CHAPTER III

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

1. NATURAL HISTORY AND THEORETICAL SCIENCE

On 8 August 1793 the Convention acted on the draft of a law submitted two days previously by the Comité d’Instruction Publique. The first article is curt and to the point: “All the academies and literary societies licensed or endowed by the nation are abolished.” The seventh and last article placed their facilities—botanical gardens, observatories, apparatus, libraries, museums, and other appurtenances—under the oversight of unspecified governmental authorities pending dispositions to be made when a system of public education should be organized. The intervening five articles, framed by friends of the Academy of Science on the committee, exempted it from the fate of the others and assured that one body a provisional existence. The Academy of Science, and it alone, was still to discharge its normal functions and to receive its annual appropriations. In addition, the courses of instruction in science and mechanical, chemical, and medical arts currently offered under the auspices of other societies were also to continue. By Article 3 the Convention was to direct the Committee of Public Instruction to bring in a measure providing for organization of a new society for the advancement of science and the arts.

The Convention did no such thing. Instead, it quashed the saving articles and adopted only the first and last, thus eliminating all academies forthwith while expropriating their assets. A single speech by David, still a member of the Committee, dealt the coup de grâce. Though instancing mainly abuses in the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, he delivered a diatribe on “the absolute necessity of destroying en masse all academies, last refuge of all aristocracies.”¹ The specific, and no doubt intended, effect was to eliminate the exception made for the Academy of Science. The truncated measure may be fairly described as inimical to high culture, erudition, and learning in general and to exact science in particular.

The word “exact” is chosen advisedly, for the law of 8 August makes a startling contrast to the provisions for natural history adopted just eight weeks previously by the same Convention, newly purged of its Girondist members. A decree of 10 June 1793 converted the Jardin des Plantes and the Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. With the addition of the adjective “National,” that is still the official name. As we shall see, a draft of the measure was framed by the staff itself in August 1790, but was never acted on by the Constituent Assembly. It called for creation of twelve chairs of natural history and vested administration of the establishment in the hands of the professors, all to be of equal rank. Such a provision was both munificent and democratic. No university in the world afforded a dozen chairs for all the sciences put together. Except for the Collège de France, no other institution of any sort for teaching and research was as yet governed by the professional staff. As for equality in the Republic of Letters under the Old Regime, it was a principle honored in the breach everywhere but among the forty immortals of the Académie Française.

Considering these events many years ago, we ventured to suggest that they exhibit the institutional expression of a sensibility formed by the ro-mantic strain in the Enlightenment.² Even before the Revolution, the Acad-emy of Science was failing to project a sympathetic image beyond the perimeter of official circles. Its haughty report on Mesmer and the fad of animal magnetism in 1784 left the impression of arrogant scientists scorn-fully dismissing as mere illusion what had been a fascination to fashionable people everywhere and a wellspring of psychic good feeling in the experience of the widespread membership of the Societies of Harmony.³

More generally, the political class of the revolutionary years was deeply marked by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The feature of the Rousseauist mentality that loves nature and hates science was latent among them, as it probably is in varying degree in a significant proportion of temperaments in all populations throughout modern times. Any perception that the authority of science compounds abuses of authority in the large is apt to accentuate those hostile attitudes and to bring them into the open. A widespread example in recent memory was the hostility to science embedded in the countercultural movement that emerged in the 1970s, compounded out of fear of atomic energy, revulsion from deceits practiced by government to justify a failed military campaign, rejection of objectivity in favor of feelings of unity between man and nature, and romantic refusal of limits upon the indulgence of personality.⁴

A concrete institutional legacy further burdened the Academy. It was a corporation, a privileged corporation, one among the myriad boxes into which the old regime compartmentalized French society and kept the subjects of the king in thrall to the crown and separate from each other. Or so the revolutionary generation felt. That any vestige of corporatism was inad-missible was among the unquestioned givens of politics. On 22 September 1792, the day after the Convention proclaimed the Republic, it was declared “one and indivisible.” In diametric contrast, the designation “fédérés” was pejorative, an epithet tantamount to a death sentence under the Terror. No intermediate allegiances, no partitioning of sovereignty, must intervene between the individual citizen and the state which, in Rousseau’s formula, embodies the general will.

A comparably holistic instinct, though with respect to nature rather than society, inspired the dream Diderot fathered on d’Alembert, “Tout change, tout passe, il n’y que le tout qui reste” (Everything changes, everything passes, only the whole remains).⁵ Underlying Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1754) is the notion that Everyman is in some sense a naturalist. To attain knowledge of nature we have no need of intermediaries, no need of scientists with their baggage of abstractions and artificial constructs. Such knowledge must be immediate if we are to trust it, as immediate as the relation of the gardener to the garden or of the artisan to the material he is fashioning. Even so did Diderot identify truth with craftsmanship in the Encyclopédie, wherein analysis of techniques became technology avant la let-tre. Dignified in their many occupations, artisans were thereby to be “taught to have a better opinion of themselves.”⁶

One would not wish to argue that intellectual and cultural factors were a sufficient cause either of the suppression of the Academy of Science, or of the creation of the Muséum, or indeed of any of the myriad other events that made the Revolution what it was. In all cases, real political, social, and economic interests were in play. But latent attitudes do help explain how the Convention, preoccupied with saving a Republic beset by war, rebellion, and treason, could have taken the decisions it did in the few moments its agenda allotted to the affairs of science. An assembly of educated, articulate laymen responded favorably to a political démarche on behalf of an already popular institution of natural history. Thereupon, they responded unfavorably to the effort mounted by leaders of the scientific establishment to defend the structure it had inherited against attacks by external critics and enemies, many of them working-class, whom the Academy had dominated, offended, or excluded.

2. THE MUSÉUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE

Differing circumstances lay behind such different outcomes. Among aspiring naturalists, chafing at the lordship exercised by Buffon over the Jardin Royal des Plantes, resentment of official science entailed no hostility to precision in description or to strict method in classification. On the contrary, the widespread enthusiasm for Linnaeus among amateurs and beginners was owing to the readiness with which his system, which relied concretely on the form of the sex organs, permitted recognition and identification of plants. In the eighteenth century the practice of botany was nothing abstract. In natural history, the gradation between occupation and hobby was still a continuum, not a divide as it was in the exact sciences and had just become in chemistry. Laymen could and did participate—a Rousseau, a Goethe (who, however, disliked Linnaeus), a weekend herborizer. It is an interesting coincidence that the author of the dissenting report on animal magnetism, A.-L. de Jussieu, should have been a naturalist, although like Lamarck and Adanson (anti-Linnean all three, albeit for different reasons), Jussieu would have to be ranked among official scientists along with, or rather just under, Buffon.⁷

On 28 December 1787, a scant three months before Buffon’s death, five botanists joined themselves into the Société linnéenne de Paris.⁸ The oldest, André Thouin, head gardener of the Jardin du Roi, was an accomplished horticulturalist. The other four were youngsters, among whom only Brous-sonet had standing, or rather a very recent footing, in the scientific establishment. During his years in England as protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, he had become an intimate of James Edward Smith, a wealthy young physician and enthusiastic botanist who purchased Linnaeus’s natural history collections from the master’s Swedish heirs in 1784. Smith did so with the intention of building around them a botanical society, a project realized in the foundation of the highly successful Linnaean Society of London in February 1788. The Paris Society thus preceded it by several months even though the impetus came from England. Smith had made his grand tour of Europe in 1786 and sought out fellow enthusiasts in Strasbourg and Montpellier as well as Paris.

Of the other three charter members of the Société linneenne, Louis Bosc d’Antic, son of a not very successful industrial chemist of Protestant back-ground, had minor positions, first in the Finance Ministry and then in the postal service. He had followed Guyton de Morveau’s course in chemistry in Dijon but not done well in school. Hating both Latin and mathematics, he became a passionate herborizer in his spare time and a disciple of Romé de l’Isle, himself an advocate of Linnaean classification in mineralogy.⁹ Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison, a young man of letters, and of means, had been drawn to natural history by his youthful friendship with François Willemet, son of a famous botanist. Millin later made a certain reputation as an antiquarian and archaeologist, was a principal founder of the Magasin encyclopédique in 1795, and became the first curator of coins and medals at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Lastly, Guillaume-Antoine Olivier, a Provençal, had been Broussonet’s younger comrade during their studies at Montpellier, where he took his medical degree at the age of seventeen. On his arrival in Paris, Broussonet introduced him to his patron, Bertier de Sauvigny, who engaged the young man to undertake what was then called a “statistic”— that is, a thorough survey of the topography, agriculture, and resources of the generality of Paris. At the same time Olivier developed an interest in entomology, for which science he served as editor of the volumes treating it in the Encyclopédie méthodique.¹⁰

All five—to anticipate for a moment—took a moderate part in revolutionary politics. Thouin was elected an alternate to the Constituent Assembly and Broussonet a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Bosc, an intimate of Roland and especially of his wife, joined the Jacobins early on and served as secretary of its Committee of Correspondence for a time in 1792. He and Guillaume were regulars in the salon of Madame Roland, and hence were compromised after the fall of the Girondists. Millin took the name Ele-uth erophile and joined Condorcet in editing the Chronique de Paris in 1791– 92.¹¹

The Société linnéenne held its weekly meetings in Broussonet’s lodgings. Bosc served as president and Millin as secretary, keeping the register in Latin in good Linnaean fashion. Thouin was present only rarely, whether because he was too busy, felt out of place among the youngsters, or found the presentations amateurish. Another eight or ten joined the company and attended more or less regularly. Among them were Francois de Lamétherie, editor of the Journal de physique, a bitterly unreconstructed opponent of Lavoisier and the new chemistry. Admitted as a corresponding member was a prominent lawyer, Jacques Antoine Creuzé-Latouche, soon to be elected to the States-General. Foreign naturalists passing through Paris were occasional visitors. Proceedings consisted of accounts of investigations by the members as well as reports on their readings and on publications of various learned societies—the Academy of Science, the Royal Society, and other bodies. A fete champetre on Linnaeus’s birthday, 24 May 1788, was the finest moment of the infant Society’s brief life. In the autumn of 1788, the frequency of meetings decreased to once a fortnight. The last was held on 26 December 1788.

The demise of the French Linnaean Society in its cradle, contrasted to the flourishing of its British counterpart, has been attributed to several factors. For one thing, political preoccupations may have left little time or thought for natural history. More fundamentally, however, voluntary societies, science clubs in effect, were in keeping with the scheme of things in Britain, but not in France. The Academy of Science looked askance at the prospect for associations other than itself. Bosc and Broussonet, says Cuvier in his éloge of the former, intended “a sort of scientific revolution.”¹² All three leading botanists, Adanson, Jussieu, and Lamarck, while disagreeing with each other about method, agreed in rejecting the Linnaean system. Word went about that any who hoped for the privilege of election to the Academy would do well to dissociate themselves from the unauthorized Linnaean Society.¹³ Pressures, whether of this or other sorts, sufficed. Its members separated.

But not for long, for among the rights of man is that of voluntary association. Linnaeus had somehow become the symbol of scientific freedom among naturalists, groaning in retrospect under the heel of Buffon. On 20 July 1790 an assembly of “almost all the naturalists in Paris” adopted an address to the National Assembly favoring the placing of monuments to great scientists in public places throughout Paris. Specifically requested was authority thus to honor Linnaeus by erecting a bust commissioned at the instance of Broussonet and paid for by popular subscription. It was to be located under the cedar of Lebanon in “the public Jardin des Plantes, an establishment that we all want to see nationalized, which is to say sheltered from all influence foreign to your own.”¹⁴ There were ninety-two signatories. Besides the original Linnaeans, the petition was signed also by Lamarck, Lacepède, and Fourcroy, the latter two longtime members of the staff of the Jardin des Plantes; also by leading pharmacists, notably Pelletier and Bayen; also by important instrument makers, Miché and Lenoir; also by the flower painter Redouté, “Raphaël des Roses”; also by others on the margins of science, Lamétherie, Sage, and Hassenfratz; also by two who would figure prominently in the educational debate, Gilbert Romme and Lanthenas; also by a future terrorist, Jean-Claude Vincent; and finally by several deputies, foremost among them the abbe Grégoire.

