 1 April 1791. On 5 February 1792 he received his colonelcy in the 14th Infantry regiment. As for his political dimension, there are scattered references to Meusnier rather than Pache as founder of the Society of the Luxembourg. It matters little: they knew each other through mutual intimacy with Monge and were drawn closer by mutual suspicion of Dumouriez. In 1792 Meusnier was again called on to consult with colleagues of the Academy of Science, this time on the technical problem of engraving and printing counterfeit-proof assignats. He worked thereon in close association once again with Lavoisier, and now also with Berthollet, currently serving as an administrator in the Mint. Their collaboration continued into the early weeks of the war, in consequence of which interest revived in the possibility of concocting a propellent of unprecedented power through the substitution of potassium chlorate for saltpeter (potassium nitrate) in the fabrication of gunpowder—of that, more in the next section. Berthollet had run no further tests of that prospect after the fatal explosion in the arsenal of Essonne in 1788.22 In late May or early June Meusnier received orders to report to the Army of the Midi. He requested a two-week delay in order to complete the work on assignats, after which—so he petitioned the Minister of War—he would prefer assignment to the Army of the Rhine, “on the most exposed frontier.”23 The request did not go down well. On 1 July 1792 Meusnier informed the Minister of Public Contributions that he could not continue the work on assignats. Being under orders, he must get horses and depart. It appears almost, but not quite, certain that it was Monge who suggested to Servan that Meusnier be recalled to Paris in August 1792 to serve along with Choderlos de Laclos on the general staff. However that may be, the republican regime brought Meusnier rapid advancement. He was promoted to the rank of general officer, Maréchal de Camp, or Brigadier, on 7 September 1792, to hold rank (according to a revision of 5 October) from 1 September. With respect to strategy, his was the professional military mind behind Pache as Minister, and his the advocacy of massing on the Rhine instead of behind Dumouriez in the Low Countries. A choice had to be made. During Pache’s first month in office, the mili21

Meusnier to maréchal de Ségur, 12 July 1786, pièces 39–40 in Archives de la Guerre, ´ Général de Division, 32, which dossier contains Meusnier’s “Etats,” or service record. 22 Gillispie (1980), pp. 71–73. 23 Dossier cited n. 21.


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tary situation was as follows. Dumouriez was in command of the Army of the North. Having defeated the Prussian forces at Valmy on 20 September and the Austrians at Jemappes on 6 November, he readily occupied the whole of Belgium. The Army of the North was thus poised for just such an invasion of Holland as succeeded a year later following the second conquest of Belgium. From the Low Countries, so Dumouriez’s political enemies feared, and with reason, he would be in place to launch a pro-consular coup d’état, undo the Republic, and place the duc d’Orléans on a restored throne.24 Commanding the Army of the Rhine was Custine—“le général Moustache” the troops called him, responding to the patriotic familiarity of his way with soldiers. The Prussian defeat at Valmy had opened the Rhineland to him. A rapid offensive in September and October won control of Spire, Worms, and Mainz. It remained to secure the lower Rhine from Coblenz downstream. This mission, so Custine urged, should be assigned to the armies of the Moselle and the Vosges in the center and to Dumouriez in the north. The latter was to be instructed to move east out of Belgium in order to take Cologne and Bonn. With his left flank secure, Custine would be free to cross the Rhine and advance through Germany bringing the Revolution to its conglomerate of palatinates, duchies, bishoprics, and city-states. Their people would rally to the Republic at the mere sight of the tricolor. Such was the strategy that Meusnier supported in the councils of the Ministry of War.25 Unwilling to be downgraded to a supporting mission, much less to be diverted from his designs on Holland, Dumouriez complied only to the extent of moving on Aix-la-Chappelle. A left turn would still take him into the Netherlands, but he was in no position to cover the Army of the Rhine. Impetuous, not to say feckless, Custine had crossed the Rhine anyway, pushed upstream along the Main, entered Frankfurt on 21 October 1792, and sent a lateral column as far as Marburg. He had overreached. French exactions alienated the bourgeoisie throughout the Palatinate. The puppet republican regimes Custine set up remained dead letters. The Prussians regrouped, allied now with Hessian forces. Early in December they recaptured Frankfort, with the active assistance of its citizens. A wedge of Prussian-controlled territory now separated the Army of the Rhine from the Army of the North (just as Dumouriez had foreseen would happen), and Custine declared Mainz to be in a state of siege. Such was its precarious situation on 2 February 1793 when the Girondists, whose preferred general was Dumouriez, voted Pache out of office in the last political victory they were to win in the Convention.26 24 25 26

On Dumouriez and the conquest of Belgium, see Chuquet (1886–95), vol. 4. On Custine and the Rhineland campaign, see ibid., vol. 6. On the siege of Mainz, see ibid., vol. 7.

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Logistical rather than strategic failures were, however, the immediate reason for Pache’s dismissal from the War Office. The French military administration had never attempted to run its own supply system, a task beyond the capacity of the eighteenth-century bureaucracy, anymore than it had thought to fabricate its own munitions. Standard procedure was to contract out the provision of transport, uniforms, food, and fodder to private entrepreneurs. Thus when Pache took office, he found that under Servan contracts had been let to a company headed by one d’Espagnac, a former cleric of doubtful honesty, who undertook to provide baggage trains for Dumouriez’s Army of the North. Another supplier, one Doumerc, had agreed to furnish bread and fodder. A third outfit handled the purchase and distribution of meat for the soldiers’ mess. Two civilian commissaries-in-ordinary on Dumouriez’s staff, Malus and Petitjean, saw to the drawing and execution of these and less important contracts. Similar arrangements obtained for all the armies of the Republic. The War Ministry for its part was to see to the distribution of munitions, shelter, uniforms, and above all money—specie, not assignats—for the subsistence and payment of the troops. Of these necessities Dumouriez had received nothing in Belgium since his victory at Jemappes. Without funds, he was reduced to borrowing 300,000 francs from d’Espagnac, and on arrival in Brussels to arranging forced loans from the Belgian clergy through the intermediary of Malus and Petitjean. Necessities and expedients such as these were, obviously, an invitation to speculation and profiteering in the business of supply, where Pache, Hassenfratz, and Vandermonde, incorruptible guardians of the public interest, felt competent to gather the reins into their own clean hands. So they set out to do. Malus had entered into a contract on 16 October with a supplier in Paris and another in Douai for 20,000 pounds of flour. Hassenfratz, chief of the bureau of matériel, disallowed the price. In the extremity of military emergency, Dumouriez went over the head of “Hassain Frats” (in his exasperated spelling) and forced Pache to reinstate the contract, only to find a few weeks later that Pache himself refused to ratify a further contract let by Malus on 8 November in Brussels.27 Pache had by then conceived a plan characteristic of high-minded officialdom. He would consolidate all purchasing for the ministries of War, Navy, and Interior in a single office, a Directoire des Achats. Under his vigilant eye it would serve the needs of land, sea, and municipal forces. Thus would speculation be scotched. The new agency would be administered by a triumvirate appointed by the three ministers. Roland named 27 Dumouriez appended his exchanges with Pache, “Correspondance du général Dumouriez avec Pache,” to his Mémoires (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1794). On these exchages, see Grison (1996), pp. 137–145.


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Cousin, the mathematician, but withdrew his cooperation when the drift of Pache’s politics became clear. Monge guided himself on Pache, and they named respectively a Genevan merchant, Bidermann, and a Strasbourg financier, Marx Berr. Bidermann and Berr in turn arranged with the brothers Théodore and Baruch Cerfberr to make purchases in the Rhineland and with one Mosselman to do the same in Belgium. A certain Simon Pick was to transmit orders to the latter from Dumouriez, who, apropos of the visit of a third Cerfberr brother, Lippman, refused roundly to have anything to do with this “échappé d’Israël.”28 The whole imbroglio, indeed, is redolent of the conflict that in wartime situations always simmers between the rear and the front lines. Soldiers and their commanders in the field inevitably transvalue civilian values and improvise imperiously amid the inevitable shortages that they lay scornfully at the office doors of the bureaucrats who would smother them in paperwork and regulations. At first the struggle went in Pache’s favor. Dumouriez wrote an angry letter demanding that he himself control the provisioning of his army. Blandly Pache communicated it to the Convention. Pierre-Joseph Cambon, controller of finance, supported Pache and denounced the malversations of Malus, Petitjean, and d’Espagnac. Ever ready to believe ill of procedures held over from the old regime, the Convention ordered that they be brought before its bar to give an account of themselves. Pache seized the opportunity to replace Malus with Charles-Philippe Ronsin, one of his Hébertist appointees, a friend of Vincent, who had left the army for a career as a poet and dramatist of trivial distinction. The tide turned on 1 December with the appearance before the Convention of Malus, Petitjean, and d’Espagnac, who in the event gave a very good account of themselves. Following repudiation of the old contracts, they charged, supply did indeed collapse. Troops were without food, shoes, or shelter. Horses were without fodder. Not so, held Pache. He was devoted to the welfare of the Army. He would protect the men from the rigors of winter. He had had his Purchasing Office order 100,000 bags of wheat, 40,000 of oats, 50,000 of hay, 50,000 of straw. He had ordered shoes and wood. He had appropriated assignats. Dumouriez pressed the attack. He published his correspondence with Pache for all to see how the Minister, willful in his inexperience, had sacrificed the well-being of the army to doctrine and to politics. On 1 January 1793 Dumouriez arrived in Paris on a leave he had obtained with difficulty, since he was the last person Pache wanted in the capital. He had two purposes in mind (neither of which was to succor Louis XVI, whose trial was imminent, though he did think execution “very gauche”).29 First of all, Dumouriez lobbied to secure repeal of the decree of 15 December, which 28 29

Chuquet (1886–95), 4, p. 167. Ibid., 5, p. 2.

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imposed revolution in the French pattern on Belgium. In that he failed, though he proved to be right in foreseeing the disaffection it would cause. Second, he wished to persuade the Convention to dismiss Pache and his minions in the War Ministry. In that he succeeded. The quarrel between General and Minister had become one of the innumerable points at issue between the Mountain and the Gironde. In the matter of Pache and the scandalous nakedness of the Army, the Jacobins had a poor case. Even Pache’s political sympathizers—Danton, Couthon, Thuriot—agreed with the detractors of his administrative competence.30 Not knowing whom to believe, the Convention had sent its own commissioners, Camus and Gossuin, to visit the armies in Belgium. Their report, presented on 21 January, vindicated Dumouriez. Pache, they concluded, had abolished the old method of supply by private enterprise without the administrative capability to replace it. He was at best naive to suppose that the agents of his Purchasing Office, seasoned jobbers that they were, would be disinterested. Nor in the prevailing disarray could the contracts let by Malus and Petitjean be simply reinstated. Even under this pressure, Pache, unshaken in his conviction of the propriety of his intentions, held on to office. He had to be ejected by a vote of the Convention. On 2 February Barère moved adoption of a report of the Committee of General Defense calling for a reorganization of the War Office and a change of ministers. Two weeks later Hébertist strength in the Paris sections carried Pache to the mayoralty. On 14 February Pache’s successor, General Beurnonville, posted Meusnier, as he had earlier requested, to the Army of the Rhine. A general officer, he might thus seek to reverse in the field the impending failure of the strategy he had advocated in the War Office. Custine at once assigned him to the defense of Mainz, where he was second-in-command under d’Oyré, a competent professional officer. The garrison Meusnier joined was an undisciplined and insubordinate conglomerate consisting of twenty-nine battalions of volunteers, four disorderly regiments of grenadiers, and a leavening of six line battalions and two mounted regiments. For the most part the French troops preserved their peasant skepticism about martial virtues. They were given to self-preservation and aversion to fatigue duty rather than to martial bearing, and were sometimes seen to thumb their noses at their officers. Among the officers, however, were a number destined to become generals in the wars. Two are known to fame: Kléber and Marigny. D’Oyré held daily councils of war comprised of senior officers and four civilians. Two of them were delegates of the Provisional Council of Ministers. The other two, Reubell and Merlin de Thionville, were Deputies on mission from the Convention and fervent Montagnards. Reubell looked mainly to civil affairs, Merlin to military operations. Small in stature, mus30

Ibid., 5, pp. 11–12.


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cular of frame, active as a monkey in the uniform of a simple cannoneer, Merlin was all over the place rallying the troops. The extent and ambiguity of his authority complicated d’Oyré’s sense of his own command. Merlin and Meusnier, on the other hand, hit it off and were much in each other’s company and confidence. There are varying estimates, complementary rather than contradictory, of Meusnier’s contribution to the defense of Mainz. The facts are simply put. Mainz is on the left bank of the Rhine, just downstream from its confluence with the Main. D’Oyré placed Meusnier in command of his bridgehead, the town of Kastel on the right bank. The Prussians closed their siege lines around the French positions on 14 April. From Kastel, Meusnier led several forays intended to harass the enemy, to deny him vantage points, or to augment provisions. One such object was the enchanting village of Kostheim. Amusing themselves by torching a few cottages, Meusnier’s soldiers inadvertently burned down the entire village, after which he set sappers to fortifying the ruins. He formed, too, the more audacious project of seizing several islands in the Rhine. Meusnier threw himself, in a word, with passionate enthusiasm into the role of a combat commander. He ordered his men to do nothing he would not do himself and asked of them little less. He was ever mounting barricades disdainful of enemy fire. On 5 May he was promoted major-general. The Prussians grew to recognize his uniform. Before dawn on 5 June the Prussian artillery loosed a massive cannonade all across the positions stretching from Kostheim through Kastel to the islands, where Meusnier had passed the night. Embarking for his command post in Kastel, he was in midstream when a musketball fractured his knee. The sedentary life of a scientist and engineer can scarcely have conditioned him for the demands that transformation into a combat commmander placed on his constitution. Infection set in, and on 7 June he was ferried across the Rhine on a litter to be tended in the parish house of the Cathedral. There he set a stoical example of silent suffering and died quite publicly on 13 June. The Prussians, used to his appearances on the fortifications, allowed a two-hour cease-fire for his funeral. Thus did Meusnier, like any patriot, sacrifice his genius to what he saw as the cause of human liberty. It soon became political convention (following Merlin’s lead) to wish in retrospect that Meusnier had commanded, instead of the colorless d’Oyré, who capitulated on 23 June. Mainz might then have held. Custine might have escaped the guillotine (fortunately for himself d’Oyré remained in Prussian hands until December 1794). Thirty years later Gouvion Saint-Cyr in his reflections on the siege imagined a still more portentous might-have-been: Had Meusnier lived, he would have shown how to draw all the advantage that the art of war can derive from exact science. “He equalled Bonaparte in most of the qualities that make a general, and was his superior in some, above all in patriotism.” If only he had

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survived, the armies of France would have been under the guidance of two geniuses of the same temper.31 More recent military judgment has been less enthusiastic. Chuquet in his history of the siege considers Meusnier’s exhibition of daring to have been disruptive of the defense. The appeal of his valor to the troops was not what he calculated it to be. Their true colors were other than the revolutionary, patriotic hues his imagination painted. An engineering officer, he had never before exercised command. “When he foresaw heavy resistance,” commented one of his officers, “he increased the length of his levers. Unfortunately these were men under siege who could not be replaced. He accurately calculated the effect that he should produce on the Prussians, but he could not include in his computations the effects of friction and reaction set up in his own machinery.”32 Chuquet goes further. In his judgment, Meusnier overextended his defense works without authority and against orders. He led unnecessary and costly forays without informing d’Oyré and then demanded support. He put it about that d’Oyré was a lukewarm and irresolute commander. In short, he exploited his political credit and congeniality with Merlin to undermine d’Oyré with a view to supplanting him. However that may be, what was special in Meusnier’s death was its unification of the scientific and revolutionary legends. Unlike Carnot, he belonged in full professional right to the scientific community. Unlike Monge, he was a man of the world. Unlike Lavoisier, he had the common touch. Certainly no one else so romantically combined in himself political zeal, technical brilliance, and personal heroism. After the surrender, his sword born by an aide-de-camp accompanied his remains in the retreat from Mainz. In the retinue of the Duke of Weimar, Goethe watched the evacuation. As the column passed, he heard the Marseillaise rendered softly in the tempo of defeat. The effect, he recorded, was “gripping, terrible.”33 In 1799 Meusnier’s ashes made a second journey, from his native Tours to Paris. Covered with laurels and triumphant palms, the urn was presented to the ´ students at the opening session of the Ecole Polytechnique. After the Convention dismissed Pache from the War Office on 2 February 1793, an orator at the Jacobins attributed his fall to the machinations of an infamous cabal who “also want to take Monge from us.”34 To the dismay of Montagnards and sans-culottes, Monge did resign from the Ministry of the Navy on 14 February. Esteemed on all sides, however, he was prevailed upon to accept reelection and thus remained in office throughout the months of military and naval reverses in the late winter and early spring of 1793. He 31 32 33 34

Gouvion de Saint-Cyr (1829), 1, pp. 271–72, n. 1. Chuquet (1886–95), 7, p. 154. Ibid., 7, pp 272–73. Aulard (1889–95), séance du 3 février 1793, 6, p. 16.


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prudently opposed a set of vast schemes brought before the Council of Ministers for descents on Ireland, or on England itself, or on the Cape of Good Hope, or on India. The Navy was in no condition to undertake anything of the sort. With respect to overseas ventures, Monge confined himself to proposing that the Ile Bourbon in the Arabian Sea be renamed Ile de la Réunion.35 As will appear, Monge during his last weeks in office authorized the first of the top-secret weapons programs to be discussed in the next section. Amid the general disarray, the Convention demanded from Monge a report on the state of the Navy as if he were guilty of its unpreparedness. Worn out after eight months in office, on 8 April he asked to be replaced. “I offer the Republic all my services,” he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety. “I will be chief clerk in any of my bureaus, if it wishes. But I cannot continue as Minister. I request a replacement.” On 10 April he was released.36 Thus ended in failure, in Meusnier’s case in death, the brief experiment with scientists in positions of direct authority, civil and military. Thereafter, as will appear, the same men and others played the more appropriate part, which has been the role of technicians ever since, that of consultants and experts, responsible for counsel and for development of instruments of power, but not for wielding them. Guyton-Morveau, as he styled himself in the year II, may be considered the transitional figure, combining in his person technical competence with political standing.37 He had just been elected chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, to which Monge submitted his resignation. That famous committee had been constituted only four days previously, on 6 April. Its first business was to deal with the consequences of Dumouriez’s desertion to the Austrians. Victory in Belgium having turned to defeat at the Battle of Neerwinden on 18 March, the Convention had then decreed that Dumouriez must appear before the bar to give an account of his operations. Instead, as we have seen, he arrested the four commissioners who, in company with Beurnonville, Pache’s immediate successor in the Ministry of War, had served the summons in Brussels, bundled the lot into the carriages that had brought them from Paris, and delivered them into the hands of the Austrians. Dumouriez himself went over to the enemy on 5 April.38 Named in the wake of that shock, the Committee of Public Safety replaced a somewhat shadowy Committee of General Defense, on which Carnot had served at the outset and which Guyton had also chaired from the time of its creation on 3 January 1793. Though not dictatorial during its first 35 36 37 38

Lacroix (1932), 4, pp. 95–99. Launay (1933), pp. 97–100. On Guyton’s role in military research, see Bret (1992a). See above, chapter 2, section 6.

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three months, the newly formed Committee of Public Safety was vested with the authority of the Convention and exercised executive powers on an ad hoc basis. Danton was the leading figure politically, but his energy and influence were on the wane, and Guyton continued in the chair until 10 July. The second of the secret weapons programs that occupy the next section started at his instigation. Berthollet then resumed a series of experiments, the earliest of which had ended in a fatal detonation in the arsenal of Essonne in 1788. The goal was to produce an explosive far more powerful than anything known by substituting potassium chlorate for potassium nitrate (saltpeter) in the manufacture of gunpowder. A third project for more potent weaponry was the one that ultimately prevailed in the design of ordnance, though not for almost half a century. Its protagonist was Choderlos de Laclos, artillery officer and scandalous litterateur. His was the conviction that it should be feasible to replace cast-iron cannonballs with explosive shells and to revolutionize the order of battle through multiplication of firepower. 2. WEAPONRY

On 13 October 1792 Monge, beginning his third month as Naval Minister, responded to a memoir submitted by a citizen Mesbridrien, or perhaps Mesbridrian, of whom nothing else is known. Reporting experiments with a type of incendiary artillery used by the Russian Navy, the author developed a political argument for adopting such weapons. Monge rejected the proposal out of hand: “I think that the French Republic will never consent that its fleets should employ means of destruction of that nature, infernal machines, arms in short suited only to tyrants, and that it will always be repugnant to a free and generous people to make [use] of such means to defeat its enemies.”39 Monge could afford to take the high moral ground in the autumn of 1792. French armies were advancing everywhere. Fortunes of war changed for the worse over the winter. On 22 February 1793, shortly after resigning and then resuming office, he received an anonymous letter. When de Castries had been Minister, so it informed him, an artillery officer called Bellegarde had invented incendiary cannonballs made of a composition inextinguishable even under water. Tests had confirmed their efficacy, but illjudged scruples had prevented their being developed to destroy an enemy who would not have spared us. “Today, now that we need to combine all our means, should not that one be employed?”40 This time Monge reacted immediately and consulted the Minister of For39 Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France (2191). The documentation on which this section is based is reproduced extensively in Gillispie (1992). See also Bret (1992b). 40 AN, AFII 223, 1926.

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eign Affairs, Pierre Lebrun, whose department was responsible for intelligence. The answer confirmed that the marquis de Bellegarde was indeed known to be in England, where tests of his ammunition had succeeded at Portsmouth Navy Yard earlier in the month, and that his incendiary cannonballs were in production at Portsmouth, and also in Prussia. Monge had further learned, so he wrote in reply to Lebrun, that the officer who had fabricated the incendiaries under Bellegarde’s direction was even then in Paris. He would confer with him forthwith. Compunction was no longer an affordable luxury. “I beg you, therefore, to be persuaded that I shall not hesitate, in the present circumstances, to employ all means proposed that could give us any advantage in order to force our enemies to recognize our independence.”41 The officer in question, Captain Fran¸cois Fabre, was currently assigned to the artillery center at La Fère, some 100 kilometers north of Paris. Reading not very far between the lines makes it clear that Monge was manipulated into making this decision by underlings among the permanent staff of the Bureau of Artillery, headed by one Tréhoüart. Fabre had clearly been in touch with them. In all probability he was himself the author of the anonymous letter of 22 February, quite possibly written on their advice. Evidently Tréhoüart already knew, as Monge at first did not, that Fabre had secretly fabricated a number of his incendiary cannonballs at Metz in 1786 by order of the Minister of War. He and his clerks, not Monge himself, were the ones who actually conferred with Fabre. Normally the formal text of directives in Monge’s official correspondence was preceded by drafts composed by a member of the staff. The following instance, by Tréhoüart, was dated 1 March: The definite news, transmitted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, about the use the English and Prussians intend to make of the incendiary cannonballs known under the name of Bellegarde, should decide the Minister to adopt these means of destruction. His humanity, his civic spirit, will make it his duty to put his brothers in a position to repel with weapons of equal power attacks that the satellites of despotism dare attempt against the defenders of Republican Liberty.42 What could Monge do but approve? His signature is scrawled at the bottom of this minute, which went on to list the items Fabre would undertake to deliver on condition that he be provided with funds and priorities for workers and materials. The initial order called for 5,000 rounds of various calibers—1,800 for 36-pound cannon, 900 of 24 caliber, 1,800 of 18 caliber, and 500 of 12 caliber. Meanwhile the Ministry of War learned of the 41 42

AN, AFII 223, 1925. AN, AFII 223, 1930.

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project, and ordered another 3,700 rounds to arm its coastal gunships. This ammunition was intended for naval warfare. Impacting above decks, the shell on bursting would incinerate the rigging of enemy vessels in a flash. Lodged in the hull, it would set fire to the entire ship.43 Monge’s orders in hand, Fabre returned to La Fère and went to work. From further exchanges with Tréhoüart throughout the month of March, and other papers in the artillery archives, it appears that matters were more complicated than Fabre had indicated to the staff of the Ministry. In one respect, they were more advanced. His directions on how gun crews were to serve the weapons include instructions for howitzer shells and heavy mortar bombs as well as the rounds for naval cannon that he had led Monge to authorize. Fabre meant to use a portion of the funds he had been granted to rearm this ammunition, which had been fabricated in the 1780s and stored in a powder magazine at Versailles. The results of field tests conducted at Le Havre and Brest had shown, in the words of the Procès-Verbal, that no ship-rigging could resist the action of these cannonballs, which moreover could be employed in land warfare to burn rations, fodder, clothing, faggots, barricades, and villages where the enemy might be dug in. This ammunition is easy to fabricate, inexpensive, easy to store, and it gains in consistency and tensile strength as it ages.44 In preparing the new ammunition, however, Fabre ran into bottlenecks. Subcontractors failed to deliver molds for shaping the charge and shell casings to contain it. By the end of March he had been able to produce only 216 rounds for 24-pounder cannon, half of which Monge ordered sent to Rochefort and half to Cherbourg. The crates were not ready when news came of Dumouriez’s defection. La Fère is only 65 kilometers south of the border, and Monge took alarm lest incendiaries fall into enemy hands. Unwilling to bear further responsibility alone, he informed the Council of Ministers about the whole project. His report, written in his own hand, left to them the decision whether to hold up further fabrication, to destroy Fabre’s installations at La Fère, and to bring the tools, raw materials, and Fabre himself to Paris. He might continue the work in a secure location if the Council so directed. This on 6 April, four days before Monge resigned.45 The Council did so order. As virtually his last act in office, Monge dispatched Hassenfratz to La Fère. In a postscript to one report, Hassenfratz expresses patriotic dismay at the stream of malingering deserters he encoun43 The components were sulphur, colophane resin, sarcocelle (a vegetable resin), nitre (potassium nitrate), pulverized gunpowder, turpentine, linseed oil, and alcohol. For the exact proportions and the recipe for preparation, see Gillispie (1992), pp. 74–75. 44 Archives de l’artillerie, 6f4,b3A7. 45 AN, AFII 223, 1930.

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tered crowding the highway.46 The orders he bore were unwelcome to the recipient. His objections overridden, Fabre had to stop work, demolish his shop, pack his tools and material, crate the finished rounds, and persuade his unwilling crew to leave their families and depart for Paris, all this in less than a week’s time. On the road by 15 April, the convoy bumping toward the capital consisted of seven wagons loaded with 70 crates containing 897 incendiary bombs, shells, and cannonballs; 2,400 pounds of shell casings; 20 molds of different sizes; 4 big presses; and several barrels full of the incendiary substance.47 Where were they to go? For no preparations had been made to receive them. Hassenfratz had suggested the Arsenal of Paris, but Fabre refused to work there, and insisted on some location near the Naval Ministry. Preceding him to Paris, Hassenfratz ran about the streets, turning first to Pache, now the mayor of Paris, who referred him to the Administrators of Public Works, none of whom were in their office. Rummaging in the unattended files, he and a couple of clerks found that a basement under the Palais Bourbon appeared to be empty. Only as the convoy reached the city did Hassenfratz manage to find the officials who could authorize Fabre to unload his bombs, shells, and inflammable composition and store them underneath the present-day Chamber of Deputies while the Director of the Department of Paris canvassed the register of nationalized properties. All the local authorities were told was that a device important for the Navy had to be constructed in an isolated locale inaccessible to throngs of the curious. Among the possibilities, Fabre’s choice for installing his weapons laboratory fell on a town-house, formerly the property of a nobleman called Malleu, at the junction of the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the Rue Basse du Rampart, now the Boulevard des Capucines. So far, so good. Nevertheless, the warning by the new Naval Minister, Dalbarade, that the slightest delay risked “incalculable consequences” failed to abbreviate the ritual of the inventory incumbent, war or no war, revolution or no revolution, whenever property changes hands in France.48 Not until 30 May were Fabre’s supplies moved from the Palais Bourbon and his machinery installed in a new workshop thrown together in the inner courtyard where he might resume work on his incendiaries. In the meantime, while waiting to get into his new weapons laboratory, on 26 April Fabre received orders in the form of a request from Adjutant Tréhoüart, the grey eminence in the Naval Bureau of Artillery. The next day, he was told, a test of muriate powder, “as it is called,” was to be tried at the Arsenal of Paris. The Minister wished Fabre to be present in order to make a 46 47 48

Hassenfratz to Monge, 10 April 1793. AN, AFII 223, 1930. Hassenfratz to Ministre de la Marine, 13 April 1793; AN, AFII 223, 1930. Dalbarade memorandum, 8 May 1793; AN, AFII 223, 1925.

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report that would guide him in responding to questions put by the Committee of Public Safety concerning possible next steps.49 This was the first Fabre had heard of muriate powder, and also his first indication that the new Committee of Public Safety was subordinating the authority of the Ministry of the Navy to its own. The consequence, as will appear, was that his project became entwined with two other weapons programs: first, fabrication of the new muriate gunpowder; and second, development of explosive cannon shells. All three ventures had originated independently in the 1780s, fallen into abeyance in the interval, and now been revived, again quite independently until the bureaucracy linked them together amid the military urgencies that gave rise to the Committee of Public Safety itself, Guyton in the chair. On 9 April 1793, its third day, the newly constituted Committee at Guyton’s request named an advisory commission of four citizens “expert in chemistry and mechanics, charged with exploring and testing new means of defense.”50 The members were two chemists, Berthollet and Fourcroy, the elder of the Périer brothers, and a military engineer called Lafitte, examiner for the school at Mézières. Early in its deliberations the panel learned of Fabre’s incendiary program, probably from Tréhoüart, just as Fabre did of its interest in muriate powder. Although authority had shifted from the Ministry to the Committee of Public Safety, the same bureaucrats staffed the offices and administered the programs. Berthollet had never abandoned his belief in muriate powder. A report on his work in general addressed to the Bureau du Commerce in February 1790 includes the following passage: Though interrupted by the accident at Essone, . . . my experiments continued, and I propose to publish them very soon. I shall show that this explosive, the force of which is greatly superior to the best gunpowder known, can be fabricated with less danger than ordinary powder, that it offers great advantages for employment in mines, that it could be extremely useful for the defenses of Cherbourg—this in the opinion of Monsieur Meusnier, who is directing the work of fortification there—and that the cost will not much exceed that of good hunting powder.51 In the absence of wartime security, such things could still be published in 1791, when Berthollet’s account of his experiments appeared in Annales de chimie.52 He was there more guarded about the prospect for handling muriate powder safely, and there is no evidence of his having returned to the 49

AN, AFII 223, 1925. Bret (1989). 51 AN, F12.1329. 52 “Observations sur quelques faits que l’on a opposé a` la doctrine antiphlogistique,” Annales de Chimie 11 (1791), pp. 3–26. 50

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problem before February or March of 1793. He then resumed work, evidently at Guyton’s instigation, under the aegis of the Committee of General Defense prior to its transformation into the Committee of Public Safety. By the end of March Berthollet had succeeded in preparing a pound of the material. That was enough for renewed testing, for which Guyton expected the Gunpowder Administrators at the Arsenal to make arrangements. Jacques-Pierre Champy, Lavoisier’s successor, had been his protégé and pupil in Dijon. To Guyton’s surprise and irritation, Champy balked. A letter of 27 March explains why he had to deny himself the pleasure of welcoming his mentor at the Arsenal and of meeting Berthollet, whom he did not know but much admired. There was no corner of the Arsenal unknown to the workers. Their memory of Essone remained vivid. Anything resembling those tests would lead them to spread the alarm. People in the neighborhood would see in the slightest explosion a project for blowing up the magazines. The Gunpowder Administration must at all costs avoid the least occasion for popular suspicion.53 Champy’s resistance, compounded by problems in assembling the apparatus, delayed the muriate tests until 17 April, the date on which Fabre was ordered to attend. They succeeded well enough that the Committee of Public Safety ordered them repeated on a larger scale at Essone, site of the 1788 explosion. In attendance on 2 May were Guyton, Berthollet, Fabre, RearAdmiral Landais, and two of the three Gunpowder Administrators, Champy and Dufourny. Dufourny, the political appointee who had taken to signing himself simply “L’homme libre,” reported that muriate powder exhibited all the superiority it had shown in the tests at the Arsenal. He seized the occasion to press for higher wages for the workforce there. Champy, the professional powdermaker, was more reserved. Nothing unfavorable to the new explosive should be inferred since the testing mortar was too light and its excessive recoil had dissipated the effect. He felt obliged, moreover, to warn Guyton that the chemical manufacturer, Jean-Antoine Carny, whom Berthollet had engaged to produce muriate powder on a large scale, was of doubtful probity. Also informed about the muriate project was General Choderlos de Laclos. We know by a letter from Champy to Guyton of 5 April that Laclos had briefly visited the proposed testing site in the Arsenal in company with Berthollet. His involvement is the first indication that muriate research was converging with another, quite different line of weapons development. Laclos has remained famous, and in some eyes infamous, for his erotic masterpiece, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782 amid the manifold frustrations that attended the end of the old regime. He was then forty-one years old, an obscure captain in the artillery, scion of a family of the recent 53

Champy to Guyton, 26 March 1793. The letter, of which Patrice Bret kindly sent me a copy, is from a private collection of Guyton’s papers.

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and minor nobility.54 The present work is not the occasion, and its author is not the person, to emit yet another among the plethora of opinions concerning the social, political, or ethical import, if any, of that piece of coldhearted, strong-willed sexual intrigue. Nor need we enter into the question whether his unfinished De l’Education des Femmes, written in 1783 and unpublished until 1903, should have a place of honor in the women’s movement. Suffice it to observe that Laclos’s writings, stylish and spirited, bespeak a temperament much given to administering shocks and a mind as unconventional as it was literate. Ironically enough, Laclos had first made himself known in military circles by a literary attack on Lazare Carnot, like himself an aspiring and frustrated officer, but in the rival Corps of Engineers. An open letter to the Académie ´ Fran¸caise made contemptuous fun of Carnot’s Eloge de Vauban (1786), in which Carnot celebrated the defensive strategy that had curbed the ferocity of eighteenth-century warfare.55 Laclos was reinforced in the onslaught by his superior officer, General the marquis de Montalembert. The crossfire was a skirmish in a campaign Montalembert waged throughout much of the 1780s, the goal of which was to persuade the high command to adopt a novel “perpendicular” system of fortification. He would have replaced Vauban’s shield of horizontal fortresses by vertical redoubts studded with casemates. Cannon massed in these structures would have subjected attacking forces to a saturating firepower. Montalembert had carried out experimental demonstrations of his construction in the isle of Aix in 1780. Laclos served as a subordinate officer in this enterprise, which was the origin of his preoccupation with innovative weaponry. Wearying of the inanity of a static military career in a peacetime army, Laclos took indefinite leave in 1788 and entered the retinue of Louis XVI’s cousin, the duc d’Orléans, whom he served in the capacities of private secretary and ghostwriter. Marginal at the highest level, redolent of free masonry, adventurism, and ambition, d’Orléans and his entourage were ever toying, not untreasonably, with the chance that a turn of the dynastic wheel might displace the mainstream of power into their channel. Laclos accompanied his master on a diplomatic mission to London in 1789. Back in Paris in July 1790, he joined the Jacobins. In company with Pache, Audouin, Vincent, and Hassenfratz, Laclos was, as we have seen, one of the prime movers in toppling the Monarchy on 10 August 1792. Days later he rejoined the Army at the instance of Danton, who dispatched him to the headquarters of the reserve army corps at Châlons-sur-Marne in order to keep a republican eye on its elderly, distrusted commander, the Bavarian-born Luckner. Promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the course of that mission, 54 55

A recent biography is Poisson (1985). Choderlos de Laclos, Lettre a` MM. de l’Académie fran¸caise sur l’E´ loge de Vauban (1786).

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Laclos served briefly with the Army of the Pyrenees. It is unclear precisely when he turned his attention from active duty to weaponry, and specifically to development of explosive cannonballs. He must have been back in Paris by February 1793, however, for a report from Fabre states that General Choderlos de Laclos had then proposed field trials in which hollow cannonballs filled with gunpowder would be fired at the mock-up of a segment of a ship’s hull. In the meantime, Monge picked Laclos to be governor of the Ile de France (Mauritius) and remaining French outposts in India. Before taking up that post, however, and also before the tests he had ordered could be run at La Fère, Laclos was arrested in company with fellow Orleanists. Although the duc d’Orléans had thrown in his lot with the revolution´ aries, taken the name Philippe Egalit´ e, and voted in the Convention for executing his cousin, he and his intimates were nonetheless suspect in the spring of 1793. Among other dark possibilities, they were thought to be plotting a surrogate monarchy in league with Dumouriez. Laclos was imprisoned on 1 April and released on 10 May, remaining under house arrest for a brief time. He was thus unable to attend the tests of muriate powder at the Arsenal and at Essonnes. Nevertheless, Laclos provided the impetus that brought the three projects for incendiaries, muriate powder, and explosive shells together in a unified program of weapons development. Berthollet had always intended muriate powder to be a propellant. Having been apprised of its power, Laclos, still in prison, proposed instead that the novel explosive be tried as the charge inside his “hollow cannonballs,” which were already under fabrication for test firing at La Fère. Before and also during his confinement, he was in touch with a colleague of Tréhouärt in the Ministry of the Navy, an adjutant called Saint-Fief, and through the Minister, Dalbarade, with Guyton and the Committee of Public Safety.56 Although the mock-up of a naval hull had no initial connection with the incendiary program, Saint-Fief had assigned Fabre responsibility for overseeing its construction. The dummy was nearing completion in mid-April, when he left La Fère for Paris. Guyton seized on Laclos’s proposition. Acting with the authority of the Committee of Public Safety, he accepted Fabre’s recommendations that heavier shells be ordered from the one forge capable of producing them, Dieudé’s establishment at Charleville in the Ardennes, and that a 36-pound cannon replace the inadequate 24-pounder at La Fère. Finally, he urged Berthollet to accelerate preparation of sufficient muriate powder to fill the reinforced shells for proving. Where might the work be done? Not at the Arsenal, though Champy cooperated to the extent of assigning a skilled powdermaker, one Fallot, to assist Berthollet. All these exchanges occupied 56

Choderlos-Laclos au Citoyen Guitton-Morveau, 1 April 1793; and l’adjoint de la Ministère, Saint-Fief, to Citoyen [Guyton], 31 March 1793. See Guyton papers above, note 52.

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the weeks of late April and May while Fabre was waiting for access to the property in which to fabricate incendiaries. Seclusion and secrecy were the requirements for Berthollet’s project as for his. Fabre allowed, albeit reluctantly, that the town house rue Basse du Rempart was roomy enough for both. Work began on 30 May 1793. What happened the next day is best told in the words of Fabre’s report to Dalbarade: Citizen Minister, You have no doubt been informed of the event that happened yesterday in the place where the workshop for fabricating incendiary ammunition is supposed to be established. By your orders, I gave Citizen Berthollet a location for making muriate powder. His workers having failed to take precautions, the powder being grained caught fire from the friction. There was an explosion. The three workmen were pretty badly burned. The casements in the windows were blown into the courtyard. People from the neighborhood, armed, crowded into the house. They threatened me, and also the noncommissioned officer on duty with me. We were accused of having tried to burn down Paris, of having bungled the attempt. A sabre was pressed against the chest of the noncommissioned officer, &c.57 Receiving no reply, Fabre wrote again on 5 June saying he had also sent a copy of his report to the Committee of Public Safety, “where it may have been forgotten.”58 It may indeed. On Friday 31 May 1793, the day of the accident, leaders of the Paris sections, prominent among them Hassenfratz, “le républicain,” and Dufourny, “l’homme-libre,” mobilized the mob of sans-culottes that surrounded the Tuileries demanding expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. The site of Fabre’s laboratory was some 800 meters distant from that scene. Detonation of the muriate powder must have come as an unidentified blast amid the cacophony of the day. Champy gives more detail in his letter to Guyton, defending Fallot and bespeaking payment of damages to him and his assistant: He [Fallot] had taken on himself the job of granulation of the powder, for which, in order to lessen the danger of its taking fire, he did not wait for it to be perfectly dry. He wanted to work on a batch of about six pounds. It was too damp, and it plugged up the holes in the sieve, which prompted him to defer the operation until after his dinner. When he returned to work, fire broke out at the first shake of the sieve and spread immediately to about twelve additional pounds of powder, which was still very humid and was being dried in the sifters on the floor. His fellow worker, who was by the window, was badly burned by 57 58

AN, AFII 223, 1927. AN, AFII 223.1927.

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thick flames carried his way by a draft of air. He scrambled out through the window, and hung on to the iron hooks set in the wall two stories high.59 Neither Fabre nor his workers were willing to remain in Paris. To a man they wished to return to La Fère, where they could work at their ease in the facilities of the construction arsenal. Its military insecurity had been much exaggerated in the panic over Dumouriez, so Fabre argued. Even were the enemy to mount an invasion, he would still have time to evacuate his materials. He would, moreover, be on site to oversee the proving out of explosive cannonballs. The Artillery Bureau rejected the reasoning out of hand. Failing to persuade an equally obdurate Fabre to settle for a location in the suburbs, Tréhoüart advised Dalbarade to approve his alternative demand, which was to move the incendiary project to Châlons-sur-Marne. There Fabre would find peace, quiet, and skilled workers, and also be within reach of La Fère and the forges of the Ardennes. Moving and reinstalling his shop once again occupied Fabre throughout the rest of June and the first weeks of July. Berthollet for his part simply lost his nerve. No more than Champy did he blame the workmen for the explosion on 31 May. We took all possible precautions, he wrote to Guyton. “You see, my dear colleague, that it is impossible to handle so hazardous a reagent. . . . We must, therefore, abandon our attempted projects.”60 Such was not Guyton’s opinion. A memorandum of 7 July is one of his last directives as chairman of the Committee of Public Safety. It orders that the relative effectiveness of muriate powder and ordinary gunpowder be compared in the tests of explosive cannonballs to be run at La Fère.61 On 10 July Guyton and all but two of his colleagues on the first Committee of Public Safety were replaced by montagnard hardliners. The administrator who carried out Guyton’s intentions in the ensuing weeks was a fellow chemist, Pierre-Auguste Adet, who had succeeded Tréhoüart as adjutant in the Artillery Bureau in mid-June. Laclos was released from house arrest on 21 June. The idea of explosive shells in general and muriate shells in particular had come from him. Accordingly, he was not simply invited to attend the projected tests. On 12 July Adet put him in charge and directed Berthollet and Fabre to place themselves at his dispositon. Barely installed at Châlons-sur-Marne, Fabre had to interrupt his own program yet again and return to La Fère, not to work on incendiaries as he had wished to do, but to oversee the proving of explosive cannonballs. Neither he nor Berthollet was to be excused from further participation in the muriate program, what59 60 61

Guyton papers, cited note 56. Berthollet to Guyton, 1 June 1793, papers cited note 52. AN, AFII 223, 1924.

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ever their reluctance. The Committee of Public Safety had been informed of the arrangements. The Minister, wrote Adet to Berthollet, was “of the opinion that the event that caused suspending fabrication of that powder is not a strong enough reason to lead us entirely to give up the advantage that so valuable a discovery can hold for the Republic.”62 Firing experimental rounds at the ship’s dummy began at the La Fère proving ground on 20 August. Results in the first days were encouraging both for 24-caliber and 36-caliber shells filled with ordinary military gunpowder. Fabre’s report of the twentyninth to Adet, who had been present at the outset, explains why the tests had to be suspended. Citizen Adjutant, I have the honor of presenting an account of an unfortunate event that has just taken place owing to the effect of the too ready inflammability of muriate powder. You will remember that the first 24-pounder round filled with that powder, having missed the ship’s dummy, ricocheted without exploding and disappeared behind the embankment of the polygon, and that the three men we sent to retrieve it could not find it. An unfortunate day laborer came on it yesterday 300 yards (150 toises) behind the embankment in a field of oats that he was mowing. Thinking to retrieve the powder it contained, he sat down with the cannon-ball between his legs and tried with his hammer to drive the point of a little file that he used to sharpen his scythe into the fuse, which, as you know, is attached to the thick side. You can judge of the effect of the friction, iron on wood; the round exploded; the man was blown to pieces, his limbs and his intestines were scattered over a great distance. He leaves a wife and three children whom he supported by his work, and she is pregnant.63 Discounting the misfortune of this further accident, the Artillery Bureau advised the Committee of Public Safety that the ammunition tested at La Fère was promising enough that trials should be continued and expanded, though at another site. Initially the choice fell on Rochefort. Laclos, his adjutant Bellot, Fabre, and Berthollet received orders to that effect from Adet. They were to cooperate with Guyton, to whom Adet appealed in urgent terms. No one, he wrote, was better placed to appreciate the importance of this experiment, and no one better qualified to assure success, “not just with respect to the experiment itself, but in order to overcome moral obstacles that could oppose it. Your dual capacity of Scientist and Representative of the People will serve to dismiss them.” He trusts, Adet continued, 62 63

AN, AFII 223, 1925. AN, AFII 223, 1928.

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in Guyton’s patriotism and zeal. Were he to refuse this mission, it would become impossible to continue the experiment and to benefit from the immense advantages it holds.64 Whether Guyton responded is uncertain. Perhaps he too had become persuaded of the intractability of muriate powder. Or else, or also, Prieur, beginning to exercise his kinsman’s former responsibility for military technology on the Committee of Public Safety, preferred to reserve Guyton for the more comprehensive mission of its newly formed Armaments Section, whereon he served throughout the Terror in tandem with Monge, Fourcroy, Hassenfratz, Berthollet, and others. At all events Laclos succeeded Guyton as the driving force behind the top secret munitions program in the weeks following the accident at La Fère. With the energetic support of the Naval Artillery Bureau, now headed by a new adjutant, Chappatte, and drawing on the authority of the Committee of Public Safety, Laclos enlarged the prospective scale to the dimensions of battle. The object now was to repeat the muriate powder experiments done at La Fère with thirty-six- and twenty-four-caliber cannonballs and to extend them with eighteen- and twelve-caliber ammunition. Techniques must be found for manufacturing the powder less dangerously and less expensively. The hull of an entire ship of the line, bridge and superstructure included, must serve for target. Methods must be developed for defending a fort against muriate cannonballs, and also against incendiaries. Both types of ammunition were also to be fired experimentally from aboard ships. Compounding the powder would require a platoon of at least eighteen artillerymen, commanded by a sergeant. They might come from either the Army or the Navy but must include at least six artificers. All must be intelligent and sober. It must not be given out that they are to fabricate muriate powder, but rather “to work on a newly contrived composition still little known and thereby a little dangerous.” None of these men should be the father of a family. It would be only fair to give them extraordinary payment.65 In anticipation of success, the plan called for production of a sufficient quantity of shell casings and of muriate powder for use in the field and eventually in combat. Fabre was to identify all the forges in the country capable of casting hollow cannonballs. All told, a supply of 50,000 or 60,000 shells must be obtained with minimum delay. C. A. Carny, who had filled Berthollet’s orders for small amounts of “oxygenated muriate” (potassium chlorate), had his shop in rue du Harlay-au-Marais. To the demand that he increase production, he replied that he needed payment in advance. At Prieur’s behest, the Committee of Public Safety also accepted his further demand that three of his most skilled laborers be exempted from imminent 64 65

AN, AFII 223, 1926. AN, AFII 223, 1924.

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conscription. With their help he had already prepared eighty pounds, at great price. If much larger amounts were ordered, he could greatly lower the unit cost. In that case, he would set up a separate shop for that one product and produce sixty pounds a day.66 All these preparations occupied most of September 1793, the first month of the Terror. As the project expanded in the imagination of Laclos and the staff of the Artillery Bureau, it became clear that facilities at Rochefort were inadequate. What was required was nothing less than a permanent weapons laboratory. On 28 September a directive to Laclos, drafted by himself for the signature of the Artillery Adjutant, ordered him to find a location in the environs of Paris.67 In all probability he had already decided where it would be. His choice fell on the château and park of Meudon, site of the presentday observatory. On 21 October the Committee of Public Safety decreed the installation there of what it is not fanciful to define as the distant forerunner of Los Alamos. Laclos took title in the name of the Navy on 4 November. The next day he was arrested in his lodgings in Paris. The coils were even then closing ´ around his onetime patron, now Philippe Egalit´ e, who was indicted before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the sixth and executed on the seventh. Laclos remained in prison for thirteen months, first in La Force, then in Picpus. Rumor had it that he saved himself from the guillotine by ghostwriting speeches for Robespierre. On the sidelines under the Directory, and ever drawn to conspiracies issuing in strong measures, he was certainly a partisan and probably an agent of Bonaparte in preparing the coup d’état of 18 brumaire (9 November 1799). Restored to active duty, Laclos died during the siege of Tarento on 5 September 1803. Apart from Laclos and Adjutant Chappatte in the Artillery Bureau, no one, not Berthollet, not Guyton, and certainly not Fabre, had wished to push forward with experiments on muriate powder in the winter of 1793– 94.68 Only after a further fatality on 16 July 1794 did the Committee of Public Safety formally abandon the program, however.69 Nevertheless, the weapons laboratory founded for that purpose became a regular installation ´ of the French armed forces. Les Epreuves de Meudon, the Meudon Proving Grounds, were an active site of military research and development into the Napoleonic period. On 23 April 1794, the Committee of Public Safety designated a member of the Convention, Jean-César Battelier, to exercise oversight and expedite the work.70 A clockmaker by profession, he had already been named director of the national Porcelain Manufactory at nearby Sèvres 66 67 68 69 70

AN, AFII 223, 1930. Ibid. Fabre to Artillery Bureau, 29 nivôse an II (13 January 1794), AN, AFII 223, 1924. Arrêté du 7 thermidor an II, AN, AFII 220, 1869, pièce 69. AN, AFII 220, 1896.

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in September 1793. Neither the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), nor the transition to the regime of the Directory in December 1795, interfered with the testing and development of weapons at Meudon. The logo on its stationery conveys the spirit. A montage of mortar, howitzer, and cannon barrels over the legend “Mort Aux Tyrans” is surmounted by a phrygian bonnet and framed by the words Action, Célérité, Confiance, Discrétion. Activation of the first military units formed and trained for aerial warfare is the most famous, although it did not prove the most effective, of the enterprises undertaken at Meudon.71 It was said of Joseph de Montgolfier that he had hit on the idea of hot-air balloons in 1783 amid a meditation on ways by which Gibraltar might be taken.72 Enthusiasm for aerial stunts in ensuing years issued, inevitably, in proposals for military applications. Guyton had himself staged one of the early flights, in April 1784. Preferring a diluted hydrogen to hot air, he succeeded in soaring above his native Dijon but failed in his attempt to achieve locomotion. He returned to the subject in the summer of 1793 while chairing the first Committee of Public Safety. A report Guyton addressed to his successors on 14 July, four days after leaving the Committee, explores the prospect for adapting aircraft to warfare. Observation from tethered balloons would, he foresaw, be the most practical possibility. A major obstacle was the cost of obtaining hydrogen. Besides being expensive, the standard procedure, which was the action of sulfuric acid on iron filings, had the further disadvantage of requiring saltpeter for production of the acid. An alternative method was decomposition of water in the presence of red-hot iron, which Lavoisier and Meusnier had achieved in their famous experiment of 1783. Although Guyton refrained from mentioning the source of the process, Lavoisier was nevertheless included in a commission named at Guyton’s instance on 18 September to reproduce the reaction on an industrial scale. Meusnier had been killed three months previously. Lavoisier’s participation was one of the last acts of his career. Besides Guyton himself other commissioners were Fourcroy, Monge, Berthollet, and Périer. Handling the apparatus and performing the operations were two skilled technicians, both recruited by Guyton. The first, Jean-Marie Coutelle, had been formed in experimental physics by Charles, and had learned the trade serving as demonstrator in his teacher’s public courses. Though not a member of the commission, Charles (who had built and flown the first hydrogen balloon in 1783) lent a hand in analysis of the quality of gas produced. The name of the second operator, Nicolas-Jacques 71 72

For the story of military aerostatics, see Bret (1990a) and (1991a); Robineau (1990). Gillispie (1983), pp. 15–17.

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Conté, has been immortalized in the invention, also under the pressure of wartime shortages, of the graphite pencil still in daily use throughout the world. Though the most famous, that was perhaps the least astute of the inventions created by one whom the cliché wholly fits, a mechanical genius. The terrace of the Feuillants adjoining the Tuileries served for outdoor laboratory. Experiments run there from 20 September to 5 October 1793 succeeded admirably in liberating a volume of 23.82 cubic meters of hydrogen, more than enough to lift a balloon. Such was the enthusiasm at the prospect that almost instantly, in late October, the Committee of Public Safety dispatched Coutelle, his assistant Lhomond, and the requisite equipment to the Army of the North. They bore a letter signed by Carnot to the effect that the foremost scientists endorsed his mission. “Citizen Coutelle is not a charlatan,” he wrote, enjoining the commanding general, Jourdan, and Duquesnoy, the representative on mission, to afford him every facility. Neither one could be bothered. Once on the ground Coutelle himself recognized that an attempt in the field would be premature. Personnel and equipment required further preparation, if with all deliberate speed. Meudon provided the ideal site. On 24 November 1793 the Committee of Public Safety ordered establishment there of an Aerostatic Development ´ Center (Centre des Epreuves Aérostatiques). On the technical side Conté set out to determine the optimal shape of a tethered balloon, to improve procedures and apparatus for liberating, storing, and handling hydrogen, and to concoct a varnish that would preserve the flexibility of the fabric while eliminating leakage of gas. Throughout he worked in close consultation with Monge, Guyton, and Vandermonde. Vandermonde undertook a mission to Lyons in order to ready the silk industry to produce a sufficient supply of sturdy taffeta for mass production of balloons. On 29 March 1794 a series of trial ascensions succeeded perfectly in the presence of Guyton, Monge, Prieur, and Barère. Each of them tried a flight, in Monge’s case accompanied by his daughter. On 2 April the Committee of Public Safety accepted Guyton’s draft of the decree creating a military Company of Airmen (Aérostiers). The new branch, or rather twig, of the armed forces consisted of forty men and three officers, Coutelle in command. Three weeks later the fledgling unit had orders to ready itself for combat with the Army of the North. Reporting to Maubeuge on 7 May, Coutelle and his men had less than a month to set up their furnace, extract their hydrogen, inflate their balloon, L’Entrepreneur, and mount a series of trial flights. Reports of subordinate commanders and staff officers who made ascents were very positive. On 21 June a decree of the Committee of Public Safety declared: “It is no longer a question of calculating the difficulties, but of overcoming them. Fortune follows boldness.”73 The next day orders came 73

Robineau (1990), p. 422.

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to move to the plain of Fleurus in front of the Austrian defenses of Charleroi. A team of twenty men dragged L’Entrepreneur, fully inflated, across country the thirty-odd miles from Maubeuge. Whether the signals semaphored from the gondola to inform Jourdan of enemy dispositions contributed to French victory on 26 June is unclear. Jourdan was dismissive and thought they did not. Guyton, who was present throughout, was satisfied they did. The previous day, almost surely at his instance, a second company of airmen had been activated at Meudon. Its training completed, it was attached to the Army of the Rhine in March 1795, while the first company went over to the Army of the Sambre and Meuse. Replacements and further recruits were then to be trained in a for´ mal Ecole des Aérostats created at Meudon in October 1795 and directed by Conté. In no engagement other than Fleurus, however, did either company see action. Army commanders—Jourdan, Moreau, Hoche—thought balloons a nuisance. Aerial observation, it is fair to say, was an innovation that scientists and engineers who momentarily had the ear of politicians sought to impose on generals in the field. Bonaparte did include airborne units in the Italian campaign of 1796–97 and in the Egyptian expedition of 1798, perhaps in deference to Monge, his favorite retainer in both. He occasionally ordered a balloon lofted, but only for psychological effect, not for use in combat. Regular employment for military observation awaited the American Civil War. Proposals for weaponry of all sorts streamed in upon the Committee of Public Safety, as upon any government in wartime, and were regularly referred to Meudon for examination and, if they were promising, demonstration and testing. Prominent among them were incendiaries of various types—rockets fashioned out of pikes carrying inflammable warheads, cannonballs heated red hot before loading, a terra cotta projectile that would hold its heat longer than iron, a composition concocted by a certain citizen, Pinelly, that risked setting fire to the woods around the new proving grounds. Throughout the autumn of 1793 Fabre and his incendiary project were still based in Châlons. Promoted to the rank of major (chef de bataillon) on 31 October, he received orders in November to ship a quantity of his incendiaries to the forces assembling for the effort to retake Toulon and the Mediterranean fleet, which had been betrayed into British hands by royalist officers and residents in August. He demurred on the grounds that the enemy ships were out of range, and that unsuccessful employment would tip off the enemy to the existence of the still secret weapon.74 In January 1794 he also demurred, in a long-suffering way, to orders to move

74

Fabre to Dalbarade, 16 brumaire, an II (6 November 1793); AN, AFII 223, 1928.

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his shop yet again, this time to Meudon. Grudgingly he had to agree, of course, though it would take him six weeks to resume operations.75 Though Fabre continued to experiment with modifications of his incendiary composition, perfecting explosive projectiles became his principal occupation at Meudon. He served there for eighteen months, from the spring of 1794 until late in 1795. Monge maintained his interest and made valuable suggestions throughout. In a later series of memoirs Fabre recognized that the idea of serving cannon with explosive shells had originated with Laclos in 1792. The latter’s experiments never worked, however. All the shells that Laclos actually tried firing fractured in the barrel of the gun. Only he, Fabre, drawing on his long experience with the fabrication of incendiaries, and with signal help from Monge, had succeeded in adapting shell casings to serve also in the production of hollow cannonballs that could withstand the shock of firing when filled with gunpowder. Although Fabre’s testimony is the sole direct authority for these statements, there is much circumstantial evidence to confirm and nothing to contradict it.76 Preliminary trials of thirty-six-pounders, run in the presence of Monge and Hassenfratz on 20 May 1794, were altogether encouraging.77 Prieur kept in close touch with all this work. At his instance the Committee of Public Safety ordered production of no less than 300,000 rounds of the new ammunition, half explosives and half incendiaries. In late November 1794, Vice-Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, Commander of Naval Forces of the Republic, invited a deputation of captains and general officers from Paris to a test of Fabre’s explosive shells and incendiaries aboard his flagship, La Montagne, anchored in the shelter of the breakwater at Brest. To his disappointment, the incendiaries became soaked in a rainstorm and could not be fired. The shells succeeded impressively, however: “I am very much in favor of the shells [très partisan des obus],” the Admiral wrote afterward to Dalbarade, again Minister of the Navy.78 He was the only commander who was. The ammunition ordered by the Committee of Public Safety was duly manufactured and distributed to the principal ports by mid-1795. Frigates and ships of the line were armed with it and furnished with printed instructions that Fabre had prepared. Only on one relatively trivial occasion did any of it see action at sea. In the battle off the Corsican Cape Noli on 24 March 1795, a deputy on mission in charge of a frigate, Etienne-Fran¸cois Le Tourneur, ordered its explosive shells fired against three English ships. All three were put out of commission. A gradu75

Memorandum of 29 nivose, an II (19 January 1794); AN, AFII 223, 1924. Fabre to the Executive Directory, brumaire, an VI (October 1797); Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4,b350. 77 Resumé de l’épreuve sur le tir des obus de nouvelles dimensions, faite le 1er Prairial, en présence des Citoyens Monge et Hassenfratz. AN, AFII 220, 1896. 78 Villaret to Dalbarade, le 5 frimaire, an III (26 November 1794), AN, AFII 220, 1899. 76

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ate of Mézières, Le Tourneur had been a captain in the Corps of Engineers assigned, in company with Meusnier, to the fortification of Cherbourg in the late 1780s. Elected to represent the department of la Manche in the Legislative Assembly and reelected to the Convention, he focused his energy and experience on naval and military problems. In spirit and outlook, he was close to Carnot, through whose influence he was elected to the Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety in August 1795. More important, in October Carnot saw to it that both should be elected to the five-man Directory, the new governing body, on which Le Tourneur served until May 1797. Fabre blamed the failure to make further use of novel weapons on the top brass of the regular Navy, “which has always refused to use any invention at all, let alone this one.” He reports discussions in which admirals justified their refusal on the grounds that if the Navy were to employ such shells, the enemy would have the same thing to fire back within a year. Since two ships so armed would destroy or burn each other in short order, and since the English had naval superiority, the discovery would redound to the disadvantage of the French. In Fabre’s view, the high command missed the point that the opportunity lay before the Navy to blast enemy ships out of the water and mount an invasion before the English had time to respond. It behooved them further to reflect that the English and other powers were bound to discover that cannon are capable of firing explosive ammunition, and the French would thus have lost the inestimable advantage of the first strike.79 Fabre reported those exchanges in memoirs addressed to the Directory in November 1797 and to the Minister of War in January 1798. Although promotion and assignment to other duties had removed him from Meudon late in 1795, he never put his work there out of mind and was again calling attention to the still open opportunity. His appeal was heard. A decree of 20 December 1797 ordered the Minister of War, General Barthélemy Schérer, to arrange for conducting secret experiments at Meudon. Their object should be to establish in a precise manner the effectiveness of the incendiary ammunition and shells fabricated under Fabre’s direction, and further to make recommendations concerning their possible use in combat.80 Schérer appointed a highly distinguished commission. It consisted of Admirals Fran¸cois-Etienne de Rosily (the chairman) and Edouard-Thomas de Missiessy; of two colonels from the artillery, Antoine-Fran¸cois Andréossy and Jean-Jacques Gassendi; and of three mathematicians from the Institute of France, Jean-Charles de Borda (himself a career naval officer in the old regime), Monge, and Laplace. Borda and Monge were as well qualified to 79 Fabre to the Minister of War, 18 nivôse an VI (7 January 1798), Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4.,b350(5). 80 Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4, b350 (6).

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judge of mechanical and technological as of mathematical matters, while important instruments of experimental physics owed their design to Laplace, otherwise the complete mathematician. By the time the first tests were run, Monge had departed for Rome, preparatory to embarking in May 1798 to join Bonaparte in the Expeditionary Force bound for Egypt. Replacing him was the industrialist Jacques-Constantin Périer, elder of the brothers in the famous foundry, which had turned from steam engines to ordnance in 1793– 94. In addition the commission coopted a politician with some technical competence who was already familiar with Meudon, Etienne Deydier, a longtime associate of Guyton de Morveau and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, now a member of the Conseil des Anciens, the upper house of the legislature, and formerly a deputy in the Convention. Preparations were complete in early March 1798. At the far end of the test range, the naval carpentry foreman, one Lesquivit, had built a massive oaken target 5.2 meters wide by 6 meters, exactly simulating a segment of the hull of an 80-gun ship of the line. The gun battery consisted of four cannons, a cast-iron 36-pounder from the Navy, a bronze 24-pounder from the artillery, an iron 18-pounder mounted on a carriage, and a naval 12pounder. Rounds of all four calibers, both incendiary and explosive, were randomly selected for testing by members of the commission from stocks stored in the basement of the château, serving as powder magazine. The testing program was thoroughness itself. It required six sequences of several days each from March until mid-July. At each session, the entire battery fired from three to six salvos. Every round was tracked and its effect, or lack of it, recorded in detail. The first two firings, on 10 and 23 March, and the last on 17 July, were devoted to incendiaries. The delay was occasioned by the decision to bring up additional ammunition from Le Havre in order to determine whether ammunition distributed to the main ports in 1795 was still good. It was. Apart from that, however, the results were disappointing. One round lodged itself inside the planking and ignited smartly, just as it was designed to do, but guttered out for lack of air. A number failed to burn. Others that missed the target set fires in the woods beyond the range. One mishap was inadvertently encouraging. Returning in the morning of 26 March for a third day in the second series of tests, the Commission found the target consumed by fire. A round that had looked to be a dud the previous evening had evidently flared up in the night. The commissioners were also impressed by the extreme flammability of the composition. Thrown into a basin, one round continued burning under water, surfaced, and hurled sparks in every direction. Nevertheless, they were not altogether persuaded that incendiaries were a combat-ready weapon. Still less so was the artillery commander of the Army of England. With his headquarters at Le Havre, General Augustin Lespinasse had conducted

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his own tests when ordered to send incendiaries from the magazine there to Meudon. A letter to Schérer of 8 July reports finding the six-inch incendiaries fired from a 24-pounder to be perfectly useless, whereas explosive shells of the same caliber had succeeded perfectly. He had, he added in an interesting aside, employed that same ammunition with great success in the Army of the Pyrenees, whose artillery commander he had been in 1794–95. In a second letter of 1 August, he did allow that further experiments with the 36pound incendiaries would be advisable, “for in war one should neglect nothing.”81 For its part, and this was the main part, the Meudon Commission also found explosive shells to be an altogether different matter from incendiaries. Three sets of tests were run during which some twenty-six rounds of all four calibers were fired, half at a range of four hundred meters and half at six hundred. Laying the guns at proper elevation was tricky since conventional cast-iron cannonballs were much heavier than explosive shells. Propellant charges had also to be adjusted by trial and error. That many rounds missed the target was no reflection on the gunner. Of those that hit home, several pierced right through the simulated shipside and exploded in the area behind, which would have been amidships in a real vessel. Another penetrated eighteen inches of wood and splintered off two strips of inside sheathing, one of them eight feet long. A further shell knocked four planks loose, one by as much as thirty inches, destroyed a three-foot length of one of the ribs, hurled a piece of planking a distance of twenty-six feet, and detached one of the interior mountings, scattering clamps, bolts, and nails every which way. Much the most damaging, naturally enough, were the thirty-six-pounders. Even so, in the tests run on 27 April the twenty-four-pounders were impressive enough that Gassendi, who had been commander of the company in the La Fère Regiment in which the youthful Bonaparte served as a second lieutenant, wrote this account to his former subordinate, now general-inchief of the Army of England. He could not know that Bonaparte would soon embark, secretly and instead, for Egypt: You will, perhaps, be very glad to know of the effect of a shell fired into the side of a vessel and exploding there, such as we have observed in today’s test. The piece—a bronze cannon firing at 203 toises (about 400 yards);—The shell, 24 calibre weighing 161⁄2 pounds;—The powder charge in the piece, 3 pounds;—Powder charge in the shell, one pound;—Oak target [of density] 76 pounds the cubic foot, with the dimensions of the sides of an 80-gun ship;—The ribs 12 inches thick;—The interior planks 5 inches, and the exterior 8;—With the piece aimed at 10 feet above the waterline, and the target struck at 5 81

Lespinasse to Schérer, 20 messidor and 14 thermidor an VI, Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4, b350 (7 and 8).

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feet above that line, the shell penetrated into the middle of the rib and exploded. At the level of the fourth row of planks, above the main wale 8 inches thick, a 2 to 3 foot length of the 12-inch limb was torn apart in all directions. Three rows of planks less than 5 inches thick came completely unnailed and were blown off, and three thicker than 8 inches were loosened.82 Anyone who has ever participated in the testing of ordnance would have to call these experiments a considerable success. Such, clearly, was the opinion of the Commission, consisting of people who did not give their assent lightly in technical matters: The Commission . . . thinks that these two types of cannonballs could be employed very usefully on warships. Its opinion is that cannon shells could cause considerable damage to an enemy vessel when they explode in the side of the ship, and that they would put it in such condition that it would sink very promptly if they exploded beneath the water line. It also thinks that when these cannonballs pierce through the side or land in the batteries, not only will they kill many men, but more than that will cause great disorder among the crew, and are more fearsome on that score, it seems to us, than for the explosive effect itself, because very few rounds will penetrate below the water line. As for the incendiary cannonballs, although they are much superior to all the other inventions of this sort that have been proposed for the last several years, and although in certain conditions they could have a more terrible effect than would the shells, we think that generally speaking they are less fearsome. For one thing, we consider that when they are embedded in the side of a ship, the caulking of the sheathing inside and outside, as well as the flat planking, will impede the flow of air needed to ignite the wood and to keep it burning. The effect of incendiary cannonballs in the interior of a ship is still less dangerous in that anyone can grab hold of them without risk and throw them into the sea.83 The Commission concluded by recommending (with an imminent invasion of England in mind) that warships be equipped immediately with ten rounds of explosive shells for all cannon of eighteen, twelve, and nine kilograms (i.e., thirty-six-, twenty-four-, and eighteen-pounders). As for incendiary shells, five rounds of each caliber per gun would suffice. In neither category would shells of lesser caliber be worth employing. A range of eight hundred meters was the maximum at which the explosive shells would penetrate the side of a ship deeply enough to be effective, while the limit for 82 83

Quoted in Henri-Joseph Paixhans, Nouvelle force maritime (1822), p. 99. Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4, b350 (6).

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incendiaries was four hundred to five hundred meters. Precautions were suggested for storing and handling the ammunition on shipboard. The commissioners called, finally, for further experiments to determine the optimal ratio of charge to empty volume inside the explosive shells and to decide whether certain modifications in the design of the exterior would be desirable.84 The Meudon tests envisaged naval combat, with emphasis on the heaviest artillery, the thirty-six-pound cannon. Further experiments looking to the employment of explosive shells in land operations were run in the presence of the Army Artillery Committee at Vincennes in November 1799. The scale was smaller than at Meudon. Since the heaviest weapon used by the Field Artillery was the twenty-four-pound cannon, the trial was limited to shells of that caliber. Nine of the thirty rounds penetrated the rampart of a siege battery used for target, and one explosion left a crater of thirty cubic feet. Among the observers was Scharnhorst, who expressed admiration.85 Variants of the type of devices proposed or tried at Meudon—aircraft, rockets, incendiaries, exponentially more powerful explosives—figure in the armory of modern warfare. In the important instance of cannon shells the lineage was direct. The tests at Meudon and Vincennes were the most encouraging precedents, not just cited but reported in detail, by Henri-Joseph Paixhans, the ordnance reformer who initiated the first program for developing explosive ammunition for cannon that was ever systematically carried through to fruition in combat. ´ A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique in 1801, Paixhans had completed his education at the Artillery School, seen action in the Austrian, Prussian, and Polish campaigns of 1807, been decorated with the Croix de Guerre, served with Napoleon all the way to Moscow in 1812, and in 1814 commanded the batteries defending the Butte Chaumont and Belleville against the allied advance. His extensive military experience having persuaded him of the need for a clean break, he went over the heads of the Army and Navy and put his proposal directly before the civilian authorities, the Academy of Science, and the public in a book, Nouvelle force marine, published in 1822.86 His initial target was the Navy. In Paixhans’s argument, the 80- to 126gun ship of the line, the classic three-decker with its high profile, its large skilled crew, its intricate but vulnerable fittings, this floating monster to which England owed her command of the seas, was a ruinously expensive dinosaur awaiting extinction. The agent of its destruction was already at 84

Ibid. Paixhans, Nouvelle force maritime, “Réponses aux objections,” pp. 223–239. 86 Nouvelle force maritime, et application de cette force a` quelques parties du service de l’Armée de la Terre (1822). On Paixhans and his proposal, see J. Challeat (1933–35), 1, pp. 51–53; and in ´ more detail, the chapters by Idelphonse Favé in tomes 4 and 5 of Napoleon III, Etudes sur le passé et l’avenir de l’artillerie (6 vols., 1846–71). 85

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hand in the form of explosive projectiles for naval artillery of the sort tested at Meudon. Cannon on both sea and land had repeatedly been shown to be capable of firing shells and bombs at flat trajectory. Why, then, had they never been adopted systematically? Paixhans put the blame right where Fabre did, on the resistance to innovation characteristic of ranking naval officers, who feared lest they themselves become obsolete along with the ships and personnel under their command. What was needed was not invention, but creation of a new order of battle. Combination of three measures would achieve the transformation: first, increasing the caliber of naval artillery pieces; second, greatly decreasing the number on each ship; third, replacing cumbersome sailing vessels by smaller steam-powered warships. Though Paixhans gives an appendix on field artillery, he began with the naval application of explosive ammunition for the same reason that Fabre had done with incendiaries at the outset, and later with explosives at Meudon. Only by such a revolution in weaponry could the French hope to engage the British Navy on a level fighting field. Paixhans’s treatise is a summons to experiments, not a report on them. He was referred to the Academy of Science, before which body he read a memoir on “La puissance navale” on 8 May 1820.87 Experiments came later, in December 1823 and January 1824. Among the commissioners who recommended trials in 1820 and observed the execution at Brest in late 1823 and early 1824 were two who had observed the Meudon tests, Admiral de Rosily and Laplace. Others were Charles Dupin, mathematician, engineer, and technological reformer; Gaspard Riche de Prony, Director of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and foremost among civil engineers; and, finally, Louis de Marmont, Marshall of France. This time, the high command did not resist the recommendations of the scientists. Marmont wrote the report: “The results are such that, whatever idea one may have formed of the terrible effects of this weapon, those that were obtained surpass them.”88 The apology with which Paixhans begins his book resonates with the justification Cuvier advanced for Berthollet and that many another concerned with the perfecting of weapons has expressed in one way or another throughout the course of history. Perhaps we should defend ourselves from incurring the horror justly inspired by the progress of the cruel art of destruction. We have done so several times in the course of our book. Here we shall say only that all honest and enlightened men, when they engage themselves in these matters, have clearly recognized that the improvement of weapons (which is inevitable anyway) is in no way to be deplored. It confers on 87 Institut de France, Académie des Sciences, Procès-Verbaux 7 (1820–23), Séance du lundi 8 mai 1820, p. 48. 88 Institut de France, Académie des Sciences, Procès-Verbaux 8 (10 May 1824), pp. 79–80.

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the physically weak the means for battling against unjust force, and it has always been favorable to civilization, the truly courageous, and the interests of humanity.89 3. THE MOBILIZATION OF SCIENTISTS

Ever since Albert Mathiez’s classic La Révolution fran¸caise, it has been canonical to credit mobilization of science with having armed the forces that turned defeat into victory in 1793–94, the year II of the Republic.90 What are the grounds? By any standard the prospects for the French Revolution reached their nadir in the summer of 1793. Following the Convention’s expulsion of the Girondists, the cities of Lyons and Nantes, ever restive, threw off the control of Paris. In Toulon and Marseilles leaders of the dissidents appealed for support to Admiral Hood, commander of the British Mediterranean fleet. Counterrevolutionary peasants and nobles in the West and South controlled almost half the countryside. The British Navy blockaded major ports. Former slaves led by Toussaint l’Ouverture were in control of Saint-Domingue, the source of colonial riches. Military disaster threatened on all frontiers. Valenciennes, its fortifications a link in Vauban’s chain of frontier strong points, capitulated to the Austrians on 2 August. Austrian, Prussian, British, and Dutch forces stood ready for deeper invasion from the North and East while Spanish regiments were poised to strike from the Pyrenees and Piedmontese troops from the Alps. In the French ranks desertion was epidemic. Paris was itself chaotic. Prices climbed. Bread disappeared. Spies, zealots, disguised priests, deserters, madmen, thieves, desperate women, and agitators of every sort roamed the streets and held forth in public. What authority there was resided in political clubs and the municipality rather than in the Convention. Such were the straits in which the Committee of Public Safety, chaired by Guyton in its earlier phase, reinvented itself in July and August as a dictatorship in commission, a government “revolutionary until the peace.” Two decrees defined its nature from the outset, the levée-en-masse of 23 August calling for total war, and the law of 5 September introduced by Robespierre declaring Terror to be the order of the day. Drafted by Carnot as his first act on joining the Committee, and embellished for delivery by Barère, the former summoned the nation to total war in terms famous from its first article: Article 1. Young men will go into combat. Married men will forge weapons and transport supplies. Women will make tents and uniforms 89 90

Nouvelle force maritime, pp. ix–x. Mathiez (1922). The citation is to the 1959 ed., pp. 427–428.

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and serve in hospitals. Children will make bandages of used linen. Old men will have themselves carried into public places to arouse the courage of warriors and to preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic. Article 2. Nationalized houses will be converted into barracks; public parks into weapons workshops; the earth of cellars will be leached to extract saltpeter from it. Article 3. Calibrated weapons will be exclusively reserved to those marching against the enemy. Internal security will be maintained with sporting guns and side-arms. Article 4. Saddle horses are requisitioned to bring the cavalry up to strength. Draft horses, except for those used in agriculture, will haul artillery and provisions. Article 5. The Committee of Public Safety is enjoined to take all the measures necessary to establish without delay an extraordinary production of weapons of all sorts in a mode corresponding to the energy and e´lan of the French people. Consequently, it is authorized to create the establishments, factories, and plants judged necessary for carrying out the work, as well as to requisition for the purpose the artisans and workers throughout the Republic who can contribute to its success. . . . The central establishment of this system of production will be Paris.91 The execution matched the rhetoric. In consequence, a foreigner brave or foolhardy enough to visit Paris in late spring 1794, perhaps to attend the festival of Reason on 8 June, would have found the capital of France outwardly transformed into an open-air armory and a collective munitions factory supplying the armies of the Republic. All churches were closed to religious worship. The abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, now the Atelier de l’Unité, had become a huge saltpeter refinery treating 25,000 pounds of the crude salt a day. Individual citizens and teams of patriots everywhere supplemented the official scavenger crews, the saltpetermen of Paris, in ransacking cellars, poking through humid reaches of dirty masonry, and turning over piles of debris in search of encrustations from which to leach out the crude salt. A workforce of 1,800 powdermakers, most of them new to the trade, used a novel process for mixing fine charcoal and granulated sulfur with the refined saltpeter in a makeshift gunpowder plant on the plain of Grenelle.92 Directing the war were Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, the only two members of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety with the benefit of either technical or military training. Carnot took charge of military opera91

AP, 1st series, 72, pp. 674–675. The classic account, Richard (1922), has not been superseded. For qualifications, see Alder (1997), pp. 253–318; Bret (1994), chapter 5, pp. 216–275. 92


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tions, Prieur of war production. In the overall scheme of things, Carnot’s was by far the greater responsibility. Despite the objections of Robespierre, who was not yet dominant, the Committee itself requested the Convention to elect Carnot to membership. He took his place on 14 August 1793. It is possible that Guyton had called his qualifications to the attention of his successors. He hardly need have done, for Carnot had amply demonstrated his military capability. It is, on the other hand, highly probable that Guyton was behind the election of Prieur, also on 14 August. If so, he sensed in his young cousin a latent organizational capacity that nothing in either Prieur’s political activity, or his previous inactivity in the Corps of Engineers, had made evident. There is no record that Carnot or Prieur ever spoke at the Jacobins or attended meetings of the Society in Paris. Neither one was a stirring orator. The member of the Committee who normally dressed out their reports in revolutionary rhetoric was Bertrand Barère. Serving in the Legislative Assembly, Carnot had initially been overshadowed by his younger brother, called Carnot-Feulint, also a military engineer, also elected in 1791, and by a larger majority, to represent the Pas-de-Calais, where both were stationed. Feulint was of an affable and outgoing personality and more active in local politics. After the declaration of war, however, the fundamental untrustworthiness and unworkability of the monarchy brought out a kind of latent republicanism in Lazare, who proved the steadier in his principles. Never a democrat, never an idolater of the people, he nevertheless moved leftward in his political sympathies, his goal an orderly society in which people of his sort, the enlightened, hard-working bourgeoisie of moderate means and respectable background, would lead a dignified, responsible, patriotic life, neither deferring nor condescending to fellow citizens. In such a society the use a man made of his talents would determine his fortunes in life.93 Carnot first manifested his talent for military leadership on the morrow of the fall of the monarchy. On 11 August 1792 the National Assembly named commissioners to the armies to secure their allegiance to the republican order. Carnot headed the mission to the Army of the Rhine. His colleagues were Coustard, a former officer in the musketeers, and Prieur, with whom he now collaborated for the first time. Arriving at Phalsbourg on 14 August, they summoned commanders, staff, and high-ranking officers and without ado put to them the straight question: “Do you purely and simply accept the decrees of the National Assembly, Yes or No?” The few who hesitated were cashiered on the spot. Thereupon the three deputies moved 93

The standard biography is Reinhard (1951–52), 2nd ed. (1994). Gillispie (1971) is a study of his scientific and mathematical work. Dhombres and Dhombres (1997) combines a popular account of his political and military career with a treatment of his science. Charnay (1984–85) and (1990) are collections, of which the most valuable parts treat Carnot’s military leadership.

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among the rank and file to explain events in Paris, staged a triumphal entry into Strasbourg in the name of the Republic, straightened out border problems with the Swiss on their own terms, and on 4 September reported back to the National Assembly that the Army of the Rhine was loyal and the eastern departments politically secure.94 Further missions to the Army of the Pyrenees and the Army of the North led to Carnot’s appointment to the commission sent by the Convention to relieve Dumouriez in early April 1793. Carnot was lucky to be on a side errand to Arras when Dumouriez took his colleagues into custody and turned them over to the Austrians before deserting. Incarnating the authority of the Republic, Carnot assumed temporary command of the leaderless army and retrieved certain positions, notably the town of Furnes, before the arrival of Custine, transferred in the emergency from the Army of the Rhine prior to his own arrest and execution. Carnot commanded troops in the field once again, joining with Jourdan in the capture of Wattignies on 24 September, four weeks after his election to the Committee of Public Safety. Thereafter, he combined in himself functions of a Minister of War with those of Chief of a General Staff. Carnot was neither a high-flown military thinker in the manner of Guibert, Clausewitz, or Mahon, nor a great commander on the order of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or Washington. He was simply the first military leader who thoroughly believed in the Revolution that brought him to power. The war to be won was dynamic. It had little in common with the static military operations for which he had been trained as a military engineer, wherein fortification was the basis of defense and siegecraft of offense. ´ His youthful Eloge de Vauban (1784) is an eloquent defense of the merit of thus channeling the dogs of war away from civilian populations, and he has sometimes been charged with inconsistency for having mobilized mass armies to wage campaigns of fire and movement aiming at conquest and even conversion to the victor’s cause.95 The world had changed, however, and Carnot was no less a pragmatist than a republican. He took charge of a war of principles, not of dynasties; of peoples against kings, not of kings against each other. It had to be fought, not by noble officers animated by fading notions of chivalry in command of professional soldiers serving for pay, but by untrained, patriotic citizens in all ranks taking up arms to defend liberty and equality at home and impose those boons abroad. Acting with the revolutionary authority and in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, he first of all centralized control of the armies in his own hands. No longer might insubordinate generals—a Lafayette, a Dumouriez, or a Custine—pursue their private designs. On 30 January 1794 94 95

Reinhard (1994), pp. 238–268. The E´ loge de Vauban is reprinted in Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 391–406.


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Carnot drew up a comprehensive plan for the next campaign that exhibits the range of his thinking. All nine armies of the Republic were to go on the offensive, but not all with the same means or intensity. The decisive thrusts should be concentrated in two or three sectors. The crucial theater was the North, where the enemy was strongest and from where Paris was most vulnerable. The Army of the North was to be supported by the Army of the Ardennes, while the Armies of the Moselle and the Rhine were to force the enemy to divert a portion of his forces and to keep him constantly on edge, but not to overextend themselves in an invasion. As for the Armies of the Alps, Italy, and the Pyrenees, their mission was to liberate towns and regions occupied by enemy troops, to seize strong points on or beyond the border, and thereupon to conduct holding actions. In the West the armies of Brest and Cherbourg were to complete pacification of the Vendée and to prepare bases for the assault on England that was to follow the reconquest of Belgium and the mouth of the Scheldt. Only then would France free herself from strangulation, commercial as well as naval, by British sea power.96 To those ends, of the 700,000 men under arms, two-thirds were assigned to the north and northeast. No less important were logistical factors. Men and materiel must be readily moveable from one sector to another. Existing fortresses must be manned and maintained, and interior lines of transport and communication kept open in a kind of great circle behind the fronts. None of all that, it may be thought, was original with Carnot. Similar considerations deriving from the geopolitical situation of the country had governed the classic strategy of the monarchy throughout early modern history. Carnot’s contribution was that of a well-trained engineer in power. The voice that protested his inclusion when in 1795 the Thermidorean Convention debated the arrest of members of the great Committee had it right: “Carnot organized the Victory,” cried an unidentified deputy. Carnot’s tactical directives, on the other hand, were revolutionary in the literal sense that they were dictated by the circumstances of the Revolution. Armies largely composed of raw recruits and conscripted peasants could only have their effect through the mass and spirit of patriotic fighters rather than the training and skill of professional soldiers. Instead of advancing along a line of battle, infantry would be deployed in deep columns supported by sharpshooters on either side. Frontal assaults were to be avoided in favor of attack on the wings of the enemy’s position, to be followed by enveloping movements from both sides. The soldier’s surest weapon was his bayonet— at one juncture Carnot supported a proposal, not finally adopted, of arming foot soldiers merely with pikes! The battle would culminate in hand-tohand combat with an enemy demoralized by cries of “Fon¸cons—Stab them” 96

Système général des opérations militaires de la campagne prochaine (14 pluviôse an II, 30 January 1794), in Charnay (1984–85), 2, pp. 248–252.

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as the French closed in for the kill. For the purpose was not merely to outmaneuver and defeat the enemy forces, but to destroy them totally.97 The interrelations of Carnot’s military leadership, his scientific work, and his politics have been much discussed among biographers and historians.98 At one extreme he is seen as fundamentally an apolitical technician, a patriotic military strategist serving in the government of the day, whatever its complexion. At the other, in keeping with the postmodernist vogue for politicizing actions of every sort even while deploring the exercise of political power itself, Carnot is taken to have infused governance by Terror with the domineering spirit of the engineer. He would have recognized himself in neither caricature. Certainly his talents were those of an engineer, trained in the adaptation of means to ends, decisive and unsentimental in judging of results. In politics his will was that of a tough republican, a reliable and, when need be, a ruthless patriot. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI, moved the decree to annex Monaco and Belgium, proposed conscription for all men betwen twenty and twenty-five, and as basis for a declaration of rights proposed that “the safety of the people is the supreme law” and further that “every political measure is legitimate if it be required for the safety of the state.” Among the measures Carnot thus judged legitimate were orders to put down rebellion in the Vendée and “exterminate the brigands to the last man”; to recapture Lyons from the rebels “torch in hand and bayonets fixed”; to bombard Toulon “with red-hot cannonballs setting fire to the city”; and to put to the sword every soldier in enemy garrisons on French soil that failed to surrender on demand. His name also appears alongside those of other members of the Committee of Public Safety on numerous directives by which it enforced domestic policy and security, which is to say Terror. On any given day hundreds of such papers passed across the table around which sat those members who were not absent, as some always were, on particular missions of political, economic, or military urgency. No one could have considered, or even read them all. Whether as a matter of routine, or out of governmental solidarity, the Committee members concerned primarily with administration—Jeanbon Saint-André for the Navy, Lindet for commerce and subsistence, Prieur for war production, Carnot for military operations—generally went along with the political measures initiated by the triumvirate of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just.99 They did until near the end. Early in July 1794 latent hostility between Robespierre and Carnot, the ideologist and the war leader, broke into the 97 Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 101–117, gives an excellent summary and analysis of Carnot’s military leadership, and reprints Carnot’s signal directives to the armies and reports to the Convention in volume 2. 98 See my preface to the second edition of Reinhard (1994). 99 Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 101–102.


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open. Differences over strategy precipitated the break. Saint-Just accused Carnot of treason for massing French forces in the North and in Belgium rather than pushing the Revolution into the Rhineland. Carnot in return accused Robespierre of demagoguery and tyranny. Though not a prime mover in the coup that overthrew the triumvirate on 9 thermidor (27 July), Carnot welcomed their downfall and execution. The next day he addressed a manifesto to “the incomparable armies of the Republic” hailing the disappearance of the “infamous tyrants who had usurped the name of patriots.”100 Henceforth he need consult only his own lights, political as well as military, in directing the armies. The role of Prieur de la Côte-d’Or is more difficult to assess.101 After the mission headed by Carnot to the Army of the Rhine, he served on further missions, to Brittany in January 1793 and, in company with Romme, to Normandy in May and June. The latter culminated in his arrest in Bayeux and detention until late July by the municipal authorities of Caen, outraged over the proscription of the Girondist deputies from the region. Thereafter, Prieur exercised major responsibility for the first and only time in his life as a member of the Committee of Public Safety. He was elected on 14 August, the same day as Carnot. What he brought to the organization of war production was primarily political authority. Initially he channeled it through the appropriate bureaus of the Ministries of War, the Navy, and Finance, which were often at odds with each other. On 1 February 1794 (13 pluviôse an II) the Committee of Public Safety put all these offices under the control of a single commission, in effect a ministry of munitions. The Commission des Armes et Poudres had five branches: Heavy Artillery, Small Arms, Logistics, the former Régie des Poudres, and the new Revolutionary Agency of Saltpeter and Gunpowder.102 On substantive, technological matters Prieur and his staff, often enlisting the agency of deputies on mission, implemented the advice of a set of scientific consultants. Officially an agency of the ruling committee, the Armaments Section—Section des Armes du Comité Salut Public—was assigned working space in offices in the Pavillon de Flore of the Louvre, hard by the chamber wherein the great Committee ruled the country. No record survives of the procedures or internal organization, if any, of the Armaments Section. It is unclear whether its members constituted a collective panel, or whether they came and went, initiating projects and responding individually to calls on their skills and expertise. The latter scenario seems more likely. What 100

Le Comité de salut public aux représentants près les Armées, 10 thermidor an II (28 July 1794), in Charnay (1984), 1, p. 239. 101 The standard biography is Bouchard (1946). 102 Guyton, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public sur l’état de la situation des arsenaux & des armées de terre et de mer de la République, 14 pluviôse an III (2 February 1795), BN, Le381195; Richard (1922), pp. 633–640.

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seems unlikely is that the inexperienced Prieur should have conceived such a system on his own. The obvious candidate for éminence grise would be Guyton-Morveau, by now an elder statesman of science, who could advise his young kinsman on men, measures, and possibilities. For clearly the functioning of the Armaments Section exhibited a regularization of the ad hoc consultation of experts by the earlier Committee that Guyton had chaired. No definitive roster of the Armaments Section exists. Of the names that appear under its letterhead on directives and publications engendered by the manifold activities, the most prominent was Monge. Berthollet was his closest associate. Deeply involved were not only Guyton but the fellow chemist who was also a deputy in the Convention, Fourcroy. The industrial chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal was summoned in December 1793 to organize saltpeter production in the south of France, and was later given oversight of the nationwide effort to that end and also of the manufacture of gunpowder. Running a new weapons laboratory, the Atelier de Perfectionnement, was Vandermonde, whose main mission was to perfect fabrication of gunlocks made of interchangeable parts. After having headed the Bureau of Matériel in the Ministry of War under Pache, and been sent by Monge to move Fabre’s incendiary project from La Fère and install it in Paris, Hassenfratz was named, probably at Monge’s instance, to be hands-on coordinator of the many enterprises constituting the Arms Manufacture of Paris. The chemists Adet, Darcet, and Vauquelin, the pharmacist Pelletier, and the industrialist Périer brothers participated more peripherally. The chemical entrepreneur C. A. Carny, who had fabricated muriate powder for Berthollet, developed the novel method for corning gunpowder first used at Grenelle and then generally. Ancillary to munitions making was Nicolas Leblanc’s effort to bring his process for the conversion of salt to soda into profitable production at Saint-Denis.103 Thus did sovereign political power and scientific knowledge assume the stance they have exhibited in relation to each other in times of military stress throughout modern history. The structure has been more systematic than in the relatively incidental instances of the early Galileo and Lavoisier, not to mention Archimedes, situated in their respective arsenals, for the most part in peacetime. When it is a question of novel weapons, the initiative normally comes from the scientists, who approach government, as did Berthollet in the instance of muriate powder, as would Fritz Haber introducing poison gas in World War I, as would refugee physicists pressing for development of atomic bombs in World War II. It could only be thus. Military commanders could have had no advance notion of the properties of potassium chlorate, chlorine and mustard gas, or uranium-235. Far from welcoming, let alone seeking, such munitions, they have characteristically 103

Richard (1922), pp. 656–671; Bret (1994), pp. 142–149.


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resisted innovation, at least in the early stages. On the other hand, when it is a question, not of invention, but of maximizing the effectiveness of existing weapons and technology, government takes the initiative in calling on scientists. Such, to cite a recent example, was the origin of the Radiation Laboratory that developed radar technology at MIT in World War II. Even so did the Committee of Public Safety constitute its Armaments Section. What specifically did they do? They did the sort of thing scientists have done in wartime ever since. They wrote technical manuals. They taught courses. They advised on, but did not direct, production of saltpeter, gunpowder, small arms, and ordnance. First to consider are the publications ordered by the Committee of Public Safety in September 1793 for distribution within the several industries. In very short order a set of well-illustrated technical manuals patriotically issued from the press. The principal titles and, where known, the size of the press run will exhibit the dimensions of the effort: Vandermonde, Monge, and Berthollet, Avis aux ouvriers en fer sur la fabrication de l’acier (15,000); Vandermonde, Procédés de la fabrication des armes blanches; Monge, Description de l’art de fabriquer des canons (5,000); Anonymous (but almost certainly Pelletier), Instruction sur l’art de séparer le cuivre du métal des cloches (6,000); Darcet and Pelletier, Supplément a` l’Instruction sur l’art de séparer le cuivre du métal des cloches; Vauquelin and Trusson, Instruction sur la combustion des végétaux, la fabrication du salin, de la cendre gravelée, et sur la manière de saturer les eaux salpêtrées; Darcet, Lelièvre, Pelletier, and Giroud, Description des divers procédés pour extraire la soude du sel marin; Darcet, Leliévre, and Pelletier, Rapport sur la fabrication des savons; Deyeux, Molard, Pelletier, and Verkaven, Instruction pour parvenir a` opérer la refonte du papier imprimé et écrit.104 Glancing through the above writings, and turning over many handsome plates, one may at first take them for a continuation in revolutionary circumstances of the treatment accorded arts and crafts in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert and the multivolume Description des arts et métiers of the Academy of Science. So they were, in a sense, but with a signal difference reaching farther than the military urgency that motivated their composition. The Encyclopédie was conceived as a literary enterprise wherein 104

AN, ADVIII.40. The last three titles were concerned not with war production directly, but with articles of general consumption. It will be convenient to defer the problem of potash, and its possible replacement by soda in soap making and other uses, to the discussion of revolutionary saltpeter in section 4.

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technical subjects were treated, sometimes by amateurs, sometimes by practitioners, in an informed manner. Among the purposes was raising the prestige of the arts and crafts in the republic of letters and the world at large. The Academy’s compilation, by contrast, was brought to completion by Duhamel du Monceau, who had no ulterior ideological purposes.105 A stalwart of useful knowledge, he enlisted leading figures in the trades themselves and persons who for economic or administrative reasons were knowledgeable about the specialties they treated. Three minor academicians took on a number of small articles as a favor to Duhamel, but no leading member of the Academy of Science participated. The title is accurate. The enormous work, invaluable and value free, is descriptive, not analytical, and what it describes are techniques. The revolutionary manuals are deeper in vein, though not more practical. They may properly be defined as early items in the literature of technology, where the word is taken in its original and literal sense meaning not, as it soon came do to, a whole body of techniques, but rather scientific knowledge of particular techniques. The authors were important scientists. Their treatment was analytical as well as descriptive and reached to the scientific principles underlying the processes in question. What brought them to the problems, however, was neither scientific curiosity, nor a wish for recognition from their peers in a defunct Academy. It was the summons from the Committee of Public Safety. Nevertheless, the prototype antedates the military emergency and the Revolution. In 1786 Vandermonde, Monge, and Berthollet had already prepared a fully technological memoir on the nature of iron.106 Their principal finding was that the solubility of carbon in molten iron is responsible for the properties of steel. The trio of authors begins the revolutionary postscript with an abbreviation of their earlier account of the chemistry of smelting, making use now of the vocabulary of modern chemical nomenclature unavailable to them in 1786. Their main purpose is to instruct iron masters on methods for converting iron into the three main types of steel. The first type, “natural” or ingot steel, was generally called German steel, since it predominated east of the Rhine. In order to produce it, the amount of charcoal in the blast furnace is increased. The resulting pig iron is then fused directly while shielded from air by a coating of slag. The best quality came from Styria and Carinthia, and our authors draw their information from Hassenfratz, who had visited that region for the government office of mines in 1783–84. 105

Gillispie (1980), pp. 344–356. On Duhamel, see Dupont de Dinechin (1999); Académie d’Orleans (2001). 106 “Mémoire sur le fer, considéré dans ses différens e´tats métalliques,” MARS (1786/99), pp. 132–200. For an analysis, see Gillispie (1980), pp.438–443.


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Cementation, practiced mainly in England, produced the second type of steel. Success required the finest grade of iron, which the English imported from Sweden. Iron bars coated with charcoal dust were packed into a crucible and covered with a layer of damp sand before heating to incandescence and baking in a beehive furnace fired by coal. French iron masters are advised to begin converting their shops to steelmaking on a small scale. To guide them Vandermonde and his colleagues include a plate of the furnace Gabriel Jars had constructed on returning from his tour of inspection in England in 1764–65. The model to which they might eventually aspire is illustrated in plates of the splendid Newcastle Furnace that Panckoucke allowed the authors to print in advance of a forthcoming volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique. Crucible steel (acier fondu), finally, or Sheffield steel, is produced by fusing either of the other types a second time. The hardest of all, it is the best suited for jewelry, watchmaking, surgical lancets and scalpels, other fine blades, and bits for small drills, but it is brittle and hard to work. German steel is the toughest and best adapted for heavy implements and use in construction. For the present purpose, however, attention is to be focused on cementite, which is altogether superior for lances, pikes, battle-axes, sabres, and gun locks. Where to obtain the best iron? “Fellow citizens, let us transport to our forges those prideful balustrades, those grills that have nothing to preserve, and if we find the qualities of good iron there, let us convert them into steel.”107 Vandermonde, the principal of the three authors, further received orders on 12 September to visit Klingenthal in Alsace, seat of the only manufacturer in France capable of producing sabres of high quality. The mission was to draft instructions for steel workers making other sorts of blades. Before the end of October he had compiled a 106-page quarto illustrated with nine plates exhibiting the techniques for fabricating bayonets, ramrods, and the seven main types of sabres. Meanwhile Monge turned out the manual on casting and boring cannons. There, as in his lectures in the Revolutionary Course, he expressed impatience with hide-bound foundry owners who refused to substitute for earthen trenches the more expeditious method of modeling the molds in a bed of sand. Onetime iron-master as well as mathematician, and former Minister of the Navy, Monge was most at home with cast-iron naval and coast artillery ordnance. The lighter and far more expensive bronze howitzers and cannon for field artillery formed no part of the public display in Paris. They were cast in the Périer brothers foundry at Chaillot, by Michel Brézin near the Arsenal, in two lesser establishments where the masters, Héban and Thury, also converted their foundries to

107

Avis aux ouvriers en fer, p. 21.

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bronze, and in several new foundries started in the spring and summer of 1794.108 Shortage of copper was the problem limiting these and provincial foundries in production of weapons for the field artillery. A solution lay, or rather hung, in the church bells of France. Resolutions of the Convention on 23 July and 3 August 1793 decreed that they be taken down from their belfries and converted into cannon, leaving one per village for sounding alarms. “Bells with which superstition has overloaded churches,” so begins the Instruction on their destruction, “offer a fertile resource, a sort of mineral abundant enough to suffice for our needs.”109 At this moment all the sciences, all the arts, all branches of human knowledge, highly perfected by the French, must cooperate in the defense of liberty and equality and the destruction of enemies of the Republic. Indifference to the public interest is almost as culpable as enmity. Physics and chemistry must take the lead in clarifying the work of manufacturing weapons. With that call to armaments, Pelletier and Darcet launch into a detailed technical account of the metallurgy of bronze and the theory of oxidation applied to alloys. The best bells contained eighty-five pounds of copper in a hundredweight, the poorest seventy-five pounds, the complement being tin with traces of lead, antimony, zinc, and bismuth. There had been no occasion in the old regime to recover copper from bell metal. A new monetary system would require copper coins, however, and Pelletier had undertaken experiments in 1790 and 1791 at the instance of the Monetary Committee of the Constituent Assembly. Since tin oxidizes more readily than copper, his strategy was to melt cut-up bell metal in a reverberatory furnace. Oxygen was supplied by stirring in oxidized copper scale, or if available manganese oxide, as an intermediary. The procedure worked on a laboratory scale. Enlisting the services of J. J. Dizé, Pelletier repeated it in the copper foundry in Romilly, near Rouen, and succeeded in recovering the copper from five hundred pounds of fragmented bell metal. In the first experiment, copper oxide was the oxidant, in the second manganese oxide, which he now thought to be superior. He completed those trials on 30 July 1791, and reported his results both to the Monetary Committee and the Academy of Science. The only publication in 1791, however, was a memoir of Fourcroy, who independently conducted a series of experiments. He appreciated Pelletier’s work, but considered that copper oxide was preferable to manganese oxide for reasons of economy and availability.110 What with delay in the reform of currency and the resort to assignats, shortages of copper did not 108

Richard (1922), pp. 228–232. Aulard (1889–95), 6, p. 89, and elsewhere. Instruction sur l’art de séparer le Cuivre du Métal des Cloches (1793). 110 Fourcroy, “Recherches sur le Métal des Cloches, et sur le moyen d’en séparer le cuivre,” Annales de chimie 9 (1791), pp. 305–352. Besides Dizé, others working on the problem at the same time were two minor chemists, Auguste and Jeannetty. 109


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appear before the military crisis of 1793, and in the interval these investigations dropped from view. Conforming to the September order of the Committee of Public Safety, an Instruction was rushed into print. No author is given, but from internal evidence Pelletier must have drafted it. Since the object of the earlier experiments was to obtain copper for coinage, he had then carried the oxidation of the tin in molten bronze to completion and recovered pure copper. Gun metal, however, was 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin. In principle the process could be arrested when all but 10 percent of the tin was oxidized. Whether that would work in practice was uncertain. Joined by Darcet, he returned to Romilly in February 1794. Working there with the director and chief inspector of the plant, Darcet and Pelletier conducted a series of trials with four-hundred-pound batches of bell metal. Their experiments confirmed Fourcroy’s finding that copper oxide was the simplest oxidant. Even more important, taking samples from the melt as oxidation proceeded made it perfectly possible to detect the point at which the ratio of copper to tin had reached 90:10. The molten alloy might then be run directly into cannon molds. Publishing a supplement to their manual in April 1794, they conclude, “Thus this brazen source of noise, hanging so uselessly in the air for centuries, which served only to fatigue us by the importunity of sound, today becomes one of the most powerful means of our defense, and one of the most abundant resources to supply the arts.”111 One important item was published only later. Unlike all the foregoing, it concerned an entirely new procedure. On 1 November 1793, the governing committee instructed Berthollet to seek expeditious ways to meet the needs of the army for shoe leather. He was aware that Armand Seguin, who had collaborated with Lavoisier in the latter’s concluding researches on respiration, had begun work on that problem several years previously. At Berthollet’s instance, the Committee of Public Safety enjoined Seguin to continue his research and report his results as soon as possible. He set to work and on 23 prairial (11 May 1794) addressed a memoir to the Committee. Berthollet had it referred to Lelièvre and Pelletier, who were instructed to follow every step in Seguin’s tanning of a sample of at least 100 hides. A location in Mousseaux, site of the present Parc Monceau, was assigned him for the trials, which began in the heat of the summer on 19 July. Prieur, Guyton, Monge, and Berthollet attended at intervals. Pelletier and Lelièvre submitted a preliminary report to the Committee of Public Safety on 28 July (10 thermidor, the day of Robespierre’s execution), and confirmed their very positive judgment in a detailed account on 25 October 1794.112 111

Supplément a` l’Instruction sur l’art de séparer le cuivre du métal des cloches, publié par ordre du Comité du Salut Public: Rapport sur les essais faits a` Romilli, pour faire en grand l’affinage du métal des cloches. 22 ventôse, an 2 (1794). 112 Lelièvre et Pelletier, “Rapport au Comité de Salut Public sur les nouveaux méthodes de

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Traditional artisanal methods for tanning hides required two to three years. First the hair and flesh had to be removed. Tanners used one of three methods: packing in lime, packing in fermented barley, or rotting in heaps. That took anywhere from two or three to fifteen months. Tanning itself consisted in stacking the depilated hides separated by layers of dried tannin in a ditch and covering them with dirt for eighteen months to two years. Nut gall, oak bark, or sumac were the sources of tannin. No one in the trade of tanning knew why it worked. Seguin began his research with chemical analysis of tannin itself, and of the organic matter in fat and follicles. His process got rid of the latter by the action of sulfuric acid. First, he soaked hides for a day or two in a lightly acidulated solution of bark from which the tannin had been extracted. The cleansed and softened hides then underwent a second soaking in a solution of tannin. With that the job was done. Calf and cow hides would be ready in a few days. The thickest steer hides needed two weeks. The Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety considered Pelletier and Lelièvre’s report in early October 1794, and initially decided not to publish the method lest enemy countries reap the benefits. The first intention was to set up several factories to supply the armies in secret. The shortage of leather generally, and drastically rising prices, soon led to second thoughts. Seguin refrained from taking out a patent, and instead reached an agreement by which the government supplied the means to go into production. He received a fifteen-year lease on the Ile des Sèvres, where he would build a factory. The Committee of Public Safety further advanced him the capital from funds under its control.113 By April 1795 Seguin had received 195,000 livres. He was also allocated large quantities of salt, copper, sulfur, and iron. Much of the lead for pipes, and for making sulfuric acid, came from the roof of Notre Dame. By April 1795 the revolutionary tannery was in production with a workforce of four hundred. Intended as a pilot plant to reform the industry, it included a school where candidates nominated by the Committee would be trained. Between June and October 1795, Seguin put one hundred fifty students through a series of six courses. This is not the place to follow the further history of tanning in France. Suffice it to say that the seed fell on infertile ground. The tannery on the Ile de Sèvres continued in operation into Napoleonic times, when Seguin was accused of profiteering from the needs of the army. A number of his pupils attempted to replicate his procedures in the provinces. None of the efforts tanner les cuirs, proposées par le citoyen Armand Seguin,” 3 brumaire an III (24 October 1794), Annales de chimie 20 (1797), pp. 15–77. 113 Fourcroy, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, sur les arts qui ont servi a` la défense de la République, & Sur le nouveau procédé de tannage découvert par le citoyen Seguin. Séance du 14 nivôse, l’an troisième de la République fran¸caise. BN, Le381127. Cf. Bret (1994), pp.197–200.


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took root, however, and not until well into the nineteenth century did procedures such as his prevail over the fidelity to traditional ways of tanners all ignorant of chemistry. Whatever the influence of these manuals in the several trades, it was rather on the lecture podium that scientists appeared briefly at center stage in the theater of the Revolution. The notion of offering instruction for artisans and others on extraction of saltpeter originated with the Régie des Poudres, which announced a series of lectures with practical demonstrations at the Arsenal of Paris on 30 January 1794 (11 pluviôse). With the enthusiastic concurrence of Monge and his colleagues of the Armaments Section, and very possibly at their instigation, the Committee of Public Safety seized on the idea. Its decree of 2 February called for enrolling candidates from all over France in a program of crash courses on the fabrication of arms and munitions. Every district in the country was to designate two “robust, intelligent, and hard-working citizens.”114 They must leave for Paris within five days. To be preferred were men twenty-five to thirty years of age who were already in service in the artillery or active in the National Guard. One of the pair must be able to read and write. In Paris they would be lodged by the good offices of the municipality for thirty days (three décades) and paid three livres a day. Each of the forty-eight sections of Paris would also name two men. In addition fifty carpenters from the capital were to attend the courses on casting and boring cannon. Each section would nominate six intelligent representatives of that trade to an assembly meeting in the hall of the Electors in the Eveché. There the fifty deemed most capable would be elected by their fellows. On completing the course they would go out to the provinces to erect new foundries, forges, and boring mills. Curriculum and staff were ready in a fortnight. Two courses of instruction were taught by nine professors. The first treated preparation of saltpeter and gunpowder, the second the casting and fabrication of cannon. Both met daily for eight days and were offered three times in a row, the starting dates having been 19 February (1 ventôse), 1 March (11 ventôse), and 10 March (20 ventôse). On every day each lecture was also given in three versions, always by a different professor, on the theory that hearing the same material presented thrice in as many voices would drive it home. In the five mornings allotted to saltpeter, students who crowded onto the benches of the amphitheater in the Jardin des Plantes listened first to Fourcroy, then to Pluvinet, and last to Dufourny, each speaking to the identical lesson plan. In three 114

Richard (1922), p. 470. For the revolutionary courses in general, see Richard, chapter 13, pp. 469–486, and Bret (1994), pp. 245–250. The printed summaries (Programmes des cours révolutionnaires sur la fabrication des Salpêtres, des Poudres, et des Canons) are in AN, ADVI, 99, pièce 69. We reserve discussion of the content to the next section.

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sessions on gunpowder, Berthollet, Guyton, and Carny followed the same pattern. Those who wished might then troop over to the Hall of the Electors in the Bishop’s Palace where at two o’clock Monge, Hassenfratz, and Périer held forth on the occurrence of ore, the smelting of iron, and the founding, casting, and boring of cannon barrels. The last three afternoons of that series were spent visiting foundries, forges, and smithies engaged in revolutionary fabrication of cannon, muskets, and side arms. A student conscientious or bewildered enough to attend all the sessions throughout the month of ventôse thus heard every topic and watched every demonstration nine times over. Pedagogy graduated into pageantry. Revolutionary Paris opened its arms to the several hundred provincial pupils from deepest France. They were welcomed like the Marseillais volunteers who had surged into the capital on 10 August 1792 chanting what became the national anthem. On 7 ventôse a deputation from the Convention and Committee of Public Safety attended the morning lesson, after which the pupils invited the “citoyens députés” back to their barracks to share their frugal repast and join in planting a tree of liberty. The next evening the students repaired after class to the Jacobin Club. Their entrance excited acclamation on all sides. One of their professors, Hassenfratz, rose to praise their zeal and to laud the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety, “which sees to it that Enlightenment is for all citizens and proscribes the aristocracy of academies.” On 10 ventôse, preceded by drums, the whole student body was presented before the bar of the Convention carrying a banner with the inscription, “Sent from the districts, guided by the Genius of Liberty, we know how to undertake everything for the Fatherland and to die in its defense.”115 On the closing day of classes, 30 ventôse, the Commune of Paris declared a festival culminating in an immense parade. Trumpeters, mounted gendarmes, cannoneers with two artillery pieces on horse-drawn gun carriages, drummers, a platoon of sappers and miners, justices of the peace, commissioners of police, more drummers, members of the Civil and Criminal Tribunal, the Revolutionary Tribunal itself—all these bearing appropriate banners preceded delegations from the revolutionary saltpeter workshops, the revolutionary forges and gunneries of the capital, a large band, two mothers and babies from each section of Paris, and as centerpiece the nine professors of the Revolutionary Courses followed by their students. Advancing twentyfive abreast with linked arms, each student held high a copy of the Instruction furnished them. They marched in three groups. Borne aloft ahead of the first was a draped and garlanded framework on which rested a basket of saltpeter. Carried in front of the second contingent, a centrifuge for revolutionary gunpowder (of which more in the next section) was inscribed with the legend “Mort aux Tyrans.” The third group pulled in their train a gun 115

Richard (1922), p. 477.

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carriage and cannon they had fabricated. Astride the barrel rode a young citizen in a red liberty bonnet wielding tools of the trade and applying finishing touches. Next marched the fifty carpenters followed by a second band, and finally the municipal authorities of the Commune, the Department of Paris, and the Council of Ministers. The route lay along the quais of the Left Bank, across the Seine to the Place de la Révolution, and through the Tuileries Garden to the Hall of the Convention. There the Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpêtres presented a Phrygian liberty bonnet made of saltpeter, only to be outdone by the deputation from the Fontaine de Grenelle, which placed on the altar of the Fatherland a saltpeter model Mountain topped by a saltpeter bust of Marat. A distillation of the revolutionary spirit, the celebration of the Revolutionary Courses served in effect as a dress rehearsal for Robespierre’s festival of the Supreme Being on 20 prairial (8 June 1794). The whole experiment, however, had lasting consequences of quite another sort. The idea of revolutionary courses became a talisman for the renewal of higher education. Selection of talented young people from the entire country who would receive intensive instruction given by masters in technical and other modern disciplines—such was the model. Instantiating the principle were, in addition to ´ lesser examples, the Ecole Polytechnique, the new medical schools, and the ´ no less portentous, if short-lived, Ecole Normale of the year III (1795). 4. MUNITIONS AND GUNS

Among the several munitions programs in general, as well as from the podium of the revolutionary courses in particular, patriotic rhetoric celebrated above all the popular production of saltpeter. People and country were proclaimed to be at one in a procedure carried out in plain view for all to emulate. “The soil of the Republic is rich in this resource,” so runs the introduction to the decree of 14 frimaire an II (4 December 1793) summoning the whole nation to extract it. Royalism had systematically rejected a generalized production of weapons. “Now that liberty offers its brave defenders everywhere the thunderbolts that will strike down tyrants, it must multiply in the same proportion the material that launches them.” If every citizen sets himself the goal of producing a pound of saltpeter, the almost instantaneous result would be a 25 million pound supply, “more than enough to lay low all the tyrants’ slaves.” The apparent difficulty of converting each and every citizen into a saltpeterman “would be nil for republicans ready to do their utmost for their fatherland.” Let patriots say to themselves: “The salvation of the human race may depend on the last pound of saltpeter concealed in my dwelling.”116 116

Prieur, Rapport sur le salpêtre, fait a` la Convention Nationale, au nom du Comité de Salut Public, 14 frimaire an III (4 December 1793). BN, Le38.591. Also printed in AP, 1st series, 80,

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On 30 pluviôse (18 February), the day before the opening of the first revolutionary course, a deputation appeared before the bar of the Convention bearing a tribute of the first 6,804 pounds of saltpeter already harvested in the section of the Gardes-Fran¸caises. The delegates concluded their address by singing a Marseillaise of Saltpeter, of which the first and third stanzas run: Descendons dans nos souterrains, La Liberté nous y convie; Elle parle, Républicains, Et c’est la voix de la Patrie (bis). Lavez la terre en un tonneau; En faisant e´vaporer l’eau; Bientôt le nitre va paraˆıtre: Pour visiter Pitt en bateau, Il ne nous faut que du salpêtre. . . . . . C’est dans le sol de nos caveaux Que gˆıt l’esprit de nos ancêtres; Ils enterraient dans leurs tonneaux Le noir chagrin d’avoir des maˆıtres. Cachant sous l’air de gaiëté Leur amour propre pour la Liberté, Ce sentiment n’osait paraˆıtre; Mais dans le sol il est resté Et cet esprit, c’est du salpêtre!117 All that, and far more, pertains to the popular as distinct, but not finally separate, from the technical aspect of the revolutionary production of saltpeter. For the whole story was more than a one-act drama. Performance of sans-culottes in city parks and peasants in village squares was real, widespread, and politically exhilarating. There the masses did the work of the Saltpeter Corps in the old regime, which had been limited to extraction of the salt from masonry, debris, alleys, cellars, caves, barnyards, stables, dovecotes, manure piles, unfloored country kitchens, and certain natural deposits. Once obtained, crude saltpeter had to be refined, a task formerly reserved to the Régie des Poudres. Expansion and acceleration of the latter process required persons versed in chemical industry. Though included in the epithet “revolutionary” by the protagonists, enlargement of scale and innovative techniques for refining evolved commensurately with the growing pp. 616–621. For general accounts of the revolutionary program in saltpeter and gunpowder, see Richard (1922), chapters 11–13, 16; Payen (1934), chapter 5; Bret (1994), pp. 216–274; and Le Service des poudres, numéro spécial de la revue Croix de Guerre (1961), pp. 63–74, 145–154. 117 Richard (1922), pp. 460–461.


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needs of the armies throughout the time of political affect and afterward. It was in this phase, naturally enough, that participation of scientists was instrumental as well as hortatory. It will be best to consider extraction and refining in order, beginning with a further caveat, to the effect that revolutionary saltpeter did not surge out of the ground all suddenly in response to the levée-en-masse of 23 August 1793. Only in March 1794, some five months into the year of the Terror, did the yield begin to materialize in any quantity. Before drafting the operative decree of 14 frimaire (4 December), Prieur and his scientific advisers in the Armaments Section had sought to prod the Régie des Poudres into expanding its possibilities. Among the last acts of the Constituent Assembly had been a law of 23 September 1791 nationalizing the munitions monopoly that had been a concession under Lavoisier’s leadership since 1775. The régisseurs, their headquarters still in the Arsenal of Paris, now reported to the Minister of Public Contributions (Finance) and were paid salaries instead of a share of the profits. They headed a considerable organization, beginning with a staff of twenty-two in Paris. Four inspectors-general oversaw the operations of another forty-seven refineries and powder mills of varying capacity throughout the country, each under the direction of a commissioner in one of three grades. All but eight subordinate members of the staff had worked under Lavoisier since before the Revolution, the mean time of service having been fifteen years.118 Piecemeal efforts began with a measure introduced by Carnot on 28 August 1793 lifting all restrictions on the operations of saltpetermen. Henceforth they were authorized to enter and search all premises in any property whatever, without the owner’s permission. Especially to be exploited were ruined buildings and debris in the traitorous cities of Lyons and Toulon, demolished by order of the Convention after the defeat of their rebellious citizenry. The governing Committee added a fourth régisseur, Nicolas Leblanc, to the Régie des Poudres, exempted saltpetermen and powdermakers from military service, and requisitioned further workers to expand the corps. Representatives on mission spurred the search for saltpeter in regions where production lagged. Monge and a subcommittee of chemists in the Armaments Section were assigned funds to experiment with implementing the creation of artificial nitrification plants. It was recalled that in 1778 Lavoisier and his fellow régisseur, Clouet, had undertaken investigations of the Loire Valley downstream from Tours, and also of the Charente, and there discovered rich deposits that had never been exploited. Bypassing the Régie, Prieur enlisted the skills of a young chemist, Nicolas Vauquelin, 118 ´ A report to the Minister by the régisseurs gives a complete Etat, or Table of Organization, as of 17 May 1793. AP, 1st series, 73, pp. 609–617. For the location of refineries and powder mills, see Payen (1934), pp. 166–167, and charts in Bret (1994), pp. 622–623.

