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-Étienne du Mont; Louis Lefèvre de Gineau by Saint-Jean en Grève; Constantin Pèrier 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 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 Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and by Antoine Suard of the Academie Francaise, 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 Salpetrière, 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. 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 instruments 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 à mon seco urs, Gin eau! dont la main sure Organise le monde et sonde la nature; De ces sentiers obscurs faismoi sortir vainqueur; J’aime à voir par tes yeux, à 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 over-seeing delineation of the new departmental boundaries on the Observatory’s Map of France. Thouin, head gardener at the Jardin du Roi, made inspections of the quality of grain and flour stored in the École 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-Francois Demachy, one of the more scurrilous critics of the new chemistry in general and Traité élementaire 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 twenty-four 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 Metiers. Constantin Perier, engineer rather than scientist, 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 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 tripartite 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 may-oralty 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’etre, 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 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 co-ordinating 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 twenty-fourth. 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 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 Premontres 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 December 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 pro-visioning 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 political 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, 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 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 through-out the remaining life of the Constituent Assembly, he conducted himself in 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 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 École 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.

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 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 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 assignes 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 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 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, 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 long-term 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 financier 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 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 over-see 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 inadequate, 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 Control-ler-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 Lomenie 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 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” (comptabilite) had been used indiscriminately to cover everything to do with disbursements. Henceforth, “vérification” will confirm an actual payment of funds, and “comptabilite” 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, Con-dorcet 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 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 Du-pont 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 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 Frechines 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.

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 un-foreseeable 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 requires 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 Counter-Revolution, ridiculed him in the ironic couplets of a lengthy verse beginning:

Généreu x Lavoisier, ta lettre pathétique M’a fait, je l’avouerai, presque verser des pleurs; Tu viens de conquérir à la fois tous les coeurs En nous développant ta conduite héroïque.

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 memoire 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 commissioners 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 ficoncession 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 émigrés. 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 Montmedy, still on French soil. In the dead of night, the 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 Chalons. 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 Saint-Denis, 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 Paris and the suburbs had gathered in the Champs-Élysées. People packed 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 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 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, under-disciplined, and frightened protectors of order in other times and places, guardsmen overreacted 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 Hotel 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 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.

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).

3 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).

4 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.

5 Brockliss (1987).

6 On science and civic reforms, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 244-256.

7 Ibid., pp. 261-289.

8 Poirier (1993), pp. 184-187.

9 “Mèmoire sur les inégalites des satellites de Jupiter.” MARS (1771/74), pp. 580–667.

10 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’ecole 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.

13 That judgment has been redressed, to a degree, in recent scholarship. See below, chapter 1 section 5.

14 Quoted from Traité du calcul differentiel 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).

16 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. generation

19 Vicq d’Azyr, “Nouveau plan pour la médicine,” HSRM 9 (1788–87/1790), p. 150.

20 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 memoires relatifs à la Révolution Française (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.

21 For detail on the arrangements, see Hyslop (1968).

22 Bailly, Mémoires 1, p. 9. The standard work on the Paris elections is Chassin (1888–89).

23 Ibid. 1, p. 12.

24 Ibid. 1, p. 51.

25 Ibid. 1, p. 52.

26 Ibid. 1, p. 190.

27 Ibid. 1, pp. 208–214.

28 Ibid. 1, pp. 214–215.

29 Ibid. 1, p. 278.

30 Gillispie (1983), pp. 69–78.

31 See Godechot (1965).

32 The clearest brief account of the Assemblée des Électeurs is the introduction by Sigismond Lacroix to volume 1 of his edition of Actes de la Commune de Paris, 1 ^ére série (7 vols., 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.

35 Gillispie (1980), p. 34.

36 Lavergne (1861), pp. 688–696.

37 “Mémoires présentés à l’Assembléé de l’Orléanais,” OL 6 (1893), pp. 238–312. Most of these papers were published anonymously in Procès-verbal de l’Assemblee provinciale de l’Or-l éanais (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).

40 “Sur l’agriculture et le commerce de l’Orléanais,” OL 6, p. 256.

41 “Mémoire sur la convocation des États-Généraux,” OL 6, pp. 313–334.