Permission granted, a plaster bust (the bronze was never cast) was un-veiled in the presence of a great throng on 23 August 1790. The manifestation was expressly political in intent. It was clearly by design and not by chance that this very public celebration of natural history should have been staged at the very moment when the question of the Jardin des Plantes was before the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. Nationalization was a step desired, not merely by the nature lovers of the capital but by the very members of its staff, who were even then engaged in the negotiations that ultimately brought it about.¹⁵

Nestor of the establishment and curator of the “Cabinet,” or natural history gallery, was Daubenton, whose title was Demonstrator. He had put behind him animal husbandry and the zoological anatomies he had performed to illustrate Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle . An old man, he now focused his interest on the arrangement of the mineralogical collection and its exhibition to the public. Three colleagues held professorial chairs, Desfontaines for botany, Portal for anatomy, and Fourcroy for chemistry. Three others had posts as demonstrators, Jussieu in botany, the elderly Mertrud in anatomy, and A.-L. Brongniart in chemistry (Brongniart, a pharmacist, is not to be confused with his brother Théodore, a prominent architect, nor with his nephew Alexandre, one of the original Linnaeans and a future geologist.) Lacepède’s title was assistant keeper of the gallery and assistant demonstrator in natural history, while Faujas de Saint-Fond was adjunct keeper. Those names figure in a salary schedule compiled for the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly early in 1790. André Thouin, head gardener, is listed in a different section below the colleagues who had teaching responsibilities. ¹⁶

The name of Lamarck does not appear. Although a member of the Academy of Science and widely known for his Flore française (1775), he received no stipend. In the late 1780s Lamarck, descendant of an impoverished noble family, eked out a meagre living for his future wife and their five children by editing the botanical dictionary of the Encyclopédie méthodique. Previously he had served Buffon privately as tutor to his son and in 1781 was appointed correspondent of the Jardin du Roi, a distinction carrying honor but no honorarium. The crystallographer René-Just Haüy, also a member of the Academy of Science, was another familiar of the institution through Buffon’s grace and favor. In holy orders, he had no official standing there at all. Neither did Déodat de Dolomieu, Daubenton’s correspondent in the Academy, a nobleman, investigator of vulcanism, and one of the founders of geology.

The salary distribution among the nine naturalists who did hold posts was haphazard. What appear to have been the lower positions paid better than the higher ones. Faujas and Lacepède received 2,000 livres, Brongniart 1,500 plus a supplement of 500, Mertud 700 with a supplement of 1,000, while the three professors had salaries of 1,500 each. Jussieu, arguably the most distinguished of the lot, had to make do with 1,200. Van Spaendonck, painter and illustrator, earned a salary of 600 and fees of 700, while Thouin, the linchpin of the whole establishment, was paid 2,400. Finally, the intendant, Auguste-Charles-César Flahault, marquis de la Billarderie, received 6,000 in salary plus 6,000 in honorarium.

The identity of the intendant, Buffon’s successor, was an even sorer point than were his emoluments. In 1771 Buffon, who took a feudal view of his office, had entered into an agreement about the succession. His son, then seven years old, was to be second in line after the comte d’Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi. The latter’s motive was to reserve a dignified post in which to retire from ministerial responsibility for science, art, and culture. In April 1788 Buffon, his demise near, sought to secure the immediate succession to his son, by then a ne’er-do-well officer in the Angoumois regiment. The maneuver failed, but meanwhile d’Angiviller had transferred his right to an older brother, head of the noble and impecunious Flahault family. Thereafter the reversion was to go to Condorcet, who would thus be in a position to align the operations of the Jardin des Plantes with the undertakings of the Academy of Science.¹⁷

The latter provision was unknown to the staff of the Jardin, though there is no reason to think it would have gone down well, while the former dismayed them. In their eyes, administrative experience and influence at court might have justified d’Angiviller’s appointment, even in the absence of competence in natural history. His elderly brother had none of those qualities. His only contribution, it may be said, was to create a supernumerary post for Lamarck, who was a distant kinsman. In June 1789 he named Lamarck Royal Botanist and Keeper of the Herbarium, not in the garden itself, but in the natural history gallery. The step mollified no one, not even the recipient. The salary was to be a mere 1,000 livres.

In the shock of La Billarderie’s appointment, Thouin, the one member of the staff whose whole career lay within the borders of the garden, assumed the role of spokesman. A document written in his hand, intended for the guidance of their unwelcome intendant and ultimately of his brother, the minister, sets forth the staff ’s sense of their mission.¹⁸ Drafted in October 1788, it amounts to a cahier des doléances of naturalists that, in the revolutionary event, served as a blueprint for the reorganization that he and his colleagues proposed to the Constituent Assembly in August 1790.

What precipitated matters was the budget. The financial condition of the Jardin Royal des Plantes et Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle du Roi at the end of the old regime reflected that of the monarchy in zoological, botanical, and mineralogical microcosm. Casting up the accounts of the institution through 1789, the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly uncovered accumulated debt amounting to 606,026 livres, 16 sous, and 6 deniers. At this early stage of revolutionary politics, financial austerity was in principle the order of the day. On 29 January 1790 a general overview of national expenditures envisaged an appropriation of 72,000 livres for the Jardin des Plantes, less by 45 percent than the 129,000 spent in 1789.

One member of the late Société linnénne was now a deputy and a member of the Finance Committee. Jacques-Antoine Creuzé-Latouche was a lawyer and former magistrate from Poitou whose politics moved from left to center in the passage of revolutionary time. At this early stage, he was an active and influential Jacobin. His was the opinion that carried weight whenever the budget of the Jardin des Plantes was before the Finance Committee. In the course of its deliberations in the spring and summer of 1790, he succeeded in softening the projected cuts so as to leave the institution 92,222 livres, still down by almost 27,000 from the previous year. The chairman, Charles-Francois Lebrun (the same who was to be Bonaparte’s choice for Third Consul in 1799), submitted that figure to the National Assembly on 17 August in the draft of a law concerning all the academies as well as other institutions of science and learning. Among economies to be realized in the Jardin du Roi, Lamarck’s new post was to be eliminated along with that of Faujas de St.-Fond, and the intendant’s salary was to be slashed from 12,000 to 8,000 livres.¹⁹

Evidently informed of the tenor of the committee’s discussions, almost certainly by Creuzé-Latouche, the staff was ready with its own petition when the Assembly took up the proposed reforms on 20 August. Regnaud de St.-Jean d’Angély opened debate with a defense of the two naturalists to be dismissed. Thereupon Dupont de Nemours, who was in the chair, read out the address he had just received signed by the ten naturalists on the staff styling themselves “Officers of the Jardin des Plantes et Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle.” A brief and eloquent declaration of the rights of scientists, it made the case for the importance of natural history; reviewed the contributions of the institution to knowledge, education, medicine, agriculture, industry, and the quality of life; and concluded with a deferential request that the staff be granted a few days in which to prepare their own plan for reorganization. Impressed, the deputies accepted these “wise views” and referred the proposed reform back to committee. It was given a month to resubmit a set of regulations to be drawn up by the signatories.²⁰

This initial petition indicated the staff ’s concerns in passing—unequal salaries, inability to name their colleagues, an incoherent teaching program—but discreetly said nothing of the intendancy. La Billarderie, for his part, also had had wind of the Committee’s intentions. In the preceding weeks a series of abject letters to Condorcet begged the good offices of his prospective and still influential successor. Worst of all, during the debate on August 20—so a friend told him—one deputy had observed that the positions of Lamarck and Faujas could be salvaged together with an additional economy of 4,000 livres by eliminating the office of Intendant altogether. In a last-minute, desperate appeal to Condorcet, ostensibly in their mutual interest, La Billarderie confided that, all things considered, the positions of his two subordinates were dispensable, the more readily in that he had created the post for Lamarck for charitable reasons. Pray, he went on, either burn my letter or send it back after reading. Condorcet was not a shredder of documents, and this one survives among his papers. There is no evidence of an answer. Virtually nothing then remained confidential, however, and apprehensiveness lest he might intervene noticeably cooled relations between the staff of the Jardin and the Permanent Secretary of the Academy.²¹

Creuzé-Latouche refrained from participating in the discussion on the floor of the Assembly since the time allotted the affairs of science, arts, and letters was very brief. He did, however, and this was often the way to exert influence, come into the open about the Intendancy of the Jardin des Plantes in a pamphlet giving his opinion on the disposition to be made of all academies. With respect to the Jardin, the greatest abuse, requiring the most urgent reform, precisely was its governance by an intendant. The very name, the very nature of the office, was inadmissible. “You will see,” he continued, “the present intendant, to whom any sort of natural history is totally foreign, receiving the emoluments of a place (already, by a further abuse worthy of the old regime, assigned to a successor), receiving, I say, the emoluments of a place whereof it is impossible either to divine what use he is or to conceal the harm he does, since nothing after all is more damaging to science, nor more discouraging to those who cultivate it, than the intrusion of the power of government.”²²

The officers, as they continued to call themselves, of the Jardin des Plantes, lost no time. A committee of the whole assembled on 23 August 1790, the very day on which the bust of Linnaeus was unveiled in the labyrinth, a fossil stone’s throw from their windows. At once they elected Daubenton to preside, thus snubbing La Billarderie, who was present but thereafter ceased to attend. Immediately delegated to draft a charter were Fourcroy, Lacepède, and Portal. They and their colleagues knew their minds professionally. In three days’ time they produced the first democratic consti-tution for a fully modern scientific organization ever written.²³

No longer to be partitioned between a botanical garden and a a collection of plants, minerals, and zoological specimens, the institution was to be one:Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. A national institution, its purpose was to be research and teaching over the whole field of natural history with particular attention to the improvement of agriculture, arts, and trades. All its officers would have the title of professor and would enjoy equal rights and equal salaries. Administration of the establishment would be in their hands. The responsibility would be exercised by a director elected from among their number to serve for a term of one year. He might be reelected once, but not again for at least two years.

As to its teaching, the Muséum was to resemble the Collège de France in certain respects. Courses of instruction were to be open to all comers, French or foreign, free of charge. Forming no part of the university, it would grant no degrees. Students would be there simply to learn in a specialized manner. Unlike the practice in the Collège, however, they were to have official standing in the institution. The period of study would normally occupy three years. During that time, they would enroll in every course they wished to follow and receive a certificate from the professor provided their attendance was faithful. In even more striking contrast with the Collège, students were to have a voice in the selection of their professors, even as they would have had in Vicq d’Azyr’s plan for medical education. When a va-cancy occurred, enrolled students would be invited to assemble. Those in their first year might express an opinion, but the vote would be limited to upperclassmen. Second-and third-year men would choose six of the latter to serve as electors sitting with all the professors in the nomination of the best qualified candidate for appointment by the King (this was still 1790).

Twelve chairs were to be established and twelve courses offered as follows (in the terminology of the time):

1. A course in mineralogy.

2. A course in general chemistry.

3. A course in chemical arts.

4. A course in botany in the Muséum.

5. A course in botany in the country.

6. A course in cultivation [culture].

7. A course in natural history of quadrupeds, cetaceans, birds, rep-tiles, and fish.

8. A course in natural history of insects, worms, and microscopic animals.

9. A course in human anatomy.

10. A course in animal anatomy.

11. A course in geology and training for traveling naturalists.

12. A course in natural iconography, or the art of drawing and painting all the productions of nature.

It speaks volumes for what the Muséum would accomplish that within a few years modern zoological terminology such as vertebrate, invertebrate, and comparative anatomy would be in general use. Already, in the accompanying designation of the twelve chairs, the holders of the seventh and eighth were to be respectively “Professeur d’ornithologie, d’icthiologie, etc.” and “Professeur d’entomologie, d’helminthologie, etc.”

Further articles spell out in greater detail than a faculty member of our day would tolerate exactly what each course was to contain and how it was to be taught. Regulations are laid down for the use of the amphitheater and the disposition of the botanical garden. Provision is to be made for the installation of laboratories, a menagerie, and a library. Correspondence is to be maintained and specimens to be exchanged with appropriate institutions in the provinces and abroad. A security officer is to assure maintenance of order throughout the establishment.