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Fourcroy’s former laboratory assistant and junior colleague. The assignment made his name. Appointed commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety on 31 August 1793, and given full powers to commandeer men, tools, and materials, Vauquelin and an associate, Joseph Jacotot, set up workshops for extracting crude saltpeter from the earths containing it throughout the region.119 French victories in the autumn and early winter of 1793–94 may be thought to argue that these expedients and others like them, combined with a proportionate increase in size and number of powder mills, did in the event suffice to furnish the armies with the gunpowder needed to turn the tide of war. Such was not the view of Carnot, Prieur, and their scientific advisers. In what degree the further revolutionary saltpeter program was politically motivated, and in what degree logistically, it is impossible to say. The elements were inextricable. It appears likely, however, and Prieur’s report to the Convention on 14 frimaire suggests as much, that the quick and stunning success of the Vauquelin mission entered into the calculation in the decision of the Committee of Public Safety to transcend the capacities of the Gunpowder Administration, a holdover from the old regime after all, and to enlist the general public in augmenting the supply of raw material for munitions. Initially the Régie des Poudres was to have been enlarged and supplemented, not supplanted. The decree of 14 frimaire enjoined private citizens to search everywhere for saltpeter save in locations reserved to the Saltpeter Corps. The Régie was to send one of its officials to every department in order to provide instruction to agents whom each district and municipality would name to organize the extraction of saltpeter locally. A common workshop might be set up, or property owners might leach fruity deposits and evaporate the liquor on their own. In either case crude saltpeter was to be compensated at the fixed price of 24 sous a pound on delivery to the nearest installation of the Régie for refining.120 Distrustful of routine, however, and impatient for results, the Committee of Public Safety incrementally took control of munitions into its own hands. A decree of 4 nivôse (24 December 1793) divided France into eight regions for the purpose.121 An inspector in each exercised the authority of the Committee of Public Safety and reported directly to it. Henceforth certification of district agents pertained to them, not to officials of the Régie des Poudres, as did responsibility for stimulating the zeal of local authorities, extending the search for saltpeter, correcting procedures in workshops and powder mills, and instructing a team of young workers who might educate their 119 120 121

AN, AFII*130. AP, 1st series, 80, pp. 616–619. Aulard (1889–95) 9, p. 626.


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fellows both by precept and example. The Gunpowder Administration continued to operate its own arsenals and powder mills, but had no part in the proliferating revolutionary operations. Named to oversee ten departments in west central France was Vauquelin. His erstwhile collaborator, Jacotot, a Dijonnais lawyer and science teacher who had distinguished himself as a volunteer in the artillery, headed the neighboring ten departments in central France. Fran¸cois-Antoine-Henri Descroizilles, a pharmacist of Rouen turned chemical manufacturer, covered ten departments in the Northeast. A onetime consultant of Roland, he had been arrested as a federalist early in the Terror. Descroizilles had conducted successful experiments on artificial nitrification, however, and a memoir on the subject composed in prison won him release and appointment as inspector. It is an almost certain surmise that Guyton and Berthollet were the ones responsible for selecting the eight inspectors, all of whom were competent in chemistry, several as apothecaries. The one they named first, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, had charge of the largest territory, eleven departments in Provence and Languedoc. A brilliant chemistry teacher in his youth and author of a successful textbook, Chaptal had become an enterprising chemical manufacturer in Montpellier.122 Participation in the revolutionary munitions program brought him to the fore, as it did Vauquelin, with the difference that his became a far more important presence on the national stage. In later years Chaptal published path-setting works on viniculture, on industrial and agricultural chemistry, and on French industry in general.123 Before that, as will appear, he served Bonaparte in the critical post of Minister of the Interior throughout the Consulate, during which term of office Chaptal in effect organized the Napoleonic administration of the country. By February 1794 the flood of saltpeter began to outstrip the refining capacity of the Régie des Poudres, which was equally incapable of fabricating more than a fraction of the gunpowder it eventually made possible. Refining and powdermaking both required skills and a labor force as well as patriotism, however, and were none so easy to decentralize as was extraction from far-flung deposits. In the forefront of the action was another chemical manufacturer, Jean-Antoine Carny, rue du Harlay-au-Marais in Paris, to whom Berthollet had turned for industrial scale production of muriate powder in August 1793, and who on 12 April had already approached the first Committee of Public Safety with a proposal to fabricate the powerful new explosive.124 Questions about Carny’s honesty accompany his name in many of the archi122 Ibid. 10, p. 101 (7 January 1793). On Chaptal, see Pigeire (1932); Péronnet (1988); and Louis Bergeron’s introduction to the 1993 reprinting of Chaptal, De l’industrie fran¸caise (1819). 123 Chimie appliquée aux arts (4 vols., 1807); L’art de faire le vin (1819); De l’industrie fran¸caise (2 vols., 1819); Chimie appliquée a` l’agriculture (2 vols., 1823). 124 Aulard (1889–95), 27 April 1793, 3, pp. 484–485.

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val records where traces of his activity remain. He was well thought of by Berthollet, Guyton, and Prieur, however, and there is no doubt about his enterprise. On 15 December 1793 Carny came forward with the design of what he claimed to be a new machine for fabricating gunpowder in a safe, speedy, and inexpensive manner—of which more in a moment. At or near the same time, Carny further proposed adopting a process for refining saltpeter more expeditiously than by the traditional method. By the end of January 1794 it became clear to Prieur and his colleagues that procurement of munitions and weapons must no longer be partitioned among the three ministries of War, the Navy, and Finance.125 On 1 February 1794 (13 pluviôse) the Convention centralized all operations under a new Commission des Armes et Poudres under the direct control of the Committee of Public Safety. To coordinate the proliferating activities in the capital, the Committee had already on 26 January (7 pluviôse) created an Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres for Paris.126 It was to have three administrators politically acceptable to the Commune and under the technical oversight of a commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety. On 3 February Carny was duly appointed to be munitions chief in Paris.127 Decisions about revolutionary installations were taken at the same juncture. The governing committee had already instructed Carny and an associate to scout out properties in which new powder mills might be installed. On 29 January it accepted his recommendation of the château of Grenelle beyond the Gros-Caillou quarter and an estate near the Porte des Ternes in what is now the seventeenth arrondissement.128 The section of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Unité in patriotic parlance) stepped forward simultaneously, no doubt at Prieur’s prompting, with a solution to the problem of mounting a refinery for processing masses of crude saltpeter from all over France. Their revolutionary committee, ever distinguished by patriotism, offered for the purpose the nave and precincts of their Temple of Reason, the once and future abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In exchange they requested allocation of a smaller church in which to celebrate the cult of the Supreme Being. On 14 pluviôse (2 February), in a decree signed by Prieur alone, the Committee of Public Safety accepted the proposal, stipulating that the paintings in the ancient structure be transferred to the Louvre before refining began.129 At the end of February, Prieur and his consultants completed marginalization of the Gunpowder Administration. On the twenty-seventh the Com125

Barère, Rapport et Projet de Décret sur l’établissement d’une Commission nationale des poudres et armes de la République, 13 pluviôse an II. BN, Le38.677a. 126 Aulard (1889–95), 10, pp. 460–461. 127 Ibid., 15 pluviôse (3 February 1794), 10, pp. 635–636. 128 Ibid., 10 pluviôse (29 January 1794), 10, pp. 506–507. 129 Ibid., 14 pluviôse (2 February 1794), 10, pp. 617–618.


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mittee of Public Safety extended the powers of the Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres from Paris to the entire Republic.130 Henceforth the district agents overseeing the people’s extraction of crude saltpeter all over France would report to the Revolutionary Administration. It would establish refineries and powder mills where it thought proper, always with the approval of the Committee of Public Safety. It would place at their head qualified artisans, giving preference to those who had followed the revolutionary courses in Paris. In charge would be two expert commissioners. The side-tracked Gunpowder Administration, renamed Agence Nationale des Poudres, would still run its own installations, but have no further part in improvising new ones. Prieur and his scientific consultants had already decided on the two commissioners who would head the national effort. Descroizilles, inspector for Normandy and the Northeast, accepted forthwith. Chaptal, inspector in the South, was in Carcassonne when he received a letter from Berthollet, dated 25 February, which informed him that “the wheel of the Revolution would be calling him to other functions.” Chaptal demurred. His enthusiasm for the Revolution had extended no further than the work of the Constituent Assembly. A patriot he supremely was, but of Carnot’s ilk, not Robespierre’s. If Republic there had to be, and clearly the Monarchy had failed, it should be an orderly Republic of talents and merit. For Chaptal’s was a provincial sensibility, nurtured in Montpellier and steeped in the culture of the Midi. Though Chaptal was anything but a political activist by temperament, in early 1793 he was among the leaders of local Federalist resistance to Jacobin domination from Paris. As a consequence he was arrested and detained in the Citadel of Montpellier after expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention in June. Fortunately, the Revolutionary Tribunal had not yet extended its reach to Montpellier, and he was released after a few days. Thereupon he and his family took refuge in a remote village in the Cévennes. He kept a low profile high in the mountains until late December 1793, when the Committee of Public Safety appointed him Saltpeter Inspector in the Midi. Two months later, summoned to a Paris ruled by Terror, Chaptal initially responded that he thought himself to be more useful to the Republic where he was. Attempting to take no for an answer, Berthollet sought to persuade the Committee of Public Safety to respect Chaptal’s reluctance. He failed. “Your refusal and your delay are very damaging,” Berthollet wrote, and sent a further word the next day: “Are you aware that the [Gunpowder] Agency with all its facilities cannot fabricate more than six million pounds a year, and that we require, and must make, thirty million? . . . You are going to

130

Ibid., 11, pp. 434–435.

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compromise your reputation. The Committee of Public Safety will certainly put you under requisition.” Still Chaptal held back. A final message from Berthollet urges: “The Committee of Public Safety will have none of your refusal. It knows that you are very useful in your present mission, but it needs you at the center of the action. . . . Come! You will have the backing of the Committee of Public Safety to do good work, and to resist any malevolence that manifests itself. . . . I think that any further resistance will be interpreted badly.” Finally, on 23 March a direct letter from Carnot and Prieur themselves left Chaptal neither doubt nor choice. In Paris on or about 1 April, he met Robespierre for the first time, and went to work, conscious all the while of the fate that would await him if “malevolence” should prevail. It took the form of repeated denunciations that the Jacobin leadership in Montpellier forwarded to Fouquier-Tinville, prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Whatever Descroizilles’s contributions, his part was secondary, and Chaptal had overall charge of revolutionary production of munitions. Documents are lacking, but it must have been he who decided to concentrate all powdermaking in the château of Grenelle rather than setting up a second mill near the Porte des Ternes. Vats, troughs, stoves, and ovens were installed in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and refining masses of crude saltpeter began there in April, some weeks before the improvised powder mill was ready to combine the finished product with charcoal and sulfur. Serving as commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety under Chaptal, Carny had the job of designing both operations. His virtuosity was much more important in improving the technology of gunpowder than in refining saltpeter, however, and beginning in early May, he focused his attention on perfecting powdermaking at Grenelle. It soon appeared that refining saltpeter and milling it into gunpowder posed problems of a very different sort from extraction of the raw material. Extraction was a nationwide voluntary effort, modestly compensated as piecework, motivated by patriotism, conducted in public, sustained by civic spirit. Crude saltpeter from all over France had to be shipped to Paris for processing and fabrication into gunpowder. Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Grenelle were in effect factory operations. They required, not merely technical virtuosity, but firm management backed by political authority. Under the circumstances nothing weaker than the authority of the Convention embodied in Representatives of the People would suffice. To direct Grenelle, the Committee of Public Safety named a naval engineer, Joseph Niou, deputy from Charente-Inférieue. To direct Saint-Germain-des-Prés it chose Augustin Frécine, deputy from the Loir-et-Cher. The terms of their instructions make clear that the problems Niou and Frécine were expected to resolve were other than chemical. They were to see to the proper organization of the revolutionary powder mill and refinery and


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to maintenance of order. They were to dismiss employees who did not perform well, whether because of incompetence or lack of civic spirit. To replace the delinquents, they were to find citizens capable of good work. If necessary they might requisition any not already engaged in national service.131 Thus did Niou and Frécine, in company with their counterparts managing the fabrication of ordnance and small arms, encounter what Marxist historiography considers to be the fundamental contradiction of the French Revolution. The material interests of the working class were contrary to those of the government it had enabled to seize power. On 23 prairial (11 June 1794) Frécine found himself obliged to address the following proclamation to his labor force: I feel the most painful regret at finding myself forced even for a moment to drop the language of fraternity with you in order to make you hear only that of severe reason. I learn with surprise and sadness that there are individuals among you who obstinately want a raise in pay at the expense of the Republic. What then, citizens! Has the detestable spirit of greed that national justice has just annihilated among monopolists infected the pure soul of sans-culottes? Such a suspicion is too odious for me to be willing to entertain it, and you will not allow it to hang over your heads. Did they not understand, continued Frécine, that price controls (the maximum enacted on 29 September 1793) entailed fixing the price of their labor? None among them was earning less than twice what he had in 1790. Let there be no more talk of raises. Let them remember that they are under requisition, and that the law of 13 pluviôse (2 February) prescribes arrest for whoever “impedes or delays the extraordinary fabrication of saltpeter and gunpowder.”132 In the event nothing was allowed to impede it. From mid-April until mid-June 1794, the Régie, renamed Agence Nationale des Poudres, ran its old installations while Chaptal’s Agence Révolutionnaire expanded the improvised ones. Finally, on 17 messidor (5 July 1794) the Committee of Public Safety, on recommendation of the overall Commission des Armes et Poudres, combined them into a single Agence des Poudres et Salpêtres.133 A triumvirate directed it: Champy from the Agence Nationale (the old Régie), Chaptal from the Agence Révolutionnaire, and Fran¸cois-Joseph Bonjour, 131

On Niou’s mission, see ibid., 1, p. 500n; 12, pp. 455–456; 14, pp. 174, 712–713. On Frécine’s, ibid., 13, pp. 367–368, 455; 14, p. 356; 16, p. 224. 132 BN, Lb41.1120. 133 Barère, Rappport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, Sur l’état de fabrication du salpêtre & de la poudre, & sur la nécessité de supprimer l’Agence nationale, ci-devant Régie des poudres et salpêtres, 17 messidor an II (5 July 1794). BN, Le38.837.

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formerly Berthollet’s laboratory assistant, employed since early 1794 in procurement of naval munitions. The ultimate success of the munitions program virtually justified the rhetoric. By the time the Terror ended, in mid-summer 1794, some 6,000 workshops extracting crude saltpeter had sprung up throughout France, over sixty of them in Paris. In round numbers, the harvest of crude saltpeter in 1793 had fallen to just short of 2,718,000 pounds from an annual average of 3,500,000 during the preceding ten years. Prieur later claimed that in 1794 the revolutionary procedures had yielded 16,754,000. The most careful recent analysis of all the data, which at best are not precisely verifiable, reduces that estimate, though not drastically, to 14,750,000. What with the additional 4,830,000 pounds delivered to the former Gunpowder Administration, France produced 19,580,000 pounds of crude saltpeter from its own soil in 1794. The yield was less than the hyperbolic 30 to 40 million Prieur had called for in the report of 14 frimaire (4 December 1793) that launched the effort. Nevertheless, the achievement is no less remarkable in retrospect than it was at the time. Refining would reduce the total to twelve million pounds of pure saltpeter. In theory that would have sufficed for fabricating 16 million pounds of military gunpowder, over five times the average annual production of explosives of all grades from 1775 through 1792. In practice powder mills were able to turn out seven million pounds of gunpowder in 1794—28.6 percent from Grenelle, 20 percent from improvised mills elsewhere, and just over half from experienced installations of the former Régie des Poudres.134 What of the technology? Contemporary political commentaries echo Carny’s claim that he had invented the revolutionary procedures both for refining saltpeter and for fabricating gunpowder. The facts are otherwise. There is no doubt that he was a skilled manipulator of chemical apparatus, an effective manager, and a successful entrepreneur. He undoubtedly perfected and accelerated procedures on the factory floor both at SaintGermain-des-Prés and at Grenelle. The principles were already known, however. With respect to saltpeter, the starting point was Lavoisier’s last chemical investigation.135 War was imminent when Lavoisier, having resigned from the Treasury, 134 Bret (1994), 270–271. Prieur’s figure is for the twelve months following 4 December 1793 (14 frimaire), “Notice sur l’exploitation extraordinaire du salpêtre, qui a eu lieu en France, pendant les années 2 et 3 de la République,” Annales de chimie 20, (an V, 1797), pp.291–307. For data from the Régie des Poudres and its successor, Agence nationale, see Bottée and Riffault (1811), tables 1 and 3. 135 “Mémoire sur les différentes méthodes proposées pour déterminer le titre ou la qualité du Salpêtre brut; Sur la volatilisation de ce sel, qui a lieu par la simple e´bullition; Et sur les changemens qu’il paroˆıt convenable de faire aux opérations usitées jusqu’à présent pour le raffinage du Salpêtre,” OL 5, pp. 614–664.


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provisionally resumed his place in the Régie des Poudres.136 Still bedeviling procurement of munitions was the chronic dispute between the Régie and its suppliers, the saltpetermen of Paris, over estimating the quality, and thereby determining the price, of the crude saltpeter they dumped fortnightly in the yard of the Arsenal.137 Manual laborers now had access to lawyers who knew how to make their grievances felt. “The Régie des Poudres,” they complained in a memoir to the National Assembly late in 1791, “had conceived the design, why it is difficult to say, of keeping the saltpetermen in entire dependence.”138 The one chemist of the Academy they trusted was Antoine Baumé, apothecary turned manufacturer, who looked at chemical operations from a practical point of view akin to their own. In 1788 he had served on an academic commission that investigated the assaying of crude saltpeter. The test they recommended was novel. It consisted of washing a sample of crude saltpeter with a saturated solution of saltpeter itself on the theory that impurities would be dissolved and carried off leaving a residue of the pure salt. In later years Baumé claimed that the suggestion was his, though Lavoisier attributed it to Riffault des Hêtres (Desestres in his spelling), the Régie’s commissioner at Tours.139 In either case, Baumé was party to the proposal, and the saltpetermen expressed willingness to abide by it on condition that their representatives be present every time a delivery was tested: “It makes little difference whether this procedure is or is not capable of improvement; the question here is not of the effect of saltpeter, but of the price the Administration ought to pay for it. This is no operation of chemistry, to be carried to the highest degree of precision; it is rather a rule of proportion, to be established between buyer and seller.” On 14 May 1792, three weeks after the declaration of war, a decree of the National Assembly addressed the problem. The Minister of Public Contributions, Etienne Clavière, was to consult the Academy of Science and the Régie in order to find a formula that would resolve the issue. Clavière turned, inevitably, to Lavoisier. Ever intent on balancing whatever books, Lavoisier set to work. From mid-May through mid-August he labored virtually full-time on the problem of assaying crude saltpeter. He experimented, not on a laboratory scale, but with randomized 5,000136

Above, chapter 1, section 7. For a contemporary analysis by two chemists who were not party to the issue, see Fourcroy and Vauquelin, “Mémoire sur les incertitudes et les causes d’erreurs qui se trouvent dans la méthode d’essayer les Salpêtres bruts par la dissolution saturée du Nitre,” lu a` l’Académie des Sciences le 27 juillet 1791, Annales de chimie 11 (October 1791), pp. 125–142. 138 BN, Lf 65.11, Mémoire a` l’Assemblée Nationale, pour les vingt Salpêtriers du Roi, établis dans la Ville, Faubourgs, et Banlieue de Paris, par le Me Lavaux, avocat aux Conseils, pp. 41, 43. 139 OL 5, p. 620). Riffault was co-author of the treatise on gunpowder with Bottée (1811). Guyton confirmed Lavoisier’s attribution in a report on methods of assaying crude saltpeter, Institut de France, Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie des Sciences, 26 thermidor an V (14 August 1797), 1, 244–256. 137

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pound samples shoveled out of the great mass of a normal delivery. This was the first time that a serious chemist, or any of the régisseurs, had refined saltpeter with his own hands, instead of merely studying the principles and overseeing the refinery. Lavoisier began with the test the saltpetermen were willing to accept—washing crude saltpeter with a saturated solution of the salt. Variations in temperature and concentration of other salts presented difficulties, but he thought to average out discrepancies by testing not one, but twelve samples from the first batch of crude saltpeter to be refined. As always the saltpetermen had extracted their product by boiling the mixture of salts out of waste materials, throwing a bit of potash into the cauldron in order to convert the “eau-mère” (nitrates of calcium and magnesium) into saltpeter, and cooling the evaporated liquor to the point of crystallization. Lavoisier also carried out the traditional process of refining. It consisted of two further recrystallizations, after each of which the additional saltpeter washed out in the solvent water had to be recovered by further evaporation over high heat. Comparing the yield to what the assay had predicted, he discovered that up to 7 percent of the original saltpeter had boiled away with a portion of the liquid in these repeated firings. It followed that: The saltpetermen were correct in saying that the crude saltpeter they delivered contained so much pure saltpeter, but that the Gunpowder Administration was no less right in holding that on refining the same material produced only some lesser amount. From the moment that one perceives a truth that has been long sought and elusive, everything seems to join together to confirm and establish it.140 Lavoisier gave Baumé full credit, not for the idea of the test he had just used, but for imagining the application that immediately suggested itself: Might it be feasible to refine saltpeter cold by a similar procedure carried out on a large scale, and thus eliminate the loss to ebullition? Crude saltpeter could be washed in bulk with a saturated solution of itself that would dissolve and carry off impurities. Water alone would do as well, Lavoisier noted, since it would quickly become saturated in the process. Baumé had tried his notion, but only in the laboratory with a 100-ounce sample, and had reported positive results to the Academy of Science in a memoir read on 24 March 1792.141 He had been unaware of the effect of ebullition, which 140 Op. cit., n. 125, OL 5, pp. 630–631, 654–646). Multhauf (1971) considers that Lavoisier was mistaken about vaporization of saltpeter, and that the deficit in yield was due to entrainment in the course of repeated ebullition, which would have the same effect. 141 “Mémoire sur le raffinage du Salpêtre brut,” lu a` l’Académie des Sciences le 24 mars 1792, Annales de chimie 17 (April 1793), pp. 84–101. Baumé says that the personnel of the Arsenal had resisted his proposal on the grounds that workers would be unwilling to change their routine.


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though it strengthened the case for trying the procedure, would still cause considerable waste since the “eau-mère” (solvent water containing nitrates of calcium and magnesium) would have to be treated with potash and evaporated before crystallization. A further large-scale experiment was the only way to test practicality. Lavoisier proceeded to have a second 5,000-pound sample from the same randomized pile loaded into a large vessel. Over it his assistant poured a third of its weight of cold water—1,500 pints. After long stirring, he let the mixture settle before draining off the wash water. He then had the residue shoveled into large willow baskets placed in pans so that none of the drip should be lost. The saltpeter he obtained after this first lixiviation was grayish and looked rather like rock salt, of which it still contained a good deal. A second washing, this time with 2,400 pints of cold water (48 percent of the weight of the sample), left 2,593 pounds of saltpeter. Another 780 pounds precipitated out of the wash water and “eau-mère” on evaporation and cooling. The total yield from the cold process was thus 3,373 pounds, 128 more than he had obtained by the traditional method. The product was yellowish rather than pure white. It may still have contained up to 2 percent ordinary salt, but was certainly good enough for commercial use, especially in the manufacture of mineral acids. It would probably also have sufficed for fabrication of hunting-grade powder. Whether cold refining was capable of yielding a usable saltpeter for the finest grade of military gunpowder, Lavoisier could not say. Before finishing the experiments he had planned, he had to abandon his laboratory. Unnerved by the violent overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August, he and his wife moved out of the Arsenal on 15 August. They were none too soon. Three days later members of the revolutionary committee of the section, Les Piques, forced their way into the Arsenal, arrested his two colleagues, the Le Faucheux father and son, and jailed them in La Force. The elder Le Faucheux committed suicide in prison. After five days the son was released. Named to join him as régisseur was Fourcroy, who, ever adept at trimming his sails politically, had the prudence to refuse. Jacques-Pierre Champy, the second choice, accepted. Having been Gunpowder Commissioner for Burgundy, and a member of Guyton’s chemical circle in Dijon, Champy was admirably qualified.142 Less so was the one later named to the third place. A radical engineer, Louis-Pierre Dufourny was a member and for a time president of the revolutionary Commune of Paris. He took to signing himself simply “L’Homme Libre,” nothing more. Further horrified by the September massacres, Lavoisier decided to leave his temporary lodging and escape Paris for the relative shelter of his manor of Freschines. He and his wife remained there until November, returning to

142

Poirier (1993), pp. 331–332; Bret (1990b).

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take up his forlorn defense of the Academy in 1793. While in the country he wrote up his incomplete experiments on cold refining of saltpeter. I am far from proposing to make so great a change lightly. I did not intend to suggest it at all until I should be able to demonstrate the possibilities and advantages by repeated and more developed experiments. Indeed, I mention it in this memoir only because, being no longer provided with the same means to pursue the large-scale experiments that I had intended in the matter, I thought it my duty to transmit the results of my observations to the Ministry and to my successors.143 Lavoisier published his memoir in two installments in the October 1792 and January 1793 issues of Annales de chimie.144 It concludes with an exact description of the apparatus he would have set up and the procedures he would have followed in order to verify the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of cold refining of saltpeter. The arrangement would have been simplicity itself. Two lead-lined trenches, one and a half to two feet deep, six feet wide, as long as space permitted and sloping slightly end to end, would have been lined with lead. A bed of crude saltpeter up to eighteen inches deep would be spread in each. Over it would be poured 25 to 30 percent of its weight of water. After long stirring and soaking, the wet saltpeter would be heaped into a pile at the upper end of the trough, and the liquid drained from the lower end through one of two taps. That would carry off all the “eau-mére” (calcium and magnesium nitrate) and much of the salt. A second washing of the residue, with 35 to 45 percent of its weight in water, would remove the rest of the salt and be drained through a second tap into a separate container. Potash would be added to the rinse water from the first washing in order to recover saltpeter on evaporation. The solution from the second rinsing would simply be evaporated in order to recover the salt. What followed on the ground was cruder and more complicated. Dufourny, now a successor in the Régie des Poudres, drafted the official instructions circulated throughout France by order of the Committee of Public Safety in implementation of the decree of 4 December 1792 calling for the popular extraction of saltpeter. The phrasing is suited to the readership and devoid of chemical terminology. Whether or not Dufourny had read Lavoisier’s final memoir, he certainly consulted with people who had. So far as it goes, the procedure he outlines for extraction of saltpeter by washing the materials containing it with cold water is similar in the essentials to Lavoisier’s proposal for refining. 143 144

Op. cit. n. 134, (OL, 5, pp. 645–646). Annales de chimie 15, pp. 275–267; 16, pp. 3–39.


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Instead of lead-lined troughs in the refinery, washtubs or wine tuns are to be split lengthwise. The half-cylinder tubs, fitted with taps, are arranged in sets of three. All three in each set are filled with the earth or pulverized debris to be leached. Water poured into the first is to cover the contents to a depth of two fingers. After three hours of soaking, the mixture is stirred vigorously, and allowed to soak another three hours. The water drawn off is then passed in the same way through the second tub, and set aside to be evaporated to crystallization. A second charge of water is passed in succession through all three tubs. The first tub is then filled with new earth or rubble and becomes the third for the next sequence, in which a third charge of water is passed in reverse order through all three tubs. The process continues back and forth in such wise that the solution to be evaporated will have passed through three tubs, of which the last is filled with new earth after every third washing. Evaporation then consists in simmering the liquor in a large boiler or cauldron. At the end of the first stage, the solution is sufficiently concentrated for the saltpeter to crystallize on cooling. That point has been reached when crystals form in a test spoonful. The solution is next poured into earthenware, copper, or iron vessels and left to cool and settle for three or four days, in which time crystals of saltpeter form all along the sides and bottom. The liquor is then poured off and the saltpeter allowed to drain into it. That liquor contains further saltpeter in solution along with impurities, of which common salt predominates. In the course of a further evaporation, gobbets of salt are skimmed off the surface as they appear. When the volume is reduced by about half, a saltpeter bonus crystallizes out on cooling. There is, finally, still more saltpeter to be obtained from the remaining “eaux-mères,” but recovering it requires potash or wood ashes and the specialized skills of professional saltpetermen. The ordinary citizen will do better to collect this last liquid and hand it over to the nearest refinery. Such were the layman’s instructions for the revolutionary saltpeter program. The next contemporary document consists of the program of the Revolutionary Course on the Fabrication of Saltpeter and Gunpowder.145 It was completed on 30 ventôse (20 March 1794), some four to six weeks before refining got under way at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Except for the exordium “Mort aux Tyrans,” the language is that of chemistry, not of the streets. The level was the same as it would have been a little later in the elementary chemistry course in one of the educational institutions of which the revolutionary courses were a precursor. Although purporting to describe how salt145

AN, ADVI 79, pièce 69. Programmes des Cours Révolutionnaires sur la Fabrication des Salpêtres, des Poudres, et des Canons. Faits a` Paris, par ordre du Comité de Salut Public . . . par les citoyens Guyton, Fourcroy, Dufourny, Berthollet, Carny, Pluvinet, Monge, Hassenfratz, et Perrier.

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peter is extracted and refined, the account is really of how things should be done. The third lecture deals with extraction. The process it describes is the same in principle as that called for in the Instruction (above) circulated throughout the country in December 1792. Instead of sets of three improvised troughs, however, the proper atelier is now said to be furnished with at least thirty-six barrels, preferably fitted with false bottoms for filters as well as machined taps. They are arranged twelve to a rack on three levels. A system of pumps, conduits, and pipes facilitates circulating the wash waters. After leaching, crude saltpeter is recovered from solution by evaporation in egg-shaped copper vessels set into wood-burning brick ovens. It would be preferable to substitute shallow copper basins since rate of evaporation is proportional to surface area. Finally, the most extensive discussion in the lecture on extraction treats the theory of specific gravity in liquids. The hydrometer invented by Baumé is to be used to measure the relative concentrations of the various salts mingled in solution with saltpeter, and evaporation is to be controlled accordingly. None of this can have had any but a coincidental bearing on the revolutionary saltpeter patriotically extracted in village squares and in workshops cobbled together in the Place Maubert and other places like it throughout Paris. The reference workshop (if not hypothetical) must have been some installation, unidentified, of the Régie des Poudres. The fourth lecture, on refining crude saltpeter, is even more theoretical. It opens with a method that is of interest merely in illustration of chemical properties. Saltpeter may be refined simply by exposing it to the air. In a humid atmosphere the impurities, which are deliquescent, slowly dissolve out and may be drained off. That is feasible only on the laboratory scale, however, and the main subject of this lecture is a detailed account of the standard procedure for refining crude saltpeter by two further recrystallizations together with a description of the apparatus and an explanation of the underlying theory. The auditor is told that this is what happens in refineries, though with no mention of the Régie des Poudres, which still ran them. Only at the end, almost as an afterthought, did the lecturer devote two paragraphs to an outline of the more rapid method of cold refining that the “Revolutionary Genius” had required and created, and that could take the place of the old process. That was in February and March 1794. Six months later the new process had replaced the old one. In October Chaptal drew up full instructions for the treatment of crude saltpeter that “national factories,” by which he meant Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had developed.146 Henceforth the method was to be standard in refineries throughout 146

“Instruction sur le raffinage du Salpêtre, nouvellement adopté dans les fabriques nationaux,” Annales de Chimie 20 (1797), pp. 356–359.


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the country. Leavening the workforce that developed it, first under Carny’s direction and later under Frécine’s, were artisans (unfortunately nameless) who had followed the Revolutionary Course all jammed together on the benches of the amphitheater in the Jardin des Plantes. The equipment was far more elaborate than the lead-lined troughs Lavoisier had imagined. Experience also led to certain modifications in the procedure he had suggested. The recipe now prescribed three rounds of rinsing instead of two, each time with proportionally less water than he had called for, and Chaptal specified shorter intervals of soaking. Also the residue after the third washing was dissolved in boiling water and filtered to screen out insoluble impurities before final crystallization. Nevertheless, it was Lavoisier, Chaptal acknowledged (though only later in a textbook account), who had first carried out cold refining, and Carny who implemented and perfected the process in the emergency production of 1794. That is not the end of the saltpeter story, though it is as far as we shall follow it. In 1810 Bottée and Riffault describe an industry transformed by the interpenetration of chemistry and technology throughout a further fifteen years of wartime.147 Cited are subsequent researches by Berthollet, GayLussac, Vauquelin, and Bérard concerning the chemistry of nitrates, potash, sulfates, and other salts.148 Still more striking, however, is the sophistication of the language, the instrumentation, and the procedures. The operators clearly knew the behavior of their materials from experience and had learned their chemical properties by studying the science. Neither extraction nor refining were now carried out in cold solution. Instead, temperatures were carefully controlled to avoid ebullition, and concentrations regularly titrated to determine the amount of each impurity at every stage. Treatment was modified accordingly in order to recover the last grains of saltpeter from recrystallization, now reduced to one operation, and subsequently from the several wash waters. The very scale was on another order of magnitude. By Chaptal’s account, 500 to 600 pounds of crude saltpeter went into each vat. In 1810 the amount was ten times as great—3,000 kilograms. The restored Administration of Saltpeter and Gunpowder, in short, was running an operation of modern quantitative chemistry on a fully industrial scale. Converting other nitrates, mainly of calcium and magnesium, into potassium nitrate required stirring potash (potassium carbonate) into solution both during extraction and refining of saltpeter. Potash (Vegetable alkali) was obtained from wood ashes and the incineration of plants and under147

Bottée and Riffault (1811), chapter 1, pp. 3–111, treats saltpeter. Berthollet, “Observations sur les proportions des e´lémens de quelques combinaisons,” and Gay-Lussac, “Sur la vapeur nitreuse, et sur le gaz nitreux considéré comme moyen eudiométrique,” both in Mémoires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil 2 (1809), pp. 42– 67 and 235–253, respectively. The Bérard and Vauquelin references are not specified. 148

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brush.149 The need for it in the production of revolutionary saltpeter failed to elicit a comparably patriotic response. Housewives were unwilling to sacrifice the ashes from hearth and stove that they mixed with fat to serve as soap. Though urged, they largely failed even to carry their buckets of dirty wash water to the nearest saltpeter workshop. Chaptal’s successor as Inspector of Saltpeter and Gunpowder in the Southwest, Raymond, was particularly severe: “Ashes are in some sense the property of women citizens, not all of whom are Republicans. For most of them that stuff is more precious than liberty.” They think only of the laundry, not of their sons and husbands at the front. “Free and enlightened Men, about this you will hear only the voice of the Fatherland. You will not allow the avarice of a sex, incapable by itself of sensing the price of the small sacrifice asked of it, to compromise for a single moment the security of our country.”150 Unable to rely on volunteers, he and his fellow inspectors, reinforced by deputies on mission, had to compel local authorities to requisition working parties for incinerating brush, herbaceous plants, weeds, and the lies of wineries, all of which yielded “salin,” or crude potash in varying measure. The Committee of Public Safety sought further to encourage the production of synthetic sodium carbonate in order that artificial “mineral alkali” might be substituted for potash in the textile industry and in manufacture of soap and glass. The main source of natural soda in the eighteenth century had been certain seashore plants that convert sodium chloride from sea water into organic salts and yield sodium carbonate on incineration and lixiviation. The best quality, known as barilla, came from the beaches around Alicante in Spain. The supply was inelastic. Growing demand in the 1780s, combined with obvious mercantilist considerations, had led the Bureau du Commerce under Tolozan’s direction to promote efforts already under way to find a practical method for converting sea salt directly into commercial soda. By the time of the Revolution, at least eleven such processes had been proposed, by Carny and by Guyton de Morveau among others, and several were in operation. Chaptal’s chemical works at Montpellier produced soda from the action of brine on litharge (lead oxide). The partnership of Malherbe and Athénas in Brittany made it from the action of Glauber’s salt (sodium sulfate) on sodium chloride in the presence of iron scrap and charcoal. The glass factory at Muntzthal and the bleaching plant at Javelle used other methods. Nowhere, however, could artificial soda be made as cheaply as barilla, and none of these processes survived commercially. The one that eventually did, and that became the main basis of the alkali 149

Vauquelin and Trusson, Instruction sur la combustion des végétaux, la fabrication du salin, de la cendre gravelée, et sur la manière de saturer les eaux salpètries (1793). 150 Raymond, Aux administrateurs et Sociétés populaires des départements du Tarn, de HauteGaronne, de l’Ariège . . . etc., 13 messidor an II (1 July 1794), pp. 2–3. BN, Lb41.3924.


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industry in the nineteenth century, exploited the reaction discovered by Nicolas Leblanc. He succeeded in converting sodium sulfate into soda by fusion in the presence of limestone and charcoal. A surgeon in the retinue of the duc d’Orléans, Leblanc made the discovery sometime in the latter half of 1789. Lacking any capital, he formed a partnership with the Duke himself and two others, the Duke’s agent, Henri Shée, and J.-J. Dizé, Darcet’s laboratory assistant at the Collège de France. They chose a site near Saint-Denis for their factory, La Franciade. On 25 September 1791 Leblanc received the fourteenth patent issued under the patent law of 7 January 1791.151 La Franciade never came on line to reach its theoretical capacity of 275,000 pounds of soda annually. Throughout 1792 and the first half of 1793 its operation consisted merely of large-scale experiments performed to perfect the several stages of the process. In July 1793 the impossibility of obtaining sulfuric acid amid wartime shortages forced Leblanc to shut down. Throughout the year of the Terror, he worked with revolutionary saltpeter in Paris. On 29 December 1793 (9 nivôse an II) the Committee of Public Safety named him to the Régie des Poudres to assist Champy, LeFaucheux, and Dufourny as fourth régisseuer. In the meantime his plant was visited and its procedures inspected, also by order of the Committee of Public Safety. A decree of 28 January 1794 (8 pluviôse an II) ordered that the revolutionary mode of war production be extended to the manufacture of alkali, and Prieur appointed a commission headed by Jean Darcet to examine, evaluate, and publish all procedures and to make recommendations. Their clear and thorough report is our main source of information for the state of the industry.152 The legend of Leblanc, spread upon the annals of invention by himself and his descendants, features the patriotic innovator of a flourishing enterprise destroyed by the Committee of Public Safety’s order to publish his discovery. He thus becomes the innocent victim of the Revolution, his rights sacrificed to the war effort, he himself compromised and excluded from his own factory because of tainted capital provided by the Duc d’Orléans. Betrayed by his scientific colleagues, he is ruined by competitors who take advantage of his patriotism to secure a commanding lead in exploiting his own process. The benefactor of his country, broken by its ingratitude, he dies by his own hand in 1806, having won for his pains only a pathetic place in the martyrology of inventive genius. Leblanc did commit suicide, but the story has no other substance. He was a clever chemist but nothing of an entrepreneur. Berthollet and Fourcroy made every effort to protect his interest and to enable him to reopen his 151

Above, chapter 3, section 4. Jean Darcet et al., Description des divers procédés pour extraire la soude du sel marin (1794). The other commissioners were A. Giroud, C. H. Lelièvre, and Bertrand Pelletier. An extract in Annales de chimie 19 (1797), pp. 58–156, omits the plates illustrating the construction and arrangement of Leblanc’s furnaces. 152

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plant. His conduct assured their failure. He made impossible conditions: forgiveness of debts, huge subsidies, a monopoly on all the sodium sulfate produced in France. Leblanc finally managed to regain title from his creditors in 1801, but failed to make a profit from his process. Nor did anyone else for over twenty years. Artificial soda was manufactured by that and other methods in the interval, but succeeded economically only as a byproduct. Until well into the nineteenth century it could not compete as a principal object of manufacture with the importation of natural soda from Spain and the Natron Lakes of Egypt.153 Gunpowder is what finally counts in any assessment of the material effect of the revolutionary munitions program. Acceleration of production, expansion of yield, and modification of the physical character of the product were its main features, all pertaining rather to persons versed in the technology than to consultation of scientists, intervention of politicians, or participation by the general public. Guyton, Carny, and Berthollet did, however, give the three lectures devoted to fabrication of gunpowder that concluded the revolutionary course. The first lecture ended with a warning: “The effects of gunpowder can never be too terrible when it is employed against wild beasts or tyrants, but it can be fatal to those working on it if they commit the slightest imprudence, so that for their own protection discipline in the workshop must be very strict.”154 Powder mills of the Régie des Poudres fabricated their product in the classic proportions of 75 percent saltpeter, 12.5 percent charcoal, and 12.5 percent sulfur. The machinery consisted of batteries of twelve mortars and pestles arranged six on either side of a camshaft run by water power. Weighing eighty pounds each, the pestles were fitted at the foot with shoes of copper sheathing. They delivered fifty to fifty-five strokes a minute dropping a distance of fourteen inches into mortars hollowed out of a solid block of hardwood. The charge in each consisted of a twenty-pound batch of the ingredients, which had been separately pulverized and stirred together manually. The composition was moistened with a pint of water before starting the mill. Pounding lasted twenty-one hours. At the end of the first hour, and every three hours thereafter, the clutch was thrown to stop the camshaft, and the pestles were lifted in order to allow the charge in each mortar to be stirred, transferred to the next, and remoistened. Compacting finished, the powder was spread out to dry for several days, during which it hardened to the consistency of a flat pastry. Broken into pieces manually, it had then to be crumbled and grained or corned by pressing the powder gently with a small wooden pestle through a succession of two sieves made of sheep-skin 153 On the history of the Leblanc process, see Gillispie (1957a) and J. G. Smith (1979), and on the Leblanc patent, see above, chapter 3, section 4. 154 Cours révolutionnaire (n. 28), 6e Le¸con, p. 4.


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stretched on a wooden frame. The holes punched in the first were about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and smaller in the second. The granulated gunpowder was then further dried and the dust sifted out by shaking on a strainer of cloth. The dust, which might amount to 20 percent or 30 percent of the original weight of powder, had to be collected, compacted, and recycled through the graining stage. Depending on the weather, which determined the time for drying, fabricating a batch of gunpowder in the classic manner required up to a week. Our most detailed contemporary account of the technology comes from two officials who had served under Lavoisier and whose careers in the Gunpowder Administration spanned the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic era.155 While Bottée and Riffault pay tribute to the e´lan of popular involvement in the munitions crisis of 1793–94, their tone is deprecatory with respect to the techniques improvised in the emergency. They leave the unintended impression that it was the push of an oversupply of saltpeter rather than the pull of supplying the armies that motivated adoption of expeditious methods of fabricating gunpowder. However that may have been, the established arsenals of the Régie des Poudres continued to work with the machinery at hand while the “revolutionary” procedure that Carny introduced at Grenelle dispensed with stamping mills altogether. Instead, he composed gunpowder in a centrifuge. A barrel thirty-two inches long by sixteen inches in diameter and pierced by a horizontal axle rested on two sawhorses with a crank handle at either end. The charge consisted of seventy-two pounds of separately pulverized saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in the standard proportions. With the ingredients were loaded two hundred copper balls just under an inch in diameter. Two men in two-hour shifts whirled the barrel as fast as might be for twelve hours. The result was not the compacted composition produced by a stamping mill, but a uniform mixture of loose powder. After a little moistening it could be compressed into sheets at once. The press consisted of a pile of thirty trays, two feet by eighteen inches, with tongue-in-groove rims. A quarter-inch deep layer of powder was spread evenly onto each. A vise and lever arrangement permitted squeezing the pile hard enough to compress the layers into “galettes” or press cakes a sixteenth of an inch thick. Graining could be carried out in one of two ways. The press cakes could be spread inside a sheet folded over them and crumbled under a rolling pin. Or, and this was more efficient, a piece of coarse canvas could be placed on each tray before the powder was layered onto it. The threads would be squeezed into the press cake and grain the powder into roughly cubic morsels of close to

155

Bottée and Riffault (1811).

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the right size for military gunpowder. Neither method of graining left appreciable dust to be recycled. The whole process required a couple of days. Carny proposed the elements of just such a system to the Committee of Public Safety as early as 15 December 1793, well before the powder mill at Grenelle had even been imagined. A commission consisting of Monge, Hassenfratz, and Berthollet reported favorably.156 Carny later put it about that, even like refining saltpeter in cold solution, the idea of dispensing with stamping mills was his own. In fact, powder mills in England had been composing gunpowder by use of millstones since the middle of the century.157 In 1781 a French engineering officer, Joseph-Fran¸cois Charpentier de Cossigny, on duty in the Ile de France (now Mauritius), had tried the centrifugal technique successfully in a colonial powder mill. His repeated attempts to break the monopoly of the Régie des Poudres and interest a succession of Ministers of the Navy and of War fell on deaf ears in the late 1780s and early in the Revolution. In April 1794 he approached Berthollet, who informed the Committee of Public Safety but returned a noncommital answer. At the same time Cossigny, a former nobleman, was obliged by the law of 16 April (27 germinal) to quit Paris for the provinces, whence he returned after the fall of Robespierre to win the attention of Chaptal and Champy.158 Champy, a veteran of the Régie des Poudres, developed the last of the procedures deriving from revolutionary techniques, although he perfected it only in 1796, two years after the levée-en-masse had run its course. Swiss gunpowder had long had the reputation of being the finest anywhere produced. Its superior quality was thought to be a function of the physical form of the grains, which were spherical rather than angular and irregular in form. Private craftsmen, mainly in the canton of Berne, produced it in small quantities. Where known at all, their jealously guarded procedures were thought to be inapplicable to large-scale exploitation. Champy hit upon a method of fabricating just such spherical grains. In April 1795 two powdermakers in the Agence des Poudres et Salpêtres, Barthélemy and Paillart, gave a demonstration in the new powder mill in Vincennes of a method the former had invented for compressing loose powder composed centrifugally. Instead of transferring it to a press, they moistened it and ground the paste by means of two vertical millstones turning in a wooden trough. After eight minutes, it took on sufficient consistency to be granulated by shaking it through the sieve in a brass sizing drum. Quite unexpectedly the gunpowder grains that thus formed were perfectly round, albeit too humid. There was the further, seemingly insurmountable, diffi156

Aulard (1889–95), 15 December 1795, 9, p. 416. For English procedures, see West (1991), pp. 167–187. 158 Bret (1994), pp. 221–225, points out Cossigny’s priority. Cossigny published his own account with documentation in Recherches physiques et chimiques sur la fabrication de la poudre a` canon (1807), followed by Supplément (1808). 157


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culty that the millstones and the drum were so gummed up that they had to be laboriously cleaned after every operation. Champy was present at the demonstration. He knew that the Swiss procedures involved a rotary method of graining, and it occurred to him that substituting a second round in the rotating barrel for the milling and sieving of the Barthélemy experiment might avoid the inconvenience of the latter while emulating the success of the former on an industrial scale. So it proved. Slightly different proportions of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur—75 percent saltpeter, 16 percent carbon, 9.0 percent sulfur—were mixed in the rotating barrel for about three and a half hours. The loose powder was then slightly moistened in a kneading pan with a saturated solution of saltpeter to make up the small initial deficit. Passing the pasty mixture through a sieve reduced it to globules which, and here was the original feature, were then reloaded into the barrel, without the copper balls this time around, and whirled dry for roughly half an hour. The grains of powder that emerged from this, the earliest mechanical method of corning, were perfectly spherical. The advantages were considerable. Mechanical graining saved a third to a half of the time and labor required for manual processing; dampened powder was safe to handle; and round grains held up better during storage and shipment than did angular ones. Also, and this was apparently important, they were easier to recognize as stolen if a shipment was hijacked. The only disadvantages appeared to be that getting the degree of moisture right was pesky and that round powder, while comparable in force to ordinary powder when proved in mortars and artillery pieces, was less suitable for small arms. In October 1796 a blue ribbon commission consisting of Fran¸cois-Marie d’Aboville, presiding General of the Central Artillery Committee, and two members of the newly established Institut de France, Borda and Pelletier, reported enthusiastically on both the fabrication and tests of round powder run in the proving grounds at La Fère. They recommended that it replace traditional black powder and become standard issue for the armed forces. In May 1797, the government ordered fabrication of 100,000 pounds for further tests on a still larger scale.159 That never happened. The urgency of the year II was long past. Carny had returned to private industry attempting to exploit, not his own process for converting marine salt to soda, but Leblanc’s. Chaptal had gone home to Montpellier, where he accepted the chair of chemistry in the reformed med´ ical faculty, the Ecole de Santé. The Directory had replaced the Committee of Public Safety while exercising nothing like comparable authority. Munitions were again the monopoly of the Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpêtres, the old Régie redux. Bureaucratic infighting and obstruction de159

On Champy and round powder, see Bret (1993b); Bottée and Riffault (1811), pp. 271–291.

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railed Champy’s invention and delayed the introduction of round powder until his procedures were perfected by his son fifteen years later. Meanwhile, Bottée’s colleague and co-author, Riffault, had devised modifications in the stamping mill that permitted fabricating gunpowder more speedily than by the revolutionary centrifugal method. It was a near thing, and fortunate in Bottée’s view, that Prieur had intervened to prevent junking the stamping mills in favor of rotating barrels amid the flush of enthusiasm for the latter at Grenelle.160 For production ended at Grenelle on 31 August 1794. On that day 300 of the 1,800 laborers perished in an explosion that destroyed the mill. One of them, according to contemporary accounts, had taken his pipe out of his mouth before entering and put it in his pocket with the tobacco still smoldering. New mills using the same procedure, and separated for safety, were installed in four nearby locations, a former convent in the Bois de Vincennes, a onetime abbey in the Forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a hermitage in the forest of Senart near Corbeil, and a monastery close by Essonnes. It was months before they could be in production, however. An accident twelve days earlier had stemmed the flow of saltpeter. On 19 August, three weeks after the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror, an overheated drying oven started a conflagration that raced through the refinery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, consuming all the stocks of saltpeter on the floor. Refining resumed after a few weeks, and continued at a reduced pace through 1795, but the zest had gone up in smoke.161 There is no dispute but that the emergency programs both of saltpeter and gunpowder met the needs of the armies in 1793–94. There is also no doubt that the example of its success, the brief stimulus of competition, and the exposure to scientific scrutiny forced a restored establishment to accelerate and modify its own procedures. The problem of the chemical role of the constituents in producing the detonation of gunpowder had preoccupied chemists for at least a century. Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Gay-Lussac all addressed it, albeit in a somewhat peripheral manner, without successfully deriving the properties of the phenomenon from their respective theoretical standpoints. The earliest comprehensive research was the work Joseph-Louis Proust carried out in Spain. Between 1785 and 1806 he served as professor of chemistry at the Royal Artillery School in Segovia and munitions adviser to the Spanish Government. In 1812 Bottée and Riffault annotated a separate printing of the seventh in the series of nine memoirs on gunpowder that Proust published in the Journal de physique between 1810 and 1814. The chapter that concludes their 1811 treatise is a discussion of potential improvements in the technology of gunpowder. They there cite appreciatively his 160 161

Bottée and Riffault (1811), pp. cxxxvi, 289. Ibid., pp. cxxxix–cxli.


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experiments on measuring the volume of gas produced by burning saltpeter in the presence of varying proportions of sulfur and charcoal.162 The phenomenon of detonation thus presented chemistry with problems, but so far at least chemical theory had nothing to offer the technology of gunpowder. Modifications were empirical in nature deriving, not from the chemistry of the ingredients, but from increasingly detailed scrutiny of the physical properties of gunpowder—its shape, density, the size of grains— and the relation of these variables to the design of ordnance and small arms. The influence of science in modernizing the technology of gunpowder was real but indirect, as it was in the intimately linked instance of saltpeter. In the aftermath of revolutionary exposure to the scrutiny of scientists, technicians became better educated than formerly. They conducted their work in a far more scientific fashion than they had done. They understood what they were doing in a more sophisticated manner. Scientific knowledge and behavior penetrated industry. Theory no doubt entered here and there, but it did not transform practice. Not quite yet. What, finally, of the weapons to be fired by revolutionary gunpowder? On 3 November 1793 Carnot reported to the Convention on the installation of the Manufacture Extraordinaire d’Armes of Paris pursuant to the levéeen-masse of 23 August.163 The goal was to turn out 1,000 muskets a day in a city where none had ever been made and a country where the annual production had averaged a mere 50,000. Already, in just over two months, hammers were clanging on anvils and fashioning cast-iron strips into barrels in the first of 258 open-air forges, 140 to be installed on the esplanade of the Invalides, 54 in the Luxembourg garden, and 64 in the Place de l’Indivisibilité (now the Place des Vosges). The Committee of Public Safety had commandeered forges and blacksmiths from the departments of the Cher, the Allier, the Nièvre, the Haute-Saône, the Haute-Marne, and the Côted’Or, the nearest regions in which ironwork of good quality was produced. The strips being forged, however, had to be shipped from foundries around the country. The cost of moving trip-hammers for flattening bars at the foundry would have been prohibitive. Moored in the Seine, five large barges held sixteen gun lathes and reaming apparatus for calibrating the bore. Alongside were millstones and grinding tools for removing spurs and polishing surfaces. All were to have been driven by water power, but the river was so low that hydraulic machines had to be supplemented by a manually operated mill in the cloister of SaintGermain-des-Prés and by steam power on the Ile Louviers and in several 162

Ibid., pp. 296–297. Bret (1994), p. 675, gives a complete list of Proust’s memoirs. On Proust, and on chemistry and gunpowder generally, see Mauskopf (1988) and (1990). 163 Carnot, Rapport sur la manufacture extraordinaire d’armes établie a` Paris, fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, 13 brumaire an II. BN, Le38546.

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suburban locations. Installed in former convents, town-houses of e´migrés, and halls of the university, and hence less in evidence, were seventeen workshops for boring priming holes, fashioning stocks, fabricating flintlocks, and finally assembling and testing muskets. Already 240 fabricators of flintlocks from the armory of Maubeuge, occupied by the enemy, were lodged in the cells of the former Charterhouse near the Observatory and at work in the cloister. Bayonettes and ramrods, however, were contracted out to private workshops. When fully organized in the winter of 1794, the administration of the Manufacture d’Armes de Paris was staffed by bureaucrats who had run procurement in the former ministries of War and the Navy. They reported through the overall Commission des Armes et Poudres to Prieur and the Committee of Public Safety. By a decree of 24 August 1793, the Committee itself had already selected eight accomplished ironworkers in Paris and sent them to the armory in Charleville to learn the trade of gunsmith, and fast. They were to follow and practice every step in the fabrication of muskets and to bring back to Paris samples of all the parts at each stage in their fashioning. They would thus be prepared to direct the revolutionary workshops. In addition the Committee requisitioned all laborers who could be spared from existing arsenals throughout the country. The sections of Paris were required to take a census of ironworkers and an inventory of their tools. Common laborers were to hire themselves out to the public workshops. Artisans who had the equipment and wished to work in their own shops under contract were encouraged to do so. The most accomplished cohort consisted of clockmakers and watchmakers in Paris, a company “known for their patriotism,” who resolved to suspend their own work and devote themselves to making the parts for which their skills were best adapted. Piece-work was the basis of payment for all but unskilled laborers. Prices and wages had been fixed by an arbitration commission consisting of representatives of the Paris sections, of the municipality, of workers from the armory at Maubeuge, of the War Ministry, and of the Administration of the Manufacture de Paris. The chairman was Hassenfratz, whom the Committee of Public Safety named on 12 November 1793 to be its commissioner and liaison with the whole enterprise.164 The manual he undertook to produce on fabrication of muskets never reached publication, however, and ironworkers from other trades had to learn the art of making guns as best they might on the job. In the old regime, Maubeuge and Charleville in the North, Saint-Etienne in central France, and Liège in Belgium were the centers for manufacture of small arms and sporting guns. At the outset the Manufacture de Paris was to 164

AN, AFII 214A, plaq. 1834, pièce 40.


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follow procedures long established there. The Committee intended, however, to create incentives for inventive artisans to simplify, rationalize, and improve techniques throughout. Carnot recognized that difficulties were bound to arise and errors to occur in organizing so enormous and novel an enterprise. Persons hostile to the Revolution had denigrated the effort from the start and sought to hobble it in all sorts of ways—by bidding up the raw materials, by harassing the cadre of skilled workers, by subjecting them to conscription, by inciting in them avaricious pretentions to higher wages. For Carnot was not immune to the strain of political paranoia infecting the revolutionary leadership. The structural fault lines proved to be real, however. A thorough and original recent study exhibits how deeply they ran both into the body politic of the labor force and into the technical problems encountered in massproducing muskets.165 At the height of the effort in the late spring of 1794 the Manufacture de Paris employed over 5,000 workers. They had little in common, not even their grievances. Locksmiths from Maubeuge and Liège, many separated from their families and all badly lodged, detested Paris. They evinced impatience bordering on scorn for the clockmakers, instrument makers, and other skilled artisans assigned to learn the trade by working under them. Experts normally turned out five flintlocks in a ten-day work week. Novices did well to make one or two. The inequity of payment by the piece left the latter far worse off than they had ever been in their proper trades, and they demanded a daily wage. The largest contingent of workers engaged in calibrating and finishing barrels and assembling muskets were masters, journeymen, or apprentices from the metal trades in the capital—swordsmiths, ordinary locksmiths, ornamental ironworkers, cutlers, scissor-grinders, jewelers, goldsmiths, watchmakers, machinists, and so on. Their skills were as varied as their experience. Used to their own shops, many now spent long days in improvised factories under the direction of armorers requisitioned from the old arsenals. Casual laborers from the sans-culotte seedbeds of the capital performed the merely manual tasks. None at any level were more content than working people in general to rest one day in ten instead of every Sunday. One other thing all had in common. They could not feed their families with the revolutionary patriotism attributed to them by the governing Committee. Like laborers in the saltpeter refinery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they soon demanded better pay. Prices were rising despite the maximum. As early as December 1793 a riot in the Capucins workshop and walkouts in two others slowed production. The Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of six Maubeuge armorers responsible for the former. Late in the 165

Alder (1997), pp. 253–291; Richard (1922), pp. 13–104, gives a comprehensive account of the Manufacture d’Armes.

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month Hassenfratz found that a majority of workers were absent after an attempted mutiny in a flintlock atelier at Marché-aux-Puces. Again its director went to prison. The Committee proceeded to invoke the LeChapelier law of 1791 that forbade trade associations, and decreed that all instigators of collective action among armaments workers would be jailed in irons for two years. Discontents nonetheless simmered, and rumors circulated of a general strike in the Manufacture d’Armes. Whatever their revolutionary zeal in the early months of Jacobin governance, armament workers shared with others a gathering alienation from the ruling party. Execution of leading Hébertists in March 1794 exacerbated mutual mistrust. Despite all this, production of muskets surpassed 500 a day for most of the time between March and December 1795. The goal of 1,000 was reached briefly in September. True, about 10 percent of the output consisted of repairs to old muskets, and quality was another matter. There was nothing like the rigorous verification of calibers and testing on the range imposed by procurement officers in the old regime. Proving the completed musket consisted of a single firing in the ditch alongside the Arsenal. Fabrication of flintlocks, however, was the limiting bottleneck. Forging the barrel was a comparatively simple and straightforward task. The flintlock was a work of precision consisting of nine finely machined principal parts. By April 1794, the revolutionary ateliers were managing to deliver a mere handful, at most eighty a day, a fifth of the rate of production at the end of the old regime, and at an exorbitant price. Even so, repairs to old weapons accounted for most of the output. In order to break out of the impasse, Prieur and his advisers acted on the Committee’s intention to encourage innovation. Scholars who frequent technical reaches of the archives have long been tantalized to come upon fragmentary records of the revolutionary Atelier de Perfectionnement, in effect a research and development laboratory. From those papers it immediately appears that Eli Whitney was by no means the first to imagine the advantage that interchangeability of parts would entail in the production of muskets. Now Alder in his recent study of revolutionary arms production has discovered that the notion was nothing novel by the end of the eighteenth century.166 Standardization was already a desideratum in Gribeauval’s reform of the French artillery after defeat in the Seven Years War. Honoré Blanc, designer of the musket adopted in 1777, standardized flintlocks on an experimental ´ scale at Saint-Etienne, only to be frustrated by resistance amounting to potential mutiny among the established gunsmiths, each in his own small shop. In the traditional practice of their trade, master locksmiths aided by one or several journeymen fabricated all the parts for each flintlock individually. They produced one at a time, adjusting the pieces to each other as 166

AN, F121310, 1311, 1312, 1313. See Tresse (1956a); Alder (1997), pp. 277–282.


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they worked along. The general design was the same, but the tumbler of one might or might not fit into another. Late in the 1780s the artillery high command installed Blanc in a laboratory workshop located in the security of the dungeon of Vincennes. In November 1791 he was ready to go public and staged a demonstration in front of the Invalides. A gunsmith there assembled a number of flintlocks from parts taken at random from a bin holding enough to equip 500 muskets. Commissions of the Academy of Science and of the Artillery verified his success. The artillery officers worried, however, about the impact of such a system on the old armories, and about the social desirability of replacing skilled craftsmen with low-paid workers stamping out gun parts by rote. Whether for that reason, or out of inertia, the government took no action. Blanc ultimately elected to go into business for himself, but did not get into production in the factory he established at Roanne before 1797.167 Prieur and his scientific advisers, most immediately Vandermonde and Hassenfratz, thought to emulate and enlarge on Blanc’s achievement when the Committee of Public Safety created the Atelier de Perfectionnement by an order of 4 May 1794.168 Situated in the former townhouse of the Montmorency family, virtually a palace at 169 rue Marc, it was a considerable undertaking. Installed were drop hammers, a rolling mill, drill presses, a stamping machine, and machine tools of various sorts. Twenty of the best locksmiths were transferred from the Manufacture de Paris, and a famous mechanic, one Glaësner, was requisitioned from Lyons. At the height of activity, in January 1795, the personnel consisted of ninety-five people. In charge was Vandermonde, who had directed the collection of machines that had been built around the legacy of Vaucanson and maintained by the Academy of Science. Assisting was Hassenfratz, who had busied himself in armaments from the time he served, first under Pache in the Ministry of War, and then under Monge in the Ministry of the Navy. At the outset, the foreman on the shop floor, with the title of Inspector, was Pierre-Bernard Mégnié, Mégnié le Jeune, who with Fortin and Lenoir was one of the three leading instrument makers of Paris.169 The initial purpose was to speed up the production of muskets and, in the words of Hassenfratz, “to simplify it in such a manner that any type of citizen can henceforth perfectly well fabricate separate pieces of muskets.”170 Mégnié describes his attempt to divide the labor of producing tumblers, hammers, springs, triggers, pans, vises, and so on by means of a protoassembly line: 167

Alder (1977), pp. 221–249. AN, AFII 215A, plaq. 1845, pièce 33. 169 Daumas (1953), pp. 360–365. 170 Rapport, undated, but in response to request from Committee of Public Safety, 3 pluviôse an III (22 January 1795). AN, F121310. 168

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We began installing the flintlock workers by making various experiments [essais] on the labor going into the parts of a flintlock, such as passing the same piece through several hands in the sequence of the different stages in its fabrication in order to find out whether time would be saved or quality improved by restricting each worker to handling the same tool for the same task. But the French temperament, especially in a town like Paris, is ill suited to such regimentation [concentration], so that our experiments did not have the result we expected of them. Accordingly, since then the locksmiths are following the usual procedures until such time as we can complete the machines that will save time and improve quality by use of lathes, dies, stamping machines, screw presses, and so on.171 As in the pioneering work of Honoré Blanc, the experiment was a technical success and for the time being a practical failure. The Atelier de Perfectionnement did succeed in fabricating a handful of flintlocks made of interchangeable parts. The artisans followed the new system only under duress, however, and reverted to traditional methods there and throughout the Manufacture de Paris for most of their output, which did increase in the late spring and summer of 1794. After Thermidor discontent was rife and discipline in the Atelier a problem. Mégnié quarreled with the administrative director, a bureaucrat called Anthelmy, and vanished under a financial cloud, as indeed he had done once before in his career. Appointed to succeed him was Fran¸cois-Philippe Charpentier, a noted machinist who had designed a horse-powered mill for boring six cannon at once, and whom Thomas Jefferson had engaged to construct a portable press. For the Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety, on which Guyton and Fourcroy served along with Prieur and Carnot, believed in the promise of research and development. The Atelier de Perfectionnement broadened its mission to making machine tools and standard weights and measures for the metric system. It survived liquidation of the Manufacture de Paris. In the end, reinstitutionalization of science and technology under the Directory combined the Atelier de Perfectionnement with Vandermonde’s collection of machines in the new Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. On 13 November 1794, two to three months after the fire in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the explosion at Grenelle, the Commission des Armes et Poudres submitted a report to the Convention calling for a great reform, in effect the abolition, of the Manufacture de Paris. One of the “prodigies of the Revolution,” in operation for just a year, it had outlived its usefulness. Four months into the thermidorean period, language about the great effort 171

AN, F121310. Mégnié le Jeune, Extrait sommaire, 17 nivôse an III (6 January 1795).


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had changed in tone. It was now held to be impossible that the Manufacture should have been well organized. Everything had had to be created at once. The raw materials were often defective. The workers were not all experienced. Their instructors were often incompetent. Much of the effort went into repairs. In order to keep the workers busy, muskets to be fixed were shipped at great expense from provincial centers where they could have been serviced more rapidly and cheaply. The cost of the enormous operation was incalculable. Private enterprise was in any case always preferable. Finally, the needs were no longer urgent. French armies were victorious everywhere, and had captured quantities of weapons from the enemy. Acting on the report it had no doubt planted, the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety over a period of months wound down the Manufacture de Paris, sent the artisans that its predecessor had requisitioned back to their own trades and localities, and laid off the sans-culottes mobilized from the working quarters of Paris with modest severance pay. It did so in the face of protest by deputations to the Convention, street demonstrations, and severe unrest verging on insurrection. For hostility between the working population and the regime was now in the open.172 Procurement of small arms, like production of saltpeter and gunpowder, returned to normal channels, though of increased capacity. Critics objected at the time, and skeptics have considered since, that rather than turn Paris into a munitions and weapons factory, the Committee of the year II would have done better in a material sense to arm the country by augmenting and adding to existing arsenals and armories. It may be so. Guyton’s report of 2 January 1795 on the state of arsenals and armaments rejects that view, but makes clear that it was in just such wise that foundries in Douai, Strasbourg, Rochefort, and Toulon, as well as those of the Périer brothers and Brézin in Paris, were able to supply the armies with cannon, howitzers, and heavy mortars.173 But the goal had not been merely a material one. Carnot had made clear at the outset that he and his colleagues had more in mind than productivity: “The purpose of the Committee of Public Safety in distributing them [the forges] massively in public places and along promenades adequate to accommodate them was to inspire the people with the confidence they should feel in their resources and to make the populace itself the watchman over the impediments that this great effort of fabrication might encounter.”174 172

Richard (1922), pp. 770–792. Guyton, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public Sur l’état de situation des arsenaux et de l’armement des armées de terre et de mer de la République, 14 pluviôse an III. BN, Le381195. 174 “Rapport a` la Convention,” le 13 brumaire an II (3 November 1793), AP, First series, 78, p. 211. 173

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5. INVENTIONS

On the face of it military urgency in revolutionary France acted as a forcing house of scientifically based inventiveness. Artillery shells charged with gunpowder, incendiaries, high explosives, aerial warfare, interchangeable parts, synthetic alkali, chemical tanning, mass produced steel—all these innovations lay in the future of warfare and industry. In fact, the births were premature. Novel techniques and processes met with resistance, incomprehension, or both on the part of those who would have had to put them into effect: generals and admirals, on the one hand, artisans and manufacturers on the other. The new possibilities made no practical difference until decades later, when military, economic, and industrial structures were ready to accommodate technology. Even in the munitions industry proper, revolutionary saltpeter and round gunpowder were left aside in the course of a more widespread rationalization of the producing services. Of the industrial manuals thrown together by scientists in the autumn of 1793, only the directions for recovering copper from bell metal were followed at the time. The report of a deputy on mission concerning Vandermonde, Monge, and Berthollet’s guide to steelmaking could equally have applied to the others. “Do not believe,” wrote Roux-Fazillac to the governing committee in April 1794, “that it is possible for ironworkers to make steel with the sole help of the memoir you have had distributed; it is too scientific and intelligible only by workers who already know how.”175 The revolutionary courses, too, were over the heads of most of the auditors. Among inventions properly speaking, the two that succeeded right off, the telegraph and the misnamed lead pencil, pertained to communication rather than weaponry. Besides practicability, a further critical factor explains their immediate success. Neither one displaced established procedures or invaded an existing craft. The mode of genesis differed, however. The pencil responded to a need and was commissioned. The telegraph no one had imagined. On 12 July 1793 the following token message was relayed in eleven min´ utes from Paris by way of Ecouen to the village of Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, a distance of twenty-six kilometers to the north: “Daunou has just arrived. He announces that the National Convention has just authorized its Committee of General Security to seal the papers of representatives of the people.” The acknowledgment required nine minutes: “The inhabitants of this beautiful region are worthy of liberty by reason of their respect for the National Convention and its laws.”176 Sending from the Park of Saint-Fargeau in Ménilmontant was the inventor, Claude Chappe. The name of rue du Télé175 176

Quoted in Woronoff (1984), 353. “Rapport sur le télégraphe . . . par Lakanal,” PVCd’IP 2, p. 5.

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graphe in the twentieth arrondissement commemorates the site. Responding from the top of a hill on the edge of the village was his brother, Abraham. ´ The Ecouen relay was on the height above the château. Members of the commission that reported to the Convention were Daunou, Arbogast, and Lakanal, the latter two of whom accompanied Abraham Chappe. The telegraph itself was as ingenious as it was simple. Pivoted on top of a ten-foot pole, the “regulator,” a balance arm in the form of an elongated framework, carried two wings hinged in the middle and tapered at opposite ends. A system of cords and pullies worked by a crank enabled the signaler to tilt the regulator at any angle to the horizontal and either wing at any angle to the regulator. A shorthand code permitted translating the ninety-two defined configurations from sign language into French. Each set of positions had a different meaning depending on which of ninety-two lines of code an initial signal specified. The total number of elementary combinations was thus 8,464. Nephew of the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, who had died of dysentery in Baja California while observing the second transit of Venus in 1769, Claude Chappe was the second of four brothers. Even like his uncle, he combined a dutiful commitment to holy orders with a passion for instrumental science, and was an enthusiastic member of the Société Philomathique. He and his brothers began working on the old problem of communication at a distance in their native town of Brûlon (Sarthe) in 1790. They tried and failed to build an electric telegraph. Attempts at a combination of audio with visual signals were no more successful. Chappe then turned to the famous clockmaker, Bréguet, to construct the eventual device he designed, while himself encrypting a code. On 21 March 1792 he requested permission to dedicate to the Legislative Assembly, wherein his older brother, Ignace, was a deputy, his “discovery” of a way “to communicate rapidly over a great distance the account of any event whatever.”177 The Assembly referred the proposal to the Comité d’Instruction Publique, which appointed one Gibergues to bring in a report. France was not yet at war. He never did. On 14 May 1792, no doubt prompted by the declaration of war three weeks earlier, the Committee commissioned Romme to join in the investigation. Before he could do so, suspicious patriots in the Belleville quarter destroyed the mysterious contraption in their midst. On 15 October 1792 Chappe petitioned the Convention for an indemnity and authorization to reconstruct his apparatus. Referred again to the Comité d’Instruction Publique, the request languished until Romme brought it before the Convention once more on 12 March 1793, asking that the Committee on War also be seized of the proposal. His initial judgment, reported on 1 April, was altogether favorable, and the Convention accepted his recommendation that 177

PVCd’IP(L), p. 162.

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further tests be conducted over a distance sufficient for the results to be conclusive. Accordingly, on 6 April Daunou and Lakanal were added to the Commission, while Arbogast replaced Romme, overburdened with other duties. Popular suspicions had not been allayed, and on 2 July the Convention accepted ´ their recommendation that the communal authorities of Belleville, Ecouen, and Saint-Martin-du-Tertre be ordered to inform local people that Chappe’s installations were in the national interest and to place them under the protection of detachments of the National Guard. Lakanal reports that he and his colleagues were accompanied by several “savants,” whom he does not name, to observe the trial that succeeded brilliantly on 12 July. After the ´ opening exchange, the two parties continued to correspond until the Ecouen post signaled it could no longer transmit. The only operators who would need to know the code were the two at either end. Intermediate way stations would simply relay signals in ignorance of their meaning. The average time required to transmit a signal from one post to the next proved to be twenty seconds. A normal, and confidential, dispatch could thus reach Paris from Valenciennes in twenty-three minutes and forty seconds. Arbogast and Daunou had been skeptical at the outset. The demonstration dissipated all indifference, however, and they joined Lakanal in an unusually emphatic recommendation. Their report of 26 July 1793 virtually told the Convention what it should do. They think that body will hasten to

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nationalize this interesting discovery. They think it will not neglect the opportunity to encourage the useful sciences. If ever these should be alienated, fanaticism would rise up again and servitude cover the earth. The law Lakanal proposed had two articles. The first named Chappe Ingénieur Télégraphe with the salary of a Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. The second instructed the Committee of Public Safety to determine which telegraph lines it was important for the Republic to establish. The decree passed the same day with no dissent.178 On 4 August, nine days later, the Committee of Public Safety duly ordered construction of a telegraph line from Paris to Lille. Enlisting the help of his three brothers, Chappe threw himself into the task throughout the time of the Terror. The line was ready for testing on 4 April. A Chappe cousin, one Delaunay, devised an improved shorthand code, and the line officially opened on 16 July 1794. The first military dispatch reached Paris on 15 August, announcing the recapture of Quesnoy. For some reason, perhaps distrust of the new system, the Committee of Public Safety refrained from notifying the Convention until it received written word from the field, hard copy, two days later. News that Valenciennes had been taken came by telegraph on 28 August and was reported immediately. Two days later Carnot appeared before the Convention in the early evening to read the third dispatch from Chappe: “Condé restored to the Republic. The surrender took place this morning at six o’clock.”179 This time the triumph of the telegraph accentuated the triumph of the army, and the Convention erupted in applause. Flush with success, the Chappe brothers constructed a ParisStrasbourg line in 1798 and Paris-Brest in 1799. England, Spain, and Sweden followed suit with variants of the Chappe system. During the first decade of the nineteenth century semaphores spread across much of Europe in anticipation or in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. It is a nice near-coincidence that two notable inventors should have begun as gifted painters: Samuel F. B. Morse of the electromagnetic telegraph that displaced Chappe’s in the 1840s, and Nicolas-Jacques Conté of the modern pencil. When in Egypt with Conté in 1798–99, Monge famously said of him that he had “all the sciences in his head and all the arts in his hand.”180 Born into a well-to-do farming family in what is now the Orne, he preferred making things to tilling the soil. At the age of nine he whittled himself a violin with a pocket knife. When he was fourteen he replaced an artist called Couin, who had fallen ill, and completed a painting in the chapel of the hospital in Séez, run by nuns who were his aunts. 178

Ibid., pp. 16–162, 294; PVCd’IP 1, pp. 385–388, 403, 434–435; 2, pp. 3–6. PVCd’IP 4, pp. 943–944; On Chappe and early telegraphy, see Ignace Chappe (1840), Butrica (1992), and Businelli (1993). 180 Jomard (1852), p. 7. 179

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In Paris in the 1770s Conté studied under Greuze, earned his living by portraiture, and attracted a considerable clientele. At the same time he followed Charles’s course on experimental physics and also picked up a working knowledge of chemistry. Early in the Revolution he proposed ideas for utilizing the white-elephant Machine de Marly, for minting coins, and for bleaching fabrics. Conté’s talents were known to Charles, Berthollet, and Guyton, the last of whom had him called to the weapons laboratory at Meudon. There he was at work on improving methods for generating hydrogen (in the course of which an explosion cost him the sight of his left eye), for compounding an impermeable varnish to coat the fabric of balloons, and for determining the optimal form of the inflated envelope—all that when in April or May 1794, he received the commission to develop a substitute for pencils no longer obtainable from England.181 Ever since the sixteenth century the graphite used in fine pencils came from a single source, a mine of ore misnamed plumbago or black lead, in Borrowdale, near Keswick in the county of Cumberland. Several deposits in Germany yielded a barely usable quality, but no other mineral in Europe was comparably rich in carbon of the right texture. None was exported, and English pencilmakers monopolized the world market for what in France were called “capucines” until the end of the eighteenth century. Several engravers and artists had devised substitutes in the face of rising prices and impending exhaustion of the Borrowdale mine, but had succeeded only partially and on the scale of their own shops when war cut off the supply. Given the assignment to develop an artificial graphitic substance in quantity, Conté was responsible to the Agence des Mines, created by the Commission des Armes et Poudres in June 1794. Fourcroy explained the problem in a report to the Institute on the pencils Conté submitted for its approval two years later. He had set out to prepare a hard paste that would be perfectly homogeneous and finely grained but capable of taking various colors and assuming different degrees of hardness. The composition must be nonmelting and totally resistant to exposure to air, to water at any temperature, and to other liquids. It must be superior to English pencils in point of uniformity of grain, consistency, and hardness throughout the entire length of each pencil and among all the pencils produced. Fourcroy could not divulge the secret of Conté’s success without infringing on his property in the discovery. In fact, the technique consisted of mixing potter’s clay freed of all impurities with finely powdered graphite enriched with lamp black to enhance the carbon content. For colored crayons he stirred in the appropriate metal oxide. Conté then fused the mixture in a crucible at red heat. The melt was poured in a thin layer onto a mold of semi-cylindrical grooves machined into a wooden plank that was immediately covered by a twin mold so that the two could be pressed tight against 181

On Conté and the pencil, see Bret (1994), pp. 188–196, Petroski (1990), pp. 70–78.

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each other by a vise. Cooling and absorbing air from either end, the solidifying stems shrank away from the mold. After thorough drying in an oven at low heat, they were encased mechanically in grooved wooden halves to be glued together and rounded. The research consisted in varying the duration and intensity of firing and the identities and proportions of ingredients in order to obtain the properties of texture, color, and hardness desired in pencils and crayons for many purposes. Conté accomplished that in the laboratory within six months, and reported success to the Agence des Mines in October 1794. The hard part remained. Developing industrial equipment and procedures required another two years. Initially the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety offered to allocate a nationalized property and funds to establish a factory. Conté refused. He had not at first thought to patent his invention or to go into production for himself. Family and and friends persuaded him otherwise, however, and on 7 January 1795 he took out a patent. In partnership with his younger brother, Jacques-Louis, Conté raised the capital, designed and built the machinery for the factory he installed in the Fontaine-de-Grenelle quarter at 910 rue de l’Université, opened a retail shop on the right bank, and by 1797 was taking orders for hundreds of thousands of pencils at a time. Fourcroy goes on to describe their quality: Twenty-six months of experiments, of researches no less various than numerous, of felicitous application of science to all aspects of this new fabrication, have led Citizen Conté to the complete solution of the problem he set himself: a paste that imitates but surpasses natural plumbago, a color diversified and modified at the artist’s pleasure from a normal gray to a thick black, diminution of the metallic sheen which is a drawback of the natural product in drawing, new instruments, simple and ingenious machines for all the modifications, forms, and in general different procedures required both for the composition of the basic material of the pencils and the wooden casing that cover it. . . . Nothing is missing from the procedures imagined by Citizen Conté. We assure the Institute that this artist has truly created a new and ingenious art founded on the most exact knowledge of chemistry and mechanics.182 6. NATURAL HISTORY AND CONQUEST

Spoils of war have ever included works of art.183 In the military campaigns of the French Republic, works of nature in the form of natural history collections became equally unfair game. 182

PVIF, 6 prairial an IV (5 May 1796) 1, pp. 43–45. Saunier (1902) gives a full account of French acquisitions and restitutions in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. 183

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A decree of the Convention annexed Belgium (or more precisely the ten provinces constituting the Austrian Netherlands) to France in February 1793 following conquest by Dumouriez.184 After his defection in April, Austrian forces counterattacked, expelled the French from onetime Hapsburg territory, and established outposts inside the French frontier. Retreat from the Rhineland and armed rebellion in the Vendée compounded Republican reverses in the late spring and summer. Reorganized by Lazare Carnot, newly conscripted French armies stabilized the internal and external military situation in the autumn and winter of 1793 and resumed their offensive toward the North and East with the capture of Charleroi on 25 June 1794. The next day the Austrians suffered further defeat at Fleurus. Jourdan and Pichegru reoccupied Brussels on 8 July. Antwerp and Liège were retaken on the twenty-fourth. The downfall of Robespierre on the twenty-seventh, 9 thermidor, in no way impeded the continuing French advance into the Rhineland and Holland. Two novelties mark this campaign in military history, albeit in a small way. First, aerial warfare made its debut in the Battle of Fleurus. Second, and as already noted, on 13 May 1794 the Committee of Public Safety ordered creation of commissions of science and arts to accompany the armies in occupied countries. Accordingly, on 30 messidor (18 July 1793) the Commission Temporaire des Arts requested the staff of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle to name two of its members to the “Commission d’Extraction près les Armées.” The Assembly of Professors obliged, and on 4 thermidor (22 July) delegated Thouin and Faujas to continue the operations they had nearly completed in Picardy and Flanders north of the border.185 On 3 fructidor (20 August 1794) the (thermidorean) Committee of Public Safety further decreed that they were to be joined as commissioners by the antiquarian Michel LeBlond, former librarian of the Collège des Quatre Nations, and the architect Charles Dewailly. The orders were “to betake themselves to Belgium and other countries occupied by the Armies of the North and of Sambre and Meuse in order to collect all the monuments, all things of value, and all resources of learning that had any relevance to arts and sciences in order to enrich the Republic.”186 Departing Paris on 5 September 1794, the four commissioners arrived in Belgium to find they were not the first in the field. Passing through Malines, they discovered that a Deputy on Mission, Claude-Hilaire Laurent, had there appropriated a large collection of old manuscripts, both paper and 184 On Belgium during the French Revolution, see Palmer (1959–64), 1, pp. 341–357; 2, pp. 69–82; and for an exhaustive account, Tassier (1930). 185 PVCTA 1, p. 306; AN, F171223–1224, dossier 3. Published posthumously, Thouin (1841) is a journal of his forays into Belgium, Holland, and Italy. 186 AN, F171276, dossier 4, pièce 189.


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parchment, which filled twenty-four large cases loaded onto twelve wagons. Already on the job in Brussels since mid-July was Lieutenant Luc Barbier of the Fifth Regiment of Hussars, in civilian life a painter of modest talent. Three deputies to the Convention, of whom the principal was Guyton de Morveau, accompanied the army in its campaign. Apprised of the artistic richness of the country, and “considering that, for the honor and progress of the Arts, the proper place of works of genius is in the abode and in the hands of free men,” Guyton and his colleagues detached Barbier and an aide, one Niger, from their military duties. Their orders, issued on 18 July, were to seek out and transport to Paris the chefs d’oeuvres of Rubens, Van Dyck, and other masters of the Flemish school. Added to the team three days later were two others, the canonneer Floriot and a simple soldier, Franiske, both recommended as capable artists.187 Barbier conducted the first shipment of over a dozen Rubens paintings to Paris. Announcing their arrival on 21 September 1794, Guyton moved the admission of Barbier before the bar of the Convention, which duly applauded his diligence and patriotism.188 Returning at once to Belgium, Barbier rejoined his helpers, who had moved on from Brussels to Antwerp and Ghent. The haul of Rubens alone came to some thirty-two canvases removed from seventeen convents and churches in those three cities and the Flemish towns of Lierre, Malines, Afflighem, and Alost.189 Nor did Barbier’s team limit themselves to paintings. In addition to two fine Rubens drawings, the Bishop’s Palace in Ghent yielded a splendid tall clock with harmonic chimes in a superb mahogany casing, three other timepieces of remarkable design, two antique marble vases, two fine porcelain vases, a floral design incised on a black marble tablet, five elegant tables with gilt trimmings and elaborately carved legs, a splendid mahogany desk, two ornate e´pergnes of white porcelain trimmed in bronze gilt, a pair of crystal chandeliers, and the entire library, which was packed in twelve crates.190 Before returning to active military duty in early October, Barbier was critical of the newly arrived Thouin-Faujas group. He had been informed, he warned the Commission Temporaire des Arts, that at Tournai they had dismounted three Rubens masterpieces and, contrary to all sound conservation principles, had had the canvases rolled on very thin cylinders with the paint inside. It was decided that the Comité d’Instruction Publique should 187 AN, F171276, dossier 2, pièce 100. Arrêté des Repts du peuple près l’Armée du Nord, a` Bruxelles le 30 messidor l’an II de la R.; and Arrêté . . . le 2 thermidor . . . , both s. L. B. Guyton. 188 PVCd’IP 5, pp. 75, 89. 189 PVCTA 1, pp. 420–421. See p. 432n. for the list of paintings. 190 AN, F171276. Extrait du Procès-Verbal du 3 thermidor 2ieme année des objets tirés de ´ l’Eveché de Gand.

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be so advised in order that it might take steps to prevent such damage, which was merely the fruit of ignorance.191 Thenceforth paintings formed a small, though not negligible, part of the material gathered by the official commissioners. Writing from Brussels on 20 September 1794, Thouin, Faujas, LeBlond, and Dewailly report having passed through Valencienne, Cambrai, Mons, and Laaken. Only in Cambrai had the administrators heeded instructions from Paris to assemble in one place all the objects that might interest them. Except for the collection of Burtin, a noted naturalist in Brussels, which formed their first shipment to Paris, the botanical gardens and natural history galleries contained little worthy of transporting to Paris. Not so the libraries: they had visited eight so far, the most important being the Royal Library of Burgundy in Brussels. From these rich repositories they had drawn about 8,000 volumes, of which 5,000 were already packed in cases and en route for Lille. Included were a large number of incunabula, among them a Xenophon of 1467 and an Isidore of Seville of 1469. Editions of Thucydides, Homer, and Sophocles were of slightly later date. As to the manuscripts, they had concentrated on those in French. Particularly interesting was a copy of the sermons of Saint Bernard, since it exhibited the state of the French language in the twelfth century.192 Thouin and company left Brussels on 27 September. “The wish to advance our literary conquests along with those of the Armies of the Republic led us to suspend our operations in Belgium,” wrote the commissioners in their next report, written from Liège and addressed directly to the Committee of Public Safety on 23 October 1794.193 In emulation of their co-linguists in France, the democratic faction in the former prince-bishopric (never part of the Austrian Netherlands) had already risen against their old regime, and popular assemblies in many localities had petitioned the Convention for annexation to the French Republic. En route, it appears, and also back in Brussels, the Commissioners of Science and Art had met with unspecified impediments on the part of the military authorities to which they were attached. Already with Pichegru’s headquarters in Liège, fortunately from their point of view, was the Representative of the People Augustin Frécine, the same who had directed the saltpeter refinery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés 191 5 vendémiaire an III, F171726, dossier 4, pièce 167; PVCTA 1, p. 420, 26 September 1793; Thibaudeau (for Comité d’Instruction Publique) to Membres du Comité et aux Commissaires chargés de recueillir des objets des sciences et arts dans la Belgique, 16 vendémiaire an III (6 October 1794), AN, F171276, dossier 3, pièce 122. 192 Faujas, Thouin, LeBlond, and Dewailly to “Citoyens Représentants,” le 4eme jour complémentaire de l’an II. AN, F171276, dossier 2, pièce 78. See also PVCTA 1, p. 446 (6 October 1794). 193 LeBlond, Thouin, Faujas to Comité de Salut Public, le 2 brumaire an III. AN, F171726, received 2 brumaire an III (23 October 1794).


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prior to the fire. He ironed out their difficulties with the generals and entered wholeheartedly into their work of inspection and acquisition. (Ten years later, on learning of Napoleon’s proclamation of the Empire, Frécine enjoyed a convivial dinner with friends in Tours, after which, at once gourmet and pure republican, he shot himself.) Still working as a team, with the collaboration now of Frécine, the four commissioners gave a full account of their operations since leaving Brussels. Having passed through Louvain, wrote LeBlond on behalf of Dewailly and himself, they had not failed to put the library there as well as those in Liège under contribution. The harvest was abundant, though with the exception of a few treasures, among them a Nuremberg Bible of 1479, the quality was lower than in Brussels. Many old volumes, he acknowledged, might scarcely be thought worthy of transporting to France. Still, however tedious the contents, they offered useful evidence for the history of typography. As for paintings, Liège had little of merit to offer. There were half a dozen painters whose work approximated the Italian style. It did seem worthwhile to send along samples of their work, but that was all. Thouin, however, was delighted with the variety of botanical gardens. Among the thirteen he visited, he found sixty-four vegetable species unknown in the Jardin des Plantes, many novel medicinal plants, and a Chinese olive. Best of all were a range of exotic fruit trees virtually unknown in France. But the most surprising discovery was a variety of enormous chicken that laid eggs with near abandon and was remarkably tender when roasted. He had come into contact with several enlightened cultivators whose views on reclaiming wasteland were eminently practical and who sympathized with Republican principles. Following in the footsteps of valorous conquerors, he and his colleagues could not fail to be reminded of glorious battles at every turn. Nor could they deny themselves the pleasure of sharing their pride with their fellow citizens. Accordingly, they engaged several young artists among the soldiers to make sketches of the finest scenes, and sent a portfolio of drawings to the Committee along with their report. There had been one extensive natural history collection in Liège, wrote Faujas, but it belonged to an e´migré who, unfortunately, had sent it to London. Although nothing suitable was left for him to harvest, he was greatly impressed by the advanced state of the extractive industries in this old region of coal mining and had been able to gather a wealth of information relevant both to improving French technology and to illuminating certain issues in the theory of the earth. He had had drawings made of the most powerful steam engines used for pumping water out of mine shafts. Liège was surrounded by important marble quarries. Unfortunately the Austrians in the anger of their retreat had put the torch to a superb chemical plant producing sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), of which the proprietor was a Republican sympathizer who had taken refuge in France.

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Following the last shipment from Liège on 19 October 1994, the Commission of Science and Arts proceeded into the Rhineland by way of Spa, Aixla-Chappelle, Cologne, and Bonn. “It’s in Cologne that we shone,” reported LeBlond on 1 January 1795 from Coblentz, their furthest point. Twenty-five cases of books, prints, and drawings, three enormous culverins, one of which had been cast in 1400, ancient gold and silver medals and monuments, fragments of an antique mosaic, Greek and Egyptian figurines, a huge prehistoric stone sarcophagus—“There is what this ancient city of the Ubians has furnished to the Republic.” All that was in addition to an abundant artistic harvest: paintings and drawings of Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mantegna, and an infinity of other masters. “Little did it matter to me to be treated as a literary pirate,” LeBlond wrote in one of the rare admissions that he and his colleagues met with any resentment, let alone resistance.194 Unfortunately several emigrés had preempted relics of the three kings, a quantity of gold and silver, and a few precious stones, while the Elector Palatine had managed to send his whole library from Bonn to Munich along with his entire natural history collection except for the birds and quadrupeds. All they had acquired consoled them for having missed out on that. Thouin and Faujas, by contrast, were a little disappointed in the botanical gardens and natural history of the neighborhood of Cologne. The richest by far belonged to an enlightened collector and friend of the French Revolution, the baron de Hupsch. A philanthropist, he regularly distributed food to the poor and kept his gallery open for the benefit of the public. In view of his beneficence, Frécine thought it in keeping with French dignity to exemplify the importance the Republic attached to science and the arts by assigning de Hupsch the house and garden of an emigré in order that he might display his collection to better advantage and cultivate medicinal plants. That generous decision left little in the way of specimens worthy of the Muséum in Paris.195 A very detailed letter from Bonn on 6 January 1795 lists a number of botanical specimens but concerns mainly the topography, agricultural economy, and horse-breeding practices of the Rhineland.196 The weeks in Germany produced considerable friction between the two naturalists and their scholarly partners. Faujas and Thouin wished to return to Paris, wrote LeBlond disapprovingly in his long letter from Coblenz, 194 LeBlond to unnamed correspondent in Paris, probably Thibaudeau, le 12 nivôse an III (1 January 1795), AN, F171276, dossier 5, pièce 197. On the Cologne shipment, see also Faujas and Thouin to Commissaires d’Instruction Publique, le 24 frimaire an III (14 December 1794), AN, F171229. For greater detail on the ransacking of libraries in Cologne and Trier by LeBlond and Dewailly, see F171276, dossier 10, pièces 315–357. 195 Thouin and Faujas to Commissaires de l’Instruction Publique, le 24 frimaire an III (14 December 1794), AN, F171229; cf. PV/Cd’IP 5, pp. 498–499; 6, p. 407. 196 Faujas and Thouin to Commission Exécutive du Comité d’Instruction Publique, AN, 17 F 1229, le 17 nivôse an III.


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whereas Dewailly and he, though they too had business at home, had gathered in barely half the available crop and were eager for more time to do a thorough job of culling the local libraries. When they did turn back, they intended to pass through Louvain (again), Antwerp, Ghent, Tournai, Ypres, Bruges, Ostende, and several other cities still to be exploited.197 The initial reaction of the Comité d’Instruction Publique was to replace Faujas and Thouin, although nothing in their own letters betrays any loss of zeal.198 That decision changed after Pichegru invaded Holland, led the Army of Sambre and Meuse across the frozen Waal on 8 January 1795, and captured Utrecht, The Hague, and Amsterdam virtually without resistance. The stadtholder, William V of Orange-Nassau, fled to England. By the end of January the French controlled the entire country, declared to be the Batavian Republic on 4 February 1795. Instead of returning home, Faujas and Thouin received orders to proceed forthwith to The Hague, there to see to conservation of the Stadholder’s reportedly magnificent natural history collection, and to transport to Paris whatever might enrich the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle.199 The prospect rekindled their enthusiasm if, indeed, it had ever flagged. From Maastricht Thouin sent a detailed summary of their shipments to date: from Malines on 22 September 1794 a convoy of twelve wagons loaded with twenty-four large cases of books and manuscripts; from Brussels on 24 September five wagons with nine cases of books and two carriages full of natural history specimens; from Liège on 19 October eighteen wagons with twelve cases of books and manuscripts, one carriage of living plants, one of paintings, and one with a cage of live animals; from Cologne on 30 November fifteen wagons with thirty large cases of books, antiquities, tools, minerals, cannon, and the three culerins; from Aix-la-Chappelle on 12 December twenty-four wagons with nine cases of books and manuscripts, nine marble columns, a bronze statue, and a collection of minerals, insects, and butterflies; from Bonn on 30 December twenty-six wagons with thirty-four cases of natural history and books; from Maastricht, finally, on 3 January 1795 three wagons with thirty-two cases of books and natural history specimens.200 LeBlond and Dewailly parted from Thouin and Faujas at Maastricht whence, on Frécine’s orders, they undertook a side trip to Stavelot and Malmédy in order to inform themselves about the paper and cardboard industry that flourished there. LeBlond took advantage of the occasion to appropriate a number of valuable works from the library of the Benedictine order, forAN, F171726 (n. 11 above). PVCd’IP 5, p. 433 (17 January 1795). 199 Extrait du Procès-Verbaux de la Commission Temporaire des Arts, le 10 pluviôse an III (29 January 1795). AN, F171276, dossier 2, pièce 94. Not included in printed PVCTA. 200 AN, F171229, dossier 12, pièce 261. Records of the receipt of the various shipments in Paris are in AN, F171240A, dossier 9; F171245, dossier 7; F171261; F171277, dossiers 1, 2, 6–9. 197 198

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merly sovereign in the tiny ecclesiastical principality containing those two towns. At his behest, a pair of volunteers from the military balloon company, no doubt at loose ends since the Battle of Fleurus, made a shopping trip through several abbeys he had not time to see and collected manuscripts and fifteenth-century editions that their captain, Coutelle, undertook to send to Paris. The partners then made their way to Amsterdam, where they arrived on 20 February to find instructions from Frécine that they were to rejoin him in The Hague. It appeared that the political dispositions taken for Holland would not permit operations of the sort they had conducted in other conquered countries, and LeBlond contented himself with going through the library and collection of antiquities in the Stadholder’s palace in order to note the most remarkable objects and pieces of furniture in an inventory that the Representatives of the People might consult as circumstances permitted.201 LeBlond and Dewailly returned to Brussels by way of Antwerp with still another side trip for further gleaning in Louvain. After sending off a final shipment of fifty-four cases of books and manuscripts, they found that in Belgium too matters were on a different footing. Incorporation of the country into the departmental structure of the French Republic, like the conversion of Holland into a sister republic, no longer permitted simple appropriation of what was no longer enemy property. A decree of the Committee of Public Safety of 20 February 1795 abolished the “Agences d’Extraction” attached to the armies.202 On 3 March the entire membership of the new Central Administration of Belgium, eighteen strong, addressed a sharply worded memorandum to the Comité d’Instruction Publique denouncing the high-handedness of its agents, demanding restitution of Belgian patrimony, and noting that the Committee had been presented with a series of illuminating reports on vandalism, of which the treatment of Belgium was a cardinal example. On 4 March Frécine, then in Antwerp, ordered that henceforth agents might not take possession of goods belonging to religious bodies or private corporations except by mutual accord and at a fair price. As to objects in public buildings or in emigré properties, regular procedures were to be followed in the presence of a commissioner of the local municipality.203 In the light of all this, Le Blond and Dewailly sent repeated requests to Paris for instructions. Receiving no reply, they concluded that they

201

LeBlond to Citoyens Représentatifs, La Haye, le 27 pluviôse an III (15 February 1795). The Secretariat of the Commission des Approvisionnements, Motet, transmitted the order to Brussels on 11 ventôse an III (1 March 1795). AN, F171726, dossier 1, pièce 26. 203 Les Membres Composant l’Administration Centrale de la Belgique au Comité d’Instruction Publique, 13 ventôse, an III (3 March 1795), AN, F171276, dossier 4, pièce 187. Frécine’s order is repeated and clarified by an adjoint, one Paris, 4 germinal an III (24 March 1795). AN, F171276, dossier 2, pièce 71. 202


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must regard their mission as terminated and returned to Paris on 2 April 1795—with regret, for an important harvest remained to be reaped.204 Meanwhile, Thouin in The Hague learned on 22 February that he too was being recalled to Paris, ostensibly because his presence was needed to supervise subdivision of a parcel of land being joined to the Jardin des Plantes. Nothing could give him greater joy, he replied. Despite the frigid weather, he would have set forth at once, except for certain considerations he thought it useful to convey before complying. The conquest of Holland, he points out, has given France possession of the properties of the Stadholder. Among other things of value, the Natural History Collection is unique in the world. Drawn from the Dutch colonies, inaccessible to others, it contains specimens little known or totally unknown elsewhere. But what heightens its merit is the extraordinary state of conservation of the contents. The birds and reptiles of Surinam, the quadrupeds and insects of the Cape of Good Hope, the molluscs and fish of the East Indies—all the preparations exhibit incomparable ingenuity and great taste. A handsome hippopotamus nine feet long, well stuffed and in a natural pose; a wild boar from the Cape, of which no good drawings exist; three little deerlike quadrupeds from the same country and totally unknown; a tufted pheasant from China and a pearly pheasant from Sumatra, two birds few naturalists have seen; the skeletons of a fifteen-foot giraffe and a huge orangutan; and finally a great quantity of fish, serpents, and insects unknown to science. He has examined all this carefully, and is persuaded that at least two-thirds of it would improve, augment, and complement the contents of the galleries in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and would make the national collection the greatest the world will ever see and the most useful to the progress of natural science. Independently of these riches, others are to be found (unless the English have destroyed them) in a country house called Loo in Guelderland. Installed there is a menagerie in which are two young elephants, a male and a female, a “cazouart” (emu?), one of the largest birds known, and several other strange and wild creatures. Their acquisition would greatly enrich our menagerie. Only the expense deterred the Representatives of the People, Charles Cochon and Dominique Ramel, who were on the scene. The Stadholder had left a pile of debt, and his collections might be considered assets for the value of which his creditors would bill the Republic. But there ought to be ways around that.205 Evidently Thouin was allowed to stay in The Hague, and evidently ways 204 Note addressée au Comité d’Instruction Publique relative aux voyages des commissaires envoyés dans la Belgique . . . le 30 vendémiaire an IV (22 October 1795) AN, F171276, dossier 2, pièce 69. 205 Thouin to Comité d’Instruction Publique, 4 ventôse an III (22 February 1795), AN, 17 F 1276, dossier 2, pièce 83.

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were found. On 31 December 1795 two auditors for the Director General of Public Instruction presided over the opening of the crates he had sent from Holland in the preceding months. The first shipment consisted of one hundred forty-seven cases containing hundreds of the choice specimens he had described. The second of seventy-four containers included seventeen additional cases of natural history, ten full of scientific books, and a number of trunks packed with the personal effects of Faujas, Thouin, and several other Frenchmen leaving the Hague. Among them was one Coqueret, the Stadholder’s “ci-devant” head chef. Tucked in here and there were a magnificent ivory model of an elephant hunt, a superb solar cadran, and a beautiful Delbarre microscope. A single crate composed the third and last shipment, a miscellany of Dutch books, plans and models of fortifications, natural history, and additional personal effects. Nothing more is awaited from Holland, concludes the report, except the living animals, of which there are fifty-two individuals.206 The animals had to wait, probably because of the expense. For that reason, early in 1796 Ginguené, Minister of the Interior under the Directory, instructed local administrators in Cologne to refrain from sending pieces of sculpture, architectural columns, and other heavy objects that LeBlond and Dewailly had collected and failed to ship. Perhaps transportation could be arranged when calls on the Treasury slackened.207 Evidently the budget eased later in the year, for the menagerie of the House of Orange could then be moved to Paris, all but the two elephants, Hans and Parkie. For them a heavy-duty carriage and special cages, the first of which Hans smashed, had to be constructed. A somewhat embroidered account tells of their passage, pulled by a team of a hundred horses to Deventer, and thence by barge along canals to the Seine and Paris. Once the great beasts were safely docked alongside the quai at the bottom of the Jardin des Plantes, the boards were knocked from their cages. Raising her trunk (it is said) Parkie looked about, first at the vista of Paris, then at Hans, and trumpeted twice, once for liberty and again for love.208 No hint that anyone in Paris felt the slightest compunction about all this 206 Rapport au Directeur-Général de l’Instruction Publique par les C.ens Cuvelier et Madaye, 10 nivôse IV. AN, F171229, dossier 12, pièce 302. See also Thouin’s dispatches to his colleagues of the Muséum detailing his findings from February through June 1795, AN, AJ15823; AJ15836, dossier D19, Collections du Stadhouder. The Procès-Verbaux of the staff meetings at the Muséum summarize Thouin’s reports, AN, AJ15*97. The record of the expenditures in shipping the menagerie is in AN, F17 1019, dossier 4. An inventory of objects returned to the Netherlands in 1815 will be found in AN, AJ15840, dossier A. 207 24 pluviôse an IV (13 February 1796) AN, F171726. dossier 7, pièce 215. 208 J.P.L.L. Hooel, Histoire naturelle des deux éléphans, mâle et femelle, du Muséum de Paris, venus de Hollande en France en l’an VI (an XII, 1803). The booklet includes a plate of the elephants copulating.


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has come to light in the archives. From Liège one complaint survives. After dissolution of the Agences d’Extraction, the agent in charge of objects of science and art there was a painter, one L. Defrance, who was also a member of the local administration. On 22 September 1795 he addressed a letter to the Comité d’Instruction Publique concerning shipment of further booty which, as in Cologne, LeBlond and Dewailly had left behind. The principality of Liège, he reminded the Committee, had already staged its Revolution before the French arrived and had declared for the Republic. Devastated by the Austrians in retreat, its reward from the French was to be treated as a conquered country, to be stripped of its cultural heritage, and to be left in misery and anarchy, its industry destroyed. “There are the fruits of its resolute love of liberty. Pardon a friend of liberty this digression.”209 Whether Defrance was a Frenchman or Liègeois is unclear. The post-Thermidor reports on vandalism perpetrated under the Terror, to which the Brussels administrators alluded, were submitted to the Comité d’Instruction Publique by Grégoire. While he praised the work of the Commission Temporaire des Arts in France, his judgment of the early operations in Belgium is an instance of the capacity of even the most balanced minds to take a set: Still more than the Romans, . . . we have the right to say that in combatting tyrants, we are protecting the arts. We are collecting their monuments even in the countries where our victorious armies penetrate. Besides the plates of the famous map of Ferrari, twenty-two cases of books and five carriages of scientific objects have arrived from Belgium: among them are manuscripts lifted from Brussels in the war of 1742 and returned in 1769 as stipulated by the treaty of peace. Thanks to its courage, the Republic acquires what Louis XIV could never obtain even for an enormous price. Crayer, Van Dyck and Rubens are en route for Paris, and the Flemish School steps forth en masse to ornament our museums.210 More germane to the present history, the Republic also acquired a cache of scientific books that enriched the collection at Mézières to form the nu´ cleus of the library of the Ecole Polytechnique. Among the treasures were David Gregory’s 1703 edition of Euclid, a first edition (1634) of the Oeuvres 209 L. Defrance au Comité d’Instruction Publique, le 5me jour complémentaire de l’an III. AN, F171276, dossier 3, pièce 155. 210 “Rapport sur les destructions opérées par le Vandalisme, et sur les moyens de le supprimer.” Comité d’Instruction Publique, séance du 14 fructidor, l’an second de la République, (1 September 1794). Oeuvres de l’abbé Grégoire (1977) 2, pp. 273–274. J. Guillaume (1901) gives an annotated edition of this report and takes Grégoire to task for characterizing episodes of expropriation and loss in the year II as vandalism.

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mathématiques of Stevin, a 1621 Diophantus, a 1624 Opera geometrica of Torricelli, and a 1728, six-volume Opera omnia of Leibniz.211 Such, in sum, was the precedent that Bonaparte followed in 1796–97 when he named a Commission of Science and Art headed by Monge and Berthollet to accompany the Army of Italy. He enlarged on it still more dramatically in Egypt, where the clone of French science he implanted on the banks of the Nile flourished from 1798 until 1801. 7. EFFECTS OF WARTIME: SCIENCE AND THE STATE

The quotation from Cuvier at the head of this chapter will show that awareness, not to say celebration, of a role for scientists in wartime did not await Mathiez and the generation of historians whose patriotism responded to the harrowing exigencies of the 1914–18 conflict. It is arguable that in our period the armies could have been more efficiently and economically supplied had the energy and resources going into the revolutionary production of saltpeter, gunpowder, and muskets been directed to expansion of normal services, and that the purpose of the emergency measures was political rather than logistical. Even if discernible, the distinction would have been impossible to justify in the year of the Terror. However that may be, the more innovative weapons and techniques devised by the experts overreached either the capacity of industry or the imagination of commanders, or both, and awaited future realization. The involvement of science in affairs was more pervasive than provision of weaponry, important though that became in later times. That government should turn to science for technical advice, and that scientists should draw support from government, was of course nothing new in France. Colbert initiated those exchanges. What happened amid the urgencies of revolution and war was an increase in the density and intensity of those exchanges. For science the difference in degree amounted to a difference in kind. From 1793 through 1795, scientists in the public eye did nothing else. In consequence, the importance its success had long held in justifying the intellectual program of the Enlightenment was institutionalized. It was not in response to some démarche of scientists, but through recognition of the magnitude of its presence in the events that shaped the future, that science displaced letters as the premier element of culture in the structure of the Institut de France. 211

Pepe (1996b), pp. 160–163.

CHAPTER VII

Thermidorean Convention and Directory

1. INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF FRENCH SCIENCE, 1794–1804

In the classical historiography of the French Revolution, the final ten years of the First Republic have had a bad press. The political drama from the convening of the States-General to the overthrow of Robespierre, with all its portents for the nineteenth century, lapses into a dispiriting prospect of reaction, corruption, profiteering, and instability at home, tempered by military conquest abroad. Failed royalism alternates with failed populism until the politically bankrupt Republic collapses into the receivership of a vulgar and factitious, albeit glorious, empire. The historian of science reads different kinds of evidence. If one pays attention to the views of scientists and intellectuals, and one can scarcely ignore their testimony, the creative phase of the Revolution, far from ending with Robespierre, came into its own with his destruction. The September massacres, the Jacobin conquest and exercise of power, the terror and the guillotine—all this they saw as one last outburst of fanaticism and barbarism, the ultimate perversion of civilization by the religious impulse gone overtly political. Now at last, reason and moderation, talent and knowledge, had their chance to create the order to which the century had been pointing. It is not by following the further political involvements of members of the scientific community after Thermidor and under the Directory that we will take their point, although the Consulate is another matter. True, Carnot, Fourcroy, and Guyton served on the Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety, no longer dictatorial. Fourcroy was foremost in denouncing Jacobin abuses, to which he never acknowledged having been party. Carnot, not yet known for his contributions to the science of mechanics, was hailed as “Organizer of Victory” from the back benches of the Convention when rightist deputies called for his proscription as an erstwhile terrorist. Among former members of the Committee of Public Safety, he alone continued in the shaky substitute for power vested in the Directory. Fearful of tyranny, the framers of the Constitution of the year III (1795) seated the executive branch of government in a committee consisting of five Directors to be nominated by the lower house of the legislature and elected by the upper. For the first two years Carnot was the leading figure, occupying himself

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VII. THERMIDOR AND THE DIRECTORY

both with direction of the war and maintenance of domestic order. In the former capacity he selected Napoleon Bonaparte to command the Army of Italy in 1796. In the latter he put down with a heavy hand a proto-socialist movement, the Conspiracy of the Equals led by Fran¸cois Babeuf, who called himself Gracchus. Suspected unjustly of complicity with royalists who had staged a political revival in the legislative elections of 1797, Carnot was ousted from government in the neo-Jacobin coup d’état of 18 fructidor (4 September) and went into exile in Switzerland. There he returned to the little noticed studies of mechanics and mathematics he had started as a youthful engineer and began preparation of the works he contributed to those sciences during his post-political maturity.1 The locus in which to follow the development of the scientific enterprise writ large is institutional. In that major respect the regimes of the thermidorean Convention, Directory, and Consulate were nothing short of inventive. They afforded the scientific and technical community the very prototype of a modern set of institutions, administrative, advisory, honorific, research-oriented, educational, technological, and journalistic, in a mix of the official and the voluntary, with the former predominating. The Institut de France, the Bureau des Longitudes, the Observatoire de Paris, the Mu´ séum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the Collège de France, the Ecole Poly´ ´ technique, the Ecole Normale of the year III, the Ecole and Corps des Ponts ´ ´ et Chaussées, the Ecole and Corps des Mines, the Ecole de Santé (soon to become the Faculté de Médecine), the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (the latter two under the Consulate), half a dozen specialized scientific and technological journals—there was nothing comparable to this galaxy of facilities elsewhere in Europe. The Astronomer Royal of Denmark, Thomas Bugge, a member of the International Commission on the Metric System in 1798–99, left an account of his visit to Paris that brings the scientific community to life, its personalities, its strengths, and its institutions.2 Its extent and liveliness are witness to the preeminence of French science in the world at large, and were by the same token instrumental in realizing it. ´ 2. INSTITUT DE FRANCE, MUSEUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE, AND BUREAU DES LONGITUDES

Foremost among the institutions in point of prestige stood the Institut National des Sciences et Arts, now the Institut de France, embodying an ideal of the unity of knowledge that may be thought symbolized architecturally in the imposing dome and all-embracing wings of the Mazarin palace on the 1 2

Gillispie (1971). Crosland (1969b) is a modern edition.

VII. 2. INSTITUT DE FRANCE

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Quai de Conti. After meeting for ten years in the Louvre, the Institute has been installed there since 1805. Modeled on the design of the Société Nationale imagined in Condorcet’s educational scheme (though taking the name Institut from Talleyrand’s), it existed, not like the academies of the old regime by the grace and favor of government, royal or otherwise, but by civic right. Its collective citizenship in the body politic was constitutional, a foundation stone for the structure of the Republic as laid down in the Constitution of the year III (1795). It is, perhaps, noteworthy that it has never provoked the hostility that accrued to the privileged academies in the old regime.3 At the same time, its initial organization exhibited the displacement of letters by the revolutionary dominance of science within French culture. For the Académie Fran¸caise, the senior cultural corporation in the old regime, and again in later times, was not revived until the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, nor until then was the term Academy used to designate any of the divisions of the Institute. Much the largest of the original three was the Class of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, the First Class, composed of sixty resident members without distinction of rank. In the original plan, there were to have been as many nonresidents. Those ranks proved impossible to fill, however, and in 1803 the status was reduced to that of correspondents. The full-fledged members were distributed evenly among ten sections, eight of which were defined much as in the late Academy. These were mathematics, mechanical arts, astronomy, general physics, chemistry, natural history and mineralogy, botany and vegetable physiology, and anatomy and zoology. The two areas newly included were medicine and surgery, and rural economy and veterinary medicine. In 1803 the distinction between sciences addressed to inanimate and to animate nature was recognized in provision for two Permanent Secretaries. Delambre and Cuvier thereupon served side by side. So largely did the First Class fill the public eye after its opening session on 26 December 1795 that mention of the Institute would normally be taken to refer to its membership and activities, while those of the other classes were specified as pertaining to the Second or Third. The Second Class, Moral and Political Science, had thirty-six members distributed among six sections, one of which, geography, was quasi-scientific. The active element in the Second Class, among whom were those who designed the Institute as a whole, consisted of the set later called idéologues. They were alumni for the most part of the salon of Madame Helvétius, friends and admirers of Condorcet, who thought to follow his lead in 3

Perhaps the author may be permitted an anecdote to illustrate that the prestige of the Institute remains high. During a time when he and his wife were residing in Paris, the person who helped with household chores was impressed to hear that he was working at the Institute. “Ce ne sont pas des imbéciles sous la Coupe,” she said.

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founding social science on the model of the natural sciences. Discussion of the role of these prime movers in founding the Institute, of their expectations for the social sciences, and of their self-defeating part in bringing Napoleon to power will follow later, in the next chapter.4 Literature was bundled in with the Fine Arts and relegated to the Third Class, which had forty-eight places in eight sections. Only three were occupied with letters: grammar, ancient languages, and poetry. The remaining five dealt with archaeology, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music and declamation. The measure founding the Institute provided that one-third of the membership, two in each section, should be named by the Executive Directory on nomination by the Comité d’Instruction Publique of the expiring Convention, and that these in turn should elect the remaining two-thirds of the charter membership. In the event, and the result was predictable, the First Class thus chosen consisted of the surviving members of the Academy together with new people named to fill the vacancies and to occupy the twelve slots in the two additional sections.5 Formalities in the First Class were outwardly much what they had been in the Academy of Science, albeit with three exceptions. Election of members no longer had to be approved by an official of government. Publication of works of science no longer needed its imprimatur. Agencies of government still submitted technological proposals to its judgment, but operation of the patent system relieved the First Class of the onerous duty of judging whether an inventor should receive limited monopoly rights in its exploitation. Otherwise, there was little change in the business of the meetings. Prizes were set and awarded. Sealed notes were accepted in order to establish and safeguard priorities. As in most selective organizations before and since, attendance was spotty except when election of new members entailed tense discussions of the worthiness of others to join the company. Of the research papers and proposals submitted, most of them by aspirants for membership, the more promising were delivered orally before the entire class and referred to commissions for a report, normally recorded in the Procès-Verbaux. Referees might or might not recommend publication in the Savants étrangers series. As before, the annual volume of memoirs opened with summaries of the year’s proceedings by the Permanent Secretary and continued with research papers, sometimes lengthy, submitted by members. Still, although forms remained largely the same, functions changed appreciably. The capacity of a single vessel to contain all science and bear it 4

Below, chapter 8, section 3. For the list, see Crosland (1992), p. 54. This is an excellent, detailed, and thoughtful history of the Academy of Science from 1795 to 1914 with many informative asides on the Institute in general. For the statutes governing the latter and also the old academies, see Aucoc (1889). 5


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forward had already been overstrained in the last years of the old regime, and the decline and fall of the Academy released a pent-up thrust toward specialization that would have prevailed anyway sooner or later. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century, however, did the several sciences form their own societies. In the meanwhile scientific journals proliferated. Internal collegiality of the boards, and in some cases institutions, that edited and produced them went far toward focusing the life of emerging disciplines. After the ending of the Terror, the first periodical to be launched was the monthly Journal des mines. Its initial issue appeared in September 1794. The opening passage bespeaks the mood at the outset: Liberty lends new strength as well as new virtues to the peoples who fight for it. The need to conquer which has steeled the character of Frenchmen has led to daily discovery of unknown resources. If we draw greater advantage from the gifts of nature, if we rely more fully on our soil and our industry, it is the state of war that is responsible. Thus do momentary privations assure solid and lasting advantage in the future.6 Already in 1789 Lavoisier had engaged his prestige to enable his immediate associates to launch the Annales de chimie, inspired by the success in Germany of Friedrich Crell’s Chemisches Annalen.7 At first a quarterly, it became a monthly in 1791. Eighteen volumes had appeared before the Terror interrupted it with the issue of September 1793. Publication resumed in 1797. In 1815 it enlarged its scope to become the Annales de chimie et de physique. Like the chemistry, the physics it then covered was largely experimental and technological. The nascent field of mathematical physics was ´ served by the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique, published at irregular intervals following the first number in 1795. Circumstances in 1793–94 interfered with the Bulletin des Sciences of the Société Philomathique. Thereafter it became not simply a vehicle for reporting on current science, although that too, but a medium for timely publication of brief research papers in all fields. The Société d’Histoire Naturelle, on the other hand, never developed its single volume of memoirs into a journal,8 the need for which was in any case obviated after 1802 by initiation of the Annales du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, in effect a house organ. Before that several naturalists, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire among them, published papers in the Magasin encyclopédique and the Décade philosophique, the foremost periodicals addressed to an educated public in the later 1790s. As for the Journal de physique, which had started as the abbé Rosier’s Observations sur la physique in the old regime and changed its name in 1794, the editor, Jean-Claude 6

Journal des mines de la République 1 (vendémiaire an III), p. 3. Crosland (1994), a highly original history of the Annales de chimie, also gives an informative census of nineteenth-century French scientific periodicals in general. 8 Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris (an V, 1797). 7

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Delamétherie, published worthwhile articles on mineralogy and natural history, but was so obsessed with hostility to the new chemistry, and also to the abbé Haüy, that he turned the periodical into a journal of fringe science, not to say crank science. Three private organizations published material of varying importance. ´ The Société Médicale d’Emulation, an association of young doctors founded in 1796 by Xavier Bichat, Jean Alibert, and Guillaume Dupuytren on the model of the Société Philomathique, issued a Bulletin des sciences médicales beginning in 1797. Bichat published his early papers there. The fourth volume (1809) contains the manifesto with which Fran¸cois Magendie began his campaign to transform physiology into an experimental science.9 It culminated in the appearance of his Journal de physiologie expérimentale, starting in 1821. Chaptal was a prime mover in founding the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (to be discussed below) in 1801. Its Bulletin, a monthly, is expressly technological. Finally, the most famous, the informal Société d’Arcueil, consisted of the twelve to fifteen disciples who gathered around the partnership of Berthollet and Laplace in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Its three volumes of memoirs contain, among many other things, cardinal papers in the formative years of physical chemistry and mathematical physics.10 Anyone wishing to publish his findings in a timely fashion, and that included the entire scientific community, increasingly turned in the first instance to one of the above outlets rather than to the Mémoires of the First Class of the Institute. Finished products by members still appeared there, but the annual volumes were chronically in arrears, sometimes by as much as three years. They now became repositories for recording science initially published elsewhere rather than vehicles for advancing it. Aspirants for membership in the Institute had no choice but to look to other outlets. The Savants étrangers series, which had published such submissions as were deemed worthy by the former Academy, contains only two volumes between 1795 and 1811, when it lapsed until 1827 without finding room for a number of the papers that referees had recommended should appear there. Not that the changing function of the Institute reflects a decline in the importance of official, centralized science—on the contrary. But its vitality is to be discovered by reading, not the memoirs, but the Procès-Verbaux.11 That the meetings were not always well attended, though sometimes embarrassing, was of little moment. The serious work occurred in committees 9

“Quelques idées générales sur les phénomènes particuliers aux corps vivants,” Bulletin des sciences médicales 4 (1809), pp. 145–170. 10 Mémoires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil (1807–1807, 1809, and 1817). Crosland (1967b) is a facsimile reprinting with illuminating editorial commentary. For the society itself, see Crosland (1967a). 11 PVIF, 11 vols., 1910–1922.