42 “Instruction donnée par la noblesse du baillage de Blois à ses députés aux États-Génér-aux,” OL 6, pp. 335–363. Cf. Poirier (1993), pp. 239–244.

43 “Mémoire sur les encouragements qu’il est nécessaire d’accorder à 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.

45 “Instruction donnée par la noblesse du baillage de Blois,” loc. cit., n. 42 above.

46 “Mémoire sur la convocation des États-Généraux” (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 prerevolutionary 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.

48 On the Réveillon affair, see Rudé (1959), pp. 34–44, modified by Rosenband (1997).

49 For Lavoisier’s account, see “Mémoire de la Régie des Poudres,” OL 5, pp. 714–731. Jean-Baptiste Clouet (1739–1816), Lavoisier’s colleague as régisseur, is not to be confused with Jean-Francois Clouet (1751–1801), also a chemist and staff member at Mézières before the Revolution and at the École polytechnique afterward, nor with the abbé Pierre-Romain Clouet (1748–1810), librarian at the École des Mines (Taton 1952). On the accident at Essonnes, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 71–72.

50 Procès-Verbal des seances . . . de l’Assemblée Générale des Électeurs de Paris 1 (1790), pp. 322– 324.

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

52 “Rapport fait le 6 août 1789 à l’Assemblée des Représentants de la Commune . . . par un de MM. les régisseurs des poudres.” Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution, 1 ^ére série, 1, pp. 107–108. Hereafter cited as Lacroix, Actes. See also Guillaume de Brune (the future Napoleonic Marshal), Lettre occasionnée par la découverte du bateau de poudre . . . adressée à l’Hôtel de Ville , le 8 août 1789 (BN, Lb 39. 7612).

53 Lacroix, Actes 1, pp. 108–109.

54 Ibid., p. 112.

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 medécine 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 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 mthodique 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 methodique, see Watts (1958), Tucoo-Chala (1977), and Darnton (1979).

58 Gillispie (1980), chapter 3.

59 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 génerales sur la Réforme dont la Médecine est susceptible. & sur la nécessité de la rappeler à l’état d’unité et de simplicite où elle etoit au temps d’Hippocrate, en la réunissant à 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 à l’Assemblée Nationale”, Noveau plan de constitution pour la médecine, pp. xxxiv– xxxvi).

62 Ibid., p. 11.

63 Below, chapter 2, section 2.

64 Foucault (1963).

65 Noveau plan de constitution pour la medecine, p. 57.

66 Ibid., p. 80.

67 Ibid., pp. 74–75.

68 Quoted in Dreyfus (1903), p. 140.

69 Camille Bloch and Alexandre Tuetey, eds., Procès-Verbaux et Rapports du Comité de Mendicit é 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.

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

73 “Plan du Travail,” op. cit., n. 70 above, p. 317.

74 PVRCM, “Premier rapport,” op. cit,, n. 72 above, p. 330.

75 Gillispie (1980), pp. 252–256.

76 PVRCM, p. 634n.

77 “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 à Paris pendant la Révolution, documents inédits, (4 vols., 1895–97), 1 (Les hôpitaux et hospices, 1790–91), introduction. The replies that survive are those from Bicêtre (84, 230–253), the Salpêtrière (94, 265–284), the Enfants Trouvés (108, 303–312), the Saint-Esprit (123, 354–364), the Maison de Scipion (126, 377–390), and the Petites Maisons (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, 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 à donner à la classe indigente dans les différentes circonstances de la vie,” pp. 383–464.

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 resume sommaire,” PVRCM, pp. 534–574.

85 Compare the provisions proposed in Nouveau Plan , Pt. II, “De l’exercice de la médecine dans ses rapports avec la salubrité publique,” 1, pp. 68–72, with the Projets de decrét 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 84, 26 mai 1791. “M. Vicq d’Azyr a fait . . . lecture de quelques réflexions offrant le rapprochement des agences de secours proposés par le Comite 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 lay-men, named by the departmental Conseil général.

87 The only study of the Comité de Salubrité is a thesis for the Faculte de Médecine, Ingrand (1934). It is drawn from a study of the PVCS.

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.