An appended budget accords with the appropriation of 92,222 livres approved by the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. Only there, almost as an afterthought, do the identities of the prospective pro-fessors appear. In the order of the above chairs they were to be Dauben-ton, Fourcroy, Brongniart, Desfontaines, Jussieu, Thouin, Lacepède, Lamarck, Mertrud, Portal, Faujas, and Spaendonck. The uniform salary was to be 2,500 livres with a few temporary exceptions. Lemonnier and Petit, former professors of botany and human anatomy, were to share in the stipends of those chairs. Thouin was to have an extra 500 livres so as not to be penalized. By a similar though larger token, Daubenton, venerated among his junior colleagues as co-founder with Buffon of the gallery, must not lose by the change and was to receive a supplement of 3,500. The most interesting feature of the list is this, however. Since the two chairs in botany were preempted by the prior claims of Desfontaines and Jussieu, Lamarck at the age of forty-six was constrained to move from the field in which he had distinguished himself to invertebrate zoology. He did have a considerable collection of shells that he had amused himself by classifying, but otherwise had never studied any element of the subject hewas now to teach.²⁴ Instead, he went on to become its founder as a system-atic discipline.

On 9 September the definitive text was read out by Fourcroy, adopted unanimously, and printed forthwith.²⁵ He and Thouin were delegated to wait on the president of the National Assembly and to ask permission for the entire staff to appear there on the sixteenth, four days before the dead-line, in order to present the proposal they had been invited to make. No record of their being received survives. Nor did the Constituent Assembly find time to take further action.

Expectations thus dashed, the staff returned to the uneven tenor of their ways, still officially subject to La Billarderie’s authority. Meanwhile, on 27 August, the day after Fourcroy’s draft was ready, former members of the defunct Société linneenne, naturalists at large who had orchestrated the un-veiling of Linnaeus’s bust on the twenty-third, reorganized themselves as the Société d’histoire naturelle . Theirs was now one among a raft of “ Sociétés libres” of all types springing up throughout the country in the heady air of freedom. For the purview had widened beyond the Linnaean inspiration. The attraction of membership in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle in 1790 bespeaks, not adherence to Linnaean taxonomy, but an opening of science, whether prudential or genuine, toward a public of all interested parties.²⁶ The shift toward political activism may have been the reason why Brous-sonet never joined the new society.

One thin volume of Actes appeared in 1792. Sixty-three resident members of the Society and ninety associates, many of them foreign, are there listed in order of their joining. Far down on the list are the names of La Rochefoucauld, Roland, Parmentier, and Lavoisier, who may by then have thought membership to be politic. According to a prefatory note, another volume of Actes was ready for the printer and would appear if the public response to this first offering warranted. Evidently it did not. The Society published nothing further until 1799, when a single volume of Mémoires appeared containing papers presented to the Institut de France in the later nineties.

From a historical point of view, three among the twenty-seven articles in the 1792 Actes are noteworthy. A paper on the African hornbill was the earliest publication of Etienne Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. A twenty-year-old pensionnaire at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine, he is “Geoffroy fils” in the table of contents.²⁷ Second, a piece by Lamarck takes J. F. Gmelin to task for his edition of Linnaeus’s Systeme Naturae. The publication teems with the “grossest errors,” which Lamarck devotes his review to identifying.²⁸ The third, and by far the most substantial and interesting of the memoirs to be noted, is by Philippe Pinel, who served as Secretary from 30 December 1791 until 29 June 1792. It is an exercise in the comparative anatomy (his term) of quadrupeds and has nothing to do with the nosology or neurology for which he became celebrated. Both the method and the spirit prefigure Cu-vier and may well have served him as a model. It is no longer sufficient, runs Pinel’s argument, to characterize genera and species on the basis only of external and often arbitrary appearances. To establish “natural families” among large animals and to “grasp the gradations that link them one to another” requires determining “the immutable interrelations of the mechan-ical structures that the skeletons of these animals never fail to exhibit. For the advantage of the exact sciences is to introduce rigorous precision and a sort of invariability into the working of the human mind.” In Pinel’s anal-ysis the arrangement of the bony parts of the lower jaw gives the key to such a classification.²⁹

Despite the failure of the Constituent Assembly to act on the reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes in 1790, La Billarderie’s position in the inten-dancy gradually became untenable. On 1 October 1790 Condorcet’s journal, Chronique de Paris, printed an editorial welcoming the brochure in which the staff published its plan of reorganization. A month later, in November, La Billarderie’s brother, d’Angiviller, was accused on the floor of the National Assembly of having misappropriated the funds he had once disbursed as Director of the Batiments du Roi. The allegations were false, but he was indicted nonetheless. In June 1791 d’Angiviller’s arrest was ordered, his property was seized, and he fled France to take refuge in Russia at the court of Catherine II. Having already ceased to function as intendant, La Billarderie formally resigned in September 1791 and retreated to his native Picardy early in 1792. Implicated in some scheme of counterfeit assignats in January 1793, he died on the scaffold in Arras at an undetermined date during the Terror.

Left to their own devices, the staff of the Jardin des Plantes chose Dau-benton, Thouin, Lacepède, and Desfontaines to constitute an interim commission pending a regularization of their situation. In practice Thouin ran the Jardin des Plantes while Daubenton handled the much smaller matter of the gallery. Life went on. The botanical collections of assorted emigrés were expropriated and added to the stock. Fourcroy, Portal, Brongniart, and Jussieu gave their courses. The Paris section that took its name from the Jardin des Plantes assumed responsibility for security. Its voters further elected Jussieu to represent them in the General Assembly of the Commune of Paris, where his duties were an unwelcome distraction from his botanical studies. In collaboration with Jean-Guillaume Bruguières, a friend who was a specialist, Lamarck set about mastering the field he would later teach.³⁰ He also began writing the first of the speculative works on the nature of physical reality that both damaged his later reputation in the scientific community and led to his theory of transformation of species.³¹ All this while, from 1790 into 1793, he and his colleagues were awaiting enactment of their Plan of Reorganization. That failed to happen, even though one of the principal authors, Lacepède, was a deputy in the Legislative Assembly and a member of the Comite d’Instruction Publique.

The Ministry of the Interior was a revolving door in 1792. After dismissing Roland on 13 June, Louis XVI appointed Terrier de Monciel, an able man who lasted but a month in office. What was the dismay in the Jardin des Plantes when, in this last gasp of the monarchy, the King at Terrier’s instance filled the vacant intendancy by naming the enormously prolific and widely read nature writer, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, author among much else of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière indienne.

To read those tales nowadays as anything but caricatures of Rousseauist sentimentality at its most saccharine requires an enormous, and perhaps unsustainable, effort of historical will power. In his own eyes, and those of his readers, however, Bernardin was no mere fabulist. He was a literary naturalist, the continuer of Buffon. Such lay readers as Terrier de Monciel, and indeed Louis XVI, could deem it appropriate to appoint him Buffon’s successor. They could also be certain that his nomination would be popular. The subtitle of an American abridgment conveys the gist of his immense Études de la Nature: “Containing a Vindication of divine Providence, derived from a philosophic and moral survey of nature and of man.”³² Sympathetic scholarship has recently sought to rehabilitate Bernardin’s writings on natural history by considering them in the current light of ecological sensitivity and opposition to experiments on animals.³³ His future associates could only fear, however, lest he seek to realize fantasies of the sort he had published within the precincts of the Jardin des Plantes.

On the contrary, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who had been trained technically in the École des Ponts et Chaussées before becoming a writer, proved to be an able advocate of the interests of the institution and its staff throughout the early months of the Convention. He saw to the completion of the great greenhouse that shelters a miniature tropical rain forest to this very day. He had the courage to address the problem of preventing the people from picking the flowers even though the flowers now belonged to the people.³⁴ He sought to organize a second natural history expedition to America to be led by the botanist Joseph Dombey, who had explored the natural history of Peru, Chile, and Brazil from 1778 to 1784, and who died of mistreatment in a British prison on the island of Montserrat in 1794. ³⁵

Bernardin’s most signal initative was a pamphlet calling for attachment of a menagerie to the Jardin des Plantes. The immediate occasion was the desirability of making some provision other than slaughter or starvation for the animals barely surviving in the cidevant royal menagerie at Versailles—a rhinoceros, a hartebeast, a quagga, a tufted pigeon from the isle of Banda, and a lion with its faithful companion, a dog. To build a new menagerie around these forlorn creatures would hold an intrinsic advantage for the Jardin des Plantes. What still attracted scientists no less than general readers to Buffon’s great work was his treatment of the character and behavior of animals. Mere anatomy is insufficient. Only the study of living animals yields an intimate understanding, to which end their captivity must be made as natural as possible: “The relations of animals with the plants of their native country may there be studied. Only by that dual harmony can they be naturalized. . . . At the sight of the vegetation among which they were born, they will give themselves over to love-making under the illusion of being at home.”³⁶ Zoologists would thus be afforded a window onto the life of their subjects, artists would be able to draw animals from nature, and throngs of visitors would bring prosperity to one of the poorest quarters of Paris. In a positive report on the proposal read before the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, a committee consisting of Millin, Pinel, and Brongniart went further than Bernardin intended. Zoo animals, they argued, could serve the purposes of an experimental physiology. Only some ten months later, in November 1793, was the nucleus of a menagerie actually installed at the Jardin des Plantes, and then in consequence of the arrest of several entertainers, proprietors of sideshows without a circus, who were exhibiting caged animals in public places. The impetus, however, had come from Bernardin.³⁷

It also fell to Bernardin to appoint to the staff Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, one among the trio, the others being Lamarck and Cuvier, in whose later work natural history made the transition to modern biology. We have just seen how it was for institutional reasons that Lamarck moved into invertebrate zoology. Cuvier, a year younger than Geoffroy, was still unknown to the scientific community in Paris. In 1792 and 1793 he was serving as tutor in a noble Protestant family, the d’ Héricy in Normandy, where he occupied his leisure hours in the study of molluscs along the seashore.

Geoffroy’s opportunity, the most inadvertent of all, was owing to an adventure worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Twenty years old in 1792, Geoffroy was following a medical course, mainly to please his father, while greatly preferring Daubenton’s lectures on mineralogy at the Collège de France and those of Fourcroy and Jussieu in the Jardin des Plantes. Having completed his general education at the Collège de Navarre, he was now a boarding student in the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine. Foremost among the resident masters, all non-juring priests, was the abbé Haüy, the crystallographer, himself a onetime pupil of Daubenton and also an alumnus of the Collège de Navarre. Drawn together by common interests, master and pupil had become friends when, in the immediate aftermath of the rising of 10 August, Hauy and the entire collegial staff were arrested and jailed in the neighboring Saint-Firmin seminary, converted into a prison. Resolved to save his teachers, Geoffroy ran first to Daubenton, then to all the other scientists he could reach, and managed to enlist the support of enough influential people to secure an order for Haüy’s release on 14 August.

Others of the collegial staff were still incarcerated at the onset of the prison massacres in September. On 2 September, the day the murders began, Geoffroy got himself up in the garb of a prison guard with a fake identity card, made his way into Saint-Firmin, but failed to persuade his masters to leave their brothers and follow him out of danger by a back way. Watching from his room that night, he saw an aged priest hurled to his death from a window across the alley. Desperate, Geoffroy found a ladder, propped it in an angle of the wall of Saint-Firmin, and climbed to a second-story window. One after the other he helped twelve elderly priests, one of whom sprained an ankle, clamber down to safety from what must have been a very low security prison.