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anyway. Their reports exhibit the operation of a forum serving for the accrual of reputation, for the exercise of quality control by a system akin to modern peer review, and for guidance of research by the setting of prize contests. Given the dynamics of competition for reputation in motivating scientific careers, the honorific importance of the Institute may have been greater than that of the Academy had been under the old regime, when royal or courtly favor had a larger part in determining the success of careers than did outside influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The designation “Membre de l’Institut” has ever since lent great weight to the names of those elected. When issuing commands in Egypt, Bonaparte, who was elected to replace Carnot in exile, signed himself “Général-en-chef, Membre de l’Institut.” As for refereeing, every paper read before the Institute was referred to a committee whose spokesman was designated by the whole body. Their procedures cannot quite be called peer review. Except for authors who were members of the Institute, the process was not one of judgment by persons of equal status. But it was expert judgment. Reports and recommendations were very full. In most instances criticisms were discriminating, fair, and just. The documents constitute a major source of information for the historian, even as they did at the time for those who read or heard them. A number were published in one or another of the current journals. Finally, the problems set for prize competitions had a far more measurable effect on the direction of research than had been the experience of the eighteenth century, perhaps because the several disciplines were defining themselves more explicitly. Four famous instances will make the point. The prizes set for mathematical treatments of double refraction in 1808 (won by Etienne Malus), of heat diffusion in 1810 (won by Joseph Fourier), of the theory of elastic surfaces in 1811 (won by Sophie Germain), and of diffraction of light in 1819 (won by Augustin Fresnel) were instrumental in inciting investigations that, combined with others of the same sort by Poisson and Ampère in electricity and magnetism, turned physics into a mathematical science. Formal opening of the Institute on 6 April 1796 confirmed rather than initiated revival and new departures in the life of science. As we have seen, in late 1794 and early 1795 the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle was much occupied in accommodating the collections expropriated in the French provinces, Belgium, and Holland.12 A more momentous event for its future direction was the arrival in Paris in March 1795 of a young naturalist, Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was born in 1769 into a family of modest means in the Burgundian town of Montbéliard, a linguistically French and religiously Lutheran enclave that had been subject to the Duke of Württemberg since 12

Above, chapter 6, section 6.

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1349. He thus had his higher education in the Höhen Karlschule in Stuttgart. There he came under the influence of the lecturer in zoology, Friedrich Kielmeyer, an early exponent of romantic Naturphilosophie, who aroused his interest in natural history, trained him in dissection and drawing, introduced him to the comparison of animal forms, and became an intimate friend. Cuvier took his degree in 1788. No openings were available in the ducal civil service, for which he had been prepared, and instead he took a position as tutor in the family of a French Protestant family, the d’Héricy, in Normandy.13 During the years of the Revolution, for which Cuvier’s initial sympathy turned to disgust, he spent the fall and winter in Caen, where there were libraries and a fine botanical garden, and the months of fine weather in the d’Héricy chateau of Fiquainville. The fishing port of Fécamp and the Channel beaches are nearby. Tutorial duties were light, and Cuvier could employ what would otherwise have been extensive leisure in the scrutiny and dissection of sea birds and aquatic creatures cast up on the sands or caught by fishermen, especially molluscs. What brought him to the attention of the staff of the Muséum was a chance meeting late in 1794 with a leading agronomist, the abbé H.-A. Tessier, who had taken shelter from the Terror in Normandy. Impressed with Cuvier’s zoological investigations and insight, Tessier urged him to send samples of his notes and conclusions to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. He wrote himself to Geoffroy, and also to Jussieu, pressing them to invite the accomplished outsider to Paris. Cuvier was eager on his own account to make himself known in Paris. Until then his only scientific association had been correspondence with friends in Stuttgart, most notably with Christoph Heinrich Pfaff.14 His letters occasionally allude to his sense that natural history must needs rise to a philosophical level transcending the precise but arid taxonomy of a Linnaeus while at the same time achieving an accuracy and rigor lacking in the stylistic elegance of a Buffon. Taking Tessier at his word, Cuvier sent Geoffroy the manuscript of a memoir on the anatomy of the octopus and the snail while also addressing a paper on classification of quadrupeds to Millin, secretary of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle. 13

The literature on Cuvier is large. See the bibliography in Bourdier, “Cuvier,” DSB 3, pp. 527–528. Appel (1987) is excellent on his relations with Geoffroy. Laurent (1987) discusses the relations of Cuvier and Lamarck in a manner favorable to the latter. Dehérain (1908) is a catalogue of Cuvier manuscripts at the Institute. Outram (1980) is a calendar of his correspondence, and Outram (1984) treats Cuvier’s career as a public figure rather than his science. Coleman (1964) presents an illuminating analysis of his theoretical standpoint. Daudin (1926) is an indispensable account of the development of the taxonomy supplemented with an exhaustive chronology of relevant publications. 14 Georges Cuvier’s Briefe an C. H. Pfaff aus dem Jahren 1788 bis 1792 (Kiel, 1845). A French translation by Louis Marchant appeared in 1858.


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Both responded positively. Millin arranged his election to the society. Geoffroy, in keeping with his romantic nature, was even more enthusiastic. Feeling unsure of himself in the field of zoology, to which chair in the Muséum he had been named at the age of twenty-one with virtually no training, Geoffroy welcomed the prospect of collaboration with a clearly more accomplished contemporary three years his senior. In so doing he ignored the warnings of older and wiser colleagues who feared lest he be opening the way to a competition that would leave him in the shade. Geoffroy shared his lodgings in the Muséum with Cuvier for some months after the latter’s arrival in Paris in March 1795. They then entered upon a partnership that in the next two years produced five joint memoirs treating the classification of mammals, the two-horned rhinoceros, the species of elephants, the taxonomy place of the tarsier, and the natural history of orangutans.15 All their specimens came from the collections in the Muséum enriched by the acquisitions from Holland. Positions for Cuvier were found straight off. He was named professor of ´ natural history at the Ecole Centrale du Panthéon in March, and also adjunct professor of anatomy at the Muséum, where he supplied the lecture course that the elderly incumbent, Fran¸cois Mertrud, was incapable of giving. Cuvier grew stout in his maturity and corpulent in old age, but his was an arresting presence at the outset. Slim, red-haired, with strong features and a commanding delivery, he spoke extemporaneously while illustrating his lectures with free-hand drawings on the blackboard. He also published on his own. The most important memoir drew on his seaside researches in Normandy and divided the two classes of insects and worms in which Linnaeus had placed invertebrates into six classes: mollusks, crustaceans, insects, worms, echinoderms, and zoophytes.16 The early papers contain hints of what became the research program of the Muséum for the next quartercentury, which was an extension of Jussieu’s system for a natural classification from botany to a complete zoological taxonomy based on comparative anatomy. In that enterprise he was joined, or rather followed, by Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Duméril, Latreille, and lesser lights, whatever their differences, which were profound, in the philosophy of nature. The publication of Cuvier’s course, Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée, was certainly his greatest technical work. The first volume, collected and edited under his supervision by André Constant Duméril, appeared in 1800.17 15

For bibliographical detail of these and other papers, see Daudin (1926), pp. 286–287. “Mémoire sur la structure interne et externe, et sur les affinités des animaux auxquels on a donné le nom de Vers,” Décade philosophique 5 (1795), pp. 385–396; “Second mémoire sur l’organisation et sur les rapports des animaux a` sang blanc,” Magasin encyclopédique 2 (1795), pp. 433–448. 17 Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée (5 vols., 1800–1805). The first two volumes were edited by A. C. Duméril, the last three by G. L. Duvernoy. 16

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Whether intentionally or not, Cuvier fulfilled the warnings of Geoffroy’s older colleagues and left his early friend and partner on the sidelines. Elected a charter member of the Institute on 13 December 1795, he was the youngest present at the opening meeting of the First Class on the twenty-sixth and as such named Secretary.18 Geoffroy had to wait until 1807, long after returning from Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, to join Cuvier in the Section of Anatomy and Zoology. Election to the Chair of Natural History in the Collège de France in 1800, coupled with promotion to a full professorship at the Muséum in 1802, put Cuvier in a position to become one of the pair of leading eminences throughout the Napoleonic regime, his counterpart in the exact sciences having been Laplace. Laplace’s was the guiding hand in the establishment of the Bureau des Longitudes, the official institution that housed and directed the senior of those sciences, astronomy. Lakanal, again a member of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, resumed his pose as legislative patron of science in the waning days of the Convention. Laplace was still rusticating in the village of Mée near Melun in December 1794, when he received a letter from Lakanal asking advice about the organization of observatories. Seizing the opportunity, Laplace hastened to Paris to seek a rendezvous. Apparently he met with encouragement, for a few days later he drafted a set of proposals. Both observatories in the capital needed rehabilitation. The great Paris Observatory should have three astron´ omers and three adjuncts (élèves), and the smaller one at the Ecole militaire one astronomer and an adjunct. Five observatories would suffice in the provinces, provided they be well situated. First of all, however, and this was new ground, a centralized Commission of Astronomy should be created with the mission of coordinating the work of the ensemble, publishing observations, and perfecting theories and astronomical tables. Laplace’s letter concludes with a peroration about the beauty and value of astronomy, its sublime discoveries, its importance for navigation and cartography, its indispensability for happiness and liberty through freeing mankind from superstition and belief in an imaginary heaven ruling over the human race. The shield against that is “knowledge of the true system of the world.”19 Laplace did not there say that Exposition du Système du Monde would be the title of the soon-to-be-famous book he had been composing in his retreat from Terror. Lakanal incorporated Laplace’s peroration virtually verbatim into his justification for the astronomical items in the budget he proposed for a national system of education in April 1795.20 The suggested commission here becomes a Bureau des Longitudes. The Comité d’Instruction Publique thereupon 18 19 20

PVIF 1, p. 1n. Laplace to Lakanal, 2 nivôse an III (22 December 1794), PVCd’IP 5, p. 309. PVCd’IP, 21 germinal an III (10 April 1795), 6, p. 67.


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assigned Grégoire to develop a legislative draft in consultation with the Navy and Finance Committees. Presented to the Convention on behalf of all three committees on 22 June 1795, the proposal was adopted forthwith.21 Grégoire’s preamble is no less rhetorical than Lakanal’s. His argument turns less on the cultural and intellectual value of astronomy, however, than on its practical advantages. The tyranny across the Channel owes command of the seas, without which England would be but a second-rate power, to lavish support of astronomy. As early as 1714 a Commission of leading scientists and navigators, Newton among them, had persuaded Parliament to set a prize of £20,000 for a method of determining longitudes at sea. The current Board of Longitude consisted of eighteen members, six of them Lords of the Admiralty in addition to astronomers such as Maskelyne and instrument makers such as Dollond and Bird. Its Nautical Almanach appeared five to six years before the period it covered, while the Connaissance des temps, at best a year ahead of time, currently languished in arrears. There is no evidence, but Grégoire may well have had Laplace at his elbow in preparing the recommendation. In any case, the express model was the Board of Longitude, with the difference that its smaller counterpart in Paris was charged by government with bureaucratic as well as consultative functions. Its mission was to benefit the operations of the Navy and Merchant Marine through the development of astronomy, to improve hydrography, cartography, meteorology, and horology, to conduct research on terrestrial magnetism, and to perfect the determination of longitudes. It was further to arrange for an annual course of astronomy open to the public, to improve the accuracy of astronomical tables, and to see to timely publication of Connaissance des temps. The most pressing task was to reanimate the Observatory of Paris, in a state of near paralysis after the Terror. Its junior ´ partner at the Ecole militaire was in better case. The Bureau was also to mount observatories in the naval bases at Brest and Toulon, to establish others at appropriate locations elsewhere in the provinces, and to coordinate their operations and those of foreign observatories with the central work in Paris. The initial membership consisted of two mathematicians, Laplace and Lagrange; four astronomers, Lalande, Cassini, Méchain, and Delambre; two experienced navigators, Borda and Bougainville; one geographer, Buache; and one instrument maker, Carochez. They were to name four adjunct astronomers who would carry out the daily work of observation and calculation in Paris under their direction and receive stipends of 4,000 francs a year. The annual budget for maintenance of instruments and running an office was 12,000 francs. Present at the first meeting, on 6 July 1795, were Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, Borda, Buache, and Carochez, Borda in the 21

PVCd’IP 6, pp. 125, 223, and for the complete text, pp. 321–328.

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chair. Delambre and Méchain were absent, Delambre having departed two weeks previously for Orléans to resume his survey of the meridian while Méchain was in Marseilles seeking to arrange a return to Barcelona. Bougainville, retired voyager rather than scientist, never took much part. Cassini IV, oscillating between dudgeon and a desire to take part in the direction of his former astronomical fief, wrote that he would attend further meetings. After many changes of heart, however, dudgeon won out, and he retired to sulk in the family estate of Thury north of Paris occupying himself with local politics and seeking to recover funds he considered due him from the state’s takeover of the Cassini map of France. The onetime headquarters of the Bureau des Longitudes are situated at the back of the inner court of the Institute. The historian who consults its early records there takes notes amid period furniture in a dimly lit chamber dominated by a magnificent Bréguet clock, the only one of its kind.22 The pendulum consists of a hollow glass tube shaped into a serpentine bob at its lower end and filled with mercury to a level causing it to beat seconds at a given latitude. Until 1804 the Procès-Verbaux are in the tiny, crabbed hand of Lalande, who was inevitably elected Secretary at the outset and named interim Director of the Paris Observatory to begin repairing the disorders left by the egalitarian trio of Nouet, Perny, and Ruelle, in charge during the Terror. An initial problem was political. Experts had refrained from pointing out to the framers of the Republican Calendar that the additional day in old-style 1796, a leap year, would cause the year IV to begin on the day after the autumn equinox. At first the Bureau des Longitudes thought to propose to the Convention that the discrepancy be fixed by dropping the “sextile” for the year III. After discussion with the Comité d’Instruction Publique, however, it appeared that the game of astronomical accuracy was scarcely worth the political candle, and that reconciliation of the calendar with celestial reality had better be left to the future.23 Throughout the 1790s proofreaders of the Bureau des Longitudes had to be vigilant lest the old dates creep into print in the Connaissance des temps and the new Annuaire, an astronomical journal initiated in 1795.24 It would thus appear that contributors still used them in their private calculations, as indeed they would have been bound to do when incorporating data from abroad. Whether in ancient China, medieval Islam, or early modern Europe, astronomy unlike other sciences had ever depended on sovereign authority for support. Such continued to be the case in France, the difference from the old regime being that the Bureau des Longitudes proceeded to oversee its 22 The Procès-Verbaux from the first meeting on 6 July 1795 through 27 December 1810 are contained in three registers. Bigourdan (1928–1933) is a history of the Bureau des Longitudes organized topically in installments. 23 PVCd’IP 6, pp. 207, 459–460, 488, 501. 24 Procès-Verbaux, 2e registre, 9 prairial, 4 fructidor, 19 fructidor, an VI (1798).


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affairs like the professional Board of Trustees that it essentially was. No other science yet knew such official management. Its membership represented theory, practice, instrumentation, and application. Its meetings were held twice a decade until 1806 and thereafter weekly. Its responsibilities were serious and attended to minutely. They included financial accountability; vigilance over the daily and nightly work of astronomical and meteorological observation; stimulation of research by setting prize competitions; compilation and publication of the Connaissance des temps and the new Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes; maintenance, repair, and replacement of instruments; modification of the physical plant to accommodate the installation of telescopes of increasing power; supervision of a technical library; keeping open lines of communication with the Ministries of the Interior and of the Navy, with the astronomical section of the Institute (there was much overlap of membership), and with the public, the last by way of a course to be offered annually at the Collège de France. That the Bureau was an authoritative and administrative commission with work to do, and not, like the Institute, an honorific and consultative body dispensing awards, recommendations, and judgments, is evident from the scale of compensation. The stipend of 8,000 francs amounted to a salary (traitement) paid to an official (fonctionnaire). The 1500 francs received by members of the Institute was an honorarium (indemnité ). That point was not always clear to members of the Bureau des Longitudes, who sought from time to time to be accorded the status of an academy.25 Staffing the Observatory was difficult at the outset. Not many young men had studied astronomy in the preceding few years. Of those named to the four adjunct positions in Paris, among them Méchain’s son and Lalande’s nephew, only two stayed the course. About one, Burckhardt, little else is known, not even his first name. He would appear to have been German, since before approving his selection in December 1799, the Minister of the Interior wished to know whether he was still in the service of the Duchess of Gotha.26 The second, Alexis Bouvard, had originally been appointed to the vacancy left by Cassini’s resignation early in the Terror. By good luck Bouvard proved to be an excellent mathematical astronomer and was promoted to full membership in the Bureau in 1804. He served Laplace as calculator throughout composition of the five volumes of Mécanique céleste (1799–1825). In the course of that collaboration Bouvard became not only research assistant but an intimate young friend and confidant who was much with Laplace in later years and present beside his deathbed in 1827.27 25 26 27

360.

Bigourdan (1930), pp. A.18–A.26. Bigourdan (1928), p. A.17. Gillispie (1997), p. 278. On Bouvard’s career, see A.F.O’D Alexander, DSB 2, pp. 359–

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Bouvard’s Tables astronomiques of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (1821), standard for the former two, soon proved inaccurate in predicting positions for Uranus. He attributed the anomalies to perturbations caused by an unknown body, a conjecture confirmed by the discovery of Neptune in 1846, three years after his death. Other adjunct positions were filled for brief intervals by graduates of the ´ Ecole Polytechnique, notably Poisson, Biot, Arago, and Cauchy, for whom they were stepping stones into a career. Beset by constant turnover, the staff operating the Observatory was hard pressed to perform the calculations for Connaissance des temps and the Annuaire in a timely manner, and the Bureau turned for help to Gaspard Riche de Prony, Director of the Cadastre, which (it will be recalled) was intimately associated with creation of the metric system. As will appear in the next section, Prony had assembled a team of calculators to compile an elaborate set of decimalized logarithmic and trigonometric tables. Borrowing a few of his people to work with the astronomers solved the problem of mathematical staffing at the Observatory. The expedient was the more natural in that the Bureau des Longitudes, in addition to its strictly astronomical and cartographical duties, served also as a bureau of standards. It was vested from the outset with responsibility for implementing the metric system and safeguarding its standard units.28 3. COMPLETION OF THE METRIC SYSTEM

It had never been the intention of the Committee of Public Safety that the purge of the Commission Temporaire des Poids et Mesures on 23 December 1793 should impede the reform of weights and measures, much less lead to repudiation of the metric system. Quite the contrary, Prony was to have replaced Delambre in the measurement of the meridian.29 Pending its completion, standard units based on the provisional meter were to have been fabricated and distributed pursuant to the law of 1 August 1793.30 The Convention ordered that all documents addressed to the executive Commissions (the former ministries) should use the new units as of 1 thermidor an II (19 July 1794), a week before the end of the Terror. Accordingly, the Commission des Travaux Publics instructed engineers in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées to employ the metric system in drafting projects and composing reports. It also commissioned an Instruction sur les poids et mesures and considered assigning engineers throughout the country 28

PVCd’IP, Bigourdan (1928), pp. A.17, 25–27; and for detail of the involvement of the Bureau des Longitudes with metrology, (1930), C.1–92. 29 Extrait du registre du Comité de Salut Public, 8 nivôse an II (28 December 1793); Prony’s commission from the Minister of the Interior, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS. 724. 30 Above, chapter 4, section 5.

VII. 3. COMPLETION OF THE METRIC SYSTEM

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the task of conducting courses in arithmetic and decimal calculation to be given once a décade on the day of rest. Unfortunately, copies of the manual were virtually unobtainable. In any case, few local artisans were capable of accurately dividing and subdividing meter sticks for general use.31 These gestures toward reform of weights and measures, and others like them, thus amounted to mere twitches in a state of suspended animation amid the tumult of great events throughout the time of terror. Only in April 1795, nine months after the fall of Robespierre and sixteen months after Prieur’s purge, did work on the metric system resume. The decree calling for resumption of the operation was based on a report prepared with no sign of shame-facedness by Prieur. Along with Carnot, he had continued on the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety until 6 October 1794. Thereupon the Committee of Public Instruction invited him to take in hand the problem of weights and measures once again, and elected him anew to membership on 7 December. A subcommittee named for the purpose included representatives of the Convention’s Committee on Finance. Ready on 18 February 1795, their proposal was enacted into law on 18 germinal an III (7 April 1795).32 No less rhetorical than its predecessors, the draft exhibits more realistic expectations. Although the assignats go unmentioned, it was no doubt their depreciation that taught the lesson, here accepted, that the value of money is bound to be determined by the market and not by a natural standard. Decimal subdivision of the livre, now the franc, was to be retained but its twentieth part, the five-centime piece, would still be called the sou. In a further, and more inevitable, concession to “the immense force of habit,” decimal division of time would be abandoned. That feature was not, after all, a matter of commercial weights and measures. People would be unwilling to discard the watches in their pockets, nor would watchmakers throw out the stock for sale in their shops. Resistance was bound to be enormous. To insist on inclusion of timekeeping would discredit decimalization in general and with it the whole metric reform. Nomenclature is the immediately recognizable feature of the law of 18 germinal. Only the terms meter, centimeter, and millimeter survive from earlier proposals. In place of other names, for example grave and cade, Prieur’s report substituted gram, liter, kilogram, kilometer, hectare, and so on. A few words, such as are, décimètre, myriamétre, and décalitre, never caught on. Purists chided the authors for the barbarism of certain prefixes, but no further modifications have ever been required. Hellenist that he was, Delambre permitted himself a slightly ironic defense of the revised terminology 31 ´ For these and other measures, see Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 2630, 噛31; 2922. 32 PVCd’IP 5, pp. 551–563.

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even while disclaiming any part in having framed it. “Hécato–,” he acknowledges, would be more faithful to the Greek than “hecto–”, but words like “hécatomètre” would have too many syllables. As for “kilo” in place of the more literal “chilio,” the substitution of “k” would obviate a vicious pronunciation, while there is licence for “chilo” as the poetic form of “chilio.” In illustration Delambre cites the Iliad, book V, v, 860, where Mars, wounded by Diomedes, cries out like a thousand or ten thousand men.33 The assumption of the legislation was, not that the metric system had to be created, but that in principle it was already in being. All that remained were the practical matters of bringing the new units into use and completing the precise geodetic determination of the base. The former task need not and should not await the latter. The provisional meter specified in the law of 1 August 1793 would be sufficiently close to the final value for all ordinary purposes, and there must be no further delay. A three-man Agence Temporaire des Poids et Mesures would replace the comatose Commission Temporaire chaired by Lagrange. Its mission was strictly limited to application.34 A further stipulation, adopted on 17 April, prescribed that measurement of the meridian was to resume in charge of the former commissioners, that is to say Delambre and Méchain, over whom the Agence was given no authority.35 Named to the Agence Temporaire were Legendre and two associates, Charles-Etienne Coquebert de Montbret and Etienne-Fran¸cois Gattey, both of whom combined administrative experience with technical competence. Editor of the Journal des Mines, Coquebert was a naturalist who had been a civilian official in the Navy, while Gattey’s background was in the Ministry of Finance. The latter was chef de fourrager, in effect chief provisioner, for the Army of the Rhine at the time of his appointment to the Agence Temporaire.36 Popularization of the metric system thereupon became his principal occupation. Gattey wrote a number of manuals, one for the use of farmers, another for pharmacists, a third for the public. Eventually he designed a calculator, a sort of slide rule, that made mechanical conversions between old and new units.37 As for Legendre, service in the Agence Tempo33

Delambre, Base du système métrique 1, p. 60. A.-G. Belmar, “L’Agence temporaire des poids et mesures et la diffusion du système métrique en France,” in Débarbat and Ten (1993), pp. 67–77. Cf. Champagne (1979), pp. 217–224. Records of the the Agence temporaire are in AN, F12.1288, F12.1298, F12*.210, F12*.215–218, and F12*.220. 35 PVCd’ IP 6, pp. 91–92. Séance du 28 germinal an III (17 April 1795). 36 Letter over the signature of Fourcroy, 22 pluviôse an III (12 February 1795), AN, ADVIII, 37. 37 ´ Eléments du nouveau système métrique (1801); Tables de réduction des anciens poids en nouveaux et réciproquement a` l’usage des pharmaciens (1801); Explication . . . de l’arithmographe (1806), etc. See Dictionnaire de Biographie Fran¸caise, article by St. Le Tourneau. Among a number of competing manuals were M.-J. Brisson, Réduction des mesures et poids anciens en ´ mesures et poids nouveaux (an VII, 1799); Etienne Bonneau, Arithmétique décimale (an VII, 34


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raire brought him back to the mathematical problems of geodesy. A memoir completed in 1806 proved that no error was introduced in triangulating the surface of the earth as if it were a sphere rather than a spheroid.38 Assigned quarters at 1080, rue de Vaugirard, Legendre and his colleagues ran a lively agency. Beginning with linear measures, they retained the leading instrument makers, Fortin, the younger Mercklein, Lenoir, Kutch, Jecker, to construct prototype standards and to make the tools for large-scale production of metersticks, weights, and graduated containers. The payroll at full strength consisted of 34 persons—artisans, toolmakers, woodcutters, writers, designers, engravers. Salaries totaled 131,200 francs annually, starting with the three commissioners at 8,000 each.39 Among others, the Agence Temporaire employed a blind “arithmetician,” one Duverny, to give public demonstrations showing how easy the new measures were to use. He even opened a shop that sold them. In less than a year of operation the Agence Temporaire placed orders for the manufacture of 100 standard meters in copper, over 25,000 wooden L-squares, almost 4500 metersticks, and a smaller number of short rulers. It produced pamphlets, circulars, and posters addressed to the general public along with instructions for the use of schoolmasters, shopkeepers, bureaucrats, and craftsmen in many trades. On 19 February 1796, the Directory folded the Agence Temporaire into the Ministry of the Interior, where it became the Bureau Consultatif des Poids et Mesures with no change in personnel or mission.40 Throughout the ten months of its independent existence it had expended a considerable sum, just over 1.75 million francs.41 Policy called for making haste slowly. The further law of 1 vendémiaire an IV (23 September 1795) prescribed beginning with certain units in certain areas, starting with the Paris region, where use of the meter was to be obligatory as of 22 December 1795. Enforcement was another matter. Inspectors in any market had to be accompanied by gendarmes from a different quarter since policemen turned a blind eye on the transactions of shopkeepers along their own beats. The judiciary systematically refused to convict carpenters caught using feet and inches or grocers selling cabbages by the pound. Manufacture of the old measures might be forbidden, and it was, but repairing them could not be 1799); S.-A. Tarbe, Manuel pratique et élémentaire des poids et mesures et du calcul décimal (an VII, 1799). 38 “Analyse des triangles tracés sur la surface d’un sphéro¨ıde,” MIF 7, Pt. I (1806), pp. 130– 161. On Legendre’s participation, see Hellman (1936). 39 The names and salaries are contained in a folder of administrative documents in AN, F12.1288. For the payroll following transfer to the ministry, see AN, F12.1289. 40 Ministre de l’Intérieur aux Administrations Centrales des Départements, undated letter, AN, AF12*.215, 噛6. 41 Receipts consisted of 1,755,469.45 francs, of which 11,138.40 came from the proceeds of sales of new measures, and the rest from the Treasury, leaving a balance of 80 centimes. The accounts down through 1813 are in AN, F12*.220. Cf. A.-G. Belmar, op. cit., n. 34, above.

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prevented. The coopers (boisseliers) of Paris refused to fabricate liters, decaliters, hectaliters, and kiloliters without a subsidy. “Let us not be discouraged by past experience,” writes the Minister of the Interior to the commissariat of police in Paris on 8 July 1799.42 Nothing frustrated, or not admittedly so, by the resistance of the capital, on 16 July the Directory ordered exclusive use of the new measures in eleven surrounding departments.43 Thus the work of educating, not to say bullying, the public had started. People increasingly knew what the system was, even if they refused to use it generally. Determination of the definitive meter actually was accomplished under the Directory, albeit barely. Immediately on passage of the law of 18 germinal, the Comité d’Instruction Publique reconstituted its Commission of Weights and Measures to exercise scientific oversight of the completion of ´ de Calon, director of the cartothe survey.44 Meanwhile, General Etienne graphic section of the War Department, had conceived the notion of extending the coverage of the Cassini map to the newly annexed territories of Belgium and Savoy. Thinking to engage Delambre and Méchain to undertake the triangulation, Calon designated them “astronomes du Dépôt de la Guerre.” Delambre persuaded him that it would make sense first to complete the survey of the meridian. Calon provided administrative backing until July 1795, when administrative responsibility passed to the Bureau des Longitudes, founded on 25 June.45 AN, F12*.217, 噛999. Aisne, Aube, Eure, Eure-et-Loire, Loiret, Oise, Seine-Inférieure, Seine-et-Marne, Seine-etOise, Somme, Yonne. AN, F12*.217, 噛1074. Efforts to bring the metric system into use are abundantly documented in AN, F12*.215–218. 44 Article 10 of the law of 18 germinal an III calls for completing the determination of the basic units of the metric system. On 17 April 1795 the Comité d’Instruction Publique named as commissioners those who had been involved from the beginning: Berthollet, Borda, Brisson, Coulomb, Delambre, Haüy, Lagrange, Laplace, Méchain, Monge, Prony, and Vandermonde (PVCd’IP, 6, p. 92, Séance du 28 germinal an III). Formally, their authority ended with the dissolution of the Convention and its committees on 26 October 1795. The First Class of the Institute thereupon named the same commissioners, with the exception of Vandermonde and the addition of Legendre, to exercise the responsibility vested in it by Article 25 of the law (Aucoc, 1899, p. 25) founding the Institute (PVIF, Séance du 6 floréal an IV [27 December 1795], 1, p. 30). 45 PVCd’IP 6, pp. 321–328; Delambre, Grandeur et figure de la terre, p. 216. It is an exaggeration to suggest, as does Heilbron (1990), pp. 230–232, that Delambre resumed operations in service to Calon. Calon, formerly an officer of the Corps des Ingénieurs-Géographes and currently a deputy to the Convention, had been director of the Dépôt de la Guerre since April 1793. He was engaged in a complicated game of bureaucratic empire building and named noted scientists, among them Laplace, Delambre, and Méchain, to his roster in the role, essentially, of consultants. He also obtained funds from the Committee of Public Safety with a view to mapping the newly annexed departments and to completing the survey of the meridian. The sum promised the latter was rather small—110,000 francs. A letter from Méchain makes it doubtful that he or Delambre ever received the money (Méchain to Calon, 13 fruc42 43


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Reassembling his equipment and personnel, Delambre departed Paris for Orléans to go into the field again on 28 June 1795. Méchain for his part, after returning from Spain by way of Livorno and a long stay in Genoa, remained in Marseilles until 31 July 1795. The revived Commission wished him to consult in Paris before he resumed his observations. Not that it had any inkling of the discrepancy in the relative latitudes of Montjouy and Barcelona that plagued him, but no one in authority had laid eyes on Méchain since the beginning of the whole operation in June 1792. Instead of obliging, he pleaded ill and repaired directly to Carcassonne. There he proceeded very slowly to gather up the threads of his triangulation, all the while looking over his shoulder for a chance to break away to Barcelona. Aftereffects of revolutionary vandalism dogged the footsteps of both surveying parties, north and south. In the region around Dun-sur-Auron the steeples had been razed by order of the Montagnard deputy to the Convention because of the arrogance with which they had soared over the humble abodes of citizens. Everywhere economic insecurity bedeviled operations as peskily as political insecurity had done three years previously. The government supplied funds in the form of assignats, which innkeepers and tradespeople normally refused to accept. Delambre had to wait a month in Bourges because he could not pay the coachman. Further along, he was forced to cut back for a time to one Borda circle, one cart, one assistant, and one horse, and to abandon nighttime observations for lack of candles. Méchain labored in similar straits. Somehow they managed, however. Despite refractory terrain, Delambre had advanced his triangles from Orléans to Bourges by December 1795. Thereupon, he hastened north to Dunkirk in order to determine the values for latitude and azimuth that he had been unable to complete in the winter of 1792–93, and that would anchor the chain of triangles at its upper end. He recorded 174 observations of the superior and 138 of the inferior passage of Polaris across the meridian, and 306 all told of Beta of Ursa Minor. The season was too advanced and the weather bad, however, and he was less than satisfied with the level of agreement among his results. Thereafter Delambre worked his painstaking way south of Bourges throughout the spring and summer of 1796, arriving at Sermur on 28 October. Méchain and he had agreed, in their intermittent correspondence, that ´ whoever should first reach Evaux, a station just northeast of Sermur and nearly equidistant from Dunkirk and Barcelona, would take the latitude there and measure azimuths at the mid-point of the chain. That task fell to Delambre over the winter of 1796–97. There was every prospect that he and tidor an III [30 August 1795], copy in dossier Méchain, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences). Calon’s attempt to centralize all cartography in the Dépôt de la Guerre miscarried. On this complicated affair, see Bret (1991b); Berthaut (1902), 1, pp. 135–146.

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Méchain would meet at the junction of their respective sectors in Rodez by the end of the summer of 1797. Delambre had twelve stations to go when the good weather returned in April, and Méchain, still based in Carcassonne, had but ten. Even so Delambre reached Rodez first, having heard nothing from Méchain, and there he measured the final angle of his series on 31 August 1797. He had been dismayed, three days previously, to encounter his partner’s associate, Tranchot, along the road from Rieupeyroux to Rodez. After five years of vicissitudes, Tranchot had had enough and was making his way back to home and family in Paris. Méchain had found a new helper, so Tranchot reported, and counted on finishing before the bad weather. Instead, he fell ill again. At once Delambre offered to continue beyond Rodez, as indeed Méchain had thought to do in the early days when fortune seemed to be smiling rather on him. Now, he would have none of it. Honor required his completing the portion assigned him, however cruel the continuing exile from friends and loved ones. There was nothing for Delambre to do but turn to the remaining task, measurement of the bases. In October 1797 he returned to Paris, consulted with Laplace, and set about surveying in the auxiliary triangles that would link the overall chain to its northern base. The two ends were to be at Melun and Lieursaint. The winter set in before Delambre could lay Borda’s precisely calibrated rods end to end along the twelve kilometers of mainly straight and level road between the two towns. That job, requiring forty-five days on site, was completed on 3 June 1798. He had thought to verify the result by measuring the same route in reverse, but that would have meant leaving the Perpignan base until the following year. Time was pressing. On 9 June 1798 Talleyrand, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, transmitted to foreign governments a resolution by the Institute. Framed at the instance of Laplace, and adopted over Borda’s strong objections on 20 January, it invited them to name scientific representatives to join with French colleagues in a congress on weights and measures to convene in Paris on 6 October 1798.46 The purpose would be to review the entire operation prior to international adoption of the metric system. That left just four months for completion of Méchain’s remaining triangles together with the southern base. There was no chance of finishing before the deadline unless Delambre took on the latter in addition to Melun. As soon as he could complete his preparations, therefore, he repaired to Perpignan, arriving in the Midi on 22 July. The road to be measured runs between Vernet and Salces. It was less well reconnoitered than the base at 46 Laplace to Delambre, 10 pluviôse an VI (29 January 1798), in Laissus (1961). Cf. PVIF 1 (1795–99), p. 335, séance du 1er pluviôse, an VI. Talleyrand’s letter of invitation is reported in Le Moniteur, no. 261, 21 prairial an VI (9 June 1798).


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Melun and in a far less developed region. Finding shelter and security for the instruments each night was often, indeed usually, difficult. The wind seldom relented. Nevertheless, this task too Delambre brought off in fortythree days of field work, completing it on 18 September 1798. We have already noted the remarkable agreement between the value of the Perpignan base calculated from its counterpart at Melun (6006.1983 toises) and its measured value (6006.27).47 The difference was eleven inches. Immediately on finishing, Delambre notified Méchain and asked for all his triangles in order that he might make that calculation. Méchain’s behavior was by now causing grave concern. He had answered no letters since the previous April. Acting for the Bureau des Longitudes, Borda even persuaded Madame Méchain to travel to Carcassonne. Her husband was pleased to see her; she found him in good health; but he would do no work until she had departed. Alarmed herself, she made a detour to Perpignan to consult Delambre. He promised her to remain nearby, to replace Méchain if need be, and to bring him back to Paris when their operation was finished. On his wife’s departure, Méchain moved his party to Rodez in order to work back to Carcassonne. Finally he wrote his partner a line, on 5 September, telling of troubles but assuring Delambre he would receive the remaining triangles “in a little while.”48 Ten days later Méchain did send along the data for the main part of the chain from Barcelona to Carcassonne. He had still to complete the stations at Saint-Pons and Montalet. Delambre had gone on to Carcassonne himself in early September, thinking to be on hand in case of further illness. On 6 October, the very day the Metric Congress was to have convened in Paris, Méchain wrote from St.-Pons to add the triangles, including Mont Alaric and Carcassonne. On 22 October, finally, Méchain measured his last angle. A few days later he joined Delambre in Carcassonne. The two were face to face, or side by side, six years and four months after they had parted in Paris, each to measure his segment of the meridian. Méchain categorically refused to accompany his partner to Paris, however. He would have none of it. First he must return to Barcelona, though he would give no reason. Finally he yielded, not to argument, but to letters from Borda applying the stick of orders from the Bureau des Longitudes and dangling the carrot of the directorship of the Observatory.49 What, after all that, did Delambre and Méchain find to talk about, traveling back to the capital together? Delambre does not say. They arrived, at all events, in late November 1798. Foreign deputies to the 47 Above, chapter 4, section 3. Delambre’s account of his measurement of the Perpignan base is contained in a letter to Prony, 4e jour complémentaire de l’an VI (20 September 1798), ´ Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS. 724. 48 This account of the last phase of the survey is drawn from Base 1, pp. 65–97. 49 Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie 6, pp. 761–762.

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conference on the metric system had come early, as visitors with expenses paid to Paris are wont to do, and had been awaiting Delambre’s and Méchain’s return, though not impatiently, for some two months. Formally the visitors served as consulting members of the Institute’s Commission on the Metric System. Several scholars have suggested that this assemblage may be considered the first international scientific congress.50 That may be an exaggerated view, for the countries represented were either satellites of the French Republic or minor neutral states. No invitations went to England or the United States, nor to Austria, Prussia, or Russia. For that reason other writers have concluded that the meeting was largely a sham, intended to rubber-stamp a fait accompli, and that the notion of international consensus was specious.51 The last point may well be correct. There can be no doubt that the Institute and government did indeed milk the event for all the propaganda it was worth, both scientific and political. Formal presentation of the standard meter and kilogram, fabricated in platinum, to the joint meeting of the Councils of 500 and of Elders on 22 June 1799 was put into the mouth of a Dutch delegate, Jan Henrik van Swinden: “You will have observed, Citizen Legislators, that useful union of foreign and national scientists. It has been perfection. . . . You will not have failed to notice also that it is to two foreign scientists, a Swiss and a Dutchman, that the Commission of the Institute has confided the task of drawing up the report and reviewing the history.”52 Nevertheless, it does not follow from the hollowness of the diplomacy that the actual work of the assembled experts was technically empty. In company with their French hosts, they did in fact determine the length of the standard meter and the weight of the standard kilogram on the basis of the survey of the meridian. These were serious people: from the Batavian Republic (Holland), Hendrik Aeneae as well as van Swinden; from the Helvetian Republic (Switzerland), Johann Georg Tralles; from the Cisalpine Republic (Lombardy), Lorenzo Mascheroni; from Sardinia, Count Prospero Balbo, whom the provisional government of Piedmont replaced with Antonio Maria Vassalli-Eandi; from the Ligurian Republic (Genoa), A. L. Multedo; from the Duchy of Tuscany, Giovanni Fabbroni; from the Roman Republic, Pietro Franchini; from Spain, Gabriel de Ciscar and Augustin de

50 Crosland (1969a); Jean Dhombres, “Le regard e´tranger sur la vie scientifique fran¸caise vers 1800,” in Debarbat and Ten (1993), pp. 41–64. 51 John L. Heilbron, “The Measure of Enlightenment,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider (1990), pp. 233–235; Dhombres, op. cit., n. 50 above. 52 “Discours prononcé a` la barre des Conseils du Corps législatif, au nom de l’Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, lors de la prèsentation des e´talons prototypes du mètre et du kilogramme.” Séance du 4 messidor an VII, Base 3, pp. 584–591.


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Pedrayès; from Denmark, Thomas Bugge, whose account of scientific Paris we have mentioned.53 Fabbroni, natural philosopher and cosmopolitan figure of the Italian enlightenment, took a leading part in modernizing Florentine scientific institutions and Tuscan political administration. His had been the initiative in converting the stuffy old ducal Wunderkammer into the Museo di Fisica e di Storia Naturale, a scientific institution of general scope and major importance on the scale of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and the later Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris.54 Mascheroni was a poet, philologist, and geometer. His Geometria del Compasso (Pavia, 1797) deals with the theory of geometrical constructions and shows that any problem in a plane that can be worked with ruler and compass may also be solved by the compass alone. In the intervals of the first Italian campaign, Bonaparte enjoyed mathematical discussions with Mascheroni, whose book on the compass is dedicated in verse to “Buonaparte l’Italico”:55 Geometra Maestro, e mi sovenne Quando l’alpi varcasti Annibal novo Per liberar tua cara Italia. . . . The others, too, were all authors of reputable works on mathematics, astronomy, navigation, surveying, or physics. Clearly, they were given a good time in Paris, but they had not come there merely to be made use of, nor to be gulled. The first plenary meeting convened in the Dépôt de la Marine on 28 November 1798. Thereupon, the more involved of the visitors were teamed with their French colleagues in the tasks of verifying and correcting the metric data. Darcet and Lefèvre-Gineau now replaced Berthollet and Monge, absent in Egypt. Borda died on 19 February 1799, before the Commission had completed its report on the data and determinations for which he had devised both the strategy and the instruments employed throughout. Vandermonde too having died, in 1796, the remaining members of the Commission proper were Brisson, Coulomb, Haüy, Lagrange, Laplace, and Prony, together with Delambre and Méchain, ex officio. The actual work was assigned to three subcommissions, one concerned with verification of the survey of the meridian and determination of the meter, one with comparison of Borda’s measuring rods, and thus the new meter, with the old standards based on the toise of Peru, and one with fixing 53

Above, chapter 7, section 2. For Fabbroni’s career in general, see Pasta (1989), and for his participation in the Congress on the Metric System, chapter 6, section 1, pp. 435–455. 55 On Mascheroni, see A. Seidenberg, DSB 9 (1974), pp. 156–158. For his relations with Bonaparte, and the so-called Mascheroni-Napoleon problem, see Fischer (1988), app. 6.3, pp. 318–323. 54

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the value of the kilogram. Whether the detail of their operations appears appealing or the reverse will depend on one’s attitude to the capacity of human eye and hand, driven by technical willpower, to achieve ever greater accuracy in the design and use of precision instruments. One thing is clear, however. Window dressers would not have gone to such trouble. The working members of the subcommission responsible for reviewing the geodetic and astronomical operations consisted of van Swinden, Legendre, Tralles, and Delambre. Sitting as a team, they began by reviewing the raw data for every angle in order to agree upon a mean value, rejecting readings that were clearly faulty and deciding according to each set of circumstances recorded in the registers what weight to give differences of varying amounts. The discrepancies on which discussions turned were normally on the order of a tenth of a second. Rarely did they amount to a second. Of the ninety triangles in the finished chain, the gap between the sum of the angles and 180⬚ was under a second in thirty-six, under two seconds in twenty-seven, and under three seconds in another eighteen. Only in three triangles did it exceed four seconds, and in none was it over five. Next they turned to similar examination of the azimuthal measurements at Watten, Bourges, Carcassonne, and Montjouy, and of determinations of ´ latitude at Dunkirk, Paris, Evaux, Carcassonne, and Montjouy. The last, astronomical set of observations gave the celestial arc. To determine the terrestrial distance that subtended it required referring the data to the measured lengths of the two bases. After examining all details of those measurements, the Commission decided that the very form of the registers and the close agreement between the measured and calculated values at Perpignan precluded appreciable error and made further verification of the bases superfluous. It has been, and still is, said of the metric reform that, since its proponents were clearly not naive, they must have been disingenuous in pretending that a standard could consist of a natural quantity rather than a physical object to which units are to be referred. Not so. The Commissioners understood perfectly well that the base of the metric system must be a physical standard. The dimension they chose was nothing abstract. It was the length of the first of Borda’s four platinum measuring rods with which Delambre had taped both bases on the ground. This object they defined as the module for purposes of calculation. They could then compute the number of modules, first in the arc of the meridian measured from Dunkirk to Montjouy, and by extrapolation in the entire quadrant. In making these calculations, the four commissioners proceeded independently, each employing a particular numerical method different from the other three. At the end they compared their results and agreed on the very minor adjustments needed to reduce to a minimum the exceedingly slight variations. The meridian between Dunkirk and Montjouy, so they


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found, subtends a celestial arc of 9.6738⬚ with its midpoint at 46⬚11⬘5⬙. Its length was 275,792.36 modules. The most extreme difference between the four sets of calculation did not amount to 0.5 demi-modules (less than six feet). It remained to verify the length of the module. That was the main assignment of the second subcommission, chaired by Méchain and consisting also of Coulomb, Mascheroni, Multedo, and Vassalli. Their instrument was a comparator equipped with a micrometer and vernier. Also constructed by Lenoir, it was the same that Borda and Brisson had used in determining the provisional meter in 1793. It permitted comparisons of an accuracy within 0.02 lignes or 1/1200 of an inch. Borda had designed his rods to be two toises in length. So exact, it now proved, had been Lenoir’s fabrication that the first rod, the module, was indeed equal to twice the toise de Pérou. The tests occupied four days during which each member of the commission made every measurement five or six times. Allowing for variations in temperature, Méchain and his colleagues established that Borda’s second rod differed from the first by an undetectable amount while the third was shorter by 4 ⳯ 10ⳮ6 toises and the fourth longer by 5 ⳯ 10ⳮ6 toises. These miniscule differences canceled each other out in effect so that at a temperature of 12.5⬚ centigrade, the four rods laid end to end measured eight toises. Further verification of the toise du nord, the standard used in Lapland, confirmed its equivalence to the toise de Pérou, whereas the standard used by Mairan to measure the length of the seconds pendulum in 1735 was 0.0341 lignes shorter. After reporting their results to the parent commission, Méchain and his colleagues were also, and finally, to verify the platinum meter, the crown jewel of metrology, to be conserved in a perpetual archival quarantine, and also its iron counterpart, to be used for all but the most extraordinary purposes. The Commission had laid in a supply of fifty pounds (not kilograms, ironically) of platinum, and both the standard meter and standard kilogram were fabricated by MM. Janety, père et fils, the only artisans in France who worked that metal with sufficient skill.56 Lenoir had now to calibrate both metallic bars so that they should measure exactly 1/10,000,000th of the quadrant of the meridian. In computing what that length should be, van Swinden’s commission took account of the flattening of the earth and the consequent decrease in the length of a degree of latitude with distance from the pole. They compared the equatorial length of the degree obtained in Peru in 1738 with the average that the meridional survey gave for the latitudes between Dunkirk and Barcelona, and arrived at the figure of 1/334 for the flattening. Allowing 56

“Rapport fait par M. d’Arcet . . . sur les ouvrages en Platine exécutés par M. Janety fils,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 11 (1812), pp. 207–208.

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two toises to the module, and correcting for what was assumed to be the elliptical curvature of the meridian, van Swinden and his colleagues arrived at the figure of 443.295936 lignes for the meter. Delambre rounded off that overdetermined number to 443.296. The provisional meter of 1793 was slightly longer, at 443.444 lignes, a difference of about a third of a millimeter. (The toise, it will be recalled, contained 864 lignes.) As for the kilogram, the subcommission reviewing the procedures for the standard of weight consisted of Coulomb, Mascheroni, van Swinden, and Vassalli, with Tralles in the chair. The actual laboratory work was assigned to Lefèvre-Gineau, with whom Fabbroni was paired after the latter’s arrival in Paris. No small measure of self-control was required on Fabbroni’s part to participate in the fine detail of measuring the kilogram even as Tuscany was being drawn into the War of the Second Coalition. A French Army occupied Florence in March 1799. In this instance, indeed, the French scientist responsible has a notably less distinguished reputation than does his foreign colleague. Professor of experimental physics at the Collège de France from 1786, Lefèvre de Gineau, as he was then, gave courses of which we know only the titles, served as a deputy in the Napoleonic legislature, and never added a word to the published literature of science. The only index we have to his quality as a physicist is the procedure, admittedly very ingenious, that he devised for fixing the weight of the kilogram. Even there the description does not come from his pen. Delambre held off publishing the final volume of the Base du système métrique, awaiting Lefèvre-Gineau’s promised account of his operations. It never materialized. Delambre was thus, to his chagrin, unable to include the actual data, as he did for the meridional survey, and was reduced instead to printing Tralles’s report on the experiments. Fortunately, it omitted no detail. The instrument maker was Nicolas Fortin, Lenoir’s peer in all respects. It is probable, indeed, that Fortin took a major part in the design as well as fabrication of the apparatus. That, indeed, was the all-important aspect, since the conception amounted to nothing more than elementary Archimedean hydrostatics. The problem was to determine the weight of a cubic decimeter, i.e., a liter, of water at the temperature of melting ice. No way existed to fabricate a container of precise capacity. What needed to be measured, therefore, was the apparent loss of weight when immersed in water of a body of exact external dimensions. The object should be large enough so that instrumental error would be insignificant in proportion to the volume of water displaced. At the same time it should be of specific gravity just over unity, and thus light enough not to fatigue a very delicate balance. Further, it must be such that its weight could be determined in air, in the vacuum, and in water. It must finally be of a form permitting precise determination of its size.


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To meet those requirements, Lefèvre-Gineau and Fortin decided on a hollow brass cylinder about 11 cubic decimeters in volume with a diameter equal to its height. The interior communicated with the external air by means of a brass tube 1.3 millimeters in diameter, the tip of which would remain above the surface of the water. Venting would permit correcting the weight in air for the value in a vacuum since the counterweight was of the same brass and thus equally buoyed by the atmosphere. It had not, of course, been possible to fabricate a mathematically perfect cylinder, and Lefèvre-Gineau measured its slight irregularities by means of a comparator Fortin had invented that detected linear differences to an accuracy of 0.17 millimeters. He directed Fortin to trace three concentric circumferences intersected by six diameters on the top and bottom. That yielded points of comparison for variations in height. Eight circumferences traced at equal distances on the cylindrical surface gave ninety-six intersections with perpendiculars joining the ends of the corresponding sets of upper and lower diameters. Thus, thirty-seven perpendiculars were compared with one standard brass ruler and forty-eight diameters with another. These relative dimensions were then reduced to metric units by a technique Borda and Brisson had employed for the provisional meter. The volume of this notquite-perfect cylinder came out at exactly 0.0112900054 cubic meters, i.e., 11.29 cubic decimeters. (In this early stage of decimalization, it will have been noticed, few calculators had a sense of how many decimal places should be considered significant, the general practice being the more the better. Delambre was an exception.) Weighing in air was straightforward, requiring no precautions other than the normal centering in the balance tray and exchange of weights and weighable from one side to the other in order to eliminate any asymmetry in the balance by taking the mean. Fortin’s scales were accurate to 0.02 grains (1 ⳯ 10ⳮ5 pounds). Lefèvre-Gineau had eleven unit weights fabricated, exactly equal, with a set of subdivisions down to a millionth of the unit. As in the case of the module of the meridional survey, the values were arbitrary since the kilogram had still to be determined. In fifty-three weighings of the cylinder in air, the difference between the extremes was 4.5 ⳯ 10ⳮ5 parts. Suspending the cylinder from the balance tray in order to weigh it in a vessel containing distilled water was more complicated. Even so, in thirty-six trials the greatest variation was 0.045 parts, and the mean term came to 0.209 parts of the unit module for the apparent weight in water. Adjusting that value for true weight required corrections of three sorts: first, for the weight of air buoying the counterweight; second, for the weight of air contained in the cylinder; third and most important, for the temperature of the water. The last variable required two subsidiary corrections for differences in temperature, one affecting the water, the other the brass. In principle, the water in which the cylinder was weighed should have been at

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the temperature of melting ice. Still, no matter how carefully Lefèvre-Gineau and Fabbroni packed a thick layer of shaved ice around their apparatus, they were unable to lower the temperature inside the vessel below 0.3⬚. Moreover, water is at its maximum density at 4⬚. (As will appear, it was Lefèvre-Gineau who first determined this value.) Those differences required subtracting 1.44 ⳯ 10ⳮ3 parts of unit weight from the reading. Also, the cylinder had been at a temperature of 17.25⬚ when it was measured and weighed in air. Borda’s experiments permitted calculating the amount of the contraction for brass. Allowing for that, and for the submerged portion of the stem on which the cylinder was suspended, its volume in water was to be reduced by 0.01 to 11.28 cubic decimeters. Incorporating these corrections in the data, Lefèvre-Gineau and Fabbroni calculated that the cylinder displaced a weight of water at maximum density equal to 11.27 unit modules, and that a liter thus weighed 0.999 units. Such would be the weight of the “true kilogram, determined,” Tralles observes, “by a series of experiments, calculations, and reductions which had not, perhaps, been anticipated at the outset.” It remained for Lefèvre-Gineau to compare his unit module to the pile de Charlemagne, the old standard of marc weight. In the event, the kilogram proved equal to 18,827 grains, or two livres, 5 gros, 35 grains. Like its linear basis, the provisional meter, the provisional kilogram of 1793 had been slightly larger than the “true” value. The experiments of Lavoisier and Haüy had fixed it at 18,841 grains. In sum, then, the proceedings of the Congress on the Metric System produced results of two sorts. The painstaking work of verification refined the determination of both linear and gravimetric values, and scrutiny of the data exhibited geodetic anomalies in the shape of the earth. Lefèvre-Gineau, as Tralles pointed out, had imagined and, together with Fabbroni and Fortin, carried out a quite novel method for determining specific gravity. The procedures that Lavoisier and Haüy employed were less precise by several orders of magnitude. They had carefully measured the volume of a hollow copper cylinder and compared the values for its weight in air and in a container of filtered spring water, but had taken no account of physical variables of temperature and atmospheric pressure.57 LefèvreGineau, by contrast, included in his experiments a series of measurements of the apparent weight of objects suspended in water at decreasing temperature. In so doing, he appears to have been the first to determine an important physical constant, namely the exact temperature at which water reaches its greatest density. These experiments remain among the many things he 57

The note printed in Lavoisier OL (cited chapter 4, n. 78) is very cursory. There is a much fuller account in “Rapport fait a` L’Académie des Sciences le 19 janvier 1793 sur l’unité des poids et mesures,” printed in “Recueil de pièces relatives a` l’uniformité des poids et mesures,” Annales de chimie 16 ( January 1793), pp. 272–277.


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never published although, according to Tralles’s account, he intended to do so. Tralles’s own expertise came into play in connection with effects of temperature and carried over from gravimetrics into the determination of the meter. Only he, indeed, committed what would, in a different political climate, have been the lèse-majesté of questioning procedures that were the very basis for calculating the length of the arc of the meridian, those of Borda himself. In measuring the coefficient of thermal dilation of his rules, Borda had immersed them in a tub of shaved ice in order to determine their length at 0⬚. The Lefèvre-Gineau experiments, Tralles now objected, created doubt that this temperature could have been reached. Accordingly, the Commission repaired to Lenoir’s laboratory to verify the matter. There, it proved impossible to lower the temperature of an icy bath below 0.6⬚. Moreover, and this was more serious, temperatures read off the scale built into the metallic thermocouple constituted by the rules themselves differed from those taken with a mercury thermometer. The gap was a non-negligeable two to three degrees. It appeared, therefore, that Borda’s zero of temperature had really been higher by that much. If so, the difference in the length of the module at working conditions would have come to 0.005 lignes in the meter. The “true” meter would measure 443.291 lignes instead of 443.296 if this correction were made. Evidently it was not. Tralles may, indeed, have been thought a bit of a pest. He was not asked to report on these findings, which van Swinden communicated to Delambre simply as notes recorded in Tralles’s register.58 Findings of more general import emerged from the four sets of recalculation of the chain of triangles. The overall results, showing that the length of the degree decreases from Dunkirk to Montjouy, were only what was expected. The detail of the numbers quite took the experts by surprise, however, for the decrease was very irregular. Compared to the mean degree in the sector from Dunkirk to Paris, the decrease of two modules per degree ´ was very small between Paris and Evaux, then suddenly very large at sixteen ´ modules per degree in the short interval between Evaux and Carcassonne, and lastly a moderate seven modules per degree in the southernmost stretch from Carcassonne to Montjouy. These unexpected facts appeared to correspond to another anomaly. In all Delambre’s data, the greatest discrepancies were the departures between what the azimuths at Bourges, Carcassonne, and Montjouy should have been as calculated from Dunkirk, and the values actually observed at those three stations. Now it turned out that the differences were in the same ratio as the variations in the decrease of the length of the degree in the relevant sectors. Clearly the correlation between the two sets of irregularities, discov58

“Notes communiquées par M. van Swinden,” Base 3, pp. 434–446.

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ered independently, might be taken as confirmation that neither resulted from error. What could be the explanation of the startling asymmetry the data exhibited? There might be a bulge in the form of the terrestrial meridian, or a slight ellipticity of the equator affecting also the parallels, or a force of attraction exerted by mountain masses, or an irregularity in the body of the earth, or some combination of these factors. The commissioners, limited by their brief to the base of the metric system, did not presume to say. “It will be for the most celebrated mathematicians to fix their attention on these facts, to attempt to disentangle their elements, and to formulate a more adequate theory of the earth than any we possess so far.”59 Its work completed, the Commission submitted its report to the Institute, which in turn delegated members to make formal presentation of both the platinum and the iron prototypes of the two standards, the meter and the kilogram, first to the Conseil des Anciens, then to the Conseil des CinqCents. The ceremonies occurred on 4 messidor an VII (22 June 1799). Only on 19 frimaire an VIII (9 December 1799) was the legislation framed and enacted that replaced the provisional meter with these, the definitive standards of the metric system. The new measure reaffirmed all other provisions of Prieur’s law of 18 germinal an III. One month previously, on 9 November 1799, Napoleon had seized power in the coup d’état of 18 brumaire, appointing Laplace to be the first Minister of the Interior under the Consulate. That the metric system should have been sealed into law during Laplace’s six ineffectual weeks in office was one respect in which his was an appropriate presence in the government. It is clear from the rhetoric accompanying these several occasions that the convening of an international Congress on the Metric System had been a political gesture. It should be equally clear, however, that the political gesture was one entailing serious technical discussion and no mere ratification of the operations conducted in the field by Delambre and his colleagues. Delambre, in fact, disagreed with certain choices. One problem, for example, had been how to resolve the very slight discrepancy between the calculated and measured values of the base at Perpignan. Instead of selecting one base over the other, or taking a mean in proportion to the length of each, the Commission had decided to rely on the measured value at Perpignan in calculating the length of the southern portion of the meridian and on the Melun value for the northern portion. Delambre would have preferred the sort of correction Lacaille had used, which was to make a very slight adjustment in one triangle just south of Paris. When he subtracted 0.1⬙ from the angle at Torfou, and added 0.05⬙ to the other two at Montl59

Van Swinden, “Rapport fait a` l’Institut national . . . le 29 priarial an 7 . . . sur la mesure de la méridienne de France,” ibid., p. 619.


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héry and Malvoisine, the difference between the bases disappeared. Since he had more confidence in the bases than in the triangles, this solution would have corrected the less by the more secure measurements.60 The story does not end in 1799 with acceptance of the two standards and their placement in the Archives Nationales. Refining the data and compiling the record printed in Base du système métrique occupied much of Delambre’s energy for the the next ten years. Like everything else connected with the project, its publication took much longer than expected. The first volume appeared in January 1806. Only after it had gone to press did Delambre learn of the observations in Barcelona that Méchain had concealed until the day of his death in Spain in September 1804. Addressing that problem delayed appearance of the second volume, which contains most of the actual observations. An omission for which the Commission itself had been responsible also had to be repaired. In calculating the length of the degree in Peru, its members had neglected La Condamine’s numbers in favor of Bouguer’s, which yielded a different value. Considering that Méchain would also have preferred the former, Delambre took the mean between the two. He then incorporated this correction in the data, as he did the results Méchain had suppressed for Barcelona, together with other minor adjustments. His new figures gave Delambre an earth slightly more oblate and a meter slightly longer than the Commission’s: 1/309 instead of 1/334 for the flattening of the earth, and 443.328 instead of 443.296 lignes for the meter.61 By the time the second volume appeared, in July 1807, the printer had already set type for some five hundred pages of the third. Everything connected with the survey of the meridian and the meter was in principle in hand, and publication awaited only the write-up of the kilogram. LefèvreGineau kept his colleague dangling another three years before Delambre abandoned hope. The final volume of Base du système métrique thus came out in November 1810. The further delay had its compensations, however, among them discovery of Lacaille’s manuscripts in the archives of the Observatory. Delambre proceeded to compare every item in the original record of the survey of 1739–40 to his own readings for the same angles, latitudes, and azimuths. The detail enhanced his admiration for the predecessor who had obtained from the instruments at his disposal all the accuracy of which they were capable. Delambre found his most intense satisfaction in the extension of the arc of the meridian, first to Greenwich in the north, and then to Formentera, southernmost of the Balearic Islands. The longer arc would subtend an an60 61

Ibid., p. 421, note; cf. vol. 2, p. 704. Ibid., pp. 135, 432, n. 1.

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gle of 13⬚12⬘ with its midpoint falling almost on the 45th parallel, at 45⬚3⬘, to be exact. That was the great advantage, for calculation of the length of the quadrant and hence the meter would then be independent of hypotheses concerning the flattening of the earth. Elongation to the north was easy. Delambre could simply splice the chain of triangles into the survey conducted by William Roy for the joining of Paris to Greenwich in 1787. On doing so, he was gratified to find that Roy’s measurement of the bases on Hounslow Heath and Romney Marsh precisely confirmed his figures for Melun. Moreover, the latitude of Dunkirk calculated from Greenwich accorded with his value for the former, about which he had been uneasy because of the adverse conditions at the time he made the observations.62 This extension, finally, yielded a figure for the meter that was easy to remember, 443.322 lignes. Formentera was another matter. It was Méchain who had initially thought of stretching the arc across the sea to the Balearic Islands. In the autumn of 1792 he had made a start on choosing stations along the coast south of Barcelona. He had also dispatched a Spanish aide, José Gonzales, to Majorca with the mission of establishing an observation post on the highest peak, Mont Torrellas, visible to the naked eye from Montjouy. Borda’s telescopes proved unable to pick up the signal at a distance of 185 kilometers, however, and Méchain’s subsequent internment in Barcelona precluded any exploration of alternatives. Ten years later the Bureau des Longitudes gave Méchain a second chance. On 31 August 1802 it accepted his proposal that the operation be resumed in order that the measured arc of the meridian might be symmetrical with respect to the 45th parallel.63 What he really wished, of course, was authorization to return to Barcelona in order to repeat his still unrevealed observations of latitude. No record remains among his papers to show that he accomplished his secret purpose. On arriving in Barcelona, in May 1803, he was fully occupied in organizing the triangulation of the Balearic Islands. Perhaps he thought to postpone such clandestine sightings until he should have completed his express mission. He never did. Since Majorca was still out of range, Méchain had to devise a flanking strategy that led him much further down the coast than he had anticipated. The southern terminus was now to be the summit of Campvey in the island if Ibizia, which he hoped to link across great distances in a triangle with the peaks of Cullera and Desierto de las Palmas on the mainland. Vicissitudes of weather, topography, and banditry in the remoteness of Valencia were as 62

Ibid., p. 193. Bureau des Longitudes, Procès-Verbaux, 13 fructidor an X; A. E. Ten and J. Castro, “La jonction géodésique des Iles Baléares au Continent et le système métrique décimal,” in Débarbat and Ten (1993), pp. 148–154. 63


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harrowing as anything he had survived a decade earlier in the Pyrenees.64 This time he did not survive. An epidemic of “tertian fever” ravaged the region in the late summer of 1804. Méchain contracted a severe case of what was probably malaria, refused to stop working until it was too late, and died at Castellon de la Plaza on 20 September 1804.65 Laplace took the lead in turning to Napoleon for authority to continue the operation. Imperial orders to that effect issued forthwith. On 2 May 1805 the Bureau des Longitudes accepted Laplace’s nomination of Arago and Biot to continue and complete the work of Méchain.66 Their expedition partook of the youthful derring-do of a new generation of physicists rather than the dogged perfectionism of their predecessors. Arriving in Spain early in the winter of 1806, they modified Méchain’s plan and chose a site at La Mola on the tiny island of Formentera for the southern terminus. Having triangulated a junction with Ibizia and Mont-go on the mainland, Arago and Biot completed their extension of the meridian in the late summer of 1807.67 In their eyes, as in those of their patron, Laplace, the interest had shifted from metrology to the geodetic problem of the shape of the earth. Once the meridional chain of triangles was completed, Arago set about extending it laterally to Majorca in order to determine the curvature of the parallel and the length of one and a half degrees of longitudinal arc. In the early months of 1808, however, Frenchmen in Spain became enemy aliens amid the passionate rising provoked by Napoleon’s intervention in the peninsula. Only in July 1809, after a year and a half of misadventures involving two spells of durance, the first fairly vile in Spain and the second less so in Algiers, did Arago manage to return to France.68 64

Méchain to Jaubert, 13 messidor an XII (2 July 1804), Dossier Méchain, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences. 65 An error, no doubt typographical, in Base 1, p. 96, has “troisième jour complémentaire an 13” (instead of an 12); many reference works follow that and give the date as 20 September 1805. See Louis Marquet, “A propos de la mort de l’astronome Méchain en Espagne,” in Débarbat and Ten (1993), pp. 163–176. 66 Laplace to Minister of the Interior, 11 June 1806 (AN, F17.1065A, dossier 16); Bureau des Longitudes, Procès-Verbaux, séance du 2 mai 1805. 67 Biot’s full account of the extension of the meridian occupies the first part of Recueil d’observations géodésiques, astronomiques, et physiques, exécutées . . . en Espagne, en France, en Angleterre, et en E´ cosse, pour déterminer la variation de la pesanteur et les dégrés terrestres sur le prolongement du méridien de Paris, faisant suite au troisième volume de la Base du système métrique (1821). Although the title continues “rédigées par MM. Biot et Arago,” the introduction and all the text were composed by Biot. The work is always catalogued under his name. A note explains that Arago proposed to write up his observations on the longitudinal arc between Formentera and Majorca in a companion volume (p. xxx). He never did. See also Ten and Castro, op. cit. n. 63 above. 68 Documentation in AN, F17.1065A, dossier 16. Arago recalled (and certainly embroidered) his adventures many years later in Histoire de ma jeunesse (Brussels and Leipzig, 1854). Cf. Daumas (1987), Sarda (2002).

Mont Serrat Matas Montagu Morella Lleberia

St. Jean

Bosch de Lespina

Tosal de Encanadé

Mont-Sia Arès

Desierto de las Palmas Espadan

Cullera

Campvev (Juixa)

Mont-Go Mola (Formentera) Echelle de 30,000 Toises 0 2 4 6 810

20

30

Extension of the Survey of the Meridian, from Mont Serrat to formentera (Reprinted from Jean-Baptiste Biot, recueil d’Observations Géophysiques, Astronomiques, et Physique [Paris, 1821]. Courtesy Rare and Special Manuscripts Collection, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University)


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Meanwhile Biot had put in hand a series of experiments to determine the intensity of the force of gravity at locations along the meridian by measuring the length of the seconds pendulum. Late in 1807, Arago assisted him in counting and timing the swings in Formentera. There they parted. Biot left Spain early in January 1808, just in time to escape the simmering hostility. He took an indirect route to Paris, pausing to verify previous values at Bordeaux, where he was assisted by Claude-Louis Matthieu. Thence he turned east in order that they might make similar measurements for purposes of comparison in Figeac and Clermont, which also lie along the 45th parallel. Safely back in Paris in March, Biot repeated Borda’s initial determinations at the Observatory.69 Later in 1808, and still in company with Matthieu, Biot moved on to Dunkirk. Besides experiments with the pendulum, which had not previously been performed there, they made new observations of the latitude that had worried Delambre. A by-product was an extensive study of phenomena of refraction over the sea close to the horizon.70 The report greatly refined the earliest scientific explanation of mirages in the paper that Monge had presented in Cairo before the Institute of Egypt in 1798 following Bonaparte’s march across the desert from Alexandria.71 Biot never lost interest in the pendulum, however. Returning to the problem after the wars ended in 1815, he traveled to Britain to observe the method used at Greenwich, and then to Scotland to make his own measurements, first at Leith, and finally in archaic Unst, northernmost of the Shetland Islands.72 Amid all these adventures, the length of the meter did not greatly interest either Biot or Arago. On returning from Spain in 1808, Biot read a summary of their results to the First Class of the Institute. Phrased largely in the first person singular, it gave little emphasis to Arago’s part and failed to mention that he was in a precarious situation in Spain at the very moment. The slight, compounded by a stream of briefer reports that Biot kept pouring out on particular observations, led to a falling out that embittered their further careers. Their extension of the arc, Biot calculated, yielded a meter of 443.2958 lignes, 0.0002 of a ligne shorter than the value of 443.296 for the definitive meter. So minuscule a difference, representing a discrepancy of 69

“Expériences sur la longueur du pendule a` secondes faites a` différentes parties du méridien depuis l’ˆıle de Formentera . . . jusqu’à Unst,” op. cit. n. 67 above, pp. 439–520. For the Borda determination, see above, chapter 4, section 3. 70 “Recherches sur les réfractions extraordinaires qui s’observent très-près de l’horizon.” Lu le 8 août 1808. MIF 10 (1809/10), pp. 1–266. Biot seldom included the names of collaborators as co-authors of his memoirs. 71 “Mémoire sur le phénomène connu sous le nom de mirage,” Décade égyptienne 1 (an VII, 1799), pp. 37–46; reprinted in Mémoires sur l’E´ gypte 1 (1800), pp. 64–78. 72 ´ “Mesures du pendule en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Shetland,” op. cit. n. 67 above, pp. 521–572.

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forty-one centimeters in the measurement of the entire arc, Biot found to be “really astonishing”—forty or fifty times below what was to be expected of observational error.73 Delambre did not quite agree on the correct value. Though not published until 1821, Biot’s Recueil d’observations géodésiques was presented as the sequel to Base du système métrique.74 More important, Biot had followed Delambre’s procedural example and had transmitted the complete registers of his observations to the Bureau des Longitudes. Delambre had the data at hand, therefore, while he was in the final stages of compiling volume 3 of Base du système métrique. He could not resist a concluding calculation of the value of the meter. It takes account not only of the extension to Formentera, but of operations performed throughout all stages of the project. Four different, though not mutually independent, arcs had been the basis for successive computations of the length of the quadrant: (1) Dunkirk to Montjouy; (2) Dunkirk to the mean between Montjouy-Barcelona; (3) Greenwich to Montjouy-Barcelona; (4) Greenwich to Formentera. Taking the mean among all four, Delambre now arrived at the figure of 443.316 lignes to the meter, down a bit from the 443.328 he had originally preferred to the Commission’s 443.296, and also from the easy-to-remember 443.322 given by the extension to Greenwich. If the latitude of Greenwich were reduced by 0.5⬙, and there was reason to think it should be, this number, appealing for mnemonic reasons, would be right. One thing in conclusion he could safely say: “The meter is determined with as much precision as we may be permitted to hope for.”75 From the outset, the design of the metric system, including its initial nomenclature, had been (it will be recalled) intimately linked with prospective development of a national system of land registry. The law of 16 September 1791 providing for the cadastre was one of the last decrees adopted by the Constituent Assembly.76 Prony, the Director, had been far from idle since his appointment to head the project in October 1791. He immediately hired a staff and opened an office. The Academy of Science approved his proposal in July 1792. He supposed at the time, as did everyone involved, that Delambre and Méchain would spend a year or so in the field and a further year in calculating and verifying their chain of triangles. Instead, immediately after the purge of 23 December 1793, the rump 73

“Exposé des résultats des grandes opérations géodésiques faites en France et en Espagne par MM. Biot et Arago, pour la mesure d’un arc du méridien et la détermination du mètre,” MIF 9 (1808–09), Histoire, pp. 16–21. Clerks at the Bureau des Longitudes calculated the difference to be even smaller, less than 0.0001 lignes. Biot, op. cit. n. 67 above, introduction, p. xvii. 74 Op. cit. n. 67 above. 75 Base 3, p. 546. 76 On the cadastre, see Konvitz (1987), pp. 41–62.


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Commission of Weights and Measures added Prony to its reduced membership. He could not have foreseen that development, nor that he would be called on to relieve Delambre of his duties. A report he composed just three days prior to the purge takes stock of the work of the cadastre.77 As soon as the new units were determined, teams of surveyors would fan out across the country. Draftsmen in the central office would then fit the measurements of local boundaries and individual properties into the metrical framework on a scale of 1:20,000 for the triangulation of districts, 1:5,000 for plans of entire communes, 1:2,000 for charts of agricultural acreage, and 1:1,000 for dimensions of urban properties. The cadastre would require the services of many more professional surveyors than were to be found in France. Accordingly, ´ Prony instituted an Ecole de Géographie, the earliest of the revolutionary technical schools, thinking to enroll some 200 pupils for intensive courses of two to three months. He would train 600 surveyors in a year and have them ready by the time the meridian should be measured. Theirs would be the task of carrying out the geographical aspect of the mission of the cadastre. The complementary aspect, which did not need to await determination of the meter, was to reach firm estimates of the extent and territorial distribution of wealth throughout the country. Three of the four sections composing the Bureau of the Cadastre were occupied with those investigations. The first, on population, worked with the information contained in the pioneering series of memoirs on demography published by the Academy from 1786 to 1791.78 The clerks of the cadastre refined those results in the light of additional data, and redistributed the findings by department, district, and commune into the new subdivisions of the country. A year later Prony could report their overall conclusion to the newly founded Institut de France: a total of 25,564,466 citizens lived within the former boundaries of the Republic.79 Meanwhile the staff of the second, cartographical section was busy rectifying errors detectable by inspection in the sheets of the Cassini map of France. They proceeded to transfer the modifications to the new departmental maps, and to correct further discrepancies in the latter by means of graphical techniques that Prony provided in tabular form. Draftsmen also fitted overlays to regional and general maps for the purpose of exhibiting population breakdowns and economic data. The former came from the first section and the latter from the third, whose subject of economic geography 77 “Situation du travail des Bureaux du Cadastre et des Transports le 30 frimaire de l’an ´ deuxième,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MSS. 2402. The occasion was a decree of the Convention uniting the Bureau du Cadastre with the Commission des Subsistances et Approvisionnements. 78 See Gillispie (1980), p. 47, and, for a full discussion, Brian (1994), pp. 256–286. 79 “Résultats du travail fait au Bureau du Cadastre pour connaˆıtre la superficie et la popula´ tion du territoire fran¸cais,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MSS 2149.

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had yet to find a name. Personnel in that office had the tedious job of assembling disparate bundles of information from all over the country on agricultural practice, manufacturing installations, trade and commerce, natural resources, types of property, and modes of transport and communication. The sources were scattered, and often forgotten, documents submitted at one time or another to agencies of government, as well as a vast heterogeneity of published accounts never before classified or integrated into a workable body of facts. Among the tasks was design of a questionnaire that would elicit such data in a systematic manner from every commune throughout the country. A marginal note in Prony’s small but elegant hand specifies the goal on which all this activity was to converge:80 So vast an undertaking requires that the bases be prepared with the greatest care in order that precision and uniformity may be assured in all features of its execution. Without that they will provide only a formless miscellany, from which it will be impossible to draw any comparative notions of the territorial wealth of the different parts of the Republic, and that is the indispensable condition for assessing taxes either proportionally or according to any given rule. A combination of the obsessively precise with the grandiose defines the engineering science of Prony’s generation. Nowhere is its character manifest to greater advantage, or (depending on the point of view) disadvantage, than in the feat accomplished by the calculators employed in the fourth section of the cadastre. On the face of it, the compilation of tables might seem the most mundane of chores. Not so in the office of the cadastre, which was attached to the Commission des Travaux Publics by decree of the Committee of Public Safety on 6 May 1794.81 The instructions came with the authority of Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, then directing the war effort, and Prony certainly drafted the terms himself:82 The decimal division of the quadrant of the circle required that new tables of sines, tangents, etc., and of their logarithms, be calculated. I was assigned this task in the year II, and since it was desired to invest everything relating to the French Metric System with a quality of gran80 81

Document cited in n. 77 above. Aulard, Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public 13, pp. 312–313. Séance du 17 floréal an

II. 82

Prony, Notice sur les grandes tables logarithmiques et trigonométriques, calculées au Bureau du cadastre sous la direction du citoyen Prony. Prony read the notice before the First Class of the Institute on 1 germinal an IX (22 March 1801). A report by Delambre on behalf of Lagrange, Laplace, and himself is appended, as is an essay by Prony on the history of logarithms. The three pieces were printed together as a brochure (1801) and also in MIF 5 (An 9 [1801]/1804), “Histoire,” pp. 49–93.


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deur that would command attention, and a superiority over everything done until then that would inspire confidence, I was expressly enjoined not only to compile tables that would leave nothing to be desired in point of exactness, but to make of them the greatest and most imposing monument of calculation that had ever been executed or even conceived. Nothing, Prony went on, could have been more to his taste, and in a literal sense, he succeeded. The “Grandes Tables Logarithmiques et Trigonométriques, adaptées au Nouveau Système Métrique Décimal” consist of seventeen folio volumes of tables and one of directions on their use. They contain: (1) The introduction; (2) Sines for the 10,000 seconds of the decimalized angles contained in the 100⬚ quadrant of the circle, calculated to twenty-five decimal places, with seventh- and eighth-order differences displayed in the columns; (3) 100,000 logarithms of the above sines, calculated to fourteen places with third-order differences; (4) logarithms of the ratios of sines to arcs for the first 5,000 hundred-thousandths of the quadrant; (5) log tangents corresponding to the log sines; (6) logarithms of the ratio of tangents to arcs as in (4); and for good measure (though the following tables were not part of the assignment) (7) logarithms of numbers from 1 to 10,000 calculated to nineteen places; and finally (8) logarithms of numbers from 10,000 to 200,000 to fourteen places. The work took less than two years and was finished by the end of 1795. He could not, Prony observed much later, have hoped to live long enough had he followed the traditional method of direct calculation and interpolation. Inspiration came to him on reading at random in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He had just bought a copy of the first edition 1776 from a dealer in old books. The passage was the famous one where the principle of division of labor is exemplified in the fabrication of pins. “All of a sudden,” he recalled, “I conceived the idea of applying the same method to the immense work the burden of which I had allowed myself to take on, and to fabricate my logarithms the way one fabricates pins.”83 Prony divided his team of calculators into three sections. The first consisted of four or five leading mathematicians, foremost among them Legendre. Their task was to devise the principal analytical formulas (or programs) for the construction of each set of tables. The seven or eight members of the second section—among them J.-G. Garnier, Joseph Lanz, Nicolas Halma, and Marc-Antoine Parseval—were applied mathematicians. From the formulas supplied by Legendre and his colleagues, they computed values at 10⬚ intervals in the sine table and at comparable intervals in the others. These values were entered in the top line of every folio sheet. That

83

Prony, Notice sur les grandes tables logarithmiques et trigonométriques (1824), p. 5.

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left the remaining ninety-nine to be filled in by the laborers of the third section, the keypunchers, so to say.84 Prony employed eighty to ninety of these people. The only qualification was the ability to add and subtract. They made up, he noted, a curious collection of persons from very diverse backgrounds. What with the austerity of revolutionary fashions, a number were victims of ideological unemployment, having been hairdressers, wigmakers, or couturiers in the old regime. Others found political asylum in the employment of the cadastre, safely occupying themselves with arithmetic at the height of the Terror. On the average each calculator made 900 to 1,000 additions or subtractions in the day’s work. All computations were performed twice in order to check one set against the other, so that in the end two complete copies of the tables were produced. The sheets with fewest errors, Prony found, were the ones filled in by the people of least intelligence, men who led an “automatic” existence. Of the total of approximately 2.3 million numbers, of which half a million were carried to 14 to 25 decimal places, at most 1 percent had been calculated by the second section from the analytic formulas supplied by the first. The remaining 99 percent were fabricated from these by processes that could be called “manufacturing.”85 That the division of labor had brought forth a white elephant was not the judgment of contemporaries. Publication of the gargantuan compilation was to have facilitated propagation of the metric system. A decree of the Committee of Public Safety of 11 May 1794 ordered that 10,000 copies be printed at the expense of the Republic.86 Accordingly, the Commission des Travaux Publics entered into a contract with Firmin Didot calling for a stereotype edition comprising 1,200 folio sheets at a cost of 144,000 francs. Two-thirds of the work had been set in type, and four hundred plates prepared, when the collapse of paper money under the Directory and the chronic failure of the state to honor its engagements led the publisher to desist. An attempt to revive the project in 1801 under the firmer aegis of the Consulate came to naught.87 Although enthusiastically recommending publication, Delambre did then point out that actual use of the Great Tables of the Cadastre would be limited to calculations of major significance requiring an uncommon degree 84 Sheets of calculations, some in manuscript, others printed, are in AN, F17.1244b. See also ´ Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 1745. For a summary of the mathematical details, see Grattan-Guinness (1990), 1, pp. 177–183. Prony treated the formal aspects of con´ structing the tables in his “Cours d’analyse appliquée a` la mécanique” at the Ecole Polytechni´ que, Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique, cahier 1 (1795), pp. 92–119; cahier 2 (1796), pp. 1–23; cahier 3 (1796), pp. 209–273; cahier 4 (1796), pp. 459–569. 85 Op. cit. n. 83 above, pp. 7–8. 86 Aulard, Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public (13, p. 433), séance du 22 floréal an II. 87 See the 1801 report by Delambre, cited in n. 82 above.


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of precision. It was all the more important, therefore, that they be made available. Prony’s master compilation would become the standard and model for normal tables to be constructed henceforth from analytic formulas rather than by the empirical methods employed since the time of Napier and Briggs. Even so did a pair of German mathematicians come to Paris in 1799 to collate their calculations with Prony’s before publishing a convenient set of trigonometry tables for centesimal division of the quadrant.88 Delambre relied on the cadastre tables himself when completing and publishing in 1801 a one-volume set of decimal trig tables that Borda had begun in 1792.89 The most convincing evidence of the appeal of Prony’s work came from the British. Sir Charles Blagden, the chemist, was much in France after the end of the war in 1815. A close friend of Berthollet, he settled for a time in Arcueil. Early in 1819 Blagden proposed to Davies Gilbert, president of the Royal Society, that in the general interest of science the British Government reopen the question of publishing the Great Tables and offer to subsidize half the expense, which would then have come to 125,000 francs for each government. Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary and the most influential member of the cabinet, was persuaded of the merit of the project and informed the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Charles Stuart, that Blagden was to serve as British representative on the commission that would explore the matter. Blagden died in March 1820, however. Negotiations continued for a few years.90 Why they miscarried is unclear. Perhaps growing sophistication concerning significant figures contributed to recognition that logarithms with twenty-five decimal places serve no practical purpose. Or perhaps the French were put off by a suggestion that the trigonometric tables be recalculated for sexagesimal subdivision of the quadrant. Or perhaps the latter proposal reflected gathering awareness on both sides that decimal subdivision was not in practice taking hold for angular measurements. Or perhaps all these factors eventually told against printing a collection on the scale of Description de ´ l’Egypte. At all events, the two manuscript copies survive. The one consigned to 88

Johann Philipp Hobert and Ludewig Ideler, Neu trigonometrische Tafeln für die Decimaleintheilung des Quadranten (Berlin, 1799). Published also in a French edition. 89 Tables trigonométriques décimales . . . calculées par Ch. Borda, revues, augmentées, et publiées par J. B. J. Delambre (an IX, 1801), 114. The volume also contains a set of log tables for numbers from 10,000 to 100,000 carried to ten decimals. 90 Two manuscript minutes in Prony’s hand concerning the negotiations, dated 2 March and 8 March 1819, are in his dossier in the Archives de l’Académie des Sciences. Also in the dossier are a separate printing of the memoir Prony read at the Séance publique of the Académie des Sciences on 7 June 1824, Notice sur les grandes tables logarithmiques et trigonométriques, adaptées au nouveau système métrique décimal (1824), together with a printed “Note sur la publication, proposée par le gouvernement anglais, des grandes tables logarithmiques et trigonométriques de M. de Prony.”

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the Bureau des Longitudes is conserved in the Observatory of Paris. The other, Prony’s personal copy, came to rest after various peregrinations in the library of the Institut de France.91 In all other respects Prony’s administration of the cadastre was an exercise in ingenious futility. A decision of the Directory of 29 May 1797 transferred the Bureau du Cadastre to the Ministry of the Interior. Neither before nor after the move were funds ever ade´ quate. The Ecole des Géographes languished and was eventually replaced by ´ the Ecole des Ingénieurs-Géographes, one of the professional schools open ´ to graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique.92 No surveyors went out into the countryside. Property taxes continued to be assessed by makeshift procedures differing from locality to locality. Scientists and bureaucrats shared ´ only their frustrations.93 Having succeeded Chézy as Director of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in October 1798, Prony resigned from the moribund Cadastre in 1801 and took service instead with the Bureau des Longitudes.94 On 24 March 1802 an order of Chaptal, Minister of the Interior, abolished the Bureau du Cadastre on the grounds that its activities had been merely theoretical. So they had been, though not for lack of vision on Prony’s part, and thereafter geodesy and land registry went their largely separate ways.95 A companion irony of the early history of the metric system is that decimalization of angles should have miscarried, for that feature, all the more attractive by virtue of its applicability to the cadastre, had been the main justification for basing the meter on the quadrant of the meridian instead of on the seconds pendulum. Unlike the decimalization of time, the provision for angular subdivisions was never formally renounced. Laplace, for one, remained faithful to the design he had championed at the outset. The quadrant contains 100⬚ in Mécanique céleste, and all angles are divided decimally. Nathaniel Bowditch had to transpose them into sexagesimal form in the explanatory notes accompanying his splendid translation.96 Since the first 91

Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MSS.1496–1514. For administration and financial accounts, 1796–98, see AN, F17.1393. Dossiers 3 and 4 ´ ´ contain documents on the Ecole des géographes. For the relations between the Ecole des ´ Géographes, the Dépôt-Général de la Guerre, and the militarized Ecole des Ingénieurs-Géographes founded in 1809, see Bret (1990). 93 Prony to the Minister of the Interior, le 14 ventôse an VII (4 March 1798), AN, F17.1393, dossier 4. On the difficulty of securing agreement among various agencies on cartographical scales, see AN, F17.1135, dossier 17; and on the general paralysis in 1799–1800, the memoirs ´ de la situation du Cadastre” and “Projet d’organisation,” dated 1 messidor an VIII (20 “Etat June 1800) AN, F4.1246. 94 Bureau des Longitudes, Procès-Verbaux, le 4 et le 20 floréal an X (24 April and 10 May 1801). 95 A new cadastre was organized in 1807 with the mission of piecing together local surveys into a national system of land registry. For its further history, see Dreux (1933), and Recueil de documents législatifs, projets, et lois, réglements, rapports, etc., concernant le cadastre (Imprimerie nationale, 1891), BN, Lf158.236. 96 Mécanique céleste by the Marquis de La Place (4 vols.: Boston, 1829–1839). 92


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two volumes of the treatise appeared in 1799 and the third in 1801, it must be presumed that Bouvard, who performed the calculations, had access to Prony’s tables in the Observatory. Decimal trig tables were readily accessible to the scientific public only after 1801, when Delambre completed and published the set Borda had begun compiling in 1792 for use with his repeating circles, and never finished.97 Delambre and Méchain thus had had to make their geodetic observations with instruments graduated decimally, and to convert the values into sexagesimal form before doing the calculations and presenting the data to the international Congress in 1798 and 1799. Delambre did not spare himself much, but at least he refrained from the drudgery of reconverting the tens of thousands of arcs and angles recorded in Base du système métrique into centesimal fractions of the quadrant before publishing the work. Biot and Arago, by contrast, did have the Borda-Delambre tables with them in 1806–7 in Spain. In consequence, Biot’s account of the extension of the meridional arc to Formentera is a numerical hybrid. He gives the data for triangulation in decimal angles and the astronomical observations required for determination of azimuth, latitude, and longitude in conventional sexagesimal fractions. The former he obtained with a Borda repeating circle and the latter with a four-foot zenith telescope supplied by Lenoir.98 When Biot later verified the length of the seconds pendulum near Bordeaux, it was at the 45th, not the 50th, parallel. The inconvenience of the mixture suggests a probable explanation for the failure of angular decimalization. The law of 18 germinal year III may indeed have been realistic in exempting the hours, minutes, and seconds of the day from the purview of the metric system. Nevertheless, withdrawal of time effectively doomed the decimalization of angular measurement in general. Mere surveying operations such as triangulation are timeless. Not so the fixing of geographic position by means of astronomical observation— application of astronomy to cartography and navigation depends on parameters in time as well as space. It is scarcely to be imagined that ship captains, with no Bouvard on board to do their calculations, would employ one arithmetic with their chronometers and another with their quadrants, even had they been willing to throw their sextants overboard, to exchange their compasses graduated in thirty-two winds for new ones showing forty, and to equip the quarter deck with decimal logs for estimating speed in kilometers instead of knots per hour. There is no evidence of resistance to the new units in other sciences. On the contrary, led by the scientific establishment, the shift came rapidly. Two memoirs presented to the Institute in 1796, its first year, used metric units, 97 98

Op. cit. n. 90 above. Op. cit. n. 67 above, pp. 183–185.

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one by Chaptal on a type of soap used in washing crude wool, and the other by Jacques Tenon on the dimensions of the human skull.99 Neither was at all abstract. The old units, on the other hand, figure in papers by the provincial astronomer Honoré Flaugergues, the elderly agronomist H.-A. Tessier, and the prominent pharmacist Bertrand Pelletier.100 Laplace himself, it may be noted, still worked with a 90⬚ quadrant in a study of the rotation of planetary bodies that he read on 21 January 1796.101 The second volume of the Institute’s Mémoires contains van Swinden’s summary report to the Institute in May 1799 on the measurement of the meridian.102 By that time employment of metric units had already become the official practice of the Institute. Occasional exceptions occur in memoirs dealing with agricultural, pharmaceutical, or industrial subjects. Until 1800 or shortly thereafter, most authors give the old style values in parentheses following the metric quantities. A rather poignant mingling of old terms with new occurs in a report by the aged apothecary Antoine Baumé, a surviving hold-out against the new chemistry, its theory and its nomenclature. He writes of decomposing “des sels marins calcaires,” by means of “de la chaux, de l’alcali fixe, et de l’alcali volatil.” The source of lime, “chaux brulée” (oxide de chaux in up-to-date nomenclature), was a sample of marble, “terre calcaire pure” (carbonate de chaux), heated long and hard so that its weight diminished in the amount of “6 hectogrammes, 25 grammes (10 onces) . . . par demi-kilogramme (par livre).”103 The Journal des mines and Annales de chimie, with their strong emphasis on applied science, were both vehicles of the metrical reform and appeared in a timelier manner than the memoirs of the Institute. As noted above, the editor of Journal des mines, Charles Coquebert, was one of the triumvirate chosen in March 1795 to head the Agence Temporaire des Poids et Mesures.104 His account of the metric system, published in the issue for October-November 1795, was the earliest explanation to be written for skilled artisans, manufacturers, and merchants.105 Several prior pieces in Journal des mines 99 J.-A. Chaptal, “Observations sur le savon de laine et sur ses usages dans les arts,” MIF 1 (an IV/an VI [1798]), lu le 1er prairial, an IV (20 May 1796), pp. 93–101; J.-R. Tenon, “Recherches sur le cran humain,” MIF, lu le 16 messidor an IV (5 July 1796), pp. 250–279. 100 Honoré Flaugergues, “Mémoire sur lieu du noeud de l’anneau de Saturne en 1790,” MIF, ´ de l’agriculture des Iles lu le 16 floréal an IV (4–5 May 1796), pp. 75–88.; H.-A. Tessier, “Etat Canaries,” MIF, lu le 6 brumaire an V (27 October 1796), pp. 250–279. 101 “Mémoire sur les mouvements des corps célestes autour de leurs centres de gravité,” op.cit., lu le 1er pluviôse an IV (21 January 1796), pp. 301–376. 102 “Rapport sur la mesure de la méridienne de France,” MIF 2 (An VII [1799]/1800), lu le 29 prairial an 7, pp. 23–80. Also printed in Base, this is the report cited in n. 60 above. 103 “Mémoire sur la décomposition des sels marins calcaires par le moyen de la chaux, de l’alcali fixe, et de l’alcali volatil,” MIF 5 (an IX [1801/1804]), pp. 89–104. 104 Above, this section. 105 “Sur le nouveau système de mesures,” Journal des mines 3, no. 14 (brumaire an III), pp. 73–85. An English translation appeared in Nicolson’s Journal, no. 5 ( July–August 1797).


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had already reported measurements in metric units. Indeed, what would appear to be the first appearance of the meter in a technical article on something other than the system itself occurs in the third number, for December 1794. Prony there contributes a mathematical analysis of the efficiency of a horse-powered pump that is illustrated in diagrams with a metric scale.106 Engineers of the small Corps des Mines—it consisted of twenty-six people at the end of 1794107 —employed the new units in their articles from the outset. So, too, did members of the Institute such as Haüy and Vauquelin. Papers by provincial contributors, especially those dealing with methods of extraction of metals or other chemical procedures, and also accounts of foreign work (which were very full), tended to employ the old units, albeit decreasingly, until after the turn of the century. Not many of these accounts, it should be noted, were strictly quantitative. Even among leading people, it was frequent usage to give relative rather than exact weights of materials being processed—“100 parts of pulverized jacinth were heated for two hours with 600 parts of caustic potash . . .” and so on.108 The Annales de chimie printed all the official documents defining and providing for the metric system in the issues of January and July 1793, the last two that appeared before it shut down during the Terror. Publication resumed only in January 1797, and Annales de chimie was, therefore, several years behind Journal des mines in introducing metric units into technical literature and practice. The first two numbers published after the hiatus contain, respectively, a lengthy résumé of the contributions of chemists to war production and an extensive collection of documents bringing readers up to date on the state of the metric system. Featured in the latter is an explanation of the new units composed by Prieur, now a member of the board, no doubt for political reasons.109 The lead paper in the next issue ( January 1797) is a preprinting of the memoir Chaptal presented to the Institute on the type of soap used for washing crude wool, the only difference being that this version gives the quantities in avoirdupois followed by the metric equivalents in parentheses 106

“Description d’une machine simple et peu coûteuse, propre a` e´puiser les eaux, dans les recherches des mines et les exploitations naissantes,” Journal des Mines 1, no. 3 (frimaire an III), pp. 15–28. 107 A list of those named by the Committee of Public Safety as of 15 vendémiaire an III (6 October 1794) consists of three agents, seven inspectors, twelve engineers, and two of the forty students authorized, with the remaining thirty-eight places to be filled by a competition ( Journal des Mines 1, no. 1 (vendémiaire an III), pp. 125–126. 108 R.-J. Haüy, “Observations sur les pierres appelées . . . Hyacinthe et Jargon du Ceylan,” Journal des Mines 5, no. 26 (brumaire an V [September–October 1796]), p. 99. 109 Instruction sur les Poids et Mesures de la République Fran¸caise, suivie d’un Vocabulaire de ces mesures, et de tables exprimant leurs rapports avec les mesures anciennes,” Annales de chimie 20 (an V ou 1797), pp. 191–252. For the first two years, Annales was one of the very few publications to give the old-style along with the republican dates. That ceased with the year VIII.

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instead of the other way about.110 Thereafter the pattern in Annales is much the same as in Journal des mines. By 1799 the new units had largely displaced the old except in reports of foreign work and in articles on industrial processes. The quantities are still pounds in a 1799 account of the fabrication of Parmesan cheese by Monge, of all people, just as they are still pints in 1801 in Chaptal’s discussion of the wine industry.111 However applicable the contents, Annales de chimie and Journal des mines were scientific journals. A better indicator of the degree of penetration of the metric system is Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, also a monthly, which started publication in 1803.112 Founded in 1801 on the model of the Royal Society of Arts in London, the new society set itself the mission of pointing French industry along the path to a productivity comparable to that of British enterprise.113 Its Bulletin was a technological journal. The contributors were entrepreneurs, manufacturers, inventors, engineers, skilled artisans, agriculturalists, and teachers, as well as a few scientists, government officials, and patrons of the Society. Filling the pages are accounts of up-to-date and often novel machines and processes of all sorts, for heavy industry, light industry, textiles, mining, transport, power, agriculture, and communications. Throughout the Napoleonic period, each issue contained nine or ten articles, one or two of which give metric quantities with equivalents in the familiar units. Most of those that do were written by members of the technical establishment, such as Hachette, Chaptal, and Guyton, or concern their work. In a few instances, the scale of the plates is in meters and centimeters while the text describing machines or their operation refers to feet and inches. The contents of the Bulletin became richer and fuller after 1815, in phase with the industrial expansion that followed the Restoration. The change was not favorable to the metric system, however. In the volume for 1820, for example, thirteen of the articles illustrated by plates are in old units, four are metric, and six are a mixture—one of them a plate drawn on the scale of one millimeter to the inch. The next ten years show no progress. In 1830, the proportion is fourteen articles illustrated with conventional scales to seven metric. The evidence of engineering and architectural literature is similar. A pref110

Above, n. 100; Annales de chimie 21 (pluviose an V, January 1797), 27–71. Gaspard Monge, “Notice sur la fabrication du fromage de Lodézan connu sous le nom de Parmézan,” Annales de chimie 32 (vendémiaire an VIII [September 1799]), pp. 287–295; J. A. Chaptal, “Suite du traité sur les vins,” ibid., 36 (an IX [1801]), pp. 3–49. 112 On the Société d’Encouragement, see below, chapter 8, section 4. 113 For the proceedings at the foundation, see the Recueil des Procès-Verbaux for the early months, 1 November 1801 to 22 September 1802, Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 49 (1850). 111


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erence for metric units was a function of age and education. For example, the members of the scientific task force that accompanied Bonaparte to ´ Egypt were mostly young graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. Back in France, they prepared the plates of ´ Description de l’Egypte between 1803 and 1812.114 The scale they used was 1:100 for the elevations and sections of all the monuments and 1:400 for ground plans. It is especially revealing that the forty-seven sheets of their map of Egypt should be drawn at 1:100,000 despite the preference of Bonaparte and all his generals for the scale of the Cassini map, 1:86,000, on which while in military school they had learned to plan battles. Clearly, the barrier that the metric system largely failed to cross was not the one dividing the literate from the illiterate, nor even the numerate from the innumerate. The boundary ran rather between official technology and the actual operation of productive enterprises. As for the people in general, it is a commonplace that for a generation and more, they refused to have anything to do with meters, liters, and kilograms. Lucien Bonaparte succeeded Laplace as Minister of the Interior in early January 1800. He it was who began what later celebrants of the metric system called its adulteration.115 The unfamiliarity of the nomenclature was said to be responsible for much of the resistance, and Lucien proposed to overcome that obstacle by reverting to the familiar names. A decree of 13 brumaire an IX (4 November 1800) confirms the provision of the law of 4 vendémiaire an IV (26 September 1796), laying down that the system was to come into effect throughout the Republic on the first day of the year X (23 September 1801). In order to ease the transition, however, the terms might henceforth be given in their French equivalents: mille for kilometer, doigt for centimeter, livre for kilogram, ounce for hectogram, and so on. The modifications were much the same as those that Borda, Lagrange, and Monge had suggested in the public session of the Academy of Science of 10 April 1793 as a means of disarming political hostility.116 In both revisions the word meter would survive, but all other words would be familiar instead of systematic. So far the retreat was merely nominal, and it does not appear that this measure took effect. Two days after its promulgation, on 15 brumaire, Lucien was dropped from office, though not on that account, to be replaced by Chaptal, who served throughout the consulate. Administrative pragmatism distinguished the domestic policies of the Napoleonic regime from the manifold commitments to principle characteristic 114

Gillispie and Dewachter (1988). Bigourdan (1901), chapter on “Atteintes portées a` la pureté du système métrique,” pp. 190–199. Cf. Morin (1873), pp. 35–40. 116 Above, chapter 4, section 5. Lucien had had a conference with Laplace, Berthollet, and Monge before framing the measure. See “Rapport présenté aux Consuls de la République par le Ministre de l’Intérieur,” 9 brumaire an IX (31 October 1800). AN, ADVIII, 38. 115

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of its republican predecessor. Chaptal was an industrial and agricultural chemist, patron of the Société pour l’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale, and closer in spirit to its goals than to the mathematical rationalism of a Condorcet, a Laplace, or even a Lavoisier. When the next few years brought no progress on weights and measures, he was quite willing that decimalization as well as nomenclature should be called into question. Whether because of pained protests from Laplace, or for other reasons, that proposal did not then go forward. Instead prefects in France itself and throughout the Empire continued in vain attempts to establish public weighing stations (“poids publics”) in market towns and to enforce compliance generally.117 The stalemate between science and commerce, between the law and economic practice, continued until 1812. That year of Napoleonic disaster did bring a metrical as well as the more famous Muscovite retreat. A decree of 12 February opens with an article asserting that no change will be made in weights and measures as defined by the law of 19 frimaire an VIII. It then reverses course and specifies that the Minister of the Interior will see to the fabrication of auxiliary standards for general use in markets, retail trade, and ordinary commerce. The linear unit, equal to two meters, was again to be called the toise. One side of the measuring stick would show metric graduations and the other the old partition into six feet subdivided duodecimally in inches and lines. Clothiers would use an aune of 120 centimeters divided into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths. The pound equal to half a kilogram and the bushel equal to a quarter of a hectoliter would also be subdivided in traditional binary fashion so that there would be sixteen ounces to the pound.118 For ordinary purposes, in short, the old units were reinstated in name and equated to the new values. For official purposes, on the other hand—commercial contracts, wholesale transactions, and of course science—the metric system would remain legal. It alone, and this proved the most important provision, would be taught in schools, including primary schools. The legislation thus recognized the reality that traditional units were continuing in daily use throughout the country. Its framers complicated that reality by adding to the manifold regional variations yet a further set that agreed with local units in name, but not in value, anymore than they agreed with each other. Confusion, and unmeasurable opportunities for chicanery, were thus 117

Circular letter from Chaptal to Prefects, 2 frimaire an XI (23 November 1802), Circulaires, instructions et autres actes émanés du ministère de l’intérieur de 1797 a` 1821, 4, pp. 359–381. For further items of correspondence between the Ministry of the Interior and prefects in many departments, particularly Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, Vosges, Meurthe, and Ille-et-Vilaine, see AN, F12.1295, F12.1298. 118 Bigourdan (1901), pp. 194–199. For the background and consequences of this law, see documentation in AN, ADVIII, 38; F12.1292; F12.1298; correspondence of Montalivet (Minister of the Interior) with prefects, op. cit., n. 117, 12 (1812), pp. 56–69.


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compounded, so that France in the early nineteenth century was in the situation of America in the twenty-first, except that instead of there being two sets of uniform units, one for scientific and the other for ordinary purposes, the latter were more heterogeneous than they had been in the old regime. Of all the manifold attempts throughout the Revolution to change the habits, the instincts, the behavior of people in service to some intellectual construct, nothing more starkly exhibits the chasm separating the sensibility of the political class from the lives of working people than does the conflict between the conception of the metric system and the inertial, the visceral resistance it encountered. Consider, for example, the incomprehension marking the opinion of a member of the Conseil des Anciens when speaking to a resolution on weights and measures passed by the Conseil des CinqCents on 5 messidor an VI (23 June 1797): “People cling to the old measures the way they cling to old rites of religious fanaticism: most retail merchants form a sort of sect, where the measures currently used have received a sort of consecration; and, bent under the yoke of a new fanaticism, a mercantile fanaticism, they defend their ell and their bushel the way others defend their cross and their holy water.”119 Two years later, in 1799, P. C. L. Baudin, president of the Conseil des Anciens, welcomes the presentation of the meter and kilogram by the delegation from the Institute, but a weary condescension tempers his expectations:120 Still, let us not be surprised if the results of an operation ardently wished for in all times and in all countries seem to be accepted with little eagerness by the present generation, which demanded them insistently in the first place. . . . The same Rousseau, whose admirable definition of the law we have adopted, reminds us how a present universally anticipated can be greeted coldly. Men, he said, will always prefer a bad way of knowing things to a better way of learning them. Impatience with such childishness fills Charles Coquebert in an address of 1804 scolding the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. It really should not be so hard, he said: “The new metric system would be much better appreciated than it is if, instead of judging it out of the promptings of laziness or according to inaccurate claims, all those who are in a position to make use of it, and that includes practically the totality of citizens, would make the effort to devote half an hour out of their lives to studying it.”121 At long last the measure that eventually succeeded was enacted in 1837. 119 “Opinion de B. M. Decomberousse (de l’Isère) sur la résolution relative aux poids et mesures,” 9 fructidor an VI (26 August 1798). AN, ADVIII, 37. 120 Base 3, p. 651. Baudin cites the Dictionnaire de musique. 121 “Observations sur le nouveau système des Poids et Mesures,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 3 (1804), pp. 103–105.

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The tone had not changed. The Minister of Public Works introduced the law imposing the metric system in these terms: “But in the habits, in the spirit of routine, and in the ignorance of the lower classes, it encountered obstacles that time could overcome and that discouraged, prematurely perhaps, the Administration.” Supporting an amendment that would have admitted units representing an eighth of a kilogram and of a liter (125 grams and 125 cubic centimenters), a member observed: “Gentlemen, in questions of this sort we must abide by facts and usage.” He was shouted down: “On the contrary, we mean to change the usage, which is vicious.”122 The Minister was right, obviously. What finally succeeded was time, not persuasion, not reason, not authority, but time, an expanse of forty years during which an educational system taught all French children meters, grams, and decimals while resistance weakened along with the elderly clinging to their habits. How, finally, is the historian to explain that throughout much of the world where the French writ never ran, the counterparts of feet and inches, pounds and ounces, pints and bushels, have been displaced by metric units and become extinct? Certainly neither eighteenth-century rationalism, nor revolutionary rhetoric, nor the power of a French state in relative decline, could have caused other polities in the nineteenth century and other continents in the twentieth to embrace the metric system.123 Intrinsic factors must have been at work, as to a degree they had been in France. In the event, a worldwide technical and commercial selection of convenient units—one may say the fittest units—has driven avoirdupois back upon the island of domestic trade and commerce in the United States of America. It is, finally, appropriate that the measure that carried the day in France in 1837 should have been presented in the upper house of the National Assembly, the Chamber of Peers, by General the marquis de Laplace, who on his father’s death in 1827 made himself a champion of the integrity of the metric system. ´ 4. THE ECOLE NORMALE DE L’AN III

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance for the future of higher ´ professional education, and not only in France, of the Ecole Normale de l’an ´ ´ III (1795), the Ecole Polytechnique (called Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publi´ ques [Public Works] for its first year), and the Ecoles de Santé (Health), the euphemism for medical schools. The Comité d’Instruction Publique drafted measures providing for all three in 1794 with their eyes fixed both on the 122

Cited in Bigourdan (1901), pp. 202–211. French domination was not what implanted the metric system in Europe except, perhaps, at a bureaucratic level. Ample documentation shows Napoleon’s prefects in Germany failing to bring metric units into use in occupied territories as signally as did their colleagues in France. AN, F12.1290; F12.1295. 123

´ VII. 4. ECOLE NORMALE

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future and the immediate past. In point of recruitment, pedagogy, and school spirit, or e´lan, the inspiration for the entire trio was the “revolutionary method” in the crash program of courses on saltpeter, gunpowder, and weaponry of the preceding months. Nevertheless, the eventual adoption not only in Europe but America of the term normal school (which to be sure was already used in Austria and Italy) for the formation of teachers, of the term polytechnic for the formation of engineers, and of the centrality of clinical experience for the formation of physicians and surgeons, all this suggests that the educational purpose of these institutions, however clothed in revolutionary rhetoric, answered to fundamental opportunities in the domains they served.124 ´ First, the Ecole Normale: the viability of a national system of education would clearly depend on training a corps of teachers, and forthwith.125 After failing to adopt the Condorcet plan or any other, the Convention did accept a low-keyed measure framed by one Gabriel Bouquier, a hitherto obscure member of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, requiring the establishment of primary schools to which parents would be obligated to send their children. That law passed on 19 December 1793. In May 1794, near the height of the Terror, the Committee further drafted a plan to bring four young men from each district to Paris to be given a revolutionary, which is to say accelerated, training in pedagogy by specialists. They would then return to their districts where they would set up “normal schools” to standardize the training of elementary school teachers in order that the Bouquier Law might be implemented generally.126 Primarily responsible for magnifying that modest prospect into a grandiose educational experiment involving the foremost scientists of France was the intervention of Dominique-Joseph Garat. A minor man of letters in the 1780s, Garat had frequented the salon of Madame Helvétius in Auteuil, and become a leading figure among those of the idéologue circle who were pulling legislative strings in the Thermidorean Convention. He had been Minister of Justice in 1792 and Minister of the Interior prior to August 1793. His fence straddling in office aroused the distrust of both Girondists and Montagnards, and he lowered his profile to the level of invisibility during the Terror. In October 1794 Garat was named to direct the Commission d’Instruction Publique, the executive arm of the Comité d’Instruction Publique 124

The term “normal school” was not novel. That the French were well aware of the precedents is evident from the lengthy appendix, in Italian, to volume 6 of the collection Séances des E´ coles Normales (1800), detailing provisions for the “Sistema normale” developed in the Prussia of Frederick II and adopted in Austria and much of Italy. 125 ´ On the Ecole normale, see Dupuy (1884), reprinted in Le Centenaire de l’E´ cole Normale, 1795–1895 (1895), pp. 21–209; Julia (1981), pp. 154–171; Palmer (1985), pp. 213–220. 126 On the Bouquier plan, see Palmer (1985), pp. 179–183, 200–201; and for the documentation, PVCd’IP 3, pp. xxiv–xlviii, 56–62, 191–196; 4, pp. xl–xlix, 451–452, n. 4; pp. 461–462.

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and, in effect, a proto-Ministry of Education. A fellow literary bureaucrat, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, who edited the ideological journal Décade philosophique, headed the office concerned with “sciences et arts.” Garat drafted the proposal that Lakanal, again on the parent Committee, presented to the Convention on 24 October 1704. It was the intention of his fellow deputies, or so Lakanal informed them, to develop a vast plan for public education. To that end, “you have wished to create in advance a large number of teachers capable of carrying into effect a plan . . . the purpose of which is regeneration of the human understanding in a Republic of twenty-five million men all of whom democracy makes equal. In these schools it will not be the sciences that are taught, but the art of teaching them. The disciples will not only be educated men; they will be men capable of educating.”127 Regeneration of the human understanding, the telos of the idéologues, went far beyond the scope of the Bouquier law. Not only had the anticipated level of preparation for teachers risen from reading, writing, and arithmetic to an undefined height, but in a planning document of 28 November ´ the notion of regional normal schools had given way to a single Ecole Nor128 male concentrated in the capital. Accordingly, on 1 pluviôse an III (20 January 1795) some 1,400 aspirants overflowed the amphitheater of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, which had seats for 750, and spilled out into the garden. Like the munitions workers who had warmed the same benches, they had been selected by district authorities throughout France in numbers proportional to the local population, in many cases on recommendation of local patriotic societies. These were not youths. There was no question of exemption from military service, and they ranged in age from twenty-five to the sixty-six years of the navigator and explorer Bougainville, included by some quirk of the selection process. Their preparation varied from none to the sophistication of a significant number of former teachers in the colleges and schools of the old regime.129 Foremost among the latter was the twentyseven-year-old Fourier, who had been teaching mathematics in a Benedictine school in Auxerre, where he had been imprisoned momentarily during the Terror. Also like their predecessors, would-be teachers were paid a stipend to sit at the feet of leading scientists, and now of scholars, too. Theirs was intended to be a short day but a full week, or rather décade. By the original schedule, classes were to run from 11 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. On the first and sixth days, mathematics was to be taught by Lagrange and Laplace, physics by Haüy, and descriptive geometry by Monge; on the second and seventh, nat127

PVCd’IP 5, pp. 151–158, p. 157. Ibid. pp. 263–265; Palmer (1985), pp. 211–212. 129 Of the 250 whom Dupuy could identify, some 60 had been professors in clerical colleges, and another 75 had taught primary school. See Centenaire de l’E´ cole Normale, pp. 116–135. 128


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ural history by Daubenton, chemistry by Berthollet, and agriculture by Thouin; on the third and eighth, geography by Buache and Mentelle, history by Volney, and moral philosophy by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; on the fourth and ninth, grammar by Sicard, literature by LaHarpe, and analysis of the understanding (i.e., psychology) by Garat himself. In the second meeting of each décade students were expected to ask questions and to raise subjects for discussion, while the fifth day was to be reserved for conferences open to the general public as well. Lectures were to be pedagogical, exemplifications of how to teach the subject, and not learned discourses. Still, that could be accomplished only by exposing students to the subjects themselves. On the day of rest pupils were to visit museums, botanical gardens, libraries, observatories, and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Monge was much the most accomplished teacher. He and Berthollet were the only two who had given courses in the revolutionary program on arms and munitions. Daubenton and Haüy had taught in the Jardin du Roi, while in the 1780s Garat and LaHarpe had given fashionable adult education in literary topics at the Lycée, and Mentelle was a geography teacher at the secondary level. Laplace had held classes in a small roomful of cadets in ´ the Ecole militaire for several years when he first came to Paris, and Lagrange had taught for a short time at the Royal Artillery School in Turin some forty years previously. As for the others, Bernardin de Saint-Pierrre, Thouin, Vandermonde, and Volney had had no teaching experience, and Berthollet only his brief stint in the revolutionary munitions courses. Instructions to the faculty on the necessity of thorough preparation and improvised delivery are no less pertinent today than at the time. Professors at ´ the Ecole Normale were enjoined not to read their lectures. Instead regulations called for stenographers to take down every word. The professors were to have the opportunity to revise their texts, which would then be printed ´ and circulated to faculty and students of the Ecole Normale in time for the discussions, and thereafter to deputies in the Convention, to district administrators throughout the country, to ministers of state, and to diplomats abroad. At the opening session on 20 January 1795, a frigid winter’s day, Lakanal and Deleyre, clad in the regalia of representatives of the people on mission, presided on the dais festooned with revolutionary banners while looking over the shoulders of the professors who delivered the first three lectures, Laplace, Haüy, and Monge. The original schedule could not be met in what followed, however. For some reason no classes were held on the second day. On other days there might be one or two lectures, often running overtime, instead of the three intended. The number delivered by members of the faculty varied greatly. Sicard actually completed the course he planned. Famous for the sign language that enabled deaf-mutes to communicate, he let himself go before an audience that could hear and delivered twenty-eight

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wordy discourses on the art of speaking (not grammar as announced). Daubenton, Nestor of the faculty at age seventy-nine, managed seventeen and urged the merit of systematics in natural history over the stylishness of a Buffon, to whom he had played second fiddle for most of his career. Laplace came close to fulfilling his program in ten lectures but had to skip the discussion of celestial mechanics he had intended. Monge delivered thirteen lectures on descriptive geometry while Lagrange gave five on fine points of analysis supplementing the more elementary and comprehensive presentations by Laplace. Haüy’s course on physics came to fifteen lectures, Buache’s and Mentelle’s on geography to fourteen, Berthollet’s on chemistry to twelve, and Volney’s on history to five. In general the softer and less articulated the subject, the more fragmentary its coverage. LaHarpe’s course on literature met five times, Garat’s on analysis of the understanding only twice, and Bernardin de St.-Pierre’s on moral philosophy once, and then a month late. Thouin, scheduled for agriculture, was with the army in Belgium and Holland and never appeared on the podium at all. Instead, Creuzé-Latouche, he who had been the legislative protagonist for transforming the Jardin du Roi into the Muséun d’Histoire Naturelle, and who was now a member of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, proposed substituting political economy.130 The move was significant in two respects. First, the course was the first ever offered in that subject in France, and one of the earliest anywhere. Second, in an indication that the idéologues did not have everything their own way, the person chosen to teach political economy was not a would-be social scientist or reformer of the human mind, but Alexandre Vandermonde, mathematician and technologist. Students who wished to pose a question of the professor were required to register it the day before a discussion session. In the courses on political economy, geography, history, and language, the material lent itself naturally to these “debates,” though even there the number of participants was a small minority of the student body. That physics was still largely a qualitative science is evident in the number of objections Haüy had to meet in eight discussions concerning its scope and its definitions of the properties of bodies—weight, density, liquidity, elasticity, porosity, and so on. Not much was said of experiment until the last three discussion periods when Haüy stilled his sometimes impertinent interlocutors by enlisting Lefévre-Gineau to demonstrate the use of a hygrometer, the law of falling bodies, and the existence of atmospheric pressure. Mathematics was less susceptible to objections. In the single discussion held during Laplace’s course three students, all clearly knowledgeable, asked questions, one about the convergence of series, a second about incompat130

Above, chapter 3, section 2.