90 Ibid., 8 January 1791; 2 December 1790.

91 Reprinted as Annexe in Ingrand (1934).

92 Below, chapter 2, section 3.

93 “Réponse à l’adresse aux provinces, ou Réflexions sur les écrits publiés contre l’Assemblée Nationale,” Oeuvres de Condorcet 9, p. 489.

94 “Déclaration des droits” (1789), Oeuvres 9, p. 181.

95 “Au corps électoral contre l’esclavage des noirs” (3 February 1789), Oeuvres 9, p. 471.

96 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralite des voix (1785), p. cxxvi.

97 “Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité” (3 July 1790), 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.

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 son-in-law, Arthur Condorcet-O’Connor, and Francois 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 Crepel 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). Crepel 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 (janviermars 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.

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.

106 “Essai pour connaitre la population du royaume,” MARS (1783/86–1788/91). The actual numbers were assembled by François 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.

111 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilite, “Discours preliminaire,” 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.

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 elections 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.

115 Essai, p. 111.

116 “Sentiments d’un républicain sur les assemblées provinciales et les États-Généraux” (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.

118 Op. cit., n. 103 above, p. 656.

119 AP, Première Série, 3, pp. 661–666.

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

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

122 For the proceedings of the first Assembly, see Lacroix, Actes 1.

123 Ibid., 2, pp. 201, 207–208.

124 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 française.

125 Robiquet (1890a), p. 511.

126 Leçons de calcul differentiel (1777), Introduction à l’étude de l’astronomie physique (1787), Traité de calcul differentiel et de calcul intégral (2 vols., 1796).

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.

131 Ibid. 3, pp. iii–v, 88–89.

132 Bailly, Mémoires 2, p. 26, edition cited above, section 2, n. 20.

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

134 Lacroix, Actes 1, pp. 33–36.

135 Ibid., 3, pp. iv–v, 89–91.

136 Ibid., 2, pp, 470–472, 638–639; 3, pp. iv–vi, 10–11, 31–32, 300–301.

137 “Sur la formation des communes” (1789), Oeuvres 9, pp. 405–410.

138 Lacroix, Actes 3, pp. vi–vii, 198–201.

139 “Adresse à 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.

140 Lacroix, Actes 4, pp. 10–11.

141 The text is published in Buchez and Roux (1834–38) 4, pp. 121–162.

142 “Adresse aux districts,” 18 January 1790, quoted in Lacroix, Actes 4, p. iv.

143 Règlement général pour la Commune de Paris, rédigé par ses députés réunis à l’Archeveveche.

144 Quoted from Esprit du Règlement general pour la Commune de Paris (1790) in Lacroix, Actes 4, pp. viii–x.

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

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, Ébauche d’un nouveau plan de société patriotique, adopte par le Club de Mil-sept-cent-quatre-vingt-neuf (1790).

148 See, for example, Le patriote français (17 April 1791), pp. 411–412; and Camille Desmoulins in Révolutions de France et de Brabant (9 May 1791), pp. 487–490.

149 A facsimile reprinting of the Journal was published in 1982 by Éditions d’Histoire Sociale (EDHIS).

150 “Avis au peuple francais sur ses véritables ennemis,” 24 August 1790, ibid.

151 Quoted in Poirier (1993), p. 271.

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.

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

154 “Addition aux observations de M. Lavoisier, député suppleant 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).

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 theorie des probabilités et les calculs financiers,” in Rashed (1988), pp. 267–328.

158 “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 à 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.

161 Bosher (1970), pp. 232, 309, and especially the chart, on p. 239.

162 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 bureau-cratic 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).

164 For Condorcet on the Treasury, see “Sur la constitution du pouvoir charge d’administrer le Tresor 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 à 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, “Apercu de la valeur des récoltes du royaume” (1787) and Lavoisier’s 1787 “Résultats de quelques expériences d’agriculture et réflexions 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.

169 Ibid., p. 464.

170 Ibid., pp. 509–510.

171 Quotations in Poirier (1993), pp. 290–293.

172 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).

173 Jérôme Petion 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.

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

175 Ibid., serie 2, 5, pp. 399–414.

176 “De la République, ou, un roi, estil nécessaire à la conservation de la liberté?”, read to the Cercle Social, 12 July 1791, Oeuvres 12, pp. 227–237.