Enormously grateful, Haüy begged Daubenton to facilitate his young savior’s eagerness to shift from medicine to natural history. Opportunity arose in March 1793. Like many other political moderates of good family, Lac-epède, comte de La Ville-sur-Illon by birth, thought it the better part of valor to leave Paris and take shelter in his own country for a time. At once Daubenton proposed that Geoffroy be named to fill the vacancy. Bernardin readily agreed, and on 13 March nominated Geoffroy for appointment to the Natural History Gallery. Given his youth, his rank was Assistant Keeper and Assistant Demonstrator. So it happened that on 10 June 1793, when the Convention finally adopted the measure transforming the Jardin des Plantes into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, its first professor of vertebrate zoology was not Lacepède, but Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a mere college student three months since, who knew even less of his science than did Lamarck of its invertebrate branch.³⁸

Bringing the staff ’s three-year-old plan for reorganization out of limbo and onto the floor of the Convention was the most fruitful of the tasks that Joseph Lakanal took on himself as lobbyist and legislative champion of science. His self-justification, published many years later, opens with this sentence: “I was not unaware that men of letters are as a rule illustrious and needy, and that they have to be supported and succored. I was not unaware that, failing such support and assistance, they will leave for other countries where they will be welcomed by neighboring governments which know that science repays its benefactors with immortality.”³⁹ Elected to the Comite d’Instruction Publique in January 1793, Lakanal first intervened in the proceedings of the Convention on 16 February with a request that the Comite d’Instruction Publique and the Comite des Finances be instructed to prepare a joint report on the new organization to be given the Jardin des Plantes. The motion passed with no discussion, but nothing happened. In the course of an unrelated mission in the departments north of Paris, on 24 March Lakanal stopped by the chateau of Chantilly, former seat of the princes de Conde. Amazed by the profusion of works of art and objects of scientific interest, he proposed that a commmission be named to take an inventory and to arrange for transporting everything of value to Paris.

The obvious place for the natural history collection was the Jardin des Plantes. That was the reason, according to Geoffroy’s account, why Lakanal called on Daubenton on 9 June, at three o’clock in the afternoon. In company with his young protegé, now a colleague, the venerable mineralogist received the visiting deputy, whom neither he nor Geoffroy had ever met. The occasion proved a windfall for both parties. When Lakanal inquired about the general needs of the establishment, Daubenton seized the unexpected opportunity and pressed into his hands the brochure containing the Reorganization Plan of 1790. Lakanal, who had yet to make a mark in the Convention, thus found himself provided with a piece of legislation ready made. He took the text home, pruned the rhetoric of Fourcroy’s preamble, and the next morning secured the agreement in principle of the Comité d’Instruction Publique. Its members could scarcely have had time to read it. No trace remains in their minutes. During the session of the Convention that very evening, 10 June, Lakanal was given the floor. “Is the tree of liberty to be the only one not to be naturalized at the Jardin des Plantes?” asks his report.⁴⁰ The accompanying legislation passed at once, with no discussion among deputies whose minds were on other things—on the sieges of Valen-ciennes by the Austrians, of Perpignan by the Spaniards, of Mainz by the Prussians, on the capture of Saumur by the Vendéens, on the anger and dismay provoked in provincial centers by the proscription of the Girondists.⁴¹

In this fashion, without debate and largely unnoticed, did the onetime Jardin et Cabinet du Roi officially become the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. The intendant’s post being abolished, Bernardin took the transformation in good part and retired, gracefully enough and with an indemnity. Specification of the courses to be taught is contained in the law itself, the text of which is relatively brief.⁴² Apart from trivial changes in terminology, the only difference from the 1790 draft was provision for a second course in what would soon be called vertebrate zoology, the purpose no doubt being to reserve a place for Lacepède alongside Geoffroy whenever the former might return.

Only after passage of the law, which none of the staff had foreseen, did a committee consisting of Fourcroy, Thouin, and Jussieu draw up regulations that would govern the establishment in detail. Here there was a signal modification of the original proposal. After three years of revolution, the new by-laws were markedly less democratic. There was now no question either of student power or of participation by students in the selection of their professors. Indeed, the prospect for formal enrollment in the institution and for a coherent three-year curriculum was abandoned. The only provision for students appears in a single sentence of a lengthy document: Those among them “who need verification of their presence in various courses will inscribe their name and address in a register kept for each course and will receive a certificate of attendance from the professor.”⁴³

3. THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY CLIMATE

Lakanal’s role with respect to the Academy of Science was an altogether more parlous affair and ended, though not through his doing, with its abolition. Its eventual suppression, even like the reform of the Muséum, was preceded by formation of a society of scientific amateurs, the Société Philomathique. Among the “free” or voluntary societies, it proved to be the only one to survive the revolutionary ferment. As matters fell out, the Société Philomathique found a niche wherein it continues to prosper in the evolving environment of science.⁴⁴ At first glance, its members had much in common with the original Linnaeans. They initially foregathered on 10 December 1788, a couple of weeks before the Linnaeans held the last meeting of their abortive society. Both groups were started by enthusiasts for all that natural knowledge might hold for young men of their generation. The moving spirit of the Société Philomathique (at first called “Gymnastique”) was Augustin-François de Silvestre, student and scion of a family in the service of the comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII. Assigned the job of cataloguing the royal patron’s library, Silvestre is said to have set himself to reading mathematics, physics, chemistry, and natural history in order to understand what was in the books. Associated with him were five comrades: Alexandre Brongniart, future geologist and son of a famous architect; Claude-Antoine Riche, naturalist and younger brother of Gaspard Riche de Prony, mathematician and civil engineer of note; Charles de Broval, a student of mathematics and physics who dropped from view in the early 1790s; and two young doctors, both of whom died in 1790. Silvestre and Brongniart, the two seniors, were twenty-six in 1788.

The formalities were very similar to those of the Société linneenne. At the weekly meetings members gave papers reporting on their reading, occasionally on their investigations, and regularly on the proceedings and publications of the Academy of Science, the Royal Society, and other principal scientific bodies. There was considerable overlap in membership. The two groups played cox and box in the same modest quarters on different evenings and divided the rent. Indications are that the Philomathes gravitated toward natural history and away from the exact sciences that originally piqued their curiosity. The specification of eleven fields of interest drawn up in 1788 began with general physics and mathematics, astronomy, and experimental physics, in that order, and ended with botany and zoology. In 1791, by contrast, the by-laws stipulate nine fields. Natural history and anatomy were now at the head of the list with mathematics and archaeology at the bottom. It is unclear whether the new ordering reflects the revolutionary tilt from the exact to the life sciences, or (which may come to the same thing) the readier accessibility of the latter.

However that may be, the Philomathes went their own way in other and more important respects. Unlike their naturalist counterparts, the members not only perused books and memoirs, they repeated and occasionally initiated experiments on problems in chemistry and physiology. By May 1791 the Society had attracted a select circle of correspondents, fourteen in number, to whom it sent word of what was being learned by way of a monthly newsletter. The Bulletin, as it was called at the outset, contained accounts of new discoveries, important items of scientific novelty in general, and a summary of the Society’s own work. Fifteen issues composed the first series. A clerk transcribed eighteen copies of each in order that the manuscripts might be circulated, but only to the correspondents. Resident members were not allowed to receive them lest they be tempted to skip meetings.

Beginning in late 1792 the Société Philomathique had its Bulletin printed. Unlike the publications of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, the new journal survived the confusion of the times and under the Directory became one of the important periodicals in the new scientific dispensation. Like its parent society, the Bulletin filled a need. It was neither the organ of a newly specialized discipline, like the Annales de chimie, the Journal des Mines, and the Annales du Muséum, nor was it, like the Journal de physique, the production of a single editor who published often lengthy memoirs by persons not of the Academy of Science. In keeping with the self-educational purpose of the Society, the Bulletin reported current work at the forefront of science. To that end, articles were concise and publication rapid. In the later 1790s leading scientists themselves took advantage of those features. Laplace, for example, rather than wait out the year or two before a lengthy memoir could appear in the Mémoires of the Institute, often published abstracts in the Bulletin de la Société Philomatique. Its place may be compared to that of Science and Nature today. The editorial purpose was timely reporting, not popularization.

Two further features differentiating the Philomathes from the Société d’Histoire Naturelle were limited membership and a low political profile. Initially, resident members were to number no more than twenty. Although the ceiling was lifted in 1791, the membership increased only slightly prior to the suppression of the Academy of Science in August 1793. In 1797 it was fixed at fifty. “Libre” the Society might be, but it was also selective. Candidates had to be elected but might be black-balled, at first by two, and later by three, negative votes. Only serious people were welcome, none of whom betrayed a trace of resentment over the exclusiveness of the Academy of Science. In their eyes it was the main source of the knowledge that they had joined together in order to improve themselves by sharing in it. The Société Philomathique, in short, took no part in the mounting campaign against official science, or in politics at large.

In that as in most respects, it followed the example of the Academy of Science, which eschewed consideration of political matters. The earliest indication in the Procès-Verbaux of the Academy that the Revolution was occurring appears in the minutes of the meeting of 4 July 1789, when a resolution to congratulate Bailly on his conduct as president of the National Assembly carried unanimously. In the same meeting Laplace came forward with the first suggestion of his career for a reform reaching beyond the formulations of celestial mechanics, probability, and physics. His proposal went dead against the current of the times. It stipulated that henceforth the Academy would require an elementary knowledge of mathematics and mechanics on the part of artisans seeking a brevet, or official license. His colleagues, most of them more sensitive to political realities, postponed discussion of his motion. The next day a large majority prudently voted to require nothing and simply to record a “preference” for licensing technicians versed in those subjects. Laplace’s next intervention was more in character. On 18 July, four days after the fall of the Bastille, he read a paper on the inclination of the ecliptic.⁴⁵ An informal record of the proceedings of the Academy kept privately by Fougeroux de Bondaroy is also devoid of political allusions. He notes that he was absent on 15 July, and that only twenty-three members were then present, but does not say why.⁴⁶

Only late in 1789 did the Academy begin to question the conformity of its own regime with the revolutionary order of things. The issue was raised, not by any future Jacobin among the company, but by the foremost of its honorary members. The Academy returned from its annual recess on 14 November. On the eighteenth the Duc de La Rochefoucauld opened the first regular session of the new term with an address urging a thorough revision of the statutes. Citing the example of the night of 4 August, when liberal noblemen in the Constituent Assembly (and he among them) re-nounced their feudal rights, La Rochefoucauld called on the Academy to purge itself of the taint of the past by itself framing a constitution that would eliminate every feature of its organization and procedures smacking of inequality or privilege. Even like the three estates of the body politic, the four grades of honoraire, pensionnaire, associe libre, and associé, which he now called orders, must be merged into one. Eligibility for a pension, or stipend, must depend only on seniority and no longer on status. All members of the Academy would have the same voice in its affairs. Any distinction between academicians was inadmissible, except that provision should be made for a class of members—he meant but did not say amateurs—whose responsibilities precluded their making science their occupation. The crown would have no voice in the election of new members and officers, which would henceforth pertain entirely to the Academy. It would exercise its civic re-sponsibilities subject to the authority of the National Assembly, and the role of the King would shrink to a formality.⁴⁷

La Rochefoucauld’s demarche was not, on the whole, welcome to his colleagues. For one thing, his own status was such that the move could scarcely be felt to come from one among equals. For another, the Academy had just been through a reorganization in 1785, while Lavoisier was Director. Though disciplinary rather than political in nature, the reform had been a wrenching episode.⁴⁸ La Rochefoucauld had even then weighed in heavily favoring the change. Finally, members of the Academy were far from being of one mind politically. Their opinions ranged from the incipient radicalism of a Monge and a Fourcroy through varying degrees of liberalism, indifference, insensitivity, and conservatism to the royalism of Cassini IV, behind whose name the numeral signified a tenure as Intendant of the Observatory no less hereditary in practice than the lordship of any manor.