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ibility between the notion of infinitesimals and logarithmic calculation, a third about the effect of the oblate figure of the earth on determination of the meter. Lagrange too held only one discussion, in which he took the precaution of including Laplace at his side. His discourse on number systems occupied most of the time, after which he and his colleague answered three questions on that and on the relative advantages of decimal and duodecimal bases. Monge on descriptive geometry was more accessible both personally and substantively. He alone addressed his interlocuters as “tu” and “toi,” a politically correct affectation whose time had passed in the views of some, and his subject matter was notably less abstract. Fourier took the occasion of the first debate to show his mettle by proposing definitions of the straight line, plane, and circle that he deemed more rigorous than accepted Archimedean formulations. Monge gently responded that he had begged the question, to which soft rebuff another student agreed. Six or seven others engaged in exchanges at a comparable level in two remaining discussions. Pedagogically, the brave, or perhaps foolhardy, experiment could only be a spectacle, not a success. Relatively few of the auditors were adequately prepared even for elementary lectures. Unable to find seats or to follow when they did, many of the others took to drifting about town.131 Inevitably, in a city as critical as Paris, what a journalist called the “tower of Babel in the Jardin des Plantes” became an object of ridicule in the press, while its expense, lack of focus, and general disorganization came to seem a scandal in the eyes of deputies to the Convention. Four months was to have been its term. Among other uncertainties, the legislation had never specified what its future was to be. Garat, Ginguené, Sicard, and others wished to continue it as a permanent institution for the training of secondary, not elementary, school teachers. Instead, the Convention closed it down. Sicard gave the last lecture in the last session, the sixty-first, on 16 May (26 floréal). His subject was punctuation. Gilbert Romme, who (it will be recalled) had tried to save the essential principle of the Condorcet Plan, had administered the coup de grâce in a speech to the Convention: ´ I think that the Ecole Normale has completely failed to fulfill its mission. The students consist of two sorts. The first are well informed in certain respects and very little in others; the second in none. The latter expected to find elementary ideas in the lectures of their professors. All they got were academic notions. One of the greatest vices of the teaching is that the professors presume that their students already have superior knowledge. Besides that, it was assumed that the attention of 131 An amusing and irreverent student’s eye view of the proceedings is the letter that Matthew Bonace wrote to his cousin and published in Journal de Paris. Excerpts are in PVCd’IP 6, pp. 98–105.

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young people could be sustained long enough to follow three very different subjects presented very rapidly in a single sesssion. The professors themselves would be incapable of paying such attention. This school could be very useful for people who already have extensive knowledge. It is useless for those who do not. . . . Since all I see in the institution is organized charlatinism, I ask for its suppression.132 That was Romme’s last success. The Convention ordered abolition of the ´ Ecole Normale as of 19 May (30 floréal). As we have seen, his intervention on behalf of the insurgents of the following day, 1 prairial, landed him in the prison where he committed suicide.133 ´ The short-lived Ecole Normale thus had nothing but the name in com´ mon with the Napoleonic Ecole Normale of 1810, which was subject to the ´ Imperial University, much less with the famous Ecole Normale Supérieure of the rue d’Ulm, which has been the principal nursery of the French academic elite since the middle of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, its influence on the actual practice and content of secondary education under the Directory, though minimal, was not negligible. On 16 December 1794, Lakanal, still spokesman for the Comité d’Instruction Publique, followed up ´ on the summons to create the Ecole Normale with a proposal to establish a ´ system of Ecoles Centrales, one in every department. They would combine what in Condorcet’s plan would have been secondary and higher education (lycées and instituts).134 A measure to that effect passed the Convention with little discussion on 3 ventôse an III (21 February 1795), even as the presumed ´ cadre of teachers entered on their second month of preparation in the Ecole Normale. Little happened after its demise until 23 October (3 brumaire an IV) when, in one of its last acts, the expiring Convention finally codified an educational system in legislation drafted by Fran¸cois Daunou. The legislative expert among the idéologues, Daunou was principal author also of the Constitution of the year III, which established the Directory and embedded the Institut de France in the foundations of the Republic. From a modern ´ point of view, the Ecoles Centrales that opened under the Daunou law were curious institutions, as indeed they seemed at the time to those accustomed to the rigid stratification year by year in the clerical colleges of the old regime. There were no prerequisites, no requirements, no curriculum, no promotion from one grade to the next, and no diplomas. Examinations were ´ at the option of each professor. In the arrangement of courses, the Ecoles Centrales resembled a set of junior-grade Collèges de France. Inscribed students, and others for that matter, might attend as many or as few of the offerings as they pleased, in any order, and for as long as they liked. Most 132 133 134

27 germinal an III (27 April 1995) PVCd’IP 6, p. 96. Above, pp. 297–298. PV Cd’IP 5, pp. 299–309.


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courses occupied one year, a few two or even three years, again as the professor chose. The enabling legislation prescribed what the courses should be, but administrative oversight, financing, and staffing were left to local departmental authorities. The courses were to be nine in number, grouped loosely into three divisions. In the first were drawing, ancient languages (i.e., Latin), and natural history; in the second, mathematics and physics-chemistry; in the third, general grammar (i.e., idéologie), belles-lettres, history, and legislation. If observed, provisions of the Daunou law would have entailed a rough sequence. In principle the minimum age for taking courses in the first group was to have been twelve, for the second fourteen, and for the third sixteen. In practice that stipulation was widely ignored, and students of any age were to be found in any course. Recent quantitative studies estimate that approximately 70 percent of 629 known professors had been teachers in the old clerical colleges. Most of the rest were artists teaching drawing, doctors teaching natural history, and lawyers teaching legislation. Over 10 percent of ´ the sample professoriate, 78 in all, had enrolled in the Ecole Normale. ´ By 1799 about 10,000 boys were attending the Ecoles Centrales. The number was far short of the 50,000 enrolled toward the end of the old regime in the clerical colleges, whose premises in many cases had been taken over. The social mixture was more heterogeneous, however. There were three schools in Paris, the Prytanée (the once and future Louis-le-Grand), the Panthéon, and the Quatre-Nations. Among the fathers of 885 students among the 979 enrolled, 30 percent were of the prosperous bourgeoisie, another 30 percent were of the artisanal, shopkeeping, and even working classes, 25 percent were civil servants, and 12 percent were lawyers or doctors. The figure 10,000, however, was not the sum total of those receiving some sort of secondary education in France under the Directory. A large number of private schools, some of them former colleges that had survived the Terror, had sprung up to serve families who could pay the fees.135 For the most part, theirs continued to be a classical curriculum based on Latin with little room for modern subjects. ´ No matter how inchoate the teaching program, the Ecoles Centrales were far from an unqualified failure educationally. Distinguished people were on the faculties of the three schools in Paris: among them Georges Cuvier in natural history, Sylvestre Lacroix in mathematics, M. J. Brisson in physics and chemistry, F. U. Domergue in general grammar, J. P. L. Fontanes in belles-lettres, and P. C. L. Guérolt in ancient languages. All but Guéroult ´ were members of the Institute, and he became director of the 1808 Ecole Normale. The course in drawing attracted the largest enrollment by far throughout the country. Many boys studying the subject did become artists, 135

For these and further generalizations, see Palmer (1985), pp. 247–251, and for the quantitative studies on which they are based, p. 243, n. 27.

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illustrators, or mechanics, and might enroll further in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Boys studying natural history did go into agriculture, pharmacology, or medicine, the last after going on to one of the ´ Ecoles de Santé. Some boys studying legislation did become lawyers. A few boys taking mathematics and physics-chemistry did present themselves for ´ admission to the Ecole Polytechnique.136 In the judgment of a historian of French scientific education, provision for chairs of natural history, mathematics, and physics-chemistry was “the birth certificate of an autonomous teaching of natural science at the secondary level.”137 In brief, the short life ´ of the Ecoles Centrales, immediate forerunners of the very different Napoleonic Lycées, might be taken as an illustration of a dictum attributed to Otto Neugebauer to the effect that no one has ever devised an educational system that could spoil a really good mind. ´ However that may be, the experience of the Ecole Normale, like many another pedagogical experiment before and since, accomplished more for the education of its professors than of its students. Except for Mentelle, a school teacher, not one of them had ever been called on to address the whole range of his subject in public. Contributing greatly to their doing so ´ in the Ecole Normale was the obligation to review and revise stenographic copies of the lectures for publication. The contemporary editions are a bibliographical hodge-podge, not to say a nightmare—inevitably so, given the urgency of getting them into print somehow, anyhow, first in order to be circulated for discussion, and in two later revisions in order to mitigate the dearth of school books.138 The ensemble of those texts, taken as a window into the mindset of the late 1790s, furnished the subject for systematic study ´ in a seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the late 1980s, the fruits of which are a critical annotated edition currently in course of publication.139 136

Palmer (1985), pp. 246, 252–257, and notes. Belhoste (1995), p. 26. 138 Séances des écoles normales, recueillies par des stenographes, et revues par les professeurs. The first edition was gathered and published in 7 volumes in 1796, and a third in 1806. Available to me has been the second edition (1800–1801) in ten volumes plus three of débats. Volumes 1–5 and the first part of volume 6 contain the enabling legislation and regulations and the revised lectures in the order of their delivery. Reading straight through brings home what it must have been for students listening to one topic after another. The second part of volume 6 is a 450page appendix in Italian of the “sisteme normale” normalizing the preparation of teachers in Prussia, Austria, and much of Italy. Volume 7 has a 142-page abstract of Laplace’s Mécanique céleste composed by Biot in 1800, followed by the historical part of the course Thouin could not give on agriculture and his tabulation of European plants. Volume 8 has the continuation of Daubenton on natural history and Lacepède’s first course on natural history (1798) at the Muséum, followed by his e´loge of Daubenton. Volume 9 contains the completion and corrections of Berthollet’s interrupted course on chemistry, followed by the rest of Thouin’s undelivered course on agriculture. Vol. 10 consists of Lagrange’s Le¸cons sur le Calcul des fonctions on a level immeasurably above anything in the preceding volumes. 139 Two volumes have appeared, Dhombres (1992) on mathematics (Laplace, Lagrange, and 137


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Although the test of time is by no means the sole, or perhaps the most important, criterion of historical importance, the courses that have stood it best in the eyes of one reader in the early twenty-first century are those of Laplace, Monge, and Volney. It is hard to imagine what portions of his published text Laplace could have squeezed into the forty-five minutes allotted for each lecture. In the first eight he led his auditors along the classical sequence of topics from arithmetic through operations of algebra and formulations of geometry and trigonometry to analytic geometry and the theory of curves and surfaces. The subject matter was elementary, although the treatment was novel in that Laplace conveyed the sense of mathematics as a living investigative enterprise rather than an inert body of Euclidean proofs and Cartesian rules. His intention was not simply to teach the elements, but to show how they should be taught. In that respect, as Sylvestre Lacroix testified, his course served as model for a generation of textbooks. Laplace’s immediate purpose, however, was to prepare the mathematical ground for exhibiting the cosmic basis of his principal civic commitment, the metric system, and also the civic dimensions of the principal areas of research in his own career, celestial mechanics and probability. Those dimensions had not, it may be noted in passing, been much mentioned in his earliest memoirs, nor were they fully evident to him prior to the circumstances of the Revolution. Laplace devoted his ninth lecture to the rationale for the survey of the meridian discussed above in chapter 4 on the metric system.140 Had he been able to carry out the program as announced, he would have treated the calculus of difference and differential equations, rational mechanics, astronomy, and the theory of probability. Forced to cut his course short, he elected to skip to the last topic, the one that was least understood and most important for civil society. He promised to repair the omission in a forthcoming book on mechanics and astronomy designed for readers unversed in mathematical analysis. As good as his word, Laplace published Exposition du système du monde the next year, in 1796. That book is one of the most successful verbal accounts of mathematical science ever composed. He there exhibits for the educated public the results of a century of research into the Monge) and Nordman (1994) on forerunners of political science (Volney, Buache and Mentelle, and Vandermonde). A communication from Jean Dhombres brings word that the third on literature, moral philosophy, and general grammar is in press, and that what is intended to be the conclusion, a critical overview, is a year away from publication. The volume with Haüy’s course on physics, Berthollet’s on chemistry, and Daubenton’s on natural history has been further delayed, in part because of the untimely death of the initial editor, Michelle Goupil. Also informative are the remarks on the content of the courses by Garat, LaHarpe, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (with which we will not be concerned) in Moravia (1968), pp. 387–405. 140 Above, p. 241.

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motion of planets, much of it his own, and all of it confirming the stability of the solar system in service to the Newtonian law of gravity. The first edition closes with a panegyric of astronomy—and a political statement. The merit of the science is that it dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relation with nature, errors all the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. truth! justice! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes necessary to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness.141 Laplace published Exposition du système du monde three years before the first two volumes of Traité de mécanique céleste (1799), the mathematical magnum opus from which he extracted it. By contrast its counterpart for a general public, the Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814), appeared a year and a half after Théorie analytique des probabilités (1811), the mathematical master work it epitomized verbally. The Essai philosophique has lasted. Its most recent edition appeared in 1986.142 The nucleus was Laplace’s tenth ´ lecture at the Ecole Normale. That concluding lecture was an extraordinary performance. His early memoirs on probability had done more than the writings of any other to develop the old theory of chances (hasards), which bore mainly on games and other genuine or imagined binary models, into a branch of analysis that was of fundamental philosophical significance and applicable to real problems of science and social science alike. The main themes Laplace distilled ´ out to put before his class at the Ecole Normale were as follows: what are taken for irregularities in the natural world are evidence neither of miracles nor of indeterminacy, but are simply events of whose causes we are ignorant; probability is relative in part to our ignorance and in part to our knowledge; multiplication of instances permits prediction of future events with a probability amounting to certainty when carried to infinity; the credibility of testimony diminishes with the number of times it is relayed; tables of mortality permit reliable estimates of the size and distribution of a given population; the size of the sample in demographic studies has a precise relation to the margin of error; probabilistic demonstration of the overall life-saving effect of inoculation against smallpox cannot ease the anxiety of parents who decide to expose a child to its danger; inverse probabilities permit estimating the reliability of decision making by judicial panels and electoral bodies; putting money into lotteries is folly, whereas soundly based life-income schemes, tontines, and insurance policies are wise investments. Laplace con141

Exposition du système du monde (1796), 2, p. 312. For fuller discussions of the work, see Dhombres (1992), pp. 30–37; Gillispie (1997), pp. 166–175. 142 Editions Christian Bourgeois, with an illuminating preface by René Thom and an exellent historical postface by Bernard Bru.


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cludes with a remark on the prospective value of probabilistic analysis in political economy: Let us treat economics as physics has been treated, in the light of experience and analysis. Simply consider, on the one hand, the large number of truths to discovery of which that method has led in the study of nature, and on the other hand, the mass of error that the mania of systems has produced; and you will feel the need of consulting experience in all things. It is a slow guide, but always sure, and abandoning it leads to the most dangerous errors (écarts).143 Laplace may have included that closing remark in deference to Vandermonde’s course in political economy. He never recurred to the subject. The point about which he evidently felt most strongly was the one he considered in the middle of his lecture, for he had taken those paragraphs almost verbatim from the manuscript of Exposition du système du monde, where they appeared the next year in the concluding passages. Laplace there exemplifies the probabilistic argument for the determinacy of nature in the case of the structure of the planetary system. So far as then known it consists of seven planets, fourteen satellites, and the rings of Saturn. All observable motions together, both of revolution and rotation, some thirty in all, are in the same direction; all orbits are almost circular and almost in the same plane. The probability that so coherent an arrangement could be the result of chance is effectively null. There must be a unitary cause, and here Laplace invokes what in later times has been called his nebular hypothesis. Misleadingly so, for the question does not concern nebulae in outer space. The accurate term would be atmospheric hypothesis, since what Laplace had in mind was condensation of the matter in an atmosphere surrounding the sun, rotating with it, and now shrunken to the dimensions observable in a telescope. It is a further mistake to suppose that Laplace was anticipating the nineteenthcentury shift of attention from the structure of nature to its development over time. Again not so, his problem was with the probability of cause. There is no better illustration of the reciprocity, rather than what might at first glance seem the incompatibility, of his lifelong preoccupations with probability and determinism.144 It is worth noting, finally, that Laplace did not recur to the formation of the solar system in Essai philosophique des probabilités, addressed like Exposition du systéme du monde to an educated public to whom the mathematics in the Traité de mécanique céleste and Traité analytique des probabilités was inaccessible.145 Reading Laplace, one feels that he cared about what he could do with 143

In Dhombres (1992), p. 140. For further discussion of Laplace’s standpoint, see Dhombres (1992), pp. 11–47, and Gillispie (1997). 145 On Essai philosophique, see Dhombres (1992), pp. 37–41; Gillispie (1997), pp. 224–242; and the preface and postface to the edition cited in n. 142. 144

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mathematics in respect to philosophical determinism, cosmic order, and ultimately civic order. Reading Lagrange, one feels that he simply loved the mathematics. There was a poetic quality to his mathematical sensibility. Lagrange, thirteen years Laplace’s senior, had also given instruction only briefly as a very young man, in his case at the Royal Artillery School in Turin. After having distinguished himself in Turin, his birthplace, Lagrange was called to Berlin in 1766 and there made his reputation by inventing the calculus of variations and composing elegant memoirs on planetary perturbations, number theory, and theory of equations. His election to the Academy of Science and move to Paris in 1787 preceded by a year publication of his masterpiece, Mécanique analytique (1788). A person of gentle disposition, Lagrange entered on a state of mild depression after that effort. He withdrew from active analysis and instead interested himself in Lavoisier’s reform of chemistry, which in his opinion introduced into that science a coherence previously characteristic of mathematics and astronomy. As we have seen, he also served a bit passively on successive commissions overseeing the metric system. Now at the age of fifty-nine, a return to the classroom had the immediate effect of drawing him back to mathematics. Or rather, his return ´ to classrooms, for Lagrange was also on the faculty of the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics (the future Polytechnique), which opened on 21 December ´ 1794, a month before the Ecole Normale. Fourier tells of the impression he made on students in the latter: Lagrange, the foremost savant in Europe . . . has delicate features and a dignified appearance. His complexion is slightly pitted, and he looks pale. His voice is very feeble unless he warms to his subject. He has a marked Italian accent and pronounces s’s like z’s. He dresses plainly in black and brown. He speaks in a familiar manner, with some difficulty. His speech is halting and simple, like a child’s. Everyone recognizes that he is an extraordinary man, but one has to have seen him to appreciate that he is a great man. He talks only when he is lecturing, and sometimes uses phrases that excite laughter. The other day he said, “There are still many important things to say on this subject, but I shall not say them.” The pupils, most of whom are incapable of appreciating him, don’t give him much of a welcome, but the professors make up for that.146 The poetic strain in Lagrange’s mathematical sensibility led him to try to convey the charm of his subject by historical asides. “Citizens, in the words of an ancient Greek, arithmetic and geometry are the wings of mathematics.” So opened the second lecture. Not to speak metaphorically, Lagrange continued, these two sciences are the foundation and the essence of all sciences 146

Quoted by Amy Dahan Dalmédico, “Le¸cons de Lagrange,” in Dhombres (1992), p. 184.


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that treat magnitudes. Not only are they fundamental, they are complementary. When you find a result, in order to use it you must translate it either into numbers or into lines. For the one you need arithmetic, for the other geometry.147 Virtually nothing in Lagrange’s expositions would have shown his students how to solve such problems. The two lectures on arithmetic deal not with its operations, but with properties of numbers and propositions of number theory in general. Only if geometry be thought completely reducible to analysis, and Lagrange did think that, might the remaining three be thought to treat the second wing of mathematics. They concern in fact the theory of equations. The third, on resolution of third and fourth degree equations, is particularly abstract. The fourth and fifth are a shade more accessible. The former contains the interpolation for the solution of numerical equations since known as the theorem of Lagrange. In the latter he shows, among other things, how to solve higher order equations by plotting the curves. Whatever the pedagogical failure, preparation of these lectures was important mathematically to Lagrange. After editing the texts for publication in ´ the first edition of Séances de l’Ecole Normale (1796), he went on to develop their central theme of algebraicization in his second general treatise, Théorie des fonctions analytiques (1797). A famous passage in the preface to its predecessor, Mécanique analytique (1788), states the purpose of that work: We already have several treatises of mechanics, but the plan of this one is entirely new. I propose to reduce the theory of that science and the art of solving problems relating to it to general formulas, the simple manipulation of which gives all the equations necessaary for the solution of any problem. . . . No diagrams will be found in this work. The methods I set out require neither constructions, nor geometric or mechanistic reasoning, but only algebraic operations, in conformity with a regular and uniform procedure. Those who love analysis will be pleased to see Mechanics become a new branch and will be grateful to me for having thus extended its dominion.148 The full title of his final treatise announces the extension of this programmatic algebraicization to the calculus itself: Theory of analytic functions, containing the principles of the differential calculus free from all considerations of infinitesimals, vanishing quantities, limits, and fluxions, and reduced to the algebraic analysis of finite quantities. In the former work, Lagrange thought to base mechanics on the principle of least error; in the latter to base the differential calculus on the expansion of power series, which is to say on the 147 148

Ibid., p. 211. Quoted in ibid., p. 186.

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algebra of polynomials.149 By now teaching and publishing were complementary for Lagrange. He further explicated and developed that theme in his ´ courses at the Ecole Polytechnique from 1795 through 1798, which he then published as Nouvelles Le¸cons sur le calcul des fonctions.150 Owing in large part ´ to the work of a protégé of later years, and onetime student at the Ecole Polytechnique, Augustin Cauchy, his program for founding the calculus on algebraic operations did not finally prevail. ´ Unlike Lagrange, who gave only an inaugural lecture at the Ecole des Travaux Publics, Monge taught there in the mornings and in the afternoons ´ at the Ecole Normale. His subject matter, descriptive geometry, was the same at both, but the latter course was more elementary. In the preliminary ´ lecture at the Ecole Normale, Monge defines descriptive geometry as an “art” with two purposes: “The first is to represent with exactness in designs that have only two dimensions objects that have three and that are capable of rigorous definition. . . . The second purpose . . . is to deduce from the exact description of bodies everything that follows necessarily from their forms and respective positions.”151 The term “descriptive geometry” was new with Monge. The subject and the topics treated, on the other hand, were anything but new. Desargues, as Monge acknowledged, had anticipated much of it in the early seventeenth century, after which his work was lost to view amid the brilliant triumph of Cartesian analysis.152 Monge developed what he still called the art into a unified science by discerning the geometry implicit in techniques long since employed in artistic perspective, stereotomy (shaping stones for construction of vaults and arches), architectural and mechanical drawing (blueprints in later usage), delineation of shadows, design of sundials, cartographical profiling, grading of highways, the art of fortification, and so on.153 Monge began his course in an elementary manner with the conventional methods of projection. The first lecture considers determining the position of a point in any body by its projection, first onto three other points, next onto three right lines, then, and this was the most convenient, onto three planes of known location. In the second lecture Monge moved on to orthogonal projection of a line onto two nonparallel planes, the intersection of 149

I owe this summation to Amy Dahan Dalmédico in ibid., pp. 185–186. Cf. Jean Itard, “Lagrange,” DSB 7 (1973), p. 570. 150 The 1801 edition of Séances de l’E´ cole Normale, vol. 10. Above, n. 138. 151 Dhombres (1992), pp. 305–306. 152 Taton, “Desargues,” DSB 4 (1971), pp. 46–51. 153 The standard and indispensable work on Monge is Taton (1951). See also his “Monge,” DSB 9 (1974), pp. 469–478. Belhoste and Taton, “L’invention d’une langue des figures,” is a ´ ´ fine analysis of the lectures at the Ecole Normale and the Ecole Polytechnique in Dhombres (1992), pp. 269–303. There is an account of Monge’s career prior to 1789 in Gillispie (1980), pp. 519–529.


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which determines its position. Those techniques suffice for the representation of any polyhedral surface since they permit plotting the location of its edges and vertices. Not so for curved surfaces, and Monge develops in the third lecture the procedure for generating such surfaces by the motion of curved lines. He here alludes to but does not develop the possibility of expressing the same construction analytically by formulating the equation of the curve in question. In the fourth and fifth lectures Monge turns to constructions. The problems are to find the tangents and normals to curved surfaces at any point. Single cylinders and cones offer the simplest cases. Other figures and combinations of figures are more complicated. Further lectures on descriptive geometry proper deal with the intersections of surfaces of various sorts. Let us take a sample problem at random: in the case of two planes each tangent to a different surface, find the line, tangent to both surfaces, along which the planes intersect. Throughout Monge gives examples of the applicability of geometric construction to practical tasks such as shaping stones to support a vault, shading of colors in a painting, and adjusting for differences of altitude in triangulation of a territory. In all this he thought to show how geometric construction could often reach solutions to practical problems more readily and directly than analysis. At the same time, he sought to exhibit the complementarity of the two major mathematical modes by devoting two lectures to an elementary presentation of the differential geometry with which he had made the reputation that had won him election to the Academy of Science in 1780. At the opening of his course Monge evoked the need to liberate France from its dependence on foreign (i.e., British) industry. That would require in the first place focusing education on subjects that require exactness. Artisans must learn to make things with precision. Consumers must learn to require it. The public must be informed concerning the natural resources of the country, fortunately ample. Manufacturers must learn the use of laborsaving machines and standardized methods of production. For all those reasons a national system of education must be given a new direction. The readiest instrument for that purpose would be familiarization with the use of descriptive geometry. A command of it would benefit intelligent young men of all classes. Those with inherited means would learn to invest them more productively. Those with no fortune other than their education would learn to earn higher returns from their work. It must be said, however, that the interest of Monge’s lectures lies in the geometry of the examples he adduced from the practice of many trades rather than in its capacity to fulfill those civic purposes. He implied, but cannot realistically have supposed, that determination of the normals to the curved surface of a vault would lead bridge builders to construct more symmetrical arches or that constructing a plane tangent to the curved surface that was determined by the position of the beholder’s eye and the location of

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light sources would lead artists to paint better pictures.154 Indeed, among the multitude of examples Monge cites, the only one that clearly changed a given practice was the method he himself had invented when a youth at Mézières for determining the defilade (the protection from artillery fire afforded by terrain) at any point in a fortified position. The influence, in short, of descriptive geometry was less on specific technologies than it was, first, on the immediate exemplification of rational procedures it afforded to ´ students of engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique, and, second, on the future of mathematics. Laplace, who was of an ungenerous disposition, could not have considered Monge’s descriptive geometry to be a branch of mathematics, analytically speaking. Lagrange, who was generous, may have privately agreed. Geometry did nevertheless regain importance in the nineteenth century. In the opinion of Michel Chasles, and no scholar has been better placed to judge, that it did so was largely owing to Monge’s teaching and example. Poncelet’s projective geometry and principle of continuity, Lazare Carnot’s Géometrie de position (1803) and theory of transversals, Charles Dupin’s Développements de la géométrie (1813), Etienne Malus’s Traité d’optique (1813), Chasles’s own contributions to pure geometry, the many geometrical mem´ oirs by graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique in Gergonne’s Annales de mathématique pure et appliquée—in Chasles’s account all this and current rational geometry in general derived directly or indirectly from descriptive geometry.155 The new geometry dealt with problems of extension in a different manner from that of its classical predecessor. Operational might have been a better adjective than rational. Its procedures were constructive rather than deductive. Instead of being a given body of proofs and theorems, it arrived at theorems by transforming the properties of three-dimensional figures into properties of two-dimensional figures that could be represented on paper as the former could not. The resulting diagrams then permitted discovery of otherwise undetected relations among the elements of the original forms. In other words, plane geometry became an instrument of research into spatial relations. Monge loved teaching and disliked writing. Had it not been for the ste´ nographers who took down his course at the Ecole Normale, we would have only the testimony of students and not Traité de géométrie descriptive, the most widely read and influential of his two treatises. His assistant and disciple, Nicolas Hachette, who had seconded him at Mézières, gathered it to´ gether from the Séances des Ecoles Normales, and saw the book through the press in 1799 while Monge was absent with Bonaparte in Egypt. It is thanks ´ to Monge’s course at the Ecole Polytechnique that we also have the other of 154 155

Dhombres (1992), quatrième le¸con, pp. 340–341. Chasles (1889), pp. 189–253; cf. Dupin (1819).


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his completed treatises, again through the good offices of Hachette, Analyse appliquée a` la géométrie (1805). Of Monge’s mathematical work, there would have otherwise remained in print only the series of specialized and largely inaccessible memoirs of infinitesimal and differential geometry presented to the Academy of Science in the 1770s. By contrast with the mathematical courses, there was little innovative about the presentations of Haüy on physics or of Berthollet on chemistry. It was the first time either had addressed himself in public to the whole range of the science he was called upon to teach. Haüy indeed had begun as a naturalist. His scientific reputation rested on his crystallogaphy. As it happened, his determination of the geometry of crystalline forms proved to be less influential in physics than in chemistry, where it introduced the notion of a “molécule intégrante” at the basis of atomic structures.156 Haüy had reached a wide scientific public in 1787 with a nonmathematical explanation of Aepinus’s theory of electricity and magnetism, to which he added an account of Coulomb’s early experiments.157 Like Aepinus and Franklin, he there adhered to the one-fluid theory of electricity and also of magnetism, although in his course and later writings he shifted to the two-fluid model.158 No doubt Haüy’s availability was the main factor in his being chosen to ´ teach at the Ecole Normale. Students complained in one of the discussions that he was giving too much prominence to crystallography. Unlike most of his colleagues, Haüy intended to present his subject in a manner suited to instruction in primary schools. In his account physics is still a largely qualitative, descriptive, and experimental science without a hint of the mathematicization that would shortly overtake and transform it. The same is true of his textbook, Traité élémentaire de physique (1803), which he developed from the stenographic copy of his lectures. A highly successful textbook, it won him election to the Légion d’Honneur. Unlike Haüy, Berthollet was known as a major figure in the science he was teaching. Indeed, following the loss of Lavoisier, he was the leading chemist in France. So far, however, his reputation rested, not on any novel views about the subject as a whole, but on particular discoveries such as the chemistry of chlorine compounds, on his service to the dyeing industry as consultant to the Gobelins in the 1780s, and on his recent contribution to munitions-making in the 1790s. A valuable treatise on the art of dyeing, ´ emens de l’art de la teinture (1791), was his only book so far. For all his El´ eminence, his course was no less conventional than Haüy’s, if pitched at a 156

Mauskopf (1976). Exposition raisonnée de la théorie de l’électricité et du magnétisme, d’après les principes d’Aepinus (1787). Aepinus’s main work appeared in 1751, Testamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi. That Aepinus had begun with what would now be called the piezo-electricity of crystalline tourmaline may well be what had attracted Haüy’s attention. 158 ´ Séances des Ecoles Normales 5 (1800), p. 330. 157

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higher level. He in common with almost all his colleagues placed great hopes on an eventual unification of the science of chemistry around the notion of affinities, which he developed at the outset, but which was not then, nor would it ever become, capable of organizing the established heads of chemical information that Berhollet presented in the body of his course. He elaborated on the stenographic copy of his introductory remarks in Recherches sur les lois de l’affinité (1801), a synthetic work reporting on the state of an unresolved question. His lectures contain no hint of the reorientation in the direction of physical chemistry that Berthollet did give the science in the Essai de statique chimique of 1802, written in consequence of the discoveries he made in 1799 Egypt, to be discussed in the next chapter. Of the two remaining courses touching on science, geography was a boring failure, political economy an interesting failure, and neither left a mark on the immediate or distant future. The former was split between two professors of geography whose differing views of the subject, the one theoretical, the other pedagogical, induced confusion instead of complementing each other. Jean-Nicolas Buache de Neuville, Buache during the Revolution, was a hereditary geographer in a family long attached to the court. His uncle, Philippe Buache, Geographer Royal, constructed theories of physical topograpy according to which the surface of the earth is arranged in systems of mountains, river valleys, plains, and seas organized hierarchically. Buache de Neuville continued that program, to which he added ethnographic considerations concerning the peoples inhabiting the various terrains. Detailed descriptions of surface features in France province by province and in neighboring countries served the larger purpose of formulating geopolitical recommendations to government. Edme Mentelle, by contrast, considered that geography was an affair of territories, boundaries, cities, routes, rivers, mountains, distances, populations, and so on. All the data existed needing only to be compiled and imparted. He spent his career imparting it in ´ tandem with the facts of history at the Ecole Militaire. He and Buache attempted to unify their course by situating the description of the earth in its astronomical setting. They did have two things in common. Both considered geography to be a necessary adjunct of historical knowledge and a guide to power politics, and both practised it as a sedentary pursuit to be cultivated from books and maps. The travels of an Alexander von Humboldt lay some distance in the future of the science, and nothing in their course pointed the way.159 According to contemporaries, Alexandre Vandermonde had an unprepossessing personality and an important mind. He now turned the inquiring spirit he had long since brought to mathematics and technology to problems 159

Nordman gives an account of the background and content of the course in Nordman (1994), pp. 137–166.


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of economics. In March 1794, soon after he closed his interchangeable-parts workshop, the Atelier de Perfectionnement, the Committee of Public Safety sent Vandermonde to Lyons to oversee adaptation of the silk industry to production of the taffeta required for fabrication of military balloons. On his return to Paris he wrote a report, not simply on that, but on the state of industry and commerce in Lyons generally.160 In all likelihood that was what led to his appointment to the belated chair of political economy in the ´ Ecole Normale. It is unclear who else could have been at all qualified. Dupont de Nemours was in exile in New York. Jean-Baptiste Say had yet to make a reputation. The course as such was not a success. Vandermonde apologized frequently for his lack of preparedness. He agreed when students complained of its incoherence. Let us all study together, he appealed to them. In retrospect certain of his positions seem preposterous, particularly his enthusiasm for assignats. The lecture on money praises them to the skies. They are the most rational form of currency ever invented. They do not conflate, as do precious metals, the properties of possessing value and representing value. The value they do reflect, land, is the main source of real wealth. What is to blame for inflation is insufficient production of goods, not oversupply of paper money. In other respects Vandermonde is shrewd. He knew his Wealth of Nations thoroughly, and agreed with Adam Smith on the advantages of division of labor and substitution of machines for human labor where feasible. He disagreed on free trade, however, and preferred the protectionist recommendations of James Steuart when it was a question of shielding real and human value, say the skills of the silk workers of Lyons, against ruinous competition. He shared the position, virtually axiomatic at the time, that the right to property is the foundation of social order, but he disagreed with the prevailing view that its basis is natural law. In Vandermonde’s analysis, it originated in a convention and its justification is social utility, not natural right. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Vandermonde’s treatment of political economy is his standpoint. Unlike Condorcet and his followers, the idéologues, who thought to quantify a social science by calculating the probability of desirable outcomes, Vandermonde was no moralist. In his view political economy should not be studied as a normative subject. It was descriptive and analytical. His instinct agreed with Laplace’s injunction to treat political economy on the model of physics, “by way of experiment and analysis.”161 He would make of economics an exact science, at least in its theoretical formulations, even if it could not be so in its application to the 160 “Rapport sur les fabriques et le commerce de Lyon,” Journal des arts et manufactures 1 (1794), pp. 1–48. Cited by Jorland in Nordman (1994), pp. 342–343. 161 Above, this section.

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complications of commercial reality. He was much attracted to Adam Smith’s model of the invisible hand holding a balance between supply and demand. The concept of a natural equilibrium in a market economy would permit eventual mathematization of the factors in terms, not of probabilities, but of the functional analysis of differential calculus. There are no equations in Vandermonde’s text, however. His mathematical sense only led him to prefer such a direction. On 22 April he ended his eighth lecture, which was on pricing mechanisms, with the promise that he would develop their consequences in the next meeting and, if time permitted, take up the question of the effect on prices of the money supply. That did not happen. In failing health, Vandermonde was unable to complete his course. He died on 1 January 1796.162 It could be argued that the course on history given by Volney broke ´ fresher ground in its field than did any other offered in the Ecole Normale. In all likelihood, Constantin-Fran¸cois Chasseboeuf chose the pen name Volney in token of his admiration for Voltaire at Ferney. Born in 1757 into the prosperous provincial bourgeoisie, even like Voltaire half a century earlier, Volney completed his secondary education, a classical education, at the college of Angers, where he began the study of law and also of Hebrew. He came to Paris in 1775, at first to qualify himself in medicine. Among his fellow students was Cabanis, who became and remained an intimate friend and companion, and who introduced him to the salon of Madame Helvétius in Auteuil and the circle of future idéologues. There he met baron d’Holbach, whose salon he also frequented and whose empirical standpoint in political and moral philosophy he admired and later emulated. Medicine proving little to his taste, Volney had the wit and also the means to explore the resources of the capital. He threw himself into the study of oriental languages, perfected his Hebrew, and learned Arabic with Leroux des Hauterayes at the Collège Royal. In December 1782 the twenty-five-year old Volney set forth on a journey of exploration to Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Whether he was on his own or on a secret mission for the ministry of foreign affairs is unclear. He lived and traveled in the near East for over two years, perfecting his Arabic and spending time in Alexandria, Tripoli, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Haifa, St.-Jean d’Acre, Jerusalem, and various monastaries and retreats along the way. Returning to France in March 1785, he settled down at home in Anjou to write an account of all he had seen and learned. Voyage en

162 For a detailed analysis and evaluation of Vandermonde’s course, see the collaborative introduction to his lectures by D. Woronoff, A. Alcouffe, G. Israel, G. Jorland, and J. C. Perrot in Nordman (1994), 340–358. See also the analysis by Moravia (1974), pp. 729–734.


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´ Egypte et en Syrie appeared in two volumes 1787. An immediate success, it made his reputation.163 Late twentieth-century critics of European and American attitudes to the Near East might find in Volney’s book an early instance of the “Orientalism” they deplore. Its thesis is that despotic polity, religiosity, oppression, and slavery were responsible for arrested social, economic, and intellectual development in the Ottoman Empire. However that may be, many good books are more than their thesis. Volney penetrated the life and atmosphere of the countries he visited and conveyed their inwardness as no European had done in modern times. Its tone is sympathetic in a human sense and in no way condescending. Consistent in his antipathy to oppression, he joined Condorcet, Grégoire, and other opponents of slavery in the Société des Amis des Noirs in 1788. Coming from such a background, Volney naturally welcomed the Revolution. He represented Anjou in the Constituent Assembly and took an active part in company with Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Bailly in the political maneuvers that assured the dominance of the Third Estate. A liberal of 1789 and nothing radical, Volney was of the view that his agenda for the Revolution was complete with the work of the Constituent Assembly. After its dissolution in September 1791, he left Paris for Corsica, where he thought to cultivate oranges while occupying his mind with study. He had just completed a second major work in a vein not unlike Gibbon’s on Rome, the very successful, much translated, and frequently reprinted Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). In Corsica Volney met and was much impressed with a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte. The agricultural experiment a failure, he returned to Paris in 1793. His La loi naturelle, ou le Catéchisme du citoyen fran¸cais, appearing that September, is a timely pamphlet designed to base personal morality and civic duty on a rigorously empiricist, or sensationalist, psychology.164 It in no way satisfied the emerging Robespierrist equation of virtue and terror. Volney was then planning a trip to America in order to complement his study of the Near East with a scrutiny of still farther parts. He was arrested in November 1793, on the eve of his intended departure and spent the Terror in confinement. On release he resumed association with the circle of idéologues now engaged in forming the polity of a stabilized revolution. Such were the circumstances in which Garat tapped Volney to give the ´ course on History at the Ecole Normale. Soon after it was finished, in September 1795, he did depart for the United States, where he traveled and 163 164

Gaulmier (1951). Reprinted with Le¸cons d’histoire in Gaulmier (1980).

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observed the new republic and its Indian neighbors for three years, return´ ing to Paris in June 1798. The fruit, Tableau du sol et du climat des Etats-Unis (1803), delivers more than its title promises and is too little known in the land it describes. It will be clear from this summary that there were historical dimensions to Volney’s thinking, but that he was not a historian. His Le¸cons d’Histoire are no less worth the attention of historians and others for that.165 Volney was at one with fellow heirs to the Enlightenment in considering the physical and natural sciences to be the cynosure of exact knowledge. History has no such claims. Historical facts are known, not through the senses, but through testimony and memory, both fallible. Their certitude is at best probable. The historian’s job is to estimate the degree of probability, which subject Volney takes to be the most important taught at ´ the Ecole Normale. Historians cannot think to command agreement. They must needs respect the opinions of those who differ even as they expect others to tolerate theirs. History is, in effect, simply an investigation of facts that can be known only through intermediaries. They need to be interrogated, like witnesses. “The historian conscious of his duties should regard himself as a judge who calls narrators and witnesses before him, confronts them, questions them, and seeks to arrive at the truth, that is to say the existence of the fact, such as it was (tel qu’il était).”166 The emphasis can only call to mind Ranke’s famous injunction to tell it as it really was, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” With respect to purview, Volney, the student of other cultures, has no patience with limiting history to accounts of three privileged peoples, Jews, Greeks, and Romans, let alone to the story of any single nation in early or modern times. On the contrary, its proper scope is all humanity taken as a single society composed of peoples considered as its individual actors. The facts to be searched for are not the dramatic episodes about which myth, legend, tradition, and patriotism cluster, but rather such common and ordinary experiences as occur frequently enough to constitute patterns and to reveal principles: “for principles are not abstract things, existing independently of humanity; principles are general and summary facts resulting from the addition of particular facts and thereby constituting, not tyrannical rules of conduct, but the basis of approximate calculations of likelihoods and probabilities.”167 Volney clearly shared not only Condorcet’s confidence in probabilistic analysis, and also the sense that history embraces all humanity. Even if he had read Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, however, he cannot have had time to consider his late friend’s 165

Barthélémy Jobert provides an excellent introduction and notes to Volney’s Le¸cons in Nordman (1994). 166 “Le¸cons d’histoire,” in Dhombres (1992), p. 62. 167 Ibid., p. 61.


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´ testament, for it issued from the press only while the Ecole Normale was in session. What Volney did not share was Condorcet’s fixation on the idea of progress or his confidence in it. In point of method, Volney prefigures Tocqueville, who must have read his account of America before departing for his famous investigation of the workings of equality there. Whether or not Tocqueville consciously modeled his treatment on Volney’s, they both eschewed narrative of events in favor of analysis and comparison: analysis of the structure and workings of the societies they studied and comparison with relevant evidence elsewhere. In Tocqueville’s work the terms of comparison were America and France. Volney’s brief course afforded less opportunity to deploy his method, but he does suggest that comparison of the state of contemporary Asian society with that of classical antiquity would be revealing. As just noted, he also intended to scrutinize America with similar ends in view. Analysis and comparison, then, constitute the mode of writing and teaching history, not narrative. That had been understood in antiquity, when the word had the connotations of inquiry and description, as it had done in the writings of Thucydides and Herodotus, and for that matter (though Volney does not mention this) in Francis Bacon, and as it still does in the phrase “natural history.” In modern usage, so he thought, it too often means telling edifying stories. People who want that would do better to read novels, or on occasion biographies. History understood as the scrutiny of societies through “an array of fully positive well determined facts” is not well suited for schoolchildren.168 In a modern plan of education, study of elementary mathematics, science, natural history, and geography should precede history, which would better be reserved for those furnished with the knowledge enabling them to be critical. Of all persons who may profitably study history, it most directly behooves the public interest that those charged with affairs of government should have done so. Ths scope is as follows. Historical scrutiny of the most renowned peoples will comprise the course and progress 1. Of such artisanal and skilled activities as agriculture, commerce, navigation. 2. Of various sciences such as astronomy, geography, physics. 3. Of private and public morality, and the examination of ideas formed thereof in different epochs. 4. Finally, we will follow the course and progress of legislation; we will consider the origin of the most remarkable civil and religious codes; we will investigate what the mode of transmission of these codes from one people and one generation to another has been; what effects they have produced in the habits, customs, and character of nations; 168

Dhombres (1992), pp. 82, 105.

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what relation is to be found between the customs and character of nations and the climate and physical state of the land they inhabit; what changes are produced in their customs by migrations and the mixtures of races. . . .169 Clearly Volney would not have approved of a work like the present one, even though it concerns science and the working of institutions, since it also seeks to recreate as well as interpret past events. He would, on the other hand, have felt completely at home in the company of Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and contributors to the journal Annales. At the conclusion of the fifth lecture Volney acknowledged that the course so far had concerned historiography (though he did not put it that way) rather than history itself. He would have to leave it there, however. He had been given only two weeks to prepare his thoughts and was exhausted. He needed to rest, draw breath, and assemble the materials to be presented in treating examples of history proper.170 ´ Instead, the Ecole Normale closed. However abortive educationally, the failed experiment brought into the open a set of relations between science and its public that was latent in the structures reciprocally of science and society (for example in Condorcet’s plan for education) but not yet expressed institutionally at the turn of the nineteenth century. For the first time anywhere, science and higher learning were enlisted in the service of public education. For the first time, students were to be formed by new knowledge imparted firsthand by its makers and not old knowledge retailed by clergymen seeking to mold their morals and characters on models from the past, classical and religious. In the future scientists would typically be professors at the highest level and not just researchers. Reciprocally professors at institutions of higher learning would ideally be researchers and not just teachers, as they had been in the eighteenth century and earlier. Nor did ´ the failure of the Ecole Normale diminish those expectations, which contin´ ued in force in the regimes of the Ecole Polytechnique, the medical schools, and eventually the nineteenth-century university system in general. ´ The Ecole Normale instantiated a related feature of the change. Even at the highest level a professor must address himself to the whole range of his subject, and not merely to his specialty. In doing so he thinks to form students in the practice of a discipline. Reciprocally, however, doing so may lead the more innovative to consider forming, or rather reforming, an entire discipline in line with the thinking that guides their own research. The less innovative then follow suit in line with the research they admire. The effect reached beyond the lecture hall. A change in the mode of scientific publica169

In Nordman (1994), p. 60. On returning from America, Volney revised the stenographic copy printed in his absence into the form published in 1800 and reprinted many times, most recently in Gaulmier (1980). 170


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tion accompanied the transformation of scientists into professors. It was not merely, or mainly, a matter of textbooks, though a considerable literature of scientific textbooks did issue from the press to meet the demand poorly ´ served by publication of three successive editions of the Séances of the Ecole Normale. More important, in the early decades of the new century scientists published in two ways. On the one hand, immediate results of particular pieces of research came out in the new monthly or quarterly journals, and this was by far the greater part of a large volume of scientific literature. On the other hand, whole sciences form the subject of a number of treatises intended, not to resolve particular problems, but to reform (not necessarily revolutionize) entire disciplines. There were precedents, of course, antedating whatever impetus participa´ tion in the Ecole Normale may have given. The most notable were Lagrange, Mécanique analytique (1788), and Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de la chimie (1789). We will reserve a discussion of discipline formation for the conclusion, but a glance at the most important titles appearing over a thirtyyear period will suggest the amplitude of a return to the mode of publication of treatises, which had been the instruments through which Copernicus, Vesalius, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, and Newton, to mention only the foremost, had wrought a more conceptual, if less institutional, transformation of thought about nature. Here is the list. mathematics Lagrange, Théorie des fonctions analytiques (1797). Lazare Carnot, Réflexions sur la métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal (1797); Géometrie de position (1803). Monge, Géométrie descriptive (1799 and later editions). Legendre, Essai sur la théorie des nombres (1808). Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812); Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814). Dupin, Développements de géométrie . . . (1813). Poncelet, Traité des propriétés projectives des figures (1822). astronomy Laplace, Traité de mécanique céleste (5 vols., 1799–1825); Exposition du système du monde (2 vols., 1796 and later edition.). physics and mechanics Lazare Carnot, Principes fondamentaux de l’équilibre et du mouvement (1803). Malus, Traité de l’optique (1810); Memoire de la double réfraction de la lumière dans les substances cristallisées (1810).

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Hachette, Traité élémentaire des machines (1811). Poisson, Traité de mécanique (2 vols., 1811). Fourier, Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822). Ampère, Recueil d’observations electro-dynamiques (1823). Sadi Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (1824). Coriolis, Du calcul des effets des machines. . . . (1829). chemistry Fourcroy, Philosophie chimique, ou vérités fondamentales de la chimie moderne (1792, and many later editions). Berthollet, Essai de statique chimique (2 vols., 1803). Chaptal, Chimie appliquée aux arts (4 vols., 1807). Gay-Lussac and Thenard, Recherches physico-chimiques . . . (2 vols., 1811). Dumas, Traité de chimie appliquée aux arts (8 vols., 1828). comparative anatomy, zoology, and paleontology Cuvier, Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée (5 vols., 1800–1805); Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes (4 vols., 1812); Le règne animal, distribué d’après son organisation (vols. 1, 2, 4, vol. 3 by Latreillle, 1817). Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (2 vols., 1809); Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (7 vols. 1815–22). Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie zoologique (2 vols., 1818–22). Savigny, Mémoires sur les animaux sans vertèbres (1816). Blainville, De l’organisation des animaux, ou principes d’anatomie comparée (1822). physiology and medicine Cabanis, Du degré de certitude de la médecine (1798); Rapports du physique et du morale de l’homme (2 vols., 1802). Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800); Anatomie générale (4 vols., 1801); Traité d’anatomie descriptive (5 vols., 1801– 03). Magendie, Précis élémentaire de physiologie (2 vols., 1816–17). ´ 5. THE ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE

´ The Ecole Polytechnique has been and remains the most glamorous of the foundations of the year III. Its history is a puzzle of paradoxes. Founded in the spirit of Monge, it was soon dominated by the mathematics of Lagrange and Laplace. Intended to form civil and military engineers, it also educated the founders of mathematical physics and, a little later, protagonists among

´ VII. 5. ECOLE POLY TECHNIQUE

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the Saint-Simonians. Once the first, creative generation had graduated, a school conceived at the height of the Terror became the nursery, not of scientists or reformers, nor of industrialists, but of the technocratic elite of nineteenth and twentieth-century France. Throughout Europe and America, however, it served at the outset as the very model of a modern engineering school—witness West Point, Boston Tech (later M.I.T.), the English polytechnics, and the Technisches Hochschulen of Germanic countries. Situated throughout most of its history on the Montagne SainteGeneviève in the heart of the Latin Quarter, it was a colorful thread woven into the civic and cultural fabric of Paris, but has flourished for the last quarter-century in an American-style campus in the suburbs. From the be´ ginning, the Ecole Polytechnique has marked its graduates personally with the experience of their education in a way more characteristic of elite American and British undergraduate institutions than of other French counterparts. Their identification with alma mater and sense of privileged solidarity sustains an alumni association in Paris. Mathematics and exact science have been more or less emphatically the basis of the curriculum throughout. The school is known familiarly to its intimates as “X” (from the ubiquity of that letter in mathematical analysis). Graduates identify their class by the year of entry, X-1826, X-1934, and so on.171 ´ None of this was intended. Far from being created ex nihilo, the Ecole Polytechnique emerged from a synthesis of elements drawn from the two engineering schools of the old regime. It combined an educational legacy from the military engineering school at Mézières, where Monge had started ´ his career, with an institutional carryover of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. Mézières foundered in the Revolution. Beset by contradictions between the revolutionary sympathies of the teaching staff and the royalist loyalties of the military command, drained of personnel by needs of the army at war, and unable to attract cadets untainted by aristocratic lineage who could also pass the entrance examinations, the school had all but ceased to function in the final months of 1792. In the wake of many conflicts and frustrations throughout the ensuing year, including the suicide of a commandant, it was officially closed by order of the Committee of Public Safety 171 ´ The history of the early years of the Ecole Polytechnique has been very thoroughly studied, beginning with the nearly contemporary Fourcy (1828), republished in 1987 with critical apparatus and an excellent introduction by Jean Dhombres. Leverrier (1850) gives a ´ broad and illuminating survey. Ecole Polytechnique, Livre du centennaire (3 vols., 1894), contains histories of the teaching and biographies of graduates. Shinn (1980) is a social history of polytechnicians. Belhoste, Masson, and Picon, eds. (1994), is a lavishly illustrated portrayal of polytechnicians in Paris. Belhoste, Dahan Dalmedico, and Picon, eds. (1994), contains proceedings of the bicentennial symposium. A number of articles, cited by author, appear in ´ Bulletin de la Société des amis de la Bibliothèque de l’Ecole polytechnique, cited in the notes that follow and in the bibliography by its acronym SABIX. The archives of the school are now well organized and admirably maintained in the library of the school at Palaiseau.

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on 12 February 1794. Its facilities were transferred to Metz, where they served for training in siegecraft. Carnot, who framed that measure, expected that basic training for both military and civil engineers would henceforth be ´ conducted in the Ecole des Ponts and Chaussées in Paris. A month later, on 11 March (21 ventôse), the Convention adopted a further measure calling for ´ establishment of an Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics. That law simply recognized what already existed, for in the meantime the ´ Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées had expanded, though not without difficulty, ´ and had been redesignated Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics in January 1793. Even before its mission was broadened to encompass elementary preparation for military engineering, other exigencies of the Revolution required the services of more technically trained people than its cramped facilities and outdated reliance on self-help pedagogy could ever have produced. Prony, the leading member of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, developed a proposal for a full-fledged school with a proper faculty offering instruction on the theory as well as practice of construction in general.172 This and other suggested reforms went nowhere until the death in February 1794 of the eighty-six-year old Perronet, who had founded the school in 1747 and directed it ever since. ´ Perronet was succeeded by a leading engineer in the Corps, Jacques-Elie Lamblardie, who proceeded to modify the regime. Enrollment had meanwhile expanded to 167 students. He received authorization to appoint seven professors to conduct an in-house program of teaching, instead of farming it out to private courses on specialized subjects throughout Paris while relying on advanced students to tutor their juniors in the basics of geometry, trigonometry, surveying, and stereotomy. Lamblardie further succeeded in housing the school in adequate quarters. The Hôtel de Lassay, adjoining the Palais Bourbon (the modern Chamber of Deputies), afforded space for lecture halls, classrooms, and study rooms, and eventually for chemistry laboratories, a library of books and maps, a natural history gallery, a collection of machines, and workshops fitted with a forge, an anvil, and tools for stonecutting, carpentry, and construction.173 That much, and it was quite a lot, was in prospect by May 1794, when Monge stepped into the picture and proceeded to redesign it in keeping with his program for basing a technical general education on descriptive geometry, one might almost say messianic geometry in the light of his belief in its transcendent economic, social, and cultural value. Monge had given considerable thought to questions of education in its relation with science. 172

Picon (1992), pp. 259–261. ´ Belhoste (1989) supersedes earlier accounts of the conversion of the Ecole des Ponts et ´ Chaussées into the Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics. In SABIX No. 11 (February 1994) he ´ publishes extensive documentation concerning the founding of the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics. 173


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He had consulted with Condorcet in 1792, when the latter was designing his master plan, and had drafted but never communicated a scheme for secondary school education of artisans and workers in September 1793, after quitting the Ministry of Marine Affairs.174 He is certain to have collaborated with Carnot, Prieur, and scientific veterans of the Arms Commission in framing provisions for the new school of public works. Fourcroy, a member of the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety, presented the legislation to the Convention on 24 September 1794. Four days later the founding law, known by its date of 7 vendémiaire, was adopted without ado. The measure affects to implement the decree of 11 March (21 ventôse) calling in the midst ´ of the Terror for establishment of an Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics.175 Now, however, Fourcroy’s report dresses the proposal out in rhetorical flourishes celebrating the overthrow of the latter-day tyrants and the emergence of true republican values. The new school would be quite different from its predecessors. Instead of limiting itself to elementary preparation of a handful of military and civil engineers for specialized service in the respective corps, it would be entirely independent of both the military and the Ponts et Chaussées. The purpose was a higher education for engineers in general. The country, so runs Fourcroy’s report, required five species of engineer: 1⬚ military engineers, 2⬚ civil engineers, 3⬚ cartographers (ingénieurs géographes), 4⬚ mining engineers, and 5⬚ naval engineers. Separate schools, and those inadequate, had existed for the first, second, and third. The sector of mining, of great importance, had been particularly ill served by a recent, small, and merely theoretical school. For map-making and naval construction, aspirants had learned by the equivalent of apprenticeship after picking up what elementary mathe´ matical instruction they could find in private courses. The Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, by contrast, would provide a three-year curriculum of higher technical education, the purpose of which went beyond improvement of public works to increasing scientific literacy in general, in the first instance among its graduates and more largely by setting an example for a ´ national educational system. As at the Ecole Normale, where the inspiration was comparable, the faculty would consist of leading scientists. Theory would inform practice, practice would exemplify theory, and professors would combine teaching with research. They would advance pedagogy and knowledge reciprocally by publishing their courses and communicating their ´ findings in a journal, the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique. Like the Muséum (though Fourcroy does not mention the analogy) the institution would be governed by its faculty sitting in council.176 174 175 176

Published by Taton in Dhombres (1992), pp. 574–582. For the legislative history, see Langins (1980). Extracts from the two registers recording the minutes of meetings of the Conseil de

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Enrollment was to be four hundred students. That would be over twice ´ the size of the recently expanded Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and orders of magnitude larger than Mézières, which had normally numbered twenty students at the end of the old regime. They would be paid a stipend of 1,200 livres and would lodge with reliable families in loco parentis, for the Committee of Public Safety worried about their moral welfare in the capital. ´ Unlike their counterparts in the Ecole Normale, and their predecessors in the revolutionary courses of the year II, who were nominated by local authorities in numbers proportional to the population of the region, candi´ dates for the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, sixteen to twenty years old, would undergo a national competitive examination on arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. It would be given in Paris and twenty-one provincial cities. A distinctive aspect of the initial organization was not mentioned in the Fourcroy report. The detailed prospectus that followed, anonymous but certainly drafted by Monge, emphasized that study halls, recitations, problem sets, drawing lessons, and laboratory work would occupy the greater part of a student’s day. Those exercises would be conducted in groups or “brigades” of twenty students each. They would be supervised by “chefs de brigade,” selected from among the best students in their final year. Their role would be similar to that of prefects in a modern boarding school, except that they would be chosen for academic rather than personal merit and leadership.177 ´ Like the student professors in the former Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, a chef de brigade would help his juniors with their lessons and lead them in recitations, draftsmanship, and laboratory exercises. Among the early chefs de brigade were Biot and Malus. The positive effect of a tight internal articulation on morale and school spirit contributed fundamentally to the ´ distinctiveness of an education at the Ecole Polytechnique in its early years. Instead of being a set of young people connected only when attending disparate classes, students were members of a body academic headed by their professors, themselves holding the equivalent of regular faculty meetings to regulate the whole. The curriculum was Monge’s dream child. He laid out the design of the teaching program in the shape of a tree of knowledge growing horizontally.178 The form was encyclopedic. The spirit was positivist. The two main branches consist of mathematical science and physics. The former divides into analysis and the description of objects. Analysis applies to geometry on the one hand and mechanics on the other. Objects that may be described are of two ´ l’Ecole Polytechnique, an III–an VII (1795–99) have been transcribed by E. L. Dooley and published in SABIX N⬚ 12 (November 1994). 177 ´ Développemens sur l’enseignement adopté pour l’Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, published by order of the Committee of Public Safety. Reproduced by facsimile in Langins (1987a), pp. 227–269. 178 Reproduced by facsimile in Langins (1987a), pp. 128–129.


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sorts, those that can be defined rigorously and those that cannot. The former are to be studied in courses on stereotomy, architecture, and fortification. (Architecture then comprised both theory and practice of constructions of all sorts, not merely buildings but roads, bridges, canals, ports, and ships.) The latter, undefinable objects are to be captured by drawing—one might say the science of drawing since “dessin” had a connotation both wider and more precise than its modern translation. Physics, the second main branch, divides less neatly. Its upper stem, general physics, is simply that, the properties of bodies, extension, heat, light, sound, electricity, and magnetism. The lower, particular physics or chemistry, has three parts according to the chemical nature of the substances to be analyzed. The course of study was to take three years, though students who failed to complete it might be allowed a fourth. The guide throughout would be descriptive geometry. Monge gives the reason: Descriptive geometry is a language necessary for and common to the ingenious person [homme du génie] who conceives a project, the skilled persons [artistes] who must direct its execution, and the workers who must carry it out. This language, which is capable of precision, has the further advantage of being a means for seeking the truth and for reaching desired or unknown results. Like all other languages, habitual use is ´ the only way to become familiar with it. Thus, students at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics will practice it continually throughout the three years that the course of instruction lasts.179 Monge would not have expressed it this way, but for him descriptive geometry had a transcendent quality in that it put human faculties in contact with the mathematical structure of external reality. Its proper scope in ´ his mind was far wider than anything he claimed for it at the Ecole Normale, where it was one course among many. At the school of public works, where the initial design was his doing, it was the core of the curriculum. He devotes half his prospectus, twenty pages, to that one subject. That plan provides three instructors for geometry, three for chemistry, one each for analysis and general physics, and an unspecified number of drawing masters. Mathematics occupies six days in every décade. For all three classes, the respective courses in descriptive geometry begin with an hour’s lecture at eight in the morning, after which the brigades repair to their respective study rooms where students work individually on problems and constructions until two in the afternoon. On two of the six days alloted to mathematics, each of the three classes spends the hours from five to eight in the evening in different courses on analysis. The first-year men do analytical geometry, the second analytical mechanics, and the third analytical hy179

Op. cit., n. 177, p. 230.

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drodynamics. Those courses consist of an hour’s lecture followed by a twohour problem session. In the other four afternoons of the six devoted to mathematics, the two classes not doing analysis take drawing lessons. Chemistry has two days a décade, beginning with an hour in lecture and the rest of the morning and afternoon in laboratory instruction and experimentation. General physics gets short shrift. One two-hour lecture on the fifth day of the décade suffices for what was a merely descriptive science. There being no laboratory work, students take the same course every year for three years in order to fix the definitions in their minds. The rest of the day was free for study or relaxation. The tenth day of every décade is open for exercise and recreation. Thus, of the seventy-four hours of schooling every décade, a student would spend thirty-six on descriptive geometry, twelve in drawing lessons, twelve doing analysis (applied to descriptive geometry in the first year), eighteen learning and practicing chemistry, and two listening to physics. Theory would occupy the twelve hours spent in lecture halls by all members of each course. Application would occupy the sixty-two spent by the brigades in practical work and drawing. After three years a well-rounded polytechnician would be a fully educated man ready for any career involving technical talent and virtuosity.180 That ideal was an enlarged projection of Monge’s experience at Mézières upon the tabula rasa of a new educational system. It was never completely fulfilled. Exigencies of the moment and political expediency required that an initial class of engineers be produced within a year. To that end the proponents of the new school drew upon the example of the revolutionary courses ´ ´ of the year II, as did the organizers of the Ecole Normale and the Ecole de ´ Santé. The Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics opened with three months of revolutionary courses before initiating its regular teaching schedule. They had in common with the putative model only the political appeal of the name, the eminence of the teachers, and an accelerated pace. The revolu´ tionary courses at the Ecole Centrale ran the whole body of the accepted students through the subjects of the three-year curriculum in three months, the first-year courses in the first month, the second-year in the second, and the third-year in the third. The compression was accomplished by offering only the lectures and postponing the classroom and laboratory work. Examinations followed, the purpose of which was to sort the student body into the three classes that would then begin a normal school year. The most accomplished would follow the regular third-year courses and graduate in one year, the middling group would take the second- and third-year classes and graduate in two, and the least prepared would follow the entire threeyear curriculum. The word “polytechnic” appears for the first time in the Développemens sur l’enseignement adopté pour l’E´ cole Centrale des Travaux Publics is reproduced by facsimile in Langins (1987a), pp. 227–269. 180


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printed announcement: “Programmes de l’enseignement polytechnique de ´ l’Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics.”181 Many notables attended the ceremonial opening on 21 December 1794. It featured chemical oratory by Fourcroy and a lecture by Lagrange, who did not appear again until the revolutionary courses terminated three months ´ later, almost concurrently with the demise of the Ecole Normale. Present at the creation were 272 students and some twenty-five provisional chefs de brigade, who had been chosen in advance from among the applicants. These latter had arrived in Paris six weeks earlier to be put through an intensive course in preparation for their responsibilities as teaching assistants.182 They and their successors selected from each graduating class would supplement a ´ distinguished faculty. Fourier, a student in the Ecole Normale, was appointed an instructor in May 1795. Besides Monge, Lagrange, and Fourcroy, ´ others who served on the teaching staff of the Ecole Polytechnique more or less regularly under the Directory were Hachette, Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Berthollet, Chaptal, Pelletier, Prony, and Baltard, among a number of less remembered names. The revolutionary courses and the remainder of the first academic year were anything but a flying start. Monge fell gravely ill and had to be replaced in the descriptive geometry course for some weeks. A further round of entrance examinations brought the number of students almost to the 400 allowed, but the latecomers straggled in irregularly. The winter of 1794–95 was bitter cold. Bakeries were often empty of bread. The Committee of Public Safety authorized military rations for the students, which excited the resentment of workers at the school and in the neighborhood. Tardiness was chronic. The starting hour had to be put back to 8:30, and even then the first classes in the morning were ill attended. Often only twenty or thirty students would show up for a lecture. The worst was physics. The subject was a bore and Hassenfratz a deadly teacher whose students would sometimes hiss instead of applaud him, as they did Monge and Fourcroy. Discipline was lax. During the many hours spent in study halls, students would often talk, gossip, and horse play instead of ordering their notes, working their problems, and constructing their geometric figures. Many had colds and coughed and sneezed all day. The chemistry laboratories were not ready at the outset. In those with minimal equipment, ovens sometimes roasted potatoes instead of heating reagents. Temptations of the big city were irresistible for many a student. Roaming the streets when they should have been doing descriptive geometry, a number took part in the quasi-gang wars between gilded-youth muscadins and 181

Facsimile in Langins (1987a), pp 126–198. ´ Monge gave an account of their training in the first number of the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique 1 (1795), p. 6; see Langins (1987a), pp. 24n., 270–271. 182

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plebeian jacobins. Coming for the most part from fairly well-to-do families, they tended to side with the former, to the dismay of their teachers. Other political involvements were involuntary. Like all able-bodied men, students were liable for service in the national guard, which took them out of school at regular intervals. Most of them were mobilized to serve in putting down the last popular rising of the Revolution on 1 prairial (20 May 1795). Politics also took its toll upon the faculty. In the aftermath of prairial, Monge, having missed the early weeks of his course, perforce went into seclusion for some months, as did Hachette, lest their well-known jacobin sympathies expose them to the imprisonment that Gilbert Romme had terminated by suicide. A warrant did issue for Hassenfratz but was never executed, while Fourier was arrested a few days after joining the staff and held in custody for several months. Upon completion of three months of revolutionary courses, what had been intended as the regular curriculum began on 24 May 1795, five days after the risings of prairial. Lagrange gave his first lecture at the ceremonial opening. Neither then nor later was his course comprehensible to more than a handful of his auditors. With only five months left of a normal academic year, it was impossible to complete the original plan. Beset by difficulties ´ and criticism, the Ecole des Travaux Publics soldiered on as best might be throughout the summer of 1795 in imminent danger of going the way of the ´ Ecole Normale. Acting for the Committee of Public Safety, Prieur initiated ´ the reform that turned it into the Ecole Polytechnique as of 1 September and saved the day at the expense of Monge’s original, perhaps unrealistic conception. Abandoned was any notion of a general technical education. Abandoned was any idea of independence from the special interests of the existing civil ´ and military engineering services. Instead, the Ecole Polytechnique would recruit their students and give them basic training. The several service ´ ´ schools—the revived Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, the Ecole du Génie and École de l’Artillerie (combined at Metz in 1802), the small Ecole ´ des Géogra´ phes (attached by Prony to the cadastre), and the three naval schools (Ecole ´ ´ des ingénieerus de vaisseaux, Ecole de navigation, and Ecole de marine)—all these, now to be called ećoles d’application, would be upgraded and admit ´ only graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique.183 The relation, in a word, would be comparable to that of a modern American undergraduate education to graduate professional training. Abandoned too, therefore, was the ideal of educating technically competent generalists in courses that married theory with application. Application 183 ´ ´ On the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, see Picon (1992), pp. 272–288; on the Ecole du ´ Génie et de l’artillerie, see Belhoste and Picon (1996); on the Ecole et Corps des Ingénieurs ´ Géographes, see Berthaut (1902), Bret (1991b); on the Ecole des mines, see Aguillon (1889).


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would henceforth be the affair of the higher schools of that name while the ´ curriculum of the Ecole Polytechnique, with which they were now associated, would become increasingly abstract and theoretical. Abandoned also was the wider thought of centering a school of general technical education in a national system built on similar principles. Abandoned, finally, was any aspiration to model education nationally upon what was available to the brightest and the best. The modern separation of the grandes écoles, top schools, from an eventual system of universities open to all secondary-school ´ graduates dates from the reform that turned the generalist Ecole Centrale ´ des Travaux Publics into the analytical Ecole Polytechnique. Despite the distractions and confusions of the first year, the fledgling ´ Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics had given direction to a minority of committed students, among them Jean-Baptiste Biot, Etienne Malus, Louis Poinsot, Edme Jomard, Jacques Chabrol de Volvic, Prosper Jollois, and Michel-Ange Lancret. The first three are famous in the annals of physics and mathematics; the last four (as will appear) were crucial participants in Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition.184 Many years later Jomard remembered vividly the impression Monge made on them and their fellow students. Without the benefit of a blackboard, his elocution exhibited the properties of three-dimensional geometrical objects with their forms, their magnitudes, their inflections, their diverse intersections. Monge did not make us see them simply by word and gesture. He made his auditors feel as if they were touching them, so to say, with their fingers, such was the harmony between word, gestures, and even posture at each moment. And then, what a light in his eyes! What power in his voice! What variety in his intonations! His features, a little irregular, lit up so as to transform his face. . . . When he described a surface of revolution verbally and designed it manually, you saw it; a developable surface, you developed it with him; a gauche surface or any other of double curvature, he engendered it with an eloquent gesture in such a way that it became palpable. Abstractions took on body with him. He had the art of making the most complicated things simple and the most obscure things clear.185 Such was the teaching that now reached beyond the few and important people Monge had trained or worked with at Mézières—Carnot, Meusnier, Lacroix, Hachette—and inspired the first generation of students formed at ´ the Ecole Polytechnique, who elevated him to the status of patron mentor, if not saint. Historians have contrasted the school as Monge imagined and started it, 184

Fourcy (1828) lists the names of all entering students in the classes from 1794 through

1827. 185

Jomard (1853), pp. 13–14.

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“Monge’s School,” to “Laplace’s School,” the forcing house of mathematical analysis that it soon became.186 There is no doubt that Monge and Laplace were very different in personality, temperament, political attitude, and mathematical taste. The one was generous, outgoing, and enthusiastic; the other haughty, reserved, and severe. There is reason to think that feelings of innate hostility occasionally found overt expression. Apart from personal factors, their respective relations with the institution were not fully comparable. Monge was less committed to mathematics than Laplace. His teaching systematized descriptive geometry and brought it into the open but invented little. His interests had spread also to other things, to chemistry, to physics, to technology, to warfare, to politics, to education. Before long he would gravitate into an orbit around Napoleon’s rising star. ´ Monge inspired the Ecole Polytechnique. He did not administer it. He did not even stay with it. Absent by reason of illness or political prudence for much of the first academic year, neither did he complete the second, 1795–96. Instead he departed with Bonaparte on the first Italian campaign in May 1796, returned briefly to Paris in October 1798, and was away again until October 1799, first in Rome, then in Egypt. On his return he resumed teaching, but concentrated mainly on analytic geometry, leaving descriptive geometry largely to Hachette. The course was already diminished by 1800. Monge retired in 1809. The next year descriptive geometry, now paired with theory of machines, had only 85 hours and analysis 137.187 ´ In contrast to Monge, Laplace came into the affairs of the Ecole Polytechnique almost as a deus ex machina, and not at first of his own volition. He had remained in semi-seclusion near Melun during the months of its gestation, had nothing to do with its foundation or original curriculum, and never taught there. His initial involvement was peripheral. He served briefly on the ad hoc panel headed by Vandermonde that examined candidates to ´ fill up the ranks of the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics in the supplementary competition of November 1794. Laplace had been dismissed from his post as examiner of artillery cadets (an important source of income) shortly after suppression of the Academy of Science in August 1793. On 23 July 1795 the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety reinstated him in that post, observing that he should never have lost it. So it happened that, beginning in 1795–96, when the ećoles d’application were subordinated to 186

The contrast began with the recriminations against the influence of Laplace by the geometer Théodore Olivier, X-1811, a champion of descriptive geometry, advocate of applied science as the basis of an engineering education, and moving spirit in the founding of the ´ practically oriented Ecole Centrale des Arts et Métiers in 1829. Mémoires de géométrie descriptive, théorique, et appliquée (1851). 187 For discussions of the displacement of descriptive geometry by analysis, see Belhoste (1994), Gillispie (1994), Sakarovich (1994), and Paul (1980). In a broader sense the transition is a central theme of the magisterial study by Grattan-Guinness (1990).


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´ the Ecole Polytechnique, Laplace was ipso facto examiner for its graduates applying for admission to the artillery school. Not only so, he and Bossut, who had been reinstated as examiner of cadets for the Corps of Engineers, ´ were to select candidates for admissision to the Ecole Polytechnique itself. Setting entrance examinations and final examinations, Laplace assisted by Bossut was thus in the position of watchdog over the entire course of study. At the end of the first year Laplace was dissatisfied with procedures and results. A letter to the Director in December 1796 makes recommendations regarding both admissions and the course of study.188 Instead of relying on regional examiners employing individual criteria, the selection process needed to be centralized. Only a single panel sitting in the precincts of the school would be in a position to rank candidates from the entire nation according to uniform standards. Prior to that teachers everywhere should no longer rely on preparing pupils out of the classic textbooks of Bézout and Bossut. They should be supplied with the syllabus of a specific course of instruction. Instead of attempting to judge of a youngster’s general knowledge, the examiners could then be very demanding with respect to the required materials. Examining the polytechnicians who had in principle completed the course, Laplace found very few to be qualified for the respective services. His judgment accorded with the experience of Prony, whose students in the course on analytical mechanics were so ill prepared that he taught them elementary calculus instead. Accordingly Laplace considered it indispensable that the time devoted to calculus and analytical mechanics be increased. The spirit of his recommendations was not perfectionist, however. He recognized that in a school of public service it was more important to train the majority of students reasonably well than it was to pitch everything at the level of the few strongest, though neither should the latter lack opportunity to sharpen their talent. The future development of their subjects depended on them. Laplace’s criticisms and recommendations were ill received by all concerned. Most students disliked advanced and abstract mathematics and resented being held to higher standards. Members of the staff, personally sympathetic to the absent Monge and in tune with his ideas, considered Laplace ´ a threat to the Ecole Polytechnique at a time when its very existence was still precarious. Officials of the ećoles d’application, and especially the artillery, which needed young officers fast, denounced the requirement that they pass ´ first through the Ecole Polytechnique. Calculus was no help to a battery commander laying his guns in combat. Politicians, other than Carnot and perhaps Prieur, could scarcely understand the issues. Nevertheless, such was the leverage afforded by the post of examiner that Laplace prevailed. In two ´ Laplace to the Director of the Ecole Polytechnique, 19 frimaire an V (5 December 1796), published in Langins (1987b), pp. 176–177, to whose discussion I am much indebted. 188

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years’ time, uniform entrance examinations took place in Paris. In 1796–97, students willy-nilly spent almost a third of their class hours on calculus and analytical mechanics, more than three times the fraction Monge had allocated to analysis at the outset. Beginning in 1799–1800, Laplace disposed not merely of leverage, but of ´ direct authority. Among graduates of the Ecole militaire whose qualifications for the artillery he had examined in the old regime was a sixteen-year-old Corsican, Napoleone Buonaparte. Immediately after the coup d’état of 18 brumaire (9 November 1799), Bonaparte in power as First Consul named his onetime examiner, whose fellow member of the Institute he now was, to serve as Minister of the Interior. Laplace’s time in government was far briefer than Monge’s had been, six weeks instead of eight months. Napoleon at Saint Helena famously said of him that he brought the spirit of infinitesimals to administration. There is no reason to think that Napoleon favored Laplace over Monge personally or with respect to their mathematical programs. He admired them both in their different ways. Nevertheless, Laplace’s brief tenure of the ministry allowed him to modify the regime of the ´ Ecole Polytechnique in a signal manner. Governed academically by the Council composed of the teaching staff, it had been administered incoherently by a sequence of directors, none holding office for more than a year. ´ Lamblardie returned to the modified Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in 1795, to be succeeded there in 1798 by Prony for a tenure of forty years. Monge served as director for a few weeks in 1797–98 and few months in 1799–1800, and Guyton de Morveau for a few months in 1798. There being no legislative body to debate and delay proposed reforms, as had regularly happened under the Directory, Laplace was able to impose a thorough reorganization in December 1799. The Conseil d’Instruction composed of the teaching staff would still conduct the week-to-week academic business. Exercising ultimate authority, and reporting to the ministry, a newly constituted body would function as the equivalent of a modern Board of Trustees. This Conseil de Perfectionnement consisted at the outset of the two mathematics examiners (i.e., analysis); two examiners all told for descriptive geometry, chemistry, and physics; three members of the Institute; four commissioners elected by the teaching staff; and the representatives delegated by the various service schools to participate in the final examina´ tions of applicants graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique.189 At the same time, enrollment, which had been lowered to 250 under the Directory, was fixed at 300. The normal course of study was now reduced to two years of 189 The minutes of the meetings of the two councils, Registre des procès-verbaux du Conseil d’Instruction and Registre du Conseil de Perfectionnement, and also the printed Rapports du Conseil de perfectionnement depuis l’an X jusqu’à l’année 1839 addressed to the Minister of the ´ Interior, may be consulted in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique at Palaiseau. Extensive photocopies will be deposited under my name in the library of Princeton University.


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preparation for the ećoles d’application. Students who then felt unready to take the examinations qualifying them for admission were to be dropped. Those who tried and failed might have a third year. Though not yet militarized, polytechnicians were to wear a uniform and be paid the stipend of a sergeant in the artillery.190 A few weeks previously Lagrange had retired from teaching, recognizing that a broad range of students needed a more accessible road to analysis than a course on its frontiers could afford. Lacroix, who succeeded him, was a superb teacher. Laplace, of course, resigned as examiner on becoming Minister of the Interior. Appointed in his place was Legendre. If mathematicians were to be graded like students, the top three at the time would have been Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre, in that order. On leaving the Ministry in favor of Lucien Bonaparte, Laplace exerted strong influence on the regime ´ of the Ecole Polytechnique from the vantage of the Conseil de Perfectionnement. Descriptive geometry, grouped with “machines” and no longer included under the rubric of mathematics, continued to suffer ineluctable reduction in the curriculum at the expense of analysis.191 Chemistry underwent a concurrent decline despite the prestige and influence of Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, and Berthollet, all three members of the faculty, and the last named close to Napoleon and to Monge and closer to Laplace personally than was any other colleague.192 The proximate cause was the examination system, the effects of which went beyond its motivation. The purpose was straightforward and meritocratic. It was to select the students best qualified on grounds of ability ´ alone, first for admission to the Ecole Polytechnique, and on finishing their course, for admission to professional training in the service schools. What exceeded, and perhaps distorted, that objective were the means chosen to achieve it. Laplace’s purpose, and that of his colleagues, was not to aggrandize analysis to the detriment of other studies or to favor young people from fortunate backgrounds over others. Quite the contrary. It was simply that mathematical ability, unlike general intelligence, literacy, and culture, could be measured comparatively and exactly. That might once have been true of Latin, but schooling in the classics had so deteriorated in the revolutionary years that it was dropped from the entrance examinations in 1800.193 The same argument eliminated chemistry and physics from the final examinations in 1810. In consequence students preparing both for entrance and final examina190

Fourcy (1828), pp. 192–200. On the course on rational mechanics and “machines,” see Chatzis (1994), and on the teaching of mechanics down to 1850, see Dupont (2000). 192 Smeaton (1954); Langins (1981); Tron (1996). 193 ´ Rapport sur la situation de l’Ecole polytechnique . . . par le Conseil de perfectionnement établi en exécution de la loi du 25 frimaire an 8 (n. 189), p. 4. 191

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tions concentrated their efforts on mathematics and neglected other subjects. The examinations came to seem more important to them than the courses. Their attitudes reflected the very structure of the institution, in which teachers and examiners were distinct from each other in order to ensure objectivity and of equivalent importance in the educational scheme of things. They received the same salaries and had equal representation on the Conseil de Perfectionnement. A further provision assured the privileged position of mathematics. Its two examiners had permanent tenure while their colleagues examining lesser subjects were appointed annually. Educational experience in the United States and elsewhere has shown that insistence on strictly objective testing may have unintended consequences. It was never the purpose of Laplace and his colleagues to provide a means for recruiting a technocratic elite from well-placed families that would dominate much of French polity in the next two centuries. Neither, to suggest more or less remote historical comparisons, did Confucius concoct his philosophy in order to furnish material for the examiners who chose the administrators of the Chinese empire. The dons did not teach classical letters at Oxford, nor mathematics at Cambridge, in order to select officials from the governing class—“Send forth the best ye breed”—who would rule in India and elsewhere. Such, however, among other things, was what followed out of the Classical Honours School at Oxford and the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, neither of which had the slightest relation to the future duties of honours men and wranglers. What mattered functionally was the role and conduct of the examinations, not its content. It was essential, however, that the subject matter be so precise that the legitimacy of the ranking not be questioned and that the fairness and objectivity of the competition be recognized both by the candidates and the general public. Mathematics met the case in France. But why analysis instead of descrip´ tive geometry? Its expansion in the curriculum of the Ecole Polytechnique, gradual prior to 1802, then became an express policy. The report of the Conseil de Perfectionnement for 1806 notes that the teaching of statics, until then based on synthesis, must henceforth be analytic in form. Without mentioning Monge’s original design, the report for 1808–9 contradicts it in stating that “mathematical analysis applied to geometry, mechanics, and several branches of physics forms the basis of the teaching program.”194 Any search for a satisfactory explanation of the change will need to go deeper than incidental personal rivalries or mere academic politics. For the transition to analysis in the curriculum answered to negative demand. Except in Lacroix’s course from 1799 to 1808 and Prony’s courses throughout on analytical mechanics, analysis was badly taught. Lagrange was way over most students’ heads at the outset. Ampère and Cauchy were brilliant 194

Registre du Conseil de Perfectionnmenmt, 1808–1809, fol. 1.


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minds. The former was a poor teacher from 1816 until 1828, when he realized it and resigned, and the latter a pedagogical disaster from 1816 until 1830, when he went into a royalist exile.195 A majority of students disliked the subject and resented the time spent on it and the pressure it put upon them. Their future employers were no more enthusiastic. Already in 1809 ´ the commandant of the Ecole de l’Artillerie et du Génie in Metz com´ plained that students coming out of the Ecole Polytechnique were ill prepared for practical exercises and quickly forgot the abstract courses they had endured. The Conseil de Perfectionnement appointed a commission headed by Malus to examine the criticisms. It found them to be justified in large part, and recommended changes, none of which were ever made.196 But it was in the 1820s, at the height of Cauchy’s creativity in mathematics and Ampère’s in electrodynamics, that complaints from all sides about their teaching reached a maximum, again to no avail. What skills, in point of fact, did a young engineer use in the early nineteenth century? One may think in the first place of the striking achievement ´ of the contingent of twenty-odd early graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique who accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, namely the superb plates of their ´ magnificent Description de l’Egypte, of which more in the next chapter. The treatment of light and shadow, of the floor plans and elevations of temples, of sculpture and monuments, of land and sky, of mapping—all of it was accomplished, not by artists, but by engineers. The preparation of that magnificent work bears witness to the value of their training in drawing, stereotomy, and perspective, which is to say descriptive geometry. More generally, in order to apply the laws of statics and dynamics, of hydrostatics and hydrodynamics, of friction and the strength of materials, to the construction of roads, bridges, canals, buildings, fortifications, and ports, ´ the original program of the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics was precisely what was needed. Practicing engineers had no use for the analytical parts of Prony’s Mécanique philosophique of 1799. In 1817, when C.-L. Navier, X-1803, a foremost engineer in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, published a new edition of Bélidor’s century-old manual of construction, the classic La science de l’ingénieur, he relegated the analytical apparatus he supplied to the footnotes.197 It is further worth recalling that the suspension bridge across the Rhône at Tournon, the first in the world hung from iron cables, was constructed in 1824–25 by a self-made engineer, Marc Seguin, who was totally ignorant of analytical mathematics. When he submitted the design to the General Council of the Ponts et Chaussées for approval and authorization, 195

On Cauchy’s course, see Gilain (1989). Fourcy (1828), pp. 300–303. 197 Bernard Forest de Bélidor, La science de l’ingénieur (1727). In 1819 Navier edited Bélidor’s companion work, Architecture hydraulique (2 vols., 1737–39) in similar fashion. 196

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Navier recommended its rejection. Ironically enough, the Pont des Invalides that Navier himself designed shortly afterward collapsed when a ruptured sewer main poured a flood into the Seine.198 There is no reason to think that public works in France constructed by polytechnicians in the early nineteenth century exhibited improvements upon those built in Britain by graduates of Woolwich or by self-taught engineers who learned their trade by apprenticeship. Contemporary observers, among them Charles Dupin, X-1801, on the whole thought not.199 What, then, in the absence of practical applicability or demand, did drive the displacement of descriptive geometry and related subjects by analysis in ´ the curriculum of the Ecole Polytechnique? One such factor it shared with ´ ´ the Ecole Normale and the Ecole de Santé. It was the proposition that leading scientists should do the teaching. Leading scientists in any milieu prefer to be on the cutting edge. Fourcy cites the author of a memoir in ´ 1797 who reminds the reader that the Ecole Polytechnique, founded at a time when all scientific and educational institutions had been suppressed, was intended not only to supply engineers, but also to be a “repository destined to conserve the teaching of the arts and sciences.”200 That was never forgotten. The 1816 report of the Conseil de Perfectionnement states that, besides preparation for the public services, which remains the primary mission, the method of instruction also serves “to develop the faculties of those rare individuals whose tastes and inclinations call them to a profound study of the sciences.”201 To that end, the professors are urged to keep their courses up to date and drop the obsolete manuals of Bézout and Bossut. The Jour´ nal de l’Ecole Polytechnique had by then become the most prestigious of journals for mathematics and pure science. Students and former students, not to be left out, were encouraged to circulate their research and memoirs ´ in the less formal Correspondance de l’Ecole Polytechnique, started by Hachette. Finally, and this is perhaps the essential matter, the issue was not one of rivalry between fields of mathematics of equal weight. The roles of analysis and descriptive geometry in the evolution of mathematics were not symmetrical. Descriptive geometry pertained to synthesis, the time of which was largely past. Its revival was owed to the particular genius of Monge and not to some strong undercurrent of mathematical development emerging from the depths. That “géomètre” meant mathematician well into the nineteenth century was a lexicological anachronism. Even Chasles draws his contemporary developments from the classics in his Développements des méthodes en 198 199 200 201

Gillispie (1983), chapter 5. Dupin, Force commerciale de la Grande-Bretagne (1824). Fourcy (1828), pp. 122–123. Registre des procès-verbaux du Conseil de Perfectionnement, 4, 82v.


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géométrie (1837). The case Monge makes for the educational value of his favorite subject, and for its utility in stonecutting, construction, and theory of machines, is more convincing than are his afterthoughts about its access to discovery of truth. The very career patterns and personalities of geometers and analysts were ´ different. Of Monge’s successors at Ecole Polytechnique, Hachette was a faithful wheelhorse, and Leroy, who taught the subject after 1815, when Hachette was exiled as a jacobin, was a nonentity. Like Monge himself, his scientific heirs, although they did work in geometry, also spread their interest and efforts across a range of subjects. Meusnier did experimental chemistry, contributed to aerostatics, and died a soldier. Carnot organized victories. ´ Lancret directed the Description de l’Egypte. Poncelet had a military career, became a general, and contributed to the theory of machines. Dupin went into politics, as did Arago. These were worldly men, “positive spirits” in the parlance of the times. Not only did they apply geometry, they applied themselves to wider enterprises. Those drawn rather to analysis sat at desks in a focused manner. Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre, Sophie Germain, Ampère, Cauchy, Poisson— they were persons of active thought, not action. Rather than apply their mathematics to construction and technology, they drew their mathematics out of analysis of the behavior of physical objects and forces. Thus Fourier—who to be sure was an active administrator as prefect of the Isère Department—invented the branch of analysis that immortalized his name for a study of heat conduction. When analysis is justified at all, the claims are different from those for geometry. “The cultivation of mathematics,” writes Lacroix in the preface to his textbook, “may be considered from two points of view. . . . Generally it is only a means for exercising the mind, developing the intellectual faculties, and offering matter for meditation and discussion; Sometimes also, but unfortunately much more rarely, it furnishes precepts and results applicable to daily use and to the needs of society.”202 In like ´ manner, observes the Director of Studies in the Ecole Polytechnique, “Advanced theories, although they are rarely applicable in the public services, are nevertheless a subject for study of the highest importance in that they exercise the students’ intelligence and in some sense give the measure of their ability.”203 Not only did pure analysis come to dominate the curriculum, the courses in analytical geometry and analytical mechanics became more and more abstract. Except for theory of machines, developed by Cauchy, Coriolis, and Poncelet, the other topics initially treated as applications of descriptive geometry, to wit draftsmanship, stereotomy, theory of shadows, and perspec202 203

Traité élémentaire du calcul différentiel et du calcul intégral (1802), p. iii. Registre du Conseil d’Instruction, 25 September 1812.

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tive, diminished with it and eventually vanished. We have to do here, so it would seem, with an instance of what may well be the most general tendency in the history of science, which is the ineluctable progress of mathematicization. Chemistry in the eyes of Lavoisier, physics in the eyes of Laplace, economics and even historiography in our own day, the entire world picture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—all have sought to find expression so far as possible in the language of mathematics, or at least to assume the guise of quantification. The displacement of descriptive ´ geometry by analysis in the Ecole Polytechnique was nothing other than a special case of the working of this process within mathematics itself. Its movement over the long term is toward abstraction, rigor, and generality. That occurs, not in response to outside pressures, whether sociological or political, but by “la force des choses,” a more powerful dynamic than the pallid “force of things” suggests. ´ In the Ecole Polytechnique mathematics served to inculcate intellectual discipline as well as skill in calculation. That was the reason for which Dupin opposed introducing literature and fine arts into the curriculum. He was second to none, he explained, in his admiration for high culture in itself. But he feared lest such courses prove seductive and sap the intellectual vigor of the students.204 Whatever their intellectual vigor, an unintended psychological side effect did occur. Passing such a test, clearing so high a hurdle, reinforced the feeling of initiation into a highly select elite. Like many a shy American freshman subjected to hazing in a fraternity, and many a timid Prussian Burschenschaftler sporting the scars of a duel, a basically unmathematical polytechnician who nevertheless survived the ordeal of analysis would rally to the “X” tradition once he had proved his mettle. A second element of discipline complemented mathematics in the ritualization of the polytechnic experience. In 1804 Napoleon regimented the ´ Ecole Polytechnique. What with his positive sense of the contribution of young graduates to the Egyptian expedition, and his admiration for Monge on the one hand and Laplace on the other, he had long taken a close interest in the school. Its discipline left much to be desired, and not only in his eyes. Attendance at class was spotty. The behavior of students in public, particularly at the theater, was often rowdy.205 Scattered about the city in lodgings, they were under no control when out of class. Youthful political instincts led them to gird against authority, whatever the complexion of the government. A number had taken part in the royalist rising against the 204

Dupin (1819), pp. 62–63. On 1 thermdor an XII (20 July 1804), Fourcroy, then Councillor of State in charge of Public Education, apologized to Napoleon for the “bagarre au Théatre fran¸cais.” AN, AFIV, 1050. 205


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Convention that Bonaparte came to the fore by dispersing on 13 vendémiaire (5 October 1795). With all these things and prospective needs of the army in Napoleon’s mind, the decree of 16 July 1804, among the earliest he ´ promulgated as Emperor, placed the Ecole Polytechnique under military authority, where with many modifications it remains to the present day.206 A general, Gérard Lacuée, took command as governor, seconded academically by a field-grade officer, S. Gayvernon, who taught the course on fortification, as Director of Studies.207 The student body henceforth consisted of a battalion composed of four companies. A battalion commander, two captains, four lieutenants, and a quartermaster were to enforce discipline and oversee military training, which however must not occupy the hours devoted to class work. Students would henceforth live in dormitories and eat in dining halls. They had worn uniforms since the early days, but would now be outfitted in the style of line infantry. From that decree derive the sword and jaunty bicorne cap that came to bespeak the esprit de corps born of living, learning, marching, and maturing together at a formative time of life. No more unexcused absences, no more straggling in late—students would march back and forth to class, and from one class to another, each company under the command of an officer and preceded by a drummer. Readying the former Collège de Navarre to receive the school required a ´ year. Only in 1805 did the Ecole Polytechnique move from the Hôtel de Lassay adjoining the Palais Bourbon, seat of the lower house of the legislature, to the quarters it occupied until 1976. The separation came as a relief both to students who resented the censorious eyes of legislators and to legislators who had had enough of noisy students. No change was envisaged in the curriculum. A momentous change in the regime, however, did follow in 1805. No longer to be paid modest stipends, students would henceforth be charged fees of 800 francs a year. Instead of a school selecting its students on the basis of merit alone, it became a school selecting the most meritorious students whose parents could pay tuition. War was expensive, Napoleon wrote the governor in explanation of the forthcoming decree, and he wished to keep costs down. Considerations of another sort further justified the change in the Emperor’s eyes: “For people who are not well off, it is dangerous to give them too great a knowledge of mathematics.”208 Hence the ´ social complexion of graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique in the nineteenth century. Provision for twenty-five scholarship students did little to modify the picture despite Monge’s generosity in donating his salary to swell the

206

Fourcy (1828), pp. 246–249; Bradley (1975, 1976). Bradley (1975). 208 Napoleon to Lacuée, 23 March 1805, quoted in Bradley (1975), p. 440. The decree was promulgated on 22 fructidor an XIII (9 September 1805). 207

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fund. “The cradle of the sciences,” commented Charles Dupin, “was suddenly transformed into a mercenary barracks of apprentice pretorians.”209 Militarization did not exclude or much affect the tiny minority of firstgeneration graduates who brought about mathematicization of physics. Our ´ section on the Ecole Normale closed with a list of titles. A short list of those avant-la-lettre mathematical physicists follows: Fourier on the theory of heat; Sadi Carnot and Clapeyron on the foundation of thermodynamics; Biot on chromatic polarization of light; Malus on reflective polarization and double refraction of light; Fresnel on interference and the wave theory of light; Cauchy on foundations of the calculus and properties of an elastic ether; Poisson on the potential function in electrostatics and magnetism; Ampère on electrodynamics; Coriolis on work and energy—in only one area, acoustics, did the cardinal contribution, which was the theory of elastic ´ surfaces, come from other than a teacher, graduate, or both of the Ecole Polytechnique, and that other was Sophie Germain. Nowhere else in the history of science is the wellspring of so momentous a set of developments to be located in a single institution. ´ 6. THE ECOLE DE SANTE´ AND CLINICAL MEDICINE

In 1865 Claude Bernard entitled the classic of nineteenth-century French physiology Introduction a` l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. In his view, the strategy of basing medicine on the science of which he was past master stemmed from the reform of the healing arts two generations earlier. Experimental physiology became a sustained specialty in Paris in consequence of a modernized medical education and conversion of the Hôtel-Dieu into a teaching hospital. Such was the discredit of faculties in general early in the Revolution, and of the Faculty of Medicine in particular, that the schools ´ opening in January 1795 were euphemistically called Ecoles de Santé. The thermidorean Convention thus made provision for professional education of physicians as well as engineers and teachers. In this instance too the revolutionary courses on saltpeter and gunpowder were the putative model to be emulated in recruitment and, initially, for pedagogy. On 23 August 1794 the Committee of Public Safety jointly with the Comité d’Instruction Publique appointed a commission, Fourcroy in the chair, with instructions to frame a measure for the training of doctors, most urgently for the Army. He brought in a report on 27 November (7 frimaire). The ´ draft proposed a medical clone of the Ecole des Travaux Publics, to be called École Centrale de Santé and situated in the former College of Surgery, now ´ known as the ancienne Faculté in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine. Local officials were to choose one student from each district. On arrival in Paris 209

Dupin (1819), p. 70.

´ VII. 6. ECOLE DE SANT E´

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they were to be assigned to classes at the level of first-, second-, or third-year instruction according to the degree of their preparation and to be taught in the accelerated manner of revolutionary courses as their contemporaries were to be at the future Polytechnique.210 There was no mention of schools outside Paris. It was not, evidently, Fourcroy’s doing that the eventual design derived rather from Vicq d’Azyr’s New Plan for Medicine. Amendments moved during debate and incorporated in the legislation of 14 frimaire an III (4 December 1794) brought the model closer to the reform that Fourcroy’s onetime mentor had designed, albeit with modifications in the interest of economizing time and cost. Duration of study was to be three years instead of four, and instead of the five schools Vicq d’Azyr had recommended, there were to be three. Three hundred students were to enroll in Paris, one hundred and fifty in Montpellier, and one hundred in Strasbourg. Courses were to begin on 1 pluviôse (21 January 1795). In one respect the provisions were more generous than those of the New Plan. Students would receive a stipend, as at the Ecole Polytechnique, instead of paying tuition.211 The central feature of Vicq d’Azyr’s reform was not then put in doubt. Henceforth, training of doctors and surgeons was to be unified. Not merely would the inferior status of surgery be eliminated. The very distinction must disappear. Graduates would be neither doctors nor surgeons. All would be Officers of Health. The staff would consist of twelve professors and twelve assistants in Paris, eight such pairs in Montpellier, and six in Strasbourg. Each school would be associated with local hospitals and would be furnished with a library, laboratories, anatomical and natural history collections, surgical instruments and apparatus, and a garden of medicinal plants. As to the curriculum, provisions of the legislation were an abbreviated summary of the scheme for courses of instruction that Vicq d’Azyr had elaborated in 1991. Students in the second and third years would accompany their professors or other doctors in their hospital rounds, assist in surgical operations, and observe or even perform autopsies. The teaching, in a word, was to be clinical, as it had long been in surgery, instead of bookish as it had reputedly been in medicine. With respect to this, the fundamental reform, students both medical and surgical had already voted with their feet. The legislation in effect legitimated their response after 1789 when Pierre-Joseph Desault, chief surgeon of the HôtelDieu since 1786, invited students in general to attend his public lessons and operations in the new surgical amphitheater of the huge hospital. Prior to construction of that facility, built in 1788 to accommodate 300 spectators, 210 PVCd’IP 4, pp. 979–980. The full report was printed separately, “Rapport et projet de ´ décret sur l’établissement d’une Ecole centrale de santé a` Paris” (1794/an III). 211 Above, chapter 1, section 4; PVCd’IP 5, pp. 281–283.

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students at the College of Surgery had accompanied Desault in his rounds as an extracurricular part of their training. Desault himself described how they were obliged to cluster about a bed, often containing several patients. Those in the back would climb on the edge of other beds in order to see the invalids and hear the diagnosis and prognosis. All would then crowd around operating tables located right in the wards. So closely did they press in that his elbow would often be jostled while cutting, excising, and suturing. Throughout his career, beginning with private courses in the 1760s, Desault committed himself equally to the improvement, systematization, and teaching of surgery. Appointed professor at the College of Surgery in 1776, he was later named surgeon at the Charité hospital, second in size to the Hôtel-Dieu. Throughout, students followed him in his rounds, but only in the small hospice of the college was clinical experience an integral part of its own training program. Hospitals, after all, were not and are not primarily educational institutions. Desault’s admission of students to the Hôtel-Dieu met with fierce resistance from the nursing staff, consisting of Augustinian sisters. In their view patients, for the most part indigent, were properly objects of charity, there to be cared for. Their suffering was not a matter for public display. Installation of an amphitheater, where operations became drama, gave even greater offense than violation of the corpse by autopsy. The administrators of the hospital overrode the objections and supported Desault in his determination to impart the highest possible degree of skill to future physicians and surgeons alike. He met with other chagrins, however. In the heady egalitarian climate of 1791, students who were not among the select 300 admitted gratis to his course rebelled against his authority. Claiming to be 2,000 strong, they presented a petition to the National Assembly objecting to his charging fees, which effectively excluded them, and which indeed were dropped thereafter. His reputation on the left did not recover. On 28 May 1793 Desault was arrested by order of the radical Revolutionary Committee of the Luxembourg.212 Intervention by Fourcroy, who put in hand a petition signed by fifty doctors, won his release three days later, and Desault continued his course throughout the Terror. On 14 December 1794 the Comité d’Instruction Publique named him to be professor of clinical surgery, one of the ´ twelve chairs instituted at the Ecole de Santé, even while he continued in his post at the Hôtel-Dieu (renamed Hospice d’Humanité).213 Courses began in January 1795. In early May the Committee of General Security called on Desault to attend the infant son of Louis XVI, who had fallen ill in prison in the Temple. Desault became violently sick on 1 June after dining with 212 Gelfand (1973) publishes the petition and Desault’s outraged response, in which he gives a full account of his practice. 213 PVCd’IP 5, p. 316.


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certain representatives of the people and died that night. Though never confirmed, poison was suspected, the more so that the colleague who had been with him in the Temple and another named to take their place died soon afterward in the same manner.214 Desault published nothing on his own. The main source for knowledge of his methods and techniques is the edition of his Oeuvres chirurgicales, compiled by the most noted of his disciples, Xavier Bichat.215 Beginning in 1792 the value of Desault’s teaching was proven on the field of battle, where realities of combat forced physicians to join surgeons in hands-on treatment of casualties. The eminence of many of his students constitutes longer-range evidence of his place in medical history (although he himself, ironically enough, opposed the unification of surgery with medicine). Among them, ´ besides Bichat, were five members of the staff at the Ecole de Santé: J.-N. Corvisart, Philippe Pelletan, Marie Lallemand, Fran¸cois Chaussier, and Antoine Dubois, and countless physicians and surgeons both military and civilian. Bichat in turn inspired the careers of Jean-Louis Alibert, GaspardLaurent Bayle, Fran¸cois Magendie, and above all Théophile Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope. Such was the surgical component that in considerable part formed the practice of the Paris School of Clinical Medicine, drawing students from all over Europe and America in the early nineteenth century. The view has been long and widely held in medical circles, and among historians of medicine, that in general the teaching hospital, newly associated with a university faculty, became the seat of medical education and research at the hands of the Paris School of Clinical Medicine. Pathological anatomy there and then, it has been said, displaced nosology as the basis for the understanding of disease. Classification gave way to analysis. The explanation of a malady henceforth lay in the lesions it produced in certain body parts, not in some interaction between its nature and the nature of the invalid. No longer content with external observation and mere symptoms, doctors sought to penetrate inside the body so far as possible—by auscultation, by palpation, by thoracic and abdominal percussion, by peering down throats, by thumping and listening to chests front and back, if need be by surgery. The stethoscope worn around the neck became the doctor’s signet. They treated diseases, not patients. Physicians observed the facts and abjured theories, with the exception in some instances of vitalism. The classic Hippocratic consideration of environment, individual temperament, humors, diet, climate, seasons, symptoms, and appearance was a practice of the past. Alleviation of suffering was to be achieved by intervention, not by 214

PVCd’IP 6, p. 380, n. 1. ´ Oeuvres chirurgicales de P.-J. Desault (3 vols., 1798). Bichat’s Eloge appears in volume 1. Translated into many languages, the work was a trusted manual in the early nineteenth century. The four volumes of the ephemeral Journal de chirurgerie (1791–1796) mostly consist of notes taken by students. 215

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aiding nature to effect a cure. Detailed case histories were to be kept for selected patients with interesting conditions, not only or mainly in order to follow their individual progress or decline, but with the larger purpose of establishing records of the course of every identifiable disease in statistically significant numbers. Their availability drew the interest of Laplace to medicine as a field ripe for the application of probabilistic analysis to human concerns. Indefatigable dissection broadened the data base—Bichat was said to have opened 600 cadavers. With respect to this, the canonical picture, scholars of very different persuasions, most influentially Erwin Ackerknecht and Michel Foucault, have agreed that all of the above were main features of the revolutionary transformation that modernized the profession and practice of medicine, first in France, then throughout Europe.216 In no art or discipline was the transition from an encyclopedic to a positivistic framework of knowledge and action more categorical and complete. Recent scholarship has qualified and tempered this viewpoint in several respects, and in one important instance rejected it altogether.217 Certain reservations turn on the immediate realities in Paris. Laurence Brockliss has complemented his reevaluation of the curriculum of French colleges in the old regime with a collaboration exhibiting that medical education and practice, also far from null, were more solid and effective than revolutionary rhetoric allowed.218 Furthermore, the promise of an egalitarian, vitalized, hands-on medical training in the 1790s was far better than the performance until well into the nineteenth century. Legislation could not erase the prejudice that relegated surgeons to a lower status than doctors in point of professional prestige. There was still no formal institutional connection between faculty and hospital. Lectures in the classroom remained quite separate from clinical instruction. Too many students with too little discipline crowded into Paris. The number exceeded 1,000 by 1800, and the official courses in clinical medicine failed to be effective for more than a favored handful. Few of those trooping along in a professor’s wake could push close enough to the bed to see the patient, about whose case the discourse was often hurried and perfunctory. For most students, real access to sustained bedside experience required paying the fee to enroll in one of the private courses given by physicians with privileges at one or another of the many hospitals in Paris. ´ Final oral examinations in the Ecole de Médicine were little more than a formality. There was no provision for licensing. Quacks abounded through216

The principal works are Ackerknecht (1967), Foucault (1963), and Sournia (1989). Important for particular aspects are Gelfand on surgery (1980), Maulitz on pathological anatomy (1987), Nicolson on diagnosis (1992, 1993), and Pickstone on physiology (1981). 217 Essays and a valuable introduction discussing the state of the question are in Hannaway and La Berge (1998). 218 Brockliss and Jones (1997).


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out the city and the country, and the vast majority of the population still depended on folk medicine.219 ´ Attempts to meet realistic expectations began with creation of an Ecole Pratique de Dissection in October 1797. It marked the first formal retreat from the principle of equal access. Chosen through competition, 150 select students, scalpel in hand, could there learn anatomy by opening cadavers.220 It was left for the Consulate, however, to systematize what the Revolution had begun while restricting liberty and equality, though not fraternity, in the interest of practicality. In the field of medicine, as throughout the polity at large, the initiative came from Chaptal in the Ministry of the Interior. A directive adopted by the Conseil général des Hospices on 23 February 1802 opened the posts of extern and intern in the Paris hospitals to medical students who succeeded in the competition for appointment. They might apply for an externship in their second year of studies. Those accepted would take an active part alongside the doctors in examining and treating patients. Others, the majority, could be no more than spectators in the ´ clinical offerings of the Ecole de Médecine and would have to pick up what training they could get in private courses. On completion of their medical studies externs might apply for an internship. Interns were in effect residents at the beginning of their careers who, while reporting to the responsible physician, would themselves treat patients and be available in emergencies. Such a post, obviously, has become a universal stage in medical education throughout the world.221 Finally on 11 March 1803 (19 ventôse an XI) the Corps Législatif adopted the measure that is the historical point of departure for the body of regulations governing both medical education and medical practice in France ever since. Fourcroy framed the legislation as he had done the 1794 law (14 fri´ ´ maire) that it replaced. The Ecoles de Santé were now renamed Ecoles de Médecine (to become Facultés in 1808). Not to go into detail, medical practitioners, including midwives and pharmacists, had now to be licensed by the state. The degree and diploma of doctor were restored and extended to surgeons. As in the old regime, it required successful completion and defense of a thesis, though no longer in Latin. Physicians and surgeons were still to be trained together, but the distinction of the specialties was recognized. The term “officers of health” henceforth designated, not the whole profession, but a lower tier, the equivalent of country doctors. Without taking a degree they might qualify themselves through three years of medical education, five years of hospital training, or six years of apprenticeship to a licensed practitioner. Clearly it was bound to require a generation or more 219 220 221

Ramsey (1988); Brockliss and Jones (1997), pp. 818–834; Brockliss (1998). Imbault-Huard (1973); see Keel (2001), chapter 4. On the externat and internat, see Keel (2001), chapter 4.

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before the transformation of the medical profession in its higher reaches in Paris, Strasbourg, and Montpellier had appreciable effects in the delivery of health care in town and country throughout France.222 More generally, indeed very generally, Othmar Keel has recently drawn together the findings of meticulous studies published over the last twentyfive years and extended them in an impressive work.223 He there disputes the primacy of the Paris School of Clinical Medicine with respect to any and all of the factors that, he agrees, did modernize the European practice of medicine in the period between, roughly, 1750 and 1830. His main findings follow. Item: Clinical teaching and research, though not called that in the late eighteenth century, had already begun then under the leadership of Auenbrugger in Vienna, of Morgagni in Pavia, of William and John Hunter in London, and of James Carmichael Smyth, Alexander Munro primus, and Alexander Munro secundus in Edinburgh. So also had hospital reform under the impetus of enlightened despotism in Austria and Germany and of philanthropy in England and Scotland. In Paris too, not only Desault but also his successor at La Charité, Corvisart, neither of whom had any connection with the Faculty of Medicine, were conducting students on their rounds in the years before the Revolution. Item: The importance of surgery in the study and teaching of anatomy for medical purposes was not peculiar to France. Even like Desault and Corvisart at the Charité, and indeed before them, leading teachers and practitioners in Britain, the Hunters in London and the Munros in Edinburgh, had had their formation in surgery before turning to medical teaching. They trained their many students accordingly, among them Matthew Baillie and Benjamin Rush. Item: In the wars of the eighteenth century, military medicine throughout Europe amounted to a dress rehearsal for reform of public health later in the century. Physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists perforce worked together in service to hygiene, sanitation, treatment of wounds, and controlling epidemics. Military hospitals could not in effect fail to be clinical. Item: In Vienna, Pavia, London, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, hospitals had begun evolving into institutions for the professional study and treatment of disease at the hands of doctors and surgeons and were no longer merely charitable foundations for nursing the poor and sick and sheltering the outcasts of society—the orphans, the aged, the mad, the homeless, the syphilitic—although those needs had still to be met. Item: The modern conception that disease is the manifestation of pathological lesions in specific parts of the body did not originate with the French 222 223

Ramsay (1988), pp. 77–82; Brockliss (1989). Keel (2001).


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school. It may be traced back at the very least to the anatomical work of Giovanni-Battista Morgagni in Pavia, who indeed was much cited by Vicqd’Azyr in the Dictionnaire de Médicine. True, Morgagni largely limited his scrutiny to the pathology of particular organs in this, that, or the other location in the body and did not analyze the nature of the tissues that compose them. Item: With respect to diagnosis, the notion is quite wrong that percussion and auscultation as developed by Auenbrugger in Vienna fell out of use until Corvisart’s translation of his treatise in 1808. In fact (in Keel’s view) Corvisart failed to understand the technique fully. In any case, variants were part of the regular procedures practiced and taught by others in Austria and Germany and by the Hunters and Alexander Munro secundus in Britain. In all those centers regular autopsies served to confirm or disconfirm diagnoses. Item: Finally, appreciation of the pathology of tissues, though it did not figure in Morgagni’s work, did antedate Bichat and the French Clinical School to whom it is normally attributed. Knowledge that lesions characteristic of a certain disease affect the same tissue—synovial, muscular, serous, nervous, and so forth—in the same way, whatever the organ in which they are constituents, is the crux of pathological anatomy. In Keel’s account, Bichat had it from Pinel who in turn had taken the point without acknowledgment from Smyth. Haller also carried analysis beyond organs to the level of membranes and tissues, as did the Hunters. The approach later called histological and the discipline of general anatomy that flowed from it were thus not, Keel insists persuasively, the fruit of Pinel’s application of Condillacian ideology to pathological problems. This summary oversimplifies a work rich in convincing detail. Keel does not deny that the Paris School of Clinical Medicine did exist, and that it did dispense a medical training and promote a medical practice transformed in France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Nor does he deny that it made important contributions to the development of medicine elsewhere, though what they were he does not specify. Instead, the central purpose of his book is to reduce the role of the French School to politicizing, rhetoricizing, and in signal instances plagiarizing innovations that had been underway elsewhere in Europe since the middle of the eighteenth century. In a historiographical sense Keel’s deconstruction of the Paris School of Clinical Medicine may be read as the case in medicine of revisionism concerning the French Revolution itself. Of those events in general, it may similarly be said that no essential aspect of modernity was original with the revolutionary generation. Natural rights, consent of the governed, sovereignty of the people, representative and constitutional government, republican polity, citizenship, the dignity of labor, democratic principle, public safety as the supreme law—these assertions and practices and others like them are to be found in one or several of the following: Athenian gover-

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nance, the Roman Republic, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the writings of the philosophes, particularly of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the physiocrats, and the Encyclopedists. Reforms attempted in France itself during the reign of Louis XVI are a further instance. It may further be argued, and in a restricted sense Tocqueville hinted as much, that the French Revolution was unnecessary, that the elements of modernity would have come together in the normal course of historical evolution without being fired in the crucible of idealism, passion, violence, terror, war, and imperialism. Perhaps. Who can know? But the fact is they did not, and counterfactual history can never be more than hypothetical. The fact is that the French Revolution fused those elements into a concerted, messianic movement to remake the world and to shape a democratic future. The political dynamics of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth stem from that seminal fact. But the French Revolution was more than politics. The tsunami it launched into the future stirred deeper waters. As will appear, the leading spirits in sectors comparable to medicine partook of the general determination to remake their professional worlds in keeping with the positivist orientation that defined the historical moment. The makings of a modern exact physics ´ existed before the foundation of the Ecole Polytechnique. But only its early graduates, no longer either géomètres or natural philosophers, founded modern mathematical physics on purpose by expressly practicing it. The makings of comparative anatomy were there before transformation of the Jardin du Roi into the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. But only the members of its staff turned themselves from naturalists into practitioners of a new science of life, a rigorous biology. These developments, as seminal in their sectors as the political impetus in the larger society, did not unfold out of some logic inherent in the respective sciences any more than democracy followed from the logic of enlightenment. They came about in consequence of programs, programs of research. Our concern is not with medicine itself, but with the scientific roots (there were also other roots) and with the by-products of Paris Medicine, of which the autonomy of experimental physiology was the most important. Nevertheless, a word needs to be said, if only in passing, about the modernization of medicine. For in France that process was if anything more programmatic than was the concurrent formation of the modern scientific disciplines. Vicq d’Azyr’s New Plan for Medicine was a far more express and comprehensive blueprint than any course laid out in advance for physics or biology. Vicq d’Azyr was well aware that its prescriptions were nothing new in detail. They simply reflected the best and most effective practices, both technical and institutional, that were already under way, in France and abroad. Paris Clinical Medicine went to school, so to say, to that plan,


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however modified in practical reality. Its novelty was in the whole and in the revolutionary spirit animating members of the generation who answered to the summons. Nothing of the sort emanated from the entourages of Morgagni, Haller, Smyth, Munro primus and secundus, nor even the Hunters. Their discoveries in pathology (Keel leaves no doubt that these were real), their practices in diagnosis (he leaves no doubt that these were penetrating), their teaching (he leaves no doubt it happened at the bedside)—in none of all this did they envision a reform of the whole system of health care, including the profession of medicine, in a manner consonant with the reform of society at large. Connotations of the word rhetoric have become pejorative in recent usage. None of the above physicians was guilty of it in their writings, whether in Latin or in the vernacular. Their case histories and pathological reports are severely and properly technical, written for the trade in the sense that mathematics is said to be written for mathematicians. If language is to have effects outside such boundaries, however, it had better partake of rhetorical qualities. That was clearly not the only reason for the appeal Paris held for foreign students. After the close of the Napoleonic wars and until mid-century, thousands of American, British, German, Dutch, and other medical students flocked to Paris. They did not normally take degrees at the Faculté de Médecine. Their purpose was to experience a year or two of practical training in what was widely considered the world center of medical sophistication. The excitement of living in Paris certainly had a lot to do with it. But the main attraction was the wealth of opportunity for observing and helping to treat patients in the Hôtel-Dieu, the Charité, the Saint-Louis, and other of the many hospitals, for observing operations in surgical amphitheaters, and for performing autopsies and dissecting cadavers in the attached facilities. Foreign students were astounded that no tuition fees were charged. ´ Still, the official courses at the Ecole de Médecine and the Collège de France were crowded. Up to 200 French students or more might follow the professors in morning rounds during which their expositions would often be hurried and inaudible. Many Americans were unable to follow lectures in French in any case. They got their hands-on training from their contemporaries. Interns gave private courses for modest fees to small groups of pre-doctoral French and foreign students, usually four or five at a time. They were allowed to circulate in the wards in the late afternoons or evenings and to pick out the most interesting and instructive cases for discussion and treatment. That is how the neophytes learned the diagnostic techniques of percussion, auscultation, and stethoscopic analysis. American students would typically attend a few lectures of Laënnec, Alibert, Dupuytren, Magendie, Broussais, or Corvisart

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just to say they had seen and heard the great men. It was, however, through time at the bedside, and general exposure to the ambience of Paris medicine, rather than through the express tutelage of its leaders, that they came home imbued with the conviction that observation and experience were alone reliable, that theories were a sham, and that the practice of medicine was a positive, newly professional undertaking based upon science.224 224

Warner (1998a, 1998b).