Nevertheless, the Academy had little choice but to appoint a commission charged with drawing up an appropriate proposal. On 10 March 1790 it brought in a draft of regulations consisting of some seventy-four articles conforming in most respects to La Rochefoucauld’s recommendations. Equality and citizenship within the academic body politic were the main motifs. There was to be no distinction among members except that arising from ability to attend and participate regularly. The role of the disciplinary sections was to be subordinated to that of the Academy as a single entity. Seniority carrying the right to a stipend was to accrue within the body as a whole rather than section by section. An executive committee was to handle nominations for the entire company. Procedures in general were to be simplified. ⁴⁹

Discussion ensued in an academic rather than a revolutionary tempo. Almost two months elapsed before the Academy took up the reform at all. Not until the meeting of 2 June 1790 was the first part of the new “règlement” formally read out. Thereupon, the Academy proceeded to consider one article at a time in weekly meetings. At that rate it might have completed its deliberations in a year and a half, say by the end of 1791! Impatient at this snail’s pace, the Constituent Assembly demanded on 20 August 1790 that all academies submit new constitutions within a month. The session was the same in which the Assembly also, but in a very different tone, invited the officers of the Jardin des Plantes to frame a set of regulations for their institution. The contrast in their political credit is already apparent: the Assembly treated the naturalists with consideration, the academicians with asperity. Thus put to it, the Academy scheduled four extraordinary sessions every week and managed to finish its deliberations with seven days to spare on 13 September 1790, four days after the naturalists completed theirs.⁵⁰

Creuzé-Latouche, the member of the Finance Committee who championed the naturalists and attacked their Intendant, had hard words in the same pamphlet for the Académie Francaise and the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He contrasted the inanity of the former with the insufficiently appreciated utility of the Society of Agriculture, and considered the latter to be “founded on principles of tyranny and servitude,” which systematically humiliated a crowd of estimable artists. About the other academies in themselves he had nothing adverse to say, though the National Assembly would certainly need to examine their relation to the Constitution and the law. Creuzé-Latouche directed his criticism not at their procedures, but at his chairman, Lebrun, who considered that they must remain under the immediate patronage of the King. Only royal largesse, in that view, could assure the disinterested flourishing of science, art, and letters, in the future as in the past.

Not so, countered Creuzé-Latouche, with some passion. Those times are past. Having adopted the principle of separation of powers, the Assembly would surely not commit the fatal error of assigning the agencies bound to have the greatest effect on public opinion to one of those powers. All institutions of government responsible for science, arts, letters, and public education should be declared “National.” They must, insisted Creuzé-Latouche (not quite consistently with Montesquieu’s principle of separation), be subject to the legislative power, and he specifies the institutions he has in mind: the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Société Royale de Medecine, the Société Royale d’Agriculture, the Jardin des Plantes, the three chairs of chemistry, anatomy, and natural history at the Collège de France, the École Veterinaire d’Alfort, the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin, the Académie d’Architecture, and the Bibliothèque du Roi. The Assembly should appoint a special committee to review the reorganization plans that its decree of 20 August 1790 required from the whole lot.⁵¹

That happened only under the Legislative Assembly with the creation of its Comité d’Instruction Publique. In the meantime, members of the Academy of Science agreed with Creuzé-Latouche about the importance of the role of the Crown, but disagreed with each other over what it should be. In their deliberations that was the most divisive issue. Should the King or the National Assembly be the authority to pass on the election of new members and officers? Fourcroy spoke for the radicals, Jussieu and Cassini for the royalists within the academy. Proponents of its responsibility to the Assembly and the nation carried the day, though barely. Only the designation “Royale” was to be retained.⁵²

Neither the initial foot-dragging nor the concluding discord enhanced the standing of the Academy of Science, whether in the eyes of the politicians, in those of the public, or in its own. Practically, however, the outcome was of no more moment for the Academy than for the Jardin des Plantes. The Constituent Assembly failed to ratify either set of regulations. Even while exchanging projects for reform with its fellow Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of Architecture, the Academy of Science, like the Jardin des Plantes, continued to operate in accordance with its old procedures, albeit with one cosmetic change. A resolution of 19 February 1791 prescribed that henceforth academicians would sign the register in order of seniority and without distinction of status.⁵³

Under the Legislative Assembly the whole question of reformed regulations became moot. At the outset Condorcet was in the chair of the Comite d’Instruction Publique, which now had the mission, originally evoked by Creuzé-Latouche, of preparing legislation to regulate all learned and cultural institutions. The conflict of interest with Condorcet’s post as Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science was obvious. On 21 November 1791 he requested the Academy to choose a vice-secretary to serve throughout his own term in the National Assembly. Reluctant to make a continuing commitment in such uncertain circumstances, his colleagues named Fourcroy for a three-month stint, replacing him successively with Haüy, Cassini, and Lalande at like intervals throughout 1792.

As we have seen, Condorcet would have transformed the Academy into a Society for Science and the Arts and elevated it to the apex of the national system of education. Thus would he have fleshed out the scholarly curriculum on the backbone of science, subordinated the classroom to the high oversight of scientists, while reciprocally sheltering the essential scientific functions of the Academy within the citadel of an apolitical educational framework. So far as the minutes show, the Academy never formally discussed the Condorcet proposal either before or after its submission to the Legislative Assembly in April 1792.

There must have been discussion in the corridors, however. Evidence comes from the astronomer André Méchain, who ran the survey of the southern sector of the meridian that would serve as basis for the metric system. Between May 1793 and September 1794 Méchain was first marooned and then, by the misfortunes of war, interned in Barcelona. In all that interval he could receive no direct news from Paris. A long and plaintive letter to Borda of 10 January 1794 reports how people tell him that the Academy of Science has been destroyed, that all its members are scattered, and that his mission no longer serves any purpose. He cannot believe such tidings, however: “No doubt we are wrongly informed. I presume that the Academy of Science has been combined with the National Institute conformably with the project to that end already formed in the spring of 1792.”⁵⁴

To all appearances Condorcet’s colleagues were accepting of the prospect of their transformation into a Society and content to leave institutional matters in his hands. However that may be, the strategy miscarried. Worse, it backfired. Critics and enemies already assailing the Academy on intrinsic grounds were now joined by opponents of central aspects of Condorcet’s educational proposal, notably its exclusion of morality, civic spirit, and character building from the classroom, and its assigning responsibility for higher education and professional training to the state. What could be seen as a bid for power thus augmented the negative image of the Academy among people who did not necessarily partake of hostility to science and intellect per se, although as we shall see that strand too was wound inextricably into the noose. With the Condorcet scheme stillborn, and its author in political eclipse in the late winter and spring of 1793, the defense of a compromised, still unreformed, and formerly royal Academy devolved on others, and principally on Lavoisier, who was himself in a parlous and exposed position.

More virulently than among naturalists, though there too, resentment of the Academy of Science had long festered in the breasts of others, mainly artisans, inventors, apothecaries, and laborers subject in one way or another to its authority. The most paranoid voice and the most venomous pen were Jean-Paul Marat’s.⁵⁵ There is no need to repeat here the history of his attempt to win academic approbation for the misconceived but by no means empty experimental investigations of phenomena of light, heat, and electricity that he had put before the public in the 1780s.⁵⁶ He took his revenge in a forty-page pamphlet, Les charlatans modernes, ou lettres sur le charlatanisme académique, published in September 1791, concurrently with the elections to the Legislative Assembly.

It had not escaped Marat—nothing political did—that the new legislature would decide the future of academies and other cultural institutions. That prospect, he explained in the foreword, made the moment right to rescue from oblivion letters he had written some years previously that would otherwise have remained private. In fact, Marat had already published a modified portion on the general iniquity of academies in his journal L’Ami du peuple following the debates, discussed above, of 17–20 August 1790 in the National Assembly on funds to be allocated to academies and literary societies.⁵⁷ It is evident from allusions in Les charlatans modernes to particular episodes in Marat’s dealings with the scientific community that he must have compiled this, his version of the facts, in 1784 and 1785, before publishing his (excellent) translation of Newton’s Opticks (1787) and his last scientific effort, the incoherent Mémoires academiques (1788).⁵⁸ As in other of his writings of the time, Marat indulges in the conceit that the author is someone other than himself, a person whose identity he is bound not to divulge. The form is epistolary. A series of eleven letters purports to be addressed to an intimate friend, one Camille. The pose Marat affected in the 1780s is still his standpoint. No enemy he of reason and knowledge: No, No! Defender of these instruments of enlightenment, he will face down official, and corrupt, pretenders in the pay of men in place and power. “In a century said to be philosophic and amid a nation calling itself free, can it be thought a crime to unmask academic charlatanism, and to repudiate the epoch of barbarism that its ensconced adepts seek to revive!”⁵⁹ Thus the exordium.

The source of the credulity that dishonors the current generation—so runs Marat’s argument—may be traced to the marked preference shown for science over letters. Literature speaks directly to the heart and mind. What purports to be science, instead of imparting direct knowledge of nature, disguises it in jargon and only encourages the credulous in their fascination with the marvelous. Hence the ease with which such mountebanks as Mesmer and Cagliostro could dupe the public, even enlisting in their impostures the participation of certain luminaries of the Académie Française. That members of the Academy of Science and the Society of Medicine had condemned these fads was nothing to their credit. Charlatans themselves, they acted only out of professional jealousy and fear of being eclipsed.

Further letters take the chemists to task for perpetually multiplying entities, particularly in the case of novel gases. Science is no better than fashion, an affair of “perpetual revolutions,” of which the current chemical instance represents a reversion to occult ideas of the scholastics. To be preferred are the procedures of “physicists” who seek to reduce phenomena to the mani-fold operations of a basic principle. Marat has in mind, obviously, his own claims, and others like them, for fire, light, and electricity, but the main gist is denunciation of the scribblers who, aping Voltaire and Diderot, took their cue from the spirit of destructive criticism given off by science in order to undercut the sensibility awakened by Rousseau.

Thence Marat proceeds to the venality of scientific institutions. Stipends paid gratuitously to academicians form part and parcel of the generalized scandal of pensions lavished on courtiers at the expense of the people. Such corporatism among the favored few, preceded by ruthless competition for advancement, do not at all encourage scientific productivity. On the contrary, these practices stifle true creativeness. In science as elsewhere only the innocent inquirer working and thinking alone happens on those things of truth and beauty bare that are their own reward. Not by rigged prize contests will such discoveries be elicited. Nor, when free inquiry does achieve success, will its fruits be communicated through the medium of a monopolistic official press.

These, the standard complaints against the establishment of science, arts, and letters, had been aired by others in the 1780s but not by Marat, who then aspired to join the system. Released from that ambition by the Revolution, he turned the extraordinary journalistic talent he discovered in himself to overthrowing the Academy, among other things. To that end he published the griefs he had long been harboring. Interpolated passages and pointed footnotes throughout the text of Les charlatans modernes bring the general strictures up to date. Only in letters X and XI, however, did his proxy correspondent get down to personal cases and pillory those whom Marat considered his erstwhile tormentors. These were members of a body that took the radiant sun for its symbol and for its logo “this modest epigraph, Invenit et Perfecit: Not that it had ever made any discovery, or had ever perfected anything, for all that has ever come out of it is a heavy collection of aborted memoirs that serve sometimes to fill up empty space in large libraries.”⁶⁰

Among the astronomers, Lalande is no less famous for his grotesque gallantries than for his incorrect weather forecasts and implacability against innovators. Cassini is mainly known for having mistaken the iris in the lens of his telescope for a colored star. His inferiority to his ancestor Dominique shows that importing a race of astronomers has not worked as did importing a race of hound dogs. Among physicists, Rochon never invented anything but does have the merit of appropriating the discoveries of others. LeRoi is the roving reporter for all the errors, all the stupidities, all the extravagances published in the last two centuries. The best of the mathematicians are La Place, Monge, and Cousin. All three are automatons in the habit of following certain formulas and applying them blindly, like a workhorse that turns a millwheel a certain number of times before stopping. Monge is famous for his good luck in getting the job of examiner of pupils in the engineering corps through having taught the maréchal de Castries how to count. (Marat has this wrong—Monge was examiner of naval cadets.) Cousin is famous for the theory of crocheting and for a castiron digestion. Laplace is famous because of his pretty better-half and for his linx-eyed gaze, which could penetrate a depth of 15,000 leagues in order to perceive that the nucleus of the earth is of middling density. Condorcet, a literary cad (faquin), is the Academy’s panegyrist who demands for himself, so say his colleagues, the eulogies he pronounces on others. Of the many stories about him, one would do. Pretty or not, his patroness (Julie de Lespinasse) had been the mistress of the marquis de Ker. Since any service is worth a salary, she got a legacy of 30,000 livres on Ker’s death. When his heirs contested it, Con-dorcet fixed the procurator of probate, and has drawn quarterly income ever since from the fruits of his patroness’s labors. If he had been a year older, people would have taken him for the gentleman’s son, but given the good lady’s tastes, he might well be descended from any passing Turk.