CHAPTER VIII

Bonaparte and the Scientific Community

1. MONGE IN ITALY, 1796–1798

The curve of Bonaparte’s historical trajectory turned sharply upward with the Italian campaign of 1796–97 and the landing of his expeditionary force in Alexandria in August 1798. Italy was the making of his military reputation, legendary from the outset, and Egypt the proconsular, and as it turned out pre-Consular, interlude before seizing power. Monge and Berthollet were at his side throughout. Invasion of Italy and occupation of Egypt had, one will not say a cultural justification, but a cultural or, perhaps better, a modernizing component. Later conquests, after Bonaparte declared himself Napoleon I in 1804, were merely imperial. In Monge’s eyes, and many true believers thought as he did, Bonaparte’s army was the bearer of the French Revolution and Bonaparte the hero who could save it from itself. Enlightened Italian opinion did not disagree at the outset. In the first fine flush of enthusiasm, and hopes never entirely soured, the French came on as liberators from foreign rule.1 Italianate qualities of the Corsican conqueror encouraged hopes for national dignity. Progressive civic sentiment rallied to his side. Bonaparte flattered its representatives in Milan, Padua, and other cities of northern Italy. In the interludes of winning battles against the Austrians, he visited universities, sought out scientists, and took a hand in framing laws and constitutions for the Cispadane and Cisalpine Republics, with which he replaced the crazy quilt of Austrian-ruled or -dominated duchies from Lombardy to the borders of Tuscany. The recapture of Toulon on 19 December 1793 had brought Bonaparte to general notice. In late August, leaders of an insurgent rising against the jacobin dictatorshsip of the city, headquarters of the Mediterranean fleet, had welcomed protection by the British Navy blockading the port. Four months later forces of the Convention mounted an assault. Bonaparte assumed command of the artillery when his superior officer was wounded and carried the day. Promoted brigadier general on the recommendation of 1

On the political aspects of the French in Italy from 1796 to 1799, see Palmer (1959–64), 2, pp. 263–326.

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VIII. BONAPARTE AND THE SCIENTISTS

Robespierre’s brother, Augustin, and several fellow representatives on mission in the Midi, Bonaparte came under a shadow after 9 thermidor, only to emerge on 5 October 1795 (13 vendémiaire). Ten days earlier the expiring Convention, fearful of a royalist victory in the forthcoming elections, adopted a decree requiring that 500 of its deputies be among the 750 members constituting the two houses of the legislative body of the future Directory. In protest against the two-thirds ukase, royalists staged a demonstration that threatened violence from the right of the sort that the last sans-culotte rising had visited on the Convention from the left four months previously (30 prairial). Called on with other formerly jacobin officers to protect the deputies, Bonaparte commanded the artillery that dispersed the rioters with Carlyle’s famous whiff of grapeshot. Ten days later he was promoted major general and, on 26 October, was named commander of the Army of the Interior with the rank of full general. From 1795 to 1797 Carnot as Director continued to run the war. When feelers for peace with Austria failed, the strategy he devised called for the Army of the Rhine under Jourdan and the Army of the Danube under Moreau to close a pincers on Vienna and dictate peace terms. Bonaparte, in command of the Army of Italy, was to create a diversion south of the Alps. Instead, Jourdan and Moreau failed, and the diversion turned out to be the main show. There is no need to rehearse here the string of victories by virtue of which Bonaparte drove the kingdom of Sardinia from the war, annexed Nice and Savoy to France, and occupied northern Italy. Streets, bridges, and quais in Paris are named to commemorate the signal battles: Mont-Cenis, Montenotte, Mondovi, Lodi, Castiglione, Arcole, Rivoli. Bonaparte assumed command of the Army of Italy in Nice on 27 March 1796. His early victories in April, and full awareness in Paris of Italian artistic wealth and scientific productivity, called to mind the cultural harvest reaped in Belgium and Holland in the year just past.2 On that express model, the Directory in late May appointed a set of “Commissioners of the Government to seek out objects of science and art in the countries conquered by the Armies of the Republic.”3 Named to the commission were Monge and Berthollet for the sciences, Thouin and La Billardière for natural history (Lacepède having refused), Barthélemy and Tinet for the fine arts, 2

Above, chapter 6, section 6. On Monge in Italy, see Launay (1933), pp. 196–226, and Aubry (1954). A transcription by Monge’s son-in-law, Eugène Eschassériaux, of his correspondence with his wife and family is in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France. The largest portion concerns his two missions in Italy. A microfilm and printout may be consulted in the library of Princeton University. Still more useful is an Italian translation, edited and thoroughly annotated by Cardinale and Pepe (1993). The “avant-propos” of the August 2002 issue, no. 31, of Sabix announces that the de ´ Chaubry family, descended from Monge, are placing his papers in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique. 3

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and Dejoux and Moitte for sculpture. Though not officially chairman, Monge was the leading personage and de facto coordinator of its activities. At his initiative, books and manuscripts were included in the mission.4 ´ Monge took leave of his wife, turned over his course at the Ecole Polytechnique to Hachette, and in company with the commission departed for Milan on 23 May 1796. When he there met with Bonaparte (he thought for the first time) on 7 June, the general, whom he still spells “Buonaparte,” expressed appreciation for having been received briefly as an unknown junior artillery officer from Corsica while Monge was Minister of the Navy. Monge was fifty years old and Bonaparte twenty-seven when their friendship began in Milan. The older man was charmed at once. Based at first in Milan, the Commission reached out into Lombardy to collect incunabula and manuscripts, among them autographs of Leonardo and Galileo from the Ambrosiana Library; many further incunabula from the library of Brera; objects of art from churches and municipal galleries in Milan, Pavia, and Cremona; and among other things, a natural history collection with specimens of vulcanology from the University of Pavia. Monge reports their success in a stream of enthusiastic letters to his wife. He and his colleagues followed in the wake of the army to Bologna, where he was thrilled with the paintings of Guido Reni, Caracci, Domenichino, Garofalo, Guercino, and especially Raphael’s altar piece, the Glorification of Saint Cecilia, with whom he could have fallen in love. The convent of San Salvatore was especially rich in codices and incunabula, while the Bolognese Institute yielded a rich trove of Etruscan vases, microscopes, a clever camera obscura, and a fine collection of minerals, shells, and fossils. From Bologna the commission moved on to Ferrara (the most beautiful city in Italy, in Monge’s view), Modena (in late August the French supported a rebellion against the reigning Duke), and Florence (Tuscany had remained formally neutral). At each stage Monge saw to assembling the trophies and Berthollet to crating and shipping them. Canvases were removed from frames and carefully rolled. Sculptures were carefully padded and secured. In making his ´ selections Monge never forgot the needs of the Ecole Polytechnique for both 5 scientific instruments and books. Shipments went from each location to Milan, where they were assembled to be transported in a series of convoys to Paris. The tone of Monge’s letters home mingles satisfaction with the rightness of exporting democratic revolution, the enthusiasm of a tourist enraptured on a first visit to Italy, and the enterprise of an art dealer with no scruples about a free hand in a good cause. Treaties imposed on local rulers veiled his 4

Pepe (1997). ´ On the involuntary Italian contributions to the library and laboratories of the Ecole Polytechnique, see Pepe (1996b). 5

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mission in a cloak of legality, and the question of its propriety seem never to have entered his mind. On the contrary, according to Charles Dupin, a former student and disciple, whose memoir conveys Monge’s sense of the mission, French curatorial expertise saved the legacy of antiquity and the Renaissance from the mold, decay, and insects that threatened them owing to the neglect in which those treasures had too long languished in damp churches and rundown galleries throughout a backward Italy. Their restoration and installation in the Louvre would preserve and make them available to all Europe in the city that currently wore the mantles of democratic Athens and republican Rome.6 Only on a later visit to the port of Livorno does Monge mention having encountered a certain hostility, though not because of the work of the commission. Merchants there were unhappy to have exchanged real profits from exports to England for theoretical liberties imported from France. To his surprise his stock after-dinner speech to local notables on the benefits of the Revolution fell flat, and glasses remained on the table when his colleague proposed a toast. The reception was also cool when the Commission entered Rome at the end of July 1796. It arrived there by virtue of an armistice imposed on the Holy See, as if in anticipation of the concordat with the papacy prior to Napoleon’s self-coronation in December 1804 with the Pope standing by in Notre Dame. Facing Austrian counteroffensives in the North, Bonaparte needed to protect his rear. He agreed to spare the States of the Church on four conditions: that their northern reaches be abandoned to the French, that treasures of the Church be sold to pay the expenses of the French army, that works of art be selected by the Commission in Rome, and that French sovereignty be recognized in Avignon and the surrounding Comtat-Venaissin. For once, albeit briefly, Monge was disappointed in his idol of a general. The temporal power of the papacy was a scandal. Only republicanization of all Italy would be worthy of the Revolution. In another of Napoleon’s sayings from Saint Helena, “Monge loved democracy and equality like the results of a geometric demonstration.”7 His letters from Rome are an anti-clerical diatribe. Priestly rule has brutalized and degraded the populace. Inhabitants of the nearby Appenines are little better than savages. A momentary impediment from Paris threatened the work of his Commission. Artistic circles there took alarm at the prospect of despoiling Rome, world capital of the fine arts, of its heritage. For generations the French Academy had been the seat of training and apprenticeship under Italian masters. In mid-August fifty artists, among them David and Vivant Denon, future curator of the Louvre, signed a petition addressed to the Directory 6 7

Dupin (1819), pp. 96–99. Quoted in Launay (1933), p. 61.

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urging the government to consider whether it was really in the interests either of France or the artistic community in general to strip Rome of its monuments of antiquity and of the masterpieces of painting and sculpture that filled its galleries and museums. Voices of conscience—Roederer, the architect Quatremère de Quincy, others—joined in a faint chorus of qualms. At the same time, the Directors themselves were feeling worry over Bonaparte’s exceeding his instructions and ignoring their authority.8 Monge derided these concerns. Such was the plethora of art in Rome, such the mass of manuscripts, that anything expropriated by the Commission would leave imperceptible dents. He and the commission were in Rome twice, from July to October 1796 and again, with brief interruptions, from February to August 1797. They completed their collecting in July 1797. Busts of Junius, Brutus, Homer, and Demosthenes, the Discobolus, the Vestals, the Laocoön, the nine Muses, the Faun and the Flute, the youth pulling a thorn from his foot, the Apollo Belvidere, in sum eighty-three pieces of ancient sculpture; paintings of Raphael, Guerchino, Carracci, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and many lesser masters; some five hundred bulky manuscripts from the Vatican library—all this required fifty carriages conveyed in four convoys to the port of Livorno and shipped to Marseilles. A fifth, too heavy to be transported overland, went directly down the Tiber. Joined by the objects collected earlier in Lombardy and Modena and the Lion of San Marco from Venice, the shipment reached Paris only in July 1798 after vicissitudes and bad weather en route. Parading the trophies on the Champ de Mars was the occasion of a great festival prior to their installation in the Louvre, lesser museums, and appropriate libraries.9 To general anger, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 required return of most of the masterpieces to ´ their place of origin. The library of the Ecole Polytechnique, however, lost none of its acquisitions. During the Commission’s second stay in Rome, Bonaparte charged Monge with a mission other than artistic or scientific. The Treaty of Tolentino with the Pope required the Vatican to turn over items from its treasury to help provide for the expenses and payroll of the French Army, which lived off the lands it occupied. To that end, Monge was given the task of inventorying and evaluating the items to be put up for sale—gold ingots, jewels, and diamonds from the tiaras of many a past Pope. From time to time Bonaparte called on Monge for other, more political and personal services. In October 1796 Monge participated in establishing the Cispadane Republic, which consisted of Bologna, Mantua, Modena, and Ferrara. In company with Bonaparte he attended the first Congress on 16 October. Its Declaration of Rights was a virtual translation from the French Declaration of 1789, 8 9

Cardinale and Pepe (1993), pp. 29–30. Dupin (1819) gives an evocative account.

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while the ensuing Constitution adopted in March 1797 was modeled on that of the Directory in the year III. Three months later, in June, the Cispadane was merged into the Cisalpine Republic based on similar principles and comprising all northern Italy except for most of Venetia and the Ligurian littoral, converted into another republic. By mid-summer 1797 Monge had had enough of Italy and, the work of the Commission completed, wished to return to Paris, his family, and the ´ Ecole Polytechnique. Bonaparte would have none of that. In moments of relaxation the commanding general preferred the conversation of Monge and Berthollet, often with Italian colleagues, to the company of other retainers. He kept them with him throughout the campaigns that ended with occupation of Venice and a thrust to the North that opened the way to Vienna. Bonaparte stopped short of that and proposed an armistice to the Austrian Archduke Karl. Altogether exceeding his powers, he proceeded on his own to negotiate a treaty of peace with Austria that recognized the French dispensations in Italy and granted the Hapsburg empire sovereignty over Istria and the Dalmatian Coast in exchange for its lost territories and the newly created Venetian Republic. That occurred on 17 October 1797— the next day he dispatched two messengers, Monge and his chief of staff, General Alexandre Berthier, to take the text of the treaty of Campoformio to the Directory. “We must,” he charged the rulers of France, “esteem scientists and support science. Pray extend an equally honorable welcome to the distinguished general and the learned scientist. Both are a credit to the country and contribute to the reputation of France.”10 Within four months Monge was back in Rome, this time on a mission of quite another sort. On 28 December 1798 democratic rioters protesting the papal government took refuge from the police in the French embassy, which had encouraged their actions. Joseph Bonaparte was the ambassador. Assassinated during the mélée was the military attaché, General Duphot. Berthier, now in command of the Army of Italy, marched on Rome to avenge what the Directory called an affront to “the majesty of the French Republic.” Under orders from Paris, he deposed the Pope as temporal ruler. The Roman Republic was declared on 10 February 1798. It remained to give it a constitution and establish local civil authority. To that end the Directory, already apprehensive about its own relations with the military, named a new commission consisting of Daunou, its constitution maker; Florent, a career bureaucrat in the ministry of foreign affairs; and (almost certainly at Bonaparte’s insistence) Monge. The constitution, like the others during Italy’s involuntary three-year experiment with republicanism, was a modification of the Directory’s. Its terms need not Bonaparte to the Directoire Exécutif, 18 October 1797, Correspondance de Napoléon 1er 2 (1859), p.390. 10

VIII. 2. THE EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION

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detain us, nor need the tangled affairs of Rome during the year and a half prior to the defeat of the French by combined Austrian and Russian forces in the closing months of 1799. The interval included momentary mutiny by unpaid French troops and exaction from the impoverished city of some 70 million francs in tribute, with which (less the sums pocketed by its commanders) the Directory financed, not only its failing operations in Italy, but also the pending Egyptian expedition.11 There is good reason to think that discussions of a possible Egyptian diversion had occupied Bonaparte and Monge in their many conversations during the months before Campoformio. Monge took little part in drafting a constitution for the Roman Republic or in the tri-partite political negotiations between Daunou’s commission, the French military, and Roman civilians. He arrived in Rome for the third time on 22 February 1798. On 5 March the Directory approved Bonaparte’s proposal for the invasion of Egypt. Apparently acting on prior instruction, Monge wrote to Bonaparte on the fifteenth that he would immediately proceed to the office of the Propaganda to see to securing and crating its three printing presses with type fonts in the Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Syriac alphabets. He would also try to find qualified typesetters, but doubted he could round up the five or six requested. Others might be embarked at Marseilles.12 Evidently, therefore, Monge had known the top secret plans before departing Paris. Besides that, Monge took charge of subdividing the territory of the Roman Republic into departments and districts for administrative and legislative purposes. His chief interest, however, was the central role he took in founding the short-lived Istituto Nazionale della Repubblica Romana. Its ´ creation foreshadowed that of the soon-to-be Institut d’Egypte. Instead of the four classes in Paris, there were two—first, mathematical and physical science; second, philosophy, belles-lettres, and liberal arts. There was nothing corresponding to the Class of Moral and Political Sciences.13 On 17 May, Monge left Rome for Civitavecchia, there to embark with Desaix, commander of the army that joined the flotilla transporting the main body of the Egyptian task force in a rendezvous off the island of Malta. 2. THE EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION

Bonaparte returned from Italy to Paris on 5 December 1797 to meet with an adulation that increased the sense of insecurity among the five Directors. After Campoformio, Britain remained the sole power at war with France. In 11

On the Roman Republic, see Palmer (1959–64), 2, pp. 365–382; and on the Daunou commission, Godechot (1937), 2, pp. 17–41. 12 Monge to Bonaparte, 15 March 1798, quoted in Pepe (1996a), pp. 56–57. 13 On Monge and the Istituto in Rome, see Pepe (1996a).

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the light of victory in Italy, and no doubt with the ulterior purpose of keeping so formidable a pretorian at a distance, the Directory prior to Bonaparte’s return appointed him commander of the army that would form to assault and destroy the first, last, and most implacable enemy of the Republic. An intensive reconnaissance of the channel ports in January 1798 convinced him that an invasion could not succeed in the absence of naval superiority, which was unattainable. The code name of the Army stayed the same, but its destination, already under discussion, changed to Egypt.14 Historians have either ignored the rationale of the Egyptian expedition or else taken it for a piece of special pleading. Let us try to enter into the minds of the planners, however, if only that the campaign may seem less a strategic aberration than it is commonly taken to have been. The importance of classical precedents in understanding the symbolism, and even concrete choices, in the Revolution has already been emphasized.15 Think of Caesar winning consular and eventually imperial power in consequence of victories in distant regions. Think of Alexander conquering the very birthplace of civilization, to which Bonaparte would restore science and the arts exiled during millennia of barbarism.16 The memoir of 13 February 1798 in which Talleyrand, then Foreign Minister, commends the prospect to the Directors, opens with this language: “Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire, she must become a province of the French Republic. Roman rule saw the decadence of this beautiful country; French rule will bring it prosperity. The Romans wrested Egypt from kings distinguished in arts and science; the French will lift it from the hands of the most appalling tyrants who have ever existed.”17 Talleyrand meant the Mamelukes. Volney gives an account of their re18 ´ The natural history of human society gime in Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte. exhibits few examples of adaptive hybridization more surprising than this band of gorgeous but sterile Caucasian parasites, rulers of Egypt from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. They had originated as a militia composed of slaves taken in infancy from Georgia and Turkestan by the Ayyubite dynasty in Cairo. Eventually they gathered their masters’ power into their own hands, as their successors did that of the Ottoman Porte, nominally suzerain since the conquest of Egypt by Selim I in 1517. Maintaining harems but no families, the Mamelukes ruled through a cooptive 14

The classic account for the general history of the expedition is the nearly contemporary Reybaud (1830–36), and for military history La Jonquière (1899–1907). Laurens et al. (1989) treats the expedition from the perspectives both of contemporary Egyptians and of the French. Bret (1998) gives an overview of the state of Egypt during the occupation. 15 Above, chapter 8, section 1. 16 Such was the theme of the frontispiece to the Description de l’E´ gypte. 17 La Jonquiére (1899–1907) gives the entire text, 1, pp. 154–168. 18 Above, chapter 7, section 4.


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rather than a hereditary feudalism. Until late in the eighteenth century they replenished their ranks by the purchase of Circassian boys in their original homeland. Egyptian fellahin suffered their exactions mediated by the spiritual authority of their own ulemas as they did the raids of nomadic Arabs, the swirling of sandstorms, and the depredations of locusts. Bribery fueled commerce in Alexandria and Cairo as elsewhere in the Levant. The Near East had long been the most important overseas sector for French trade after the Caribbean colonies. The interests of France in the region were greater than those of any other European power. France maintained a general consulate in Cairo. Thirty or forty French traders and merchants resided in Egypt. The foreign ministry saw to the training of a small corps of orientalists versed in Arabic and Turkish. Provision for the teaching of Oriental languages in Paris went back to the foundation of the Collège de France in the sixteenth century. Military intervention, then, was not merely an impulse imparted by Bonaparte’s ambition. Statesmen had never reconciled themselves to the loss of the French position in India in the Seven Years War. To make up for it, Choiseul, minister of foreign affairs, considered the prospect for seizing Egypt from the faltering hands of the Turks in 1768. The ancient access to Asia across the Isthmus of Suez would thus have been reopened. Officials in the ministry put similar projects before his successors on several occasions during the 1770s and 1780s. They were undoubtedly known to Talleyrand, already in the diplomatic service. Attitudes that would produce applause for such a venture in the name of a “civilizing mission” were fully formed at this, the culminating stage of the Enlightenment, which largely coincided with the descent of the Ottoman Empire into decadence.19 Condorcet appears to have been the first leader of opinion to use the term “Occident,” the West, in its modern sense, connoting the combination of cultural family with civilized norm. In Volney’s account, despotism was the besetting vice of the Orient and liberty its greatest need, the precondition of prosperity and civic virtue. Already, the French distinguished between two colonial strategies. That of the British in India replaced native despotism by foreign oppression. The alternative, their own, would in principle constitute a liberating operation to the mutual benefit of both parties. Such were the suppositions on which Fourier could draw in composing the “Préface historique” that commended the Description de l’Egypte to the public in 1809. Egypt was to have become not simply a colony, but a French province. From the Mediterranean to Nubia, the country might be considered an enormous garden capable of supporting the most varied and valuable agricultural yields. Sugar cane, flax, and indigo (Talleyrand had already written off the rebellious Caribbean colonies) might be cultivated along with 19

Laurens (1987).

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wheat, rice, and other cereals, which Egypt produced abundantly. Soda, alkali, and mineral salts might be extracted from rich deposits of natron. Had the French remained, the local population would have devoted themselves to agriculture and enjoyed the fruits of their labor in full security. The introduction of mechanical inventions would have eased that labor and increased productivity. Arab tribes would have been settled on lands newly rendered fertile by rational irrigation, and the nomads would have been exiled to the desert. The Nile Valley above Aswan would have been explored and central Africa opened to trade in iron, gold, and raw materials of all sorts. Most important of all, the canal that had linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea in antiquity would have been reconstructed. The Directory reached its decision to authorize the Egyptian expedition in the first days of March 1798. On 19 May 1798, the main flotilla sailed from Toulon. It consisted of 13 ships of the line carrying 1,026 cannon; 42 frigates, brigs, and corsairs; and 130 transport vessels of all sorts. Aboard were 17,000 soldiers, an equal number of sailors and marines, 1,000 artillery pieces, 467 vehicles, and 700 horses. Three smaller convoys, Desaix’s from Civitavecchia and two others from Genoa and Ajaccio, joined the main force off Malta prior to occupation of the island en route to Egypt. They brought the total armada to some 400 ships and 36,000 men. At sea, it covered a span of eight to ten kilometers. Bonaparte had imagined, organized, and assembled that expeditionary force in ten weeks’ time and in perfect secrecy. Etienne Malus, for example, a lieutenant of engineers, received orders in Frankfurt detaching him from garrison duty and directing him to report to Toulon for service with the Left Wing of the Army of England. No one knew the real destination apart from Bonaparte’s senior commanders, Kléber, Desaix, and Caffarelli du Falga, and the three senior members of the future Commission of Science and Arts, Monge, Berthollet, and Fourier. Although the notion of westernizing Egypt was not original with Bonaparte, the idea of accomplishing the purpose through the agency of an elaborate scientific and cultural detachment was certainly his. Apart from the precedents in Belgium and Italy, which were on a far smaller scale and with a different, more limited mission, nothing of the sort had ever accompanied a military task force. The expeditionary force landed at Alexandria on 1 July 1798. Through the oven of the summer Bonaparte moved his army clad in Alpine uniforms across the desert and defeated the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July. On 1 August Nelson surprised the French fleet at anchor in Abukir Bay and destroyed it, effectively marooning the French army in the country it controlled. The pretense of liberating the populace from Mameluke despotism gave way to the reality of a military occupation when Cairo rose against its conquerors in a bloody insurrection, swiftly suppressed, on 21 October. Bonaparte’s purpose in invading the Holy Land in early 1799 re-


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mains unclear. Was it to escape with part of his army by way of Turkey? Was it to move against India? In either case, he had to put the best face possible on failure, his first, by falling back on Cairo in pretended triumph in June 1799. Thereupon, he extricated himself and his immediate staff from the impasse by leaving, not to say deserting, his army in August 1799. Slipping through the British blockade, he returned, an ostensible conqueror, to a France beset by temporary reverses, there to seize power as First Consul in the coup d’état of 18 brumaire (9 November). Left in command in Egypt, Kléber continued the occupation with a firm hand. Acting on higher orders from Syria, a devout young Moslem assassinated him on 14 June 1800. His successor, Menou, maintained a faltering French presence until the inevitable capitulation to British forces in September 1801, just over three years after the initial landing. The Commission of Science and Arts, formally constituted after debarkation at Alexandria, numbered at the outset some 151 persons, 84 of whom had technical qualifications while another 10 were medical men. How were they recruited? Bonaparte himself specified what skills were to be represented and how many people he wanted of each sort. He charged General Caffarelli du Falga, commander of the Corps of Engineers, with administrative and financial oversight and with procurement of technical equipment, maps, and books for a library of 500-odd volumes. Since Monge was already in Rome, the main professional responsibility fell to Berthollet and Fourier, Berthollet for the scientists and naturalists, Fourier for the engineers and students. In approaching his colleagues, Berthollet could say only that they were needed for a mission of vital importance to the Republic, that Bonaparte would be its commander, and that Monge and he would be with them. Those with official posts were promised an increased stipend and protection of their positions and seniority on their return. From the observatory of Paris came the astronomers Nicolas-Auguste Nouet, Fran¸cois Quesnot, and Méchain’s son, Jérome, and from the Jardin des Plantes, Geoffroy SaintHilaire, the naturalists Jules-César Lelorgne de Savigny, Hippolyte Nectoux (recently returned from Saint Domingue), Alyre Raffeneau-Delile (not to be confused with his brother, Adrien, an engineer), and two students, Antoine Coquebert and Alexandre Gérard. The latter institution also furnished the flower painter Henri-Joseph Redouté, younger brother of the more famous Pierre-Joseph, “Raphael of the Roses.” Departing from the brigade of military balloonists stationed at Meudon were both its director, Nicolas Conté, inventor of the graphite pencil, and Jean Coutelle, pilot of the observation balloon in the battle of Fleurus. Not everyone agreed to go. Cuvier, beginning his study of comparative anatomy, did not, though he encouraged the tweny-one-year-old botanist Savigny to accept a place as zoologist, saying there was always time to learn the science.

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Six of the number were scientists or naturalists with established reputations: Monge, Berthollet, Déodat de Dolomieu, Fourier, Geoffroy SaintHilaire, and Nouet. Two others, Malus and Savigny, became well known in later years, and Michel-Ange Lancret surely would have done so had he not died young. None of the three senior people stayed the course. Bonaparte included Monge and Berthollet in the immediate circle of staff members who returned to France with him in August 1799. By then Dolomieu had already departed on his own. A onetime Knight of Malta, he was one of two emissaries sent ashore in advance of the landing on Malta to demand that the Grand Master surrender the island. He afterward resented Bonaparte’s having made him appear a traitor to the Order. He was, in any case, not of a temperament or lineage to play courtier to this upstart of a conqueror. “My association with a military expedition, which placed me, albeit indirectly, under the orders of a general, stultified my imagination,” he wrote.20 In March 1799 he found passage on a brig and left Alexandria with his assistant. Storms forced the ship ashore in the Gulf of Taranto, where the Neapolitans threw him into prison at the behest of refugee knights of Malta. Twenty-six months of solitary confinement destroyed his health, and he died shortly after his release in the course of a last mineralogical tour of the mountains since called Dolomites. For the engineers, mostly junior people, Fourier drew on the schools. ´ Seven students were required from the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. A document in its archives gives the names of those whom the Director, Antoine Chézy, nominated to take part in the expedition against England”: Pierre Arnollet, Gaspard-Antoine Chabrol, Simon Fèvre, J.-B. Prosper Jollois, Michel-Ange Lancret, Adrien Raffeneau-Delile, and Claude-Francois ´ Thévenot, all graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique. They already knew the thirteen polytechnicians whom Fourier selected from the classes immediately behind them, notably Edouard Devilliers and Joseph Dubois-Aymé. In Egypt Jollois and Devilliers worked as a team. Along with Edme Jomard, they were among the most prolific contributors to the Description de ´ l’Egypte, and they were instrumental in its eventual completion. Jomard, for ´ his part, had gone on from Polytechnique to the Ecole des IngénieursGéographes. Apparently, they might choose whether or not to accept Fourier’s proposal. In a letter to his father, Jollois explains why he has agreed to “so crazy an idea.” He has always wanted to travel. Here is his chance. He is eager to learn, eager to improve himself, eager for new experiences. Older people, among them the most distinguished of scientists and engineers, are leaving behind their fortunes, wives, children, and brilliant situations. Advisers in whom he has confidence would not propose something likely to be prejudicial to his welfare. The person—he does not name Fourier—who 20

From a memoir written in prison in Messina July 1799, in A. Lacroix (1921), 1, p. 3.


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made the proposal knows the purpose of the expedition, at least in large part, but cannot reveal the secret. The Ionian Isles? Constantinople? Italy? Cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez? It’s all conjecture—at any rate, he’s going.21 What in fact did they do in Egypt, young polytechnicians and older scientists?22 Let us consider each set in turn. On 13 September 1798 Bona´ parte ordered that the students who had not yet graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique should sustain their final examination in public. DuboisAymé, Devilliers, and their classmates settled down to review their courses and on 6 October appeared one by one before a committee consisting of Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Costaz, and Corancez. The date was about the same that it would have been in Paris. Everyone passed, and Bonaparte directed that their commissions be issued. Devilliers urged Dubois-Aymé, who was leaning toward the military engineers, to join him in preferring the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées. It was a fortunate decision. Comrades who made the other choice died of plague or wounds in Syria. Devilliers would have been included in that ill-starred campaign anyway except that he had lost his horse. A few weeks earlier he had fallen asleep in the saddle on a mission in the Delta, rolled off into the sand, and been awakened by a soldier stumbling over him in the dark. Bonaparte had not included polytechnicians in the expedition in order to ´ produce its artistic and cultural monument, the Description de l’Egypte. That was a largely inadvertent by-product undertaken at their own initiative. Fourier had recruited them with an eye to their building roads, bridges, canals, and other public works and to their collaboration on topography and cartography with the slightly older colleagues who already held commissions in the Corps of Engineers or the Ponts et Chaussées. They did do those things. A number took part in the quasi-archaeological project that Bonaparte led himself at the outset, which was a search for the vestiges and route of the ancient Mediterranean–Red Sea Canal. It succeeded, although the surveyors responsible for the traverse had the misfortune to calculate from their data that the level of the Red Sea is 8.5 meters higher than that of the Mediterranean.23 Such work-a-day tasks were little fascinating to the youngsters, however. What enthralled them was Egypt itself, its sand-choked monuments, its stilled enigma, its petrified humanity. Egypt was the great adventure in which they made the transition from boyhood to manhood. Their engagement with it left a more lasting legacy than did the presence there of ´ Jollois, Journal d’un ingénieur attaché a` l’expédition d’Egypte, ed. P. Lefèvre-Pontalis (1904). The second part of this edition contains extracts from the journals kept by Fourier, Alire Raffenau-Delile, Balzac, Descotils, Jomard, Saint-Genis, and Coraboeuf. 22 Laissus (1998) is a colorful account of the adventures and misadventures of members of the Commission. 23 Goby (1951–52). 21

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the famous scientists of Bonaparte’s entourage, Monge, Berthollet, and Fourier. ´ The Description de l’Egypte is itself a monument. Ten folio volumes and two atlases contain 837 copper engravings, many of them comprising multiple illustrations that number over 3,000 in all. Part I, Antiquités, comprises half the set. The plates in those five volumes gave a modern reading public its first comprehensive view of the architectural and artistic legacy of ancient ´ moderne, exhibit the artifacts and life of Egypt. Two further volumes, Etat the country from the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century until the French occupation of 1798–1801. The final three, Histoire naturelle, illustrate the mineralogy, flora, and fauna of the Nile Valley and the Red Sea coastal area. The regular plates measure 20 by 26 old French inches, which were five percent longer than the English counterpart. Fourier’s historical preface was bound separately and printed on paper of the same size, called Jésus in the trade. A hundred plates are of still more heroic dimensions, seventy-three of them 40 by 26, twenty-six 50 by 26, and one (the circular zodiac of Dendara) 42 by 30. No papermaker had ever before been called on to produce these Grand-Jésus sheets, which were bound separately in the two supplementary atlases. A third atlas contains a topographical chart of Egypt and the Holy Land (then part of Syria) in forty-seven leaves drawn at a scale of 1:100,000, together with an overall map in three leaves at 1:1,000,000. In addition, nine volumes of memoirs, description, and commentary, averaging 800 pages each, may be considered the point of departure of Egyptology as a field of study. Their format was in-folio Grand-aigle, dwarfing an ordinary book, easy to read but not to hold.24 The account of Philae that Michel-Ange Lancret composed for the text of the Description conveys the spirit shared by his fellow polytechnicians. He had ridden to the landing by moonlight along the ancient way taken by Strabo, who had traveled by carriage. Night rides always have a grave and portentous quality that predisposes the mind to profound impressions. But what other place could produce stronger sensations or leave so many memories? I reflected with a mingling of excitement, pleasure, and apprehensiveness that I was in one of the most extraordinary locations on the earth, amid places that partake of the fabulous, the very names of which, recited since childhood, have assumed gigantic and almost magical significance. I could touch the rocks of the cataracts at the gates of Ethiopia, at the boundary of the Roman Empire. Soon I would cross to that island where the tomb of 24 Gillispie and Dewachter (1987 and later printings) is an edition of the plates on antiquity. The introduction and critical apparatus contain full information on the bibliography, contents, preparation, and publication of the work, and on its importance for Egyptology.


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Osiris had been, an island once sacred and now ignored, the sanctuary of an ancient religion, the mother of so many others. Finally, I was close to one of the immutable divisions of our globe [the Tropic of Cancer] and the step I had just taken might have carried me into the equatorial zone. No doubt the austere beauty of a great river flowing among the rocks was not unique to Egypt. Nowhere else, however, are monuments still surviving of one of the most ancient peoples of the world, inscriptions that it has carved into the rocks through which it seems to speak to posterity. Such objects, carrying the mind back to the most distant centuries, enrich the panorama with a beauty greater than anything that nature alone can offer in its most imposing sites. On approaching the pylon, his eye falls on words inscribed in Latin: “I, L. Trebonius Oricula, I lived here” and “I, Numonius Valla, I dwelt here under the Emperor Caesar, consul for the thirteenth time.” Inscriptions of this kind are nothing solemn or monumental. You do not study them for the date of an event or for the dedication of a temple. Another kind of curiosity, another interest, attracts and touches you. Here is a man who has been no more for centuries, and who is speaking to you. Like you, he came to see these very places. Like you, he was a foreigner. He wrote down his name, even as you write yours. Perhaps the same thoughts stirred in him. It is a joy to imagine what they may have been. You have just learned his name. You guess his occupation. You think you see him in his uniform and in the act of writing. I picture to myself a soldier of the Roman garrison, long from his country amid incessant wars. Full of the memory of home, he whiles away the boredom of exile, hoping to be able one day to tell family and friends how he carved his name on the most distant temples of mysterious Egypt. The antiquities of Egypt had figured in but a desultory way in the work of the Commission of Science and Arts during the first year of the occupation. Only in July 1799, when the artist Vivant Denon, who had accompanied Desaix’s army up the Nile, returned to Cairo with a portfolio of delightful drawings, later published, was the French command aware of what awaited discovery in the south.25 Before departing in August, Bonaparte (who took Denon and his drawings with him) ordered the Commission to undertake an archaeological inventory of upper Egypt. Two groups were duly named, one headed by Fourier, the other by the mathematician 25

Denon, Voyage dans la basse et la haute E´ gypte (1802).

The Ile of Philae in 1799 (Reprinted from Gillispie and Dewachter, La Description de l’E´ gypte, vol. 1, pl. 3. Courtesy Princeton University Library)

The Fa¸cade of the Temple of Dendara in 1799 (Reprinted from Gillispie and Dewachter, La Description de l’E´ gypte, vol. 4, pl. 7. Courtesy Princeton University Library)

The North Gate of the Temple of Dendara as if Restored (Reprinted from Gillispie and ´ Dewachter, La Description de l’Egypte, vol. 4, pl. 6. Courtesy Princeton University Library)

Ground Plan and Longitudinal Section of the Temple of Phiae as if Restored (Reprinted from Gillispie and Dewachter,

The Circular Zodiac of Dendara (Reprinted from Gillispie and Dewachter, La Description de l’E´ gypte, vol. 4, pl. 21. Courtesy Princeton University Library)

Interior of the Portico of the Temple of Esna (Reprinted from Gillispie and Dewachter, La

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Costaz. No one in the high command was aware that the job was already well under way in a self-starting manner, and had been for some five months. An earlier commission headed by Pierre-Simon Girard of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées had been in upper Egypt investigating the hydrography of the Nile Valley since March. Four of the members, Jollois, Devilliers, Dubois-Aymé, and Duchanoy, were polytechnicians, another three were mining engineers, and the last was a sculptor, Castex. The junior people irritated their chief, a grouchy sort, by throwing themselves into scrutiny of ruins in all the moments they could spare from their damp, official measurements. They neglected their duty in favor of hieroglyphs, he complained to the commanding general, Belliard. The latter was a cultivated man, fortunately, and let them have their way. In due course the three groups merged forces and joined efforts. Coming upon Dendara was what set them off. “The mere sight,” recalled Devilliers, was “enough to compensate the fatigue and discomfort of the most difficult journey.”26 There they met Denon returning to Cairo from Philae in the extreme south. He showed them his drawings. They were mere sketches, remarked Jollois with youthful scorn. The artist had not known how to measure anything or draw the simplest floor plan. That was exactly what they, polytechnicians, had been trained to do, and they threw themselves into it, setting out to record the dimensions, not just of a courtyard here and a fa¸cade there, but of the totality of every temple, every palace, every tomb. Belliard gave them permission but at their own risk in a region rife with bandits. Their most extraordinary exploit was the circular zodiac of Dendara. Blackened with age and soot, that masterpiece decorated the ceiling of a small pavilion without windows on the roof of the temple. They divided the surface into eight sectors by means of strings stretched like chalk lines to serve as coordinates. Then, craning their heads backward they copied every detail by the flickering light of a smoky torch. Their success may ´ be judged by comparing the plate in the Description de l’Egypte with the 27 original, now in the Louvre. It requires minute inspection to detect the slightest error. The army paused long enough on its advance to the south to give them a month at Dendara and another five days on the return north. On the other hand they had only a tantalizing twenty-four hours for their first glimpse of Karnak, Luxor, and Thebes. Ten days at Esna further south gave time to accustom themselves to the interior of the portico. Devilliers describes their first reaction: We felt a certain confused admiration that we dared not acknowledge . . . looking back and forth from the monument to the expression on 26 27

E. de Villiers du Terrage, Journal et souvenirs sur l’éxpédition d’E´ gypte (1899), p. 131. Volume 4, plate 21.


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the faces of our comrades. We each tried to tell ourselves that we had not completely lost our taste and forgotten the principles we learned in studying Greek monuments. This struggle between the real beauty of the monument and our prejudice in favor of Greek proportion and form held us in suspense for some little time, until soon we were carried away by a unanimous surge of admiration.28 On leaving Esna, the commission had a month to reach Aswan and then turn back down the Nile to Thebes. They worked fast in measuring the floor plans and drawing the elevations at Kom Ombo, Edfu, Elephantine Island, and especially Philae. The return journey allowed them five weeks in Thebes, however. Jollois and Devilliers rented a little house on the river bank. In company with a dozen fellows—Jomard, Lancret, Dubois-Aymé, Duchanoy, Descotils, Saint-Gênis, the artist Dutertre, the naturalist Nectoux, the sculptor Castex, with other volunteers some thirty-odd in all— they labored night and day in scorching heat to survey the locations, measure the floor plans, and design the elevations of all the monuments of Thebes, the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, and Karnak. A word needs to be said about the ensuing production of the Description ´ de l’Egypte. On returning to Cairo, the collaborators with Kléber’s encouragement joined in an association, in the form of a joint stock company, to pool their drawings and data for eventual publication. With their materials would be combined graphical and statistical information concerning modern Egypt collected by a commission Kléber established composed of many of the same people. After the evacuation of Egypt and return to France in 1801, Bonaparte directed the state to take over the project while leaving royalties to the contributors. Conté, Lancret, and Jomard served successively as Directors. The entire group of collaborators then organized themselves into a collective body on the model of the longstanding assemblies of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, which reviewed all proposals for public works.29 In similar fashion, the assembly of collaborators passed on all the drawings and texts submitted by each of them for eventual publication in the Description. This was in the fullest sense a work of collaboration. Starting in 1801, preparation of the plates, editing the texts, seeing it through the press—all that required years. The first volume appeared in 1809 and the final atlas in 1829. The project had then lasted for thirty years. At its peak in 1809–10 some thirty-six contributors were on the payroll. So great a joint effort may properly be characterized as team research, perhaps the earliest such instance in all history. With an annual budget of over 60,000 francs, 28 29

Ibid., p. 156. For its procedures, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 492–493.

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the cost had then reached 1,500,000. Nothing else on such a scale prior to World War II comes to mind. All that stemmed from the camaraderie of our young polytechnicians starting with their departure for Egypt. Once they had given themselves the mission of capturing ancient Egypt on paper, they refused to be discouraged, whether by news of Bonaparte’s departure, which reached them at Philae, or by the assassination of Kléber, or by risk from bandits and nomads, or by the negative attitude of their superiors. When Dubois-Aymé was banished momentarily to Qoceir after a quarrel with his boss, Girard, he turned exile to advantage by studying the habits of the nomads in the region, and wrote one of the most interesting memoirs in the collection.30 The enthusiasm of the whole lot was contagious, so much so that the naturalists and certain others joined in what became a much larger venture. But the polytechnicians had by far the leading part in recovering antiquity. Their curiosity was not simply a function of youth. The civil and military engineers in the Expedition were only a few years older. An important factor was certainly the emphasis on drawing and descriptive geometry at the ´ Ecole Polytechnique. But their education contributed more than technique, essential though that was. Their reaction to the art and architecture of ancient Egypt bespoke an openness of mind and spirit less evident among their leaders. Even Fourier, especially Fourier, took no interest in the aesthetic qualities of the relics of an ancient civilization. Only later, while writing the Preface, did he give their beauty lip service. By then Egyptian styles were all the fashion. When on the ground he found their form rude and barbarous. The classical principles of symmetry were in no way respected, he complained. The architects did not know how to construct vaults and arches.31 Instead of temples, Fourier studied the statistics of cities along the route. The only interest he took in archaeology was the possibility of devising numerological methods for deciphering hieroglyphs and establishing the dates of the zodiacs of Dendara and Esna. That last problem he reserved for himself, expressly denying it to Devilliers and Jollois, who had discovered and copied them. Having shut the young men out, he never completed the study he had projected and published nothing. It seems reasonable to attribute the sensitivity of the team of polytechnicians to their education. Engineers formed under the old regime were no less competent technically, but they had not had the advantage of a collegial formation. They had not grown up together amid the rituals and camaraderie that imbue young people with a spirit of adventure, an esprit de corps, a sense of solidarity, a 30

Below, n. 77. See the notes he kept of his travels in Egypt, published in Jollois, Journal, cited in n. 21 above. 31


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culture of excellence, qualities not normally found in technicians who are merely trained, not educated. Other aspects of their conduct in Egypt were equally civilized. They did not behave like members of a force of conquerors. They did not impose on the local people. Wherever they found themselves, they looked for lodgings and rented them from the owners. They bought their provisions, their supplies, and their horses. They paid their servants wages and bargained with merchants over the price of souvenirs like tourists of our own day. In spite of the revolt in Cairo, they expressed no hostility toward the Egyptian people. On the contrary, they developed feelings of sympathy for the natives, and especially for the fellahin in villages. Those for whom they expressed no empathy were the soldiers in the army. On the contrary, they distrusted them—a sentiment that was mutual. An unbridgeable social gulf separated polytechnicians from foot soldiers, who did treat the populace badly and loot at will. That soldiers, not Egyptians, might steal their wallets was a constant worry. The scientific members of the expedition, to turn now to them, funneled their investigations for the most part through the Institute of Egypt, a colonial adaptation of the Institute of France. It opened on 23 August 1798. Total membership during the three years of the occupation consisted of fifty-one people. Twenty-six belonged to one or the other of the two scientific sections, “Mathematics” and “Physics,” the remaining two sections having been designated “Political Economy” and “Arts and Letters.” The Institute held sixty-two meetings, the last on 1 germinal an IX (22 March 1801). It elected Monge its first president and Bonaparte vice-president for terms of three months. Fourier was Permanent Secretary throughout. The proceedings were those of academic bodies in France. Memoirs were read or submitted in writing and referees named to report on the contributions; the governmental, in this case the military, authorities called on the Institute for advice on particular problems; these tasks and others were referred to ad hoc committees.32 Publication occurred through various channels. The Courier de l’E´ gypte, a chronicle or calendar of public events comparable to the semi-official Moniteur universel in Paris, occasionally printed abstracts of the proceedings of the Institute. La Décade égyptienne modeled itself on the Décade philosophique, the journal of enlightened learning in France. The majority of the communications to the Institute printed therein were also published in the four vol´ umes of the Mémoires sur l’Egypte brought out in Paris by P. Didot between 1799 and 1802. The latter contains much that the Décade, which ceased publication in 1800, does not. Certain memoirs also appeared in the regular scientific press—the Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Bulletin de la Société Philomathique, Journal des Mines, and so on. Several members of the expedition published books on what they had seen and learned, for example Desgenettes’s Histoire médicale de l’Armée d’Orient (1802). Many of the memoirs in the Description ´ de l’E´ gypte were first presented to the Institut d’Egypte. 32

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The most important single object in the care of the Institute was, of course, the Rosetta Stone, which was found in July 1799. Neither scientists nor polytechnicians were responsible for that discovery. Accounts of the circumstances vary, but the most plausible version has it built into an ancient wall that impeded constructing the foundation for an enlargement of the stronghold later called Fort Julien. The engineering officer in charge of the demolition, Lieutenant Fran¸cois-Xavier Bouchard, at once recognized that the trilingual inscriptions might provide the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs at the top and the script in the middle from the Greek at the bottom. The stone was brought to the Institute in mid-August, almost simultaneously with Bonaparte’s departure. Interest was intense. The two senior orientalists, Jean-Joseph Marcel and Remi Raige, set to work studying the inscriptions with the collaboration of a classicist, Jacques-Denis Delaporte. They succeeded in recognizing the middle part for the cursive form of the hieroglyphs at the top. Copyists set to work, but perfect accuracy was unattainable. Marcel was also director of the printery, however, and—anticipating the invention of lithography by about ten years—he bethought him that the stone itself could serve as a printing form. Washing the surface left the grooves moist. Printer’s ink was then spread upon the dried surface, and a damp sheet pressed gently into contact with all the raised areas. The technique produced a perfect reproduction of the text, the letters white on black, which could be read through the back or in a mirror. Conté, never at a loss, imagined an alternative procedure, treating the stone as a copper plate and taking prints with the letters black on white. Copies of both sorts circulated among the learned. A bit later, Raffeneau-Delile made a sulfur cast, and fortunately so. Otherwise, the French would have been left with nothing but these proofs since the Rosetta Stone with other archaeological treasures became spoils of war enriching the British Museum. To return to the proceedings of the Institute, a number of the papers presented by the leading people treated topics that pertained to their personal research but not to Egypt.33 These communications filled out the pro33

On 29 July 1799 Monge read a draft of a memoir of infinitesimal geometry later published in Journal de l’E´ cole Polytechnique (11e cahier, 1802). It was the first of three papers eventually included in Application de l’analyse a` la géométrie (1807). Fourier read four papers on pure mathematics, (Goby [1987], pp. 203, 221, 263, 274, 533). The first, “Notes sur la mécanique générale,” was probably an outgrowth of his earliest published paper, a memoir on virtual velocities in the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique (5e cahier, 1798), which was the only thing he ever published on classical mechanics. The titles of the other three papers concern theory of equations. It is often said that his interest in heat diffusion originated during his three years in the Egyptian climate, but there is nothing in the written record to substantiate that surmise. Of the other mathematicians, Corancez, an altogether minor follower of Lagrange, presented a


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gram with examples of pure science, and we shall not consider them further. Neither, at the other extreme, shall we consider applied science in the form of responses to tasks set by the commission concerning immediate needs of the army.34 Our subject has two aspects, first, the properly scientific work undertaken in consequence of the presence in Egypt and, second, the scientific study of the country itself. Of the papers concerning phenomena encountered in Egypt, the most famous is Monge’s memoir on mirages.35 He read it at the second meeting of the Institute on 28 August 1798, just a month after the grueling march from Alexandria to Cairo. The illusion of island villages shimmering and reflected in the waters of a lake ever receding with the horizon had tantalized and tormented the army. Monge explained that at the height of the day in a desert the heat of the sunsoaked sand dilates the air immediately above the ground so that its density is less than that of the enveloping atmosphere. Light rays from just above the horizon are reflected as if by a mirror at the upper surface of that rarefied layer. The effect is double. It brings forward the upright images of villages and palm trees that are beyond the true horizon, and it also inverts them so that they appear to be surrounded by and mirrored in the waters of what is in reality a reflected rim of sky. Modern optics attributes the phenomenon to a dual refraction, direct and inverse, in the surface layer rather than to reflection by its upper surface, but the underlying physics of the effect remains what Monge adduced. Altogether more strategic in the scientific development of the author was Berthollet’s “Observations sur le natron,” the second most frequently mentioned paper to derive from the study of Egypt.36 Berthollet’s career reversed the usual order, for he had made his reputation in applied science, first in the chemistry of dyes and then in munitions. He contributed to fundamental science, not out of innovations in his youth, but as a middle-aged man’s reflection on a lifetime of experience with chemical reactions and propiece on the theory of algebraic equations and another on the design of balance wheels in watches to minimize the effects of heat dilation (Goby [1987] 232, 483). Malus, a Monge disciple, presented a memoir on differential equations. A memoir on light, Malus’s entry into what became his principal work in physics, was intended for the Institute but never read. Arago gives a resumé (“Malus,” Oeuvres 3 [1859], pp. 131–134). Berthollet, finally, read a paper on the formation of ammonia and another on the eudiometric analysis of the atmosphere. Goby (1987) gives a detailed account of the entire Procès-Verbaux of the Institute. 34 ´ Goby (1987) lists the questions that Bonaparte proposed to the Institut d’Egypte concerning such matters as resources for the manufacture of gunpowder, improvement of ovens for baking bread, the water supply, substitutes for hops in brewing beer, and so on. 35 “Mémoire sur le phénomène d’optique connu sous le nom de mirage,” Décade égyptienne 1 (an 7, 1799), pp. 37–46; reprinted in Mémoires sur l’E´ gypte 1 (1800), pp. 64–78. 36 “Observations sur le natron,” Mémoires sur l’E´ gypte 1, pp. 271–279. Extracts were published in Annales de chimie 33 (1800), pp. 343–348.

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cedures. Published in 1803, Essai de statique chimique deals with the effect of physical factors—temperature, pressure, light, relative concentration—in determining how far and how fast a reaction will go, and sometimes whether it will occur at all. It cannot be said that Berthollet’s experience in Egypt caused him to take up those problems. He was already dissatisfied with the prevailing theory of elective affinities, around which he had tried to ´ organize his course at the Ecole Normale, and which depended on purely chemical considerations. He would probably have moved beyond dissatisfaction to research in any case. But Egypt was the occasion, and the specific problem it offered was the natural occurrence of soda in the Natron Lakes, which take their name from the Greek for that commodity, a staple of Egyptian commerce since antiquity. In late January 1799, Berthollet and his assistant Regnault accompanied General Andréossy in a six-day reconnaissance of the valley containing them, at a fourteen-hour march west of Cairo, and also of the adjoining valley of the Fleuve sans Eau. They found the limestone formations surrounding the lakes, which are strongly saline, to be impregnated with salt and encrusted with a thick natural coating of the alkali. Evidently salt (sodium chloride) and limestone (calcium carbonate) were there undergoing a double decomposition reaction to produce natron or soda (sodium carbonate) and calcium chloride. The natron formed only on limestone. Where clay predominated, the soil was full of salt with little or no soda. The sandy areas contained neither since there the rains dissolved the salt and carried it into the lakes. In coves into which the limestone areas drained, however, the water contained soda rather than salt in solution. The deduction had to be that in those limestone regions, the lime decomposed salt in the presence of heat and humidity while the resulting natron dried out and solidified at the surface. The companion product, calcium chloride, being extremely deliquescent, took up water and seeped into the ground. The exciting feature, to Berthollet, was that the reaction well known to chemists in the laboratory is exactly the reverse. Here, then, was a classic instance where the conditions rather than the chemicals determine the direction of the reaction. On 4 February 1799, Andréossy gave the Institute a lively account of the region, its topography, its dejected Coptic monasteries, its trade routes traversed by Geaouabis and Bedouins.37 Berthollet followed with a report on his observations and announced his intention of explaining the formation of natron in another session. Instead, on 10 February he and Monge departed with Bonaparte for the invasion of the Holy Land, then part of Syria. On 29 June, at the first meeting of the Institute after their return to Cairo, Berthollet was elected president and Andréossy vice-president. He began reading 37

“Mémoire sur la vallée des lacs du natron,” Décade égyptienne 2, pp. 93–122.


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the promised “Recherches sur les lois de l’affinité chymique” on 8 August, and never finished. On 22 August he and Monge departed again with Bonaparte, secretly, for France. He thereupon read his memoir before the parent Institute of France in October and November. Published in its Mémoires for 1800, and also separately, it makes a preliminary statement of the argument of Essai de statique chimique in briefer compass and, it has to be said, clearer form.38 Only of the naturalists could it be supposed that their presence in Egypt would contribute intrinsically to the development of their science rather than incidentally, as was the case for mathematicians, physicists, and chemists. Apart from the engineers, naturalists were the most important contingent in the Commmission of Science and Arts. Originally, there were to have been fifteen, five in each of the main specialties of mineralogy, zoology, and botany, though in the event only twelve set sail. The most explicit record of the scientific conquests of the Expedition is to ´ be found in the third division of the Description de l’Egypte. The three albums of plates accompanied by two volumes of text devoted to “Histoire Naturelle” come to something less and something more than the Natural History of Egypt that was intended. The ensemble is less in that it is fragmentary, however voluminous, and haphazard in organization rather than systematic. It is more in two ways: first, in that participants encountered problems and opportunities that carried over into their own careers and disciplines, both constructively and destructively; and, second, in that the entire enterprise associated scientific factors with historical, economic, social, and political factors in an intimacy never previously achieved, nor even attempted, in the study of any other country. What is in the “Histoire Naturelle”? Like the first division of the Descrip´ tion de l’Egypte, “Antiquités,” it is best approached through scrutiny of the plates, with secondary and supplementary reference to the texts. The case is ´ Moderne” of otherwise with respect to the second major division, the “Etat Egypt, where the memoirs hold far greater interest than the plates, elegant though they are. The plates of natural history were engraved between 1805 and 1814. Four contributors were responsible: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Savigny for zoology, Delile for botany, and Rozière for mineralogy. In principle each was to supply a set of “Explications” to accompany his plates in the volumes of text. Neither Geoffroy nor Savigny accomplished that, Geoffroy because he lacked the will, Savigny because he lacked the power. Their annotations had to be supplied by others some twenty years after the plates were ready, Geoffroy’s by his son Isidore, Savigny’s by a naturalist also of the next generation, Victor Audouin. 38

PVIF 2, pp. 18, 20, 21, 39; MIF 3 (1801), pp. 1–96.

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Volume I contains the vertebrates in sixty-two plates, forty-two from Geoffroy’s collection and twenty from Savigny’s. They are divided into the four classes of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. Geoffroy did all the ichthyology and Savigny all the ornithology, while Savigny supplemented Geoffroy’s bats, mongooses, rabbits and rams, his crocodiles and his tortoises, with carnivores and snakes. Volume II contains the invertebrates in fifteen groupings—three classes of mollusca, annelids or worms, three classes of arthropods, three orders of insects, echinoderms, and four orders still called zoophytes (sponges, ascidians, polyps, and algae). The whole is illustrated in one hundred and five plates comprising thousands of drawings, all due to Savigny. Volume IIbis contains sixty-two botanical plates from Delile and fifteen from Rozière depicting minerals. The plates that produce the most vivid impression for clarity of line, precision of detail, and general elegance are the series of fourteen in color on birds in Volume l, the entire series of invertebrates in Volume II, and the fifteen in color on minerals in Volume IIbis. The effect is not accidental. Savigny and Rozière gave minute and constructive supervision to the preparation, whereas Geoffroy and Delile engaged artists to illustrate the specimens from their collections and passed the designs along to the engravers. What with the skills and high standards in those two trades, the results are good, but not outstanding. Savigny’s plates became a resource, especially in malacology, and not mere illustrations of Egyptian flora and fauna for vicarious travelers.39 Given the importance attached to natural history, it comes initially as a surprise that the naturalists contributed very little to the Décade égyptienne ´ and the Mémoires sur l’Egypte. The first time Geoffroy appeared before the Institute of Egypt, he read a paper on ostriches, a piece of popular science, he confessed apologetically to Cuvier, “written for the Army.”40 While in Egypt, Savigny composed one paper, on the purple lotus, a vestige of his botanical training. Its “very pointed style” served to convince his skeptical older colleagues that the youth was a serious and exact naturalist—thus Geoffroy to Cuvier, again.41 Apart from that, Rozière wrote a memoir on the 39 It was for scientific, not antiquarian, reasons that in 1926 Paul Pallary reproduced Savigny’s plates on molluscs, identifying the species that Audouin had been unable to name and correcting his faulty annotations—“Explication des planches de J. C. Savigny,” Mémoires présentés a` l’Institut d’E´ gypte 11 (1926), Cairo. 40 “Observations sur l’aile de l’autruche,” Décade égyptienne 1, 46–51; Geoffroy to Cuvier, 21 October 1798, letter 噛xxiii in Hamy (1901), pp. 95–96. Geoffroy also contributed a “Note relative aux appendices des Raies et des Squales,” male sexual organs the function of which was suggested to him by analogy to similar structures that he found dissecting reptiles in upper Egypt, Décade 3, pp. 230–233. In addition, he requested support for a program of experiments to determine whether the sexes coexist in “les germes de tous les animaux.” That topic became a favorite motif of his research in later life, but there is no evidence that he ´ pursued it further in Egypt. Report in Mémoires sur l’Egypte 3, p. 385. 41 Letter cited in n. 40.


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mineralogy of Qo¸ceyr, Delile a couple on the cultivation of senna and on the genus Ximenia, and J.-L.-A. Reynier, brother of the general, a pair on date palms and the caprification of the fig sycamore. That is all, and it was not much. Still, the naturalists were there not to write papers, but for the prior tasks of making observations and collecting specimens. They suffered a setback before they could begin when, in July 1798, the “Patriote,” the ship carrying scientific apparatus, struck a reef and sank. Scalpels, microscopes, tweezers, alcohol, jars, pins, paper for pressing plants, frames for mounting butterflies—their equipment lay at the bottom of Alexandria harbor.42 Still, except for microscopes, they could improvise more easily than could the engineers, also deprived of their more elaborate and precise instruments. All alike persevered. Geoffroy frequented scholars, fishermen, peasants, snake charmers, bazaars, caves, and excavations, always drawing, dissecting, and mounting everything vertebrate, ancient or current, that he could lay hands on. His enthusiasm prevailed until the return from upper Egypt early in 1800. Thereafter, spells of illness and discouragement interrupted his activity. During the last months in Alexandria, from March until September 1801, he largely gave himself over to speculative philosophy. Among the naturalists, only Savigny accompanied the Syrian task force. He maintained his zeal until the bitter end. The threat of confiscation of their material by the British then brought Geoffroy back into action at his junior colleague’s side. The collections they saved were very considerable. Back in Marseilles, they needed forty or fifty cases to transport it all to Paris. Geoffroy required some 300 pints of fresh alcohol to replace the turbid liquor in which products of his dissection risked rotting. He succeeded in his wish of presenting his specimens of vertebrate anatomy to his colleagues of the Museum of Natural History. The commission that received them consisted of Cuvier, Lamarck, and Lacepède. The last wrote the report and noted especially that the mummified forms were identical with corresponding species today.43 Not being a member of the staff of the Museum, Savigny kept his collection in his own possession in order to prepare his plates for the Description ´ de l’Egypte. The insects would appear to have been the richest part and furnished the material for his signal contribution to morphology, the study of the mouth parts of insects and crustacea. Besides that, he had mounted the skeletons of many birds, most notably the ibis, on which in 1805 he published the book that made his reputation with the public.44 42

For recovery of the cargo in 1985, see Bret (1987). “Rapport des Professeurs du Muséum sur les collections d’Histoire naturelle rapportées de ´ l’Egypte par E. Geoffroy,” Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle 1 (an 11, 1802), pp. 234–241. 44 Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l’Ibis (1805), Savigny’s collection, together with five albums containing the original drawings for the plates, was left to his companion, Olympe Letellier de Sainteville, and by her to the city of Versailles, where they lived and died. It might 43

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Geoffroy and Savigny were of comparable interests and contrasting temperaments. Neither one was satisfied to do anatomy merely for the sake of taxonomy. Zoologists both, they moved beyond classification to morphology, Geoffroy in the spirit of romanticism, however, and Savigny in the service of precision. Geoffroy’s was a generous disposition. His letters from Egypt are lavish in their protestations of affection and esteem for his colleagues of the Muséum, and especially Cuvier, to whom the majority are addressed. His ardor is almost embarrassing, the more so as he received no answers nor any reassurance on the not infrequent occasions when he let himself wonder whether he had been forgotten. Already the polarization of his basic interests began to make itself felt. In the first year and a half Geoffroy came to know the country as a member of the inner circle of the Institute. He joined the engineers in the exploration of upper Egypt and later of the Sinai. Scalpel always in hand, he was full of ichthyology, ornithology, herpetology, and the archaeological anatomy of mummified animals disinterred at Saqqara and elsewhere. Toward the end, Geoffroy transcended all that in meditation about ultimate causes. It was prompted by capture in the Mediterranean of specimens of the torpedo ray and the electric eel. As soon as he reached quarantine, so he wrote Cuvier on 26 September 1801, he would send “a very extensive work on physics, chemistry, and physiology: discovery of the nervous fluid and of the vital principle has led me to a very grand theory. I hope to return to France worthy of you and my illustrious colleagues.” The discovery was that the nervous fluid is identical with caloric and that all the phenomena of nature can be explained by its interactions with light, oxygen, and the electrical fluid. Inevitably, these ruminations earned Geoffroy the contempt of Fourier. After Berthollet’s departure, Geoffroy complained, Fourier set out by “sarcastic insults” to show that all his colleagues were ignoramuses, and that only his own students, the civil engineers, had some knowledge.45 The pattern repeats itself writ large in the record of Geoffroy’s mature development throughout his scientific prime. Immediately upon returning to Paris, he began publishing memoirs in the Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle on his discoveries in Egypt: on a hitherto unknown Nile fish with fourteen to sixteen dorsal fins, a lungfish, which he called Polypterus bichir from its name in Arabic; on a flatfish, Achire barbu, with both eyes on one still have been seen in the Bibliothèque de Versailles until 1919. In that year an impatient librarian, pressed for space and failing to arrange for custody in the Museum or elsewhere, consigned the specimens to the cellars. There they moldered until Paul Pallary identified the remains in 1927. See Pallary, “Marie Jules-César Lelorgne de Savigny, sa Vie et son Oeuvre,” ´ Premiere Partie, Mémoires présentés a` l’lnstitut d’Egypte 17 (1931). 45 Hamy (1901), letters lviii, lxii.


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side of the head, for all the world like a Picasso drawing; on the electrical organs of the torpedo ray, the electric eel, and the thunder fish; on the Nile crocodile.46 Reprintings of these memoirs, together with an account of the “Trionix” or Great Nile Tortoise and a general discussion of the order of bats, constituted the principal contributions from his own pen to the De´ scription de l’Egypte. He preferred dramatic creatures, obviously. In that respect, he harked back to Buffon, as also in his character sketches of the animals, their habits, their conduct, almost their morality. One title is “Observations sur l’affection mutuelle de quelques animaux, et particulièrement sur les services rendus au Requin par le Pilote.”47 His anatomies were highly professional, however. The detail is precise. The drawings and descriptions are clear. He knew the literature thoroughly. He had a keen eye for novelty. The true direction of his interests appears in a series of three memoirs on the anatomy of fish in general, published in 1807.48 “This year,” he wrote, he had had a revelation, “while working to put the finishing touches on my ichthyology of the Nile for the imminent publication of the great work on Egypt.”49 Until then, he had agreed with the opinion among naturalists that in many respects the internal organization of fish bore no resemblance to that of vertebrates in general. Now, on close examination of his Egyptian specimens, and of the rich collection assembled by Cuvier, he is delighted to find that the very organs that had most obstinately resisted comparison do in fact exhibit deep analogies with those of other vertebrates. The shift toward morphology led Geoffroy away from systematics and toward the famous confrontation with Cuvier in 1830 over Geoffroy’s central tenet, the underlying unity of form in all vertebrate organizations.50 His major work is Philosophie anatomique. The first volume appeared in 1818 and is generally agreed to be Geoffroy’s masterpiece. In it he argues for unity of type on the basis of comparisons of five groups of anatomical structures among vertebrates of many classes. The second volume (1822) represents a further shift in interest and discusses variation in species with much emphasis on teratology, and particularly on deformations in human anatomy. ´ He never did do any more annotations for the Description de l’Egypte, how46

“Histoire naturelle et description anatomique d’un nouveau genre de Poisson du Nil nommé Polyptère,” Annales du Muséum 1 (1802), pp. 57–68; “Description de l’Achire barbu,” Annales du Muséum 1, 152–155; “Mémoire sur l’anatomie comparée des organes e´lectriques de la Raie torpille, du Gymnote engourdissant, et du Silure trembleur,” Annales du Muséum 1, pp. 392–407. Geoffroy was very prolific. A complete bibliography is in Cahn (1962). 47 Annales du Muséum, 9 (1807), pp. 469–476. 48 “Premièr mémoire sur les poissons,” ibid., 357–372; “Second mémoire,” ibid., pp. 413– 427; “Troisième mémoire,” ibid., 10, pp. 87–104. 49 “Premier mémoire,” pp. 357–358. 50 Appel (1987).

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ever. Instead, subscribers waited. They waited and waited and had to wait until 1824. By then Geoffroy’s son Isidore was nineteen, and his father turned him from the career of mathematician the boy had intended and made of him the laboratory assistant who then gave those “finishing touches” to the ichthyology of the Nile that his father had promised when Isidore was two years old. So it was with the other classes of reptiles and mammals. In the latter section, Geoffroy himself did complete the bats, but that was all. Savigny, by contrast, started by publishing a book of general interest and moved in the opposite direction from Geoffroy toward the highest specialization. His Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l’Ibis (1805) is a work of surpassing charm, combining classical scholarship with zoological precision in small compass and graceful proportion. Allowing for the modesty of the presentation and scale, it may be said that Savigny accomplished for the scientific side of the expedition what Denon had done for the archaeological ´ with Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-Egypte (1802). He piqued the fancy of the public. He vindicated Herodotus and the classical authors who had written of two species of ibis in Egypt, white and black, while questioning, on the strength of Hebrew sources, their statements that the birds were unknown elsewhere. Modern naturalists had failed to identify the white ibis in its native habitat and had confused it with herons in lower Egypt. The reason was that they had never penetrated upper Egypt, where the bird was widespread, and had taken their evidence from its representation in basreliefs instead of dissecting easily available mummies. As for its black cousin, modern naturalists were again at fault in failing to distinguish it from a common migrant, the curlew. Again, they had given classical sources the wrong sort of confidence in looking for a bird that feeds on snakes. The fame of the ibis in antiquity derived from its antipathy to serpents and scorpions, from its service in devouring snakes, especially winged ones, that otherwise would have invaded the land of the pharaohs and poisoned its people. In natural fact, Savigny found, the stomachs of both black and white ibises were full of crustaceans and mollusks. They are wading birds, stabbing their down-curved beaks into the mud of marsh and river bank, and quite incapable of killing or eating snakes. Whence, then, the mythological role? Savigny spins it out of an imagination tempered by thorough knowledge of the Greek and Latin authors who treated of Egypt. It had nothing to do really with snakes, from which Egypt was in no danger, except as symbols of evil. No, the ibis appealed because it is a freshwater bird arriving on the summer winds. It settles along the banks and leads the rise of the life-giving waters. It follows them on their retreat, even into the canals and waterways of town and village, a handsome, sympathetic creature, its graceful curve of a bill congruent with life and humanity,


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a link between domesticity and nature. Through its seasonal cycle, it becomes identified with the zodiac and Toth, the ibis-headed equivalent of Mercury, bringer of science and messenger of the gods, to whom the first month of the year is dedicated. If the ventral cavities of ibis mummies contained the remains of snakes, and typically they did indeed, it was because the embalmers had known how to respect truths that reach higher than natural history. Thereupon Savigny, now twenty-eight years old, settled down to the arrangement and study of his collection, and also of collections of invertebrates at the Muséum and elsewhere, looking to preparation of the plates for ´ the Description de l’Egypte. Many bear the legend “Engraved between 1805 and 1812.” On 29 August 1808, he presented his taxonomy of birds to the General Assembly of the Commission.51 He worked most intensively between 1810 and 1814, for the division of “Histoire Naturelle” was already ´ Moderne” in the struggle to finish the falling behind “Antiquités” and “Etat work and to satisfy the increasingly impatient authorities. For that reason he deferred what looked the easiest, almost routine, task of furnishing the “Explications” for his plates in favor of perfecting the illustrations themselves and writing up the discoveries the work was yielding in zoology at large. He gathered those discoveries in his major book, Mémoires sur les animaux sans vertèbres (1816), a work of morphology, as was Geoffroy’s Philosophie anatomique. Although published almost at the same time, the two were very different in spirit and subject matter. Savigny’s book consists of two parts, comprising two memoirs in the first and three in the second, all of them read before the First Class of the Institute between October 1814 and January 1816. Part I, subtitled “Théorie des Organes de la Bouche des Crustacés et des Insectes,” marks the point of departure for the nineteenth-century zoological study of homologies in general. It contains no speculation about the plan of nature, no obiter dicta at all. Nor do Savigny’s other writings. When he began ordering his Egyptian materials in 1802, so Savigny advised the reader at the outset, he found himself at a loss to ascribe to the manifold families of insects and crustaceans precise Linnean characters, that is to say systems of organs always disposed in the same order and thus comparable from species to species. The botanist he had been trained to be would do that (he implies), whereas entomologists are forever multiplying observations without generalizing them or laying a foundation for their science. What no one had yet attempted, he would try. The task might well ⬘ 51 ´ “Système des Oiseaux de l’Egypte et de la Syrie,” DE, HN 1, 1ere partie (1809), pp. 63–114. A note advises the reader that “this systematization of birds is to form part of a larger work.” It never did. It is one of only two scientific memoirs published uniquely in DE rather than reprinted there after having been long available in the journal literature. The other is Savigny’s Système des Annélides (n. 56 below).

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prove beyond his strength. “But I strongly desired to contribute in some measure to the perfecting of the beautiful work on Egypt, which does such honor to France among the public.”52 He began with some 1,500 species by detaching the mouth parts and the other main external features and making separate drawings of each, proceeding to organs of nutrition, of sense, of respiration, and of locomotion. Most of the creatures were barely four to five lignes long (a little less than a centimeter) and some much smaller. With this array of thousands of drawings before him, he found that the same elements of mouth parts occur in all the forms and that their modification from species to species, genus to genus, order to order, afforded the most regular and revealing series of comparisons. His first paper concerns moths and butterflies.53 He there attacked the most controversial case, for Latreille had held that Lepidoptera along with Diptera are the two orders whose organs of mastication are entirely different in the first and second stages of their lives. Cuvier, too, considered that the jaws of the caterpillar disappear completely on its metamorphosis into a butterfly. Not so, Savigny found, taking issue with his elders. Butterflies, like their caterpillars, like Coleoptera, like Neuroptera, and “all chewing [broyeurs] insects,” have two lips, an upper and lower, two mandibles, and two jaws, always in the same relative positions. True, they are so modified, and so miniaturized, that it was not surprising they had never been recognized. The maxillae, in particular, had been taken for a tiny two-part coiled tubule in no way resembling jaws. With that characterization, indeed, Savigny established the morphological definition of the class of insects properly speaking, that is to say the Hexapods, with six legs and two antennae, whether winged or not, whether undergoing metamorphosis or not. There remained the second division of articulated invertebrates, the myriapods, the arachnids, the crustaceans (the term arthropod is later), which Linnaeus had grouped under the designation insect. They form the subject of Savigny’s second memoir, in which he adduced homologies with a virtuosity and daring that are even more startling than the acute comparisons of the first.54 Here, too, the mouth parts are the key to classification, with the difference that in certain orders some of the organs that hexapods exhibit are lost altogether. In those cases, the organs that serve for mastication are com52 Savigny, Mémoires sur les animaux sans vertèbres (1816), pp. iii–iv. For bibliographical detail, see Daudin (1926), 2, pp. 314–315. 53 Savigny, “Observations sur la bouche des papillons, des phalènes et des autres insectes lepidoptères; suivies de quelques considérations sur la bouche des diptères, des hémidiptères, et des aptères su¸cants,” Mémoires sur les animaux, 1, pp. 1–37, lues a` l’Institut le 16 octobre 1814. “Rapport de Lamarck,” PVIF (24 October 1814) 5, pp. 408–411. 54 Savigny “Observations sur la bouche des Arachnides, des Crustacés et des Entomostracés,” Mémoires sur les animaux, 1, pp. 39–117, lues a` l’Institut le 19 juin 1815. “Rapport de Lamarck, Cuvier, Latreille,” PVIF (3 July 1815) 5, pp. 521–526.


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parable to those that other orders use for locomotion. Crabs are the notable example. They show two mandibles, two pairs of jaws, and underneath those structures three pairs of auxiliary jaws. The organs that serve as legs in hexapods thus appear to be transformed into jaws in crabs, which are called decapods, since they have five additional pairs of appendages that serve for crawling. The three papers that form Part II of the collected work are grouped under the heading “Recherches anatomiques sur les Ascidies composées et sur les Ascidies simples.” Very few memoirs read before the Institute in these years were given such speedy and such full reports as the successive committees, composed of Cuvier, Lamarck, and Latreille, accorded to Savigny. Cuvier took the occasion of the first two of these papers to review the entire field of polyps, zoophytes, and lithophytes, inasmuch as Savigny’s observations were “of epoch-making character in the natural history of colonial animals.”55 Savigny had shown, in a word, that the organization of the alcyons—a designation he now preferred to the vagueness of polyps—was far more complex than had been supposed, that several genera of zoophytes were in reality composite, that is to say colonies of ascidians, and that the entire order of creatures was very comparable to mollusks. The second part of Savigny’s Mémoires sur les animaux sans vertèbres, but not the first and perhaps even more interesting part on buccal theory, was ´ included in the Description de l’Egypte, as was the last work he was able to complete, “Système des annélides.”56 Comparing the species he had collected in the Red Sea and Mediterranean with those already assembled at the Muséum, he advanced the systematization of the large and confused group of organisms that Cuvier had designated “Red-Blooded Worms.” Savigny read his monograph before the Institute in three installments from May to July 1817, and presented the completed text on 29 November 1820. In the interim, he suffered the first onset of the neurological disorder that robbed him of effective sight and incapacitated him for life when it recurred in 1824, “in the prime of life, victim of his devotion to science”—thus Latreille 55 Savigny, “Observations sur les Alcyons gélatineux a` six tentacules simples,” Mémoires sur les animaux, 2, 1–23; lues a` l’Institut le 6 février 1815, “Observations sur les Alcyons a` deux oscules apparens, sur les Botrylles et sur les Pyrosomes,” lues le 1er mai 1815, 2, pp. 25–66. Rapport de Cuvier, PVIF (8 May 1815) 5, pp. 496–500. The third memoir in this series was “Observations sur les ascidies proprement dites, suivies de considérations générales sur la Classe des Ascidies,” 2, pp. 83–132. 56 DE, HN, Texte, 1, 2e Partie, Tableau systématique des Ascidies, tant simples que composées, mentionnées dans les trois mémoires suivants; offrant les Caractères des Ordres, Familles, Genres et l’lndication sommaire des Espèces, 1, pp. 58; and 3e Partie, Système des Annélides, principalement de celles des Côtes de l’E´ gypte et de la Syrie, offrant les Caractères tant distinctifs que naturels des Ordres, Familles, et Genres, avec la Description des Espèces, pp. 1–128. Savigny appended a note stating that after communicating the monograph to the Academy, he had added four new genera, and had added five new species to five others, but had made no other changes.

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and Lamarck, the latter near blindness himself in old age.57 Everyone supposed that Savigny must have contracted the “germ” of his affliction in Egypt, though ironically he had been one of the few to be spared the prevalent “opthalmia” while in the desert. Savigny was never able to provide the annotations for his plates. Not only could he not work, he could not be spoken to about work. In desperation the commission responsible for publication, pressed by the Minister of the Interior, arranged that a young naturalist, Victor Audouin, would furnish identifications and explanations as well as he could by drawing on secondary sources and the internal evidence of the drawings themselves. Apparently Olympe Letellier de Sainteville, who selflessly shared Savigny’s life and cared for him, agreed that he should not be told. Audouin made many mistakes and omitted much. Savigny never became blind; he could occasionally read for brief intervals, and learned what had been done. His objections and ´ corrections may still be seen entered in his copy of Description de l’Egypte in the municipal library of his native city of Provins. Unable to support the light of day, he passed the years until his death in 1851 enveloped in a veil of black netting whenever the shutters of his room were opened. His only remaining publication was a description and taxonomy of the highly patterned hallucinations produced by the incessant turbulence in his optic nerves.58 He lived out his days as if with an aurora borealis inside his head. ´ The botany in the Description de l’Egypte is of less importance to science 59 than the zoology. Geoffroy reported in an early letter that the botanists were at first disappointed to find little in Egypt that they did not already know in Europe.60 Hippolyte Nectoux, who had been Royal Botanist and director of the royal gardens in Port-au-Prince, published very little about Egypt. The young Coquebert died of the plague in Cairo in the last moments of the occupation. A little memoir he had written comparing the ´ flora of France and Egypt is included in the Description de l’Egypte as a 61 memorial. Apart from that, everything came from Raffeneau-Delile. He 57

“Rapport sur le travail de M. Savigny relatif aux annélides,” PVIF (6 March 1820) 7, pp. 22–28. 58 “Remarques sur les Phosphènes, phénomènes dont le principe est dans l’organe de la vue, ou fragments du journal d’un observateur atteint d’une maladie des yeux,” Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences 18 (1842), pp. 385–416. In the opinion of colleagues in the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute, Savigny’s illness was other than ocular. They find the symptoms to be a “classic description of temporal lobe epilepsy.” The cause in an adult is normally a tumor, though it is rare for an adult so afflicted to survive the onset as long as did Savigny. Letter to the author from Dr. Alfred Sommer, 19 September 1988. 59 ´ But see P. Ascherson and G. Schweinfurth, “Illustrations de la Flore d’Egypte,” Mémoires présentés a` l’Institut E´ gyptien 2 (1889), pp. 25–260, avant-propos. 60 Geoffroy to A.-L. de Jussieu, 12 August 1796, in Hamy (1901), lettre xv, p. 67. 61 ´ “Réflexions sur quelques points de comparaison a` e´tablir entre les plantes d’Egypte et ⬘ partie, 59–62. celles de France,” DE, HN, texte 1, 1ere


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supplied sixty-one plates to Tome IIbis, accompanying them with “Explications” in the text. He worked out a classification of the plants he had illustrated, cross-referencing them to their Arabic names and also to Linnean nomenclature and to the other major systems. Besides that, he contributed memoirs on wild and on cultivated plants and another on the doum palm.62 Delile was industrious but showed nothing of the conviction of either Geoffroy or Savigny. In 1803 he went off to America as assistant commissioner for commerce in the consulate at Wilmington, North Carolina. He had studied medicine before joining the Egyptian expedition, and he resumed those studies in New York and Philadelphia, taking an M.D. in 1807. Thereupon, he was called back to Paris to take charge of botany for the ´ Description de l’Egypte. In 1809 he defended his New York thesis (on pulmonary consumption) before the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and proceeded to treat patients while also preparing his Egyptian plants for publication. He was appointed to Candolle’s chair in botany in Montpellier in 1819 and lived there until his death in 1850. ´ The mineralogy in the Description de l’Egypte is, on the other hand, very interesting indeed. The fifteen plates are extremely handsome. They comprise 112 illustrations in full color of the principal rocks and petrifactions encountered in the exploration of the country and in the study of its monuments. The author, Fran¸cois-Michel de Rozière, was a mining engineer. His participation in the work on Egypt constitutes the sum total of his contributions to science and scholarship. He seems to have been completely forgotten, and unjustly so, for the contributions are remarkable. Rozière was both thoughtful and conscientious, a person of unusual cultivation, taste, and imagination even for a member of a generation in which those qualities were not rare among technically inclined people. He was aided by a fellow mining engineer, Hippolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils, and a student, JeanNicolas Champy, the son of Jacques-Pierre Champy of the Gunpowder Admistration. At that juncture in the development of earth science, mineralogy was shedding the chrysalis of natural history and entering into the formation of the new discipline of geology. Rozière designed his plates expressly to exemplify the service that engravings of rocks, properly executed, could render the new science. The graphic arts applied to natural objects had been perfected in the previous thirty years. Rozière pointed to the difference in beauty and precision between Buffon’s plates, excellent for their day, and the much superior illustrations, especially of lilacs, by Redouté the elder. Geolo´ “Flore d’Egypte,” DE, HN, texte 2, pp. 145–320; “Florae aegyptico illustratio,” DE, HN, ´ texte 2, pp. 49–82; “Mémoire sur les plantes qui croissent spontanément en Egypte,” DE, ´ HN, texte 2, pp. 1–10; “Histoire des plantes cultivés en Egypte,” DE, HN, texte 2, pp. 11–24, ⬘ partie, pp. 53–58. “Description du palmier doum,” DE, HN, texte 1, 1ere 62

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gists had yet to develop a precise classification and standardized nomenclature. In order to show why neither the scientific nor the general reader could dispense with a sample or an illustration, Rozière cited several scientific descriptions of the rocks of Egypt. An example from Saussure reads, “Rock resulting from a mixture of transparent quartz, yellowish feldspath, and black schist in moderately hard layers.” Even for those with ready access to a cabinet of mineralogy, a graphic representation was preferable to such verbiage. It could be designed to exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of a particular mineral, not all of which might be present in every sample. The elements could and should be written down, but the form, the color, the mixture, above all the texture, those features could be shown only graphically.63 Such were the theoretical considerations that presided over the drawing and engraving of the plates on mineralogy. Most of them were executed by Cloquet, former drawing master at the School of Mines in Paris, and others by Amédée and Ringuet. Half a dozen engravers divided the task of preparing the plates, often using different techniques—engraving, stippling, and dry-point—for rendering varieties of surface in the same rock. The lines were too fine to permit color printing from several plates. Instead, the principal colors were printed from a single plate, and each sheet was then touched up by hand as called for in the Redouté technique. Once prepared, the illustrations were presented, not in some order of mineralogical systematics, but according to the occurrence of the objects in Egypt since the ´ purpose of the Description de l’Egypte was “to give a complete knowledge of the country.” Thus, Plate 1 shows the varieties of granite, the “syenite” of writers in antiquity, in the region of Aswan and the Cataracts; Plate 8 the porphyries of the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea; and Plate 9 fossilized shells of the Red Sea coast. Elsewhere in the work, under Antiq´ Moderne as well as Histoire Naturelle, other articles on topoguités and Etat raphy and agriculture, some of them by Rozière himself, deal in passing with the mineralogy of various regions. The coverage was not complete, however, and he undertook to incorporate in his “Explications” enough detail of the regions that had been missed to complement those memoirs.64 To them he joined a comprehensive monograph in the form of an appendix. The full title is “On the Physical Constitution of Egypt and on Its Relation with the Ancient Institutions of the Country.”65 This book-length study of physical geography by an otherwise unknown mining engineer is characteristic of the larger commitments of the contributors to the Description de ´ Rozière, “Discours sur la représentation des roches de l’Egypte et de l’Arabie par la gravure, et son utilité dans les arts et dans la géologie,” DE, HN, texte 2, pp. 41–48. 64 “Explication des planches de minéralogie,” ibid., pp. 683–725. 65 Ibid., pp. 407–682. 63


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´ l’Egypte. In other hands, or in some ideological context, the treatment might have seemed daring. Rozière sought to show how culture derives from material circumstances. His approach is quietly matter-of-fact, however. More than any other country, he observes, Egypt invites such analysis, first because of her historical importance in the beginnings of civilization, and second because the physical conditions of life in society largely came down to domination by the Nile. No other country has ever exhibited such dependence of a highly developed society on a single set of natural factors that could be studied in isolation. “That is what imperiously dictated the first customs and determined their character, and perhaps that is what has changed least.”66 Knowledge of the physical state of Egypt will throw light, not only on her own ancient people, but on usages of Greece, of the Near East, and of Europe. Elements of their own theogonies, their arts and crafts, their systems of time and measurement, and their physical and astronomical conceptions, all derive from Egypt. Rozière had informed himself of what was known of the origins of the zodiac, of the division of the year, month, and day, of linear and angular scales and units of measurement. His treatment of the much-discussed Egyptian metric system, a subject that attracted others among his engineering colleagues, may be the most interesting feature of his enormous and informative memoir.67 ´ In the original planning of the Description de l’Egypte, topography was to have been a fourth, or rather the first, main division of the work, preceding ´ Moderne, and Histoire Naturelle.68 and setting the stage for Antiquités, Etat That planning fell victim to considerations of military security when, after the collapse of the peace of Amiens in 1803, the Commission was informed that the Emperor had ordered that the map of Egypt “should remain under the seal of a state secret.”69 In 1814 the restored monarchy authorized even´ tual publication of the Carte Topographique de l’Egypte, et de Plusieurs Parties des Pays Limitrophes as a supplement to the completed work. It appeared 66

Ibid., p. 408. ⬘ Ibid., 3e partie, sec 1ere , pp. 497–534. For other discussions, see P. S. Girard, “Mémoire sur ´ le Nilomètre de l’Ile d’Eléphantine, et les mésures e´gyptiennes,” DE, Antiquités, Mémoires, 1, ´ pp. 1–48; Edme Jomard, “Mémoire sur le système métrique des anciens Egyptiens,” DE, Antiquitiés, Mémoires, 1, pp. 495–802; Samuel Bernard, “Notice sur les Poids Arabes anciens ⬘ partie, pp. 229–248, and “Mémoire sur les Monnoies de et modernes,” DE, EM 2, 1ere ere ⬘ ´ l’Egypte,” DE, EM, 1 partie, pp. 321–468. 68 On 18 February 1802, Chaptal, then Minister of the Interior, summoned the members of the Institute of Egypt to his office in order to name the commission that would oversee the work. They chose Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Costaz, Desgenettes, and Conté. See Pierre ´ Jacotin, “Mémoire sur la construction de la carte de l’Egypte,” DE, EM 2, 2e partie, pp. 1–118, 18–19. 69 D’Hunebourg, Minister of War, to Berthollet, in 1808, though undated, Bibliothèque nationale, NAFr 3577, registre 2, containing the procès-verbaux of the Commission on the DE. 67

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only in 1828. Consequently, the memoirs intended to accompany it are scattered amid the texts of the other three divisions, the largest number ending ´ in the three volumes of Etat Moderne. The map itself is on a scale of 1:100,000 and is divided into forty-seven sheets, numbered from south to north, beginning with the Cataracts and spreading out to include the Delta, the Sinai, and Syria. Accompanying and synthesizing them is the Carte géographique in three sheets at a scale of 1:1,000,000. A single-page “Tableau d’assemblage” locates each sector in an overview of all Egypt. All told, thirty-seven members of the expedition ran traverses, more or less extensive: seven topographical engineers, thirteen officers in the military engineers, twelve civil engineers, two students, and three general officers (Andréossy, Reynier, and Sanson).70 On repatriation, all were ordered to deliver their sketches and data into the custody of the Dépôt Général de la Guerre. There the maps were drawn and the plates engraved under the supervision of Colonel Pierre Jacotin of the Corps of Topographical Engineers (Ingénieurs Géographes), who had directed the field work in Egypt. The preparation required the services of twenty-three engravers. The plates are beautiful and the atlas is a triumph of the graphic arts. Compared to the existing cartography of Egypt, it may also be considered a work of professional quality. The map that had guided the invasion was a pretty one. It had been compiled in 1765 by an armchair cartographer, the chevalier d’Anville, who worked from books and from other maps. When ´ the Carte Topographique de l’Egypte is judged by the criteria of mapmaking in 1800, however, the verdict is mixed. For it was below standard technically. Not only was the model, the Cassini Map of France, becoming outdated, but the circumstances in Egypt precluded the use of equally accurate methods in the field. On the other hand, the map of Egypt was ahead of its time conceptually. It anticipates the thematic cartography of the nineteenth century, which serves civic purposes other than the simple mapping of terrain—showing transportation systems, for example, or natural resources, or population distributions, or regionalization of economic activity. Ideally, admits Jacotin in his “Mémoire sur la Construction de la Carte de ´ l’Egypte,” an application of the most exact scientific procedures in a full survey would have been appropriate. After all, geometry had been invented in Egypt. That would have required measuring baselines on the ground, determining the length of an arc of the meridian, never yet accomplished in those latitudes, triangulating the entire country as the Cassini map had done for France, and fixing the exact geographical position of the resulting net70

A manuscript memoir by Jacotin gives a different and fuller listing than the page of credits printed with the atlas. “Exposé des moyens employés pour parvenir a` la confection de ´ la Carte de l’Egypte.” Bibliothèque nationale, Département de cartographie, GeDD2564. It is evidently an early draft of certain of the passages included in the memoir cited in note 68.


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work by astronomical observation. Nothing so ambitious was possible. Teams of surveyors would have needed armed escorts, as did the mission that undertook Bonaparte’s favorite project, the limited task of reestablishing the route of the canal that had connected the Red Sea with the Mediterranean in antiquity.71 Its results suffered from the loss of precision instruments, most of them in the “Patriote” and the remainder in the sack of Caffarelli’s headquarters in Cairo during the insurrection of October 1798. But even had that fine equipment been available, it could not have been used to undertake a general survey. There were too few trained people. There was not time. All that could be attempted were the rougher and readier techniques, either of traverse or of sketch map, that are available to a surveyor working alone. Those two sets of techniques are not to be despised. In skilled hands, they suffice for ordinary purposes. Of the total area of 3,010 square leagues (for engineers still generally thought and worked in the old units, reserving the metric system for official reports), about 40 percent was mapped with the use of plane table, measuring chains, and graphometer (a graduated demilune with a movable sighting arm), while in the remaining areas the distances were paced off and the directions taken by compass. In the ideal case of a proper survey by triangulation, a single astronomical determination suffices in theory to fix the coordinates. Conditions in Egypt having been far from ideal, the senior astronomer of the commission, Nouet multiplied observations to determine the latitude and longitude of some thirty-six vantage points in order to compensate for error in the traverses.72 The oldest member of the Institute of Egypt, Nouet had always been something of a journeyman astronomer, not to say a workhorse. His activity in Egypt, and it was prodigious, consisted entirely of determining and recording astronomical and meteorological data. Apparently he had kept his instruments in his personal baggage. They consisted of a Borda repeating circle twenty-five centimeters in diameter, a Dollond achromatic telescope with sixty-three-millimeter aperture on a copper mounting, a thirty-fivecentimeter quadrant also on a copper column, a Berthoud marine chronometer (number thirty-four in that artisan’s register), and two compasses, one for declination and one for inclination. 71 J.-M. Le Père, “Mémoire sur la Communication de la Mer des Indes a` la Mer Méditerranée, par la Mer Rouge et l’Isthme de Soueys,” DE, EM 1, 21–186. On this enterprise, see J. E. Goby, “Histoire des nivellements de l’Isthme de Suez,” Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Historiques et Géographiques de l’Isthme de Suez 4 (1951–52), pp. 99–177. 72 Jacotin’s explanation of the two techniques, op. cit., n. 68 above, 12–13, is admirably clear and could well be incorporated in a modern manual of surveying. The terrain sectors allocated to each engineer were chosen to include at least two of Nouet’s reference sites, one at either end where each overlapped with the neighboring sector. They could thus serve to control the accuracy of the traverse in each sector and to link it to the next.

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Determining latitudes was, of course, a relatively simple matter of reading the height of the sun on a given date. To determine longitude required comparing the time of given astronomical events in Egypt to their occurrence according to Paris mean time. The difference was a measure of the longitude, an hour corresponding to 15⬚. Nouet relied most frequently on eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, but also noted occultations of Jupiter and Venus. He had with him the astronomical almanac, Connaissance des Temps, but verified many of the ephemerides on his return to Paris. Tourists even now may see the record of his determinations inscribed by the sculptor Castex on the stone of the temples of Philae and Karnak. Not all of them are correct. He had established the position of Alexandria immediately on landing, and run a triangulation of the city and its environs, in collaboration with the naval officer Fran¸cois Quesnot, as Nouet and other associates later did for Cairo. Before his arrival there, an accident in Rosetta altered the movement of the chronometer. By good fortune another member of the expedition, the astronomer Beauchamp, also had a Berthoud chronometer, number twentynine, and let Nouet have it. The extremes of heat affected its regularity, however, particularly during the invasion of Syria. Nouet referred later readings back to his Alexandria observations to correct for this new source of error, though with only partial success. Assembling the data in Paris, he followed the method that Dionis du Séjour had devised for the Cassini map in calculating projection of the data onto a plane surface. Intersections of latitude and longitude at 30⬘ intervals together with the 36 cardinal geographical locations were plotted with respect to rectangular coordinates consisting of the meridian passing through the apex of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the parallel of latitude at right angles to it.73 It is in the memoirs and studies on topography that the Description de ´ l’Egypte most largely fulfills the promise of its title. Evidently the term connoted both delineating the outlines of a place and observing what went on inside, for the description, much of it composed by engineers, is of human society in its setting. On 19 November 1799, right after the return to Cairo of the commissions that had explored the antiquities of upper Egypt, Kléber ´ ´ appointed a Commission des Renseignements sur l’Etat Moderne de l’Egypte drawn from members of the Institute. It divided its charge among ten subcommittees, the tenth on Geography and Hydrography consisting of Pierre Jacotin, commander of the topographical engineers (Ingénieurs-Géographes), and J.-M. Le Père, chief civil engineer in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, who had directed the survey of the ancient canal from Suez to the Mediterranean. It is unclear whether it was they or the parent body who decided ´ Jacotin, ibid., pp. 29–30; Nouet, “Observations astronomiques faites en Egypte pendant les Années 6, 7, et 8 (1798, 1799, 1800),” DE, EM 1, pp. 1–20. 73


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that an “enquête,” or general inquiry, should form part and parcel of the survey. In either case, Jacotin and Le Père drew up an elaborate set of instructions for the engineers running traverses. It had three parts. The first prescribed the methods to employ in surveying terrain. The second provided a form to fill out in ten columns. The tabulation would assign a code number to each locality and give the place names in Arabic and French. The surveyor would write down the name phonetically as best he could understand it and have it corrected as soon as he could find someone who knew Arabic. There were then spaces for the number of inhabitants and families, their status and occupations, the type of agriculture, the species of trees, the nature of commerce and industry, and particular remarks. The third item was a notebook for recording general observations about the region. What of the communications, by land and water? What of the state of canals and tow-paths? What of the air quality and drinking water? What of animal husbandry and of the prevalence of wild animals and snakes? What of forestry, of gardening, of stonequarrying and masonry? The surveyors are invited to write at large of the character of the population; of why one region is more densely populated than another; of the Arab tribes in surrounding territories, their number, their camp sites, their movements, and the number of their camels and horses. What is the state of agriculture, and how might it be improved? Are there arts and trades peculiar to the region? Is commerce conducted by barter or by money, in what commodities and with whom? Only for a few provinces was there time to complete the forms, but the conception of the task is no less interesting for that. The problem of language will indicate how serious an effort the commission made to get things right. Two sorts of information leap to the eye on opening the album. Lettered on the face of the maps are the battle sites of the campaigns and the names of villages, towns, and cities, the latter in both French and Arabic. In order to render those place names, the commission found an engraver, one Miller, who undertook to learn to write Arabic. An Orientalist of the expedition, Rémi Raige, gave Miller an intensive one-man course. Only after passing an examination before the famous Arabist, Silvestre de Sacy, sitting with Professor Langlès of the School of Oriental Languages, did Miller begin to engrave names upon the copper. When the task was almost done, Volney, the sage in all things Near Eastern, paid a visit to the Dépôt de la Guerre. He praised the map and the Arabic orthography, but found the transliteration into French complicated, fatiguing to the eye, and inconsistent. There was, indeed, no standard practice, and the commission took the occasion to devise one, a system that would be uniform and comprehensible by orientalists working in all European languages. To that end, the Director of the Dépôt de la Guerre, General Sanson, named an ad hoc committee of scholars and scientists—Volney, Silvestre de Sacy, Langlès, Monge, Berthol-

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let, Lacroix, among others, with several native Arab-speaking members. They met in four sessions and adopted a scheme proposed by one Ellious Bochtor, formerly an interpreter with the army. It is printed at the end of Jacotin’s memoir on the construction of the map. Redoing the transliterations required another eighteen months of work. The object was to ensure that the map be in harmony with the texts, that all or most of the place names mentioned in the memoirs be inscribed on the map, and that they be easy to recognize despite the differences in orthography among the many authors. Medicine too depended on topography. In general, of course, eighteenthcentury medicine mediated between what Rozière called the physical constitution of a region, with special emphasis on climate, and the physiological constitution of men, women, and children. Desgenettes was head physician of the Expedition and Larrey head surgeon. The Egyptian environment being dramatic, at least from a European point of view, it is natural that Desgenettes should have begun by establishing a “Topographie physique et ´ médicale de l’Egypte,” on which he collaborated with Nouet for the geographical part.74 Throughout, he interested himself in the population dynamics of Egypt and compiled a necrology of Cairo for the three years of ´ the occupation. His Histoire Médicale de l’Armée d’Egypte discusses administrative matters and describes the development of policy on sanitation, on public health, and on the organization of hospitals. Larrey, on the other hand, wrote mainly of disease. Recent medical historiography attributes to the Paris school of clinical medicine responsibility, or credit, for the shift of the doctor’s attention from the patient to the disease.75 Larrey did, of course, belong to the same generation as Bichat and Pinel. His accounts of the diseases he encountered in Egypt can have owed nothing to either one, however, nor yet to the effects of the new regime in the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. The diseases he described were “opthalmia” (usually trachoma), bubonic plague, tetanus, yellow fever, atrophy, and also gigantism in the testicles, leprosy, and elephantiasis. He was clear that the etiology of plague, yellow fever, and tetanus, at least, involved an external agent, for which he sometimes used the word virus and sometimes germ. His concept of disease was as specific and objective as anything that entered into nineteenth-century medicine from the milieu of the new clinical practice in Paris. Since his absence in Egypt insulated him from all that, Larrey’s notions clearly derived from his observations.76 ´ All told, the text of the Description de l’Egypte comprises some 126 sepa74 “Lettre . . . sur un plan propre a` rédiger la Topographie physique et médicale de ´ l’Egypte,” 25 thermidor an VI (12 August 1798), Décade égyptienne 1, pp. 29–33. Cf. Goby (1987), p. 99. 75 Above, chapter 7, section 6. 76 Larrey, “Mémoire et observations sur plusieurs maladies qui ont affecté les troupes de ´ l’Armée fran¸caise pendant l’Expédition d’Egypte et de Syrie,” DE, EM 1, pp. 427–524.

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rate memoirs. A number of them were monographs. Only a few were slight. Of the total, 30 titles pertain to what is now called classical archaeology and 21 to natural history strictly speaking. If the remaining 75 were to be classified anachronistically, according to where their main subject matter would fall along a modern spectrum of the disciplines, the distribution would be as shown in the list below. Physical Geography Hydrography Meteorology Agronomy Technology Weights and Measures Economics Political Science

24 3 2 2 7 4 1 3

History History of Science Medicine Sociology Demography Anthropology/Ethnology Linguistics Musicology

2 4 2 2 2 8 5 4

Shall we call the information contained in these thousands of pages social science? Not if social science is knowledge produced by social scientists. But what, then, are we to call knowledge of a society produced by a large number of scientifically and technically trained people applying their talents to its description and analysis? When the surgeon Larrey writes on the bodily conformation of Egyptians, ancient and modern, is that physical anthropology? When the civil engineer Dubois-Aymé writes on the nomads of the region around Qo¸ceyr and of Arab desert tribes in general, is that cultural anthropology? When the topographical engineer Edme Jomard writes on the comparative population of ancient and modern Egypt, is that demography? When the Civil Engineer Michel-Ange Lancret writes on taxation and local administration during the last years of the Mamelukes, is that political science? Or perhaps administrative history? When the chief engineer Girard writes a veritable treatise on the trade, commerce, and agriculture of all Egypt, region by region, is that economics?77 True, a small number of pieces were written by people already expert in the European aspects of their subjects. The administrator Estève’s monograph on the finances of Egypt is the earliest systematic treatment of feudalism in the Ottoman empire. The four memoirs that together encompass Egyptian musical theory, practice, and instruments ancient and modern are by the musician Villoteau, who learned Arabic and became a musicologist.78 77

The titles being very long, perhaps it will suffice to cite the locations: Larrey, DE, EM 2, 1 partie, pp. 1–6; Dubois-Aymé, DE, EM, 1, pp. 193–202; 577–606; Jomard, DE, Antiq⬘ uités, Mémoires 2, pp. 87–142, Lancret, DE, EM 1, pp. 233–260, Girard, DE, EM 2, 1ere Partie, 491–711. 78 Estève, DE, EM 1, pp. 299–398; Vilioteau, DE, Antiquités, Mémoires 1, pp. 181–206, 357–426; DE, EM 1, pp. 607–846, 1012–1016. ere ⬘

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But the great majority of the memoirs were done, if not literally in execution of the questionnaire designed by Jacotin for his surveyors, certainly in that same spirit. That the authors were outsiders was probably an advantage. Their attitude to their subjects is that of an observer of phenomena. It was a commonplace among them that no other country in the world had been so thoroughly studied as Egypt, and certainly not France. But it was not just a question of thoroughness. No group of Frenchmen could have brought to the scrutiny of their own society the same detachment from its internal political dynamics.79 It cannot be said that the data thus assembled fed directly into the development of the social sciences as disciplines, except for geography. There it did. The exploration of Egypt was an entering wedge into Africa, and the Society of Geography, founded in 1821, numbered Jacotin, Costaz, Jomard, Fourier, and Chabrol de Volvic among its moving spirits.80 Apart from that, there is little evidence that early nineteenth-century social science made use of the Egyptian material. Its direct influence was more instrumental in the later careers of its compilers, many of whom continued in the service of the state. Their conduct of responsibility partook of the elements out of which Saint-Simon and after him Auguste Comte made philosophies abstracted from the genius of their generation—engineers exercising civil authority, administration informed by fact. Fourier was Prefect of the Isère when he ´ was writing the “Preface historique” to the Description de l’Egypte. He there says that “the sequence of plates thus represents objects which exist and admit of exact observation and description and which, for that reason, are to be considered as so many positive elements for the study of Egypt.” Chabrol de Volvic, a 25-year-old civil engineer in 1798, designed many of those plates, together with his colleagues. He also contributed an “Essai sur les ´ moeurs des habitans modernes de l’Egypte,” and collaborated with MichelAnge Lancret on a “Mémoire sur le Canal d’Alexandrie.”81 Prefect from 1806 to 1810 of the Department of Montenotte on the Ligurian coast, annexed by Napoleon along with much of northern Italy, Chabrol wrote up all he learned of the provinces for which he was responsible under the Grande Empire. The word “statistique” in the title of his memoir had gained currency for the voracious fact-gathering characteristic of administration from the time of the Directory onward.82 Chabrol ended his career in Paris as 79

The most interesting treatment of this aspect of the subject is an unpublished thèse du ´ cycle by Stéphane Callens, “Etude sur la Description d’E´ gypte, histoire d’une enquète, 1798– 3 1830” (September 1985). I am grateful to the author for providing me with a copy of his admirable study. 80 Although Fierro (1983), in a thesis on the history of the Society, is somewhat skeptical of its pretensions, its Bulletin does show a discipline in the course of being formed. ⬘ 81 DE, EM, pp 363–524; DE, EM 2, 1ere partie, pp. 185–194. 82 G.-J.-G. Chabrol de Volvic, Statistique des provinces de Savone, d’Oneille, d’Acqui, et de iem ⬘ e⬘


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Prefect of the Seine. He there put in hand an urban topography, the still ´ inadequately studied Statistique de la Ville de Paris, in its inspiration an “Etat 83 Moderne” of the capital of France. Over and beyond the enormous compilation of information on Egypt itself, its antiquities, its current state, and its geographical setting, the most interesting general feature of the participation of science in the Egyptian expedition is the relation it portended between formal knowledge and power politics. The Napoleonic occupation of Egypt may be considered the first instance of nineteenth-century imperialism in that it comprised a cultural component lacking in the mercantile colonialism that preceded it. What the French later came to call their “civilizing mission” had its origins partly in the Enlightenment and partly in revolutionary ideology. Technical competence was the operational aspect of culture. Bonaparte understood all that, not abstractly, but intuitively, practically, as he did whatever related to the exercise of power. His was the imagination that implanted a clone of French science on the banks of the Nile, in a milieu that, in contrast with earlier French and British colonies, was totally other than European. The British had done nothing of the sort in India. The pieces of positive knowledge that resulted are not without interest— the physics of mirages, the homology of crabs chewing with parts that comparable creatures use to walk on, the mortality to be expected of the plague. But it is unlikely that it would have made significant difference to the relevant sciences if those things had been learned by others elsewhere. The circumstances did matter to the scientists, and enormously. The civil and professional status of the senior people, Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Jacotin, Denon, Larrey, and Desgenettes, was elevated by their proximity to the historical prime mover who was Bonaparte. Whether the expedition was reciprocally dignified by the incorporation of science is, perhaps, a matter of opinion. The junior people—Geoffroy, Savigny, Rozière, Malus, the dozens of engineers and technicians who ran the surveys, measured and drew the monuments, and studied the country—were in Egypt at the formative time of their lives, many of them the equivalent of undergraduates. The problems on which they cut their eyeteeth arose in consequence of their presence there. The same, of course, may be said of the circumstances of most young partie de la province de Mondovi, formant l’ancien département de Montenotte (2 vols., 1824). The history of pre-mathematical statistics has recently been drawing attention, for example, Perrot (1977); Viré et al. (1980); Bourguet (1988). 83 Recherches statistiques sur la Ville de Paris et le département de la Seine (4 vols., 1821, 1823, 1826, 1829). Fourier served in the largely honorific post of Directeur du Bureau de la Statistique, which assembled the data. On this project, see the interesting compte-rendu of the first ⬘ série, 2 (1824), pp. 305–322, volume by Edme Jomard, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 1ere e er and also in Revue encyclopédique 21, 2 série, T. 1 ( janvier 1824).

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scientists. They respond to whatever their opportunities may be in choosing problems. The difference in Egypt was the exceptional nature of the circumstances. Unprecedented episodes become precedents. This one marks the beginning of the spread of European science and its appurtenances to African and Asian societies under the aegis of military conquest and political power. Despite growing British political predominance after the opening of the French-built Suez Canal in 1869, a continuing French technical and cultural presence informed the development of the Egyptian educational system, economy, and administration until the middle of the twentieth century. ´ 3. THE IDEOLOGUES AND 18 BRUMAIRE

The brief interval of the Directory, 1795–99, was the one interval in the quarter century spanning the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes when the voice of intellectuals was heard in French public life in the way it had been during the Enlightenment and has normally been since the fall of Napoleon. Among the difficulties in assessing the importance of the dominant school, known as ideology, is the change in connotation of that word.84 To call their attitudes and programs ideologistic rather than ideological will help distinguish what proponents had in mind from the modern meaning. For doctrinaire intellectuals though they were, their writings served no political movement or cause intended to transform society as did Marxism and Fascism. So far as politics was concerned, the idéologues’ initial goal was to stabilize the republican regime on the basis of the Constitution of the year III, itself their handiwork. Their further part would be to implement Condorcet’s vision of founding the social and human sciences on the model of the natural sciences. Politics and social relations would then rest on a firm foundation of positive knowledge. Since capacity for thought is the distinctive characteristic of humanity in the natural world, the origin, development, and proper employment of ideas are the basic phenomena to be elucidated. Hence the science of ideology, knowledge of ideas, in a period when similar locutions were proliferating across the gamut of activities now to be brought into the purview of reasoned observation and analysis, discipline by discipline—technology, psychology, biology, physiology, geology, anthropology, and so on. “Ideology,” in the words of Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term, “is part of zoology” and pertinent above all to the study of mankind.85 The institutional base, as already indicated, was the Class of Moral and 84

For the history of the meaning, see Kennedy (1978), an excellent biography of Destutt de Tracy. 85 ´ Eléments d’idéologie (5 vols., 1801–15) 1, p. 1. On Destutt de Tracy, see Kennedy (1978) and Goetz (1993).

´ VIII. 3. THE ID EOLOGUES AND 18 BRUMAIRE

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Political Sciences, the Second Class in the Institute, wherein the preeminence of the First Class signaled the place of science as the model for all knowledge. The structure of the Institute was itself the work of the idéologues, not of the scientists. Its architect, Fran¸cois Daunou, also drafted the Constitution of 1795. “A living Encyclopedia,” in his words, the Institute was designed to put the Enlightenment to work. Not that all, or even a majority, of the Second Class would qualify as idéologues. There was no coherence, however, among the others. The membership at large was a miscellany comprising notables from the old regime, certain members of the onetime Académie des Inscriptions, liberal political figures, deserving military men, and a handful of writers, all scattered among the sections of ethics, history, and geography. Those of an ideologistic bent belonged rather to the sections for analysis of sensations and ideas, social science and legislation, and political economy, though in none of the three were all members of that persuasion. Martin Staum, the historian of the Second Class, gives a reasonable set of criteria defining the group. It consisted of those who wrote a major work of an ideologistic nature treating medicine, philosophy, ethics, politics, or economics, and who also engaged in at least two of the following three activities: attendance in the salons of Mme. Helvétius, Destutt de Tracy, or Mme. de Condorcet; participation in La Décade philosophique whether as editors or regular contributors; engagement in moderate Republican politics under the Directory followed by opposition to Bonaparte after 1801.86 Most had suffered imprisonment during the Terror, and revered the memory of Condorcet. Immersion in Condillac’s philosophy and the notion of science as a well-made language that is analytic of reality was the common starting point. (Destutt de Tracy first studied Condillac while in prison.) All shared admiration for Lavoisier’s chemical language as a model for the elucidation of natural phenomena. Just as its nomenclature and syntax exhibit at a glance the identity of chemical reagents and the relations among them, the study of general grammar would bring out the principles underlying the relation of words to ideas, facts, and meaning in all languages. Creation of an educational system that would form young minds in the image of nature was a first priority. As we have seen, apart from the ´ design for the Institute, creation of the Ecole Normale de l’an III and of the Écoles Centrales was the one practical ideologistic achievement under the Directory. Who were they? Staum identifies fourteen intellectuals who meet the above criteria. We have already encountered Sieyès, Volney, Cabanis, Garat, Ginguené, and Daunou in connections related to ideology. Not to name them all, the others best known at the time were Destutt de Tracy, a one´ ements d’idéotime nobleman of distinguished lineage, whose five-volume El´ 86

Staum (1996), pp. 232–235.

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logie is the most comprehensive argument for its subject, and Joseph-Marie Degérando, who combined an administrative career in the Napoleonic bureaucracy with the fostering of technology and composition of a treatise on what would later be called semiotics.87 Apart from Sieyès and Volney, in later times the Second Class idéologues were prophets without honor, in their own country and abroad. Of the exceptions, Sieyès is famous for his pamph´ let on the Third Estate in 1789, and Volney for his Voyage en Egypte et Syrie ´ in 1787 rather than for his lectures on historiography at the Ecole Normale. To them should be added the political economist Jean-Baptiste Say, not a member of the Institute until later, but a member of the ideologistic circle in his youth. His important work belongs to the next generation. Otherwise, the names of the idéologues form little if any part of historical consciousness, even in France. Their tenets do not resonate as, for example, do those of Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Rousseau, or across the Channel of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, T. R. Malthus, and David Ricardo. It is not that they wrote unintelligent books. Nor have they lacked for champions, in the next generation and since. Maine de Biran paid tribute to the inspiration he found in Destutt de Tracy. So too did Stendhal. Thomas ´ ements d’idéologie. Fran¸cois Picavet in 1891, Sergio Jefferson translated El´ Moravia in 1968 and further in 1974, and Georges Gusdorf in 1978 all have thoroughly expounded and carefully analyzed their works.88 No awakening of general interest, however, has followed the successive resurrections. If that is correct, it is not easy to see why it should have been so. Nevertheless, several tentative explanations do suggest themselves. The first is philosophical and circumstantial. None among them was a stylist, and none was an original thinker or a creative philosopher. Rather, they took themselves to be philosophes in the sense proper to the Enlightenment. Writing in its twilight, Condorcet was the last of that ilk. By the time his ideologistic disciples set pen to paper, the lights of the eighteenth century had gone out. What had been the vision of a social and human science in Condorcet became a largely verbal, not to say verbose, attempt at its implementation on the part of disciples who outlived him and his time. Not only was none of them a philosopher, neither was there a mathematician among the number, and the one thing in Condorcet they abandoned was his commitment to probability and statistical inference as the tools to use. In their hierarchy of knowledge, the idéologues promoted science, which they thought to emulate, to first place. But the philosophy on which they drew was nothing of a perspicuous analysis of the science in action around them. That enterprise was left for Auguste Comte, who had yet to graduate ´ from the Ecole Polytechnique. Instead, the idéologues based their thinking 87 88

Des signes, et de l’art de penser considerés dans leurs rapports mutuels, 4 vols., 1799–1800. Picavet (1891), Moravia (1968, 1974), Gusdorf (1978).


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on Condillac, on Helvétiua, on Condorcet, whose philosophies had illuminated the sciences of the Enlightenment, but were largely irrelevant to those that were taking form in their own time, let alone in the future. The discrepancy, though not perhaps perceived among the educated public, was such that scientists took little notice of their would-be emulants in the social and human sciences. Ideologistic admiration for the physical and mathematical sciences went largely unrequited. Save for the occasional prefatory nod, as in Prony’s Mécanique philosophique (1799), it is difficult to find expressions of esteem by members of the First Class of the Institute for the program of their colleagues of the Second. Another, perhaps more fundamental factor may have vitiated the enterprise. That the classical economists and Benthamites in England, to whom may be added Cesare Beccaria in Italy, are generally taken to have been founders of the disciplines of economics, political science, and criminology cannot be a mere illusion. They were little programmatic, if at all, and did not concern themselves with methodology. None of them set out to build a general sciences of humanity and society on the model of the natural sciences. They addressed themselves to problems: the sources of wealth, the working of markets, the relation of population to the food supply, the determination of wages, crime, and punishment. They drew their theories and conclusions from observation and analysis of the phenomena that directly concerned them, and not by borrowing methods from elsewhere. Their findings were of practical rather than literary or philosophical interest. They have been preserved in general historical consciousness (as have earlier schools such as mercantilists and physiocrats) for the reason that they entered formatively into events, whether for good or for ill: the freeing of trade and markets (including the labor market), liberal political reform, and reform of criminal law. Let us consider as an example of applied ideology the positions of Cabanis, whose career as a medical writer brought him closer to the scientific community than were the others. There is no doubt about his reputation in his lifetime. The trouble in appreciating the grounds for his interment in the Pantheon may be his very transparency. From a liberal point of view, in which right means slightly left of center, he knew all the right people, he read all the right books, he said all the right things, he championed all the right causes.89 In his politics as in his writings, Cabanis represented the interface between reform in general and the reform of medicine. In his youth Cabanis had hesitated between a literary and a medical career. On the one hand, he entered a competition set by the Académie Fran¸caise in 1774 for a translation of a lengthy passage from the Iliad. For he 89

On Cabanis, see Staum (1980) and Canguilhem, DSB 3 (171), pp. 1–3. Ackerknecht (1967) attributes more importance to his influence than may be altogether warranted.

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was a good classicist. On the other hand, he studied medicine, though not very intensively, with a royal physician at the hospital in Saint-Germain-enLaye, one Léon Dubreuil. He received his doctorate from the University of Rheims, a medical diploma mill, in 1784. His father had connections with Turgot, and in 1778 at the age of twenty-one Cabanis was introduced to the salon of Madame Helvétius, with whom his relationship soon bordered on the filial. Cabanis had one famous patient. Mirabeau, whom he had met in Madame Helvétius’s salon, consulted him on problems of failing health that taxed the great orator’s ability to dominate the Constituent Assembly. When a lifetime of debauchery ended with Mirabeau’s death in 1791, Cabanis felt obliged to scotch rumors that blamed the fatal outcome on malpractice at best and poison at worst.90 Neither before nor after that episode did he conduct a regular medical practice. His works are collected in the “Corpus Général des Philosophes Fran¸cais,” but Cabanis was a literary doctor, a medical pundit, and no more a notable philosopher than he was a great physician.91 His writings exhibit neither deep insight nor sparks of originality capable of shaping the thinking of future generations. They smell of the lamp, not of the clinic, the surgical theater, and the morgue. The published work consists mainly of a series of lengthy reports on aspects of medical belief, education, knowledge, and practice. Cabanis was the epitome of philosophical and political correctness in the field of medicine. He approached it from the perspective of his fellow idéologues, for whom genetic analysis of ideas was the basis of all sound philosophy. The three most considerable books are Du Degré de Certitude de la Médecine (1798), Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme (1802), and Coup d’Oeil sur les Révolutions et sur la Réforme de la Médecine (1804). He addressed them, not to professional medical men, but to the educated public. Although the first title was ready for publication in the winter of 1789, Cabanis delayed it until 1798, by which time he was a deputy in the Conseil ´ des Cinq-Cents. He then dedicated it to the faculty of the Ecole de Santé, whose advice he had gratefully taken in revising the text in order to bring it abreast of their contributions to the art. The medical leitmotifs of this book, and equally of his further writings, came from his observation of their practice and teaching with occasional participation in the latter. The opening assertion may be startling to the modern reader. With respect to therapeutics, it expresses the indifference (amounting to pessimism in the case of Corvisart) that characterized the Paris School of Clinical Medicine. The attitude gave rise to severe criticism then and later, in France but especially abroad. Although medicine may not be directly useful in alleviating suffer90 91

Journal de la maladie et de la mort de Mirabeau (1791). Lehec and Cazeneuve (1956).