Lavoisier, finally, is “ever the father of des petites maisons” (the reference is to the report on sanitation in theaters and hospitals)⁶¹ and author of “all the discoveries that make a noise.” Lavoisier, indeed, has to be put at the head of the whole sorry list.

Since he has no ideas of his own, he takes over those of others, but since he almost never knows what to make of them, he abandons them just as easily and changes systems as he does shoes. In the space of six months I have seen him cotton on to new doctrines of the principle of fire, of igneous fluid, of latent heat, one after another. In an even briefer time, I have seen him take up pure phlogiston and pitilessly proscribe it. A short while ago, following Cawendish, he found the precious secret of making water with water. Again, having dreamed that this liquid is only pure air and inflammable air, he metamorphoses it into the king of combustibles. If you ask me what he has done to be so extolled, I shall reply that he has procured himself an income of 100,000 livres, that he formed the project of turning Paris into a vast prison, and that he changed the name of acid to oxygen, of phlogiston to nitrogen [Marat has this wrong too], of marine to muriatique, of nitrous to nitric and nitrate. There are his claims to immortality. Proud of these great things, he now sleeps on his laurels while his parasites praise him to the skies and his two-bit disciple Fourcroy runs all over Paris spreading his discoveries.⁶²

To this settling of old scores, this scratching of old sores, Marat tacked on a twelfth and last letter, said to come from “another pen,” and obviously scribbled down amid the fury of current politics. His reader is reminded of the enthusiasm aroused by the flight of the first balloons in 1783 and of the grant of 1,200 livres made to the Academy of Science to develop a method of aerial locomotion.⁶³ And where had the money gone? Into the pockets of savants frequenting the Rapee, the Opéra, and the whores. Turning to the Academy to propose a method for equalizing weights and measures was a still greater folly. What had they come up with? They had cribbed their proposal for measuring the meridian word for word from the account Romé de l’Isle (whose name they took care not to mention) had given of the ancient Egyptian system based on the pyramids, than which no determination could be more accurate. And for that piece of plagiarism they have got the Minister to hand over 100,000 écus—“a little piece of cake to be shared among the brotherhood.

“Judge from that the utility of academies and the virtue of their members . . . vile henchmen of despots, cowardly boosters of despotism.”⁶⁴

In such wise did this sick, clever, and angry man, once a doctor and now the most powerful journalist of the day, set about preparing public opinion to consider the disposition that the Comité d’Inscruction Publique, with Condorcet at its head, would propose for the Academy of Science as part of a new educational system. In great measure public opinion was already prepared. Jean-Claude Delamétherie, editor of Journal de physique and, in company with Lamarck and the pharmacist Demachy, one of the most bitter opponents of the new chemistry, lost no opportunity to castigate the crushing of fresh talent by the academic juggernaut. Far more widely read, Ber-nardin de St-Pierre’s best-selling fable, La chaumière indienne, has a learned emissary of the Royal Society traveling the world in search of truths answering to the ills of humanity. At the far point of his journey in India he encounters a Brahmin high priest, who in the most condescending manner explains that truth is reserved to Brahmin sages, for which read academicians. They alone can read the recondite language wherein it is contained, for which read mathematics or Lavoisier’s new nomenclature.

4. ARTISANS AND INVENTORS

Beyond such manifestations of personal pique and literary attitudes, real interests were at stake in a sector of the public whose opinion was now important. Leaders among the class of artisans set out to reverse the aphorism according to which science governs the mechanical arts. Among the manifold rebellions comprising the Revolution as a whole figures a gathering revolt of technology, moderate at the outset and finally extreme. To follow its course is to move down into obscure places among small but solid people, mechanics, craftsmen, artisans, inventors, and minor manufacturers, solid citizens for the most part, among whom fermented a leaven of cranks and malcontents. Their history is hard to come by. Nevertheless, traces remain of groups they formed to articulate and secure their interests, even as the naturalists had done in organizing the Société d’Histoire Naturelle.

Early in the field was the Société des Inventions et Découvertes, which originated in the summer of 1790 as an informal lobbying group of leading artisans. A minor nobleman joined the effort, one Reth de Servières, whose family had a tradition of patronage of the mechanical arts. Their first purpose was to frame and secure passage of patent legislation. It was not a new idea in France that an innovator should be authorized to profit from exclusive control over his discoveries for a certain time and that society should eventually benefit from their dissemination. The practice of the old regime accomplished the essential purpose of a working patent system.⁶⁵ An inventor whose idea passed muster before an academic commission would often be granted monopolistic control over exploitation of his invention for a period of years provided it then come into the public domain.

The principle on which the modern system is based is fundamentally different, however. The old “brevet” was an ad hoc privilege conferred by the Crown, whereas in the climate of the Revolution any notion of privilege, other than one stemming from nature, was inadmissible. That a man has a natural right of property in the product of his mind and hand no less than in his real estate is axiomatic in the French theory of patents. It was first developed in a “Pétition Motivée” that the “Artisan Inventors,” not yet formally organized into a society, presented to the Constituent Assembly in August 1790. Their case rested on Article 17 of the “august” Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen establishing the inviolable and sacred rights of property, in which are to be included the “fruits of inventive genius.”⁶⁶

On that basis, the inventors solicited enactment of legislation conformable to English patents (which in fact had nothing to do with natural law), and attached the draft of a decree to their petition. On 6 September 1790 it was referred to the Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce.⁶⁷ Named to prepare a report was the chevalier Stanislas de Boufflers. The choice could scarcely have been more incongruous or more fortunate. Adventurer and man of minor letters, Boufflers was a gay blade of the Enlightenment. Born untimely in a carriage when his mother, the marquise, was en route from Lunéville to Nancy, he was a younger son, intended for the Church. A clerical career became impractical when he composed a salacious, if not quite pornographic, fable, Aline reine de Golconde, while a seminarian at Saint-Sulpice. The young man salvaged an income dependent somehow on celibacy by taking vows in the order of Knights of Malta. Not to follow his peregrinations as a soldier of fortune, litterateur corresponding with Voltaire and Grimm, and enlightened colonial administrator in Senegal, it is enough to note that the nobility of Nancy elected Boufflers to represent them in the States-General. With characteristic agility, in June 1789 he spoke first against and then in favor of unifying the three orders.⁶⁸

Boufflers was anything but an assiduous politician. The only mark he made in the Constituent Assembly was championing the cause of artisans and inventors. Their leaders put before him a carefully assembled mass of documentation—memoirs of grievances, examples of French inventive genius frustrated by officialdom, attribution of English industrial prowess to the rewards assured inventors by its patent system. Boufflers listened. He read. He transformed their heavy-handed, literal, self-praising, and self-pitying expositions into a light, engaging essay, delightfully written and clearly serious. In his report, read before the National Assembly on 30 December 1790, the French language is at its most pleasing and persuasive.⁶⁹

The accompanying draft, enacted the same day with only minor modifications, received the royal assent and became law on 7 January 1791. Its preamble is forthright. Since any new idea that may be useful to society belongs in the first instance to its originator, it would be an affront to the rights of man not to treat an industrial discovery as the property of its author. Failure to recognize that truth may well have contributed to discouraging French industry, to have led distinguished artisans to emigrate, and to have expatriated a large number of inventions from which France should have had the initial advantages.

Hence, by Article I, “Every discovery or new invention, in all types of industry, is the property of its author.” Article II stipulates that any type of improvement on existing procedures was also to be considered an invention, and Article III that whoever introduced a foreign discovery would benefit from the same advantages as if he were its inventor. Remaining articles require that exact descriptions, designs, and models be submitted, to be made public upon issuance of the patent. Provided it was exploited within two years, its protection would hold good for five, ten, or fifteen years, depending on the fee the inventor paid. Also laid down were guidelines for litigation in case of infractions. The last article states that the Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce jointly with the Comité d’Impositions would prepare a further measure fixing the amount of those fees and providing for other details of implementation.⁷⁰

Immediately on passage of the law the artisans and inventors who had consulted with Boufflers celebrated their victory of principle by organizing themselves formally into the Société des Inventions et Découvertes. A delegation headed by Servières waited on the Assembly to express the gratitude of the new society. Its plan was to admit to membership “all citizens already known or who may become known for some discovery, invention or improvement in all types of industry.” To their apostrophe Mirabeau replied from the president’s chair: “The discoveries of industry and art were a property before the National Assembly so declared.”⁷¹ The new society had the further satisfaction that the Assembly struck down what had been in their eyes another barrier to innovation, unrelated except that it also derived from the regime of privilege. The law of 16 February 1791 abolished craft guilds, and with them the control those ancient bodies exercised over industrial procedures.⁷² The grounds were that corporatism in general, and the regulations governing the status of apprentice, journeyman, and master in particular, were incompatible with citizenship. It remained to implement the patent law and to rid inventors formally of the final great impediment, namely, the responsibility vested in the Academy of Science to advise agencies of government on the merits of novel machines or innovative processes submitted to the state in applications for subsidy or exclusive rights.

So far the only hint of differences with the Academy had been a passingremark in the original Boufflers report. How, he asked, à propos of the old system, could any tribunal judge fairly of an invention which, by definition, does not yet exist? And who could properly serve on such panels? “The best choice, no doubt, was scientists. But have not scientists themselves sometimes been accused of conflict of interest? Have they always been fair with the inventors? Let’s admit it: Erudition has little belief in inspiration, and men accustomed to marking out the paths that lead to knowledge have difficulty in supposing that it can be attained in a single leap [à vol d’oiseau].”⁷³

Delayed until late March and early April, debate in the Assembly over the implementing legislation was less than harmonious. Several deputies objected to opening the door to charlatans and to the complexities of adjudicating claims and counterclaims ad infinitum. Prominent among them was Dionis du Séjour, astronomer, mathematician, member of the Academy of Science, and formerly counselor of the Parlement de Paris.⁷⁴ Elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Paris, he was never a political being and intervened but seldom in the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly. His doing so on this occasion intensified suspicions among prospective beneficiaries of the patent law.

In late April 1791, impatient over delay, the “artistes-inventeurs” spoke for themselves, and addressed the Committee directly, inelegantly, and bluntly.

During the reign of oppression, a great concept seemed a metaphysical dream to idiots arrayed under its banner; to the jealous, a reason for persecution; to scientific bodies, an attack on their emptiness and vanity, a property to be invaded without scruple.

By benefit of the revolution, the time of tyranny exists no longer; imagination is no longer captive; the only abolute royalty preserved in philosophy is that of genius; the great charter that assures it is the beautiful Law of 7 January last, of which we demand the implementation.⁷⁵

Strong language prevailed. Enacted on 25 May 1791, the promised measure opens with the statement that patents are to be issued on demand “without prior examination.” Further, the Ministry of the Interior would open a Registry of Patents (Directoire des Brevets d’Invention). Servières was named the first director. Inventors thereby got what they wanted. It was now up to them to defend their rights before the courts and up to the market to determine the value of their creations. Some 750 patents were issued in the next twenty years.⁷⁶ The most famous is number 14, covering the method by which Nicolas Leblanc, a surgeon and minor chemist, succeeded in converting sea salt into commercial soda. He applied for it on 25 July 1791. It was issued on 19 September. After many vicissitudes, culminating in the inventor’s suicide, the Leblanc process became the basis of much of the alkali industry in the nineteenth century.⁷⁷ The laws of 7 January and 25 May 1791 remain the foundation of the French patent system.⁷⁸ So far as patents were concerned, the question of science and industry was henceforth moot.

What radicalized matters was not the dream of making money and also reputation, but money itself, right up front. In addition to monopolistic privilege for the exploitation of inventions, the industrial policy of the old regime comprised subsidies for many existing enterprises, awards for innovation of several sorts, and rewards in the form of pensions for persons who could persuade the authorities that theirs were worthy contributions to the public weal. The Academy of Science, and on occasion provincial academies, conducted prize competitions on topics set sometimes by themselves, sometimes in consultation with the Bureau du Commerce or organs of local government. The Bureau and other agencies, most frequently the Ministries of War and of Marine Affairs, might and did make grants both to established manufacturers and on a smaller scale to aspiring craftsmen, artisans, and industrial innovators of many sorts. Whatever the revolutionary commitment to unfettered rights of property, none of the beneficiaries of this largesse had any notion of renouncing it and entrusting their prospects entirely to the mercies of the market, particularly in competition with the English.