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ing and curing disease, Cabanis observes, it nevertheless merits attention as the basis of “all good rational philosophy.” It is a science, not a cure-all, the science of man. Only medicine reveals the laws that govern the “living machine.” It strips the physical aspect of man to the essentials (“met a` nu l’homme physique”).92 The moral aspect is merely another face. In common with all science, medicine serves the further purpose of dissipating superstition and exposing the pretensions of charlatans. Accustoming men and women to see in the facts nothing but the facts themselves, medical knowledge conduces to the intellectual independence and firmness of spirit that may be observed in doctors worthy of the name throughout all history. The burden of De la certitude is to meet the objections often raised against the claims of medicine to be considered a trustworthy discipline. They were seven in kind: first, we have no idea of the nature and working of life; second, the essence and causes of disease are unknown; third, diseases are so various in type and their course so dependent on vagaries of all sorts that it is impossible to isolate causal factors or to know which ones to treat; fourth, the nature of medicaments is a mystery; fifth, medical experiments are too uncertain to provide a basis for predicting the effect of a particular remedy on a particular disease; sixth, medical doctrines and procedures, instead of being constant, have varied widely in all times and places and still do; seventh and last, even if all the preceding difficulties were to be resolved so that the scientific status of medicine might be generally recognized, the art would remain so difficult that very few could be trusted to practice it. To the first six criticisms Cabanis opposes the standard version of enlightened empiricism. No science penetrates to essences or seeks out causes. Effects are what are observed and ordered by appropriate classification. To the seventh and most telling objection, he responds in the spirit of Condorcet with the assurance that in medicine as in all other fields there is no limit to the capacity of the human mind to improve its knowledge of nature. Only by an excessive stretch may Cabanis’s major work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, be considered a charter for psychosomatic medicine. A famous line from Pope appears as epigraph on the title page: “The proper study of mankind is man.” The book consists of twelve memoirs composed between 1795 and 1802. The first six were delivered before the Second Class of the Institute in 1795–96 and published separately in its Mémoires. “Subir un discours” is one of the most telling of French phrases. If Cabanis read his lectures in their entirety, they are ample testimony to the ability of its membership to endure the spoken word. Not one could have taken less than three hours, and several considerably more. Vocabulary presents the English-speaking reader with an initial difficulty. 92

Ibid., 1, p. 36.

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There is no satisfactory translation for Cabanis’s use of “moral” as a substantive. What Cabanis means is the ensemble of intellectual, emotional, and (in our sense) moral faculties. He eschews the word soul. The notion of human nature comes closest to what he had in mind. By moralist he understands a student of the human sciences in the sense in which a scientist is a student of the physical sciences. Ideally speaking the two enterprises, improperly separated for centuries, should be complementary aspects of a reformed medicine. Cabanis’s prefatory concern is with the moralist. The physical nature of mankind is no less important for the latter than for the doctor. Is it possible to find the springs of thought, wish, and feeling in the functioning of particular organs? If so, are these organs subject to the same laws as are the others? With respect to the circumstances of human beings in general, do patterns of social relations derive from their mutual needs directly, or from faculties that these needs give rise to? Do personal and social phenomena exhibit conditions corresponding to those of health and disease? Can observation discover the circumstances that conduce to such states? These problems and others like them are for the moralist what the phenomena studied by physiology are for the doctor. Investigators who have undertaken analysis of ideas, languages, and semiotics all agree on the necessity of guiding their research by knowledge of the physical basis of human nature. A machine is not to be analyzed in ignorance of the details of its structure and properties. So it is for the moralist. He takes the same route as the doctor. He must understand the relevant social circumstances, the mode of government, the content of law, and the sum of errors and truths embedded in his subject. Doctor and moralist alike thus have direct analytical methods for reaching in their respective fields all the certainty of which other sciences of observation are capable. Although descriptive sciences are not reducible to mathematics and calculation, their findings may attain the high degree of probability (Condorcet’s reason to believe) that constitutes practical certainty in other skills and subjects. What impeded the human sciences prior to the enlightened eighteenth century was metaphysics. Cabanis rehearses the contributions of the men of genius who have progressively dissipated those clouds: Aristotle, Democritus, Epicurus, the “immortal” Bacon, Hobbes, and finally Locke on the human understanding, who showed once and for all that ideas come from sensations or are the product of sensations. Helvétius popularized and clarified those propositions, and Condillac demonstrated their verity by an entirely new, linguistic analysis. Cabanis had one reservation, however. Condillac had gone too far in attributing instinctive functions to concealed operations of the mind operating on sense impressions. In reality the faculty of instinct is innate and occupies a middle ground between the workings of intelligence and involuntary functions such as heartbeat, respiration, and


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digestion. Nothing if not eclectic, Cabanis there made a place for the vitalism of the Montpellier tradition, as he did in other passages for the humoral medicine of classical antiquity. He had also been struck by the analysis that the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy brought to phenomena of moral sympathy between individual persons, explained in Edinburgh as a set of mutual reactions to similar stimuli. All that said at the outset, the focus shifts. The body of the treatise is not about the human sciences per se. It is an overview of late-eighteenth-century physiology. Based on very wide reading and no firsthand research, it purports to exhibit the influence of psychological factors on physiological processes and vice versa. In the six memoirs delivered orally, Cabanis treats in great detail the physiology of sensitivity and the influence respectively of age, sex, temperament, disease, mode of life, and climate on the functioning of the organism. The remaining six memoirs, written over a period of four years, were designed to be complementary. They concern the influence of the same factors on mental activity and psychological health. Typical observations are that coffee stimulates creativity in intellectual and artistic pursuits, that exercise is beneficial to health but must be moderate in hot climates, and that the effects of drinking water depend on what impurities it contains. This, Cabanis’s major work, came to rest on many bookshelves. Four editions had appeared by 1824, the last two containing summary abstracts by Destutt de Tracy. The compilation would appear to have been a muchappreciated source of physiological information for laymen. There is a sense, of course, in which any past work of science is dated. The difficulty in reading Cabanis in later years is that none of the scientific content points beyond his times. Nor was he quite up to date technically. Of Condorcet’s probability, he understood only the epistemological reason-to-believe aspect and not the role for statistical inference opened rather by Laplace, it is true, than by Condorcet. He keeps alluding to renovation of the sciences, but with no comprehension of what was under way, if barely, in comparative anatomy, physics, or even physiology. He alludes to Bichat in several places, but without perceiving that his work was an early stage of the transformation of physiology from a philosophical subject to an experimental science. In failing health Cabanis courageously prepared a last book, Coup d’oeil sur les révolutions et la réforme de la médecine. He wrote in close collaboration with Garat, his close friend since Auteuil days, and at the time Commissaire d’Instruction Publique, in effect Minister of Education. The work is mainly historical in compass. All the revolutions in doctrine from Hippocrates to the eighteenth century, so runs the argument, had been superficial. Fundamental reform must now occur. His summons to that end called for a comprehensive classification of sound medical data accumulated across the ages and elimination of all superfluous baggage. Nothing could have been more

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conventional than this approach. The main tool was to be linguistic, a rigorous examination of the meaning of words. He lacked the strength, Cabanis confessed, to undertake so great a task himself, as he had once intended to do. It is as well he did not try. He had no inkling that seeds of modern practice were all around him in the form of internal medicine, pathological anatomy, pharmacology, and the beginning of medical statistics. Cabanis, to do him justice as a considerable public figure, was more than a witness to linkages between medicine, science, and politics. He was instrumental in tightening the connections institutionally and intellectually. He used his influence to advance the careers of others. If he did not introduce Philippe Pinel to Madame Helvétius’s salon, and he may have done so, Cabanis welcomed the shy country doctor and put him at ease there. His 1790 brochure, Observations sur les hôpitaux, impressed the Constituent Assembly and won him appointment to the Hospital Commission, on which he served until 1793. Experience there was the basis of reflections he later published on the pitfalls of welfare policy, the need for which no enlightened person could deny.93 He kept himself out of sight throughout the Terror. Thereafter, Cabanis and others of the Auteuil circle were at Daunou’s elbow as the latter drafted the Constitution of the year III. The phrase “Living Encyclopedia” to describe the Institute may have been his coinage. At all events its Second Class was his intellectual and professional home. Elected to the Conseil des Cinq-Cents in 1795, Cabanis drew up a report in 1798 on proposed legislation for regulating the practice of medicine.94 A second, more important report on the whole system of medical education figured in the background of the reforms instituted by the law of 19 ventôse (1803), which accomplished that purpose.95 Cabanis held minor teaching posts under the Directory, briefly as professor of hygiene in a secondary school, then as Corvisart’s assistant, and finally in a chair of history of medi´ cine at the Ecole de Médecine. He did little teaching, however. Cabanis shared with his fellow idéologues, and indeed with public opinion generally, disenchantment witn the political nullity of the Directory. He was almost certainly party to the conspiracy that overthrew it. The coup d’état of 18 brumaire, 9 November 1799, which brought Bonaparte to power as First Consul, is sometimes ascribed to the Institute. That is an exaggeration, but his membership did contribute signally to growing admiration among politically minded intellectuals disgusted with the corruption and dismayed by the failure of the regime. Sieyès was the one who took the lead. 93

Quelques principes et quelques vues sur les secours publics (1803). Rapport fait au nom de la Commission d’Instruction Publique et Projet de résolution sur un mode provisioire de police médicale (4 messidor an VI) (22 June 1798). Lehec and Cazeneuve 2, pp. 388–402. 95 Above, chapter 7, section 6. 94


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His part in history consists of two extraordinary moments. Having inaugurated the Revolution with his pamphlet, “What is the Third Estate,” he now, after ten years on the fringes, engineered its demise. “Politics is a science,” he wrote, “and I think I have mastered it.”96 The events are well known and need only summary here. After a brief diplomatic mission in Berlin, Sieyès was elected a Director on 16 May 1798. He had already concluded that the Revolution must be ended, the Constitution changed, and a strong executive created to govern the Republic. The Directory had survived by dint of coups d’état, albeit barely. A final one would clear the decks. Legal recourse being unavailable, military force would be the only means to that end. Sieyès and those in his confidence began looking for a general early in 1799, months before Bonaparte’s return from Egypt in October. They thought first of Joubert, but he was killed in the battle of Novi on 15 August 1799. Meanwhile Bonaparte had reached the same conclusion about the regime but by a different route, the road of ambition rather than the dead end of political frustration. His initial notion may probably have been to become a Director. He needed allies. “I need a sword,” said Sieyès. Talleyrand and Fouché brought them together. After several meetings, they agreed on a plan. The two houses of the legislative body would be convened in the château of Saint-Cloud on the edge of Paris. They would there legislate the end of the Directory. A commission would then draw up a new constitution. Bonaparte and the army would protect the proceedings from the wrath that Jacobin agitators could be expected to stir up among the populace of Paris. The military would further assure maintenance of order pending adoption of the new constitution. Bonaparte, however, insisted on a modification. He must be present at the meetings of the legislative bodies and approve the constitutional proposals. The strategy almost miscarried. Bonaparte’s appearance before a suspicious Conseil des Anciens was a disaster. He fared worse in the Conseil des Cinq-Cents, where enraged deputies assaulted and manhandled him. His brother, Lucien, was in the chair and called the troops. Under the command of Murat—“Throw everyone out!” he ordered—they cleared the halls. What had been intended to be a parliamentary coup with military protection, on the model of fructidor and prairial, turned into a military coup that ended parliamentary government. Having written the Constitution of the year III, now trashed, and of the Roman Republic, Daunou with Garat and Ginguené at his elbow had now to compose one for the Consulate. Reviewing the draft, Bonaparte eliminated all passages that placed any legislative or judicial restrictions on the power of the executive, headed by himself as First Consul. Cabanis for his 96

Quoted in Bredin (1988), p. 9.

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part drafted the Proclamation by which the rump of the Legislative Body justified the coup d’état before the French people.97 A month later he published a brochure concerning principles of social organization in general and the new constitution in particular. If organizers of a novel political system took as their guide only the experiential lessons of history, so he argued, they would risk applying them in conditions that had no resemblance to the past. Nor could they be in a position to experiment themselves and try out their plans before instituting them. Only knowledge of the nature of man could provide a sound basis. On this, the fundamental point for a theory of society, Cabanis’s analysis and his language come directly from the physiology of Rapports du Physique et du moral de l’homme, on which he was currently working. Man has physical needs. Society must provide the means to secure them. Man has moral needs. Society must provide circumstances conducive to development of mutual sympathy and generous feeling. Only strong executive power in government can achieve those goals. Only so can Liberty, Fraternity, and the Republic be saved.98 Seldom has a sword turned more rapidly in the hand. “The Emperor,” wrote Bourrienne years later, “liked only men who occupied themselves with positive, exact subjects, enclosed in a framework in which no criticism of administration could be intruded, and no thoughts on government. He took a very negative view of economists, publicists, and, in a word, all those who occupied themselves in any way whatever with legislation, institutions, and moral betterment.” Bonaparte himself gave scornful currency to the appellation “idéologues,” coined as a term of derision by royalist journalists. Again in Bourrienne’s words, “He stigmatized true lovers of liberty with the appellations idéologues and terrorists.”99 In the first flush of organizing the Consulate, Bonaparte initially chose Sieyès and a number of the Auteuil circle for the Senate and Tribunate—Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and Garat for the former, and J.-B. Say, Daunou, Laromiguière, and Ginguené for the latter. Their ineffectual opposition—on civil liberties, the concordat with the papacy, and the law naming Bonaparte First Consul for life—enraged him. Chaptal was now Minister of the Interior. (Of his administration more in the next section.) At Bonaparte’s direction, he proceeded to reorganize the Institute in January 1803. The Class of Moral and Political Sciences was thereupon abolished. The Napoleonic Institute consisted of four classes instead of three. The First Class, with eleven sections of six members each, was divided into two 97

In Lehec and Cazeneuve (1956) 2, pp. 457–458. “Quelques considérations sur l’organisation sociale en général, et particulièrement sur la nouvelle constitution,” in ibid., pp. 460–491. 99 L.-A. Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Mémoires . . . sur Napoléon (10 vols,. 1829) 4, p. 359. 98

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parts, Mathematical Sciences (Geometry, Mechanics, Astronomy, Geography and Navigation, and General Physics) and Physical Sciences (Chemistry, ´ Mineralogy, Botany, Agronomy [Economie rurale] and Veterinary Art, Anatomy and Zoology, and Medicine and Surgery). The chief novelties here were the recognition of general physics as a mathematical science and its separation from chemistry. The Second Class (French Language and Literature) and the Third (History and Classical Literature) both had forty members undifferentiated into sections. The Fourth Class (Fine Arts) had five sections of six members each (Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Engraving, and Music). No one was ejected. Places were found in the Second or Third Classes for members of the old Second Class. No institutional foundation remained on which to build the social and human sciences.100 4. THE CONSULATE, 1799–1804

Thinking back on Egypt in later years, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire remembered a conversation between Bonaparte and Monge during which Bonaparte recalled how, as a boy, he had felt he must choose between a military and a scientific career. In either case his objective was a world to conquer. Had he gone into science, he would have studied the practical world, the world of detail. Giving the lie to Lagrange’s dictum that no one would ever surpass Newton, he, Bonaparte, would have done so in the domination he would have achieved of mind over matter.101 The recollection recalls a similar story. “If I had not had to conquer the world,” Napoleon is apocryphally said to have remarked to Lagrange, “I should have become a scientist and discovered it.” “Sire, Newton has already done that” was the putative reply, “and there is only one world to discover.” A somewhat more reliable account has Laplace presenting the first two volumes of Mécanique céleste (1799) to the newly installed First Consul, who thanked him by saying, “I look forward to reading them in the first six months I have free.” The anecdotes illustrate Bonaparte’s much advertised esteem for the exact sciences and for his colleagues of the Institute, especially its mathematical members, on whom he heaped favor more lavishly than on other civilian notables, although on many of those also. The constitution of the Consulate provided for four consultative bodies. The Council of State, successor to the Royal Council of the Old Regime, was the seat of government. Bonaparte consulted its members, individually and collectively, regularly and incessantly, often (as Chaptal reported) wear100

For the statute and membership list, see Aucoc (1889), pp. 77–89. ´ Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Sur une vue scientifique de l’adolescence de Napoléon Bonaparte, formulée dans mon aˆ ge mûr sous le nom de Monde de Détails. BN, 8 Oct. Lb44.331. 101

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ing out his councillors.102 It was the medium through which he informed himself about administration and the state of the country and formulated domestic policy. Four of its five sections, of five members each, corresponded to the Ministries of War, the Navy, Finance, and the Interior; the fifth considered and framed legislation. The three other bodies were deliberative, not administrative. The Tribune debated legislation. The Corps Législatif voted on it without discussion. The Senate, the senior assembly in point of prestige and largely ceremonial in function, was the guardian of the Constitution. It named the members of the Tribune and, in principle though never in fact, the three consuls on expiration of their ten-year terms. The favors shown to men of science under the Consulate and Empire were both honorific and material. The following list is indicative, not exhaustive: Monge, Senator for Life, President of the Senate in 1806, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Count of the Empire; Lagrange, Senator, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Count of the Empire; Berthollet, Senator, Count of the Empire, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor; Lacepède, Senator, Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor; Fourcroy, Councillor of State, Count of the Empire, Director General of Public Instruction; Cuvier, Council of State; Cousin, Senator; Fourier, Prefect of the Department of the Isère; Chaptal, Council of State, Minister of the Interior, Senator, Count of the Empire, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor; Laplace, Minister of the Interior, Senator for Life, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Count of the Empire. In addition to titles of parvenu nobility, a few favored scientists became wealthy men. A seat in the Senate carried a salary of 25,000 francs annually, as contrasted to a stipend of 8,000 for service on the Bureau des Longitudes, and 4,000 to 5,000 for a professorship at the ´ Collége de France, the Muséum, and the Ecole Polytechnique. It is estimated that after Laplace became Chancellor of the Senate in 1803, his annual income was on the order of 100,000 francs at a time when a day laborer’s salary started at 2.5 francs an hour and the median for a family to be comfortably off was 40,000.103 With the exceptions of Chaptal, Fourcroy, and Fourier, scientists served the Napoleonic regime rather as ornaments than instruments of state. True, Laplace and Carnot were among the early ministers Bonaparte appointed. But, as we have seen, Laplace’s six-week tenure of the Ministry of the Interior was an administrative fiasco. Carnot, who had appointed Bonaparte commander of the Army of Italy in 1796, was Minister of War in 1800 from 2 April to 29 August. He resigned after five months of cross-purposes with a 102 ´ Chaptal (1893), pp. 330–331. On the organization and history of the Conseil d’Etat, see Aucoc (1876) and, more fully, Le Conseil d’E´ tat, son histoire a` travers les documents de l’époque ´ (1974), Series Histoire de l’Administration Fran¸caise, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. 103 For full detail, see Crosland (1967a), pp. 56–87; Fischer (1988), pp. 234–257.


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government in which he could not be master in his own department, and of which in any case he sensed the inimicality to the Republic. Named to the Tribune, Carnot spoke and voted against the life consulate for Bonaparte in 1802 and against the Empire in 1804. He occupied the fifteen years of Napoleonic rule with the affairs of the Institute and with composition of major works of mechanics and mathematics.104 In 1814 patriotism induced him to offer his services to Napoleon, who put him in command of the defense of Antwerp. During the 100 days, Carnot further and finally served as Minister of the Interior. A monarchy that had had to be restored twice did not forgive him. Exiled once again, Carnot ended his days in Magdeburg in 1823. Of the technically qualified people who successfully served the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes in administrative capacities, Carnot and Chaptal were the two whose impact on general history proved most lasting. The one had been primarily a military engineer, the other a chemical industrialist though trained in medicine. Carnot organized victories. Chaptal organized the Napoleonic administration as Minister of the Interior during the Consulate, from 1800 to 1804. After being relieved of the post of Director of the Agence révolutionnaire des poudres on 29 September 1794, Chaptal ´ taught chemistry briefly at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, and also ´ took a hand in organizing the Ecole de Santé, before returning to Montpellier in 1795. There at home he participated in reorganizing the famous medical school in conformity with the revolutionary model for medical education while devoting his main energy to his chemical factory of La Paille, which he had founded in collaboration with Etienne Bérard in 1782. Over the years they made it into a pioneering plant for the heavy chemical industry in France.105 ´ In April 1798 Chaptal was called back to the Ecole Polytechnique, where he replaced Berthollet in the chair of chemistry prior to the latter’s departure for Egypt. On 24 December Bonaparte named Chaptal to the Council of State and assigned him to the section that oversaw the Ministry of the Interior. Chaptal had been intimate with the Second Consul, Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, since youthful days in Montpellier. In all probability he it was who, ever at Napoleon’s elbow in domestic affairs, drew attention to Chaptal’s ability and availability. When Laplace’s successor, Lucien Bonaparte, also failed to satisfy his brother’s exigencies, Chaptal was appointed acting Minister of the Interior on 6 November 1800 and Minister on 21 January 1801. 104

Géométrie de position (1803), Principes fondamentaux de l’équilibre et du mouvement (1803), Mémoire sur la rélation qui existe entre les distances respectives de cinq points quelconques pris dan l’espace, suivi d’une essai sur les transversales (1806). See Gillispie (1971). 105 J. G. Smith (1979), pp. 20–24.

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Responsible for public order, welfare, public health, communications, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, and the arts and sciences, the Ministry of the Interior was the nerve center of the French government and the main engine for executing domestic policy. Some six to eight weeks after taking office Chaptal submitted to Bonaparte a set of preliminary recommendations that amounts to an informal report on the state of the nation and a program of domestic policy.106 The tone has none of the obsequiousness that marks ministerial communications to Napoleon in later years. On the contrary, Chaptal is telling the First Consul, who was new to politics, what he needs to know and do in order to stabilize the country. He based the memoir not on official prefectorial reports, which he considered excellent, but on a review of the procès-verbaux of departmental General Councils, documents closer to the grassroots. The first thing that strikes him is their inadequacy. Not only do they lack enlightened views, but there is no notion of acquiring anything of the sort. Few remedies are suggested for the many objects of complaint. The fault is at bottom the government’s for not having provided any uniform set of procedures to guide their deliberations. Beyond that, the lack of competent people is one of the worst evils that afflicts the country. The councils must be reconstituted so as to ensure that they consist only of enlightened men of independent means. The government must realize that the worst possible argument for democratic (“populaires”) elections would be a comparison of the quality of General Councils in 1791 to their current successors, or more largely of the Constituent Assembly to the Legislative Corps and the Tribunate. The most important thing the government could do for the country would be to get it out of the hands of ignorant people. Servants of the state who best serve its interests will always recommend to the Consul the appointment only of strong, esteemed men capable of positive action. Chaptal’s analysis focuses on the areas of responsibility of his ministry. Contrary to universal complaints, the total burden of taxation is not excessive, but taxes are badly proportioned. Property and especially land taxes should be lightened and indirect taxes increased. Some industries escape taxation altogether. None should. Departments and municipalities should raise revenues locally. The government should raise money regularly and pay its obligations promptly. In order to maintain order, it should rely primarily on an independent judicial system and the courts and not on the police, the military, or vigilantes. The criminal code is chaotic, out of date, and needs thorough revision. Judges must be properly trained, free of politics, and paid a professional salary. The state of prisons and hospitals is appalling. The 106 AN, AFIV.1316, untitled and dated nivôse an IX (late December 1800 or early January 1801). This was the first draft of a printed report, in which the language is moderated. Analyse des procès-verbaux des conseils généraux des départements, sessions de l’an IX. BN, Lf 136.89.


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latter should be returned to the care of the religious orders. Roads and highways are in bad condition. The notion of restoring the corvée is ridiculous. Laborers have to be paid a living wage. Rural codes and the administration of customs must be revised in keeping with modern techniques of agriculture and the stage of development reached by various industries. All this bespeaks Chaptal’s commitment to a liberal republican regime, though not a democratic one, and his awareness of the requirements of a nascent industrial capitalism. In all the reaches of social organization, he reported to Bonaparte, the most widely felt issue is public education: “It no longer exists in France.” Those who still harbor any doubts need only read the complaints from all ninety-eight departments. There are none that do not wish for a schoolmaster in every village. Almost all want a college reestablished and at the same ´ time complain of the Ecoles Centrales. Why not admit that these establishments are vicious in all respects? Nothing could be more deadly for France than ninety-eight professors of legislation, ninety-eight professors of history, ninety-eight professors of general grammar; that is to say, three hundred persons charged with instructing youth in the art of being satisfied with words, and of substituting abstractions for realities. At no time were schools of theology or scholastic philosophy so detrimental. Fortunately the nation judges these courses aright, and the schools are deserted.107 So much for ideology. It had been a mistake to think of putting education within the reach of everyone. It is neither the duty of the government nor the interest of the state to do so. Experience has only too clearly shown that the true instruments of revolution are the half-educated. Now that this class is deprived of the resources open to it formerly, it throws itself into public affairs, to which it brings its ignorance, its demands, and its vanity. No government can hold its own in the face of such enemies. Further on, Chaptal paraphrases Bernardin de St.-Pierre to the effect that “one should concern oneself neither with praising the people nor even with their virtue, but with their work.” What he mainly fears, writes Chaptal in conclusion, is the influence on the government of two sorts of people who have had too much effect: those who think that cutting taxes will reduce the need for them, and those who see no security except in the police. His own views are exactly the opposite. He would raise the public revenues equitably in order to augment the circulation of money, in order to strengthen the hand of government, in order to stimulate commerce, in order to assure national prosperity. He would restrict the influence of the police in order to protect liberty, in order to fortify 107

AN, AFIV.1316, fol. 20.

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the action of the law, and in order, finally, to affirm the authority of the government. Chaptal’s peroration portrays the character of the country as he sees it in the light of the past ten years: Things essentially different have been taken for each other. . . . We have been led astray by wishing to assimilate ourselves now to the English, now to the Greeks, now to the Romans. We are Frenchmen, amiable and affectionate by nature. We possess an immense, an inexhaustible territory. Our tax base cannot be the same as the English one. We have gone bankrupt four or five times in the last century. We cannot pretend to be credit worthy, and fortunately we have less need to be than the English do. We are essentially religious, and they (the revolutionaries) have tried to make us atheists; we need to attach ourselves to persons, and they have tried to make us love phantoms and abstractions. We must have done with these chimeras. We must liberate ourselves from vain terrors that prevent us from living as well as possible. We have to see that the Nation is in the property owners, that property owners want tranquillity, order, and liberty, and that they will be the strongest supporters of whoever may provide that guarantee.108 Clearly Chaptal’s vision was of the bourgeois France of the nineteenth century, with all its merits and limitations. How much of it came to pass in the next fifteen years? Not tranquillity, nor liberty, nor lowering the profile of the police. For the rest, his four-year tenure in the ministry, 1800–1804, was a constructive period during much of which Bonaparte himself, though very much in charge, was on a learning curve. Thereafter Napoleonic rule quickly turned autocratic and imperial. Throughout the Consulate, however, Chaptal was the mainspring of a regime that consolidated and systematized the institutionalization of the Revolution begun under the Directory. Two major achievements, the concordat with the Church and the Napoleonic codification of law, formed no part of his direct responsibility. Chaptal spent long days at his desk studying reports from prefects, sending them directives, and tightening administrative practice throughout the whole fabric of government, regional and central. For the long term, as appears in the report quoted above, the matters that concerned him most fundamentally were education and industrial enterprise. The two were intimately related in his mind. The educational system, or rather the absence of system, was the occasion of the first of Chaptal’s reports looking to the reordering of the public services under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior. The title page 108

Ibid., fol. 24.


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carries the legend, “This work is the sequel to the ‘Essay on the improvement of the chemical arts in France’ by the same author.”109 Chaptal prepared his report on public education while still a Councillor of State. There could be no doubt, in his view, that eligible young Frenchmen had received a better education in the Old Regime than they did in the 1790s. Whatever the faults of the clerical colleges—religious dogmatism, a static, backward-looking curriculum—the things they did teach, they taught well. Members of the teaching staff made a lifelong commitment to their vocation. Taking them all together, the colleges were staffed by the equivalent of a nationwide teaching profession. The classical languages and literatures were admirable instruments for developing mental discipline, exhibiting models of conduct and character, and even inculcating the civic republican values that had found expression, after all, in the Revolution. Advancement from one grade to the next was uniform, well defined, and appropriate to the age of pupils in each. Those advantages must also be among the properties of the forward-looking educational system now to be developed. The Talleyrand and Condorcet plans also had their points, particularly the latter. The scope was national. The spirit was modern. The articulation between primary level, secondary education, higher school, and professional training was admirably worked out in principle. The whole scheme amounted to a theoretical exercise, however, and not to a plan that could be put into practice. Its basic premise was flawed. The notion that education conduces to indefinite improvement of the human mind and understanding is chimerical. The human mind is a given. The purpose of public education is not to transform society, but to conduce to its stability, to its prosperity, and to the progress of skills and knowledge. To that end an educational system must be tailored to the needs of the different classes that constitute society. It must be free, but very unequal. The Chaptal plan proposed three levels: municipal schools for primary education, communal schools for secondary education, special schools for professional education. In a republic with representative government, all male citizens must receive primary education—reading, writing, and arithmetic—and be capable of understanding the rights of man. Tuition must be free. Chaptal estimated that approximately 23,155 municipal schools would be required to provide universal primary schooling for an estimated 1,157,889 boys between the ages of seven and eleven in a population of 30,000,000. In the villages schoolmasters might also serve as town clerks in the way that curates in the old regime had done in keeping the parish registers. Beyond 109

Rapport et Projet de Loi sur l’Instruction Publique, an IX (1800). Dhombres discusses the report in Péronmet (1988), pp. 138–152.

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that, the children of laborers, peasants, and artisans needed no further education and would learn their trade on the job or on the farm. With very few exceptions, it was important not to deplete the work force by carrying public education further. The exceptions would be unusually gifted youngsters who might qualify for scholarships to enable them to move on to a communal school for a liberal, secondary education. Chaptal further estimated that about one-sixth, or approximately 231,577, of those leaving primary school would come from prosperous families and be in a position to advance to the secondary level. Many such parents preferred to send their children to private boarding schools, and fewer than half, perhaps 100,000, would enroll in the communal schools to be estab´ lished in place of the failed Ecoles Centrales. The mission of those schools will be to give a general education that will prepare a student either to embark on professional training or “to occupy a distinguished rank in society.”110 Four years will suffice. Latin and French will be taught throughout. Natural History and Geography will be added in the second and third years, and mathematics and physics in the third. The fourth year will be devoted to ancient and modern literature accompanied by further study of the scientific subjects taught in the third year. The courses are not to be specialized, however. Natural history, for example, will be taught, not for itself, and least of all in order to form naturalists, but in a way that will exhibit its relation to the arts, agriculture, and commerce. Throughout, the emphasis is to be on utility, not on satisfying mere curiosity, and the focus of every subject is to be its applicability to society. With respect to higher education, “special schools,” Chaptal considers only professional training. Most urgently needed are schools for the arts and sciences related to national prosperity, glory, and security, and to commerce. ´ ´ The Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecoles d’application for the several public services, the teaching of natural history at the Muséum, the medical and veterinary schools well under way—all that makes a good beginning. Standards in the medical schools, however, need to be raised, the time spent there abbreviated, and a regular system of rigorous examinations instituted. In addition, the government should establish special schools of law, of chemical and mechanical arts and science, of agriculture and rural economy, of drawing and fine arts, and of music. Chaptal never mentions universities. Instead, he praises the Collège de France and proposes to enhance its importance further by converting it into a Special School of Literature and Mathematical and Physical Science. In addition to its current contributions to high culture, it would then serve the functions of a normal school and prepare teachers for careers in the communal schools. Of all the special schools, only two, medicine and law, lead to lucrative 110

Ibid., p. 67.


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professions. There students can and should pay tuition. For the rest, they will come for the most part from less affluent backgrounds and, instead of paying, will need to receive a modest stipend. With regard to the municipal and communal schools, it is in the public interest that primary education be universal and that the upper classes receive a liberal education. The expense, therefore, should be born by governments, local and national. Teachers in the municipal and communal schools are to be appointed by juries named by the local authorities and be afforded a decent salary and a secure retirement. Professors in the special schools are to be chosen, not by laymen, but by their peers. Apart from assuring itself that standards are being met and maintained at all levels, government must stay out of the classroom. Chaptal insists on academic freedom throughout the entire system: It must not be lost from view (and the greatest praise one can accord the present government is that one can assert this truth) that all governments tend to an arbitrary domination. Education alone keeps the rights and duties of the people constantly before their eyes. It is the true and only corrective and regulator of the natural tendency of government toward absolute power. But when the government can direct it, it loses its main character. In the hands of governmnet, it becomes a powerful means of control; and far from balancing the overly pronounced tendency of governmnent toward tyranny, it precipitates it. Let us then preserve the independence of education. It will be the safeguard of liberty. Such are the dispositions and the intentions that guide the present Government that it will provide the requisite force.111 One wonders whether Chaptal shared the political na¨ıveté of the idéologues, with whom he had little else in common, or whether he intended this injunction as an admonition to the First Consul after a year in office. In either case, the plan the Consulate adopted in 1802 modified his proposal in fundamental ways. Bonaparte himself took a central role in discussions of education in the Council of State. The design of the lycées, which have been the centerpiece of the French educational system ever since, was his doing. The actual drafting and presentation of the legislation were assigned to Fourcroy, a member of the Council in the section of the Interior. His experience was considerable, both in trimming his sails to travel with the regime in power and in matters of education. Fourcroy had also drawn up and ´ presented to the Convention the measures establishing the Ecoles de Santé ´ and the Ecole Polytechnique. The law of 11 floréal year X (1 May 1802) specified four levels of education: primary school, secondary school, lycée, and special schools. The first 111

Ibid., p. 43.

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and last, bottom and top, were much as Chaptal had imagined. The importance of secondary schools was greatly reduced, however. Local authorities were urged, but not required, to establish and fund them. Private persons or organizations might also do so. In either case, they would need to meet certain standards in order to be recognized by the central government. In ´ practice many of the weaker Ecoles Centrales became secondary schools while the stronger ones were converted into lycées, installed usually (as were many secondary schools) in the premises of the old-regime colleges. Unlike teachers in the secondary schools, the professoriate in the lycées were civil servants, fonctionnaires, appointed and salaried by the state, subject to regular visitation by inspectors from Paris, and assured a secure retirement. Bonaparte was also responsible for the feature that guaranteed the success of the experiment from the outset, provision of scholarships on a scale unprecedented in the history of education. He wished in the short run to make ´ sure that the lycées, unlike the Ecoles Centrales, not lack for students. There was no means test, however. His object in the longer run was not to stimulate social mobility but to mobilize talent and attach it to the regime. For that purpose the pool of talent in boys from well-situated families was more than sufficient. Here he agreed with Chaptal’s emphasis on the propertied classes. Once the flow through the lycées was steady, the number of scholarships could well be reduced. At the outset, however, 6,400 élèves nationaux would be named. The government would choose 2,400 from among sons of military men and civil servants. The remaining 4,000 would be selected by competitive examination from among boys who had completed the work of a recognized secondary school. Prizes would go to secondary-school teachers who had the largest number of successful candidates. Finally, only graduates of lycées might apply for admission to professional training in the special ´ ´ schools— Ecole Polytechnique, Ecoles de Médecine, and the others. ´ Unlike the ideologistic Ecoles Centrales, the lycées offered no choice of subject matter. The six-year course of study ran along two parallel tracks, one literary, one scientific. The table below exhibits the pattern, Year I II III IV V

Language and Literature

Mathematics and Science

Latin and French grammar; History & Geography Continued Continued Latin and French Literature Continued

Arithmetic Arithmetic, Natural History Geometry, Astronomy Algebra, Chemistry, Mineralogy Algebra, Calculus, Cartography


VI

621

Differential and Integral Calculus, Mechanics, Physics, Electricity, Optics

which looks very like modern schooling.112 Clearly the belief of Chaptal and many others in the educational value of the classics was respected, but science had greater emphasis than letters. In 1809 a seventh year was added, called “Philosophy,” like the final year of the old colleges. The subjects were moral philosophy, physics, chemistry, and advanced mathematics. The same return to tradition led the two preceding years again to be dubbed rhetoric. Further legislation between 1802 and 1809 completed the imperial educational system. For the professions specified by Chaptal, it included faculties of pharmacy and law as well as medicine. Fourcroy saw to the details and the administration in the newly created post of Director-General of Public Instruction. Educational reform culminated in creation of the Imperial University in 1808. The conception here was largely Napoleon’s, and it sprang from his determination that teachers at all levels throughout the French empire should be members of a corporate order answerable to the head of state. It is important to appreciate that the Imperial University, which outlived the Napoleonic regime, was not at all a university in either the traditional or modern sense. It resembled rather a holding company and a degree-granting agency for the educational system. All teachers in the faculties and in the lycées were required to hold degrees. Those who at the outset could prove that they had had a total of ten years experience, including time they had taught in the colleges of the old regime, were automatically granted degrees—baccalaureates for professors in the lower three grades, licences (equivalent to a master’s) at the level of rhetoric, and doctorates for teachers at the level of philosophy. For the future, teachers in the lycées and second´ ary schools were trained in a new Ecole Normale, founded in 1808, which had nothing but the name in common with its predecessor of the year III. The baccalaureate was the most important degree throughout the system. On completing their course at the lycée, students sat for the qualifying examinations, which were set by professors of the faculties of science and of letters. The “bachot” was required of candidates for all professional schools. More generally it constituted, as it still does, the ticket of admission to the ranks of an educated public. Several further peculiarities of the Imperial University must be noted. It did not include the most prestigious institutions: the Collège de France, the 112

Palmer (1985), p. 301.

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´ Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, the Bureau des Longitudes, the Ecole Polytechnique, the higher engineering schools, or the military schools. The gap was thus opened for the division that still obtains between an elite higher education in the grandes écoles (and the faculties of medicine) and run-ofthe-mill higher education in the faculties of letters and of science. Nor did those faculties have any relation between each other. The organization of the university was horizontal rather than vertical. The whole consisted of regional “Academies,” each headed by a rector, which appointed staff and conducted regular inspections of the faculties, lycées, secondary schools, and primary schools in the several regions. Teachers in the latter two levels were not members of the university, but subject to its inspection if they were to be recognized by the state. The presiding officer of the entire system, finally, was the Grand Master of the university. Reputed to be agnostic, Fourcroy was not rewarded for his faithful service by appointment to this post. However indifferent himself, Napoleon wished for harmony with the Church and named a good though moderate Catholic, Louis de Fontanes, a literary ´ figure who had taught in the Ecoles Centrales of Paris.113 Resolution of the question of educational reform thus followed after Chaptal’s departure from office, and he took no further part in those discussions. It was otherwise with the second of his principal concerns, economic development, which occupied him not only in government but throughout his life. The Ministry of the Interior depended for its information on reports submitted by departmental prefects, other regional and communal officials, landowners, the medical profession, and engineers of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and the Corps des Mines. Chaptal’s predecessors under the Directory, Pierre Bénézecq and Fran¸cois de Neufchâteau, had considered it urgent to compare the condition of the country before and after the Revolution in as many respects as possible. They greatly expanded the collection of regional data that agencies of the old regime such as the Bureau du Commerce had assembled more episodically under other forms. “Statistics,” borrowed from the German, was the term for ranging the information thus collected under appropriate categories, a science nothing mathematical as yet and modeled rather on natural history.114 Chaptal further extended and regularized these “enquêtes,” for which term “survey” is too weak a translation, “inquiry” too vague, and “inquest” too accusatory. One of his first directives as Minister required the prefects to institute Councils of Agriculture, Arts, and Commerce composed of leading merchants and manufacturers in every department. They submitted reports 113

For the establishment of the lycées and the Imperial University, see Palmer (1985), pp. 281–328; and for Fourcroy’s role, Smeaton (1962), pp. 80–89. 114 Perrot (1977) gives an overview followed by a detailed bibliography of the enormous literature of regional reports, published and unpublished, from 1795 to 1804.


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and recommendations on local problems directly to the Ministry, where they were discussed in a new Superior Council of Commerce, presided over by Chaptal, that formulated policy. Building on that experience, he encouraged the formation of Societies of Agriculture throughout the country and reinstated Chambers of Commerce in major cities.115 (The latter had been suppressed by the terms of the Le Chapelier law of 1791 that outlawed trade associations, whether of laborers, employers, or merchants.) Within the Ministry Chaptal established a new “Bureau de Statistique” to sort, compile, and compare the facts pouring in from all these sources of information. His successors continued these practices with such success that in later years Chaptal could draw on a veritable data bank in composing his masterpiece, De l’industrie fran¸caise, to be discussed below. Chaptal was far more than an effective bureaucrat, an informed prophet, or an acute analyst, though he was all those things. He was in the first instance a knowledgeable and highly successful entrepreneur in his own field, chemical industry, and beyond that a prolific and influential exponent of chemical technology in detail and in general. The year seldom went by that he did not publish two or three papers. He always insisted that, unlike the unfortunate Nicolas Leblanc, the chemical manufacturer must be a businessman no less than an inventive chemist. Immediately on resigning the ministry in 1804, Chaptal set to work composing Chimie appliquée aux arts. Appearing in 1807 in four volumes, and in many later editions and translations, it established itself as the standard work of industrial chemistry in the early part of the nineteenth century. In no way is it a manual describing procedures in one trade after another—bleaching, dyeing, tanning, extracting soda, making acids, and so on. Chemical science dictates the organization—the nature of reactions, action of heat, change of state, properties of acids, alkalis, particular reagents, and so on. It is a work not of techniques, but of technology in the strict meaning of the term. Its vein is not to expound the techniques, but to inform practitioners of the chemical reasons for them. Facts normally precede the science that explains them; similarly, arts and trades are practiced before they are understood; the purpose of Chaptal’s treatment is to explain them and to permit acting on the explanations to the best advantage. As for particular trades, Chaptal undertook to return directly to one he had long studied, the art of making wine. His classic treatise on oenology had appeared during his first year as Minister of the Interior.116 In 1810 he brought out a revised edition. Nature had favored France in many ways, and not least in the suitability of otherwise less fertile regions to cultivation of the vine. Among the products of agriculture, wine was second only to ce115 116

Philippe Dermigny, “Les Chambres de Commerce,” in Péronnet (1988), pp. 196–201. L’Art de faire, gouverner, et perfectionner le vin (an X, 1801).

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reals in the value of its harvest, and it made a greater contribution than grain to the quality of life and honor of the country. Many manuals existed, but none rose above the level of describing procedures, offering favorite recipes, and identifying the influence of soil, climate, temperature, and exposure to sun. Needed was analysis of the reason for the effects of these and other factors at every stage in the cultivation and harvesting of the grapes, in the extraction and fermentation of the juice, and in the aging of the wine. Two sorts of expertise, chemical analysis tempered by tasting, were the required instruments. Chaptal employed both in experimenting with the varied wines of the widely different regions that produced them. His two central recommendations are still in force. Conducting fermentation in covered vessels instead of open vats reduced evaporation of alcohol. In years of insufficient sun, which had the effect of curtailing fermentation, adding sugar would increase the yield. Like Pasteur’s sterilization of milk by heating, the process, widely adopted, took his name at once—chaptalization.117 Some sense of the importance of sugar beets in the French economy will be borne in on the passing tourist by the ubiquity of the reminders “Attention Betteraves!” posted along rural roads in northern France, warning of slippery conditions produced by droppings from tractor-drawn wagons and trucks that transport the giant roots from field to depot and refinery. Elements of legend assign a heroic role to Chaptal in a supposedly widespread introduction of beet sugar that spared the continental sweet tooth from the effects of the British blockade during the Napoleonic wars. In fact, much sugarcane slipped through from the Caribbean on American ships, and the first large-scale planting and refining of sugar beets dates from 1812.118 Nevertheless, Chaptal was in fact the primary though far from the sole promoter of beet sugar. He first learned of the prospect in 1800 from publication in the Annales de Chimie of large-scale experiments by one Frédéric Achard on his lands in Silesia. At Chaptal’s initiative, the institute appointed a commission to study the procedure. Its report was favorable. While Minister, however, Chaptal may have been too preoccupied with more urgent matters to implement the recommendations. Only desultory experiments followed until 1809, when he and Parmentier engaged in a widely publicized disagreement on the prospects for refining sugar from beets or grapes. The one based his arguments on chemistry, the other on agronomy. Chemistry proved the more convincing, and the state provided subsidies. Several pro´ spective producers installed refineries, among them the banker, Etienne Delessert. Chaptal himself added a refinery to the experimental farm he had developed in his estate of Chanteloup in the Indre-et-Loire. In 1811 the First 117 118

229.

Michel Flanzy, “Science appliquée: le vin,” in Péronnet (1988), pp. 230–238. See the admirable summary by Monique Poulot-Moreau in Péronnet (1988), pp. 219–


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Class of the Institute published a guide, Instruction sur la fabrication du sucre de betteraves. More important, Chaptal prompted Montalivet, his successor in the Ministry of the Interior, to recommend subsidization of the industry as a weapon of economic warfare. Were the states of Europe to follow the example of the Empire in appreciating the advantages of indigenous sugar, a mighty blow would be struck against Britain, “that proud nation,” and its colonies. The Emperor agreed. A decree of 29 March 1811 ordered that 32,000 hectares (approximately 70,000 acres) be planted to sugar beets and that 1,000,000 francs be allocated to jump start the industry. More than 150 enterprises sprang up within a year. Throughout, Chaptal was at the forefront. He accompanied Napoleon on a visit to Delessert’s refinery in Passy. In January 1812 he proposed turning one of the best existing refineries, preferably that of Barruel near Paris, into a training school wherein forty young men already versed in chemistry would be joined to forty skilled young workers from leading refineries throughout the country to pool their talents as trainees for eventual leadership of the industry. A decree of 15 January ordered more than Chaptal had asked: five schools for the chemistry of sugar beets, one in the Barruel refinery and four in others, and the award of 500 licenses to start new factories exempt from taxes for a period of four years. The intent, in short, was to legislate into existence an industry combining science with skill. Not so fast, however—when peace came in 1815, the nascent industry collapsed before the competition of cheaper and better cane sugar. Only in the 1820s did it begin to make its way in France under the protection of high tariffs. There was a certain inconsistency in Chaptal’s economic thinking. Fundamentally he was a liberal. In De l’industrie fran¸caise he argues for free trade and open markets on the grounds that all countries prosper when each produces and exchanges with others commodities for which it is best suited by nature, population, and geography. With respect to sugar, however, Chaptal bases the case for government intervention on the importance for France of achieving maximum self-sufficiency. A few months after the fall of Napoleon he read and later published a memoir to that effect before the Institute. His treatment of the industry in De l’industrie fran¸caise may be taken as a cardinal example of the need to protect infant industries from competition long enough for them to grow up. These were exceptions that in his view proved the general rule prescribing free trade.119 Chaptal’s masterpiece, De l’industrie fran¸caise (1819), is a work of technology informed by economics. The term “industry” encompassed for him, as it did for Saint-Simon, not merely factory production, but agriculture, com119

“Mémoire sur le suc de betterave,” lu a` l’Institut Royal des Sciences, le 23 octobre 1815, MIF 1, pp. 27–45; De l’industrie fran¸caise (2 vols., 1819) 1, pp. 156–161.

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merce, and manufacturing—enterprise in the largest sense. While Minister he had taken advantage of the momentary peace of Amiens to stage the first ever international industrial exhibition, mounted in the courts of the Louvre. Modern economic historians, armed with statistical techniques unavailable to Chaptal, have expressed reservations, and also some disagreement with each other, concerning the reliability of his statistical tabulations of regional agricultural and commercial data.120 They do not question, however, but that his is the earliest attempt at a comprehensive economic geography of France. True, the picture he draws of the state of the French economy in the wake of twenty-five years of revolution, war, and technological change may have been overly optimistic.121 He could not know the full extent of British industrial superiority, which shocked the French when the polytechnician Charles Dupin published the thorough findings of five official inspection trips he made to Britain from 1816 to 1820.122 In France agriculture remained the largest sector of the economy. Chaptal inherited the physiocratic instinct that working the soil, in which he includes mining as well as farming, is the ultimate source of all wealth. He rarely cites British classical economists, but his analysis concerns largely the part taken in the economy by tradesmen and manufacturers working up raw materials into food and goods, and that of merchants trading their products for profit. Current criticism of De l’industrie fran¸caise bears mainly on Chaptal’s treatment of agricultural data, however. The numbers have still not been fully analyzed by modern techniques, but it does appear probable that his sanguine conclusions about the effects of redistribution of land and elimination of manorial dues may have been more impressionistic than were his estimates with respect to commerce and manufacturing. No more than modern adepts of quantitative history does Chaptal claim that anything of an agricultural revolution had occurred in France. Spread throughout the countryside, conservative by nature, suspicious of outsiders, skeptical about theories emanating from urban centers, farmers did what their fathers had done and were likely to change their ways, not on listening to agronomists, but only when they observed that a neighbor of their own ilk had done so successfully. So it was that three-field fallow-oriented cultivation gave way by slow permeation to the practices of crop rotation, deep plowing, and cultivation that had revolutionized agriculture in Britain and the low countries. Whatever the improvement of agriculture since 1789, and no one disputes 120 Yvette Maurin, Geneviève Gavignaud and Jules Maurin, Jean Georgelin, in Péronnet (1988). Georgelin in particular gives a detailed review of the literature. 121 Compare it, for example, to the summaries in Bergeron (1981). 122 Voyages dans la Grande-Bretagne, entrepris relativement aux services publics de la guerre, de la marine, et des ponts et chaussées, en 1816, 1817, 1818, 1819, et 1820 (6 vols., 1820–24).


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Chaptal that it was real, progress was less marked there in his view than it was in the sectors of industry he designates as the mechanical and chemical arts. By mechanical, he had in mind mainly the textile industries. He pays relatively little attention to the iron trades, which may be thought in hindsight to have disappointed expectations aroused by the initial success of the great coke-charged blast furnaces powered by steam that William Wilkinson and Ignace de Wendel erected at Le Creusot in 1785. That attempt languished in the revolutionary years, and not until after 1836, when the Schneider interests took over Le Cruesot, did French metallurgical trades enter the age of heavy industry.123 Throughout the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, they supplied demand, as did much agriculture, by expanding on traditional techniques. There is no doubt about the rapidity of growth in the textile and chemical industries. The patterns are different, however, although Chaptal does not put it this way. Mechanization of the cotton industry in France between 1796 and 1815 amounted to an industrial revolution, though only within that industry and to a lesser extent in woollens. Adoption of the inventions and methods of production developed by the preceding generation in England, combined with the continental system banning British imports, allowed French enterprise, particularly in textiles, to dominate the European market throughout the Napoleonic period. The chemical industry, by contrast, was a matter of rapid growth from small beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century.124 Other than praising deregulation, Chaptal gives little in the way of an economic analysis and attributes the transformation of both industries to science, respectively the science of mechanics and the science of chemistry. He had more in mind than the encyclopedist mantra that science transforms the arts. Science is there understood as entailing openness, rationalization, standardization, and classification of principles on the model of natural history.125 With respect to mechanics, a distinction Chaptal did not make may be in order. It would be difficult to argue that the rational mechanics of Varignon, the Bernoullis, d’Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace were what transformed the “mechanical arts.” Mathematically the leading edge of the science in the eighteenth century, rational mechanics did transform physics into a mathematical science in the early nineteenth century. As for the design and operation of machines in factories, however, mechanics in that sense could have been merely a talisman. Chaptal might have made the case (though he did not) for a seemingly humbler subject just then taking form. That it did not fully aspire even to be called mechanics, but rather the 123

For Le Creusot, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 435–438, and for the iron industry during the Revolutionary period, Woronoff (1984). 124 J. G. Smith (1979). 125 Gillispie (1957).

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science of machines, was illogical enough since its object was the operation of the very devices from whose principles rational mechanics abstracted its formulations. The science of machines may be traced back at least to Bélidor, but the one who coined the name was Lazare Carnot in his youthful and long unnoticed Essai sur les machines en général (1783). Carried forward ´ in a geometric spirit by Monge and Hachette in their courses at the Ecole Polytechnique, and by the textbook of the latter, the science of machines culminated in Sadi Carnot’s seminal Puissance motrice du feu (Motive power of heat) (1823) and the ensuing physics of work and energy. That approach proved eminently applicable to industrial technology, not only in the design of machinery but by way of time and motion analysis in the organization of the labor force.126 Chemical industry was a very different story. French leadership in the science in the late eighteenth century translated directly into industrial leadership in the Napoleonic period and afterward. Men trained in chemistry went into industry: Chaptal himself, Bérard, Descroizilles, Leblanc, Darcet, Dizé, Séguin, Clément, Desormes, Klaproth, Proust, Cadet Devaux, Malherbe, Athénas, and many another. Reciprocally, professional chemists investigated and often invented industrial processes: Lavoisier, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Gay-Lussac, and Thénard, to name only the most eminent. Certain processes followed directly out of basic chemistry: bleaching from studies of chlorine, eau de vie from new techniques of distillation, vinegar from the discovery that charcoal burning gives off acetic acid, purification of paraffin by sulfuric acid, synthetic dyes to replace the indigo, cochineal, and kermès cut off by the British blockade, preparation of nutritious gelatin by the action of dilute hydrochloric acid on bones, synthetic alum—other articles of consumption too numerous to list, and all this in addition to large-scale plants producing acids and alkalis to supply industrial production in general. Writing in 1819, Chaptal credits two agencies with having provided lead´ ership across the whole spectrum of public life, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. For twenty years, ´ in his account, the Ecole Polytechnique had furnished all the public services with men of superior quality. France had accomplished nothing of merit in that interval without the participation of its graduates, on the military side in achievements of the artillery and engineering corps, on the civil side in the infrastructure of roads, canals, and bridges. A number of polytechnicians were now running some of the most important manufacturing enterprises. Others were among the most distinguished members of the Academy of Science.127 Founded during his Ministry, and with his collaboration, the Société 126 127

Grattan-Guinness (1990), pp. 1060–1070; Gillispie (1971). De l’industrie fran¸caise 2, pp. 40–41.


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d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale had been, in Chaptal’s view, the principal forum of industrial progress. Unlike other “sociétés libres,” such as the Société Philomathique, which had been founded in the interests of young scientists, naturalists, inventors, artisans, medical students, writers, artists, and outsiders of various sorts, the Société d’Encouragement enrolled bankers, industrialists, landowners, scientists, and high officials of state in its membership from the outset. A graceful figure of Mercury is perched atop the fa¸cade of the townhouse it currently occupies in the Square of SaintGermain-des-Prés, opposite the ancient abbey. According to the version of the Society’s founding conserved in its annals, the idea originated in a conversation among philanthropically inclined friends in the home of Benjamin Delessert, of the banking dynasty, in September 1801. One of the company, Charles-Philippe de Lasteyrie, a muchtraveled agronomist and leading figure in the Société d’Agriculture de la Seine, is said to have returned from London and to have told of how impressed he was at what the Royal Society of Arts had accomplished for British industry in the half-century of its activity. All present agreed on the necessity of founding a similar society in Paris. A preliminary meeting followed on 4 October. Among the fourteen attending were Louis Costaz, who had commanded the aerostatic companies at Fleurus and in Egypt; Joseph de Montgolfier, inventor of the hot-air balloon, who had just assumed a position at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers; Coulomb, by now an elderly physicist; the banker Scipion Périer; and Joseph-Marie Degérando, who was elected Secretary at the organizational meeting six weeks later, on 27 brumaire (18 November 1801).128 Recent scholarship calls that account into question. From documents in the (unsafe) keeping of the Society, it appears that Degérando, who had moved on from ideology and semiotics to technology, was the one who initiated the idea.129 During the Directory, Degérando was an intimate of Madame de Staël’s philosophical circle. Thanks to her influence with Lucien Bonaparte, Degérando was appointed to a near sinecure as secretary of the Bureau consultatif des arts et métiers of the Ministry of the Interior. He was thus on the scene, or rather behind the scenes, before Chaptal succeeded to 128 “Histoire de la fondation de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale . . . depuis l’époque de sa fondation, le 9 brumaire an IX (1er novembre 1801) an X, jusqu’au 1er vendémiaire an XI (22 septembre 1802).” Why the founding is dated 9 brumaire is unclear, since the organizational meeting occurred on 27 brumaire (18 November). This compilation contains an account of the founding and the Procès-Verbaux of the meetings for the first year of the Society’s existence, prior to publication of its Bulletin. It is bound with the Bulletin 49 (1850). See also Raymond Cheradame in Péronnet (1988), pp. 191–195. 129 Butrica (1998). Surviving papers of the Society are uncatalogued and in considerable disorder. In 1987 Andrew Butrica was able to gain access to the basement in which they were then stored, and to make a preliminary inventory (Butrica [1988]). On the parlous state of its rich collection of printed materials for the history of technology, see Butrica (1997).

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the post. He it was who, with Chaptal’s knowledge and approval, orchestrated the formal founding of the Société d’Encouragement on 18 November 1801. At first dues or “subscriptions” at thirty-six francs a year were to be the sole source of financing. The three consuls, probably at Chaptal’s behest, set the example by priming the pump. Bonaparte contributed one hundred subscriptions, Cambécères twelve, and Lebrun thirty. Chaptal for his part took fifty. More important, once the Society was clearly a going concern, he arranged subventions from the Ministry of the Interior. The pretense that the Société d’Encouragement had an immaculate conception free from official paternity would thus appear to be tinged with myth. Of the 270 people who had signed on as charter members, 92 were present at the first general assembly on 18 November, among them several besides Degérando associated with the Bureau consultatif des arts et métiers. Chaptal did not attend on that occasion, but was elected president in absentia, and served in that capacity until his death in 1832. Benoˆıt Frachot, prefect of the Seine, was first vice-president and Louis Costaz second. Whatever the role of official pressure and intervention, which clearly was considerable, the moment was favorable. The mood of the Paris establishment in this first year of the Consulate was optimistic. The Revolution was being consolidated. Stability had returned. France had made peace with its European adversaries. Pitt had resigned as Prime Minister, and negotiations, which issued in the Peace of Amiens, were under way with a new, and feebler, British government under Addington. In this newly secure and forward-looking atmosphere, the notion of “encouragement” for the industrial sector caught on at once. Other adherents from the outset were Cabanis, Laplace, Monge, Hachette, Millin (conservator of the Bibliothèque Nationale), Sieyès, and Lafayette. Among the notables who served on committees of the administrative council in the first six months of activity were Fran¸cois de Neufchâteau, Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, Brillat-Savarin, Frochot, and several members of the Tribunate; among bankers, Benjamin and Fran¸cois Delessert, Scipion Périer, Récamier, Perregaux; among industrialists and technologists, Constantin Périer, Gaspard Riche de Prony, Nicolas Conté, Louis Costaz, Joseph de Montgolfier; among agronomists, Parmentier, Silvestre, Cels, Teissier, Richard d’Aubigny; among scientists, Guyton de Morveau, Berthollet, Vauquelin, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, Bosc, and Fourcroy. In no other institution had there ever been a comparable intersection of administrative, financial, industrial, agricultural, technological, and scientific circles. Neither the spirit nor the proceedings were academic. Membership was functional and in no way honorific. All that was needed for admission was a recommendation to the administrative council by an existing member. General assemblies were held twice a year. By the time of the second, on 28 June 1801, there were 705 subscribers, many of them local officials and manufac-


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turers from the major provincial cities. On returning from a visit to Lyons, his native city, Degérando announced the adherence of fifty-two of its leading citizens on 14 February 1801.130 The object of the Society was defined under six headings: 1. To offer prizes for the invention, improvement, or construction of machines or processes advantageous to agriculture, arts and trades, or manufacturing; 2. To introduce in France processes used advantageously abroad; 3. To disseminate educational materials relating to agriculture, arts and trades, and manufacturing, whether by publications and illustrations, by having models constructed of machines or devices shown by experience to be useful, or by training neophytes in branches of industry that it would be useful to import or extend; 4. To conduct experiments to test the value of inventions put before the public; 5. To advance capital to artisans who lacked the means to put into practice inventions or processes deemed of potential value; 6. To have models of promising machines and instruments constructed and distributed to the public and particularly to workshops.131 Working to achieve these ends, an administrative council conducted the business of the Society. It consisted of the five officers, a three-man finance commission, and five specialized committees: on mechanical arts, on chemical arts, on agriculture, on domestic arts, and on commerce. Volunteers though they were, their duties were not light. Degérando as Secretary must have had a virtually full-time occupation. After the first few meetings, Chaptal seldom appeared, and Costaz normally presided. Meeting as a rule once a décade, the commission delegated the formation of policies, the definition of prizes, and expert judgment of proposals to its committees, on whose recommendations it then acted. On 26 March 1801 the Administrative Council decided to launch the publication of a Bulletin. The agenda of that meeting will exemplify the range of the Society’s concerns. One Delacroix submitted the model of an ice breaker for frozen rivers and canals. Comparing it to others in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, the commission found them superior. Delacroix received thanks but no “encouragement.” Regnier, inventor of a pump for fighting fires that had the approval of the Institute, requested a loan to go into production. The request was approved, subject to the availability of funds. Costaz reminded the Council of the services of a certain Turquin, founder of a swimming school in Paris, who was in financial straits. The Council 130 131

“Procès-Verbaux des séances de la Société d’Encouragement,” cited in n.128 above, p. 67. Ibid., p. 22.

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regretted that helping artisans “fallen into misfortune” was not a proper use of its funds. Nor could it subsidize him in starting a swimming school for the infantry and cavalry. Lasteyre, a charter member, introduced a proposal to start courses or lectures on aspects of science applicable to arts and trades. Discussion was deferred. Reporting for the committee of mechanical trades, Molard proposed to describe in the first issue of the Bulletin the padlocks and valves from England that Delessert had presented to the Society. Agreed. Molard also exhibited a type of nail with cast-iron head and other cast-iron tools of various designs. They were clearly important, and the Council deferred examination to a later meeting. Finally, from among its membership the Council elected a board of editors for the Bulletin: Costaz for mechanical arts, Guyton de Morveau for chemical trades, Teissier and Silvestre for agriculture, Candolle for domestic arts, and Magnien for commerce. The first issue of the Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale came out in the year XI (1802–3). Ten to twelve numbers of twenty to thirty pages each were issued annually and circulated to subscribers. At the end of each year, they were bound into well-indexed volumes that were offered for sale to the public. Printed in a handsome quarto format, generously illustrated with admirably clear plates, the Bulletin is a rich mine of information for the history of technology insufficiently exploited by scholarship. How fully was it exploited by those for whom it was published, artisans, farmers, engineers, manufacturers, and merchants—in a word, producers and traders? The question is a special case of the general problem of the importance of publication in the development of technology. What its importance was for the development of science since the seventeenth century is obvious. Science is mere inquiry prior to publication. Until then it serves neither for the information of other scientists nor for the reputation of the inquirer. Not so technology. Economic and social dimensions are more intrinsic to its development than they are in science (though neither are they to be neglected there), and trade secrets of a sort exist even now. The very word technology—public knowledge both practical and theoretical of techniques—is anachronistic prior to the early nineteenth century. From the mid-eighteenth century the encyclopedic movement did seek to bring the arts and trades, once called “mysteries,” out of the closet of secrecy into the light of day. The great Encyclopédie was subtitled Dictionnaire raisonné, a place to look things up. Diderot, d’Alembert, and their authors largely limited the technical articles to description, illustration, and classification, as did those who produced the academic Description des arts et métiers and the early volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique.132 Not a few of the encyclopedic 132

Gillispie (1980), pp. 337–355.


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accounts were of past rather than current practices. At most the vein is inventory rather than innovation. Only at the turn of the century did a considerable journal literature featuring the latter make its appearance. The new Bulletin was not alone. The Journal des Mines, which started in September 1794, and to a lesser extent the Annales de Chimie, beginning in 1789, published technological articles in their respective fields. From the outset the Société d’Encouragement subscribed to those journals and to some sixteen others, German, English, American, Italian, and Spanish, as well as French.133 It steadily acquired books and treatises by gift and purchase. The library in its headquarters, rue St.-Dominique, was open to the public. Sampling issues of the Bulletin, one does not encounter inventions such as the spinning jenny or the separate condenser that revolutionized an entire industry. There is the occasional lucky find, however. For example, in volume 22 (1822) one comes by chance upon an account by Edme Jomard of the mathematically designed machine Conté invented for mechanically rul´ ing the copper plates for the Description de l’Egypte, a device that Conté never explained and that transformed the art of engraving in the nineteenth century.134 A selection from the contents of a typical issue of the Bulletin will convey the flavor. Number 51 in July 1809 opens with the account of a memoir by Le Gressier on the geometry of dovetailed bricks. Eckerman and Company describe a method for making an impermeable mortar. A correspondent in La Rochelle sends a note on the project for an underwater craft he had submitted to the government in 1795, on hearing which Guyton de Morveau recalled Robert Fulton’s successful demonstration on the Seine in front of the Invalides in 1800 of the submarine Périer had constructed under the American inventor’s direction. General de Grave sends the Society an incendiary rocket that a British ship had fired into the island of Oléron, where he was commanding officer. Poterat, an entrepreneur in metal work known for the quality of his brass plates for imprinting designs on fabrics, requests and receives an award to form an establishment for printing maps by typographical methods. Fran¸cois de Neufchâteau presents the Society with a comb made of whalebone sent to him by the president of the Bureau of Agriculture in London (the war did not interrupt technical communication). The 133 Ibid., p. 45. The list may be of interest: German, Annalen der Landwirtschaft, Journal für Fabriken, Oekonomische Hefte, Reignes Anzeiger, Voights Naturkunde, Scherers Journal der Chemie, Gilberts Annalen der Physik, Jenners Litteratur Zeitung und intelligenz Blatt; English, Young’s Annals of Agriculture, Nicholson’s Journal of Physick, Repertory of Arts and Manufactures; American, New York Review; Italian, Brugnatell’s Annales de chimie; Spanish, Annales d’histoire naturelle; French, Annales des arts et manufactures, Annales d’agriculture, Journal de physique, Annales de chimie, Journal des mines, Bibliothèque brittanique. 134 Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement 22, 噛ccxxxix (1822), pp. 169–183. See Gillispie and Dewachter (1987), pp. 26–28.

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Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (back from exile) communicates a detailed description with plates of improvements that Joseph de Montgolfier had made in the hydraulic ram of his invention installed at Saint-Cloud. Anyone in a position to draw energy from the flow of water in a stream or river is free to adopt the design. Guyton de Morveau and Carnot give an account of a porcelain stove that extracts a maximum of heat from the fumes before the smoke is carried up the chimney. Molard reports on decorative iron work fabricated by Lucas, a supervisor of a gallery in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, for the ornamentation of muskets used in hunting.135 Such were among the sixty-odd inventions, procedures, devices, and requests reported in a single issue of the Bulletin, the record of a month’s activity by the administrative council of the Société d’Encouragement. The Society was well named. Clearly it encouraged industry, in both the French and English senses of the verb, by publicity, by information, by approval, by advice, by the award of prizes. Publication in technology, however, was not the motor of activity that it was in science. The literature was less the vehicle of its subject than a reflection of it. The tone was more public spirited. Its volume, vitality, and variety are a witness to the productive energies of the country in the early nineteenth century. The main incentive was the specification of prizes awarded annually at one of the two General Assemblies of the Society, when notables from industry and government were invited to attend. Chaptal normally presided, as he often did at the monthly meetings of the administrative council. So many were the entries for the year 1809 that the Assembly had to be postponed from July until September. It was a particular satisfaction that a prize of 3,000 francs for white lead set in 1802 and another also 3,000 francs, for tin-plate set in 1804, had finally elicited winning entries. Of those first proposed for the current competition, the most important were 6,000 for a method of sizing paper, 6,000 for a small steam engine, 4,000 for cast steel, and 4,000 for methods of refining pig iron hot or cold, to be doubled if applicable to both. Awards of amounts ranging from 400 to 2,000 francs went to procedures for making cinnabar, for mechanically combing and spinning waste wisps of silk, for retrieving underwater peat, for synthesizing a blue dye, for using cast iron instead of copper or wrought iron in devices made of those more expensive metals, for combing wool, and for cultivating plants yielding oils.136 Two possible lines of further inquiry suggest themselves, both of which go beyond the purposes of the present book. It should be possible to trace which of the procedures winning such awards went into production, and to 135 136

Ibid., pp. 215–226. Ibid., pp. 257–296.


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make comparisons with the undoubted effectiveness of prize competitions in science set by the Institute. More generally, a survey of the entire gamut of prize competitions offered by the Society over a period of years would amount to a study, not of industrial policy, which would be a matter for government, but of an industrial agenda set by persons best qualified to assess needs. Having sustained its flying start through much of the nineteenth century, the Société d’Encouragement has declined to marginal significance in modern times. By contrast, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, with which its activities intersected at many points, has grown from modest beginnings into an institution of major importance. Unlike its counterparts, the Smithsonian in Washington or the Kensington Science Museum in London, it combines a great museum of science and technology with a fine technical school supplying both youthful training and adult education. Over ´ the last two centuries, the mathematical curriculum of the Ecole Polytechnique has served to select technically trained graduates into an elite, the ´ haute bourgeoisie or establishment, the core of a governing class. The Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, founded in 1829 in reaction against the abstract mathematical curriculum of Polytechnique, has educated an industrial upper middle class—plant managers, civil engineers, industrialists, and businessmen on a local scale. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and the ´ many local or more specialized Ecoles d’Arts et Métiers that followed, have trained a lower middle class—builders, skilled tradesmen, electricians, radio and television technicians, computer programmers, and so on.137 The abbé Grégoire, perennial sponsor of many initiatives promoting the arts and sciences, introduced the measure providing for foundation of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers before the thermidoran Convention on 30 September 1794.138 Although the notion of a teaching museum was central from the outset, the immediate concern was the material to be exhibited. There were two main sources. The cornerstone was the assemblage of model textile machines and machine tools designed or collected by Vaucanson. After his death in 1783, the Bureau du Commerce took over his laboratory and workshop in the Hôtel de Mortagne, rue Charonne, in eastern Paris. Staffed by several of Vaucanson’s workers and open to the public, the installation might be called a proto-museum of technology except that its purpose was the reverse of historical. Rather than preserving artifacts as a record of the past, its purpose was to exhibit models that would incite practitioners to innovation. The Hôtel de Mortagne was actively managed by Vandermonde, who doubled the collection prior to the Revolution, and who (it will be 137

Shinn (1980), Weiss (1982), Day (1988). PVCd’IP 5, pp. 61–64. On the early history of the Conservatoire, see Le Moël and SaintPaul (1994), Fontanon and Grelon (1994), Grison (1999). 138

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recalled) went on to direct the short-lived Atelier de Perfectionnement during the military effort of the year II. Complementing that collection were model machines, instruments, apparatus, and technical objects of all sorts expropriated during the year II from the quarters of the Académie des Sciences in the Louvre, from Lavoisier’s ´ laboratory, from the prince de Condé at Chantilly, from Philippe Egalit´ e (the former duc d’Orléans), from Belgium and Holland, and from the clergy, the emigrés, and the condemned. Agents reporting to the Commission Temporaire des Arts assembled all this and deposited the acquisitions in the hôtel d’Aiguillon, rue de l’Université, where it was not open to the public. Among other miscellany, the equipment of Vandermonde’s Atelier de Perfectionnement for small arms was added to the collection in April 1796. Placed in charge was Claude-Pierre Molard, a young technician who had followed Monge’s course in hydrography at the Louvre and served for a time as Vandermonde’s assistant in the Hôtel de Mortagne. The thrust of Gregoire’s report is that these two collections, amounting to a national treasure, are to be united in a “Conservatoire des arts et métiers.” Teachers will there demonstrate the principles and working of the machines on exhibition. They would make no attempt to teach the actual practice of arts and trades. That is to be accomplished only on the job in workshops. There is no mention of the encyclopedic goal of leveling all performance up to the highest existing standards. The purpose, though vaguely stated, is innovation. The Conservatoire would form, not laborers and artisans, but technicians, and do so by means of instruction in hands-on practical mechanics. Terminology is often indicative of intentions. The teaching staff would consist of “demonstrators,” not “répétiteurs” or “instituteurs.” Their subject matter would be methods for constructing, using, and improving tools and machines in the collection, which would be actively demonstrated, not passively exhibited. Grégoire did not use, and may not have known, the high-flown term “science of machines,” but in a nonmathematical way, that is what his words imply. The Convention adopted Grégoire’s draft without discussion on 10 October 1794. Only four years later, early in 1799, was a locale assigned, the refectory and chapel of the ancient priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. There amid Gothic arches were installed samples of the most up-to-date machinery of the late eighteenth century. The legislation had called for a teaching staff of three demonstrators and a drawing master. First named were Vandermonde, who died in 1796; the elderly experimentalist and academician Jean-Baptiste LeRoy, who died in 1800, and Nicolas Conté, who was in Egypt until 1801. Molard replaced Vandermonde, and Joseph de Montgolfier replaced LeRoy. Not until Molard was also named administrator in 1801, and the architect had adapted the religious structure to serve as a gallery of machines, did the


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Conservatoire begin to function, and then at a modest pace. Also installed were a technical library and a workshop equipped with the latest and most costly tools for the use of qualified mechanics. The drawing master, one Beuvelot, opened a course of instruction that developed in 1806 into a school of design. Artisans named by the Prefect of the Seine there received free tuition in elementary descriptive geometry and engineering drawing. Molard also arranged for a pair of English textile technicians to open a school for vocational training in construction and operation of British spinning machinery. Among the first students was Jean-Baptiste Say, who put aside his studies of political economy in order to escape Napoleonic censorship and gain experience in running a cotton business. Not until well into the Restoration did the Conservatoire become a teaching institution with a set curriculum and regular courses. The shock administered by discovery of British technological superiority brought about the change. The moving spirit was Charles Dupin, who had been greatly impressed by the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow in the course of his travels and saw to remodeling the Conservatoire along similar lines. He himself took the chair of mechanics; the prominent industrial chemist Nicolas Clément accepted the chair of chemistry; Say, returning to political economy after his own trip to England in 1816, was appointed to the chair of industrial economy. The importance of the Conservatoire as a serious trade school on a high level dates from that new departure.139 What if anything the three official demonstrators had actually taught at the outset is unclear. The Conservatoire was only one strand in the nexus of their technological activities. All three received stipends from the Bureau Consultatif des Arts et Métiers in the Ministry of the Interior. Their responsibilities there and in the Conservatoire were so similar that in the interests of efficiency Chaptal in 1802 merged the former into the latter, though he separated them again in 1804. All three demonstrators were also active in the Société d’Encouragement, founded, as we have seen, by members of the Bureau, among them Montgolfier. Molard was chairman of its Committee on Mechanical Arts. There was a constant exchange of inquiries and information between the two institutions, and also, though to a lesser degree, ´ between the Conservatoire and the Ecole Polytechnique. The Director of Studies there arranged annual visits by the students to the Conservatoire with a view to bringing their equations down to earth with a healthy dose of nuts and bolts.140 Conté, with all his dazzling energy, cannot have had much time for the Conservatoire before his death at the age of fifty in 1805. As the first editor´ in-chief of the Description de l’Egypte, he not only designed the machine that 139 140

Fox (1974b). See the account attributed to René Tresse published as an annex in Grison (1999).

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permitted engraving the nine hundred plates mechanically, he organized the entire production of that monumental work.141 Chaptal put him in charge of the jury that selected works to be displayed in the industrial exhibition of 1802. He served on the editorial board of the Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement. Having organized technical instruction to artisans working on aerostats, and opened a school in Cairo, he was appointed, again by Chap´ tal, to organize an Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Compiègne, the first of many such which over the years gradually replaced apprenticeship in the trainnng of tradesmen. Joseph de Montgolfier was a less intense, less focused, and far less worldly inventor with a deeper, albeit ill-formulated insight into the behavior and interconvertibility of heat, motion, work, and energy. His most famous invention, the hot-air balloon, first took to the air above his native Annonay on 4 June 1783. Never a success in the otherwise flourishing family paper business, Montgolfier moved to Paris in 1797 in company with his longtime friend Ami Argand, inventor of the chimney lamp. Amid the fever of financial speculation rife during the Directory, they thought to found a company to exploit their joint ideas. Nothing came of that, but Montgolfier was taken up in scientific circles and appointed to the Bureau consultatif des arts et métiers. So suggestive was his conversation that, without ever having published a line, he was elected to the Institute in 1807 in the place vacant on Coulomb’s death. It is impossible to imagine him teaching in a classroom, and there is no record of his having done so. Young men formed by Montgolfier were disciples, not students. The most noted was his grand nephew, Marc Seguin, sent from Annonay at the age of sixteen in 1799 to learn from his uncle. He learned well. Marc Seguin built the suspension bridge spanning the Rhone from Tain to Tournon, opened in 1825, the first in the world to be hung from iron cables instead of chains; he constructed the first railroad in ´ France, running from St.-Etienne to Lyons, in business from 1833; in his book on railroads, De l’influence des chemins de fer (1839), he was among the many who arrived independently, each by a different route, at a sound value for the mechanical equivalent of heat. He had had the idea, he recorded later, from his uncle, who “thought that heat and motion are only different manifestations of one and the same phenomenon, the primary cause of ´ which remains hidden from our eyes.”142 In a letter to his brother, Etienne, Montgolfier attributed the origin of his ideas to constant meditation. All during his tenure at the Conservatoire he meditated on improvements to his hydraulic ram, on the design for a replacement for the antique machine de 141

See Gillispie and Dewachter (1987), pp. 26–29. On Marc Seguin and Montgolfier, see Gillispie (1983), chapter 5; and for detailed documentation, Cotte (1997). 142


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Marly that raised water from the Seine below Paris, and most interestingly on an internal combustion engine. He deposited a design for the latter in a sealed envelope at the Institute. After his death in 1811, his son took a patent on it at the British patent office.143 During the Napoleonic era two scientific spectacles, both with a serious purpose, captured the imagination of the general public. With one, Volta’s exhibition of the electric battery before the institute in 1801, we shall be concerned in the next section. The other was staged in the courtyard of the Conservatoire. Conté there arranged for repair and inflation of the military balloon he had brought back from Egypt. Montgolfier can scarcely fail to have been involved, or at least aware, even though he had long since put balloons behind him in his meditations. The one being readied for flight was a hydrogen balloon, aerostatic rival of hot-air montgolfières. On 24 August 1804 Gay-Lussac and Biot climbed into the gondola and soared above the city to an altitude of 4,000 meters. There they took readings of the intensity of the magnetic field, a main purpose of the flight being to learn whether it varies with distance from the earth. They found it constant. They also collected a sample of air in order to determine whether its composition is the same as at the surface. Three weeks later on 16 Septemer Gay-Lussac made a second flight alone. The decreased weight allowed him to reach an altitude reckoned to be 7,016 meters, over 21,500 feet, above sea level. Observations of pressure and humidity, magnetic field measurements, and samples of air analyzed after his descent, near Rouen, confirmed the earlier results.144 The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers completes the roster of major scientific and technical institutions established under the post-thermidorean First Republic. It was, in Chaptal’s judgment, while Bonaparte was learning to govern that he was at his best. Though never tolerant of dissent once his mind was made up, he informed himself by listening to different points of view in the first two years of the Consulate. After the measure naming him First Consul for life in 1802, his tolerance for the slightest disagreement diminished. Once crowned Emperor, Napoleon surrounded himself with sycophants. Chaptal did not belong in such company. His work of organizing the administration completed, he resigned the Ministry of the Interior in August 1804 in order to occupy himself with the estate of Chanteloup that he then purchased, with composing La chimie appliquée aux arts, with sugar beets, and with the Société d’Encouragement. Napoleon appointed him to the Senate, and he did continue to serve on the Council of State, although these bodies no longer had any function other than approving and implementing imperial decrees. Like Carnot, who took the Ministry of the 143 144

Gillispie (1980), p. 158. Crosland (1978), pp. 28–31.

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Interior during the 100 days, Chaptal rallied then and accepted the post of Minister of State for Agriculture, Commerce, and Industry. Unlike Carnot, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, Chaptal was not exiled after Waterloo, but he remained in royal disfavor during the first years of the Restoration. 5. NAPOLEON AND SCIENCE

What, finally, of Napoleon’s direct influence on the practise and content of science? Was it positive, negative, or null? Are comparisons to be adduced between his effect and the effects of other despotic regimes, those of Hitler and Stalin, say, and of the Committee of Public Safety in the year II? The first thing to be noted is that, put thus baldly, the question is unanswerable. Distinctions have to be made. The ruling Jacobin Committee penalized the exact sciences, favored and promoted the natural sciences, and exploited the talents of scientists, who eagerly supplied services and gained credit in so doing. In Napoleon’s time, by contrast, internal scientific developments, to which the overworked word “revolutionary” may properly apply, were under way. The emergence of comparative anatomy from natural history and of experimental physiology from the practice of clinical medicine were beginning to converge on the formation of a rigorous discipline of biology, a science not yet named. Mathematical physics, hitherto a virtual contradiction in terms, was in the process of formation. The institutional seats of developments in the life sciences, comparative anatomy and physiology, were respectively in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Faculty of Medicine combined with the Hôtel-Dieu, although the Institute was also instrumental in the latter. Napoleon took no special interest in that work or in the people doing it. His regime did neither more nor less for the Muséum and the medical institutions than the ´ Convention and Directory had done. Attachment of the Ecole de Médecine to the Imperial University changed only the name. It became a faculty again. Unlike the Jacobin, Soviet, and Nazi regimes, Napoleon’s exercised no influence over the life sciences. Napoleon reserved his enthusiasm for the exact sciences. The framework was two-fold, official and unofficial. On the official side, the Institute formally invited and rewarded research along mathematical lines by setting and awarding prizes. Informally its ambience encouraged quantification and rigorization, as it also did in shaping values among life scientists. More immediately, an unofficial society was the starting point of important careers. In the French scheme of things, the Society of Arcueil, private albeit with patronage from on high, was a novelty with respect to physical science, even as was the Société d’Encouragement with respect to industry, with the difference that the former was a small, informal group of young scientists under the leadership of Berthollet and Laplace.

VIII. 5. NAPOLEON AND SCIENCE

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Thanks to the admirable study by Maurice Crosland, the history and importance of the Society of Arcueil are well known, and a summary will suffice.145 Soon after returning from Egypt with Bonaparte in 1799, Berthollet purchased an ample country house in the suburb of Arcueil, a good hour’s walk south of central Paris. There he installed a chemical laboratory and equipped an adjoining room with instruments of physics. Dissatisfied ´ with the theory of elective affinities as he had taught it at the Ecole Normale, Berthollet now set out to develop a more physical understanding of chemical combination by enlarging on his chance observations of the formation of soda from the double decomposition of salt and limestone alongside the Natron Lakes in Egypt. His two-volume Essai de statique chimique (1803), though lacking clarity in certain passages, was a pioneering work of physical chemistry. Laplace too was turning attention to physics in those years. Or perhaps turning it again—the Mémoire sur la chaleur (1783), on which he had collaborated with Lavoisier, is a work of chemical physics. Berthollet and Laplace, drawn together by personal affinity, scientific interests, and association with Bonaparte, formed a virtual partnership during the Consulate and Empire. Laplace contributed two notes on the relation of temperature to pressure among the molecules of an enclosed gas to Essai de statique chimique.146 In 1806 Laplace bought the house adjacent to Berthollet’s and moved his household there from Paris. The two properties communicated through a gate in the garden wall. Such was the seat of the Society of Arcueil, organized informally in 1807, and consisting of disciples and close associates of the two founders. A small and intimate company, the Society consisted of nine members at the outset and another six before activities wound down after 1815. Berthollet and Laplace served on the Conseil de Perfectionnement of the ´ Ecole Polytechnique throughout the Napoleonic period. From among its students, both guided talented young men by way of membership in the Society into careers in science. Berthollet’s immediate protégés were his son, Amédée X-1796, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac X-1797, and Pierre-Louis Dulong X-1801. Laplace’s were Jean-Baptiste Biot X-1794, Etienne Malus X-1794, Siméon-Denis Poisson X-1798, and Dominique Arago X-1803. In addition Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils, whom Berthollet had recruited for the Egyptian expedition and who was subsequently head of the laboratory at the ´ Ecole des Mines, was a member of the circle, as were Louis-Jacques Thenard, demonstrator at Polytechnique, and Jacques Bérard, the son of Chaptal’s partner in the chemical plant of La Paille near Montpellier. Free of the Ministry, Chaptal himself joined in the activities of the Society, as did two

145 146

Crosland (1967a). Volume 1, pp. 245–247, vol. 2, pp. 522–523.

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notable foreign scientists resident in Paris, Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle. In order to appreciate that the Society of Arcueil was the formative stage of the careers of leading figures in the first generation of physical chemistry and mathematical physics, one need only recall from college courses the importance of the Gay-Lussac law of combining volumes in gases and of the Gay-Lussac tower in the lead chamber process for producing sulfuric acid, of Thenard’s discovery of hydrogen peroxide, of the Bérard-Delaroche value for the specific heats of gases (which won the prize set by the Institute in 1811), of the Dulong and Petit law of constant atomic heats, of Malus’s discovery of the polarization of light, of the Biot-Savart law of the intensity and direction of magnetic interaction with the electric current; and of Poisson’s potential function in electrodynamics and the physics of work and energy—to name only highlights. ´ It is further to be recalled that education in the Ecole Polytechnique consisted of the equivalent, relative to the times, of a modern undergraduate major in mathematics accompanied by a course in chemistry. What turned our authors to careers in science was precisely the guidance and patronage of Berthollet and Laplace. Bérard lived in Berthollet’s house and assisted in the laboratory before returning to Montpellier to teach chemistry in the faculties of pharmacy and medicine. On Gay-Lussac’s graduation from Polytechnique, Berthollet took him also into his house, worked with him in the laboratory, and secured him an appointment as adjunct professor of chemistry at Polytechnique, from where he moved to the Faculty of Science as professor of physics and eventually to the Muséum as professor of chemistry. Thenard, originally of peasant stock, followed Fourcroy’s and Vauquelin’s public courses with a view to becoming a pharmacist. Vauquelin took him on, first in the menial position of cleaning apparatus in the laboratory, later as assistant and substitute lecturer. In December 1798 he was appointed ´ demonstrator at the Ecole Polytechnique, where he came to Berthollet’s attention. In 1804 Thenard succeeded Vauquelin in the chair of chemistry at the Collège de France. He addressed himself to problems of organic and industrial chemistry throughout his career, was active in the Société d’Encouragement, and served the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers on its governing board. After graduating from Polytechnique, Dulong began his career as assistant in Thernard’s laboratory. Plagued by ill health, he went on to an arduous teaching career and to his productive collaboraton with Petit on the physics of atomic heats. After graduating from Polytechnique, Biot taught mathematics in the ´ Ecole Centrale of Beauvais. Not content to rusticate, he wrote Laplace offering to read the proofs of the forthcoming Mécanique céleste. Frequent meetings with Laplace to clarify difficult passages deepened his mathematical education. In the course of those readings Laplace secured him the post of


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entrance examiner at Polytechnique. Appointment to the chair of mathematics at the Collège de France followed in 1800, and election to the Institute in 1803, both with Laplace’s support. In 1806 (it will be recalled) the Bureau des Longitudes commissioned Biot and Arago to extend the survery of the meridian to the Balearic Islands. Laplace, president of the Bureau, had appointed Arago to be its secretary only the previous year, when he graduated from Polytechnique. On his return from captivity in Spain and Algeria, Arago shared lodgings for a time with Humboldt, a charter member of the Society of Arcueil, and participated in its activities prior to becoming a member. The remaining polytechnician, Malus, was an officer on active duty in the Corps of Engineers and not resident in Paris until 1810, when he too joined the Society. He had been with Monge in the Egyptian expedition, and Monge’s courses at Polytechnique had formed his mathematical taste and style in a geometric manner. Only at Arcueil was he drawn into Laplace’s orbit. It is not to be supposed that the investigations occupying members of the Society followed two distinct tracks, one for problems of chemistry set by Berthollet, the other for problems of physics set by Laplace. Berthollet and Laplace shared a Newtonian outlook. Berthollet sought to understand chemical and Laplace physical interactions on the model of forces of attraction and repulsion operating on ultimate particles. The problems that interested them both were at bottom physical, the physics pertaining to chemistry on the one hand and the physics pertaining to electricity, magnetism, light, sound, and heat on the other. Berthollet’s disciples never confined themselves to the one, nor Laplace’s to the other. Biot and Gay-Lussac collaborated on the balloon ascent that determined values for the magnetic field and physical properties of various gases at different altitudes. Bérard collaborated with Malus in an investigation of the polarization of infrared and ultraviolet light. Biot collaborated with Humboldt on geographical variations in the magnetic field. Thenard worked with Biot on an analysis of samples of aragonite and calcite collected from certain meteorites. Thenard’s collaboration with Gay-Lussac, both chemists to be sure, resulted in publication of over twenty papers on the properties of newly discovered potassium. Berthollet and Laplace were jointly responsible for commissioning Biot and Arago to investigate the refractive indices of a large number of gases. The very title of their memoir conveys the Newtonianism, both chemical and physical, of the investigation: “Memoire sur les affinités des corps pour la lumière, et particulièrement sur les forces réfringentes des différens gaz.”147 All these examples and many more may be found in the three volumes of Mémoires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil, published in 1807, 147

MIF 7 (1806), pp. 301–385.

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1809, and 1817.148 Berthollet never fully recovered from the suicide of his son in 1812. That, and the confusion attending the fall of Napoleon, account for the subsequent decline of the Society and the delayed appearance of its third volume. After preliminary discussion in the meetings at Arcueil, many of the memoirs were also read before the Institute. Except for those papers awaiting the last volume, publication by the Society was far more rapid than by the Institute. The three volumes contain some forty-odd entries ranging in scale from monographs to short notes. The majority (in the first volume the overwhelming majority) concern chemistry rather than physics. The disparity is not, however, a measure of the importance of the program of the Society of Arcueil in the history of the two sciences. Physical chemistry settled into its stride there and was a going concern before the Society separated. By contrast, the reformation of physics was then still in its early stages. At this opening juncture Laplace addressed himself and his followers mainly to quantification of physical phenomena: electrical attraction, capillary action, the speed of sound, and the atmospheric refraction of light. Systematic mathematicization was the second stage. Laplace was certainly responsible for defining the terms of the four famous prize competitions set by the Institute for mathematical theories of double refraction, of the diffusion of heat, of elastic surfaces, and of the diffraction of light.149 Mathematicization of physics, however, was a movement wider than Laplace and his three faithful retainers, Biot, Malus, and Poisson. Arago rebelled against the master, while others carried the work into the 1820s, notably Ampère, Fourier, ´ Fresnel, and Cauchy, all connected with the Ecole Polytechnique, not to mention one who was neither a polytechnician nor a Laplacian, Sophie Germain. As for Napoleon’s part in the Arcueil program, it was clearly nothing internal to the science. He never attended a meeting of the Society. His patronage was nonetheless essential. The sense of an approving friend, though never so distant, in power was good for morale. The fundamental matter, however, was money. Neither Berthollet nor Laplace was originally a man of means. Their incomes were adequate before 1799, but they could not have afforded the properties at Arcueil, let alone the apparatus and the support for assistants. Berthollet was bad at managing his finances. Even with his emoluments from the Senate, he had fallen deeply into debt by 1807. Laplace took it on himself to write Napoleon, then at the head of his army in Prussia, recalling Berthollet’s many services and asking for a loan of 100,000 to 150,000 francs. In one of the few instances of cooperation with 148 Crosland edited an excellent reprinted edition (1967b) as a companion to his history of the Society (1967a). 149 Above, chapter 7, section 2.


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Laplace, Monge co-signed the appeal. Napoleon rallied at once, not with a loan, but with an outright grant of 150,000.150 Berthollet’s preface to the first volume of the Mémoires concludes: The progress of Physics is of great interest since the goal is to discover the true causes of phenomena, to identify the forces of nature, and to indicate their application to human industry. May the zeal of the Society of Arcueil in striving to reach these goals merit the approbation of the august head of our Government! May peace, the wish for which has long been in the heart of the triumphant hero, permit his genius to extend its fruitful influence over the arts and sciences, which alone would have assured his glory, even if the destiny of the world had not been placed in his hands!151 Only once did Bonaparte take a personal initiative in a matter of scientific research, and then to limited avail. In September 1801 Alessandro Volta journeyed to Paris to demonstrate and explain the electric battery, which he had invented in an intensive course of experimentation conducted in his native Como in late 1799 and early 1800.152 Volta’s high reputation in electrical science dated from his invention of the electrophore in 1775, an instrument that permitted electrifying an indefinite number of Leyden jars without losing its charge. A derivative, the condensator, was a device that permitted detecting the presence of weak electrical charges. In a kind of proto-field model, Volta considered them to be electrical atmospheres. A first visit to Paris, in 1782, went badly. He then told Lavoisier of experiments he had made in sparking a mixture of inflammable air (hydrogen) and ordinary air confined over water in a closed vessel, the inside surface of which was fogged in consequence. Experiments with the condensator in company with Lavoisier and Laplace failed to confirm Volta’s theory that vaporization induces weak electric charges in atmospheric space and conversely. It did not help matters that after his departure they in company with Monge sparked a mixture of air and hydrogen over mercury and obtained droplets of water. His relations with the French scientific community were thereafter complicated. A gifted experimentalist and instrumentalist with limited mathematical ability, Volta was not an astute theorist. He refused to adopt the oxygen theory of combustion until well into the 1790s and never accepted Coulomb’s measurements of electrostatic forces. His sympathies lay rather with 150

Crosland (1967a). A facsimile of the letter faces p. 278. Mémoires de la Société d’Arcueil 1 (1807), pp. 111–1v. 152 Pancaldi (2002) is a definitive biography. He treats the visit to Paris in chapter 7. For a clear, brief account of Volta’s career, see John Heilbron, DSB 14 (1976), pp. 69–82. Fischer (1988) also gives a full account of Volta’s visit to Paris and relations with Bonaparte, pp. 135– 151. 151

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the British than the French scientific style and milieu, and his closest personal connections abroad were with Saussure and others in Geneva. Nor was he among Italian scientists and intellectuals who welcomed Bonaparte’s incursion into Italy. The Austrian authorities in the Duchy of Milan had always treated him well, financed much of his research, accorded him travel grants, and appointed him to a chair of experimental physics in the University of Pavia, where he was a successful professor. Nothing of a populist, Volta had had no choice but to go along with the Cisalpine Republic. By chance his invention of the battery occurred during the interval between April 1799 and June 1800, during which the Austrians in alliance with the British briefly regained control of Lombardy. In the persuasive view of Giuliano Pancaldi, his current (and best) biographer, all this background explains how it was that Volta elected to announce his invention in letters, written, however, in French, to the president of the Royal Society in London, Sir Joseph Banks. He sent the first, a four-page description of the pile with no drawing, by mail from Como on 20 March 1800. A full account followed by messenger ten days later. It contained diagrams both of the pile and the crown of cups apparatus. The former consisted of a stack of paired silver coins and zinc disks with a moistened cardboard pad between each pair. The latter consisted of a ring of glass cups filled with water, or better a slightly salty or alkaline solution, and joined by bimetallic strips of silver and zinc spliced together in the middle with the silver end dipping into one cup and the zinc into the next. Both arrangements were easy to replicate. William Nicholson set to work at once and was immediately struck by the chemical effects produced by the battery, beginning with the decomposition of water. Thomas Garnett presented that experiment before the public in a lecture at the Royal Institution on 28 May 1800. The news spread fast, from London to Bristol and Glasgow, to Haarlem and Copenhagen, and to Geneva and Halle, all by mid-summer. Pancaldi estimates that by the end of the summer several dozen batteries had been constructed.153 The French were among the last to learn the news. On 17 August the Moniteur universel published a translated account of elaborate experiments by Nicholson that had appeared in the London Morning Chronicle. The first to experiment with the battery in Paris was one Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, a popular science and pseudo-science showman who gave public demonstrations of apparitions, electrical phenomena, and other marvels in a nightly show called “Fantasmagorie de Robertson.” In common with many serious scientists, among them Nicholson, he took the electric current to be a more powerful form of galvanism, or animal electricity, and wrote of its effects on the human body in a paper 153

Pancaldi (2002), chapter 7, section 3.


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read before the Institute on 2 September 1800 and published in the Annales de chimie.154 Experimentation followed on physiology and voltaic electricity ´ in Hallé’s laboratory in the Ecole de Médecine (in which Laplace took an interest) and on electrochemistry in the laboratories of Fourcroy, Vauquelin, Guyton, and Berthollet, who differed from one another on its implications for theories of chemical combination.155 The reception accorded the battery both pleased and troubled Volta, pleased him in that the device quickly won far greater notice among a general as well as a learned public than he had expected, troubled him in that the celebration and many interpretations of its effects tended to divert attention, not to say obscure, what concerned him most, which was the battery itself, its invention, its identity, and its working. He had never had any respect for Galvani, a mere physician in his eyes, and he dismissed the notion of animal electricity as chimerical. In his view the frog’s leg was merely a crude electrometer twitching in response to the electricity generated by the contact of the two metals in the galvanic circuit. What with the normal lag between scientific discovery and its comprehension by laymen, water was still widely considered to be an element. Its deconstruction into two gases, before the eyes of all to see, struck public opinion more forcibly than did the simple fact of a strong electric current. Scientists, particularly in Britain, went on from that to electrolysis of alkali salts, by means of which Humphry Davy isolated elementary sodium and potassium in 1807. Chemical action, he predicted at the outset, must be responsible in some manner for production of the electric current in the first place, perhaps by oxidation of the zinc. Volta foresaw no such consequences, let alone a prospect for electrodynamics. Nor did any of that much interest him. Volta’s concern in 1800 was to protect his intellectual property in the very existence of the battery, in its production of the electric current, and in his theory of how it worked. For that, the forum had to be Paris, the center of European science, not London, where developments were already out of hand. By the time Volta reached that decision, in the autumn of 1800, the French were again in control of Lombardy and had reestablished the Cisalpine Republic. Peace was concluded with Austria at Lunéville in February 1801, and the times seemed more auspicious for a visit to Paris. Volta opened a correspondence with Monge and Berthollet, sent Chaptal a description of the battery, sounded out the French commander in Italy, and applied to the authorities in Milan for a grant to cover the cost of a trip to Paris. It was approved—for 154

PVIF 2, p. 218; “Expériences nouvelles sur le fluide galvanique . . . ,” lues a` l’Institut le 11 fructidor an 8, Annales de chimie 37 (December 1800), pp. 132–150. Sutton (1981) gives a thorough account and analysis of the reception of Volta’s battery in Paris. 155 Sutton (1981), pp. 336–345.

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the purpose of “cementing an alliance of talents and knowledge between the Cisalpine and the French republics”—and Volta departed for Paris on 1 September 1801.156 His object was twofold. He wished in the first place to interest Bonaparte in his invention in order to solidify his position materially in the Cisalpine Republic and to burnish his reputation in the eyes of all Europe with the sheen of the First Consul’s patronage. More specifically, he wished to persuade the scientific establishment of the cogency of his theory of the battery and to dispel the doubts about his electrical work that had lingered since his first visit to Paris nineteen years previously. Volta was well received. In short order he met with Chaptal, Berthollet, Monge, Fourcroy, and Cuvier. He was invited to attend gatherings at Berthollet’s house in Arcueil. In early November the representative of the Cisalpine Republic presented him to Bonaparte. Bonaparte for his part made it clear to the scientific community that he wished Volta’s visit to be a success. That it should be so would answer to his affinity for things Italian (as indeed did galvanism) and confirm his commitment to the Cisalpine Republic. He arranged that Volta should attend a congress of Italian representatives meeting in Lyons in December, which duly elected the First Consul to be President of the Cisalpine. Beyond politics, Bonaparte also had an intuitive sense that electricity would somehow ride high on the wave of the scientific future. As member of the Institute no less than First Consul, he attended the three demonstrations Volta presented before that body. At the last he undertook to fund a gold medal and a prize of 3,000 francs to be awarded annually for the best experiment made each year on the “galvanic fluid,” and beyond that a onetime prize in the unheard of amount of 60,000 francs to be awarded to anyone who should make experimental discoveries in electricity and galvanism comparable to Franklin’s and Volta’s. In the short run and with respect to public acclaim, Volta’s two-month stay in Paris was an unqualified success in the eyes of both Bonaparte and Volta. It was less so with respect to professional opinion in the Institute. There is no doubt but that Bonaparte’s interest led the scientific establishment to pay more attention to Volta’s claims than it might otherwise have done. The Institute appointed the equivalent of a blue-ribbon commission to report on the question. It consisted of Laplace, Coulomb, Hallé, Monge, Fourcroy, Vauquelin, Pelletan, Charles, Brisson, Sabatier, Guyton, and, as reporter, Laplace’s protégé Biot. They adopted Bonaparte’s proposal that the first gold medal go to Volta himself. Patronage from on high could not impose unqualified endorsement, however. For the theory by means of which Volta thought to establish the identity and explain the working of the battery was 156

Quoted in Pancaldi (2002), p. 235.


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problematic at best. In his view, what generated the electric current was the tension created by direct, dry contact of the two metals. The presence of fluids served only to transmit the effect from one pair to the next, thus augmenting it by addition. Whatever chemical reactions occurred in the electrolytic solutions that completed the circuit were secondary and derivative phenomena of little interest. Unfortunately for the theory, the chemical effects, as well as the jolt administered by the pile or the crown of cups, all of which were easy to demonstrate dramatically, were what fascinated not only the general public but also fellow scientists. The experiment Volta undertook before his colleagues of the Institute, in his view “the fundamental experiment,” was difficult to perform and difficult to repeat. He sought to show that contact of the two metals in a single pair, an element so to say of the battery, produced an electromotive force. At best the effect was very slight. Nor was his method of detecting it free from objections. In order to multiply its strength to a measurable level, he used his condensator, a device that in the eyes of critics may have begged the question by producing the very charge it was supposed to measure. Also it registered a tension only on the silver side of the bimetallic pair. The reading on the zinc side was null unless a bit of wet cardboard was inserted between the metal and the condensator. Estimating the condensing power of the instrument and its relation to the tension, or potential, created by contact of the paired metals required elaborate arithmetical calculations that could appear to be gratuitous. Finally Volta’s French colleagues were happier with Coulomb’s torsion balance as an electrometer in place of the condensator. They used it in their own experimental verifications, but Volta would have none of that.157 Biot’s report to the Institute is a curious document. Ostensibly, it was favorable, in large part (it may be thought) because it was to be read in Bonaparte’s presence, two days before Volta’s departure for Lyons on 4 December 1801.158 Biot did conclude, with Volta, that the galvanic current was a weak special case of the electrical, and that the functioning of the battery was to be analyzed in terms of its physics and not of its chemical effects. Apart from that, the argument bears little resemblance to the one Volta had advanced. It treats his invention of the battery and its production of a strong, steady electric current as the culmination of a tradition of experimental electrical research passing from Dufay through Franklin, Aepinus, and Coulomb’s work in electrostatics in the 1770s and 1780s.159 Since the latter had found the attractive or repulsive force between, respectively, bodies of opposite or like charge to vary as the inverse square of the distance 157 158 159

Ibid., pp. 240–243. “Rapport sur les expériences du citoyen Volta,” MIF 5 (1804), pp. 195–222. On Coulomb, see Gillmor (1971), chapter 6.

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between them, his law appealed to the Newtonianism of Laplace, Berthollet, and their circle. It may well be considered the point of departure of a modern mathematical physics. Through the intermediary, not to say the midwifery, of Laplace, Biot fathered on Volta the occasion for the opening exercise in the research program that would express the quantified laws of a newly rigorous experimental physics in the formalism of analytical mechanics.160 From Mécanique céleste Biot adopted formulas for the theoretical shape of the earth as an ellipsoid of revolution and applied them to the distribution of electric charge on such a surface. From that he went on to calculate the gradient of tension inside the battery as a function of the repulsive force acting on the hypothetical molecules of the electric fluid. Biot had engaged in experimental study of the battery when news of it first reached Paris, but the discussion in his report to the Institute is strictly mathematical. It is not clear that Volta ever read it, or that he would have understood it if he had. He never mentioned it in later writings or correspondence.161 Unlike later memoirs, such as Poisson’s analysis of electrostatics and Fresnel’s of the diffraction of light, Biot’s opening gun in what became the campaign to mathematicize experimental physics had little influence on the science. It may even have had adverse side effects. Presented as a report to the Institute, it institutionalized the emphasis on the physics of the battery to the exclusion of its chemical action. That can only have weakened interest among the younger generation in the promising start on electrochemistry begun by their elders, Guyton, Fourcroy, and Vauquelin. In the next ten years electrochemistry was left largely to the British and the Germans. More largely, further stages in developing an understanding of the battery and the electric current proved to be experimental, not mathematical, and the French contributed little or nothing to the field until the 1820s, when Ampère turned his hand to the analysis of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, discovered by Oersted in 1820. The annual Napoleonic medal for experimental discoveries in electricity was awarded only three times in all, one of them to Davy, and the great prize of 60,000 francs never. It may perhaps be thought ironic that French work in electrical science might have been more fruitful had the experimental direction Bonaparte proposed been followed instead of the analytic path laid out by the dominant professional members of the Institute. As to the present point, which is the extent of Napoleon’s influence upon French science, the episode may illustrate the general proposition that, as distinct from the internal patronage of a Laplace and a Berthollet, the effect of external patronage on the practice and content of science has its limits. More broadly, the character and vitality of the science that emerged from 160 161

Frankel (1977). Pancaldi (2002), p. 203.


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revolutionary change in France was not imprinted upon it by Napoleon’s favor or enthusiasm. His own career may rather be seen as the political and military instance of an e´lan animating French polity in general, a confident urge to conquest manifested in its technical reaches by the scientific enterprise. It was not Napoleon who conferred pride of place on science in French culture. The authors of the constitution of the Directory did that in their blueprint for the organization of the Institute. It was not Napoleon who institutionalized modern science in France. It was the Convention and the Directory. The research programs that launched the modern disciplines of physical chemistry, mathematical physics, experimental physiology, and comparative anatomy—nothing of all that began under Napoleon’s aegis. His favor and patronage undoubtedly fortified morale and underwrote the execution of much that was already under way, particularly in the exact sciences. But none of it started, nor did any of it end, with him.

CHAPTER IX

Positivist Science

1. DISCIPLINE FORMATION

The sciences that emerged phoenix-like and transformed from the fires of revolutionary change have been well studied for themselves and will continue to be.1 Let us attempt in conclusion not a full, documented account but a summary portrayal of the character of the scientific action— “mouvance” says it better—in this, the second generation of French preeminence in science. With respect to organizational aspects, the keynotes were professionalization and discipline formation. Although the two were intimately connected, the one concerns primarily the situation of science in the larger society, the other primarily the practice of science within itself. Professionalism, indeed, was to the Republic of Science what citizenship was to the Republic proper, the signet of self-governance and collective self-esteem within the respective contexts. Factors differentiating the status of science in 1815 from what it had been in 1789 were the constitutional and civic basis of institutions formerly qualified as royal, the opening of careers that afforded a livelihood for research combined with teaching, and—perhaps most important—the creation of higher education in science.2 Not only the mathematical physicists of the coming generation, but even the mathematicians, Lazare Carnot, Cauchy, and Poncelet, had been trained as engineers. In like manner, in chemistry, those with a bent to industry— Berthollet, Chaptal, Gay-Lussac, Leblanc, Clément, Desormes—came to the fore. Similarly, in medical arts, hands-on clinical practice stemmed largely from surgery. The pattern is evident. It inheres in the advancement to professional dignity and even to leadership of skills, now become disciplines, that had been relegated in earlier times to the status of trades. Professions are defined by their social role and disciplines by their con1

To name only foremost titles, for the exact sciences see Grattan-Guinness (1990); for zoology and comparative anatomy, Daudin (1926), Appel (1987), Laurent (1987); for medicine, Keel (2001); for experimental physiology, Lesch (1984). It is by no means clear that the authors would agree with the interpretation that follows. I have ventured several anticipatory essays, Gillispie (1991, 1994, 1997b), and have incorporated the gist of them in what follows. 2 For a discussion of professionalism in science, see Gillispie (1980), 84–91.

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tent. Membership in a profession presupposes mastery of the relevant discipline, but until the turn of the nineteenth century, only the three classic disciplines of theology, law, and medicine were fully professional. Mathematics and astronomy were not. Nor had chemistry fully reached that stage in Lavoisier’s lifetime. In point of practice and method, mathematics and astronomy were little changed by professionalization, and chemistry not fundamentally. Medicine, however, was transformed in those respects, but not with respect to its professional standing. By contrast, the disciplines that mainly concern us in what follows, comparative anatomy, experimental physiology, and mathematical physics, took form concurrently with the professionalization of science in general. The formation of disciplines and their professional standing have entailed, in a certain sense, the partial separation, or perhaps insulation, of science from the larger society. A related complementarity in science generally, that between theory and practice, is relevant, although in different ways, both to professionalism and discipline formation. Insofar as members of the general public at large take any interest in science beyond its applications to technology and medicine, they seek to comprehend what can be conveyed of its current theories concerning the structure and functioning of nature: gravity, evolution, relativity, the big bang, the genome, and so on. Laymen take very little interest in actual scientific practice, except when a scandal involves misconduct. The distinction between theory and practice also pertains to scientific revolutions, and in the same manner that a distinction between ideology and civic practice does to the political revolution. We argue in the Introduction that the lasting changes in the functioning of the body politic wrought by the French Revolution were structural in kind rather than ideological. To be sure, revolutionary leaders and their followers were motivated by the succession of theories about man in society that moved the Revolution ever leftward until its consolidation following the fall of Robespierre and prior to the First Consul’s self-conversion into an Emperor. But none of those theories outlived their day. Their significance, and it was great at the time, quickly became historical and has, indeed, fascinated historians more than have the work-a-day changes that proved permanent. In these concluding pages we shall argue that a comparable distinction obtains between, on the one hand, the actual practice of the scientists who formed the modern disciplines of a rigorous biology and a mathematical physics, and on the other hand the theories that motivated and divided them. Others beside the present author may wish to consider whether the point is relevant to the differentiation between normal science and scientific revolutions that figures in the profound analysis of the latter by his close friend and longtime colleague, the late Thomas S. Kuhn. There can in any case be no doubt but that disputes in zoology between Cuvier and Lamarck turned on theory of species and those between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-

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IX. POSITIVIST SCIENCE

Hilaire on theory of morphology; or that Xavier Bichat’s preoccupation with vital forces offended Fran¸cois Magendie’s sense of the necessity to achieve a rigorous physiology; or that Laplace and his disciples thought to reduce the world picture of Newtonian astronomy to the action of forces of attraction and repulsion acting at a micro-distance on point masses, whereas their opponents constructed quite other models in analyzing problems of light, sound, heat, and electricity and magnetism. In the case of heat, Fourier preferred no model at all, which may be the reason that his analysis, though of seminal importance in mathematics, had virtually no influence on physics. Nor, finally, can there be any doubt but that models such as a mass-free elastic aether and interconvertibility of work and energy (which neither Laplacians nor their opponents considered) became staples of nineteenthcentury physics. As in the case of political theory in the Revolution, these issues did motivate the actors and are what have chiefly interested historians. They have in consequence been well explored and need no further exposition here. Those disagreements were not, however, what drove the formation of the respective disciplines. What did was rather agreement on the practice and conduct of science, to wit the application of mathematics, vivisection, and comparative anatomy to problems of physics, physiology, and zoology. It will be evident in the following remarks, and perhaps from the foregoing, that I have found the reading and rereading of Cours de philosophie positive very suggestive. Drawn from the practice of science, not from the theories advanced by scientists, Comte’s historicist scheme of knowledge may not have withstood the test of time as well as have the epistemologies of such as Plato, Leibniz, Hume, or Kant, and few philosophical injunctions are less appealing than the authoritarian political prescriptions Comte would lay down for governors to put in place when “social physics,” the science of society, should enter the positive stage in its turn. All that apart, historians of science may well find Comte, X-1814, rewarding as an acute, attentive, and informed critic of the science of his own time. He was more so, curiously enough, for the biological sciences than for the exact sciences in which he had been trained, perhaps because he could see more clearly from outside. With respect to both, however, he is a philosopher and goes deep. In contrast to the reports that Delambre and Cuvier prepared for Napoleon in 1809 on the progress of the physical sciences and life sciences since 1789,3 Comte penetrates beneath the surface to what was fundamentally at issue with respect both to methods and results. Once a science enters the positive stage, its goal is no longer a metaphysical quest for truth nor a rational theory purporting to represent physical reality. There is no longer any question of classifying information about the world in a manner conso3

Cuvier (1809); Delambre (1809).

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nant with the nature of things. Science is composed of laws, not theories. Laws are correlations of observable facts. The goal of science is to make accurate predictions based on exact knowledge of the facts. We know in order to predict. We predict in order to control events within the limits of the possible. Like the scientists of whom Comte writes, and also like Bonaparte, he was a product of his times. Rigorous attention to gathering facts and to forming policies that get results were watchwords of the men of affairs in public and private life who, whatever the carryover from the old regime, built the institutions of a modern polity on foundations laid down once the ground was cleared. 2. COMPARATIVE ANATOMY

As is well known, the word biology was a neologism embracing topics stemming from natural history on the one hand and medicine on the other. The sciences of life, wrote Comte in 1833, are capable of stating general laws in the measure that they address themselves to analyzing the relation between the diversity of organic forms and the physical milieu in which each form exists. “Formulated as mathematically as possible,” he continued, “the dual problem of biology may be posed in these general terms: given the organ, or organic modification, find the function and action, and reciprocally.”4 Over the years many biologists would have agreed with Comte’s definition, prominent among them Cuvier, from whose practice Comte took it. Among their many colleagues in disageement would have been Lamarck and Treviranus. They were the ones who in 1802 had coined the word independently of each other and in a spirit very different from Comte’s. They called for a comprehensive study of the phenomena of life. Although that is what biology does, it has never taken on an identity comparable to that of astronomy, physics, and chemistry, its predecessors in the positivist sequence. Development of the field has prospered amid a tension between the poles of vitalism and mechanism, holism and reductionism, although neither pair quite reduces to the other. Phases of its history are marked by the successive emergence of subdisciplines, each in its turn a candidate for the role of cutting edge: histology, morphology, embryology, cytology, pathology, evolution, heredity, genetics, molecular biology, genomics. All the while, and to a degree earlier, the umbrella terms zoology and botany designated study of phenomena that natural history assigned to the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Whatever the emotional appeal of vitalism and holism, and however fruitful much of the work produced under such inspiration, Comte did identify the dynamic that ultimately drove the science. He focused his analysis on the areas where the action then was: comparative anatomy and ex4

⬘ Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842), 40ieme le¸con, 3, p. 269.

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perimental physiology. Based in the Muséum, Cuvier, Lamarck, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were the foremost practitioners of comparative anatomy. In their hands it became a keen analytical tool serving the purposes of taxonomy. Working out of the Hôtel-Dieu, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Collège de France, Bichat and Magendie, both trained in surgery, were the principal founders of experimental physiology as a scientific discipline in its own right. In their hands physiology became an experimental science practiced on animals and not merely a set of theories about bodily functions or a collection of descriptive observations of specific pathologies in human beings. There was no conjunction of comparative anatomy and experimental physiology in our period, but the protagonists in each field were aware of work in the other. Commitment to rigor resonated between them in the ambience of the Institut de France. A passing observation by Lamarck in Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres will convey the theme of our discussion of comparative anatomy. “It is,” he wrote, “fairly curious to notice how, in spite of differences in enlightenment and intelligence, and in spite too of the confidence everyone has in preferring his own opinion to that of others, unanimity is nevertheless virtually complete among zoologists in their ordering of the best established classes among animals.”5 How, given what we know about their theoretical disagreements, was such consensus possible? Perhaps a historical thought experiment may suggest an answer. Let us imagine that Cuvier had died two years before he did, say in 1830. He would still have grown corpulent, arrogant, and oracular in his later years, but would not have had time to compose the insulting e´loge of Lamarck that has offended all Lamarckians and many others. Nor would he have engaged in the acrimonious debate with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, his friend and partner in their slim, inquiring youth, concerning unity of type, a quarrel trumpeted to the world by Goethe. Absent those events, neither Cuvier nor Lamarck would have contributed less than he did to positive scientific knowledge. As for Geoffroy, had his work stopped in 1830, he would have gone less far down the largely blind alley of his later memoirs on teratology. Had all that been the case, the historical perspective on their scientific relations would be formed, not by the quarrels of old age, but by reading the work of their prime and the writings of their colleagues. The image of three antagonistic proponents of mutually irreconcilable research programs would not then have taken center stage, or rest on anything more substantial than gossip. On the contrary, the first colleague cited by Lamarck in Histoire naturelle 5 Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, présentant les caractères généraux et particuliers de ces animaux, leur distribution, leurs classes, leurs familles, leurs genres, et la citation des principaux espèces qui s’y rapportent: précédée d’une introduction offrant la détermination des caractères essentielles de l’animal, sa distinction du végétal, et des autres corps naturels, enfin, l’exposition des principes fondamentaux de la zoologie), 7 vols. (1815–1822), 1, pp. 157–158.