By a decree of the previous year, 22 August 1790, at the very time when budgets of the Jardin des Plantes and all academies were also under consideration, the National Assembly had allocated 2,000,000 livres to be disbursed annually in awards for “useful discoveries.”⁷⁹ The Patent Law of 1791 expressly left inventors the option of seeking an immediate recompense from this fund if they could demonstrate the value of an innovation, and if, rather than taking out a patent, they preferred the honor of releasing it directly into the public domain. Not a sou had ever been appropriated. Now, over a year later, in the expiring days of the Constituent Assembly, leading members of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes again approached Boufflers, this time on behalf of their less fortunate brethren. His report of 9 September 1791 urges the Assembly to make good its promises and to appropriate 300,000 of the intended two million livres forthwith.

Such is the creativity of arts and crafts, so runs what was by now a litany, that humble, laborious, and faithful artisans are morally speaking the nation’s creditors. To repay the debt Boufflers proposed a program entailing, first, awards graduated according to the value of the contribution; second, pensions for deserving workers over sixty; and third, “gratifications” for those whom bad luck had landed in “honorable poverty.” All this, recognized Boufflers, would (unlike patents) require adjudication. How might such panels be composed? The Academy of Science had served well in former times. For his part, he appreciated that the virtue of its members was almost always on a par with their enlightenment so that artisans had no real grounds to feel anxiety. Still, he felt bound to put before the Assembly the reasons that they did. They were apprehensive about the carelessness entailed by constant repetition of the same routine, fearful of the esprit de corps that develops in deliberations of men who are always together, humiliated by the haughtiness attaching to the uninterrupted and unquestioned exercise of authority, and resentful of the excessive intelligence that judges of things at too high a level to appreciate their true merit: “The most enlightened body may be the most dreaded.”

In all equity artisans, like all citizens, are to be judged by their peers. “The least eloquent of them, recognizing a companion in the ranks of his examiners, will at least be sure of finding there an interpreter.” To that end, the Committee recommended that their societies be represented along with scientists on a new Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, which would advise the Ministry on the merit of applications for grants in aid of arts, crafts, and industry.⁸⁰

It was too late to allay resentment. A new society speaking for the common artisan had come into the field, the Point Central des Arts et Métiers. The first number of its journal appeared on 4 September 1791, a few weeks before Les charlatans modernes. The leading article dismisses the theoretical sciences as sophistical, and continues:

The crafts [“Les Arts”] are more reliable, and their benefits more certain! How blameworthy, then, were those abusive and tyrannical procedures, which in violating the most sacred, the most basic form of property, property in thought, in inventive or perfecting ingenuity, thereby subjected the class whose privileges are from Nature, the artisans, to all these oppressive laws, to all these harsh tests, to these severe and restless censors, the primary goal of whose ignorance and inquisitorial jealousy was to take care that true talent be humiliated or brushed aside.

How cruel and vexatious were the exaggerated pretentions of academic bodies! How revolting was that empire, tyrannical and destructive of industry, which the wealthy accorded to these usurious vampires, these despotic hornets always eager to devour the honey produced by the bees, who took advantage of their wealth or power, whether in order to seize hold of the hives also, or in order to reduce the artisans to fabrications of a degrading and ruinous sort and to deprive them even of the honor attaching to their work by usurping their inventions, by all sorts of discouragements that wearied and rebuffed their zeal, their courage, and their steadfastness, and finally by forcing them most of the time to abandon their ideas, or their specially successful discoveries, whether because they wounded the self-esteem of the most privileged, or because they infringed on interests in pre-existing enterprises.⁸¹

Changes in the provision for composition of the proposed Bureau de Consultation intensified suspicion. The Boufflers report called for equal representation of scientists and artisans without specifying the number. As originally drafted, however, the text of the accompanying decree stipulated election of three representatives by each of the companies “concerned with . . . the exact sciences, arts and crafts, and industry” (presumably the Academy of Science); by the civil or military corps trained in mathematics (presumably the artillery, the military engineers, and the Ponts et Chausseés); and by the voluntary societies of artisans and citizens trained in various crafts (none of them named). In the initial debate of 9 September, that article was adjourned to another day. When adopted in principle on 27 September, three days before the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the law provided for the Bureau de Consultation to consist of fifteen scientists chosen by the Academy and an equal number of men trained in different sorts of industry. The latter were to be selected from among the various “ Sociétés savantes,” not by their membership, but by the Minister of the Interior.⁸²

The reaction was immediate, sharp, and general. A gathering of “artists of every genre” called by the Point Central included not only the Society of Inventors but also the Masonic lodge of the Neuf Soeurs and the fiercely radical Commune representing creative artists, of which more in a moment. Their joint petition, addressed to the newly elected Legislative Assembly on 11 November 1791, urged an increase in funds appropriated for the arts and a return to the spirit of the Boufflers report. Its author had battled the “machinations of an old and distinguished corporation whose hidden and sub-terranean ramifications even today resist with incalculable force all efforts to uproot the trunk.” The Bureau de Consultation should consist of sixty delegates. An equal number would be freely elected by the several organizations. The Academy of Science would participate “like the other societies of artists.”⁸³

An alliance between artisans and artists rebelling against academic domination was the more natural in that the word “artiste” applied to both, as in their eyes did “génie” in its need for liberty, in its suffocation by authority. Resentment, not to say hatred, of aspiring artists for their academy broke into the open earlier in the Revolution than did overt anger among artisans. Whether or not artists are more contentious than technicians by temperament, and they may be, the judgment of quality is certainly a more subjective and personal matter in the arts than in the sciences.

The writ, moreover, of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture ruling over the arts ran even more widely than did the authority the Académie des Sciences exercised in science. The former’s control over the all-important choice of works to be exhibited in the annual Salon may be thought comparable to the latter’s oversight of publication. Its internal organization was far less communal, however. On nomination by an officer of the Academy, a young artist would submit a sample of his work in order to be recognized as an “agrée” qualified to exhibit in the Salon. Even if accepted, he had no rights of membership, however, and was ineligible to attend meetings until, on presentation of further work, he was received as an academician. Even that gave him no voice in the proceedings of the Academy. Decisions concerning the Salon du Louvre, the French Academy in Rome, the award of prizes, the distribution of royal patronage, the election of colleagues—all the affairs of the Academy were exclusively in the hands of the class of officers.

They consisted of a Director, four rectors, twelve councilors, and twelve full professors with twelve adjuncts. For, in further contrast with the other senior academies, the Academy of Painting and Sculpture was not only an honorific body of leading practitioners setting standards in its field. It was also a teaching institution. Its courses in drawing, modeling, perspective, anatomy, and art history were virtually obligatory for any would-be artist.⁸⁴ Not for nothing was the national tradition in painting called the Ecole française. A young hopeful led his life under the scrutiny of former teachers as well as of established masters, who were often one and the same.

The revolt against this state of things was led by one who, having prospered within the academic system, combined the talent of a great artist with the political taste of a would-be demagogue.⁸⁵ Jacques-Louis David harbored resentment, it is said, over having been passed over for the Directorship of the French Academy in Rome, and further took offense at slights to the work of a protegé who had died young and unrecognized. Whether for those or other reasons, in a meeting of the Academy on 5 December 1789 he joined with a little known engraver, one Miger, in demanding a revision of the statutes. Not only so, but while purporting to speak for the whole body of academicians, the dissidents framed an address to the National Assembly and issued statements to the public.⁸⁶

Attempts throughout by the Director, the long-suffering Vien, to bring the two sides together were doomed to failure. Anticipating the directive of 20 August 1790 by which the Committee of Finance of the National Assembly required all academies to submit revised regulations, the officers set to work early that month to draw up a plan under which the organization would henceforth be the Académie Centrale de Peinture, Gravure, et Architecture. ⁸⁷ Too little and too late, the proposed half-measures provoked a walkout. On 21 September 1790 David presided over a gathering of dissident académiciens, resentful agrées, and assorted artists of many stripes who, on the political model of the Commune of Paris, now joined themselves into a Commune des Arts embodying the liberty, equality, and fraternity of artists. No mere voluntary society, David’s Commune des Arts under Jacobin inspiration intended itself to be an anti-Academy of Painting and Sculpture.⁸⁸ Throughout the remaining months of 1790 and all of 1791, it showered demands on the National Assembly insisting that the Académie Royale simply be displaced. Walking out of the institution did not mean leaving the premises, however. The Commune des Arts expected and was allowed to use the Academy’s meeting rooms in the Louvre. Housed there also were the Société des Inventions et Découvertes and the Point Central des Arts et Metiers.⁸⁹ In good French fashion, all three groups required shelter and subsidy as well as independence from the state.

The Point Central claimed to be “composed of all true sans-culotte artists” and affected to represent the whole class.⁹⁰ Its short-lived journal printed notices of the meetings of the three groups in late 1791 and early 1792. Estimates of the numbers involved can only be rough. The Commune des Arts claimed three hundred members at the outset in September 1790. At an organizational meeting of the inventors’ society on 31 October 1791, it was resolved to send the minutes to some 52 absentees. Assuming that as many again were present, the total would be about 100. Among the names in this and other papers are those of Nicolas Leblanc, of the highly skilled instrument makers Fortin, Mercklein, and Lenoir, and also of longtime plaintiffs such as the chemist Jean-Baptiste Delaplace, the dyer Dino Step-hanopoli, and the engineer Jean-Baptiste de Trouville.⁹¹ Trouville was author of a scheme for damming the Seine just upstream from the Jardin des Plantes. His notion was to create a five-foot head of pressure that would somehow drive a series of vacuum tanks capable of raising 250,000 barrels of water a day without mechanical linkages. He submitted no plans, and an academic commission consisting of Monge, Condorcet, and Vandermonde made an unfavorable report on 7 September 1790. Thereupon Trouville, like many another would-be inventor, went over the Academy’s head to the National Assembly. Its Comité de l’Agriculture et du Commerce took the episode as an instance among many of academic refusal to entertain new ideas.⁹²

Scrawled on various of the manifestos of the Point Central are another hundred-odd signatures from a membership of 300.⁹³ There is some overlapping of signatories between the Point Central and either the inventors on one side or the artists on the other. Passing mention of additional, apparently more ephemeral, groups occurs from time to time in the sources. All told, a figure of 750 to 1,000 active participants in the rebellion against academic authority would appear to be a conservative estimate of the order of magnitude. Even that would comprise only artisans and graphic artists sufficiently advanced in their trades to be articulate. The popular mass behind them, as in all important developments of the Revolution, must have been uncountably more numerous.

Principal impresario of the Point Central was a former military engineer and mediocre poet, Charles-Emmanuel Gaullard de Saudray. Desaudray, as he now styled himself, made his first appearance in the Revolution on Bastille Day 1789, when he saved the Gunpowder Administrator Clouet from the rioters who had mistaken him for the Governor of the Bastille. His was the initiative, whatever his underlying motivation, that led the various popular and artisanal constituencies to campaign together against the academies until the Convention struck them all down on 8 August 1793. Fifteen months earlier, in March 1792, Desaudray published a grandiose alternative scheme, Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers. A mixture of bathos over the state of the arts and crafts and magniloquence over their merits, his preface introduced a draft of legislation proposed to the National Assembly by the Point Central with the assent of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes and the Commune des Arts. A huge document, comprising 120 articles under 13 headings, it called for abolition of all corporate associations of scientists or artisans in order that they might be reunited to compose “one and the same family.” By a complicated electoral process, primary assemblies of the arts throughout the country would choose delegates to departmental and municipal councils. Under the leadership of the Point Central acting for Paris, they in turn would select members of the national Directory of Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. Not to outline the whole cumbersome scheme, which could be read as a parody of the election of the States-General, what the sponsors had in mind was a republic of skills. Its spirit is epitomized in the new classification of the sciences which, in order to avert the slightest tinge of hierarchy, would be arranged alphabetically in twelve classes: Agriculture, Arts méchaniques, Chymie, Commerce, Construction, Dessein, Géométrie et Sciences Spéculatives, Littérature et Arts Agréables, Minéralogie et Métallurgie, Mechanique, Physique, Plans et Projets.⁹⁴

Cooler and more authoritarian heads prevailed during the early months of the Legislative Assembly, which took no action. Enabling legislation of 16 October 1791 had already established the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, though only for a year and on a provisional basis. On 21 November it began deliberation on procedures for distribution of the 300,000 livres allocated to craftsmen and artisans on 21 November.⁹⁵ In a concession to the artisanal groups, the Minister, Delessarts, who presided over this opening meeting, had invited all organizations represented, and not only the Academy of Science, to name their own delegates, fifteen from each side. Nevertheless, the complexion of the panel was a far cry from what Boufflers had originally imagined. Among the fifteen academicians were such eminences as Berthollet, Borda, Coulomb, Desmarets, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Meusnier, and Vandermonde. Sitting with them were four members of the relatively moderate Société des Inventions et Découvertes (among them Leblanc and Trouville), two from the Point Central (Desaudray replaced one of the original choices on 21 December), and one (Lucotte) from an even more ephemeral grouping that seems to have left no other record, a Société des Arts Réunis. The Commune des Arts was not represented since a separate jury had been empaneled to recommend awards from a fund of 100,000 livres allocated to painting, the graphic arts, and sculpture.