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des animaux sans vertèbres was Cuvier, a` propos of a fairly abstract difference of opinion over the definition of animal. He there identifies Cuvier as “the most celebrated zoologist of our time and, in effect, the most distinguished.”6 The two first cited by Cuvier in Le Règne animal were Lamarck and Geoffroy, who, he acknowledges, had left him little to do on shellfish and quadrupeds, respectively.7 As for Geoffroy, in Philosophie anatomique he first tips his hat to Newton. The next he names is Cuvier, whom Geoffroy thanks for having recognized in a memoir read before the Institute in 1812 that Geoffroy had suggested to him original views on the composition of the cranium in vertebrates.8 Later, in 1828, Cuvier stated in the preface to the second edition of Le Règne animal that the most important debt he owed on the subject of mammals was to the work on which Geoffroy and Frédéric Cuvier, his younger brother, had collaborated.9 It is evident from reading the major works of our three authors, as well as the memoirs they published in journals, that the pair Cuvier-Lamarck, followed by the pair CuvierGeoffroy Saint-Hilaire, cited each other more frequently than either did any other zoologist. There was, however, little overlap between the work of Geoffroy and Lamarck. It is further evident from such a reading that the method of analysis came from Cuvier, the major division between vertebrates and invertebrates from Lamarck, and the increasing attention given to morphology (the name was not yet coined) from Geoffroy. In that last respect, however, the more detailed and thorough work of Savigny on the mouth parts of insects and arthropods was what permitted integration of morphology into the overall enterprise of a systematic classification.10 Cuvier and Lamarck agreed on the merit of his research on alcyons, finding that “the observations of M. Savigny are epoch-making.”11 For it is not a question only of the three major figures. We here meet with the most substantial collective body of work to be encountered in all history of science until that time. Its origin may be placed precisely. In 1795, a youthful Geoffroy and youthful Cuvier, the latter new to the Museum, collaborated on a memoir on mammals. They there expressly rejected the 6

Ibid., 1, p. 9. Le Règne animal distribué d’après son organisation, pour servir de base a` l’histoire naturelle des animaux et d’introduction a` l’anatomie comparée (1817), 1, p. x. 8 Philosophie anatomique des organes respiratoires sous le rapport de l’identité de leurs pièces osseuses 1 (1818), p. 23. 9 ´ Frédéric Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire naturelle des mammifères, avec des figures originales enluminées, dessinées d’après des animaux vivants, 4 vols. (1824–1842). 10 On Savigny, see above, Chapter 8, section 2; and on classification in general, the classic and admirable work of Daudin (1926). 11 In their joint report to the Institute on Savigny, “Certains animaux confondus parmi les Alcyons,” PVIF 5 (8 May 1815), 496–500. See also the report of Cuvier, Lamarck, and Latreille on Savigny, “Organes de la bouche des Insectes sans ailes,” PVIF 5 (3 July 1815), pp. 521–526. 7

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Linnean method of classifying species according to easily recognizable external features, and initiated a program of classification based on internal anatomical organization.12 Its execution presupposed a radical new departure in technique, namely dissection and not merely description of their specimens. The background of anatomy was surgery, not natural history. Until then a scalpel was the surgeon’s tool, not the naturalist’s. There had been nothing systematic about the “tripailles” with which, in the eyes of most readers, Daubenton had disfigured Buffon’s charming and (except for those plates) beautifully illustrated Histoire naturelle. Cuvier’s ensuing Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée in five volumes (1799–1805), far more technical and less widely read than Le Règne animal, was arguably his scientific masterpiece. But it was not his alone. He called on Constant Duméril for assistance in preparing the first two volumes and on Georges Duvernoy for help with the last three. Composing Le Régne animal some ten years later, he recognized that Opel and Henri Ducrotay de Blainville had preceded him in the anatomical preparations on which he there based the division of reptiles. Attending Blainville’s lectures was Auguste Comte’s inroduction to biology. Cuvier turned to Pierre Latreille to prepare the third volume of Le Régne animal, which treated insects. Lamarck had also thought of Latreille, but too late, to do the same parts of Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres. Both Lamarck and Cuvier studied the fossils of the Paris basin, Lamarck the invertebrates and Cuvier the vertebrates, on which the latter collaborated with Alexandre Brongniart for the aspects having to do with geology. Savigny’s plates in the Description de ´ l’Egypte were prepared by Victor Audouin, while Geoffroy’s son, Isidore, did his father’s. Cuvier’s last work, on fish, was edited and completed by Achille Valenciennes.13 In scanning the entire literature of zoology from 1800 to 1830—major treatises, the Annales du Muséum, more or less important articles in other journals, the three dictionaries of natural history14 —and taking account of authors who cite each other, one arrives at the number of some fifty-odd serious researchers. That is without counting twenty-odd foreign contributors and some fifteen botanists, whose field was closely related. The whole constituted in effect a scientific community based on the Muséum as its principal locus for research and communication. There were, of course, differences of interpretation expressed, for the most 12

“Mémoire sur une nouvelle division des Mammifères et sur les principes qui doivent servir de base dans cette sorte de travail,” Magasin encylopédique 2 (1795), pp. 164–190. 13 Histoire naturelle des poissons, 27 vols. (1828–49). 14 Nouvelle dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle appliquée aux arts, a` l’agriculture, a` l’économie rurale et domestique, etc., called Dictionnaire de Déterville, 36 vols. (1816–19); Frédéric Cuvier, ed., Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, called Dictionnaire de Levrault, 70 vols. Ⳮ plates (Strasbourg, 1816–30); Isidore Bourdon and Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, eds., Dictionnaire classique d’histoire naturelle, 17 vols. (1822–31).


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part, in prefaces, notes, and occasional obiter dicta in the body of their works. What historians normally call the conflicting theories of the trio of principal authors—transformism, branchings, unity of composition—were in their own vocabulary philosophical standpoints. The word always appears with a modifier, as in Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique and Geoffroy’s Philosophie anatomique. The differences between the three leading figures are manifest, not only in the content of their work, but also, and perhaps in a more revealing fashion, in the relation of theory to observation in its development. In Lamarck’s view, what we call theory had precedence over observation. It would be an exaggeration to say that theory was independent of observation, but it involved considerations on a higher plane. In his enormous introduction to Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, he distinguished between the art of zoology and biological philosophy. The one concerns the classification of animals, the other the order of living nature. Lamarck sees in the latter a progression in the forms of life, not only in the past but continuing in the present. The temporal chain of being has, so to say, the dimensions of an escalator of being. Transformation of species over time is only one aspect of that vision, and not the most important. Throughout a long life, Lamarck never changed his outlook, but only its application. As early as Flore fran¸caise in 1778, he made the same distinction between an artificial classification of plants and their natural order. There too he affected a certain scorn for the lowly task of taxonomy, to which however he devoted the major share of his time. Exactness was important so that naturalists might understand one another, but the main interest of natural history was not there. In Geoffroy’s case, by contrast, philosophical motivation took precedence over observation in mid-career rather than at the outset. From the time that he was in Egypt, he began to meditate on the great forces of nature that are at the root of phenomena of light, heat, electricity, and life. He there also exhibited special enthusiasm for the more bizarre creatures, such as the polyptère bichir, the crocodile, the great Nile tortoise, the silure trembleur, and the torpedo ray. Only after he was recognized as an anatomist, however, did his dissections, which were always exactly performed and precisely described, begin to concern problems of morphology rather than taxonomy, about which he too came to express a certain disdain. As for Cuvier, the four branchings, “embranchements”—vertebrates, mollusks, articulata, radiata—into which stationary categories he distributes species little variable in form—date only from a memoir of 1812, the year when his major book on paleontology, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, also appeared.15 There is every reason to believe that he then felt obliged to react 15

“Sur un nouveau rapprochement a` e´tablir entre les classes qui composent le règne animal,” Annales du Muséum 19 (1812), pp. 73–84.

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against what he thought to be the more and more exaggerated views of his colleagues. However that may have been, the system of branchings had no more effect on his distribution of species into class, order, and genus than did transformism on Lamarck’s taxonomy. For that, they worked in effect as a tacit pair, the one on vertebrates, the other on invertebrates, not in harmony, but in tandem. That is how they were perceived in the next generation. It was not to advance either of their theories that Cuvier’s and Lamarck’s successors gave themselves the trouble of republishing their principal works in the 1830s and 1840s. The eleven disciples who prepared the second edition of Le Règne animal pay little attention to the branchings.16 As to Histoire naturelle sans vertèbres, Henri Milne-Edwards and C.-P. Deshayes were the two most important of the four editors.17 The one had never believed in transformism, and the other renounced it. Apropos Lamarck’s discussion of motion among the infusoria, Milne-Edwards remarks: “As to the physico-physiological theory on which the hypothetical views of our author depend, it appears to us useless to discuss it.”18 Why, then, republish Cuvier and Lamarck, with all the corrections and additions that the progress of zoology entailed? Evidently because nothing as complete, as clear, as descriptive, and as comprehensible as were the two great syntheses had appeared in the interval since their initial publication. The history of modern taxonomy for the rest of the century is a series of additions, re-attributions, and modifications in detail of classifications requiring only transposition to the time dimension and the operation of natural selection to become the outcome of the evolutionary process. It is, parenthetically, to be noted that Geoffroy’s Philosophie anatomique never had a second edition. The central feature of the method Cuvier developed for basing a taxonomy on comparative anatomy was that classification depends on the relation of function to form and arrangement in internal as well as external anatomical structures. The general problem is the relation of the structure of an animal to the life it leads. Cuvier begins his Anatomie comparée with vital functions. First are those relative to the external world. The categories are two, sensibility and locomotion. Second are functions relative to the internal economy of the creature, namely digestion, absorption, circulation, respiration, transpiration, excretion, and generation. The puzzle then is to identify the organs proper to each: serving sensibility are nervous system, eyes, ears, nose, tongue; serving locomotion are skeleton, legs, paws, hooves, fins, wings; serving digestion are mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines, liver— and so on for all the rest. The actual work consisted in dissecting specimens 16 Le Règne animal, ed. accompagnée de planches gravées par MM. Audouin, Blanchard, Deshayes, Alcide d’Orbigny, Doyère, Dugès, Duvernoy, Laurillard, Milne-Edwards, Roulin, et Valenciennes, 22 vols. (1836–49). 17 2nd ed. revue et augmentée par C.-P. Deshayes et H. Milne-Edwards, 11 vols. (1835–43). 18 Ibid., 1, p. 349.


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of every species known in order to make a systematic comparison, species by species, of the presence or absence, form, function, and relation to other structures in the body, of each organ in every animal, and further to give an account of the variation and relative importance of each structure from species to species. This was an enormous task. It might at its level be compared to the genome project of the present day. Clearly, it required a team effort. The goal was a taxonomy arranging animals in a natural series on the model of the botanical systematics of Jussieu’s Genera Plantarum of 1789. For that purpose the signal characteristics of each species had to be determined in order of importance. The first cut establishes classes—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, mollusks, and so on, each of which exhibits certain gross anatomical features that distinguish it. At the successively lower levels of orders, genera, and species, differences of physiological function in the several systems of organs and even individual organs become the telling factors. Cuvier stated the guiding principle, which Jussieu before him had called Subordination of Characters, though in a more restricted anatomical sense, as follows: Since the parts of any being must fit together [avoir une mutuelle convenance], there are certain characteristics of configuration that exclude others; there are others, however, which necessitate them. When we know such and such characteristics in a living being, we can calculate those that coexist with others, or those that are incompatible with them. The parts, the properties, or the characteristics of configuration that have the largest number of these relations of incompatibility or of coexistence with others, or in other words which exert the most marked influence on the whole being, are what we call important characteristics, dominant characteristics; the others are subordinate characteristics, and they are so in varying degree.19 For example, an animal whose digestive tract can handle only meat must have a certain form of teeth to seize its prey; must also be capable of running fast; must have strong jaws, paws, and claws; must have keen eyes and/ or nose, and so on. It is, indeed, possible to deduce all these structures from any one of them, and also the absence of others. Incisor and cuspid teeth are never found in animals with horns. Every animal with hooves is herbivorous. “It is on the mutual dependence of functions,” Cuvier writes elsewhere, “that the laws which determine the relation of their organs is founded, laws of which the necessity equals that of mathematical or metaphysical laws.”20 Such was Cuvier’s mastery of detail that he was able to trace the telling similarities or distinctions at the finer levels of systems of organs and individual organs that permitted dividing orders into genera and identifying 19 20

Le Règne animal, 1, pp. 1–11. Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée, 1, p. 47.

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individual species. The regulative as distinct from the methodological principle he called the Correlation of Parts: Every organized being forms a whole, a closed and unique system whose parts mutually correspond and conduce to the same definitive action by their reciprocal reaction. None of these parts can change without the others changing also, and in consequence each of them, taken separately, indicates and gives all the others.21 This principle in turn derives from what he defines as Conditions of Existence (Comte took the term from the Le Règne animal ): Since nothing can exist if it does not join together the conditions that make its existence possible, the different parts of each being must be so coordinated as to make possible the entire being, not only in itself, but in its relations with what surrounds it. The analysis of these conditions often leads to general laws as demonstrable as those deriving from calculation or experiment.22 Here is how Lamarck stated the same principle in Système des animaux sans vertèbres: I could here pass in review all classes, all the orders, all the genera, all the species of animals that exist, and demonstrate that the conformity of the individual and of their parts; their organs, their faculties, etc., etc., are entirely the result of the conditions to which each race of each species finds itself subjected by nature.23 As for Geoffroy, his methodological statements, if not his ideas, were less general, but his comments on the relation of structure to function in particular cases come down to the same thing. With respect to the oxygenation of veinous blood, for example, he writes “The respirable element [i.e., oxygen] is disseminated in two fluids [air and water] that are very different in nature and density. Thus an ordinate of the external world determines the condition of their respiratory organ; hence, two modes of respiration and, in consequence, two groups of animals according to whether they live in air or in the water.”24 3. EXPERIMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY

In completing his comparative anatomy, Cuvier reaches out to physiology and expresses hope for a rapprochement between the two sciences. The pre21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 45. Le Règne animal, 1, p. 6. Système des animaux sans vertèbres, 1, pp. 14–15. Philosophie anatomique, 1, p. 208.

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condition, in Comte’s view, was that the one should liberate itself from natural history and the other from medicine. On the side of physiology, the new departure dates from the work of Xavier Bichat, whose meteoric career, Napoleonic in its trajectory, transpired between 1795 and his death at the age of thirty-one in 1802.25 Institutionally, Bichat succeeded his mentor, Desault, chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu, who died suddenly in 1795, and whose example he followed in leading troops of students from bedside to operating table in the new teaching of clinical medicine. Scientifically, he transcended that and set out to investigate, not merely the location and pathology of organs and structures, but their functioning and contribution to processes of life, disease, and death. In the seven packed years of his career, he published five treatises, the most famous of which are Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1799) and the four-volume Anatomie générale, appliquée a` la physiologie et a` la médecine (1801). The former seizes the reader’s attention with the opening statement: “Life is the ensemble of functions that resist death.” Part I of Recherches physiologiques treats of life, part II of death. Neither is a simple matter. Life has two divisions, organic and animal. The functions of organic life, which are common to all living things, animal and vegetable, are birth, nutrition, growth, and death. They are internal to the organism. The functions of animal life are sensitivity, perception, volition, and mobility. They relate the creature to the world. Categorical distinctions differentiate the two lives. The most obvious is the form of the respective sets of organs. Those supporting animal life—brain, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, vocal cords, voluntary muscles, and skeletons—are bilaterally symmetrical. Those carrying out the functions of organic life—heart, blood vessels, stomach, intestines, bladder, liver are irregular in form or, in kidneys and lungs, imperfectly balanced. Bichat’s Recherches physiologiques was a transitional book. The first part, in a philosophical vein, reads like an eighteenth-century treatise of physiology. At the center of his thinking is the unbridgeable difference between vital laws and physical laws. Nevertheless, he rejected all efforts, such as those of Van Helmont, Stahl, and Barthez, to reduce the phenomena of life to a single, ineffable principle. The term pluravitalism, if such a coinage be allowed, may be said to encapsulate his standpoint. He followed Bordeu in holding that every organ is endowed with its own share of the sum of the vital forces that animate the organism. Unlike Cabanis, Bichat wrote with an economy and immediacy such that in the first part of his book, one is a little surprised and somehow pleased to 25 There is a somewhat controversial literature on Bichat’s importance. The most recent biography is Dobo and Role (1989). Huneman (1998) discusses the philosophical and methodological aspects of his physiology. See also Albury (1977); Sutton (1984); Haigh (1984). Keel (2001) takes issue with the treatments of Foucault (1963), Ackerknecht (1967), and Lesch (1984).

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recognize the functioning of one’s own body in his account of its various systems. One feels like part of the story, in which passing remarks pique attention. Plants, for example, may be thought of as incomplete drafts of animals, a sort of canvas that “need only be dressed out with an apparatus of external organs suitable for establishing relations with the world.”26 Let us not, he warns, confuse physical laws with those of social life. Both are solid but different. The onset of old age is precisely what we have observed in our parents and dread for ourselves. Bichat’s vein throughout Part I is observational. His material is drawn from medical knowledge, wide reading, and many autopsies. The information adduced from opening cadavers is subsidiary, however, and merely anatomical rather than functional in nature. The second half of his book, treating physiological researches on death, is another matter. The vein is experimental, and graphically so. Deaths are of two sorts, natural and unnatural. Bichat gives short shrift to natural death, that which the ensemble of living functions resists until it prevails. It simply happens. Unnatural deaths are of two sorts, caused by terminal illness or by accident. Study of the former is very difficult. Diseases that affect human beings can rarely be reproduced in animals. Experiment is thus out of the question. Nor can observation be conclusive, since the progress of a fatal illness denatures the phenomena to be studied. For these reasons Bichat declares himself to be incapable of addressing precisely how diseases cause death. His interest in any case, though he would not have put it this way, was not medical. The deaths he does study through their effects on particular organs are accidental to the animal, but not to him. He caused them in order to determine in the negative the function of the organ he modified or excised. Vivisection was his principal tool, as it was of the first generation of experimental physiologists who followed his lead. Prominent among those followers was Julien Legallois, who also died young, and who justified the method thus succinctly: Experiments on living animals are among the greatest lights of physiology. There is an infinity between the dead animal and the most feebly living animal. . . . It does not suffice to observe the simultaneous play of all the functions in the healthy animal; it is above all important to study the effects of the cessation of such and such a function. It is in the determination by this analysis of the function of such and such an organ and its correlation with other functions that all the art of experiment on living animals consists.27 In the always discriminating judgment of Georges Canguilhem, Legallois, but not Bichat is to be considered the earliest fully positive physiologist.28 26 27 28

Bichat, Recherches physiologiques Sur la vie et la mort, 3. Quoted in Lesch (1984), p. 89. Canguilhem (1955), pp. 125–126. On Legallois, see also Vladislav Kruta, DSB 8 (1973), pp.


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The spirit of his research was analytic rather than programmatic. Impressed with the exactitude of Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, he limited his problems, defined their parameters with exceptional care, and achieved precise determinations that, unlike many of Bichat’s generalizations, have stood the test of time. The two most notable were, first, the locus of the brain’s control of respiration in the medulla oblongata, and, second, the metameric properties of the spinal cord. The four volumes of Bichat’s Anatomie générale followed Recherches physiologiques within two years. It is a work of systematization rather than experimentation. The central argument is that the fundamental building blocks of the human body are not, as commonly held, its several organs, but rather the tissues of which the organs are composed. The basic membranes have the same character and are subject to the same diseases whatever the organ in which they figure. Tissues are to general anatomy what the elements of matter are to chemistry, the constituents of bodily organs in the one case and of chemical compounds in the other. Thus the stomach is an assemblage of mucous tissue in the lining, serous tissue on the outside, and muscular tissue in between. Muscles consist for the most part of muscular tissue attached by fibrous tissue to the bones and are bounded by synovial tissue where they slide across other structures. Bones are mainly bony tissue with cartilaginous tissue at either end and marrow in the core. Not to list them all, Bichat distinguished twenty-one systems of tissue falling into two divisions. The first comprises those that pervade the entire organism, such as fleshy matter, the nervous system, the arterial and venous systems, and what would now be called metabolic systems. The second division comprises tissues pertaining to particular organs and functions such as the bony, cartilaginous, muscular, and glandular systems. Later anatomists have modified the identity and number of such systems in many ways. But the identity of histology as a subdiscipline of biology dates from Bichat’s work. The full title, Anatomie générale appliquée a` la physiologie et a` la médecine, would be more accurate if it were reversed. His great book is the work of a physiologist who had learned the body as a surgeon. He gives detailed descriptions of the texture and structure of all tissues while developing his treatment along functional lines. General anatomy was an analysis and in no sense a topography of the body. There are no plates, no diagrams of any sort. In that respect it may not be far fetched to compare it to another famous work of analysis, Lagrange’s Mécanique analytique. Bichat’s originality has on occasion been called into question, most severely in careful studies by Othmar Keel.29 Bichat himself acknowledged that 132–135. Eugène Legallois collected his father’s works after his death, Oeuvres de J.C.C. Legallois avec des notes de M. Pariset, 2 vols. (1824). 29 Keel (2001), chapter 11, recapitulates successive criticisms of Bichat from his own time to Keel (1979).

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he had the idea for the two lives from Bordeu. Underlying the definition of life in Recherches physiologiques was the widespread vitalist notion of a tension, even a conflict, between physical forces and life forces. He also recognized that reading the first edition of Pinel’s Nosographie philosophique (1798) had fixed his attention on tissues rather than organs as the locus of certain types of inflammation. In the second edition of that work, Pinel in turn paid tribute to the extension Bichat had given the matter in his early Traité des membranes (1798). He, Pinel, had drawn on that while improving his classification and account of diseases in the second edition.30 Bichat in turn developed Pinel’s nosological criteria of tissue pathology into what in the next generation became the subdiscipline of histology. Published before the words biology or histology existed, Anatomie générale could appear at all only as a medical work. Bichat saw it that way himself. His vocabulary speaks unconsciously to the point, however. The word “tissues,” not all of which are membraneous, displaces membranes as the general term. Tissues are his subject, not diseases or their classification as in Pinel, but tissues, their character and structure, their physiological role in the functioning of the organism, their anatomical role in the constitution of its organs. The pathological state of tissues and therapeutic application of his findings are little prominent. Unlike Pinel, Bichat never practiced medicine nor ever treated patients. He taught anatomy and physiology to medical and surgical students, but did so in the manner, not of a healer and physician, but of what, in the parlance of a slightly later day, would be called a medical scientist. Bichat’s originality was in the architecture of his work, not in its details, and his impact owed as much to its dynamism as to its content. Its influence was threefold, philosophical, physiological, and biological. Even while deploring the vitalist spirit of Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, Comte put Bichat on a high pedestal in the positivist pantheon. Treating objectification of the will in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer considered that “nothing is more pertinent in confirming and clarifying the argument of the current chapter than the justly celebrated work of Bichat, Sur la vie et la mort. His considerations and mine reciprocally support each other. His provide the physiological commentary to mine, mine being the philosophical commentary on his. If we are read at the same time, we will be better understood.”31 Specifically, Schopenhauer’s dichotomy between the unconscious will to live and conscious volition corresponded to that between organic life and animal life. Lamarck does not acknowledge Recherches physiologiques, but what energizes the evolutionary process in Zoologie philosophique is the force of living 30 31

Nosographie philosophique, 2nd ed. (2 vols.), 1, pp. xxiii–xiv; 2, pp. 9–10. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1911 ed.), Zweites Band, chapter 20, p. 296.


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nature striving against destruction by forces of physical nature. Bichat was not the first to do experimental physiology (one need think only of Harvey), but the second part of Recherches physiologiques was far and away the most general and systematic experimental exercise yet to have been undertaken. It was Magendie’s starting point in transforming physiology from a theoretical and speculative to an experimental discipline and in securing its autonomy from medicine. In the critical footnotes Magendie added to the fifth edition (1822), he runs along the bottom of page after page pointing up to the absurdity of the ideas and the excellence of the work. Finally, and most important, Bichat’s initiation of the study of tissues was the first step in the two-hundred year sequence through which experimental analysis has penetrated the living organism to fix its elements successively in tissues, cells, nuclei, chromosomes, genes, and proteins, just as physical science has done (not in chronological order) in atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, and quarks, with neither end anywhere in sight. To no other physiologists of Bichat’s time, and only to leading scientists of any time, has it been given, whether by genius or by circumstances or by genius in the circumstances, to reach thus far beyond the bounds of their research. In the estimate of John Lesch, whose account of the emergence of experimental physiology is the standard work, the medical people occupied to a greater or lesser extent with physiology in Paris between 1800 and 1820 were seventeen in number. Four among them (Nysten, Dupuytren, Legallois, and Magendie) were directly inspired by Bichat and undertook experimental investigations. The total number of qualified persons involved in experimental physiology was greater than that, however. Commissioners named by the Institute to report on particular researches (themselves well informed) mention at least half a dozen other investigators. Staff members in the veterinary schools of Alfort and Lyons also engaged, and very actively, in vivisectional research.32 Nevertheless, experimental physiology had yet to become a viable specialty. Nor did it do so within the institutional structure of medicine, which was exclusively educational and clinical. There were no chairs of experimental physiology, no hospital posts, no recognized pattern for a career, no incentives for research beyond curiosity. Bichat and Legallois died young before beating out a professional path that others might follow. In order to make a living, Nysten abandoned research and concentrated on medical practice. Dupuytren’s career reversed the pattern of Bichat’s. Driven by ambition, he quit physiology and won the fame accruing to great performances on the surgical stage. It was left to Magendie to make of experimental physiology rather a sci32

Lesch (1984), pp. 84–85; Elliott (1987).

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entific than a medical discipline. That he was able to do so was owing individually to his skill, enterprise, and single-mindedness and contextually to the interest his work held for the Institute. He was far from alone in submitting his findings to its judgment. Pinel, Bichat, Dupuytren, Legallois—all followed that course. They had no choice. Prior to reincarnation of the Société Royale de Médecine as the Académie de Médecine in 1820, the only forum for receiving and recognizing medical research was the Société ´ Médicale d’Emulation, an entirely unofficial voluntary body founded by Bichat and other youngsters barely out of medical school. The scientific cast of French medicine has thus an institutional as well as an intrinsic explanation. It has been surmised that reacting against the familial, political, and professional disorder in which Magendie grew up inculcated in him the profound respect for facts, the aggressiveness about finding them, and the skepticism about theory that characterized his career.33 That may well be correct, the more so that a rigorously empirical attitude was in keeping with the positivist tenor of the times. In any case Magendie made his debut in print with a programmatic declaration comparable in point of prescience to the sealed note in which Lavoisier had laid out a program for the reform of chemistry before beginning his research in 1773.34 In 1809 the journal of the ´ Société Médicale d’Emulation, unfaithful for the moment to the memory of Bichat, published Magendie’s essay, “Quelques idées générales sur les phénomènes particuliers aux corps vivans.”35 Physiology, declared the young Magendie, lagged behind the exact sciences for two reasons. First, phenomena were badly observed and ill defined. The bulk of so-called facts would have to be verified and refined by precise experiments before the subject could become a discipline. Second, imaginary concepts and constructs multiplied entities in violation of the principle of economy in scientific explanation. Albrecht von Haller had established what became the received wisdom, to wit that sensibility and contractility are the basic properties of living matter in animals. Magendie would have none of that. He insisted instead that physiological phenomena are to be understood, not as the manifestation of innate properties, but as functions of anatomical structures organized in certain ways species by species. Without denying the validity of reducing those structures to the level of tissues, he scornfully rejected the multiplicity of vital forces with which Bichat had invested those elements. In Magendie’s thinking, the features common to animal life come down to operations of two sorts: nutrition (the processes by which the body com33

See the excellent article by Mirko D. Grmek, DSB 9 (1974), pp. 6–11. Olmsted (1944) remains the standard biography. The official e´loge (Flourens [1858]) reflects the complexity of the author’s relations with Magendie. Lesch (1984) gives detailed examples of Magendie’s experimental practice in his chapters 5–8. 34 Poirier (1993), pp. 72–73. 35 Bulletin des sciences médicales 4 (1809), pp. 145–170.


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poses and decomposes itself materially) and movement (not merely locomotion, but the activity of heart, lungs, digestive system, and so on). His formulation of the uniformity of nature in the case of living things clearly owes much to his reading of Cuvier’s comparative anatomy and may be taken as the credo of modern biology: “Two living bodies having the same organization will display the same vital phenomena; two living bodies having different organizations will display vital phenomena the diversity of which will always be in direct proportion to the difference in organization.”36 Magendie’s early attitudes and his later practice were thus what has often been considered mechanist. Nevertheless, his position, even like Cuvier’s views on species, is an illustration that a mechanist versus vitalist dichotomy seldom sorts physicians or biologists cleanly into mutually exclusive categories. For Magendie did admit the concept of a vital force. When and if it could be related to a precise law, as the principle of attraction was to the inverse square law of gravity, its role would be similar, that of a universal principle to be known by its effects and unknowable in its essence. The goal was not in sight, but he set out to work toward it. Magendie’s experimental investigations have often been described, and we need not follow the entire sequence. In the course of a long lifetime he established the responsibility of many particular structures for important generalized functions: of the cerebellum for maintaining equilibrium, of the fifth pair of cranial nerves for the sense of touch, of the roots of motor and sensory nerves in the medulla, of the absorption of nutrition both in the lymphatic and circulatory systems, of the role of the liver in detoxification, to mention only outstanding examples. His signet was the acumen and skill with which he would pinpoint the site of a specific, often minor organic function and exhibit the general physiological consequences that followed from its inactivation. The reasoning moved from effects to causes in a probabilistic vein rather than from considerations of overall design to the purpose served by the parts. The density and variation of experiments he performed in order to establish each finding was unequalled among contemporary medical scientists, and perhaps among predecessors. His style is better described as activist, interventionist, even invasive rather than as mechanistic in some external sense. It would be only a small exaggeration to characterize his work as a kind of physiological engineering. His purpose was not so much to quantify, or even analyze, his problems as to get inside them, to take control of the functions he was investigating, to turn them off or on at will. To be sure, he modeled his methods on those of physics and chemistry but always adapted to the qualitatively different complexity of living organisms. He was attentive not only to the methods of the physical sciences, but also to their content where relevant to physiology and, 36

Quoted in Grmek, “Magendie,” DSB 9 (1974), p. 7.

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what may have been professionally most important, to leading chemists and physicists of the Institute prior to his election in 1821, and also afterward. In his laboratory he employed not merely the scalpel, but newly discovered vegetable drugs, several of which he himself isolated and identified. He thus extended the reach of physiological inquiry beyond the frontier of medical research proper into the fields of botany, pharmacology, chemistry, and even physics. After publishing his critical and programmatic essay in 1809, Magendie inaugurated his research by reaching out to other sciences. Appearing before the Institute in the same year, he read a pair of papers, one on 14 April and the sequel on 7 August.37 Although the design of the experiments was largely his, he had conducted them in collaboration with a botanist, Alyre RaffenauDelille, a veteran of the Egyptian expedition. The subject of the first memoir was the action on the spinal cord of an unknown drug. One of the botanists of the Baudin expedition to the South Seas had brought back a few twigs of a bush called upas tieuté in Java and Borneo, where hunters and warriors smeared a bit of the poison extracted from it on their spears and arrowheads. A.-L. de Jussieu, who was a member of the commission reporting on the memoir, identified the plant as one belonging to the genus strychnine. Thus informed, Magendie and Delille put in hand experiments with extracts of two well-known species of the genus, nux vomica and St. Ignatius bean, which confirmed the identification. The dire effects of upas itself, however, were the main subject. Magendie dipped a splinter of wood into the mixture and inserted the merest drop under a dog’s skin. He reports in vivid detail the progress, from spine, to legs, to lungs, of the tetanus it induced, with remissions at each stage. The poison worked, Magendie expressly showed, on the spinal cord. Separating the medulla, at the top of the spinal cord, from the brain did not suppress the symptoms. Destroying the medulla did, and the animal survived—totally paralyzed. The commission reporting on the demonstration concluded that the memoir would have merited inclusion in the Savans étrangers series had its publication not been so dangerous.38 In the research that followed, Magendie threw in his lot with a pair of pharmacologists, Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou. In so doing he joined forces with a companion discipline the practice of which was rising in prestige from the stage of trade to that of profession. Apothecaries were henceforth pharmacists formed no longer by apprenticeship, but in the new ´ Ecole Supérieure de Pharmacie (not yet a faculty), directed after its founda37

“Examen de l’action de quelques végétaux sur la moëlle e´pinière,” PVIF 4, p. 196. PVIF (22 May 1809) 4, pp. 238–240. Magendie published the paper many years later in the first issue of Journal de physiologie expérimentale 1 (1821), pp. 18–32. 38


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tion in 1803 by Fourcroy’s onetime protégé, the now eminent chemist Nicolas Vauquelin. The subject matter, formerly materia medica, would henceforth be pharmacology, which, even like physiology, was in the initial stage of developing an experimental component. Scion of a family of apothecaries, Pelletier qualified for his license at the ´ Ecole de Pharmacie in 1810. He had inherited the business from his father, who had taken over Rouelle’s apothecary shop and died in 1797, when his son was nine years old. The Pharmacie Pelletier is still in business on the rue Jacob. Caventou and he followed the course in chemistry given by Jacques ´ Thenard at the Ecole de Pharmacie and focused attention on the chemistry of vegetable substances. Pelletier proceeded to the degree of Docteur-ès-Sciences in 1812. A paper on the chemical nature of opoponax appeared in 1811. Later in the year he published the first memoir of a series reporting his analyses of further gum resins—bdellium, myrrh, asafetida, galbanum, and sagapenum—and of other naturally occurring substances such as amber, sarcocolla, toad venom, and sandalwood.39 None of this had any bearing on drugs or on their physiological effects. It was just such a problem that led Magendie to initiate a collaboration. In an investigation in 1813 of the mechanics of vomiting, he found that the muscles of the diaphragm cause regurgitation and that the role of the stomach is passive. He there left unasked the question of the mode of action of the emetics he had employed.40 Medical practitioners made wide use of ground ipecacuanha root as an emetic, and Magendie now enlisted Pelletier’s chemical skills in undertaking an analysis. Dissolving out the components of the plant tissue one by one, they isolated the active principle, which Magendie dubbed emetine. Impressed, Thenard in his report to the Institute recommended that a systematic program of analysis of other medical compounds be undertaken.41 Pelletier and Caventou, the latter still Thenard’s student, took up the challenge. In close cooperation with Magendie they identified the poisonous component of upas as a salifiable base, which Magendie named strychnine. Over the next half-dozen years they proceeded to analyze the chemical constitution of other medicinal plants and isolated the active principles, notably brucine, veratrine, cinchonine, and most important, 39

“Analyse de l’opoponax,” Annales de chimie 79 (1811), pp. 90–99; “Examen de quelques Gommes résines,” Annales de chimie 80 (1811), pp. 38–53. It is unclear whether Pelletier entered these papers in a prize competition set by the Société de Pharmacie in 1809. See Lesch (1984), p. 252, n. 46. On Pelletier more generally, see Alex Berman, DSB 10, pp.497–498. 40 For accounts of these experiments, see PVIF 5, pp. 205–208, 244–248, 447–449, 597–598; Olmsted (1944), pp. 51–55. A translation of the report on the first paper by Cuvier, Pinel, Humboldt, and Percy, “On Vomiting, being an Account of a Memoir of M. Magendie read to the Imperial Institute of France on the lst of March, 1813,” appeared in Annals of Philosophy 1 (1813), pp. 429–428. 41 PVIF 6, pp. 166–168, prepared jointly with Hallé.

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morphine and quinine, all salifiable bases or alkaloids.42 Magendie on his own determined the medicinal properties of iodine and prussic acid. Magendie had been appointed in 1811 to the post of demonstrator at the Faculty of Medicine, where he taught anatomy and surgery but not physiology. Constant frictions with colleagues ensued, particularly with his immediate superior, Fran¸cois Chaussier, the professor of anatomy, and with Dupuytren, who took Magendie for a dangerous rival. It did not ease matters that Magendie himself could be abrupt, rude, and scornful on occasion. At all events, in 1813 he abandoned anatomy, resigned from the faculty, and set out to earn his living from the practice of medicine while focusing his research on experimental physiology. In Claude Bernard’s view, that decision marked the beginning of the “new physiology.” In his account, “Magendie joined example to precept. He undertook private courses in experimental physiology based on vivisections. He attracted numerous students, among whom were a number of foreigners. It was from this center that young physiologists carried the seeds of the new experimental physiology into the neighboring schools, where it then developed with prodigious rapidity.”43 Not only foreigners were attracted. Magendie’s demonstrations were soon the talk of Paris. After a visit to England in 1824 they also became the scandal of London, where the reaction of animal sympathizers breathed life into the fledgling Anti-Vivisection Society. The early papers Magendie presented to the Institute beginning in 1809 were refereed by medical members of the First Class. In the ensuing years, however, his determination to develop physiology into an experimental science aroused the interest of the whole Academy of Science. Cuvier was among the commissioners, as was Humboldt, who reported on the memoir on the mechanics of vomiting absorption in 1813.44 He served too, in company with Biot and others, on the commissions that reviewed an 1813 memoir on the esophagus and the first volume of Magendie’s only comprehensive work, the Précis élémentaire de physiologie (1816–17).45 Suggestions by Cuvier were almost surely responsible for Magendie’s undertaking comparative studies of the lymphatic systems in birds, while Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire examined the memoir on the “Organes propres aux oiseaux et aux réptiles.”46 As befitted a physicist, Biot collaborated with Percy in a comprehensive review of the 1817 memoir on “L’action des artères sur la circulation.” Magendie’s vivisections there settled in the negative the question whether muscular contractions in the arteries synchronous with the pulse supplement the pumping of the heart in propelling the bloodstream. Cuvier supplied him 42

For the Pelletier-Caventou collaboration, see Lesch (1984), 125–144. Quoted in Grmek, “Magendie,” DSB 9 (1974), p. 8, from Bernard (1867), p. 7. 44 PVIF 5, pp. 174–79. 45 PVIF 5, pp. 447–449; 6, pp. 27–28. 46 “Mémoire sur les vaisseaux lymphatiques des oiseaux,” Journal de physiologie expérimenale 1 (1821), pp. 48–55, PVIF 6, pp. 436, 506. 43


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with an example of the largest blood vessel in nature, the aorta of a deceased elephant in the menagerie of the Muséum. Neither embedded in its tissues nor surrounding them was there anything of a muscular tunic capable of exerting contractions. Instead, elasticity of the walls of the arteries is the property that enables the heart to do all the pumping. Magendie compared the elastic role of the arteries to that of the reservoir of air in hydraulic systems powered by alternating force pumps. They serve the mechanical principle that intermittent action may be converted into continuous action by using the driving force to compress a spring that exerts steady pressure in reacting.47 Following out of Magendie’s study of arterial action, J.-L.-M. ´ Poiseuille, an 1816 graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, undertook an investigation of the hydrodynamics of the circulatory system and developed it into the thesis that qualified him for the degree of doctor of medicine in 1828. He devised a haemodynamometer, adaptations of which instrument have been used ever since. It measured blood pressure by the height to which it lifted a column of mercury.48 In what might be taken as a personal vote of confidence from the side of the exact sciences, Laplace chose Magendie to be his doctor. It was almost surely Laplace, moreover, who persuaded baron de Montyon to endow an annual award for experimental physiology, a prize won by Pelletier and Caventou in 1827. Laplace and Berthollet were instrumental in securing Magendie’s appointment to the Bureau central des hospices de Paris in 1818.49 More formally indicative of Magendie’s growing scientific reputation was the membership of the commission named by the Academy of Science in 1820 to report on the memoir treating the mechanism of venous absorption in warm-blooded animals. With respect to the lymphatic alternative, only fictitious hypotheses and “nothing positive” had ever been proposed. Not a single life scientist was among the academic referees who, instead, were Berthollet, Thenard, and Gay-Lussac. After a review of Magendie’s previous research on this, the earliest of his general problems, they reported on the convincing experiments performed in their presence. “In this memoir,” they conclude, “M. Magendie gives new proofs of the sagacity with which he strives to introduce the rigorous methods of the physical sciences into physiology and to banish everything hypothetical.”50 To that appreciation may be added Magendie’s procedural remark in a footnote to his memoir on arterial 47 “Mémoire sur l’action des artères dans la circulation,” Journal de physiologie expérimentale 1 (1821), pp. 102–115; PVIF 6, pp. 175–179. 48 “Recherches sur la force du coeur aortique,” Journal de physiologie expérimentale et physiologique 8 (1828), pp. 272–305; “Recherches sur l’action des artères, dans la circulation artérielle,” ibid., 9 (1829), pp. 44–52; “Recherches sur la force du coeur aortique,” ibid., 9 (1829), pp. 341–358. 49 Lesch (1984), pp. 127, 143, 248, n. 33. 50 “Mémoire sur le mécanisme de l’absorption chez les animaux a` sang rouge et chaud,” Journal de physiologie expérimentale 1 (1821), pp. 1–18; PVIF 7 (11 December 1820), pp. 109–111.

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elasticity: “In science, to express an opinion, to think [croire], is nothing but to be ignorant. In effect, what do we really mean when we say, I believe, I think, my opinion is that such or such a phenomenon happens like this? That means only, I suspect, I conjecture that the thing takes place in such a way. In fact, when you suspect, when you make conjectures, you don’t know. You might as well say: you believe, therefore, you don’t know.”51 Magendie’s election to the Academy of Science followed in 1821. The triumph was personal, however, rather than institutional. Defense of turf defeated Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s proposal for a reorganization of the structure of the Academy in order to create a section for physiology, the experimental aspect of which had scarcely existed at the time of its foundation in 1795. Instead, Magendie was named to the section of Medicine and Surgery.52 What signaled the emergence of a new discipline was not yet institutionalization, but the success of the journal Magendie launched in the same year, Journal de physiologie expérimentale, to which he added et pathologique in the second volume. There in the fullness of his powers he published experimental researches in the ensuing decade. Notable are those that issued in his part of the Bell-Magendie Law, his most famous finding. It states that the anterior and posterior roots of the spinal cord in the medulla have different functions, and that the former govern mobility while the latter control sensibility. (Current parlance designates the two sets as ventral and dorsal, respectively.) Magendie also published translations of Bell’s papers in his journal. The joint naming represents eventual compromise in a priority dispute with Sir Charles Bell. It would be Magendie-Bell if primacy were given to depth and cogency rather than to the heuristic effect of a partial anticipation.53 Other papers in the field of neurophysiology treat the role of the cerebellum in maintaining equilibrium; the gyrations of animals when the cerebellar peduncle is severed; and the composition, circulation, and function of the cerebrospinal fluid.54 There too appeared papers of other, mostly younger medical people, and several veterinaries, doing what was clearly physiology, experimental or pathological or both. The number of such authors throughout the 1820s comes to approximately one hundred in France and 51

Op.cit., above, n. 35, pp. 103–104. Lesch (1984), pp. 118–121. 53 “Expériences sur les fonctions des racines des nerfs rachidiens,” Journal de physiologie expérimentale et pathologique 2 (1822), pp. 276–279; “Expériences sur les fonctions des nerfs qui naissent de la moëlle e´pinière,” ibid., pp. 366–371. Cranefield (1974) prints facsimile reproductions of these papers in a volume containing all the relevant publications and excerpts from the literature treating the controversy. There are fair accounts in Bernard (1867), pp. 154–158, and Olmsted (1944), pp. 93–122. 54 Above, n. 25; “Mémoire sur les fonctions de quelques parties du système nerveux,” Journal de physiologie expérimentale et pathologique 4 (1824), pp. 399–407; “Mémoire sur un liquide qui se trouve dans le crâne et le canal vertébral de l’homme et des animaux mammifères,” ibid., 5 (1825) pp. 27–37. 52

IX. 4. MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS

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abroad, for there were numerous translations from English and German. The figure may reasonably be considered a rough measure of the population of active contributors to the field. Indicative of its scientific standing was the participation of specialists in other disciplines who published on problems of physiology: from chemistry, Vauquelin and Chevreul as well as Pelletier and Caventou; from physics, Pouillet, Savart, Poisson, and Coriolis. Notable among such outside names were those of Cuvier, Humboldt, Bory de St.Vincent, and Larrey. Membership of the Institute gave Magendie the standing to secure the two positions in which he exerted formal influence. In 1830 he became head of the women’s ward in the Hôtel-Dieu. Later in the same year he won election to a still more important post, the chair of Medicine in the Collège de France. Magendie there impressed an audience wider by far than ever had heard or read the many memoirs presented before the Academy of Science. The series he delivered between 1832 and 1838, and published in 1842, transformed the perception of physiology among the educated public. His subject was the physical phenomena of life. The purpose was twofold. On the scientific side, he put all possible emphasis on physical explanations of the functioning of living creatures. On the medical side, he insisted on the necessity of basing therapeutics on exact knowledge of normal and pathological physiology.55 At the same time he was now in a position to form a new generation of students who later peopled the new discipline of experimental physiology in direct consequence of their training. It might, perhaps, be said that Magendie’s most important contribution to the science he had the largest part in launching was his role in the education of Claude Bernard, who in 1842 became his laboratory assistant in the Collège de France. For the present purpose, however, it will be fitting to conclude discussion of Magendie with a passing remark in the fourth edition of Précis élémentaire in 1836, at which time Comte was publishing Cours de philosophie positive. Magendie there identifies his discipline with biology: “Physiology, or Biology, that vast natural science which studies life wherever it exists and investigates its general characters.”56

4. MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS

In portraying the character of mathematical physics in its formative stage, we shall have to widen the angle of vision. What distinguishes the writings to be considered, and many subsidiary contributions, is that the reasoning was mathematical and that, with one exception (Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur 55 56

Phenomènes physiques de la vie, 4 vols. (1842). Translation in Robinson (1978), p. 13.

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la puissance motrice du feu), the findings are expressed in formulations of mathematical physics. The same cannot be said of any body of physics generated by a community of scientists prior to 1800 in France or to the late 1830s elsewhere. D’Alembert, to take an eminent example, would have regarded the phrase “mathematical physics,” if not quite a contradiction in terms, at least as a conflation of unlike divisions of knowledge. The Discours préliminaire (1751) to the Encyclopédie distributes the sciences into two main branches, “Mathématiques” and “Physique générale et particulière.” To the former belong geometry, arithmetic, and algebra, which d’Alembert calls “Pures,” and also mechanics, astronomy, and geometric optics, which he designates as “Mixtes.” All other knowledge of nature is “Physique,” where the best to be expected is a “recueil raisonné,” an organized collection of observations and experiments. These distinctions still governed the design of the curriculum when the ´ Ecole Polytechnique opened its doors in 1794. “Physique générale” was a relatively trivial course treating the properties of bodies. “Physique particulière” was simply chemistry. Neither had anything to do with mathematics. Nor did Haüy’s standard textbook Traité élémentaire de physique (1803). In Delambre’s 1809 report to the Emperor on the progress of “Sciences Mathématiques” since 1789, there is one fairly minor section entitled “Physique mathématique.” Delambre saw the beginnings of the developments that were to transform the science of physics very differently from the way they appear to later scrutiny. In his eyes what was gained for mathematics (he says “géométrie”) was lost to physics. He mentions “light, gravity, motion and laws of impact, even the phenomena of magnetism and electrostatics, which some have tried to subject to calculation.” The new phenomena of galvanism might possibly compensate physics for some of these deprivations. What Delambre had in mind in writing “Physique mathématique” was quantitative data developed by means of exact instruments, such as Coulomb’s torsion balance, Volta’s electric battery, Borda’s repeating circle, and Ramsden’s theodolite—physical investigations carried out with what were still called mathematical instruments. ´ To return, then, to the Ecole Polytechnique: What can have led certain members of the first generation of graduates, and of staff, to do what they were never taught to do, and what Delambre instinctively took as a deprivation for physics, and attack its main problems in mathematical terms? Clearly, we do not have to do with the accommodation or extension of some signal accomplishment. There is no single focus such as Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, Newton’s Principia, Planck’s quantum of action, or Einstein’s relativity. Instead, the inauguration of mathematical physics occurred in a large sense in consequence of the state of the art, both in mathematics and in physics. Analysis had developed virtuosity enough so that it could be


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applied to physical phenomena. Experimental and observational technique had developed to the point that data could be obtained with sufficient precision to serve in the production and verification of formulas. Still, it will not do to say that mathematical physics came into being simply because it could. Those same technical conditions, necessary but not sufficient, obtained over a much longer period and a much wider range of activity—say from the prime of d’Alembert and Euler in the 1750s and 1760s down to the emergence of British and German theoretical physics in the 1840s. Historically, the question is, what precipitated matters in France between 1800 and 1830? One explanation has won a considerable and deserved following. In 1974 Robert Fox published an excellent paper, “The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics.”57 The rise consists of Laplace, become the lawgiver of the scientific establishment, gathering disciples into a school following publication of the fourth volume of Mécanique céleste in 1805 and associating them and himself with Berthollet’s protégés in the Society of Arcueil. Its research program was reduction of the Newtonian world picture to the dimensions of corpuscular physics by applying its laws mathematically to the phenomena of light, heat, sound, electricity, and magnetism. The summons was more than intellectual. The program consisted of a concrete policy for setting problems, favoring the right people for appointment—Biot, Malus, Poisson, Arago—defining and awarding prizes offerred by the Institute, steering members of the younger generation, and shaping their careers—in a word, patronage. The fall consisted in the failure of this dogmatic and overbearing program. A supple modern physics was then born amid a rebellion of young Turks, and some not so young—a turncoat Arago, Fresnel, Fourier, Ampère, Sophie Germain, Sadi Carnot—against the Newtonian-Laplacian orthodoxy. The displacement of a corpuscular by a wave theory of light is usually taken to be the paradigm shift in this scientific revolution, if such it was. With respect to those concepts, Fox’s schematization is illuminating. How well the interpretation fits experimentation and practice as distinct from theory, even in optics, remains to be considered, as does the more general question of its adequacy as an explanation of mathematization in the other sectors that came together with optics to constitute the modern science of physics. First of all, what did it mean to be a Newtonian in the latter part of the eighteenth century? The term is not quite equivalent to physical scientist. To suppose, as is often done, that Newtonian mechanics had completely routed Cartesianism among French “géomètres,” as mathematicians still called themselves, is an exaggeration. A principle of equilibrium based on conservation of momentum still went by Descartes’s name. D’Alembert in 57

Fox (1974a).

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the Discours préliminaire exhibits a certain wistful nostalgia for the model of planets swirled about the sun in cosmic vortices. More generally, scientific values were strongly marked, not to say defined, by the cognitive primacy of mathematics. Apart from Cartesianism, it is important to recognize that the legacy of seventeenth-century physical science did not all pass through Newton’s head and hands. Statics, laws of impact and collision, and the infinitesimal calculus did not require Newton to mediate between Stevin, Huygens, and Leibniz, who respectively formulated these disciplines, and the successors who were doing rational mechanics in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, such was the power and generality of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) that the figure of Newton towered over the eighteenth century. There are three senses in which a scientist of the Enlightenment may be said to have been a Newtonian. The first pertained to astronomy. A strong, essentially Newtonian research program consisted in perfecting planetary theory by comparing calculations based upon the theory of gravity to observational data on the positions of known planets and satellites such as Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon and newly detected bodies such as Uranus, the asteroids, and many comets. By no means was the correspondence between theory and observations always exact, and the question remained open whether irregularities derived from inaccuracies in the observations, imperfections in the calculations, or higher order inadequacies in the theory itself. Laplace’s principal purpose in the many memoirs gathered into Mécanique céleste was to exhibit mathematically that such perturbations in orbital motion resulted from mutual gravitation among the planets themselves and thus confirmed rather than invalidated Newtonian theory. The second sense of Newtonianism pertained to physics. The world picture was more general than the theory of gravity, which applied only to astronomy. That theory presupposed two considerations of wider, indeed of universal, scope that were rather hypotheses than matters of demonstrated fact. The first, action at a distance, was a precondition: mechanical effects do not require contact between a moved body and a moving agent, but are capable of being produced by forces acting across empty space. The second was an extrapolation: Forces of attraction, and a fortiori of repulsion, operate not only between gross bodies such as planets, but between all the particles in the universe. Such was the research program of so-called Laplacian physics. It may be noted, parenthetically, that the appeal of a model of the solar system in microphysics was not exhausted by the failure of that program, if failure it was. The atom imagined a century later by Niels Bohr at the start of the old quantum theory in 1912 consisted of electrons orbiting at fixed levels a nucleus of protons and neutrons. Moreover, the strategy of miniaturizing the range of Newtonian forces was never a monopoly of physics. A similar inspiration has guided many an investigation of the na-


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ture of the chemical bond, of the form of minerals, and even of the structure of the living cell. The third sense is methodological. The Principia is primarily a book of mathematics applied to the solar system. Formally the laws—in analytical terms, equations—of motion of the planets are derived mathematically from first principles of mechanics, Newton’s three laws of motion stated as axioms. The success of that procedure gave a more powerful impetus than the merely philosophical assertions of Descartes to the notion of mathematics as the preferred mode of scientific reasoning and to mechanics as the fundamental discipline. Thus would Lavoisier at the end of his life hold up mathematicization as the grail that chemistry should strive to win. In this sense everyone who considered that mathematicization was the goal of science was a Newtonian, whether his science was ready for it, as Haüy’s crystallography was, or whether it was not, as in the case of chemistry. It must not be supposed, however, that mathematicization necessarily entailed analyzing Newtonian models of physical reality. Quite other mathematical methods might be and were developed for application to phenomena not reducible to the motions of material particles or bodies in space. The geometrization that Huygens applied to wave fronts, or later in the century Haüy to crystals, comes to mind, and also the analysis that Fourier invented for propagation of heat. Neither must it be supposed that the Newtonian inspiration to eighteenth-century methodology was confined to mathematicization. On the contrary, Newton was also, if not quite equally, an experimentalist. His Opticks had as powerful an influence on the tradition of experimental natural philosophy in the eighteenth century, in the persons of such notable investigators as Benjamin Franklin and the abbé Nollet, and of a host of lesser lights, as did Newton’s mathematical approach to the mechanization of astronomy and with it the world picture at large. In this connection the third, or methodological, meaning of Newtonianism at the turn of the nineteenth century overlaps to a considerable degree with the second, its role in physics. Experimental physicists generally, though oversimplistically, credited Newton with a uniquely corpuscular conception of the nature of light. Hence the primacy of optics in the notion of a Laplacean physics. In other, and perhaps most, contexts a good deal of overlapping may be discerned between any two and often all three aspects of what Newtonianism meant to individual scientists. It will clarify interpretations, however, if the distinctions are kept in mind. The three meanings of Newtonianism did not entail one another and are not reducible one to the other in giving an account of eighteenth-century science. It was perfectly possible to adhere to Newtonianism in the first, astronomical, sense and not in the others. As we have already noticed, Delambre, the complete Newtonian astronomer,

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failed to perceive the prospect for Newtonianism in the second, mathematical sense, although it was right under his nose. Thinkers of a more general sort, for example Diderot, Buffon, and Lamarck, accepted and even celebrated the Newtonian theory of gravity, while disputing, each for a different reason, the applicability of mathematics to other areas of science, let alone to human concerns. As we shall soon see, Ampère considered himself a Newtonian in the third, methodological sense, but rejected the physical model of radial forces bearing on point-masses, which for others of his generation was the essence of Newtonianism. It was also possible to consider that mathematics is the language of science, and yet not to accept either Newtonian gravitational theory (Leibniz and his followers did not) or Newtonian mechanics (Boskovic did not). Other permutations and combinations could be adduced, but these will suffice to suggest that Newtonianism was protean, but not all inclusive, inceptive, but not simple. As for Laplace, there was somehow a latent physical component in his astronomy from the outset. He was a Newtonian in all three senses, but never a servile thinker except in politics. In the Principia the force of gravity is assumed to act instantaneously. An early memoir of Laplace tries out the conjecture that gravity, like light, is propagated in time. He posits a corpuscle to be the bearer of gravitational force and calculates that it must travel at a velocity 6. million times the speed of the corpuscles that constitute a light beam. It is also assumed in the Principia that the attractive force of a body is the resultant of the attraction of each of its parts. Analysis of the shape of solids of revolution, such as the earth, might get a handle on that proposition and decide whether attraction acts, not just between centers of mass as in the theory of gravity, but among all particles at less than cosmic distances. Such was the motivation of Laplace’s entire series of researches on spheroidal attraction theory. It culminated in a memoir on the stability of Saturn’s rings. The reasoning is of a type characteristic of many a paper in mathematical physics in the centuries since, but not of prior thinking. There being no possibilty of measurement, Laplace invented a mathematical model. He imagines the ring covered with an infinitely thin layer of fluid at equilibrium under the influence of forces of inertia and gravity. Analysis of the equilibrium conditions then gives the shape. In the course of the reasoning, Laplace arrived at the basic equation governing the attraction that spheroidal bodies exert on an external point. 0=

∂ 2V ∂x 2

+

∂ 2V ∂y 2

+

∂ 2V ∂z 2

.

One does not need to be versed in mathematics to appreciate the elegance, simplicity, and symmetry of the expression that in Poisson’s hands became


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the potential function serving the nineteenth-century theory of electrostatics and magnetism. Neither is there evidence of dogmatism, and scarcely of Newtonianism, in the earliest considerable physical investigation on which Laplace engaged, which was the collaboration with Lavoisier that issued in the famous Memoire sur la chaleur (1783). The idea of the experiments was Laplace’s. The execution was Lavoisier’s. So far as is known, Laplace never performed an experiment with his own hands. He had acute physical insight, however. On a number of occasions, and this was the first of which record remains, he suggested to associates the design of instruments that would elucidate the problem at hand. In this instance it was the ice calorimeter. The design bespeaks the mathematical modeling of physical reality. We are to imagine a hollow sphere of ice with a shell insulating it from the heat of the surroundings. The heat of a warm body introduced into the cavity would melt a portion of the inner surface until it had cooled down to zero, and the weight of water would be a measure of the heat required to produce the effect.58 At about the same time, and quite independently of Laplace, new and important work appeared in exact physics. A reduction in the range of Newtonian forces, and application to phenomena other than gravity, are the central features of the seven memoirs that Charles-Augustin Coulomb read before the Academy between 1785 and 1791.59 He found, as everyone knows, that like electrostatic and magnetic forces repel each other, and conversely that unlike charges attract each other, with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charged bodies. He showed further, and this was more important for the mathematical analysis that Poisson later applied to his findings, that charge is spread evenly upon the surface of the bodies affected. He concluded, finally, that magnetism is molecular, and that magnetized bodies are composed of polarized particles. All this was in the first instance experimental physics. Coulomb produced his results by means of an instrument he invented, the torsional balance. It measured the forces by the twist that their action imparted to the fine wire on which charged bodies, usually pith balls, were suspended. The investigation was experimental, but so exact as to verge on the mathematical. Coulomb was an engineer, a graduate of Mézières trained by Monge. His prescription in this work, and in complementary studies, was to mingle experiment with calculation. He did formulate his findings mathematically, but with a resort to mathematics very different from Laplace’s. His formulas are those of an engineer, empirical shorthands that he tests against the data and modifies accordingly. They are not abstracted from known or hypothet58 59

On Laplace’s early physical investigations, see Gillispie (1997), pp. 29–37. On Coulomb, see Gillmor (1971).

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ical physical laws in order to be subjected to an analysis that will, so to say, go off into the empyrean of calculation to confirm their validity, to account for anomaly, or to predict new effects, and only then, if indeed the equations can be solved, return to earth, or to the laboratory. The electric current might have opened another field after Volta’s visit to Paris in 1800, but as we have seen his presentation was nothing mathematical—Delambre was right about that for the moment—and Biot’s application of analysis in his report aroused no interest. Isolated indications of another sort were mathematical, though no more Laplacian than Volta’s pile or Coulomb’s torsion balance. It is intriguing, for example, that as far back as the 1770s Cousin was giving courses at the Collège de France with the phrase “physique mathématique” in the title, and that in 1784–85 his subject was “Les progrès de l’analyse et en quoi ils peuvent servir aux progrès de la physique.” There is, alas, no way to know what was in those courses. Coming down another ten years, there are indications of what was to come in ´ the early cahiers of the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique. In the second (1796), Prony has a memoir, “Essai expérimental et analytique sur les lois de la dilatation des fluides e´lastiques, et sur celles de la force expansive de la vapeur de l’eau.” It consists of an analytical formulation and experimental compilation of tables for steam and other vapor pressures. The same cahier has a composite “Mémoire sur la détermination géométrique des teintes dans les desseins.” The purpose is dual: to find the law according to which apparent intensity of light varies on a surface, and to apply it in making a picture. The authors were students, chefs de brigade whose solutions to the problems were combined for publication. A famous name makes its first appearance in print in the fifth cahier (1798). Fourier has a memoir, not on heat, but “Sur la statique, contenant la démonstration du principe des vitesses virtuelles.” The demonstration is a novel one in that it refers not alone to rational mechanics but to the theory of real machines. What it does, even like the Essai sur les machines en général (1783) of Lazare Carnot, whom he cites (and is one of the few to do so), is to transpose virtual velocity into virtual work. In the eleventh cahier (1802), Barruel has an “Extrait d’un mémoire sur l’élasticité,” which is geometric in form and physical in spirit. These inquiries, and a few others like them, were straws in search of a wind. The wind, if one may judge from the contents of this journal, had come up by 1808. The fourteenth cahier, published in April of that year, contained two mathematical memoirs by Malus, out of which opened the debate on optics, and another by Poisson on theory of sound. Meanwhile Laplace himself had turned his main attention to physics on completing the fourth volume of Mécanique céleste in 1805. Its concluding part, Book X, opens with an analysis of the effect of atmospheric refraction upon astronomical observation. That was the problem on which he sought


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data by encouraging Gay-Lussac’s and Biot’s balloon ascent and for which he designed the experimental determination of the refractive indices of various gases by Biot and Arago. They fitted a hollow prism, inside which gases could be sealed, to the lower scope of a Borda circle, and working from a window in the Luxembourg Palace, trained first it and then the upper scope on a lightning rod atop the Observatory. The difference in readings measured the refractive indices of the eight different gases tested. The results were as interesting to Berthollet as to Laplace. The areas of physics in which Laplace intervened directly were the propagation of sound and the explanation of capillary action. Even like gravity, both topics were left imperfect by Newton while deriving from his physics. This is not the place to develop Laplace’s contributions in any detail. Suffice it to indicate their nature. With respect to sound, the problem was its velocity. Experiments dating from the 1730s showed that Newton’s value was too low. In 1802 Laplace suggested to Biot, barely out of school, that the discrepancy might result from Newton’s having ignored changes in temperature produced by alternate dilation and compression of air in transmitting the sound wave. Assuming that changes in temperature are proportional to changes in density, Biot calculated a correction factor bearing out Laplace’s idea, which has since been generally accepted. Laplace himself later showed that Biot’s factor is proportional to the ratio between specific heats at constant pressure and at constant volume. Equally standard in the literature is Laplace’s account of capillary action. In the first of two supplements to Book X of Mécanique céleste, he obtains a differential equation for the curvature of the meniscus by analyzing the action of the force of attraction exerted by the inner surface of the tube on an infinitely thin canal of the liquid parallel to its axis. In the other, he analyzes the equilibrium in the tube by considering the action of the forces exerted on cylindrical layers of the liquid concentric with the circumference of the tube. So much will serve as an account of French physics on the eve of the program of mathematicization emanating from the Society of Arcueil. Let us consider the fields one by one.

Optics The displacement of the corpuscularian by the wave theory of light occurred in three stages in France. In the first, Malus discovered polarization. Ironies attend his reputation. A committed corpuscularian, he made the discovery that provided Fresnel with the phenomena that ultimately assured the victory of the wave theory. Though he was a favored Laplacian disciple, his analysis was preempted by his patron’s improvement on it while it also appeared to support the Huygens wave front construction for double refraction.

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Malus entered the lists in support of neither model. His “Traité d’optique,” presented before the Institute on 20 April 1807, is a work of differential geometry in the style of Monge expressly abstracted from all considerations of the nature of light.60 Its principal theorems define the loci of tangents to, and intersections of, the developable surfaces to which rays are normal before and after refraction. Laplace served as referee. Impressed, he drew Malus into the corpuscularian entourage. The discovery of polarization followed out of two papers in which Malus criticized the experiments of W. H. Wollaston in England on determination of the refractive index of a transparent substance as a function of the angle of incidence at which total reflection occurs. Holding a crystal of Iceland spar to his eye one evening, he observed the rays of the setting sun reflected in a window of the Luxembourg Palace and saw them, as he expected, refracted into two rays. On rotating the crystal he found the totally unexpected effect that the intensity of the two rays varied reciprocally. At a certain angle the extraordinary ray was totally extinguished while a further 90⬚ rotation blanked out the ordinary ray. The reflecting window, in a word, acted on light precisely as if it were a second piece of Iceland spar. Intrigued, the Institute on 4 January 1808 at Laplace’s instigation announced a prize for a mathematical account of double refraction. Malus, who was probably intended to win, prepared a paper in two parts. The first, experimental, assigned a rhomboidal shape with three orthogonal axes, A, B, and C, to each corpuscle of light. Malus assumed that the extraordinary refraction is caused by a repulsive force, the action of which is proportional to the sine of the angle between the axis of the crystal and the principal axis A of the corpuscle of light. All the molecules of which axis B is perpendicular to the repulsive force undergo ordinary refraction, and those of which axis C is perpendicular to the force undergo extraordinary refraction. Malus hastens to add that he intends this construction, not as an image of physical reality, but as a mathematical model permitting calculation of the relative intensity of the two rays as a trigonometric function of the angle between the planes of the refracting surfaces. The second part of Malus’s paper contains that analysis. It inadvertently lent some credence to the Huygens construction whereby a spherical wave front gives one ray and an ellipsoidal wave front the other. Laplace saw a first draft, and proceeded to compose and publish a simpler, more direct analysis before Malus could revise his paper for submission to the Institute.61 He won the prize anyway, shorn of its glory, and according to Arago never forgave his erstwhile mentor before an early death in 1812.62 60 61 62

´ PVIF 3, p. 516; Journal de l’Ecole Polytdechnique 7, 14th cahier (1808), pp. 1–44, 84–129. Théorie de la double réfraction dans les substances cristallisées (1810). On Malus, see the too little known study by Chappert (1977).


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The second stage in the transformation of optics consists in the development of the phenomena of chromatic polarization both experimentally and mathematically, largely at the hands of Biot. Working at first with Arago, he began studying the production by means of polarized light of the colors, known as Newton’s rings, observed when rays of light pass through soap bubbles or very thin plates such as mica chips. Biot’s and Arago’s relations having come under strain in the course of extending the survey of the meridian to the Balearic Islands, they quarreled irreparably, but not before Arago had established that passage through mica chips appeared to depolarize the incident light. Faithful to the corpuscularian hypothesis, Biot managed to obtain a pair of (very complicated) equations for formulating these effects. More important, he proceeded to investigate the phenomenon of rotation of the plane of polarized light when passed through a plate of quartz. The resulting formula, under the name of Biot’s law of rotatory dispersion, has been part of working physics ever since, and also of chemistry. In 1815 Biot found that several transparent substances that had no effect on the passage of polarized light in their normal crystalline state did produce rotation when in solution. He determined further that other liquids, such as turpentine, cane sugar, beet sugar, oil of laurel, and oil of lemon, shared that property, some rotating a beam to the right, others to the left. He designed an instrument, the polariscope, to measure the degree of such rotation, which is an important indicator of the identity of the substance. The work, all on the corpuscular model, was thoroughly Laplacian. It was also good physics.63 The third stage consists of the triumph of the wave theory. In 1818 the Institute, again at Laplace’s instance, set a prize for a mathematical treatment of the fringe effects of diffracted light, known since Newton, with the expectation that Biot would win it, even as Malus had done its predecessor on double refraction. Meanwhile, a young polytechnician, Augustin Fresnel, unknown to the scientific community, had been meditating the conviction he had reached in private that the propagation of light is an undulatory and not a corpuscular phenomenon. Isolated in the country, ignorant of English, Fresnel was unaware that Thomas Young in England had already designed and performed experiments on fringe effects, on the success of which he established just such a wave theory, but without formulating it mathematically. As early as 1814, Fresnel by contrast began with a mathematical ´ analysis using the wave mechanics he had learned at the Ecole Polytechnique in order to show that interference of crests and troughs in a diffracted ray would produce a pattern of fringes. He then designed experiments that confirmed his hypothesis. Encouraged by Arago, whose disaffection from 63

On Biot and chromatic polarization, see Maurice Crosland, “Biot,” DSB 2 (1971), pp. 133–140.

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Laplace, Biot, and Poisson was more personal than technical, Fresnel submitted a revision of his early memoir to the Institute, and won the prize. Poisson thereupon derived a physical prediction from Fresnel’s theory, thinking to show its falsity. It followed from Fresnel’s equations, Poisson showed, that the shadow of a small diffracting disk placed in a beam of light would be illuminated as if the disk were not there. Arago tried the experiment. Poisson’s prediction was correct. It vindicated instead of refuted Fresnel’s theory. Laplace was duly impressed. Fresnel could not yet, however, account for polarization. Later in 1822 he substituted transversal for longitudinal vibrations, exhibited the non-interference of light beams polarized in orthogonal planes, and derived from his equations the Huygens predictions for the paths of the ordinary and extraordinary rays in double refraction. Laplace then acknowledged to Arago that he would place the results above everything the Academy had received in a very long time.64

Acoustics In 1807, the year when a collective Laplacian program may be said to have got under way, Poisson presented his first full-scale mathematical memoir to the First Class of the Institute. His subject was the theory of sound, which he purported to treat in complete generality. He considered an elastic fluid consisting of molecules subject to the action of any forces, and concentrated attention on the repulsive forces responsible for impressing on them vibrations transmitted through the fluid in the form of sound waves. Drawing on Lagrange’s treatment of compressible fluids, Poisson formulated a pair of basic equations for his model, and solved them for certain special cases: propagation in air at constant density and pressure, reflection from a surface, velocity of sound, propagation along an axis, and propagation in three dimensions. He proceeded to state theorems that he hoped would interest both physicists and mathematicians, such as that the speed of sound is independent of the vibrational frequency of the molecules in the air that transmit it and of the agent that causes it, that the velocity is the same in all directions so that the wave front is always spherical, and so on. The derivations are entirely mathematical, and the memoir has no significant physical content. An experimental demonstration of the form of vibrations of the type that cause sound waves did reach Paris the next year, in 1808. The German physicist E. F. F. Chladni then visited the capital. His purpose was to exhibit effects of vibrating plates for which he had developed techniques that he had published in Germany some years previously. In the standard experi64 Fresnel’s papers are collected in Oeuvres complètes d’Augustin Fresnel, ed. Henri de Senar´ mont, Emile Verdet, and Léonor Fresnel, 2 vols. (1885–87). On the wave theory of light, see Buchwald (1989), and, on the principle of interference, the too little noticed Kipnis (1990).


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ment he fastened a brass circular plate horizontally to a support at the center, scattered a layer of sand on the surface, and drew the bow of a violin rapidly up and down along the edge. The sand danced away from the oscillating sectors and gathered at the nodes, where it was motionless, thus forming patterns that exhibited the mode of vibration of the surface. The effect was graphic and dramatic. It appealed to the leadership of the Institute in the way that double refraction had done, and in 1811 the First Class set a prize for a mathematical theory of elastic surfaces confirmed by experiment. The definition was an invitation to Poisson. Only one paper came in, however. Although it was formally anonymous, the author was known to be Sophie Germain. No prize was then awarded, nor was it in the contest that was reopened in 1813, when her revised paper received an honorable mention. In 1816, finally, she received the prize in a third round, despite severe criticism by Poisson, who in 1814 had composed a paper considering the motion of elastic surfaces from the point of view of Laplacean theoretical molecular physics. Germain’s treatment, by contrast, was rather old-fashioned and geometric in spirit, harking back to the methods of Euler. She obtained a fourth-order differential equation for the vibrating surface of any form, curved or flat, and explored the properties of curvature and their radii. Her methods have been criticized as fanciful, and it is agreed that her greatest strength was in number theory. Her early essays thereon had won her the esteem of Lagrange. Laplace never showed the slightest interest in that subject, and it was probably Lagrange’s support that led his colleagues to take her seriously. However gratifying her victory, her theory of elastic surfaces failed to enter in an important way into the development of acoustics, although it did contribute to the theory of elasticity, where Cauchy was the master presence.

Electricity and Magnetism Here too, the story begins with Poisson, the complete Laplacian. The difference is that his work in this area, instead of being superseded as it was in acoustics, became the foundation of later development of the field, which transpired mostly outside of France. In 1812 Poisson presented the Institute his “Mémoire sur la distribution de l’électricité a` la surface des corps conducteurs.” He had composed it for a prize competition set by the Institute, which it was undoubtedly intended he should win, but for which he became ineligible on election to the place left vacant by the death of Malus in that year. The physics in Poisson’s memoir is from Coulomb, the mathematics from Laplace. His merit was in bringing them together in a felicitous manner. The positive and negative electrical fluids are spread on the surface of conducting bodies without penetrating the interior. Forces of attraction and repulsion inversely as the square of the distance between the molecules are

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analyzed by means of Laplace’s theorem for the attraction of spheroids, to which Poisson added a term to take account of electrical density. In a brief note in Bulletin de la Société Philomathique for 1801, Laplace himself had extended spheroidal attraction theory from the gravitational case to a thin layer of electrical fluid spread on a surface. Poisson fails to cite that source, but such is the model he analyzes. The excellence of the memoir resides in the mathematical virtuosity with which Poisson analyzes special cases of the distribution of electrical fluids, first on a nearby sphere, then on two spheres intersecting to varying degree and also in contact. Finally, Poisson compared the results of his calculations to Coulomb’s measurements. A second memoir generalizes the analysis beyond the specific form of Coulomb’s apparatus. The purpose is to obtain integrals that will determine the intensity of the charge, conceived as the thickness of the layer of electricity, at any point on the surfaces of two spheres at any distance. As usual with Poisson, the exercise is exclusively mathematical. Only twelve years later did Poisson complete complementary studies of magnetism in a series of three memoirs presented in 1824 and 1825. Meanwhile, in 1820 Oersted had discovered interaction between magnetic fields and electric currents; Ampère had begun investigating the electromagnetic effect; Fresnel had followed his papers on diffraction with his explanation of double refraction; Fourier had published his theory of heat. At the time of Poisson’s papers on electrostatics, Laplacean physics had been at the forefront of research, at least in optics. His introductory review of his earlier work in “Mémoire sur la théorie du magnétisme” reads as if nothing had happened in the interval, except that he darkly denies any underlying identity of electrical and magnetic force. In this, as in the 1812 paper, the effects are those produced by forces of attraction and repulsion between particles affected at the molecular level by the distribution of two fluids, the boreal and austral. There are differences, however. The molecular fluids do not circulate except in the interior of each molecule of a magnetized body in which the sum of the magnetized elements is a function of its volume, a function that varies with the nature of the body and its temperature. All this makes for greater analytical difficulties than in the electrostatic memoirs. With respect to application, Poisson limited himself to the case of a sphere, hollow or solid. What he had in mind was the earth. His analysis yielded numerical solutions for deviation of the compass needle, which he could compare to data assembled by the Royal Military College at Woolwich. The correspondence was satisfactory. Poisson’s analysis of the action of magnets of other forms is purely hypothetical, as is the treatment in the two memoirs that followed, where he applies his formulas to magnets in a state of motion with respect to objects attracted or repelled. The history of Poisson’s reputation is a curious one. The most promising mathematically of Laplace’s protégés in the Society of Arcueil, by the 1820s


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he was regarded as a diehard left behind by the progress of the science. That harsh verdict has never been reversed, or even appealed, in France, where tradition still ranks him something of a drudge and second-rater. Even now, no street in Paris bears his name. Abroad, however, Poisson has consistently been regarded as one of the cardinal figures of the first generation of mathematical physics. George Green, a self-taught English physicist, named Poisson’s adaptation of Laplace’s spheroidal attraction theory the Potential Function, and made it the point of departure for his Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism (1828). From there it became the basis of theoretical work in electrostatics and magnetism through the intermediary of William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin.

Electrodynamics Ampère coined the very word. He did not thereby mean to connote the development of electricity as a source of power, which never occurred to him, but rather the study of forces operating between electrical currents. That currents in parallel conductors attract or repel each other according to whether they are flowing in opposite or the same directions is the essence of his discovery. In the concluding Mémoire sur la théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques, uniquement déduites de l’expérience (1827), in which he formulated the laws, he presents the research as a model of Newtonian method.65 He purports to join Fourier, “that great physicist,” in eschewing concern with causes and limiting the analysis to observable effects. First, he says, phenomena are gathered from experiment. The laws governing them are then deduced, formulated mathematically, and subjected to further experiment. It is true that in his formulation the force acting between two elements of current is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the conductors. Apart from that, and more important apart from his mathematical virtuosity, it is very difficult to see how Ampère’s work was Newtonian, or how it could be fitted into any camp. His career was sui generis. The physics for which he is famous occupied only seven years of his life, from 1820 until 1827. Except for that he would be remembered, if at all, as a middling mathematician, an unpopular and indifferent teacher, a second-rate chemist, an embarrassing philosopher, and the victim of dismaying misfortunes in his personal life, beginning with the loss of his father to the guillotine. What brought him to the fore was his reaction to Oersted’s discovery of the deflection of a magnetic needle by an electric current. The complexity of his research in the ensuing seven years 65

Reprinted in 1958, with a foreword by Edmond Bauer. Ampère’s memoirs were gathered in Mémoires sur l’électrodynamique, 2 vols. (1885–87).

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defies summary. Suffice it to say that he partook of all approaches to physics and denied himself none. Far from deducing mathematical laws from phenomena, he designed experiments to accord with the trigonometrical form of his expressions; far from acting radially, his forces made all sorts of angles with the directions of his currents; not really acting at a distance, they are transmitted through an aetherial medium, even like Fresnel’s light waves; far from its being experiment, it was his imagination running in circles that suggested to him how a helical current would act as a magnet; he refuted Biot’s orthodox construction of the interaction of currents and Poisson’s of magnetism, but made use of the former’s work and accepted the invitation to set up experiments in the latter’s home; though nothing could be less Laplacian than Ampère’s constructions, or his mathematics, Laplace suggested to him the making of an important experiment—on forces exerted by a current flowing in a very long wire; failing to convince Faraday at the outset, Ampère was stimulated by his criticism; anything but a positivist despite his admiration for Fourier, he reduced magnetism to electricity in motion and pictured it as the effect of elementary currents circling the molecules of a magnet. Of no scientist is it more important to follow what he does, as far as may be, rather than what he says about it in prefaces and obiter dicta.66

Heat Or rather propagation of heat: unlike Laplace and Lavoisier, indeed unlike everyone who had written on heat, Fourier is concerned in Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822) not with the nature of heat, nor with its relation to bodies, nor with its repulsive force, nor with its chemical action, but uniquely and severely with its diffusion, which he saw as a phenomenon of exchanges between or within bodies. His goal was to determine the laws and in so doing abstract the study of heat from these unfruitful concerns and make of it a science in its own right, the peer of optics, of mechanics, and of electricity and magnetism. A delay of ten years intervened between completion of his theory and publication of the treatise. He developed it after returning from Egypt in the first decade of the century and submitted a memoir to the Institute in 1807, just the time when the program of the Society of Arcueil was taking form. The problem was heat diffusion between separate bodies and in continuous bodies of specified form—a rectangle, a ring, a sphere, a cylinder, and so on—considered mathematically. Lagrange disliked the mathematics, mainly because of the use of trigonometric series, from which Fourier ulti66

On Ampère, see Blondel (1982) and Hoffman (1995).


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mately developed his method of analysis. Laplace was more receptive and favored publication, but did not prevail. In 1810 the Institute announced a competition for the subject, and Fourier submitted a revised version in the following year. Despite Lagrange’s reservations, it won the prize. The latter’s criticism so disaffected Fourier that he refrained from publishing. He was then prefect of the Isère and had worked out his theory in the isolation of Grenoble. When he did finally publish his book, in 1822, with the mathematical parts much developed, he was Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science. Half a generation older than Biot, Poisson, Arago, Malus, and Fresnel, Fourier developed the theory of heat neither as an instance of Laplacian physics nor in opposition to it, but independently and more or less simultaneously. Later in the 1820s his interests and Laplace’s tended to converge, more with respect to probability than physics, however. Apart from being mathematical, their physics had nothing in common, whether in the form of the mathematics or the mode of its application to physics. In Fourier’s thinking there is nothing comparable to Laplace’s mathematical models of physical phenomena, his electrical or other fluids on the surface of bodies, or his forces operating at ranges too short for observation but still finite. His physical facts are temperatures recorded by thermometers. Nor was Fourier content with the approximate solutions reached by conventional series expansion of the integrals. He expressed the variables for heat diffusion in continuous media by means of linear partial differential equations and formulated an integral theorem that permitted solving them at any value for time. His equations express physical reality for him, but were not themselves remarkable. It was the method of solving them that was the origin of Fourier analysis, which turned out to have great power in mathematics generally and also in engineering. In his zeal to secure autonomy for the science of heat, Fourier laid down a limitation that can only be called legislative. The following passage appears in the Discours préliminaire. “But whatever the extent of mechanical theories, they do not at all apply to the effects of heat. These constitute a special order of phenomena which cannot be explained by principles of motion and equilibrium.” One may excuse Ampère’s ignoring the prospect for electric power in his preoccupation with forces generated by the passage of his currents. The dynamo had yet to be invented. Fourier’s restrictiveness is less easy to understand. The steam engine did exist, after all, and Sadi Carnot published Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu just two years after Théorie analytique de la chaleur. There is no hint in either book of the slightest awareness of the problems discussed in the other.67 67

On Fourier, see Grattan-Guinness (1972).

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Thermodynamics The word itself is an anachronism. It came into currency only a generation later among physicists developing the consequences of Sadi Carnot’s work. Nevertheless, the term is perfectly appropriate to what he set out to determine, which was (1) whether there is a limit to the motive power of heat; (2) what the optimal conditions are for the operation of a heat engine; (3) whether any agent would be preferable to steam as the means for realizing the potential of a heat engine. Sadi Carnot pictured heat as a fluid, caloric, flowing from bodies at higher to those at lower temperatures. It served his argument in much the way that mathematical fluids did for Laplace. Both adapted it from the subtle, imponderable fluids of eighteenth-century physical speculation, entities created in imagination as bearers of the effects of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and perhaps life. Sadi Carnot’s argument is mathematical in its rigor, moreover, not in its form, which is verbal. The findings are (1) that there is indeed a limit, since otherwise perpetual motion would be possible; (2) that the condition of maximum efficiency in a heat engine is that no change in the temperature of the agent should occur that is not due to a change in volume; and (3) that the motive power of heat is independent of the agent put to work to realize it, its quantity being uniquely a function of the difference between the initial and final temperatures of the agent employed. The famous heat cycle that Sadi Carnot imagined and analyzed in order to establish these results has often been described, and this is not the place to do it again. Suffice it to inquire how it could have happened that these fundamental works in the physics of heat, Fourier’s and his, should have been ships that passed in the night. The answer must be that the boundaries of disciplines, not of subject matter, impeded, not to say precluded, communication. Insofar as Sadi Carnot’s slim monograph was noticed at all upon publication, it was taken for a work of engineering, not of physics. His data on specific heats of gases came from chemists with close links to industry, such as Clément and Desormes.68 His reasoning represents the application to heat engines that his father, Lazare, had developed for the mechanics of ordinary machines in Essai sur les machines en général in 1783 (also little noticed on its appearance). The basic principles are exclusion of perpetual motion, positing of reversible processes, and interconvertibility of the quantities later called work and energy.

Work and Energy Coriolis, who also took his inspiration from Lazare Carnot, worked in comparable isolation from the physicists of his day. In Du calcul de l’effet des 68

Fox (1968, 1970).


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machines (1829), he defined the quantity work and for reasons of algebraic convenience equated it to what would later be called kinetic energy, one-half the quantity of the force traditionally called vis viva, the product of the mass of the moving body times its velocity squared. It is very curious that the dimensions of these, the basic quantities of what became the most fundamental topic of nineteenth-century science, the physics of energy, should thus have been defined by Frenchmen; further that its main tributary, thermodynamics, should have been started by a Frenchman; and, finally, that these signal accomplishments should have occurred quite apart from the movement for mathematicization of the fields then regarded as constituting the science, namely optics, acoustics, electricity, magnetism, and heat. Nor was it in France that physics was unified at mid-century around the conservation of energy and the first and second laws of thermodynamics. It was in Britain and Germany, at the hands of Mayer and Joule, of Helmholtz and Clausius. What may be said of the physics the French did do? Each of the classic formulations, of Malus, of Biot, of Fresnel, of Sophie Germain, of Poisson, of Ampère, of Fourier, and in another vein of Sadi Carnot and Coriolis, was preceded by a dense set of technical exchanges among a number of participants. At a rough count the total volume of the literature comes to approximately two hundred memoirs and treatises composed by about thirty men and one woman in thirty years. There can be no doubt about the impetus given by Laplace, but it cannot be said that the creative strain was Laplacian or the contrary, or that the successful models were continuous or corpuscular in texture. Fourier’s initiative was quite independent of Laplace and altogether irrelevant to his program for short-range forces. The Coulomb and Chladni experiments were anterior to Laplacian physics. The Laplacian analysis that Poisson made of the one, far from being overturned by rebels of his generation, passed into later physics as the foundation of potential theory in electricity and magnetism. The Laplacian analysis that Poisson also attempted of the Chladni acoustical experiments had no success in the face of the more imaginative and geometric approach of Sophie Germain. Opportunities were missed. Apart from Biot’s still-born attempt to mathematicize the phenomena of the battery, mathematicians ignored Volta for almost twenty years. When Ampère did take up electrical circuits—on learning of the quite fortuitous experiments of Oersted in Denmark—he claimed to be a Newtonian. He did analyze the action of inverse-square forces on elements of current, and might be thought Laplacian in that, except that Fresnel supported his work while Biot and Poisson criticized it because the configuration of his constructions was all circles and angles and the formulations were trigonometric. Fourier’s study of heat was an exercise in physics, where it proved of little practical or even theoretical value, whereas his analysis became of tremendous importance in mathematics and

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engineering. Already in the 1820s Navier was applying it to the design of suspension bridges (though—not for that reason—the first one he built collapsed into the Seine in the flood from a burst sewer main). Sadi Carnot’s analysis came out of engineering, not out of physics, and was later adopted as the foundation of thermodynamics. The mathematical approaches to the many problems were very various, so much so that the remarkable work by Ivor Grattan-Guinness that analyzes them in three-volume detail has the title Convolutions in French Mathematics (1990). What selected one solution rather than others into the development of the science of physics was ultimately its technical value. The political influence and personal conduct of proponents and opponents were factors, but never the decisive factors. There was favoritism on all sides, but there is no evidence of significant contributions stifled for lack of favor. All concerned had the capacity, or felt the necessity, to accept occasional defeat, while the Institute knew how to recognize merit. Of the four famous prizes for mathematical theories of physical phenomena, three went to opponents of the establishment, or to outsiders, to Germain, Fourier, and Fresnel. The fourth—actually the first chronologically—went to Malus, but how Laplacian was a memoir on double refraction that ended by vindicating the Huygens construction, and the priority of which had been preempted prior to publication by the master himself? 5. CONCLUSION

In sum, it cannot be said of those physicists, anymore than it can of their contemporaries in zoology and physiology, that they formed a school. They admired and despised one another, praised and denigrated one another, and collaborated and competed with one another. All behaved as has many a company of scientists and scholars ever since. What mathematical physicists did constitute by the 1820s was a discipline, as did zoologists and experimental physiologists. The one thing that may be said of all the physics that mattered is that it was mathematical. The one thing that may be said of all comparative anatomy that mattered is that it was based on correlation of parts. The one thing that may be said of all experimental physiology that mattered is that it was based on vivisection. Agreement on theory was never prerequisite to the functioning of the new disciplines. Disagreement on theory motivated much research. Essential to formation of a discipline was agreement, not on theory, but on procedures and techniques, in a word on the practice of the science. In all three emergent disciplines a decisive movement toward quantification and control marked the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, from the encyclopedic enterprise of classifying things in a natural order to the positivist injunction to determine the facts and then to

IX. 5. CONCLUSION

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act upon them. The shift in spirit is from enlightenment to engineering, not so much hands-on as intellectual engineering, in established disciplines no less than new ones. One recalls Lavoisier and his parting summons to chemistry to become a mathematical science, only to be followed by Berthollet, Chaptal, Gay-Lussac and company, who turned it into a physical science strongly linked to industry. Even in so recondite an area as the foundations of the calculus, the new mathematics showed a displacement toward a rigor to be attained by manipulation and control of the situation. Lagrange’s theory of analytic functions belongs to the algebraic spirit of the eighteenth century. Lazare Carnot’s, and much more important Augustin Cauchy’s, justifications of the calculus are in the spirit of the nineteenth. In Carnot’s account, the procedures of the calculus compensate for errors entailed by the use of infinitesimal quantities that are introduced in order to achieve a solution, and do so by virtue of the calculator’s power to approach the quantities of an auxiliary system to those of the given system, not approximately, but as closely as he wishes. In Cauchy’s treatment, more satisfactory to mathematicians (though not to engineers), the reasoning turns on a more rigorous argument, one that proves the existence of a limit to which the calculator may in principle approach a quantity as closely (again) as he wills. Both Carnot and Cauchy were trained as engineers. The shift in orientation is evident not only in science, however, and perhaps not first there. One thinks of the new precision brought to technology by the machine tools of Henry Maudslay and his like in England. One comes back to Laplace, with respect now to the application of probability to demography, to theory of error, to decision making, and to the analysis of electoral and judicial procedures started by Condorcet. One recalls the gathering of census data, most systematically by the Napoleonic administration. For there was indeed a complementarity between the science and the politics of the Revolutionary era. Both were progressive movements, future oriented and dismissive of the past. Both science and politics produced their protagonists out of their own internal dynamics. Of science, too, one sometimes wishes to say, not that scientists solve their problems, though they do so more often than do politicians, but that the problems find their scientists, even as the issues find their politicians. In both politics and science, the premium was upon effectiveness, on doing something rather than being someone. In both domains, the rules in principle depended upon the facts, and the point in determining the facts was to act upon them. Since then politics and science have been, albeit in different ways, instruments of each other’s larger purposes throughout the course of modern history.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A concluding remark in an earlier work suggests that it may be appropriate for acknowledgments to appear not at the beginning of a book, but at its end, after the author has done his job and the reader can take its measure. Such will again be the practice here. To mention all the colleagues and friends who have contributed to the research and writing of this book over many years would require as much space as does the bibliography, in which many of their names appear. Among those who have been most closely involved, let me mention first of all the late Robert R. Palmer. Leading preceptorial discussions in his undergraduate course during my early years on the faculty in Princeton University was my introduction to the study of the French Revolution. The colleagues of my generation in France who welcomed and encouraged my interest in their history from the outset were René Taton, the late Maurice Daumas, and the late Father Pierre Costabel. To Monsieur Taton I am especially indebted for having arranged, jointly with the late Fran¸cois Furet, for me to give a seminar under the auspices of the Centre Alexandre Koyré at ´ ´ the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales during part of each year from 1980 to 1984, in the course of which much of the material took its present form. The response and criticism of members of that seminar, as in graduate seminars in the Program in History of Science in Princeton University, were both stimulating and corrective. No one who has benefited from the hospitality of the Centre Koyré over the years can fail to feel special gratitude to its devoted executive secretary, now retired Myriana Ilic. Two friends of recent times who have added greatly to the pleasure of working in Paris are Emmanuel Grison, the equivalent of Dean of Students ´ at the Ecole Polytechnique before his retirement, and Jean-Pierre Poirier, biographer of Lavoisier and of Turgot. Among younger French colleagues with whom I have consulted, also in recent years, I should like especially to mention Bruno Belhoste, Michel Blay, Patrice Bret, Eric Brian, Bernard Bru, Jean Dhombres, the Rev. Goulven Laurent, and Antoine Picon. Foundations that have supported this work and its predecessors throughout an entire career are the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Fondation de France, the research fund in Princeton University, and finally the Fondazione Balzan. Among specialized collections, the most helpful have been the Archives of the Académie des Sciences in the Institut de ´ France, the library of the Ecole Polytechnique at Palaiseau, the Bibliothèque

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Centrale of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and the division of rare books in Firestone Library of Princeton University. A longtime friend, Joseph Wisnovsky, science editor at Princeton University Press, has taken this book under his protective wing and arranged for concurrent republication of its predecessor, the now slightly renamed Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime. I am equally indebted to Gail Schmitt, production editor at the Press, who has shepherded the current volume through the various stages of ever higher technology with matchless efficiency. Further, I am profoundly grateful to Theodore M. Porter and Robert Fox, two of the three readers for the press. They read closely and critically, kindly identified themselves, and made enormously valuable suggestions that have modified and streamlined the plan of the book and eradicated numerous flaws. Thanks go also to Jed Z. Buchwald, who generously read a draft of the last chapter. Responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation that escaped their vigilance is as always the author’s. This volume, like its companion, is dedicated to my wife of over fifty years, Emily Ramsdell Clapp Gillispie, best and dearest friend and critic. In her company a life of scholarship is a life of joy. Chapter 6, section 2 and Chapter 9, section 4 are adapted, respectively, from my 1992 and 1991 articles listed in the bibliography and copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California and the publisher of Science et Vie. That material appears here with the kind permission of the University of California Press and the editor of Science et Vie. Chapter 8, section 2 combines material previously published in the “Historical Introduction” to Monuments of Egypt (Gillispie and Dewachter [1988]) and my 1989 article. It appears here with the kind permission of Princeton Architectural Press and the American Philosophical Society, respectively. Chapter 9, section 2 includes material adapted from my essay (1997b) in the collection Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, edited by Claude Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi, and Jean-Louis Fischer. It appears here with the kind permission of the copyright holder, Publications Scientifiques du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris. Chapter 7, section 5 contains material adapted from my 1994 essay in the collection La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994, edited by Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, and Antoine ´ Pico, published by Editions Dunod.

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Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication of all titles in French was Paris. Académie d’Orleans. 2001. Duhamel de Monceau, 1700–2000, un européen du siècle de lumières. Actes du Colloque du 12 mai 2000. Ackerknecht, Erwin H. 1967. Medicine at the Paris Hospital. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ´ Aguillon, Louis. 1889. L’Ecole des mines de Paris, notice historique. Albury, William R. 1977. “Experiment and Explanation in the Physiology of Bichat and Magendie.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48, pp. 47–131. Alder, Ken. 1997. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 2002. The Measure of All Things. New York: Free Press. Appel, Toby A. 1987. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin. New York: Oxford University Press. Aubry, Paul V. 1954. Monge, le savant ami de Napoléon Bonaparte. ´ Aucoc, Léon, 1876. Le Conseil d’Etat avant et depuis 1789, ses transformations, ses travaux, et son personnel. . 1889. Lois, status, et règlements concernant les anciennes Académies et l’Institut de 1635 a` 1889. Aulard, F.-A. 1889–95. La Société des Jacobins, recueil de documents, 6 vols. Reprint, AMS Press, New York, 1973. Badinter, Elisabeth, and Robert Badinter. 1988. Condorcet (1743–1794), un intellectuel en politique. Baker, Keith M. 1973. “The Société de 1789,” in J. F. Bosher, ed., French Government and Society, 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban, pp. 208–250. London: Athlone Press. . 1975. Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baker, K. M., and Smeaton, W. A. 1965. “The Origins and Authorship of the Educational Proposals published in 1793 by the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers.” Annals of Science 21, pp. 33–46. ´ Belhoste, Bruno. 1989. “Les origines de l’ Ecole Polytechnique.” Histoire de l’éducation, no. 41, pp. 13–53. ´ . 1994. “Un enseignement à l’épreuve: l’Ecole Polytechnique de 1794 au Second Empire.” in Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, and Antoine Picon, eds., La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994, pp. 9–30. . 1995. Les sciences dans l’enseignement secondaire fran¸cais: Textes officiels. Vol. 1, 1789–1914. Institut national de recherche pédagogique. Belhoste, Bruno, Francine Masson, and Antoine Picon, eds. 1994. Le Paris des polytechniciens: les ingénieurs dans la ville, 1794–1994.

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Temkin, Owsei. 1946. “The Philosophical Background of Magendie’s Physiology.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20, pp. 10–35. Thibaudeau, Antoine-Claire. 1824. Mémoires sur la Convention et le Directoire. 2 vols. Collection des Mémoires relatifs a` la Révolution fran¸caise. ´ Thiébaut de Berneaud, A. 1824. Eloge de Broussonet, premier fondateur de la Société Linnéenne de Paris. Paris. Thouin, André. 1841. Voyages dans la Belgique, l’Hollande, et l’Italie. 2 vols. Tresse, René. 1956a. “Un atelier pilote de la Révolution fran¸caise: l’Atelier de Perfectionnement des armes portatives, mai-décembre 1794.” Techniques et civilisations 5, pp. 54–64. . 1956b. “Le Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers et la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale au début du XIXe siècle.” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et de leurs applications 5, pp. 246–264. ´ Tron, Hélène. 1996. “L’enseignement de la chimie a` l’Ecole polytechnique, 1794– 1805.” SABIX, n⬚. 15. Tucoo-Chala, Suzanne. 1977. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke & la librairie fran¸caise, 1736– 1798. Pau and Paris. Tuetey, Alexandre. 1890–1914. Répertoire général des sources manuscrits de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution Fran¸caise. 11 vols. Viguerie, Jean de. 1979. “Quelques remarques sur les universités fran¸caises au dixhuitième siècle.” Revue historique 262 ( July–September), pp. 29–49. ´ Viré, Liliane, et al. 1980. La statistique en France è l’époque napoléonienne. Ecole des ´ Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, séminaire de Louis Bergeron. Journée ´ d’étude, le 14 février 1980. Editions Jean Touzot. Vitet, Louis. 1861. L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, étude historique. Warner, John Hanley. 1998a. Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 1998b. “Paradigm Lost or Paradise Declining? American Physicians and the ‘Dead End’ of the Paris Clinical School,” in Caroline Hannaway and Ann La Berge, Constructing Paris Medicine, 337–383. Watts, George B. 1958. “The Encyclopédie méthodique.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 73, pp. 348–366. Weiner, Dora B. 1993. The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . 1999. Comprendre et soigner: Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) La médecine de l’esprit. Collection Penser la Médecine (Fayard). Weiss, John H. 1982. The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. West, Jenny. 1991. Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press. Wolf, C. 1902. Histoire de l’Observatoire de Paris de sa fondation a` 1793. Woronoff, Denis. 1984. L’industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire. Zupko, Ronald Edward. 1978. French Weights and Measures before the Revolution: A Dictionary of Provincial and Local Units. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

INDEX

Note: Footnotes containing extensive bibliographic information are indicated here by an italicized page and note number. Abeille, L.-P., 229–32 academic freedom, 113, 120, 619 Académie de Chirurgie, 207 Académie de Médecine, 668 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 68 Académie Fran¸caise, 447 academies, abolition of, 165 Academy of Architecture, 189 Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 165, 189, 202–4 Academy of Science: abolition/suppression of, 10, 164, 165–67, 184, 216–17, 219, 221, 289, 305; and the artisans and inventors, 197–98, 200, 202, 206, 217; civic work of, 10–11; Condorcet on, 121; as a corporation, 166–67; criticism/resentment of, 166, 190–92, 238; on demography, 481; and the Institut de France, 448–49; Laplace’s publications in, 7; last year of, 210–22; Lavoisier’s defense of, 216–19; membership, 7–8, 187, 210–11, 216; on Mesmer, 166; and the metric system, 237– 38, 242, 242n.49, 243–44, 243n.58, 279– 82; and the Ministry of the Interior, 210– 11; prize competitions of, 199; reform of, 186–90; in the revolutionary climate, 184, 186–94; vs. Royal Society of Medicine, 14, 37; on science clubs, 170; Société des Inventions et Découvertes, 195, 197, 197n.71, 200, 204, 205, 206; vs. the Société linnéenne de Paris, 170; on weights/ measures, 228–29 Accounting Office, 90 Achard, Frédéric, 624 Ackerknecht, Erwin, 544, 603n acoustics, 686–87 Actes (Société d’Histoire Naturelle), 177–78 Actes des Apôtres, 94–95 Adams, John, 314 Adanson, Michel, 170

Addington, Henry Viscount, 630 Adet, Pierre-Auguste, 367–68, 388 Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres, 402–3, 413–14 Aeneae, Hendrik, 466 Aepinus, 511, 511n.157 aerial warfare, 371–73, 434 aeronautics. See ballooning Aerostatic Development Center, 372 Agence des Mines, 432 Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpêtres, 403, 405–6, 418, 419–20 Agence Temporaire des Poids et Mesures, 460–61 agriculture, 27, 626–27 ailing people, public responsibility for, 48 Aix-la-Chappelle, 439 Albritte, Antoine-Louis, 296 alcyons, 587, 657 Alder, Ken, 424 Alexander I, czar of Russia, 107 Alexander the Great, 558 Alexandria, 559 Alibert, Jean, 450, 543, 549–50 alkali industry, 199, 414–16 Alvarez (military engineer), 266 Ambrosiana Library (Lombardy), 553 Amédée (engraver), 590 American Civil War, 373 American medical students, 549–50 American Revolution, 336, 547–48 American weights/measures, 224–25, 281, 494 L’Ami du peuple (Marat), 95, 98, 191 Ampère, André Marie, 2; analysis by, 537; on electrodynamics, 540, 689–90; on electromagnetism, 6, 451, 650, 688; and the mathematicization of physics, 644; Mémoire sur la théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques, 689; Newtonianism of, 680, 689, 693; teaching skills of, 534–35

718

INDEX

anatomy: classificatory approach to, 38–39; comparative, 6, 37, 178, 453, 548, 640, 653, 655–62, 694; Geoffroy on, 583; pathological, 543; and surgery, 546 Andersonian Institution (Glasgow), 637 Andréossy, Antoine-Fran¸cois, 375, 578 Annales de chimie, 7, 7n.1, 185; launch of, 449; metric system used in, 488, 489–90, 489n.109; and the Société d’Encouragement, 633 Anthelmy (bureaucrat), 426 anthropology, 600 Anti-Vivisection Society, 672 apothecaries, 227–28, 670–71 Aquinas, Thomas, 134 arachnids, 586–87 Arago, Dominique Fran¸cois: and Biot, 239n.42, 685–86; and Laplace, 644, 686; “Memoire sur les affinités des corps pour la lumière,” 643; on the metric system, 477, 477n.67, 479, 487; and Monge, 341; at the Observatory of Paris, 458; politics of, 537; in the Society of Arcueil, 641, 643, 677 Arbogast, L.-F.-A., 102; background of, 105– 6; Calcul des dérivations, 105; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111, 151– 52, 155, 159, 284; in the Convention, 149; in the Feuillants, 106; in the Legislative Assembly, 106; on the metric system, 279–80, 282–83; on the telegraph, 429–30 Argand, Ami, 638 Armaments Section (Commission des Armes et Poudres), 387–88, 389 Army Artillery Committee, 379 Army of the Rhine, 142 Arnollet, Pierre, 562 Arsenal (Paris), 29–36, 29n.47, 211–12, 395–97 artisans and inventors, 195–209; and the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 202– 4; and the Academy of Science, 197–98, 200, 202, 206, 217; Boufflers’s role, 196– 98, 200–202, 206; Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 200, 201–2, 206–9, 206n.95, 209–10n.103, 289; Commune des Arts, 201, 203–4, 203n.88, 205, 206; and craft guilds, abolition of, 197; David’s role, 203–4, 203n.88; Desaudray’s role, 205, 206; Directory of Sciences,

Arts, and Crafts, 205–6; on education, 219; grants/awards to, 200, 206–7, 208–9, 209–10n.103; gunmaking by, 422, 423, 424–25; Neuf Soeurs, 201; and patent law, 195–200, 199n.77; Pétition Motivée, 195– 96; Point Central des Arts et Métiers, 200–202, 204–5, 204n.89, 206, 221–22; Roland’s interference, 208–9; Société des Inventions et Découvertes, 195, 200, 204, 205, 206; Society of Inventors, 201 artwork conquests. See natural history/ artwork conquests ascidians, 587 Assembly of Electors, 17, 22, 33, 66, 72 Assembly of Notables (Orléans), 25–26, 64 Assembly of Representatives (Commune of Paris): Bailly confirmed as Mayor by, 67– 68; Committee of Twenty-four, 73, 74– 76, 77–78; composition of, 67–68, 73; vs. the Constituent Assembly, 68, 73–74; constitutional plan by, 68, 70–71, 72, 73– 75, 77–78; dissolution of, 77–78; Lafayette confirmed as commander of the National Guard by, 67–68; scientists in, 67–71 Assembly of the Archbishopric, 77–78 assignats: Caisse de l’extraordinaire funded by, 84; Condorcet on, 87–88, 139; counterfeiting of, 212; depreciation of, 84, 143– 44, 212, 459; fabrication of, 212–13; first issued, 83–84; Lavoisier on, 84–86, 86n, 87, 87n.155, 91, 93 astronomy: applications as time-dependent, 487; of comets, 251, 304; Laplace’s proposals, 454; losses during the Terror, 305; Newtonian, 654, 678, 679–80; professionalization of, 653; value of, 454–55 Atelier de Perfectionnement, 388, 424, 425– 26, 635–36 Athénas (chemical manufacturer), 414, 628 Athenian governance, 547–48 atomic bombs, 388 atoms, 678 atrophy, 596 Aubry Dubochet, Pierre-Fran¸cois, 246 Audouin, Victor, 579, 580n.39, 588, 658 Audouin, Xavier: Histoire générale de l’administration de la guerre, 348; in Monge’s connection, 340, 342–43, 344, 347 Auenbrugger, Leopold, 546, 547 Augustan Principate, 135–36

INDEX

Auguste (chemist), 392n.110 Augustinian sisters, 51 auscultation, 547 Austria, war with, 137, 143, 211, 647 Ayyubite dynasty, 558 Babeuf, Fran¸cois (“Gracchus”), 303, 446 Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 326 Bacon, Francis, 517, 606 Baillie, Matthew, 546 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 15n.20; arrest/trial of, 316; astronomical history by, 12; and the Champ-de-Mars massacre, 99, 315; civic work of, 11; Commission of the Academy of Science headed by, 50n.79; and Condorcet, 12, 73; and the Constituent Assembly, 15–21, 23, 24, 186; death of, 10, 305; and the Feuillants, 98; and the Health Committee, 53–54; Histoire de l’astronomie moderne, 233; J.-S. Bailly a` ses concitoyens, 316; on Louis XVI, 71; as Mayor of Paris, 67–68, 71–73, 77, 78, 98; memoirs of, 18; popularity/status of, 67, 73, 78, 96, 98–99, 315; poverty relief work of, 47; reputation/goals as a scientist, 11– 12; and the royal family’s attempted flight, 96, 97, 98; in the Society of 1789, 79; in the States-General, 8, 10–11, 15–16, 18–19; during the Terror, 315–16; and Voltaire, 12; on writers/philosophers, 18 Balbo, Prospero, count, 466 ballooning, 23, 30, 349; by Biot, 639, 643, 682–83; by Guyton, 103, 232, 371 balloons: hot-air, 371–73, 638; hydrogen, 639 Baltard (teacher), 527 Balzac, Honoré de, 88 Bancal des Essarts, Jean-Henri, 158 Banks, Sir Joseph, 101, 168, 314, 646 Banque de France. See Discount Bank Barbier, Luc, 435–36 Barère de Vieuzac, Bertrand, 146, 147–48, 354, 383 Barnave, Antoine-Joseph, 97–98, 97n Barreul, 625, 682 Barthélmy (powdermaker), 418–19, 552–53 Barthez, Paul-Joseph, 135 Base du système métrique (Delambre), 251, 251n.75, 255, 275, 470, 475, 480, 487 Bastille Day, 23–24, 30–32, 146, 149–50, 299 Batavian Republic, 439 Battelier, Jean-César, 370–71

719

batteries, electric, 639, 645–50, 693 Battle of Fleurus, 434 Battle of the Pyramids, 560 Baudin, P. C. L., 493 Baumé, Antoine, 323, 407, 408, 408n.141, 412, 488 Bayen, P., 170–71 Bayesian analysis, 59–60 Bayle, Gaspard-Laurent, 543 bayonettes, 385–86, 422 Beauchamp (astronomer), 594 Beauharnais, Alexandre de, 97 Beccaria, Cesare, 326, 603 beet sugar, 624–25, 639 Beggary Committee, 47–52, 51n.83 Belgium, annexation of, 434–37, 440, 462 Bélidor, Bernard Forest de, 628; La science de l’ingénieur, 535 Bell, Sir Charles, 674 Bellegarde, marquis de, 358–59 Bellet (survey assistant), 269, 272 Belliard (army commander), 572 Bell-Magendie Law, 674 Benedictine colleges, 149 Benedictines, 439–40 Bénézecq, Pierre, 622 Bentham, Jeremy, 602 Bérard, Etienne, 613, 628 Bérard, Jacques, 641, 642, 643 Bernard, Claude, 672, 675; Introduction a` l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, 540 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri, 615; La Chaumière indienne, 179, 194; at ´ ´ the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498; Etudes de la Nature, 179; at the Jardin des Plantes, 179–81, 182, 183, 290; Paul et Virginie, 179 Berr, Max, 353 Berthelot, Marcelin, 289 Berthesen, Salvatore, 215 Berthier, Alexandre, 556 Berthier de Sauvigny, Fran¸cois de, 102 Berthollet, Amédée, 641, 644 Berthollet, Pierre-Eugene, 2, 5; on ammonia, 577n.33; in the Armaments Section, 388; on the atmosphere, 577n.33; and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209; and Chaptal, 403–4; on chlorine compounds, 511; Consulate’s favors shown ´ to, 612; on dyeing, 511; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 502n.138, 511–12, 578;

720

INDEX

Berthollet, Pierre-Eugene (cont.) ´ at the Ecole Polytechnique, 527, 533; and the Egyptian expedition, 561–62, 577–79, ´ emens de 599; on electrochemistry, 647; El´ l’art de la teinture, 511; Essai de statique chimique, 512, 578, 579, 641; finances of, 644–45; gunpowder experiments of, 339, 358, 362–63, 365–66, 367–68; gunpowder lectures by, 396, 416; industrial processes investigated by, 628; in the Institute of Egypt, 578; on iron, 390; in the Italian campaign, 551, 552–53, 556; and Laplace, 533, 641, 644–45, 677; and Leblanc, 415– 16; on mass action, 6; on the metric system, 462n.44; in Monge’s connection, 340, 533; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 533, 551, 644–45 (see also under Egyptian expedition); “Observations sur le natron,” 577; protégés of, 641–42, 677; Recherches sur les lois de l’affinité, 512; “Recherches sur les lois de l’affinité chymique,” 578–79; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; and the Society of Arcueil, 640–41, 643–44, 677; on transliteration of Arabic, 595–96; and Volta, 647–48 Bertier de Sauvigny, L.-B.-F. de, 35, 169, 313 Bertrand, Claude, 103 Beurnonville (Minister of War), 143, 354 Beuvelot (drawing master), 637 Bézout, E., 536 Bibliographie astronomique (Lalande), 305 La Bibliothèque de l’Homme Public, 124 Bicêtre, 50, 51 Bichat, Xavier, 2; Anatomie générale, appliquée a` la physiologie et a` la médecine, 663, 665–66; death of, 663; and Desault, 543; dissections by, 544; on experimental physiology, 656, 663; the functioning of organisms, 6; influence of, 663n, 667; on pathology, 547; Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, 663–64, 666, 667; ´ Société Médicale d’Emulation founded by, 450; Traité des membranes, 666 Bidermann (merchant), 353 Billaud-Varenne, Nicolas, 323 biology, 548, 600, 640, 655, 675 Biot, Jean-Baptiste: and Arago, 239n.42, 685– 86; ballooning by, 639, 643, 682–83; at the ´ Collège de France, 643; at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 524, 529; in the

Institut de France, 643; and Laplace, 239, 641, 642–43; on light polarization, 540, 685; and Magendie, 672; on the magnetic field, 643; “Memoire sur les affinités des corps pour la lumière,” 643; on the metric system, 239, 239n.42, 477, 479, 487; at the Observatory of Paris, 458; Recueil d’observations géodésiques, 477n.67, 480; in the Society of Arcueil, 641, 642, 677; on sound, 683; on Volta’s battery, 649–50 Biot’s law of rotatory dispersion, 685 Biran, Maine de, 602 Bird (instrument maker), 455 Birth of the Clinic (Foucault), 42 Blagden, Sir Charles, 485 Blainville, Henri Ducrotay de, 658 Blanc, Honoré, 424–25, 426 blast furnaces, steam-powered, 627 blood pressure, 673 Board of Longitude (England), 455 Bochter, Ellious, 596 Bohr, Niels, 678 Bolognese Institute, 553 Bonaparte, Joseph, 556 Bonaparte, Lucien, 491, 533, 609, 613 Boncerf, Pierre-Fran¸cois, 47 Bonjour, Fran¸cois-Joseph, 405–6 Bonn, 439 Bonnay, Charles-Fran¸cois, marquis de, 78, 237, 242 Borda, Jean Charles de, 62n.113; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209, 219; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455–56; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; death of, 467; on Dunkirk-Barcelona survey team, 252, 279; on gunpowder, 419; on Lavoisier, 320; and Méchain, 273–74; on the metric system, 238, 281–82, 284, 462n.44, 473, 487; platinum measuring rods invented by, 253, 469; repeating circle invented by, 239–40, 248, 251–53, 255–56, 259–60 (figs.), 298; during the Terror, 312; on weaponry, 375–76 Bory de St.-Vincent, Jean-Baptiste, 675 Bosc d’Antic, Louis, 168–69, 170, 314, 630 Bosher, J. F., 89n.162 Bosquillon, E.-F., 307, 310 Bossut, C., 531, 536 botanical gardens, expropriation of, 290, 292, 437

INDEX

Botanical School ( Jardin du Roi), 5 botany, 168 Bottée de Toulmon, J. J. A., 413, 417, 420–21 Bouchard, Fran¸cois-Xavier, 576 Bouchaud, M.-A., 307, 310 Bouchotte, Jean-Baptiste, 346, 347, 348 Boufflers, Stanislas de, 196–98, 200–202, 206 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 455–56, 496 Bouillé, Fran¸cois Claude Amour, marquis de, 96–97 Bouquier, Gabriel, 495 Bourbon Restoration, 4, 447 Bourrienne, L.-A. Fauvelet de, 610 Bouvard, Alexis, 302, 304, 457; Tables astronomiques, 458 Boyer (physician), 329 Bréguet (clockmaker), 429 Bréguet clock (Bureau des Longitudes), 456 Brera, 553 Brest observatory, 455 Brest rebellion, 345 Brézin, Michel, 391 Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme, 630 Brisson, M.-J., 462n.44, 467, 501 Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre: in the Assembly, 73–74; on the Commission of 21, 139; on the Committee on the Constitution, 147–48; and Condorcet, 99, 147; death of, 330–31; as a Jacobin, 145; on Laplace, 312; on Lavoisier, 95 Brissotins. See Girondists Brockliss, Laurence, 133, 134, 135–36, 544 Brongniart, Alexandre: in the Academy of Science, 184; and Cuvier, 658; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172, 179, 180; in the Lycée des Arts, 215; at the Museum of Natural History, 176 Brongniart, Théodore, 171 bronze, 391–93, 392n.110 Broussais, Fran¸cois Joseph Victor, 549–50 Broussonet, Auguste, 169; in the Academy of Science, 102; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70; background of, 101; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111; in the Legislative Assembly, 101, 169; on the Linnaean monument, 170; “Notes ichthyologiques,” 102; on pseudobranchia, 101; in the Société linnéenne de Paris, 168, 169, 170; in the Société Royale d’Agriculture, 102; during the Terror, 313–14

721

Broval, Charles de, 184 Bruguières, Jean-Guillaume, 179 Brunswick, duke of, 139–40 Brussels, 436–37, 439 Buache, Jean-Nicolas, 455–56, 496–97, 498, 512 Buache, Philippe, 512 bubonic plague, 596, 599 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 12, 167; and Daubenton, 498; and Haüy, 172; Histoire Naturelle, 171, 658; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172; and Lamarck, 171– 72; Newtonianism of, 680 Bugge, Thomas, 446, 467 Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 450, 490, 631, 632, 633–34, 638 Bulletin de la Société Philomathique, 185, 449 Bulletin des sciences médicales, 450 Burckhardt (astronomer), 457 Bureau central des hospices de Paris, 673 Bureau consultatif des arts et métiers, 637 bureaucracy, 88–89, 89n.162 Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 206n.95; and assignats, 212; awards by, 206–9, 209–10n.103, 304; composition of, 201–2; creation of, 200; on education, 219; on Lavoisier, 323; Lavoisier’s education proposal to, 219–21, 219n.122, 289 Bureau des Longitudes: as a bureau of standards, 458 (see also metric system, completion of); and calendar reform, 456; establishment of, 304, 454–55; goals of, 455; and Grégoire, 151; headquarters of, 456; management of, 456–57; membership of, 455–56, 457; and the meridian survey, 462, 476, 477; Paris Observatory overseen by, 304; prestige of, 446. See also Observatory of Paris Bureau de Statistique, 623 Bureau du Cadastre, 246–47, 481–82, 486 Bureau du Commerce, 199 Bureau of Artillery, 359, 367, 368–69 Bureaux de Pusy, Jean-Xavier, 225, 237n.36 Burtin (naturalist), 436 Butte Chaillot pumping station, 70–71 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges: and Condorcet, 326, 329, 330; as Conseil des Cinq-Cents deputy, 604, 608; Coup d’Oeil sur les Révolutions et sur la Réforme de la

722

INDEX

Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges (cont.) Médecine, 604, 607–8; Du Degré de Certitude de la Médecine, 604, 605; as an idéologue, 326, 601, 603–8; and Mirabeau, 124n.41, 604; and Napoleon’s coup d’état, 608, 609–10; Observations sur les hôpitaux, 608; Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, 604, 605–7, 610; reputation of, 603, 603n; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; teaching by, 608; and Volney, 514 Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle, 166. See also Museum of Natural History cadastre, 245–48, 280, 480–86, 482n.82, 486n.95 Cadet, Louis, 17, 323 Cadet Devaux, Antoine, 628 Caen, 32–33, 452 Caesar, 558 Caffarelli du Falga, General, 560, 561, 593 cahiers de doléance, 36, 66 Cairo, 559, 560–61 Caisse de l’extraordinaire, 83, 84, 87n.155, 93 Calcul des dérivations (Arbogast), 105 calculus, 678, 695 calendar reform, 279–80, 293–98, 456 Calon, Etienne de, 462–63n.45 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de, 25 Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques Régis de, 613 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph, 163–64, 353 Cambrai, 32, 436 Cambridge University (England), 534 Campoformio, treaty of, 556 Camus (commissioner), 354 Candolle, Augustin-Pyramus de, 630, 632, 641–42 cane sugar, 625 Canguilhem, Georges, 664 Capet, Louis, 316 Carnot, Claude, 105 Carnot, Lazare, 383n, 634; army troops reorganized by, 434; background of, 102, 104, 105; on calculus, 695; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111; on the Committee of Public Safety, 104, 384, 445; Conspiracy of Equals defeated by, 446; in the Convention, 149, 383; in the Corps of Engineers, 232; in the Directory, 445–46; ´ and Dumouriez, 349; Eloge de Vauban, 364, 384; Essai sur les machines en général, 104–5, 628, 682, 692; in exile, 446; Géo-

metrie de position, 510; imprisonment of, 105; and Le Tourneur, 375; and the metric system’s completion, 459; military leadership of, 382–87, 552 (see also Italian campaign); on military training, 522; as Minister of the Interior, 613–14, 639–40; as Minister of War, 612–13; in Monge’s connection, 340; on munitions production, 427; as the “Organizer of Victory,” 104, 445, 537, 613; politics of, 383, 384, 386; reputation of, 104; and Robespierre, 386–87; on saltpeter, 399–400 Carnot, Sadi, 2; Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, 104–5, 628, 675–76, 691; on thermodynamics/heat engines, 6, 105, 540, 692, 694 Carnot-Feulint, Claude, 383 Carny, Jean-Antoine, 363, 369–70, 388, 396, 401–2, 404, 406, 413, 416, 417–18, 419 Carochez (instrument maker), 455–56 Cartesianism, 508, 677–78 cartography, 487, 592. See also map of France Cassini III, César Fran¸cois, 269 Cassini IV, Jean-Dominique: in the Academy of Science, 189, 210; arrest of, 302–3, 305, 306; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455; on Dunkirk-Barcelona survey team, 250, 251, 252; and Lakanal, 302; and map of France, 298, 303–4, 592–93; Marat’s criticism of, 192–93; and the observatories of Paris and Greenwich, 237, 298; as Observatory of Paris director, 298–302, 304–5; on the Revolution, 299 Castex (sculptor), 572, 573 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, viscount, 485 Catherine II, empress of Russia (“the Great”), 107, 109, 110 Catholic Church, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 149, 150 Cauchy, Augustin Louis, 2, 458, 508, 534–35, 537, 540, 644, 687, 695 Caussin de Perceval, J.-J.-A., 307 Caventou, Joseph, 670, 671–72, 673, 675 Cels (agronomist), 630 cementite/cementation, 391 centiares, 249 centimeters, 249 Central Committee of the Districts, 73 Cercle Social, 97 Cerfberr, Baruch, 353

INDEX

Cerfberr, Lippman, 353 Cerfberr, Théodore, 353 Chabot, Fran¸cois, 162, 163–64, 329 Chabrol, Gaspard-Antoine, 562 Chabrol de Volvic, Jacques: and the Descrip´ tion de l’E´ gypte, 598; at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 529; “Essai sur les moeurs des habitans modernes de ´ l’Egypte,” 598; as Prefect of the Seine, 598–99; in the Society of Geography, 598; Statistique de la Ville de Paris, 599 Chambers of Commerce, 623 Champagne, Ruth I., 235–36n.33 Champ-de-Mars massacre (1791), 96, 98–99, 315 Champy, Jacques-Pierre, 323, 409, 418–20 Champy, Jean-Nicolas, 363, 365, 366–67, 405–6, 589 Chappatte, Adjutant, 369, 370 Chappe, Abraham, 429, 431 Chappe, Claude, 428–30, 431 Chappe, Ignace, 429, 431 Chappe d’Auteroche, abbé, 429 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine: beet sugar promoted by, 624–25, 639; career of, 401; in the chemical industry, 628; Chimie appliquée aux arts, 623, 639; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612, 613; death of, 630; De l’in´ dustrie fran¸caise, 623, 625–26; at the Ecole ´ de Santé, 419; and the Ecole Polytechnique, 527, 613, 628; on economic reform, 622–27; on the metric system, 492; as Minister of the Interior, 491–92, 610, 614–16, 622–23, 626, 639–40; munitions work of, 401, 403–4, 405–6; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 614, 615, 619; on public education, 616–19, 621; saltpeter production by, 388, 412–13, 414; on soap, 488, 489–90; and the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 450, 628–30, 634, 639; in the Society of Arcueil, 641–42; during the Terror, 311, 403– 4; and Volta, 647–48; on wine making, 623–24 Charité hospital, 542 Charles, Jacques Antoine, 291, 371–72, 432 Charleville, 422–23 Charpentier, Fran¸cois-Philippe, 426 Charvet, Hippolyte-Lucien, 151n.72 Chasles, Michel, 510; Développements des méthodes en géométrie, 536–37

723

Chasseboeuf, Constantin-Fran¸cois. See Volney, Constantin-Fran¸cois de Chateaubriand, Fran¸cois René, 2 Chaussier, Fran¸cois, 543, 672 cheesemaking, 490 chemical industries, 627, 628 Chemische Annalen, 324, 449 chemistry: and affinities, 512; encyclopedic nomenclature of, 5, 249; Guyton’s Méthode de nomenclature chimique, 104; Lavoisier on, 5, 95, 601, 679, 695; mathematicization of, 679, 695; nomenclature/ syntax of, 601; oxygen theory of combustion, 104; physical, 644; professionalization of, 653 Chénier, André, 2, 80, 152, 313 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 152, 153, 155, 296 Chevreul, Michel Eugène, 675 Chézy, Antoine, 562 Chladni, E. F. F., 686–87, 693 Choiseul, Etienne Fran¸cois, duc de, 559 Chronique de Paris, 169, 178 Chuquet, Arthur-Maxime, 356 church bells, copper recovered from, 392–93, 428 Cimetière des Innocents, 11 Cisalpine Republic, 551, 556, 646, 647–48 Ciscar, Gabriel de, 466–67 Cispadane Republic, 551, 555–56 citizenship, 547–48 City Council, 68, 77 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 81–82, 84– 85, 150 civilizing missions, 559–60, 599 ´ Clapeyron, Bénoit Paul Emile, 540 classification/taxonomy, 7, 167–68, 170, 333, 585–87, 660. See also comparative anatomy Clausius, Rudolf, 693 Clavière, Etienne, 96, 145, 247, 407 Clément, Nicolas, 628, 637 Clermont-Tonnerre, comte de, 24 clinical medicine, 40, 40n.59, 41–45, 55–56, 495, 540–50, 596 clockmakers, 422 clocks, 294–95 Cloquet (engraver), 590 clothing industry, 492 Clouet, Jean-Baptiste, 31–32, 31n.49, 35, 205, 399 Clouet, Jean-Fran¸cois, 31n.49

724

INDEX

Clouet, Pierre-Romain, 31n.49 Cochin, abbé, 50 Cochon, Charles, 441 coinage, 234, 243–44, 243n.58, 280–81, 392–93 Collège de France, 41, 69, 128, 175, 307–8, 309; enrollment at, 549; Oriental languages at, 559; prestige of, 446; during the Terror, 306–11, 309n.55, 310n.57 Collège de Harcourt, 163 Collège de Navarre, 135, 163, 539 Collège des Quatre-Nations, 135, 163 Collège Louis-le-Grand, 129, 132, 133n.50, 149, 163 College of Medicine (Montpellier), 44 College of Medicine (Paris), 44 College of Surgery, 541–42 Collège Royal. See Collège de France colleges. See secondary schools Collet-Descotils, Hippolyte-Victor, 573, 589, 641 Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce, 196, 197, 204 Comité d’Impositions, 197 Comité d’Instruction Publique: on academies, abolition of, 165; on adult education, 158; and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209; on calendar reform, 279–80, 297–98; and the Collège de France, 308–9, 309n.55, 310–11; vs. the Commission of Public Instruction, 162; and Condorcet’s education plan, 148, 152– 56, 157–60, 162; on education vs. instruction, 156; formation of, 110–11, 189; on higher education, public need/support of, 156–57, 159; on institutes, 157, 159; LePeletier’s education plan, 159, 161, 162– 63, 219; on Louis XVI’s disposition, 158; members of, 146, 148–51; and the metric system, 279–80, 282–83; on morality/ values, 153–54, 155–56, 158–59; on patriotic festivals, 158, 160; on primary schools, 153, 155, 159, 161; proceedings of, 111n; purview of, 111–12; Romme’s education plan, 155–58, 159, 162, 163; on science’s authority, 155–56, 158; on secondary schools, 153–54, 163–64; Sieyès’s education plan, 159–60, 162; on tuition, 157 Commission d’Instruction Publique, 162, 495–96 Commission des Armes et Poudres, 387, 402, 426–27

Commission des Monuments, 290 ´ Commission des Renseignements sur l’Etat ´ Moderne de l’Egypte, 594–95 Commission des Travaux Publics, 458, 482 Commission of Science and Arts, 552–53, 561–63, 565, 579 Commission of Six, 162, 163, 301–2 Commission of the Academy of Science, 50n.79 Commission of Weights and Measures, 277– 78, 282, 462, 462n.44 Commission on the Metric System, 466–67 Commissions d’Extraction près les Armées, 292–93 Commission Temporaire des Arts, 290–92, 303n.40, 317–18, 434, 443 Committee of General Defense, 357 Committee of General Security, 287, 328–29 Committee of Public Instruction, 41, 163 Committee of Public Safety, 3; authority of, 146; civil war/rebellions ended by, 287–88; composition of, 139; creation of, 139; dictatorship by, 141–42, 146, 163; during the French Revolutionary Wars, 357–58, 381– 82; Hébertists in, 347–48; munitions and guns controlled by, 400–401, 402–3, 410, 414, 415, 427; proposals by, 140; publications ordered by, 389–95, 389n; scientists mobilized by, 383, 386, 389, 389n, 393–94, 396; and telegraphs, 430–31; during the Terror, 287–88, 303–4; on weaponry, 361– 62, 363, 367–68, 370, 373; on weights/ measures projects, 276–77 Committee of Subsistence, 68 Committee of Twenty-four, 73, 74–76, 77–78 Committee on Agriculture and Commerce, 229–30, 237, 242 Committee on Finance, 85, 89–90 Committee on Taxation, 92 Committee on the Constitution, 146, 147–48 Communal Assembly. See Assembly of Representatives Commune des Arts, 201, 203–4, 203n.88, 205, 206 Commune of Paris, 24, 33–35, 47, 77–78, 140. See also Assembly of Representatives Commune of 10 August, 343–44 Company of Airmen, 372–73 comparative anatomy, 6, 37, 178, 453, 548, 640, 653, 655–62, 694

INDEX

Comte, Auguste, 5, 598, 602, 662–63, 666; Cours de philosophie positive, 654–56 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 134, 601, 602–3 Condorcet, Madame de (née Sophie de Grouchy), 326, 330, 331, 601 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, 3, 4, 211; on academic freedom, 57; in the Académie Fran¸caise, 56; and the Academy of Science, 56, 63, 121, 189–90; arrest of, 332; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 68; on assignats, 87, 139; in Auteuil, 326; and Bailly, 12, 73; and Brissot, 147; on capital punishment, 57, 62; Chronique de Paris edited by, 169; on citizenship for women, 57, 76; civic work of, 11; on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 82; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111, 189; Committee of General Security addressed by, 328– 29; Committee of Public Safety chaired by, 139; Committee of Twenty-four chaired by, 74, 75–76, 77–78; on the Committee on the Constitution, 146, 147–48; in the Constituent Assembly, 100; in the Convention, 140–41, 146–49; and Danton, 147; death of, 10, 332; demography by, 59–60; on the disposition of Louis XVI, 147; early Revolution championed by, 235; economics/finance studies of, 87–88; on election/voting procedures, 62–63, 62n.113, 75; Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilité, 60– 63, 62nn.113–14, 64–65; on the French Revolutionary Wars, 138–39; and the Girondists, 147; in hiding, 284, 329–31; on human rights, 57; ideologism of, 602–3; on intellect of men vs. women, 57; and the Jardin des Plantes, 174; Journal d’instruction sociale of, 326–28; and Laplace, 60; in the Legislative Assembly, 101, 140; on liberty of thought, 57; Louis XVI’s denunciation drafted by, 140; and Marat, 147, 193; marriage of, 326; as a mathematician, 12–13, 58, 59; “Mémoire sur le calcul des probabilités,” 60, 60n.108; on the metric system, 229–30, 235, 236–38, 240–41, 243; and Monge, 140; and the Montagnards, 147; on the national debt, 82; in the National Guard, 72; on the “Occident,” 559; politics of, 56–59, 61–62,

725

79–82, 82, 99–100, 138–39, 146–47; on probability, 60–61, 64; on public schools, 57; Rapport et Projet de Décret sur l’Organisation Générale de l’Instruction Publique, 41, 112–24, 120n.30, 125, 127–28, 136–37, 148, 617 (see also Comité d’Instruction Publique); reputation/popularity of, 67, 75–76, 78, 147, 190, 337; on the Revolution, 336–37; and Robespierre, 138–39, 147; scholarship on, 58, 58n; and Sieyès, 66; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 330, 331, 332–38, 516–17; on slavery, 57, 139; Society of 1789 founded by, 79, 80; on the States-General, 58–59, 64–66; Tableau Général, 328; Treasury work of, 88, 90–91; on Trouville, 204; and Vicq d’Azyr, 14 Congregation of Christian Doctrine, 151 Congress of Vienna (1815), 555 Congress on the Metric System, 464, 465– 67, 472, 474 Connaissance des temps, 299, 305–6, 455, 456, 457, 458 Conseil de Perfectionnement, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 641 Conseil des Anciens, 493, 609 Conseil des Cinq-Cents, 493, 609 Conseil général des Hospices, 545 Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, ´ 151, 349, 426, 501–2; and the Ecole Polytechnique, 637; founding of, 635, 636; goals of, 636; machines/technical objects exhibited at, 635–36; prestige of, 446, 635; school of design at, 637; and the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 637; as a teaching institution, 636, 637; as a trade school, 637 Conspiracy of Equals, 303, 446 Constant, Benjamin, 326 Constituent Assembly: on academies’ constitutions/regulations, 188, 203; vs. the Assembly of Representatives, 68, 73–74; and Bailly, 15–21, 23, 24; and the Beggary Committee, 47–52, 51n.83; and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 81–82, 85; Committee on Finance, 85, 89–90; Committee on the Constitution, 74, 75, 78; committees and citizens’ wishes, 36–37; creation of, 20–22, 66; dissolution of, 15; dissolution of committees, 56; factions within, 137–38; feudal privileges/manorial

726

INDEX

Constituent Assembly (cont.) rights given up by, 33; Finance Committee, 173, 176, 203; and governance of Paris, 71, 73–74; and the Health Committee, 52–56, 53n.86; and the national debt, 82–86; Paris deputation of, 24; and the royal family’s attempted flight, 97–98, 137; and the Treasury, 88–89, 90; on unemployment/poverty, 47 Constitution of the year III (1795): Daunou’s drafting of, 500, 556–57, 601, 608; and the idéologues, 600; Institut de France established by, 446–47 (see also Institut de France) Consulate (1799–1804): Corps Législatif, 612, 614; Council of State, 611–12; scientists favored under, 612 (see also specific scientists); Senate, 612; Tribune, 612, 614 Conté, Nicolas-Jacques, 371–72, 431–33; and the Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 638; at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 636; death of, 637; and the De´ scription de l’E´ gypte, 637–38; Ecole des Arts et Métiers organized by, 638; in the Egyptian expedition, 561, 573; engraving machine of, 633, 637–38; hydrogen balloon demonstrated by, 639; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630 Convalescent Hospital, 50, 51n.80 Convention, 140–46; on assignats, 143–44; on the calendar, 297; on committee memberships, 146; Condorcet’s constitutional draft, 147–48; creation of, 140–41; on Directory membership, 552; on disposition of Louis XVI, 142, 152, 281; dissolution of, 142; on educational assets, 149; factions within, 144; Girondists expelled by, 145, 152, 216, 286–87, 346, 366; members of, 149; Monarchy abolished by, 294; Museum of Natural History established by, 166, 167; on the Terror, 287; topics/ goals of, 141–42, 146; war declared on England and Holland, 143 copper, 392–93 Coquebert, Antoine, 561, 588 Coquebert de Montbret, Charles-Etienne, 460, 488, 493 Corancez (mathematician), 576–77n Corday, Charlotte, 162, 216

Cordeliers, 97, 98, 138, 299 Coriolis, Gustave Gaspard, 537, 540, 675; Du calcul de l’effet des machines, 692–93 corporatism, 166–67, 197 Corps des Mines, 489, 489n.107 Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, 446, 458 Corps Législatif, 545, 612, 614 Corps of Engineers, 232 Corps of Topographical Engineers, 592 corpuscularian theory of light. See wave theory of light Correspondance de l’E´ cole Polytechnique, 536 corvée, 28–29 Corvisart, J.-N., 543, 546, 547, 549–50 Corvisart, J.-V., 310 Cossigny, Joseph-Fran¸cois Charpentier de, 418 Costaz, Louis, 598, 629, 630, 631, 632 cotton industry, 627 Coulomb, Charles Augustin de, 629, 693; and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209; in the Corps of Engineers, 232; on electricity, 649–50; on magnetism, 681–82; on the metric system, 462n.44, 467, 469, 470; during the Terror, 312 Council of Ministers, 360 Council of State, 611–12 counter-cultural movement, 166 Coup d’Oeil sur les Révolutions et sur la Réforme de la Médecine (Cabanis), 604, 607–8 Coupé de l’Oise, 163–64 Courier de l’E´ gypte, 575n Cournand, Antoine, 307 Cousin, J.-A.-J., 68–69; arrest of, 310; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70; at the Collège de France, 306, 308, 309n.55, 310, 682; and Delambre, 273; Marat’s criticism of, 193 Coustard (army officer), 383 Coutelle, Jean-Marie, 371–73, 561 Couthon, Georges, 289, 303, 386 craft guilds, abolition of, 197 Crell, Lorenz von, 324, 449 Cremona, 553 Creuzé-Latouche, Jacques Antoine, 169–70, 173, 174, 188–89, 498 criminal law, reform of, 603 Crosland, Maurice, 641 Currency Committee, 212, 323

INDEX

Custine, Philippe, 142, 273, 344, 351, 355 Cuvier, Frédéric, 657 Cuvier, Georges, 2, 452n.13; Anatomie comparée, 660–61; background of, 451–52; at the Collège de France, 454; on comparative anatomy, 6, 37, 178, 453, 656, 658, 669; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612; at ´ the Ecole Centrale du Panthéon, 453; in ´ the Ecoles Centrales, 501; and Geoffroy, 452–53, 454, 656, 657–58; at the Institut de France, 447, 454; at the Jardin des Plantes, 181; and Kielmeyer, 452; and Lamarck, 656–57; Le¸cons d’anatomie comparée, 453, 658; on the Linnaean Society, 170; and Magendie, 672–73; and Millin de Grandmaison, 452–53; on Monge and Berthollet, 339, 444; at the Museum of Natural History, 452–53, 454; on physiology, 675; Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, 659–60; Le Règne animal, 313, 657, 658, 660, 661–62; during the Terror, 313; and Volta, 648 Czartoryski, Adam, 107 d’Aboville, Fran¸cois-Marie, 419 Dalbarade, Minister, 365–66, 367, 374 d’Alembert, Jean le Ronde, 12, 37–38, 61, 106, 602, 676, 677–78 d’Angiviller, comte, 172, 178 Danton, Georges Jacques: arrest of, 160; in the Assembly, 68, 74, 77; on the Committee of Public Safety, 146, 358; on the Committee on the Constitution, 147–48; in the Commune of Paris, 140; and Condorcet, 147; in the Cordeliers, 98, 138; death of, 287; on Louis XVI’s flight, 98 d’Anville, chevalier, 592 Darcet, Jean, 388; on bronze, 392–93; in the chemical industry, 628; in the Collège de France, 306, 310; on the metric system, 467; munitions work of, 415; during the Terror, 311, 325 d’Artois, comte, 138 d’Assy family, 251 Daubenton, L.-J.-M., 102; Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle illustrated by, 171, 658; at the ´ Collège de France, 306, 308; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 502n.138; and Geoffroy, 181–82; at the Jardin des Plantes, 175, 178–79, 182–83; at the Museum of Natural History, 176, 308

727

d’Aubigny, Richard, 630 Daunou, Fran¸cois: in the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 149–50, 159–60; Constitution of the year III drafted by, 500, 556– 57, 601, 608; education legislation drafted by, 500, 501; as an idéologue, 601; and the Institut de France, 601; on the telegraph, 429–31 David, Jacques-Louis, 2; on abolition of academies, 165, 217; and academies’ property, expropriation of, 290; on the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 216; and the artisans and inventors, 203–4, 203n.88; as an artist, 150; on the calendar, 296; in the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 149; on removal of artworks from Rome, 554–55 Davy, Humphry, 647, 650 La Décade égyptienne, 575n La Décade philosophique, 449, 496, 575n, 601 de Castries, maréchal, 340, 342, 358 decimalization: acceptance of, 492; of angles, 224, 244–45, 486–87; of coins, 234, 249, 280–82; vs. duodecimal system, 234; of length/area, 224, 236, 249; of temperature, 224; of time, 224, 281n.112, 487; of weight, 224, 236, 249 decimeters, 249 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 9 Declaration of Rights (Virginia, 1776), 9 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (France), 1, 3–4, 9, 40, 47, 195 Declaration of War, 137, 138–39 Defrance, L., 443 Degérando, Joseph-Marie, 601–2, 629–30, 631 ´ d’Eglantine, Fabre, 296–97 de Grave, General, 633 de Hupsch, baron, 438 Delahante, Etienne, 323 Delambre, Jean-Baptiste: background of, 251; Base du système métrique, 251, 251n.75, 255, 275, 470, 475, 480, 487; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455–56; on the calendar, 297; Dunkirk-Barcelona survey, resumption of, 460, 462–63n.45, 462–66, 474– 76, 480–81; Dunkirk-Barcelona survey by, 250, 254, 256–58; Dunkirk-Barcelona survey field operations, 258, 266, 268–73, 275–78; Histoire de l’astronomie, 251, 251n.75; at the Institut de France, 447; and Lavoisier, 283; on mathematical

728

INDEX

Delambre, Jean-Baptiste (cont.) physics, 676; on Méchain, 275–76, 276n.96; on the metric system, 459–60, 462n.44, 487; on metric system subcommission, 468, 470; Newtonianism of, 679–80; on Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, 284– 85, 285n.120; on Prony’s “Grandes Tables Logarithmiques et Trigonométriques,” 484–85; Uranus studies of, 250 Delambre, Jean-Joseph, 12, 240 Delamétherie, Jean-Claude, 194, 449–50 Delaplace, Jean-Baptiste, 204, 207 Delaporte, Jacques-Denis, 576 De l’Education des Femmes (Laclos), 364 Delessert, Benjamin, 625, 629, 630 Delessert, Fran¸cois, 630 Delile, abbé, 251 Delille, Alyre. See Raffeneau-Delille, Alyre Delille, Jacques, 307, 310; Les Trois Règnes, 70 Demachy, Jean-Fran¸cois, 70, 194 demography, 481–82 Dendara (Egypt), 567–68 (figs.), 570 (fig.), 572, 574 Denon, Vivant, 554–55, 565, 572, 599; Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-E´ gypte, 584 Department of Hospitals, 50–51n.80 Department of La Nièvre, 243 Department of Paris, 163–64 Department of Pyrénées-Orientales, 268 Dépot Général de la Guerre, 304 Desaix (army commander), 557, 560 Desargues, Girard, 508 Desaudray, Charles-Emmanuel Gaullard, 206; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 219; and the Lycée des Arts, 213–14, 289; Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers, 205, 213, 214, 221–22; Société d’Artistes formed by, 214 Desault, Pierre-Joseph, 40; arrest of, 318, 542; at the Charité hospital, 542; at the College of Surgery, 541–42; death of, 542– ´ 43, 663; at the Ecole de Santé, 542; at the Hôtel-Dieu, 51, 541; influence of, on students, 543, 546; Oeuvres chirurgicales, 543, 543n.215; public lessons/operations by, 541–42 Descartes, René, 134–35, 679. See also Cartesianism ´ Description de l’Egypte (Napoleon Bonaparte): “Antiquités,” 564, 579, 585, 590,

591; botany vs. zoology in, 588; budget for, 573–74; collaboration on, 573–74; Conté’s contributions to, 637–38; Devillier’s contributions to, 562, 573; dura´ moderne,” tion of the project, 573; “Etat 564, 579, 585, 590, 591, 592; Fourier’s preface to, 559, 564, 574, 598; Geoffroy’s contributions to, 583–84; “Histoire naturelle,” 564, 579–80, 585, 590, 591; Jollois’s contributions to, 562, 573; Jomard’s contributions to, 562, 573, 597; Lancret’s contributions to, 537, 564–65, 573, 597; mineralogy in, 589–90; plates, 491, 535, 564, 566–71 (figs.), 637–38; plates, natural history, 579–80, 580n.39, 581–82n.44, 585, 589, 590, 658; Savigny’s contributions to, 587, 588 (see also under Savigny, JulesCésar Lelorgne de); scope/variety of memoirs, 596–98; social science in, 597; topography in, 591–92, 591n.58, 594–96 Description des arts et métiers (Academy of Science), 389 descriptive geometry, 5, 508–10, 522, 525–26, 530, 535–38 Descroizilles, Fran¸cois-Antoine-Henri, 401, 403, 404, 628 Desfontaines, R.-L., 171, 176, 178–79, 290, 292 Desgenettes (physician), 599; Histoire Médi´ cale d l’Armée d’Egypte, 596 Deshayes, C.-P., 660 Desmoulins, Camille, 23; Révolutions de France et de Brabant, 98 Desormes, Charles-Bernard, 628 d’Espagnac (military supplier), 352, 353 ´ eDestutt de Tracy, A.-L.-C., 600, 607; El´ ments d’idéologie, 601–2 determinism, 505–6 Devilliers, Edouard, 562, 563, 572–73 Dewailly, Charles, 434–35, 436–37, 438–41 Deydier, Etienne, 376 d’Herbois, Collot, 347 d’Héricy family, 313 Dhombres, Jean, 502–3n.139 Dictionnaire de médecine, 37–38, 37–38n.56, 39, 42, 53 Diderot, Denis, 37–38, 167, 602, 680 Dietrich, Philippe-Frédéric, baron de, 315 Dionis du Séjour, Pierre-Achille, 8, 59–60, 198, 305, 594 Diophantus, 443–44

INDEX

Directoire des Achats, 352–53 Directory (1795–1799): coup d’état, 474, 532, 561, 608–11; and the Egyptian expedition, 557, 560; and the Italian campaign, 552– 53, 554–55, 556–57; membership of, 552; organization of, 445 Directory of Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, 205–6 disadvantaged people, public responsibility for, 3–4, 48 disciplines, 652–53 Discount Bank (Banque de France), 82–83, 84, 87, 87n.155, 90 disease, 543, 546–47, 596, 599 dissection, 544, 545, 658 District des Mathurins (Paris), 74 Dizé, J. J., 199n.77, 392, 415, 628 Dollond, Peter, 298, 455 Dolomieu, Déodat de, 141, 172, 312–13, 562. See also under Egyptian expedition Dombey, Joseph, 180 Domergue, F. U., 501 d’Orléans, Louis Philippe, duc (Philippe ´ Egalit´ e), 143, 364, 370, 415 Doumerc (military supplier), 352 d’Oyré (army officer), 354–55, 356 Dubois-Aymé, Joseph, 543, 562, 563, 572, 573, 574, 597 Dubreuil, Léon, 604 Duchanoy, Chartes-Fran¸cois, 572, 573 Dufourny, Louis-Pierre (“L’Homme Libre”), 163, 317, 363, 395, 409, 410 Duhamel, Jules-Michel, 327–28 Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis, 390 Duhem, Pierre-Joseph, 294 Dulong, Pierre-Louis, 641, 642 Duméril, André-Constant, 453, 658 Dumouriez, Charles-Fran¸cois: Belgian campaign of, 344, 352, 434; distrust of, 349, 350–51, 365; military successes of, 142, 344, 350–51; and Pache, 353–54; on provisioning of the army, 353; treason/defection of, 143, 145, 146, 148, 344, 357, 384; on war with Austria, 137 Dunkirk-Barcelona survey: field operations, 258, 266–78; halt of, 285; and the metric system’s completion, 460, 462–63n.45, 462–66, 473–77, 477n.67, 478 (fig.), 479; principles/instruments, 250, 251–54, 256– 58, 261–65 (fig.) Duphot, General, 556

729

Dupin, Charles, 321–22, 380, 536, 537, 538, 540, 554, 626, 637; Développements de la géométrie, 510 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre-Samuel, 8, 25, 107, 513; and the Feuillants, 98; and the Jardin des Plantes, 173–74; in the Society of 1789, 79, 80 Duport, Adrien, 97–98 Dupuis, Charles-Fran¸cois, 295 Dupuytren, Guillaume, 450, 549–50, 667, 672 Durand de Maillane (Comité d’Instruction Publique member), 153–55, 158 Dürer, Albrecht, 438 Duris, Pascal, 168n.8 Dutemps, J.-F.-H., 307 Dutertre (artist), 573 Duvernoy, Georges, 658 Duverny (arithmetician), 461 Eckerman and Company, 633 ´ Ecole and Corps des Mines, 446 ´ Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, 635 ´ Ecole Centrale des Arts et Métiers, 530n.186 ´ Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 506, 508; attendance/enrollment at, 524, 527– 28; candidates for, 524, 530; chefs de brigade at, 524, 527; chemistry at, 526; curriculum at, 535; establishment of, 522, 523; faculty of, 523, 527; goals of, 523; influence of, on students, 529; mathematics at, 524–26; opening ceremonies at, 527, 528; physics at, 524, 525, 526, 527; revolutionary courses at, 526, 527, 528. See also ´ Ecole Polytechnique ´ Ecole Centrale du Panthéon, 453 ´ Ecole de l’Artillerie, 528, 535 ´ Ecole de marine, 528 ´ Ecole de Médecine, 544, 549 ´ Ecole de navigation, 528 ´ Ecole des Aérostats, 373 ´ ´ Ecole de Santé (later named Ecoles de Médecine): and the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 494–95; establishment of, 540– 41, 542; goals of, 495; influence of, 494; prestige of, 446; renaming of, 545; revolutionary courses at, 526. See also Faculty of Medicine (France) ´ Ecole des Arts et Métiers, 638 ´ Ecole des Arts et Métiers (Châlons-surMarne), 14

730

INDEX

´ Ecole des ingénieurs de vaisseaux, 528 ´ Ecole des Ingénieurs-Géographes, 481, 486, 528 ´ Ecole des Mines, 41, 128, 311 ´ Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, 446, 521, 522, ´ 524, 528. See also Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics ´ Ecole du Génie, 528, 535 ´ Ecole militaire, 454, 455 ´ Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics ( formerly ´ Ecole des Ponts et Chausées), 522–23 ´ Ecole Normale, 397, 494–520; abolition of, 499–500, 518, 527; classes taught, 496–99; and the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 494–95; creation of, 601; geography at, 512; goals of, 495; influence of, 494; lectures for publication, 502, 502n.138; mathematics at, 498–99; opening session of, 497–98; physics at, 498; political economy at, 498, 505, 512–14; prestige of, 446; professors’ education at, 502–3, 518–19; revolutionary courses at, 526; teachers at, 496–99, 496n.129; teacher training at, 621 ´ Ecole Normale Supérieure, 500, 502–3, 502–3n.139 ´ Ecole Polytechnique, 4–5, 397, 443–44, 520–40; administration of, 532; alumni of, 521; analysis as dominating, 528–29, 534– 38, 676–77; candidates for, 531–32; and the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 494– 95; Conseil de Perfectionnement, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 641; Conseil d’Instruction, 532; and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 637; enrollment at, 532; establishment of, 528; examinations at, 531–34; faculty of, 527, 529–30, 536; fine arts at, 538; goals of, 428, 495, 536; history of, 520–28, 521n; influence of, 494, 521, 540; leadership by, 628; literature at, 538; location of, 521, 539; mathematics/science at, 510, 520–21, 530–31, 533–34, 535–38, 635, 676–77; militarization of, 538–39, 540; Monge’s vs. Laplace’s vision of, 529– 33, 530n.186; prestige/glamour of, 446, 520–21; scholarships at, 539–40; students’ behavior, 538–39, 538n.205; tuition at, 539. ´ See also Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics ´ Ecole Pratique de Dissection, 545 ´ Ecoles Centrales, 500–502, 601. See also secondary schools

´ Ecole Supérieure de Pharmacie, 670–71 education: academic freedom, 113, 120, 619; by area, 129–30; artisans and inventors on, 219; boarding schools, 133, 618; boys’ curriculum, 133–34; Chaptal on, 616–19, 621; Committee of Public Instruction (Paris), 163; Condorcet’s plan for, 41, 112– 24, 120n.30, 125, 127–28, 136–37, 148, 152–55, 617 (see also Comité d’Instruction Publique); of doctors, 40, 40n.59, 41–45, 55–56, 130, 318 (see also clinical medicine); encyclopedic approach to, 123–24; enrollment figures, 132, 133n.50; higher, 117–19, 120, 122, 126–28, 130–31, 134, 164 (see also ´ ´ Ecole Normale; Ecole Polytechnique); history of, 132; humanist, 126, 136; institutes, 115, 117, 120, 122, 220; vs. instruction, 113– 14; in jurisprudence, 130; in Latin/classics, 116–17, 119–20, 134, 307; Lavoisier’s plan, 219–21, 219n.122, 289; liberty as requiring, 41; lycées, 117–19, 120, 122, 220, 619–21; medical schools, 397; on the metric system, 492, 494; military, 126–27, 133; Napoleon on, 619–20; National Institute, 125, 127–28; National Scholars, 120, 120n.30; National Society of Science and the Arts, 120–24, 127, 153–55; old regime’s legacy, 129–36, 133n.50, 148, 163; parish schools, 129–30; in philosophy, 134; primary schools, 114–15, 120, 125, 220; religious, 125, 130; revolutionary courses in munitions fabrication, 395–97, 411–12, 416, 428; scholarships, 132; science as basis for, 112–13, 115–16, 123–24, 126, 134–36, 164, 337–38; of scientists, 112, 135; secondary schools, 115, 120, 125, 131–34, 133n.50, 151, 163, 220; state’s responsibility for, 112– 14; Talleyrand’s plan for, 124–29; teacher qualifications/duties, 115; in theology, 126; tuition, 114, 120, 125, 131; universal/secular, 3–4, 114, 125; universities, 130–31, 134, 163; vocation training, 220. See also Comité d’Instruction Publique Egyptian astrologers, 294 Egyptian expedition, 557–600; airborne units in, 373; Alexandria landing, 551, 560–61; archaeological survey of Egypt, 565, 566–71 (figs.), 572; Battle of the Pyramids, 560; Berthollet’s role in, 561–62, 577–79, 599; Commission des Renseigne´ Moderne de l’Egypte, ´ ments sur l’Etat

INDEX

594–95; and the Commission of Science and Arts, 552–53, 561–63, 565, 579; cultural/modernizing component of, 551, 559–60, 599; Directory’s authorization of, 557, 560; Dolomieu’s role in, 562; engineers/artists in, 562–65, 572–75, 581; evacuation of Egypt, 573; Fourier’s role in, 559, 562–63, 564, 574, 599; Geoffroy’s role in, 561–62, 581–83; as imperialist, 599; influence of, 598, 600; and the Institute of Egypt, 557, 575–77, 575n, 576–77n, 591n.68; Lancret’s role in, 562; Malus’s role in, 560, 599; map of Egypt, 592; Monge’s role in, 557, 561–62, 577, 599; Napoleon’s departure from, 561, 574; naturalists in, 579–82 (see also Description de ´ l’Egypte); Nouet’s role in, 304, 561–62, 593–94, 593n.72; physicians in, 596; rationale for, 558–61; Savigny’s role in, 562, 581–82n.44, 599; secrecy surrounding, 377, 557, 560, 562–63; soldiers in, 575 Egyptology, 564. See also Description de l’E´ gypte elastic surfaces, theory of, 540 elderly people, public responsibility/health care for, 48, 51–52 election/voting procedures, 62–63, 62n.113, 75 Electoral Assembly. See Assembly of Electors e´migrés, 138–39, 314 encyclopedic vs. positivist science, 5–6, 112, 123–24, 544, 694–95 Encyclopédie méthodique, 37–38n.56, 37–39, 42, 87, 103, 389–91, 632–33 Encyclopedists, 144, 547–48 Enfants trouvés hospitals, 50 engineers, training of, 535–36 England: astronomy in, 455; clinical education of doctors in, 45; colonialism of, 559, 599; industrial superiority of, 626, 629, 637; iron/steel in, 391; naval dominance of, 455 Enlightenment: intellectual program of, 444; on naturalistic standards, 238; on physical/natural sciences, 8–10, 516; and the scientific movement, 135–36. See also idéologues Esquerdes, 32 Essonne arsenal, 350, 358, 363 Estates-General. See States-General Estève (administrator), 597

731

Esteveny (artisan), 266, 268, 274 experimental physiology, 180, 548, 640, 653, 656, 662–75, 694 explosive/incendiary cannonballs/shells, 358– 62, 360n.43, 365–69, 373–79 Fabbroni, Ligurian, 466–67, 470, 472 Fabre, Fran¸cois, 359–62, 363, 365–68, 369, 373–75 Fabre d’Eglantine, Philippe Fran¸cois Nazaire, 163–64 Faculty of Medicine (France), 4–5, 14, 53, 207, 640 Faculty of Medicine (Vienna), 42 Fallot (powdermaker), 365, 366–67 Farmers General. See Tax Farmers Faujas de Saint-Fond, B.: as a commissioner of science and arts, 434–37, 438–39; and the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172, 173, 174, 290; at the Museum of Natural History, 176 Ferry, Claude-Joseph, 295 Fersen, Hans Axel, comte de, 96–97 Festival of the Supreme Being, 318, 397 Feuillants (Société des Amis de la Constitution), 97–98, 137, 372 Fèvre, Simon, 562 Finance Committee, 173, 176, 203, 212 Flaugergues, Honoré, 488 Flesselles, Jacques de, 23–24, 35 Florent (bureaucrat), 556–57 Floriot (canonneer and artist), 435 folk medicine, 544–45 Font, Bernard, 151 Fontanes, J. P. L., 501, 622 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 12 Forceville, Mlle. de, 302–3 forensic medicine, 39, 55 Fortin, Jean Nicolas, 204, 290, 425, 461, 470–71, 472 Foucault, Michel, 544; Birth of the Clinic, 42 Fouché, Joseph, 152 Fouchy, Grandjean de, 12 Fougeroux de Bondaroy, A.-D., 186 Foullon, Fran¸cois, 35 Fouquier-Tinville (prosecutor), 325–26, 404 Fourcade, Thomas-Pascal, 311 Fourcroy, Antoine-Fran¸cois de, 149; in the Academy of Science, 189, 210; in the Armaments Section, 388; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209,

732

INDEX

Fourcroy, Antoine-Fran¸cois de (cont.) 219; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 284; on the Committee of Public Safety, 445, 523; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612; on copper, 392–93; and Desault, ´ 542; on the Ecole Centrale des Travaux ´ Publics, 523, 527; on the Ecole de Santé, ´ 540–41; at the Ecole Polytechnique, 533, 538n.205; on electrochemistry, 647; on heat, 679, 688; industrial processes investigated by, 628; on the Jacobins, 445; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 179; and Lavoisier, 320, 323, 324–25; and Leblanc, 415–16; on the Linnaean monument, 170–71; in the literary salon, 213–14; in the Lycée des Arts, 215, 289; at the Museum of Natural History, 176, 183; Museum of Natural History charter drafted by, 175; on pencils, 432, 433; political purges proposed by, 325; politics of, 325; saltpeter lectures by, 395; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; and Volta, 648; on weaponry, 362 Fourcy, Ambroise, 536 Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph, baron de, 3, 451, 496, 499, 528; in the Academy of Science, 691; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612; Description de l’E´ gypte preface by, 559, 564, 574, 598; as Directeur du Bureau de la Statistique, 599n.83; Discours préliminaire, 691; and the Egyptian expedition, 559, 562–63, 564, 574, 599; on Geoffroy, 582; on heat conduction, 6, 537, 540, 654, 690–91, 692, 693–94; in the Institute of Egypt, 575; and Laplace, 691, 693; on machines, theory of, 682; on mathematics, 576n, 644; in the Society of Geography, 598; Théorie analytique de la chaleur, 690, 691 Fox, Robert, 677 Frachot, Benoˆıt, 630 Fragonard, Honoré, 291 Franchet, Charles, 34–35 Franchini, Pietro, 466 La Franciade, 415 Franiske (soldier and artist), 435 Franklin, Benjamin, 229, 679 Frécine, Augustin, 281n.112, 404–5, 413, 436–37, 438, 440 Freemasons, 14–15, 213 free trade vs. protectionism, 513, 625

French Revolution: vs. the American Revolution, 336; and the Arsenal, 29–36, 29n.47; Bastille Day, 23–24, 30–32, 146, 149–50, 299; Champ-de-Mars massacre, 96, 98–99, 315; civic militia created/ mobilized, 22–24; committees’ role in, generally, 36–37 (see also Constituent Assembly); Condorcet on, 336–37; and distrust of government, 73; e´migrés’ plots against, 138–39; events vs. prestige of participants, 2–3; and the French Revolutionary Wars, 138–39, 142–43; issues/ influence of, 1, 3–4; journées, 139, 146; and liberty vs. equality/fraternity, 8–9; Louis XVI dethroned, 96; Louis XVI orders troop movements, 22; Louis XVI removes troops, 24; Louis XVI’s death, 142, 281, 347; and medical reform, 42–43; mob suspicion/violence, 30–35, 102, 139, 140– 41 (see also Terror); and Necker’s dismissal, 23, 31; political setting of, 136–40; popular support of desertions, 22; prison inmates massacred during, 141, 181; and Roman history, 135–36; royal family imprisoned in the Tuileries, 68, 71, 96, 266; royal family’s attempted flight, 96–98, 97n, 137, 317; and the sans-culottes, 140– 41, 145–46, 366; and science, overview of, 2; significance for modernity, 547–48; and social reform, 47–48; Tuileries invaded, 139, 140, 266, 366. See also Convention French Revolutionary Wars, 138–39, 142–43, 267–68, 328; bread shortages during, 381; British blockade French ports, 381, 385; Committee of Public Safety during, 357– 58, 381–82; Custine’s Rhineland campaign, 344, 351; declaration of war, 381– 82; deserters during, 381; Dumouriez’s Belgian campaign, 344, 352, 434; effects of wartime, 444; inventions used in, 339, 428–33, 444 (see also gunpowder; saltpeter; and specific inventions); Meusnier’s Mainz campaign, 354, 355–56; Ministry of the Navy during, 344–45; natural history/ artwork conquests, 433–44, 442n.206, 443n.210, 451; outbreak of, 343; price rises during, 381, 423; provisioning of the army, 352–54; victories in, 381, 400, 439. See also mobilization of scientists; Monge, Gaspard: connection of; munitions and guns; weaponry

INDEX

Fresnel, Augustin Jean, 2, 451, 644; on light waves, 5, 540, 683, 685–86, 694; on refraction, 688 Fulton, Robert, 633 Gadbled, Christophe, 135 Gail, J.-B., 307, 310 Gaillard, Gabriel-Henri, 17 Gaillon, Antoine Vion de, 65 Gallot, Jean-Gabriel, 53, 54, 55 Galvani, Luigi, 647 galvanism (animal electricity), 646–47, 648, 676 Garat, Dominique-Joseph, 326, 332; and Cabanis, 607; on calendar reform, 297; Commission d’Instruction Publique di´ rected by, 495–96; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498; as an idéologue, 495, 601; on the Observatory of Paris, 300–301 gardens, expropriation of, 290, 292, 437 Garnett, Thomas, 646 Garnier, abbé, 306 Garnier, J.-G., 483 Gassendi, Jean-Jacques, 375, 377–78 Gattey, Etienne-Fran¸cois, 460 Gay-Lussac, Joseph-Louis, 2, 628, 639, 641, 642, 643, 682–83 Gayvernon, S., 539 Gegérando, Joseph-Marie, 601–2 General Hospital, 50 General Regulation for the Commune of Paris, 77–78 General Tax Farm. See Tax Farmers Gensonné (Constitutional Committee member), 147–48 geodesy, 228, 239–40, 257, 461, 472, 475–77, 486 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne, 2; on the African hornbill, 177–78; on anatomy, 583; on comparative anatomy, 656; and Cuvier, 452–53, 454, 656, 657–58; Description de l’E´ gypte plates by, 579–80; and the Egyptian expedition, 561–62, 581–83; on fish, 582–83; Fourier on, 582; and Haüy, 181–82, 312; in the Institute of Egypt, 580, 580n.40; at the Jardin des Plantes, 181; and Magendie, 672; at the Natural History Gallery, 182; “Observations sur l’affection mutuelle de quelques animaux,” 583; personality of, 582; Philosophie anatomique, 583, 585, 657, 659, 660, 661–

733

62; specimen collections of, 581; on taxonomy, 659; during the Terror, 312; on ultimate causes, 582. See also under Egyptian expedition Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Isidore, 579, 584, 658 geometry: descriptive, 5, 508–10, 522, 525– 26, 530, 535–38; importance of, 510 Gérard, Alexandre, 561 Gergonne, Joseph-Diez: Annales de mathématique pure et appliquée, 510 Germain, Sophie, 451, 537, 540, 644, 687, 693, 694 Gibert (musician), 343 Gilbert, Davies, 485 Ginguené, Pierre-Louis, 326, 496, 601 Girard, Pierre-Simon, 572, 597 Girondists, 3, 4; and Condorcet, 147; and the Convention, 140–46; and the Encyclopedists, 144; Jacobins’ expulsion of, 145, 152, 216, 286–87, 346, 366; and Louis XVI, 139; vs. the Montagnards, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145–46, 148 Gislain (Treasury clerk), 95 Glaësner (mechanic), 425 Gmelin, J. F., 178 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 168, 356, 656 Golitsyn, Dimitrie Augustine, count, 107 Gonzales, José, 476 Gossuin (commissioner), 354 Gournay, Vincent de, 229 Gouvion de Saint-Cyr, Laurent, 355 Grand Arsenal. See Arsenal Granger, G.-G., 62n.114 Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 694 Green, George, 689 Greenwich Observatory, 237 Grégoire, Henri: in the Assembly, 20, 24; background/politics of, 150–51; and the Bureau des Longitudes, 454–55; and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 150; on the Comité de Salubrité, 52; in the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 149, 151; on the Commission of Public Instruction, 162; on the Commission Temporaire des Arts, 443; Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers founded by, 635, 636; on genius, 222; on the Linnaean monument, 171; on the metric system, 151, 223, 279; on natural history/artwork conquests, 443; revolutionary career of, 150–51; in the Société des Amis des Noirs, 150

734

INDEX

Gregorian Calendar, 298 Grenelle, 404–5, 406, 417, 420 Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 432 Gribeauval, J.-B., vicomte de, 424 Grocers (guild), 227–28 Grouchy, Sophie de (Madame de Condorcet), 326, 330, 331 Grouvelle, Philippe A., 80 ´ Guadet, Elie, 139, 330–31 Guérolt, P. C. L., 501 guilds, 227–28 Guilhermy (deputy), 110 Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, 17, 20, 24, 48, 52– 55, 54n.88 guillotine, 54, 54n.88, 287, 303, 330 gunpowder, 32–36, 211–12; Berthollet’s experiments in, 339, 358, 362–63, 365–66, 367–68; centrifuge technique for, 417–18, 420; corning of, 419; lectures on, 396; revolutionary course on, 396, 416, 428; round, 418–20, 428; Swiss, 418, 419; technology of, 420–21. See also Arsenal; saltpeter; weaponry Gunpowder Administration, 400–401, 402 guns, 421–23, 424–26, 444 Guyton de Morveau, Louis-Bernard, 139; in the Academy of Science, 103; and the Armaments Section, 388; on arsenals/ armaments, 427; ballooning by, 103, 232, 371; on balloons, 372; on the calendar, 295; career of, 102–3; chemical language reformed by, 234; as a chemist, 103; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111; on the Committee of Public Safety, 146, 357–58, 381, 445 (see also under weaponry); in the Convention, 149; as Côte d’Or ´ representative, 104; at the Ecole des Ponts ´ et Chaussées, 532; at the Ecole Polytechnique, 527, 533; on electrochemistry, ´ emens de chymie, 103; gunpowder 647; El´ lectures by, 396, 416; industrial processes investigated by, 628; and Lavoisier, 103–4, 324; legal experience of, 104; in the Legislative Assembly, 104; Méthode de nomenclature chimique, 104; politics of, 104; and Prieur, 232–33, 383; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630, 632, 634; during the Terror, 311, 324; weapons programs of (see under weaponry)

Hachette, Nicolas, 510–11, 527, 530, 536, 537, 630 haemodynamometer, 673 Haller, Albrecht von, 549, 668 Halley’s Comet, 251 Halvétius, Madame, 514 Hanriot, Thomas, 146 Hassenfratz, Jean-Henri, 80, 146, 160; Arms Manufacture coordinated by, 388; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 219; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; in the Commune of 10 August, 344; on deserters, 360–61; on education, 219; and Fabre, 360–61; and the Girondist expulsion, 346, 366; on gunmaking, 422, 425; on iron, 390; lectures on munitions fabrication, 396; on the Linnaean monument, 171; in the Lycée des Arts, 215, 289; in Monge’s connection, 340, 342, 346; in the Société d’Annales de Chimie, 207; in the Société populaire du Luxembourg, 342–43; teaching skills of, 527; and Vicq d’Azyr, 317 Hautpoix (instrument maker), 304 Haüy, René-Just, 5, 172, 189; on Aepinus, 511, 511n.157; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; on Coulomb, 511; on crystallography, 511, 679; on den´ sity of water, 252, 280–81; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 511; and Geoffroy, 181–82, 312; on Lavoisier, 320; in the Légion d’Honneur, 511; on the metric system, 284, 462n.44, 467, 472; Traité élémentaire de physique, 511, 676 health care, 3–4, 14–15, 37, 39–40, 45–46, 51–52, 56. See also New Plan for Medicine Health Committee, 52–56, 53n.86 heat, 679, 690–91 Héban (foundry owner), 391–92 Hébert, Jacques René, 215, 287, 348; Père Duchesne edited by, 347 Hébertists, 347–48 Heidegger, Martin, 166 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 693 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 602–3, 606 Helvétius, Madame, 326, 447–48, 495, 601, 604 Hérault de Sechelles, Jean, 317 Herschel, Sir William, 250, 299 Hippocrates, 41, 607 Hippocratic tradition, 543

INDEX

Hobbes, Thomas, 606 Hoche (army commander), 373 Hood, Samuel, 1st viscount Hood, 381 Hôpital de la Charité (Charenton), 51n.80 Horowitz, Zalkind, 310 Hôtel de Mortagne (Paris), 635–36 Hôtel-Dieu (later named Hospice d’Humanité), 4–5, 11; conversion of, into a teaching hospital, 540, 541–42; investigations of, 49; patients per bed at, 51; physiology at, 640, 663; training of surgeons at, 40 Humboldt, Alexander von, 641–42, 643, 675 Hume, David, 86 Hunter, John, 546, 547, 549 Hunter, William, 546, 547, 549 Huygens, Christiaan, 678, 679, 683, 684, 686 idéologues, 447–48, 600–611, 619 Imperial University, 621–22, 640 incendiaries. See explosive/incendiary cannonballs/shells Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 2 Institut de France (formerly Institut National des Sciences et Arts; Louvre): and the Academy of Science, 448–49; attendance, 448; Commission on the Metric System, 466; Condorcet’s plan as basis for, 150; on the Congress on the Metric System, 464; constitutional foundation of, 447; creation of, 41; Fine Arts (Third Class), 448, 603, 610–11; Grégoire’s influence on, 151; and the idéologues, 447–48, 600–601; as “Living Encyclopedia,” 608; Mazarin palace housing, 446–47; membership in, 448, 601; metric system used by, 487–88; Moral and Political Science (Second Class), 447–48, 600–601, 603, 610, 611; opening of, 451; papers read before/judge by, 451; and the patent system, 448; Physical and Mathematical Sciences (First Class), 447, 448, 600–601, 611; physiology at, 640; prestige of, 446–47; 447n, 450–51; prizes awarded by, 448, 451, 640, 644, 648, 650, 684–87, 691, 694; science as displacing letters at, 444, 447; technological advice by, 209 Institute of Egypt, 557, 575–77, 575n, 576– 77n, 591n.68 institutionalization of French science, 445– 46. See also specific schools and institutions

735

Institut National des Sciences et Arts. See Institut de France interns, medical, 545, 549 inventions: reported in the Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 633–34; wartime, 339, 428–33, 444 (see also gunpowder; saltpeter; and specific inventions). See also Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale inventors. See artisans and inventors Istituto Nazionale della Repubblica Romana, 557 Italian campaign, 373, 551, 552n.3 Jacobin clubs, 14–15, 109, 138, 287 Jacobins: on exact vs. natural sciences, 640; and the Girondists, 3, 145, 152, 216, 286– 87, 346, 366; on Louis XVI’s flight, 97, 98; and the Montagnards, 3, 139, 145, 146; republicanism of, 145; and the Thermidoreans, 4 Jacobin Society, 138 Jacotin, Pierre, 592, 593n.72, 594–95, 598, 599 Jacotot, Joseph, 400, 401 Janety, MM., 469 Jardin des Plantes, 128; botanical gardens expropriated for, 290, 292; menagerie at, 180–81; reorganization proposed, 166, 167, 171–75, 177, 178–80, 182–83. See also Museum of Natural History Jardin du Roi, 41, 173 Jars, Gabriel, 391 Jeannetty (chemist), 392n.110 Jeaurat, E.-S., 298 Jecker (instrument maker), 461 Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 326, 426, 602 Jewelers (guild), 227–28 Jolivet, Jean-Baptiste, 247 Jollois, Prosper, 529, 562–63, 572, 573 Jomard, Edme, 529, 562, 573, 597, 598 Joule, James Prescott, 693 Jourdan (army commander), 373, 384, 434, 552 Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent de, 2, 5; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67; as a city councilor, 68; in the Commune of Paris, 179; Department of Hospitals headed by, 50–51, 50–51n.80; Genera plantarum, 7, 661; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172, 179; mesmerism investigated by, 50; at the

736

INDEX

Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent de (cont.) Museum of Natural History, 176, 183; natural classification system of, 7, 170; on strychnine, 670; during the Terror, 311 Keel, Othmar, 546, 547, 549, 665 Kellermann, Fran¸cois Etienne Christophe, duke of Valmy, 142 Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord, 689 Ker, marquis de, 193 Kersaint, Armand de, 80, 345 Kielmeyer, Friedrich, 452 kilogram, definition/value of, 467–69, 470–74 Klaproth, Martin Heinrich, 628 Kléber, Jean Baptiste, 354, 560, 561, 573, 574, 594 Klingenthal (Alsace), 391 Kostheim (Prussia), 355 Kotchoubei, Viktor, 107 Kuhn, Thomas S., 653 Kutch (instrument maker), 461 La Billarderie, Auguste-Charles-César Flahault, marquis de, 172–73, 174, 175, 177, 178 La Billardière, Jacques Julien Houteu de, 552–53 labor unrest, 404–5, 413, 422–24, 427 Lacaille, Nicolas Louis de, 135, 236, 245, 269, 475 Lacepède, Bernard de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de: on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 111, 179; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612; and Delambre and Méchain, 272; on Geoffroy’s vertebrate collection, 581; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172, 178–79; in the Legislative Assembly, 101, 179; on the Linnaean monument, 170–71; at the Museum of Natural History, 176; Museum of Natural History charter drafted by, 175; in the Society of 1789, 79; during the Terror, 312; writings by, 101 Laclos, Choderlos de: arrest/release of, 365, 367, 370; on Carnot, Lazare, 364; in the Commune of 10 August, 344; death of, 370; De l’Education des Femmes, 364; and Dumouriez, 349; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 363–64; military career of, 364–65; in Monge’s connection, 340, 344; on muriate

powder/explosive cannonballs, 358, 363, 365, 367, 374 (see also under weaponry); politics of, 364 La Condamine, Charles Marie de, 227, 228, 234 Lacroix, Sylvestre, 13, 501, 503, 533, 534, 537, 595–96 Lacuée, Gérard, 539 Laënnec, Théophile, 543, 549–50 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul, marquis de, 24, 35; and the Champ-de-Mars massacre, 99, 315; as commander of the National Guard, 67–68, 72, 73; at the Condorcet salon, 326; defection of, 145; early Revolution championed by, 235; Feuillants founded by, 98; popularity of, 67, 98; and the royal family’s attempted flight, 96, 97, 98; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; in the Society of 1789, 79 La Fère, 32, 359–60, 365, 367–68 Lafitte (examiner), 362 Laget-Bardelin, M.-A., 307 Lagrange, Joseph Louis, 2, 5; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 323; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455–56; on the calendar, 295, 297; on comets, 251; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; depression of, 506; at the ´ Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 506, ´ 527, 528; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, ´ 498, 499, 502n.138, 506–7; at the Ecole Polytechnique, 508, 534; and Germain, 687; on Lavoisier, 325–26; as a mathematician, 506–7, 533, 537, 695; Mécanique analytique, 506, 507–8, 519, 665; on the metric system, 238, 281–82, 462n.44, 467; on Newton, 611; Nouvelles Le¸cons sur le calcul des fonctions, 508; retirement of, from teaching, 533; at the Royal Artillery School, 506; Théorie des fonctions analytiques, 507 LaHarpe, Jean Fran¸cois de, 307, 496–97, 498 Lakanal, Joseph: and the Academy of Science, 184; and the Bureau des Longitudes, 454; and Cassini, 302; and the Collège de France, 309; in the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 149, 151, 159–60, 182, 454, 500; on the Commission of Public Instruction, ´ 162; in the Convention, 151; at the Ecole

INDEX

Normale, 497–98; exile of, 151n.72; and the Jardin des Plantes’ reorganization, 182–83; and Lavoisier, 215–16; memoirs of, 151, 151n.72; as a priest, 151; on the telegraph, 429–31 Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Lefran¸cais de, 106; in the Academy of Science, 189; Bibliographie astronomique, 305; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455–56; on the calendar, 297; at the Collège de France, 306, 309– 11; Connaissance des temps edited by, 305– 6; Dunkirk-Barcelona survey field opera´ tions, 269, 270–71; at the Ecole Militaire, 304; Marat’s criticism of, 192; and Méchain, 251; as Paris Observatory director, 456; on tides, 305; on weights/ measures, 229n.16 Lallemand, Marie, 543 Lamarck, Jean Chevalier de, 2, 5; in the Academy of Science, 171; background of, 171–72; on the Commission Temporaire des Arts, 292; on comparative anatomy, 656, 662; and Cuvier, 656–57; Flore fran¸caise, 171; on Gmelin, 178; Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, 656– 57, 659, 660; on invertebrate zoology, 176–77, 177n.24, 179, 179n.30, 181; at the Jardin des Plantes, 181, 290; on life processes, 6; on Linnaean classification, 170; on the Linnaean monument, 170–71; Marat’s criticism of, 194; at the Museum of Natural History, 176–77; Newtonianism of, 680; Philosophie zoologique, 659, 666–67; reputation of, 179; as Royal Botanist and Keeper of the Herbarium, 172, 174; in the Society of 1789, 79; Système des animaux sans vertèbres, 662; on theory vs. observation, 659; on the transformation of species, 179, 179n.31, 659–60 Lambert, Jean-Fran¸cois, 47 ´ Lamblardie, Jacques-Elie, 522, 532 Lameth, Alexandre de, 97–98 Lamétherie, Fran¸cois de, 169, 171 La Millière, A. L. de, 47 Lancret, Michel-Ange, 529, 537, 562, 564– 65, 573, 597, 598 Landais, Rear-Admiral, 345, 363 land registry, 480–81, 486, 486n.95 land taxes, 245–46, 309–10, 486. See also cadastre language, scientific, 333–34

737

Lanthenas, Fran¸cois, 152, 153, 155, 171 Lanz, Joseph, 483 La Paille, 613 Laplace, General marquis de, 494, 612 Laplace, Pierre Simon, marquis de, 2, 5; and Arago, 686; astronomy proposals of, 454; Bayesian analysis by, 59–60; and Berthollet, 533, 641, 644–45, 677; and Bouvard, 457; Brissot on, 312; and the Bureau des Longitudes, 454, 455–56; on the calendar, 297, 298; calorimetry study founded by, 13; on capillary action, 683; and Condorcet, 60; death of, 494; demography by, 59–60, 695; on descriptive geometry, 510; on determinism, 505–6; on ecliptic incli´ nation, 7, 186; at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 529–30, 530n.186; at the ´ Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498–99, 503, ´ 504–6, 510; at the Ecole Polytechnique, 529–33, 530n.186; education of, 135; Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 504, 505; as examiner, 530–31, 533; Exposition du système du monde, 312, 454, 503–4, 505; and Fourier, 691; Jupiter/Saturn studies by, 250, 505; Laplace’s functions, 239; and Magendie, 673; Marat’s criticism of, 193, 311; as a mathematician, 537, 644; Mécanique céleste, 457, 486–87, 502n.138, 677, 678, 682–83; Mémoire sur la chaleur, 641, 681; on the metric system, 229, 238, 239, 239n.43, 240, 241–42, 247–48, 249, 486– 87; on the metric system, completion of work, 462n.44, 467, 474, 477; as Minister of the Interior, 532, 533; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 532, 538; Newtonianism of, 680–81; on probability, 504–5, 695; protégés of, 641–43, 644, 677, 693; quadrant used by, 488; on refraction, 684; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; in the Société Philomathique, 289; and the Society of Arcueil, 640, 641, 643, 677; on sound, 683; on spheroidal attraction, 7, 680–81, 687– 88, 689; during the Terror, 311–12; Théorie analytique des probabilités, 504; on tides, 305; Traité de mécanique céleste, 312, 504; on weaponry, 375–76, 380 La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, LouisAlexandre, duc de, 8; Academy of Science recommendations by, 186–87; civic work of, 11; at the Condorcet salon, 326; and

738

INDEX

La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, LouisAlexandre, duc de (cont.) the Constituent Assembly, 24; death of, 10, 141, 211, 313; early Revolution championed by, 235; feudal rights renounced by, 186; and the Feuillants, 98; on the Health Committee, 52; and Lavoisier, 13–14; in the literary salon, 213; reputation of, as a scientist, 14; in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, 177; in the Society of 1789, 79, 80; in the States-General, 22 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, F.-A.-F., duc de, 11, 634; and the Constituent Assembly, 24; and Cousin, 68; and the Feuillants, 98; hospitals investigated by, 49– 50; poverty relief work of, 14, 47–49, 51, 51n.81, 51n.83, 52; reputation of, as a scientist, 14; in the Society of 1789, 79 Larrey, Dominique-Jean, 596, 597, 599, 675 La Salle, comte de, 34, 35 Lasteyrie, Charles-Philippe de, 629 Latour-Maubourg, Charles César de Fay, marquis de, 97n Latreille, Pierre-André, 313, 313n.67, 586; Le Règne animal, 313, 657, 658, 660, 661–62 Laugier, André, 324 Launay, Bernard René Jourdan, marquis de, 23–24, 31–32, 35 Laurent, Claude-Hilaire, 434–35 La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de. See Lacepède, Bernard de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 2, 4, 8; on the Academy of Science, 216–19; agricultural/ tax reforms by, 26–27, 28–29; arrest/ imprisonment of, 213, 221, 284, 318–22, 323; in the Assembly of Notables, 25–26, 64; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70; assignat fabrication work of, 212– 13; in the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 209, 213, 219; on the calendar, 295; calorimetry study founded by, 13; on chemistry, 5, 95, 601, 679, 695; civic work of, 11; on combustion, 13; on the corvée, 28–29; death of, 10, 305, 322– 23; defense of, 323–26; and Delambre, 283; De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France, 91–92n.166, 91–94; De l’état des finances en France au 1er janvier 1792, 93; as Discount Bank board president, 82–83, 87, 90, 94, 95; economic/social reforms by, 26; and the Feuillants, 98; General

Tax Farm run by, 28, 36, 88, 94, 318–19; gunpowder/saltpeter refining by, 212; and Guyton, 103–4, 324; and the Health Committee, 53–54; industrial processes investigated by, 628; and Lakanal, 215–16; and La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, 13–14; liberalism of, 28; in the literary salon, 213; in the Lycée des Arts, 213, 214–15, 289; Marat’s criticism of, 193–94, 311; Mémoire sur la chaleur, 641; on the metric system, 229, 242–43, 284, 472; as munitions administrator, 13, 14, 29–31, 33–36, 83, 94, 96, 211–12, 388; on the national debt, 82– 83, 84–87, 86n, 87n.155, 93; oxidation studies of, 95; on physiology of respiration, 13; politics of, 81–87, 91–94; on provincial assemblies, 25, 27, 64; on pyrolysis of water, 13; “Réflexions sur les assignats,” 84–86, 87, 87n.155; Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique, 219–21, 219n.122, 289; reputation/popularity of, 94–96, 318; saltpeter experiments of, 399, 406–10, 408n.140, 413; “Second mémoire sur la transpiration,” 95, 95n.172; on slavery, 36; in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, 177; in the Société Philomathique, 289; in the Society of 1789, 79, 84–85; as StatesGeneral alternate member, 27–28; survey instruments calibrated by, 253; Traité élémentaire de la chimie, 7, 519; Treasury work of, 88, 89–90, 93, 94, 95–96, 211; water experiments of, 235, 252, 280–81, 371; wealth/status of, 13, 94 Lavoisier, Madame, 319 Law of Suspects, 287 Leblanc, Nicolas, 623; in the chemical industry, 628; death of, 415; in the Point Central des Arts et Métiers, 204; in the Régie des Poudres, 399, 415; saltconversion process of, 199, 199n.77, 388, 414–16 LeBlond, Michel, 434–35, 436–37, 438–41 Lebrun, Charles-Fran¸cois, 173, 188 Lebrun, Pierre, 340, 358–59 Le Canu, Pierre, 135 Le Chapelier law (1791), 424, 623 Le Creusot, 627 Ledoux, Nicolas, 11 Le Faucheux, J. P. (elder), 31, 34–35, 409 Le Faucheux, J. P. A. (younger), 35, 323, 409 Lefebvre de Villebrune, J.-B., 307

INDEX

Lefèvre-Gineau, Louis, 306–7; in the Assembly of Electors, 69; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 69; at the Collège de France, 69; kilogram’s value determined by, 69–70; on the metric system, 467, 470–73, 475 Legallois, Julien, 664–65, 667 Legendre, Adrien-Marie, 2, 250, 251, 257, 460–61, 468, 533 Legislative Assembly: Condorcet’s educational proposal to, 41, 112–24, 120n.30, 125, 127–28, 136–37, 148; education plan of (see Comité d’Instruction Publique); on finances, 95; formation of, 93; scientists in, 101–10; on war with Austria, 95 Le Gressier, 633 Lelièvre (pharmacist), 393–94 Le Monnier, Charles, 306–7 Lenoir, Etienne, 170–71, 204, 252–53, 258, 268–69, 425, 461, 469, 487 Le Peletier, Félix, 162 LePeletier, Louis-Michel, 159, 161–63, 219 Le Père, J.-M., 594–95 LeRoi, L.-B., 193 Leroy, Jean-Baptiste, 229, 537, 636 Lesch, John, 667 Lespinasse, Augustin, 376–77 Lespinasse, Julie de, 66, 193, 329 Lesquivit (carpentry foreman), 376 Le Tort (gunpowder administrator), 31 Le Tourneur, Etienne-Fran¸cois, 374–75 Levesque, Charles, 307, 308, 309n.55, 310 Lhomond (textile manufacturer), 207 Liancourt. See La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, F.-A.-F., duc de Liège (Belgium), 422–23, 436–37, 439, 443 light: polarization of, 540, 643, 683–84, 685; refraction of, 540, 683–84, 694. See also wave theory of light Linnaean Society of London, 168, 170 Linnaeus, Carolus, 168, 170–71, 175, 586; Systeme Naturae, 178. See also classification/taxonomy Liouville, Joseph, 59 Locke, John, 134, 606 locksmiths, 424–25 logarithms, 482–85, 482n.82 Loménie de Brienne, E.-C. de, 25, 88–89 longitudes. See Bureau des Longitudes Loudet, P.-S., 307 Louis, Antoine, 53–54, 54n.88

739

Louis XVI, king of France: and the Assembly of Notables, 25; Bailly on, 71; and the Brissotins, 145; on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 82; Comité d’Instruction Publique on disposition of, 158; death of, 142, 281, 347; debate over disposition of, 142, 147, 152, 281; denunciation of, drafted by Condorcet, 140; dethroned, 96; on the French Revolutionary Wars, 138; and the Girondists, 139; and the Jardin des Plantes, 179; on Lavoisier, 96; and Necker, 23, 24, 31; and the States-General, 7, 15–16, 21–22, 29; troop movements ordered by, 22; troops removed by, 24. See also royal family Louis XVII, titular king of France, 143 Louis XVIII, king of France, 184 l’Ouverture, Toussaint, 381 Louvre, 41, 204, 204n.89, 554–55 Loysel (deputy), 281n.112 Lucier, Procurator-General, 268 Luckner, Nicolas, baron de, 364 Lycée de la rue de Valois, 213–14, 325 Lycée des Arts, 213–15, 215n.111, 219, 289, 323 lycées, 117–19, 120, 122, 220, 619–21 Lyons, 32, 288; rebellion in, 381, 386, 399 Macloude, John, 207 Macquer, Pierre Joseph, 103, 106 Magendie, Fran¸cois, 2; in the Academy of Science, 674; “L’action des artères sur la circulation,” 672; Bell-Magendie Law, 674; and Bichat, 543, 667; and Biot, 672; at the Bureau central des hospices de Paris, 673; at the Collège de France, 675; and Cuvier, 672–73; on drugs, 671–72; on experimental physiology, 656, 667–70, 668n.33, 672–75; at the Faculty of Medicine, 672; on the functioning of organisms, 6; and Geoffroy, 672; influence of, 675; at the Institut de France, 670, 672, 675; Journal de physiologie expérimentale et pathologique launched by, 674; Journal de physiologie expérimentale of, 450; and Laplace, 673; lectures by, 549–50; medical practice of, 672, 673; “Organes propres aux oiseaux et aux réptiles,” 672; Précis élémentaire de physiologie, 672, 675; “Quelques idées générales sur les phénomènes particuliers aux corps vivans,” 668; reputation of, 673; on upas tieuté, 670

740

INDEX

Maggiolo, Louis, 129 Mairan, Jean-Jacques Dortous de, 227 Malebranche, Nicolas, 134 Malherbe (chemical manufacturer), 414, 628 Malthus, T. R., 602 Malus (civilian commissary), 352, 353, 354 Malus, Etienne Louis, 5–6, 451; death of, 684; on differential equations, 577n.33; at ´ the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 524, 529; and the Egyptian expedition, 560, 599; on light refraction, 540, 683–84, 694; on optics, 682; on polarization, 540, 643, 683–84; in the Society of Arcueil, 641, 642, 643, 677; Traité d’optique, 510, 684. See also under Egyptian expedition Mamelukes, 558–59, 560, 597 Mandelbaum, Jonathan, 184n Mantegna, Andrea, 438 Manufacture Extraordinaire d’Armes, 421, 422–23, 424, 426–27 map of France, 228, 245, 246, 247–48, 298, 303–4, 462, 481–82, 592–93. See also under metric system; metric system, completion of Marais (Plain), 138, 153, 289 Marat, Jean Paul, 3, 95, 148; Academy of Science criticized by, 190–92, 194; L’Ami du peuple, 95, 98, 191; Les charlatans modernes, 191–92; on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 155; in the Commune of Paris, 140; and Condorcet, 147; death of, 149, 152, 162, 216; Jacobinism of, 145; Mémoires académiques, 191; Newton’s Opticks translated by, 191; scientists criticized by, 192–94, 311 Marcel, Jean-Joseph, 576 Marcoz (mathematics teacher), 330 Marie Antoinette, queen of France, 14, 96, 138, 316. See also royal family Marigny, General, 354 Marmont, Louis de, 380 Marmontel, Jean-Fran¸cois, 17 Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando, 41 Mascheroni, Lorenzo, 466, 469, 470; Geometria del Compasso, 467 Maskelyne, Nevil, 455 Mason, George, 9 Masuyer, Claude-Louis, 154–55 mathematical physics, 675–94; acoustics, 686–87; as a discipline, 653, 676; and electricity, 649–50; electrodynamics, 647,

689–90; electromagnetism, 6, 650, 687– 89; emergence of, 627–28, 640; heat, 679, 690–91; as a movement, 644; and Newtonianism, 677–81, 689; optics, 679, 683– 86; and rational mechanics, 627–28; reputation of, 689; thermodynamics, 692; work/energy, 692–94 mathematics: abstraction/rigor/generality in, progress toward, 538; analysis, 59–60, 508, 536–38; branches of, 676; calculus, 678, 695; descriptive geometry, 5, 508–10, 522, 525–26, 530, 535–38; geometry’s importance, 510; integration, 59; knowledge/ truth in, 61; mathematical geophysics, 305; professionalization of, 653; social science applications of, 59–60; trigonometric functions, 247–48, 257, 482–85, 482n.82, 487. See also probability Mathiez, Albert, 444; La Révolution fran¸caise, 381 Matthieu, Claude-Louis, 479 Maudslay, Henry, 695 Mauduit, A.-R., 306–7, 308, 309n.55, 310 Mayer, Julius Robert von, 693 Méchain, André: on the Academy of Science, 190; arrest of, 266, 273, 306; astronomical studies of, 274–75; background of, 251; and Borda, 273–74; in the Bureau des Longitudes, 455–56; on comets, 251; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; death of, 275, 477; Delambre on, 275–76, 276n.96; DunkirkBarcelona survey, resumption of, 460, 463–66, 476–77; Dunkirk-Barcelona survey by, 250, 251, 256–57; DunkirkBarcelona survey field operations, 258, 266–67, 268, 273–76, 276n.96, 279, 475; injuries suffered by, 267–68, 273, 276; and Lavoisier, 273–74, 273–74n; meridian survey by, 240; on the metric system, 462n.44; on metric system subcommission, 469 Méchain, Jérome, 561 Méchain, Madame, 465 Medical Faculty of Montpellier, 135 medical science, 36–56; auscultation, 547; classificatory approach to, 38–39; clinical medicine, 40, 40n.59, 41–45, 55–56, 495, 540–50; Colleges of Medicine established, 44, 55; conserving vs. restoring health, as goals of, 39, 41; and the consular law of

INDEX

1803, 51; cost of drugs, 46; country doctors’ training, 44–45, 55; Department of Hospitals, 50–51n.80; diagnosis, 547; Dictionnaire de médecine, 37–38, 37–38n.56, 39, 42, 53; dissection, 544, 545; doctors’ availability to the population, 45–46, 56; encyclopedic vs. positivist approach to, 544; experimental physiology, 548, 640; forensic medicine, 39, 55; health care, public responsibility for, 40, 48, 56; hospices, 46; hygiene, aspects of, 39; investigations of hospitals, 49–51, 50–51n.80; licensing, 46, 545; medical jurisprudence, 39; midwifery, 46–47; military/naval medicine, 55; modernization of, 548–49 (see also New Plan for Medicine); vs. other sciences, 39; pathology, 39, 543, 546–47, 549; percussion, 547; pharmacy as a branch of, 41; politics of reform, 42–43, 51; poor people, health care for, 45–46, 51–52; procès-verbal in, 43; surgeons vs. doctors, 40, 54, 544, 545; and topography, 596. See also Royal Society of Medicine Mediterranean–Red Sea Canal, 563, 593 Mégnié, Pierre-Bernard (“Mégnié le Jeune”), 425–26 Mémoires (Institut de France), 450, 488 Menou (commander in Egypt), 561 Mentelle, Edme, 496–97, 498, 502, 512 Mercers (guild), 227–28 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 152 Mercklein (instrument maker), 204, 461 meridian: measurements checked by subcommissions, 468–70; metric system based on, 223, 233, 236, 239–42, 244–45, 248, 280; and the metric system’s completion, 460, 462–63n.45, 462–66, 473–77, 477n.67, 478 (fig.), 479; Paris survey, 261–65 (figs.); surveying principles, 254– 56, 254 (fig.), 257 (see also DunkirkBarcelona survey) Merlin de Thionville (deputy), 354–55 Mertrud, A.-L., 171, 172, 176 mesmerism, 11, 166 Messier, Charles, 297, 304 metric system, 223–85, 225n.4; Abeille and Tillet on, 229–32, 243; and the Academy of Science, 237–38, 242, 242n.49, 243–44, 243n.58, 279–82; acceptance of/resistance to, 487–94, 494n.123; adulteration of, 491; vs. American system, 224–25, 281, 494;

741

Arbogast on, 279–80, 282–83; background, 223–34, 229n.16 (see also weights/ measures); Borda on, 238, 281–82, 284; British participation in, 237, 242; and the cadastre, 245–48, 280, 480–86, 482n.82, 486n.95; for coinage, 234, 243–44, 243n.58, 280–81; and the Comité d’Instruction Publique, 279–80, 282–83; Commission on Weights and Measures, 277–78, 282; and the Committee on Agriculture and Commerce, 229–30, 237, 242; Condorcet on, 229–30, 235, 236–38, 240–41, 243; criticism of, 224–25, 230–31; definition/value of the meter, 224, 239n.42, 248–49, 282–85; encyclopedic approach to, 5; field operations, 258, 266– 78; funding for the project, 250, 284; goals of, generally, 249; Grégoire on, 223, 279; Grégoire’s role, 151, 223; Haüy on, 284; La Condamine’s role, 227, 228, 234; Lagrange on, 238, 281–82; and land taxes, 245–46; Laplace on, 229, 239, 239n.43, 240, 241–42, 247–48, 249; Lavoisier on, 229, 242–43, 284; legislation enacted (1837), 493–94; and the map of France, 228, 245, 246, 247–48; meridian as basis for, 223, 233, 236, 239–42, 244–45, 248, 280 (see also meridian); methods/ instruments, 250–58, 254 (fig.), 259–65 (figs.); Monge on, 238, 281–82, 283; and naturalistic standards, 236–39 (see also meridian; pendulum); pendulum as basis for, 223, 228, 230, 233–34, 237, 239–42, 241n.46, 242n.49, 245, 280; Prieur on, 229, 232–34, 242, 278–80, 284–85, 285n.120; Prony on, 246–48; proposals for, 229, 235–36n.33, 235–49, 239nn.42– 43, 241n.46, 242n.49; scientific vs. ordinary use of, 492–93; standardization requirement, 224, 226–27; Talleyrand on, 235–38, 249; and the Temporary Commission on Weights and Measures, 283– 85, 284n.119; vs. traditional system, 225– 28; and trigonometric functions, 247–48, 257; Turgot on, 235, 246. See also decimalization; metric system, completion of metric system, completion of, 458–94; Agence Temporaire des Poids et Mesures, 460–61; Bureau Consultatif des Poids et Mesures, 461; Carnot’s role, 459; Commission of Weights and Measures, 462,

742

INDEX

metric system, completion of (cont.) 462n.44; Commission on the Metric System, 466–67; Congress on the Metric System, 464, 465–67, 472, 474; definition/value of the kilogram, 467–69, 470–74; definition/value of the meter, 467–70, 473–74, 479–80, 480n.73; and demography, 481–82; enforcement of use of new measures, 461–62, 492; implementation of new units, 458; Instruction sur les poids et mesures, 458–59; for land registry, 480–81, 486, 486n.95 (see also cadastre); and the map of France, 462, 481–82; meridian measurement, 460, 462–63n.45, 462–66, 473–77, 477n.67, 478 (fig.), 479; for money, 459; and naturalistic vs. physical standards, 468–69; nomenclature, 459–60; Prieur’s role, 459; resumption of work, 459; sales of new measures, 461, 461n.41; and trigonometric functions, 482–85, 482n.82, 487. See also decimalization; meridian Meudon Commission, 375–78 Meudon Proving Grounds, 370–71, 372, 373, 375–77, 379, 432 Meusnier, Jean-Baptiste, 13, 252, 253–54; assignat work of, 350; chemistry experiments of, 537; in the Corps of Engineers, 349–50; death of, 355, 356; and Dumouriez, 349, 350–51; Mainz campaign of, 354, 355–56; as a mathematician, 348–49; military ambition/skill of, 349–51, 354–56, 374–75; in Monge’s connection, 340, 346; and Pache, 350–51; and Vandermonde, 349; water experiments of, 371 Mézières, 521–22, 524, 529 Miché (instrument maker), 170–71 Miller (engraver), 595 Miller, Sir John Riggs, 238–39, 240, 242 Millin de Grandmaison, Aubin-Louis, 169, 180, 215, 313, 452–53, 630 Milne-Edwards, Henri, 660 mineralogy, 589–90 Ministry of Finance, 96 Ministry of Marine Affairs, 199 Ministry of the Interior, 52, 179, 198, 210–11, 491–92, 614 Ministry of the Navy, 344–45 Ministry of the Royal Household, 309 Ministry of War, 143, 199; Pache in, 344, 345–46, 348, 352–54; reorganization of,

354. See also French Revolutionary Wars; weaponry Mirabeau, V.-R., vicomte de, 21; on artisans’/inventors’ rights, 197; and Cabanis, 604; death of, 604; early Revolution championed by, 235; in the Feuillants, 98; on the national debt, 85– 86, 86n; in the Society of 1789, 79; Travail sur l’éducation publique, 124, 124n.41 mirages, 479, 577, 599 Missiessy, Edouard-Thomas de, 375 mobilization of scientists, 381–97; Armaments Section, 387–88, 389; and bronze, 391–93, 392n.110; Carnot’s military leadership, 382–87; by the Committee of Public Safety, 383, 386, 389, 389n, 393–94, 396; for instruction in arms/munitions fabrication, 395–97; inventing vs. improving weapons, 388–89; and iron/steel, 390–91, 428; Prieur’s war production, 382–84, 387–88; and tanning of hides, 393–95; for technical manuals, 389–95, 389n, 428 Moitte (sculptor), 552–53 Molard, Claude-Pierre, 632, 634, 636–37 monetary reform, 234, 243–44, 243n.58, 280–81 Monge, Gaspard, 2, 339–58; in the Academy of Science, 509; Analyse appliquée a` la géométrie, 510–11; in the Armaments Section, 388; on balloons, 372; and Berthollet, 533; on the calendar, 295; on cannons, 391; and Carnot, 105; on cheesemaking, 490; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; and Condorcet, 140; connection (network) of, 340–43, 344, 346– 47, 348, 353; Consulate’s favors shown to, 612; on Conté, 431; on descriptive geometry, 5, 508–10, 522, 525–26, 530, 536–37; ´ donates salary to Ecole Polytechnique scholarship fund, 539–40; on Dunkirk´ Barcelona survey team, 252; at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics, 508, 524– ´ 25, 527, 529–30; at the Ecole des Ponts et ´ Chaussées, 532; at the Ecole Nationale des ´ Travaux Publics, 522–23; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 499, 508–10; at ´ the Ecole Polytechnique, 510–11, 530; and the Egyptian expedition, 557, 561–62, 577, 599; on infinitesimal geometry, 576n; influence of, 510; in the Institute of Egypt, 575; on iron, 390; Istituto Nazionale della

INDEX

Repubblica Romana founded by, 557; in the Italian campaign, 551, 552–57, 552n.3; on the Jacobin Society, 340; lectures on munitions fabrication, 396; on Louis XVI’s disposition, 345; Marat’s criticism of, 193; on the metric system, 238, 281–82, 283, 462n.44; as Minister of the Navy, 253–54, 339–40, 344–45, 356–57 (see also under weaponry); on mirages, 479, 577, 599; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 341–42, 530, 532, 538, 551–57 (see also under Egyptian expedition); reputation/personality of, 341; and the Roman Republic’s constitution, 556–57; at the Royal Engineering School, 340; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; in the Society of 1789, 79; as a teacher, 341; teaching skills of, 529; on tides, 305; Traité de géométrie descriptive, 510; on transliteration of Arabic, 595–96; on Trouville, 204; and Volta, 647–48; on weaponry, 375–76 (see also under weaponry) Montagnards (the Mountain), 3, 4, 137; and Condorcet, 147; and the Convention, 141–46; vs. Girondists, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145–46, 148; and the Jacobins, 145, 146; Rousseau’s influence on, 144; during the Terror, 287 Montalembert, marquis de, 364 Montalivet, Minister, 625 Montbéliard, 313, 451–52 Mont de Piété, 50 Montesquieu, C.-L., marquis de, 64, 85, 547–48 Montgolfier, Etienne, 30 Montgolfier, Joseph de: in the Bureau consultatif des arts et métiers, 638; at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 629, 636; death of, 639; hot-air balloon invented by, 349, 371, 638; hydraulic dam invented by, 638–39; in the Institut de France, 638; internal combustion invented by, 638–39; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 629, 630, 634 months, renaming of/subdivision of, 294, 295–97 Montucla, Jean Etienne, 12 Montyon, baron de, 673 Moravia, Sergio, 602

743

Moreau, Jean-Victor, 373, 552 Moreau de la Sarthe (physiologist), 38 ´ Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric-Louis-Elie, 24, 33, 76 Morgagni, Giovanni Battista, 38, 546, 547, 549 Morse, Samuel F. B., 431 Mosselman (military supplier), 353 Mountain. See Montagnards Multedo, A. L., 466, 469 munitions and guns, 397–427; Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres, 402–3, 413–14; Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpêtres, 403, 405–6, 419–20; alkali manufacture, 414–16; Atelier de Perfectionnement, 424, 425–26; Commission des Armes et Poudres, 402, 426–27; Committee of Public Safety control of, 400–401, 402–3, 410, 414, 415, 427; contracts for, 352; gunpowder production, 416–20, 428; instruction in fabrication of, 395–97; Manufacture Extraordinaire d’Armes, 421, 422–23, 424, 426–27; musket production, 421–23, 424–26, 444; powder mills, 402, 403, 404–5, 406, 416, 420; saltpeter program, 397–412, 444; social goals of production of, 427; workforce for/labor unrest, 404– 5, 413, 422–24, 427 Munro, Alexander (primus), 546, 549 Munro, Alexander (secundus), 546, 547, 549 muriate powder, 361–63, 365–70 Museo di Fisica e di Storia Naturale, 467 Museum of Natural History, 4–5; budget of, 176; charter for, 175–76; classification/ taxonomy in, 7, 167–68; collections expropriated for, 451 (see also natural history/artwork conquests); comparative anatomy at, 640; courses/chairs at, 175– 76, 183; establishment of, 166, 167, 183 (see also Jardin des Plantes: reorganization proposed); goals of, 175–76; prestige of, 446; professors’ rights/salaries, 175 muskets, 421–23, 424–26, 444 Napoleon Bonaparte, 1, 2–3; as army commander, 446; on beet sugar, 625; and Berthollet, 533, 551, 644–45 (see also under Egyptian expedition); and Carnot, 446; and Chaptal, 401, 614, 615, 619; and the Council of State, 611–12; coup d’état of 18

744

INDEX

Napoleon Bonaparte (cont.) brumaire by, 474, 532, 561, 608–11; declares himself Napoleon I, 551; despotism ´ of, 289; Ecole Polytechnique regimented by, 538–39; on education, 619–20; as First Consul, 532; on idéologues, 610; as an Institut de France member, 451; in the Institute of Egypt, 575; Italian campaign of, 373, 551, 552n.3; and Laplace, 532, 538; and Mascheroni, 467; military reputation of, 551–52; and Monge, 341–42, 530, 532, 538, 551–57 (see also under Egyptian expedition); opposition to, 601; personality of, 639; popularity of, 557; science influenced by, 640, 644–45, 648, 650–51; on the sciences, 611; and the Society of Arcueil, 644; and Volney, 515; and Volta, 648. See ´ also Description de l’Egypte; Egyptian expedition ´ Napoleonic Ecole Normale (1810), 500 National Assembly. See Constituent Assembly national debt, 82–87, 86n, 93 National Guard, 24, 31, 71–72, 99, 299 National Society of Science and the Arts, 120–24, 127, 153–55 National Treasury, 88–91. See also national debt Natron Lakes (Egypt), 578, 641 natural history/artwork conquests, 433–44, 442n.206, 443n.210, 451, 552–54 Natural History Collection (Holland), 441 naturalists, 168, 170, 452, 548; in the Egyptian expedition, 579–82 (see also Descrip´ tion de l’Egypte). See also Museum of Natural History; Société linnéenne de Paris Navier, Claude Louis, 535–36, 694 Necker, Jacques, 23, 24, 26, 31, 82, 83, 84, 87 Necker, Madame, 50 Nectoux, Hippolyte, 561, 573, 588 Nelson, Horatio, viscount Nelson, 560 Neufchâteau, Fran¸cois de, 622, 630, 633 Neuf Soeurs, 201 Neugebauer, Otto, 502 New Plan for Medicine (Vicq d’Azyr), 40– 47, 40n.61, 53–56, 316–17, 541, 548 Newton, Sir Isaac, 134–35, 455, 611, 683; Opticks, 191, 679; Philosophiae Naturalis, 678; Principia Mathematica, 678, 679, 680 Newtonianism, 677–81, 689

Nicholson, William, 646 Niou, Joseph, 404–5 nitrification. See saltpeter Noailles, Louis Marie, duc de, 235 Nollet, Jean Antoine, 135, 679 normal schools, 495–96, 495n.124. See also ´ Ecole Normale nosology, 543, 666 Nouet, Nicolas-Antoine, 297, 299–300, 303, 456; and the Egyptian expedition, 304, 561–62, 593–94, 593n.72 Nouveau Plan de Constitution pour la Médecine en France. See New Plan for Medicine Novosiltsev, N. N., 107, 110 Nysten (physiologist), 667 Observatory of Paris, 234, 237; astronomers, 454; e´lèves (adjuncts), 298, 299–302, 454, 457–58; prestige of, 446; staffing difficulties, 457–58; during the Terror, 298– 306, 303n.40 Oersted, Hans Christian, 650, 688, 689, 693 Olivier, Guillaume-Antoine, 169 Olivier, Théodore, 530n.186 optics, 679, 683–86 Ordnance Survey of Britain, 228 Outram, Dorinda, 311n.60 Pache, Jean-Nicolas, 146, 277; on the Bastille, 342; in the Commune of 10 August, 344; dismissal of, from War Office, 351– 52, 354, 356; and Dumouriez, 353–54; imprisonment of, 348; as Mayor of Paris, 347, 348, 354; and Meusnier, 350–51; as Minister of War, 344, 345–46, 348, 352– 54; in the Ministry of the Navy, 342; in Monge’s connection, 340, 341–42, 344, 346–47, 348; politics of, 343–44, 345–46, 348; and Roland, 343–44; at the Roland salon, 343; in the Société populaire du Luxembourg, 342–43, 346 Paillart (powdermaker), 418–19 Paine, Tom, 99, 147–48, 152, 326 Paixhans, Henri-Joseph: Nouvelle force marine, 379–81 Pallary, Paul, 580n.39, 582n.44 Pancaldi, Giuliano, 646 Panckoucke, C.-L.-F., 17, 37–38, 103, 391 papacy, and the Italian campaign, 554, 555, 556

INDEX

paper money. See assignats Paris: bread shortage in, 22; districts of, 72– 74, 76–78; food supply for, 68; governance of, 67–78; medical students in, 549 (see also clinical medicine); prison inmates massacred in, 141, 181; public reaction to troops surrounding, 22–23; war preparations in, 382 Paris-Greenwich triangulation, 228, 239, 250, 257 Paris School of Clinical Medicine, 543, 546, 547, 548–49, 596, 604 Parmentier, A.-A., 177, 624, 630 Parseval, Marc-Antoine, 483 Pasteur, Louis, 624 patent law, 195–200, 199n.77 patent system, 448 pathology, 39, 543, 546–47, 549. See also disease patriotic festivals, 158, 160 Patriotic Society of the Luxembourg (Société populaire du Luxembourg), 342–43, 346 Paulze, Jacques, 319, 322–23 Peace of Amiens (1803), 591, 630 Pedrayès, Augustin de, 466–67 La Pélagie, 50 Pelletan, Philippe, 543 Pelletier, Bertrand, 488, 527 Pelletier, Joseph, 670, 671–72, 671n.39, 673, 675 Pelletier, Pierre Joseph, 170–71, 388, 392–93, 393–94, 419 pencils, graphite, 371–72, 428, 431, 432–33 pendulum: length verified, 487; metric system based on, 223, 228, 230, 233–34, 237, 239–42, 241n.46, 242n.49, 245, 280 Percy, Pierre-Fran¸cois, 672 Père Duchesne, 347 Périer, Jacques-Constantin, 8, 388, 391; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70– 71; lectures on munitions fabrication, 396; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; in the Society of 1789, 79; submarine built by, 633; on weaponry, 362, 376 Périer, Scipion, 629, 630 Permanent Committee of Electors, 24 Perny de Villeneuve, J., 300, 302, 303–4, 456 Perregaux (banker), 630 Perronet, Jean Rodolphe, 522

745

Pétion, Jérôme, 97n, 99, 139, 140 Petit, Alexis Thérèse, 642 Petit Arsenal (Paris), 29–30 Petitjean (civilian commissary), 352, 353, 354 Pfaff, Christoph Heinrich, 452 Philae (Egypt), 566 (fig.), 569 (fig.), 572, 573 physicians. See clinical medicine; medical science ´ physics: at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux ´ Publics, 524, 525, 526, 527; at the Ecole Normale, 498; Newtonian, 677–79; quantum, 678; social, 654. See also mathematical physics physiocrats, 547–48 physiology, 600, 640. See also biology; experimental physiology Picard, Jean, 269 Picavet, Fran¸cois, 602 Pichegru, Charles, 434, 436–37, 439 Pick, Simon, 353 Pinel, Philippe, 2, 178, 180, 329, 547, 608; Nosographie philosophique, 666 Pinelly (inventor), 373 Pingré, A.-G., 295, 297, 305 La Pitié, Hôpital de (Paris), 48, 50 Pitt, William, 630 Place Royale military hospital, 50 plague, 596, 599 Plain (Marais), 138, 153, 289 Planez (military engineer), 266 Pluvinet (instructor), 395 Poinsot, Louis, 529 Point Central des Arts et Métiers, 200–202, 204–5, 204n.89, 206, 221–22 Poiseuille, J.-L.-M., 673 Poisson, Siméon Denis, 2; on electrostatics, 540, 680–81, 688; on magnetism, 451, 540, 680–81, 688, 690, 693; as a mathematician, 537; at the Observatory of Paris, 458; on physiology, 675; reputation of, 688–89; in the Society of Arcueil, 641, 642, 677, 688–89; on sound, 682, 686, 687–88, 693 Poissonier, P.-I., 310 polarization, 540, 643, 683–84, 685, 686 political arithmetic, 59 political economy, 78–96; Accounting Office, 90; and bureaucracy, 88–89, 89n.162; and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 81–82, 84–85; Committee on Taxation, 92; and the Discount Bank, 82–83, 84,

746

INDEX

political economy (cont.) 87, 87n.155, 90; finance reform, 88–91, 89n.162; Lavoisier’s De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France, 91–92n.166, 91–94; Lavoisier’s De l’état des finances en France au 1er janvier 1792, 93; Loménie de Brienne’s policies, 88–89; national debt, 82–87, 86n, 93. See also assignats politics: checks and balances in, 63–64; in 1789, 7–15; truth in, 61–67 Poncelet, Jean Victor, 510, 537 Poniatowski, Stanislas, king of Poland, 107 poor people: begging by, 47–49; charity for vs. civic rights of, 48, 51; good vs. bad, 49, 51n.81; health care for, 45–46, 51–52; public responsibility for, 3–4, 48 population measurement, 59–60, 481 Porcelain Manufactory, 370–71 Portal, A.: at the Collège de France, 306, 308, 310; death of, 308; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 175, 179; at the Museum of Natural History, 176, 308 positivist vs. encyclopedic science, 5–6, 112, 123–24, 544, 694–95 potash, 32, 413–14 Poterat (entrepreneur/inventor), 633 Pouillet, Claude-Roland, 675 Poverty Committee, 49, 53 powdermakers, 382, 399 powder mills, 402, 403, 404–5, 406, 416, 420 Prieur, Pierre-Louis, 48, 111, 149 Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, Claude-Antoine, 102; arrest of, 387; background of, 232; on the Committee of Public Instruction, 279, 284–85; on the Committee of Public ´ Safety, 284, 374, 387; and the Ecole Polytechnique, 528; on gunmaking, 425; on the metric system, 229, 232–34, 242, 278– 80, 284–85, 285n.120, 489; and the metric system’s completion, 459; in Monge’s connection, 340; saltpeter produced by, 399– 400, 401, 406; war production by, 382– 84, 387–88 primary schools: Bouquier law establishing, 495–96; Comité d’Instruction Publique on, 153, 155, 159, 161; Condorcet on, 114– 15, 120, 125; Lavoisier on, 220; metric system taught in, 492, 494 probability: and belief, 60; of cause, 505; in conviction of criminals, 61–62; definition

of, 60; and determinism, 505; Laplace on, 504–5, 695; in legislative decisions, 62– 64; and statistical inference, 60–61; vs. truth/reality, 60–61 Prony, Gaspard Riche de, 184; at the Bureau des Longitudes, 486; on the cadastre, 481–86, 482n.82; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277–78, 480–81; ´ Ecole de Géographie instituted by, 481; at ´ the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, 486, ´ 532; at the Ecole Polytechnique, 527, 531, 534; “Grandes Tables Logarithmiques et Trigonométriques,” 482–86, 482n.82; on the horse-powered pump, 489; on mathematical physics, 682; Mécanique philosophique, 535, 603; on the metric system, 246–48, 462n.44, 467; on military education, 522; and the Paris Observatory, 458; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; on weaponry, 380 Proust, Joseph-Louis, 419, 628 Provence, comte de, 138 provincial assemblies, 25, 27, 64 Prytanée (Paris), 500 Puységur, A.-M.-J. Chastenet, marquis de, 299 Quesnot, Fran¸cois, 561, 594 Quincy, Quatremère de, 555 Raffeneau-Delille, Adrien, 562, 576 Raffeneau-Delille, Alyre, 561, 579, 580–81, 588–89, 670 Raige, Remi, 576, 595 Ramel, Dominique, 441 Ramond de Carbonnières, Louis-Fran¸cois, 106, 314–15 Ramsden, William, 255, 298 Ranke, Leopold von, 516 Raulin (teacher of medicine), 310 Récamier (banker), 630 Redouté, Henri-Joseph, 561 Redouté, Pierre Joseph, 170–71, 589 refraction, 540, 683–84, 694 Régie des Poudres, 29–31, 29n.47, 32–34, 96, 395, 399, 400, 406. See also Arsenal Registry of Patents, 198–99 Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, 630 Regnault, Henri-Victor, 578 Regnier (inventor), 631 Reign of Terror. See Terror

INDEX

Reitz (teacher of medicine), 310 repeating circle, 239–40, 248, 251–53, 255– 56, 259–60 (figs.), 298 Reth de Servières, 195, 197, 208 Reubell, Jean-Fran¸cois, 354–55 Réveillon, J.-B., 17, 30–31 Revolutionary Commune, 343–44 revolutionary courses, 395–97, 411–12, 416, 428 revolutionary manuals, 389–95, 389n, 428 Revolutionary Tribunal, 287, 303, 322, 330 Reynier, J.-L.-A., 581 Ricardo, David, 602 Ricardos, General, 268 Riche, Claude-Antoine, 184 Riffault des Hêtres, J. R. D., 407, 413, 417, 420–21 Ringuet (engraver), 590 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard, 646–47 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore de, 1, 3, 138–39, 219; arrest of, 289, 303; and Carnot, 386–87; on the Commission of Public Instruction, 162; on the Commission of Six, 301; on the Committee of Public Safety, 162, 386; in the Commune of Paris, 140; and Condorcet, 138–39, 147; on Dietrich, 315; election of, 146; Festival of the Supreme Being staged by, 318, 397; on the Hébertists, 347–48; Jacobinism of, 145; and Lavoisier, 324–25; overthrow of, 141–42, 445; on Pache, 348; on the Terror, 286, 287, 381 Rochambeau, Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de, 25 Rochon, A.-M. de, 193 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 91, 555 Rohan, Prince Louis, cardinal de, 106, 315 Roland, Madame M.-J.-P: arrest of, 314; and Monge’s connection, 339, 341–42, 343, 346; salon of, 138, 169, 326, 343 Roland de la Platière, Jean-Marie: arrogance of, 208; and Bosc, 169; on botanical gardens, 290; and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 208–9; and the metric system, 279; in the Ministry of the Interior, 137, 140, 145, 179, 210–11, 343; and Pache, 343–44; in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, 177; during the Terror, 314 Roman Republic, 135–36, 547–48, 556–57 Romé de l’Isle, J.-B.-J. de, 5, 169

747

Romme, Gilbert, 102, 111; and academies’ property, expropriation of, 290; arrest of, 298, 500; background of, 105, 106–7; calendar reform by, 293–98; in the Conven´ tion, 149; death of, 298, 500; on the Ecole Normale, 499–500; education plan of, 155–58, 159, 162, 163; in the Jacobin Club, 109; in the Legislative Assembly, 110; on the Linnaean monument, 171; politics of, 109; and Stroganov, 107–10; on the telegraph, 429–30 Romme, Nicolas-Charles, 106 Ronsin, Charles-Philippe, 353 Rosetta Stone, 576 Rosily, Fran¸cois-Etienne de, 375, 380 Rouget de l’Isle, Claude Joseph, 315 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on the general will, 64; influence of, 107, 144, 166–67, 288, 547–48, 602; as a naturalist, 168; vs. Voltaire, 8 Roy, General, 253 Roy, William, 476 Royal Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters (Dijon), 102–3 royal family: attempted flight of, 96–98, 97n, 137, 317; imprisoned in the Tuileries, 68, 71, 96, 266 Royal Library of Burgundy (Brussels), 436 Royal Society of Agriculture, 229–30 Royal Society of Arts (London), 490, 629 Royal Society of London, 121 Royal Society of Medicine: vs. Academy of Science, 14, 37; and the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, 207; on ed´ ucation of doctors, 40; Eloges, 37; founding of, 11; goals of, 39–40; Histoire, 37; Mémoires, 37; mesmerism investigated by, 50; network of correspondents, 14–15; vs. the Poverty Committee, 53; on public health, 39–40, 52; Vicq d’Azyr’s work in, 37 Royal Treasury, 88–89 Rozier, F., 106 Rozier, Pilâtre de, 213 Rozière, Fran¸cois-Michel de, 579, 580–81, 589–90, 596, 599; “On the Physical Constitution of Egypt,” 590–91 Ruelle, Alexandre, 300, 303, 456 Ruffin, P.-J.-M., 310 Rush, Benjamin, 546

748

INDEX

Sacy, Silvestre de, 595–96 Sage, Balthazar-Georges, 171, 311 Saint-André, Jeanbon, 158, 162 Saint-Domingue, 345, 381 Sainte-Croix, Lallemand de, 207 Saint-Etienne, Rabaut, 158 Sainteville, Olympe Letellier de, 581n.44, 588 Saint-Fief, Adjutant, 365 Saint-Firmin seminary, 181 Saint-Gênis, Alexandre, 573 Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 382, 402, 404, 406, 411, 412, 420 Saint-Jacques Hospice, 50 Saint-Just, Louis, 47, 162, 289, 303, 386–87, 387 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de, 598, 625–26 Saint-Simonians, 520–21 Saint-Venant, Bory de, 313 La Salpêtrière, Hôpital de, 50, 51 saltpeter: Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres, 402–3, 413–14; Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpêtres, 403, 405–6, 419–20; ashes needed for, 413–14; assaying of, 406–8, 408n.140; extraction of, 399–400, 401, 403, 406, 408, 411–12; Lavoisier’s experiments in, 399, 406–10, 408n.140, 413; lectures on, 395; production program for, 397–412, 444; refining of, 400, 401–2, 404, 406, 408–9, 408n.141, 412–13; revolutionary, 413–14, 428; revolutionary course on, 411–12, 428 saltpetermen, 211–12, 382, 399, 407–8 sans-culottes, 140–41, 145–46, 303, 366, 398 Sanson, General, 595–96 La Santé, prison de, 49 Santerre, Antoine-Joseph (Père du Faubourg Saint-Antoine), 347 Saron, Bochart de, 303, 304, 305, 317–18 Sarret (mathematician), 330, 331 Savart, Félix, 675 Savigny, Jules-César Lelorgne de, 561; on alcyons, 587, 657; death of, 588; Description ´ de l’Egypte plates by, 579–80, 580n.39, 581–82n.44, 585, 658; and the Egyptian expedition, 562, 581–82n.44, 599; Histoire naturelle et mythologique de l’Ibis, 581, 584–85, 585n; illness of, 587–88, 588n.58; on insects, 585–87, 657; in the Institute of Egypt, 580; Mémoires sur les animaux sans

vertèbres, 585–87, 587n.56; specimen collections of, 581–82n.44; Système des Annélides, 585n; “Système des annélides,” 587 Savoy, annexation of, 462, 552 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 513, 602, 637 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, 379 Schérer, Barthélmy, 375 science, 652–95; authority of, 155–56, 158, 166, 335; biology, 548, 600, 640, 655, 675; comparative anatomy, 6, 178, 453, 548, 640, 653, 655–62, 694; disciplines within, formation of, 652–55, 652n.1, 658n.14, 694; education’s basis in, 112–13, 115–16, 123–24, 126, 134–36, 164, 337–38; encyclopedic vs. positivist approach to, 5–6, 112, 123–24, 544, 694–95; experimental physiology, 180, 548, 640, 653, 656, 662–75, 694; institutionalization of, 445–46 (see also specific schools and institutions); language of, 333–34; Napoleon’s influence on, 640, 644–45, 648, 650–51; vs. nature, 8–10, 166–67; pharmacology, 670–72; professionalization of, 652–53; and publication, 632–33; publications by scientists, generally, 519–20; in 1789, 7–15; study/teaching of (see specific institutions and scientists); theories vs. laws of, 654–55; theory vs. practice in, 653–54, 694. See also astronomy; chemistry; mathematical physics; mathematics scientific journals, 449. See also specific journals sea salt, conversion of, 199, 414 secondary schools: Comité d’Instruction Publique on, 153–54, 163–64; Condorcet on, 115, 120, 125, 131–34, 133n.50, 151, 163; Lavoisier on, 220 seconds pendulum. See pendulum Seguin, Armand, 95, 393–95 Seguin, Marc, 535–36, 628; De l’influence des chemins de fer, 638 September massacres, 141, 181 Servan, Joseph, 145, 343, 352 sextants, 255, 256 Shée, Henri, 415 Sicard (teacher), 496–98, 499 Sieyès, Emmanuel, 8, 17–18, 19–20, 24, 25; on the Committee on the Constitution, 147–48; and Condorcet, 66; and the Directory, 608–9; on education, 159; education plan of, 159–60, 162; and the

INDEX

Feuillants, 98; as an idéologue, 601, 602; and the Journal d’instruction sociale, 327; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; in the Society of 1789, 79; “What is the Third Estate,” 609 Silvestre, Augustin-Fran¸cois de, 184, 213, 630, 632 Simolin, I. M., 109, 110 Simpson (American consul), 314 Smith, Adam, 326, 602; Wealth of Nations, 483, 513–14 Smith, James Edward, 168 Smyth, James Carmichael, 546, 547, 549 Société d’Artistes, 214 Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale: Administrative Council, 631– 32; and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 637; decline of, 635; founding of, 450, 628–30, 629nn.128–29; funding for, 630; goals of, 631; journals subscribed to, 633, 633n.133; leadership by, 629; members/subscribers, 630–31; and the metric system, 493; prestige of, 446; prizes awarded by, 634–35 Société des Amis des Lois, 109 Société des Amis des Noirs, 150, 515 Société des Inventions et Découvertes, 195, 197, 197n.71, 200, 204, 205, 206 Société d’Histoire Naturelle, 177, 180, 185– 86, 207; during the Terror, 313 Société libre et fraternelle pour l’avancement des sciences, 218 Société linnéenne de Paris (Paris Linnaean Society), 168–70, 168n.8, 184, 213 ´ Société Médicale d’Emulation, 450, 668 Société Philomathique, 184–85, 184n, 207, 213, 289 Société populaire du Luxembourg, 342–43, 346 Société Royale d’Agriculture, 207 Société Royale de Médecine, 668 sociétés libres, 177, 184, 209 Societies of Agriculture, 623 Societies of Harmony, 14–15, 166, 213 Society of Arcueil, 450, 640–44, 677 Society of Geography, 598, 598n.80 Society of Inventors, 201 Society of 1789, 79–80, 84–85 soda, 414–15, 416, 641. See also saltpeter Spaendonck, van (painter and illustrator), 172, 176

749

St.-Jean d’Angély, Regnaud de, 173 States-General: Academy of Science members elected to, 7–8; Assembly of Electors, 17, 22, 33, 66, 72; Condorcet on, 58–59, 64–66; convocation of, 4, 7, 10, 15; elections to/composition of, 15–21, 27, 66; goals of, 10; Louis XVI’s role, 7, 15–16, 21–22, 29; and provincial assemblies, 27, 64; Third Estate representation in, 17–23, 27; Turgot’s plan for, 27. See also Constituent Assembly statics, 678 Staum, Martin, 601 Stavelot, 439–40 Stephanopoli, Dino, 204, 207 Steuart, James, 513 Stevin, Simon, 678; Oeuvres mathématiques, 443–44 Stroganov, Count (elder), 107, 109–10 Stroganov, Pavel Alexandrovitch, count (“Popo”; younger), 107–10 Stuart, Sir Charles, 485 Suard, Amélie, 331–32 Suard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 17, 68 Sue, P., 215 surveying principles/techniques, 254–56, 254 (fig.), 257, 593. See also DunkirkBarcelona survey suspension bridges, 535–36, 638, 694 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de, 24, 52, 55; Bastille Day mass by, 99; early Revolution championed by, 235; education plan of, 113, 235; on the Egyptian expedition, 558; and the Feuillants, 98; on the metric system, 235–38, 249; on the national debt, 85–86; Rapport sur l’Instruction Publique, 124–29; in the Society of 1789, 79 Tallien, Jean Lambert, 344, 347 Tax Farmers, 28, 36, 88, 94; arrest/trial of, 284, 318–19, 320–22, 324; death of, 322–23 taxonomy. See classification/taxonomy; comparative anatomy teaching hospitals. See clinical medicine telegraphs, 428–31, 430 Temporary Commission on Weights and Measures, 283–85, 284n.119 Tenon, Jacques, 53–54, 111, 488; Mémoires sur les hôpitaux, 49, 101

750

INDEX

Terrier de Monciel, Antoine-René, marquis de, 179 Terror (1793–94), 1, 286–326; arrests/ imprisonments, number of, 287; Collège de France during, 306–11, 309n.55, 310n.57; Committee of General Security during, 287, 328–29; Committee of Public Safety during, 141–42, 287–88, 303–4; the Convention on, 287; executions, number of, 287; force vs. violence in, 288; guillotine’s use during, 287, 303, 330; Montagnards during, 287; necessity of, 288; and the Observatory of Paris, 298– 306, 303n.40; property expropriated during, 289–92; Revolutionary Tribunal, 287, 303, 322, 330; Robespierre on, 286, 287, 381; Romme’s calendar reform, 293–98; scientists’ fates, 311–26, 311n.60 (see also individual scientists); summary of, 286–89; Thermidorean uprising, 289 Tessier, A. H., 452, 488, 630, 632 The Hague, 439, 440, 441–42 Thenard, Louis Jacques, 628, 641, 642, 643, 671 theodolites, 255 Thévenot, Claude-Fran¸cois, 562 Thibaudeau, Antoine-Claire, 325n.101 Thiébaut de Berneaud, Arsène, 168n.8 Thouin, André, 17; in the Assembly, 8, 67, 70, 169; botanical gardens acquired by, 290, 292, 437; on the calendar, 297; as a commissioner of science and arts, 434–37, 438–39, 441–42; on the Commission ´ Temporaire des Arts, 292; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 502n.138; in the Italian campaign, 552–53; at the Jardin des Plantes, 171, 172–73, 178–79; at the Museum of Natural History, 176–77, 183; in the Société linnéenne de Paris, 168, 169 Thouret, Marc-Augustin, 11, 47, 53 Thuriot de la Rivière, Alexis, 34–35 Thury (foundry owner), 391–92 Tillet, Matthieu, 229–32, 243, 252 Tinet (artist), 552–53 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 517, 548 Toise de Paris, 227 Toise de Pérou, 227, 231, 469 Toise du Châtelet, 227 Toise du nord, 469 Tolentino, Treaty of, 555 Tolozan, J.-F., 414

Tonnelier (mineralogy teacher), 215 Torricelli, Evangelista: Opera geometrica, 443–44 Toulon, 344, 381, 386, 399, 551 Toulon observatory, 455 Tournon suspension bridge, 535–36, 638 Tralles, Johann Georg, 241n.46, 466, 468, 470, 472–73 Tranchot (civil engineer), 266, 268, 274, 276, 464 Tréhoürt, Adjutant, 359–60, 361–62, 367 Trianon garden, 5 trigonometric functions, 247–48, 257, 482– 85, 482n.82, 487 Trouville, Jean-Baptiste de, 204 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 27, 61, 64, 128, 230, 235, 246 Valenciennes, Achille, 658 vandalism, 291, 443, 463. See also natural history/artwork conquests Vandermonde, Alexandre, 204, 252; in the Assembly of Representatives, 67, 70; on assignats, 513; Atelier de Perfectionnement run by, 388, 635–36; on balloons, 372; on the Commission on Weights and Measures, 277; at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 636; death of, 514, ´ 636; at the Ecole Normale, 497, 498, 505, 512–14; on gunmaking, 425; Hôtel de Mortagne managed by, 635–36; on iron, 390–91; on the metric system, 462n.44; and Meusnier, 349; in Monge’s connection, 340, 342, 346; on political economy, 512–14; on sabres, 391; in the Société populaire du Luxembourg, 342–43; during the Terror, jeopardy of, 311 Van Swieten (Dutch astronomer), 42 van Swinden, Jan Henrik, 466, 468, 469– 70, 488 Vassalli-Eandi, Antonio Maria, 466, 469, 470 Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre, de, 364, 381 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 635 Vauquelin, Nicolas, 388, 399–400, 401; at ´ ´ the Ecole Polytechnique, 527; Ecole Supérieure de Pharmacie directed by, 670– 71; on electrochemistry, 647; industrial processes investigated by, 628; on physiology, 675; in the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 630; and Thenard, 642

INDEX

Vauvilliers, J.-F., 307 Vendée rebellion, 143, 148, 288, 386, 434 Verdun de Montchiroux, Jean-Fran¸cois, 323 Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien, 139, 145, 147, 330–31 Vérité (deputy of the Constitutent Assembly), 329 Vernet, Madame, 329–30, 331 Vicq d’Azyr, Félix, 4; in the Académie Française, 37; and academies’ property, expropriation of, 291–92; in the Academy of Science, 14; anatomical studies by, 38–39; “Anatomie pathologique,” 38–39; civic work of, 11; on the Commission Temporaire des Arts, 317–18; and Condorcet, 14; death of, 10, 317, 318; Dictionnaire de médecine edited by, 37–38, 39, 317, 547; and Guillotin, 53; health care reforms by, 14–15, 37, 39–40 (see also New Plan for Medicine); and the Health Committee, 53–54; popularity of, at court, 14; reputation of, as an anatomist, 15; in the Royal Society of Medicine, 37, 42; during the Terror, 317–18 Villaret-Joyeuse, Louis Thomas, comte de, 374 Villebrune (teacher and librarian), 310 Villoteau (musician), 597 Vincent, Jean-Claude, 171, 342–43, 344, 347–48 vitalism, 543, 607, 655, 663, 666, 668–69 vivisection, 664, 667, 672. See also experimental physiology Volney, Constantin-Fran¸cois de, 326; arrest of, 515; background of, 514; and Cabanis, ´ 514; at the Ecole Normale, 496–97, 498, 514, 515, 516–17; on history, 516–18; as an idéologue, 601, 602; Le¸cons d’Histoire, 516; La loi naturelle, ou le Catéchisme du citoyen fran¸cais, 515; and Napoleon Bonaparte, 515; politics of, 515; Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires, 515; in the Société des Amis des Noirs, ´ 515; Tableau du sol et du climat des EtatsUnis, 516; on transliteration of Arabic, 595–96; travels of, 514–15; Voyage en ´ Egypte et en Syrie, 8, 514–15, 558, 559, 602 Volta, Alessandro, count, 639, 645–50, 693

751

Voltaire, 8, 12, 514, 547–48, 602 Voronokhine (manservant), 109–10 War of the Second Coalition, 470 Watt, James, 70–71 wave theory of light, 5, 540, 677, 679, 683– 84, 685 weaponry, 358–81; Aerostatic Development Center, 372; Arms Manufacture, 388; Atelier de Perfectionnement, 388; balloons, hot-air, 371–73; bayonettes, 385–86, 422; Berthollet’s gunpowder experiments, 339, 358, 362–63, 365–66, 367–68; Bureau of Artillery, 359, 367, 368–69; cannons, 391; Committee of Public Safety on, 361–62, 363, 367–68, 370, 373; explosive/ incendiary cannonballs/shells, 358–62, 360n.43, 365–69, 373–79; Guyton’s programs, 358, 362–63, 365–69, 371; instruction in arms/munitions fabrication, 395– 97; Laclos’s programs, 369–70, 374; Meudon Commission, 375–78; Meudon Proving Grounds, 370–71, 372, 373, 375– 77, 379, 432; Monge’s programs, 357, 358– 60, 374; muriate powder, 361–63, 365–70; Paixhans’s proposal, 379–81; and popular suspicion, 363, 366; resistance to new weapons, 375, 379–80, 428; sabres, 391; Vincennes testing area, 379. See also munitions and guns weights/measures, 3–4; American, 224–25, 281, 494; ancient, 227, 231, 233; in geodesy, 228, 239–40, 257, 461; Ordnance Survey of Britain, 228; Paris-Greenwich triangulation, 228, 239, 250, 257. See also Dunkirk-Barcelona survey; meridian; metric system Weiner, Dora, 51, 53 Wendel, Ignace de, 627 White Terror, 289, 298 Whitney, Eli, 424 Wilkinson, William, 627 Willemet, Fran¸cois, 169 Williams, David, 326 William V, of Orange-Nassau, 439 Wollaston, W. H., 684 Württemberg, duke of, 451–52 Young, Arthur, 225 Young, Thomas, 685

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