The number of delegates of the crafts and trades was thus a paltry seven among the fifteen non-academicians. When Desaudray objected, he was told that the Bureau de Consultation was never intended to represent artisans, that instead it was a commission consisting of men knowledgeable about the useful trades who were vested by the National Assembly with the responsibility of making recommendations on the distribution of awards.⁹⁶ So it was that the Faculté de Médecine had two delegates while there was one each from the Académie de Chirurgie (its founder, Louis, died in June 1792, to be replaced by the already famous Desault), the Société Royale de Médecine, the Société Royale d’Agriculture, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, the Société Philomathique, and the so-called Société d’Annales de Chimie. Only by a stretch could the last be called a society. It consisted of the editorial board of the journal founded in 1789 for propagation of the new chemistry. Its delegate to the Bureau de Consultation, Jean-Henri Has-senfratz, though he gravitated to the extreme left politically in 1793, was still perceived as a loyal member of Lavoisier’s scientific team.⁹⁷

Relieved as the Academy clearly was to be rid of the onus of judging technology, the Bureau de Consultation could scarcely avoid the appearance of being manipulated by the long arm of authority. Those imputations came from outside, however. Poring over specifications, drawings, and models week after week, serving on subcommittees of two or three, judging of con-crete mechanical devices, the scientists and technicians serving on the Bureau de Consultation appear to have developed a working solidarity among themselves. From among applications streaming in, the members in each weekly session normally forwarded the names and credentials of four or five to the Minister of the Interior recommending awards at various levels.

Certain of the names are still recognizable. On 21 March 1792 the Bureau proposed Lallemand de Sainte-Croix for the top award of 5,000 livres in recognition of the techniques he had developed for filling aerostats with hot air or hydrogen and urged further that the National Assembly grant him sufficient funds to perfect meteorological studies of the upper atmosphere. On 12 May another major recompense was to go to a textile manufacturer, one Lhomond, who had invented a carding machine for cotton more compact and cheaper than the huge English models, and whose spinning machine had already narrowed the gap with English technology. On 11 July, a reward of 1,500 was advised for John Macloude. Having smuggled the flying shuttle out of England, he had now invented a loom for muslins. Without further recompense he might, it was feared, return to England. Among longtime supplicants of the former Bureau du Commerce, Dino Step-hanopoli was recognized for his substitution of an oak-bark decoction for nut gall in preparation of a black dye for hats, while the claim of Delaplace to have a process of converting iron to steel by cementation was again, and finally, rejected.⁹⁸

In the first year of its activity, the most serious threat to the Bureau’s effectiveness came neither from any division between artisans and scientists within its ranks, nor from anti-academic fulminations of the Point Central and its allies, but from obstruction on high. Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière was twice Minister of the Interior, from March to 13 June 1792 under Louis XVI (whose overthrow he helped prepare), and again during the Gir-ondist ascendancy in the wake of 10 August 1792 until 23 January 1793. Roland had risen in the administrative service of the old regime to the rank of Inspector-General of Manufactures in the region of Lyons. From there, however, he brought to government little of the quality of a “Grand Commis d’ État” on the order of a Colbert or a Turgot. His was rather the spirit of a know-it-all bureaucrat, not to say a haughty scold. The arrogance with which he treated underlings was of a piece with the disdain that the Girondist deputies who frequented Madame Roland’s salon felt for the ignorance of working people, the sans-culottes from whom their Jacobin opponents drew strength.

Considering himself an expert on industrial processes, editor of the volumes on manufacturing, arts, and trades in the Encyclopédie méthodique, Roland made no doubt that he was a better judge of technology than the ill-assorted members of the Bureau de Consultation.⁹⁹ He began interfering with their procedures from the outset of his first ministry. In early June 1792, a few days before the King dismissed him from office, he proposed to evict the Bureau from its quarters in the Ministry and to expel the various Sociétés Libres from their rooms in the Louvre. Restored to office after the overthrow of the monarchy, Roland on 30 September 1792 closed the new Registry of Inventions, dismissed the Director, Servières, with all his staff, and transferred its functions to one of the offices in his ministry.

Turning to the Bureau de Consultation, he sent a memoir to the Convention on 13 November in which he pointed out that the law of 16 October 1791 had instituted the Bureau provisionally for one year. Its legal standing had thus already expired. Nevertheless, since its first meeting had occurred on 19 November, he had continued to correspond with it. After that date, he would consider it defunct and would honor no further recommendations for grants unless the Convention saw fit to renew its mandate. He felt bound to observe, however, that many of its judgments had been ill advised. Its scientific members, he recognized, were men of integrity and great knowledge, but more important commitments prevented their attending regularly. The others had nothing like the competence or impartiality to discharge their duties properly. He would, therefore, implement no further recommendations from the Bureau pending action by the Convention. In order that deserving artisans not suffer in the meantime, he requested authority to make appropriate grants himself from the balance of the fund allocated for the year.¹⁰⁰ To that end he had the files of the Bureau de Consultation transferred to his own office.

Roland’s offensive had the effect of obviating the few complaints about the Bureau that the popular groups had lodged and equally of cementing relations between its scientific and artisanal elements. The Sociétés Libres collectively adopted a memoir denouncing the Minister’s high-handedness and heaping praises upon the Bureau’s even-handedness, generosity, and concern for their welfare. All twelve members present at its meeting of 30 November, among them Lavoisier, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Borda, and Coulomb, addressed a letter to the president of the Convention urging legislation to give the Bureau permanent standing. In support they attached a memoir reviewing its record and rebutting Roland’s charges. The next day a deputation from the Bureau waited on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, which agreed to take up the matter forthwith.¹⁰¹ Roland had in effect over-reached himself. Although the Convention never found time for new legislation, on 4 January 1793 it enacted the decree proposed by the Comité d’Instruction Publique. That measure maintained the Law of 16 October in effect until otherwise ordered, required that all its recommendations be implemented, and forbade the Minister of the Interior to make any awards on his own.¹⁰²

Thus reprieved, and despite the eventual loss of Meusnier to the war, of Lavoisier to the Terror, and of other members to death or retirement, the Bureau de Consultation exercised its responsibilities throughout the life of the Convention. On 9 prairial an IV (28 May 1796) the Directory dissolved it on the grounds of redundancy. Henceforth the Institut de France, like the Academy of Science before it, was to be responsible for giving the government technological advice. In the four and a half years of its activity, the Bureau de Consultation had prepared 389 reports and recommended awards totalling 1,157,700 livres to 279 artisans in all. Taken together, the records of its grants and the list of patents registered in the same interval amount to an index of artisanal activity and inventiveness throughout the critical years of the Revolution.¹⁰³

5. THE LAST YEAR OF THE ACADEMY

However turbulent the external atmosphere, no overtly political dispute occurred within the ranks of the Academy of Science prior to 25 August 1792, when it had just under a year to live. In its regular meeting of that Wednesday, two weeks and a day after the overthrow of the Monarchy, Antoine Fourcroy took the floor to announce that the Société Royale de Médecine had expelled several of its members who had emigrated and who were known for counter-revolutionary sentiments. He moved that the Academy of Science take the same action with respect to those of its members known for lack of civic spirit (incivisme) and that the roll be called in order to proceed then and there to their expulsion.

Taken aback, several of those present, among them Cassini, objected to the démarche. The Academy, they observed, had no right to exclude any members. The advancement of science being its sole occupation, their personal conduct and political opinions were none of its business. Only the National Assembly, which was on the point of giving the Academy a new organization, would have the right to remove from its roll any who, in the judgment of legislators, should be excluded.

Fourcroy persisted. His colleagues need merely invoke the rule that those absent without leave for more than two months forfeit membership. When read out on the floor, however, that regulation was seen to apply only to the class of pensioners. In any case its enforcement pertained not to the Academy, but to the Ministry. After long discussion, a vote on Fourcroy’s un-welcome motion was postponed.

The next meeting, on 29 August, opened with an announcement from the chair that certain busts that might give offense had been removed from the hall. Thereupon another member, speaking to Fourcroy’s motion, again pointed out that the progress of science was their only proper concern, and that all organizational matters had always been dealt with in consultation with the Ministry. Accordingly, he moved that the current question be referred there, in effect to Roland, while the Academy turned to more interesting subjects. His motion carried, with the further provision that Cousin, the mathematician currently serving the Commune of Paris as administrator of the food supply, be asked to accompany the deputation from the Academy in waiting upon the Minister. Evidently Roland promised to take the matter under advisement and to reply by letter. Preoccupied by more urgent matters—the September massacres were under way—he returned the membership list with certain names eliminated after three months, on 21 November. ¹⁰⁴ By then, he had no need to expunge the name of La Rochefoucauld, who was murdered on 4 September. We do not know whom he did rule out—presumably honorary members who had emigrated. Perhaps that was all Fourcroy had had in mind. Perhaps not, however. He was even then planning to stand for election to the Convention.

Apart from the work of its commissions, of which the most important was occupied with preparation of the metric system, the Academy of Science treaded water throughout the autumn, winter, and spring of 1792–93. The sands were clearly running out. Attendance at the twice-weekly meetings fell off markedly. A decree of the Convention on 28 November 1792 forbade all academies to nominate new members until further notice. The Procès-Ver-baux for 1793 report no minutes for any of the sessions. The register contains mainly the record of occasional requests from the Ministries of War and the Navy for reports on the design of novel muskets, cannon, military fabrics, ambulatory hospitals, and so on, all of which were referred to appropriate commissions. Only four scientific memoirs were submitted in the seven months remaining to the Academy in the first year of the Republic, none of any importance.

As we have seen, Condorcet’s plan to turn the Academy of Science into a National Society at the head of the educational system stood no chance of enactment by the Convention. Consumed by his efforts to draft a Republican constitution in its opening months, Condorcet was marginalized in 1793 before being forced into hiding in June. Defense of the interests of science thus fell largely upon the shoulders of Lavoisier. His strategy emphasized, not the elegance, range, and depth of French science, features that were seldom mentioned, but its utility to the public, its service to the state, and its involvement with responsible practices in the arts and crafts.

On retiring under fire from the Treasury in February 1792, Lavoisier had resumed his post in the Gunpowder Administration. Immediately after the French declaration of war against Austria in April, he addressed himself to resolving the chronic dispute that over many years had poisoned relations between the Gunpowder Administration and its working class suppliers, the Saltpetermen of Paris. They earned their meagre living scavenging the salt-peter encrusted on cellar walls, damp foundations, and waste masonry throughout the city. At issue in every transaction was the quality of the crude saltpeter they delivered fortnightly into the receiving yard of the Arsenal, there to be refined into the pure grade required for gunpowder. Obliged to take what they could get in the Old Regime, laborers now had leaders who knew how to make grievances felt.

Determined to get to the bottom of the problem in the interest of all concerned, Lavoisier set to work on a scale at which no chemist had ever done experiments, that of the workmen themselves. We shall defer an account of the simplified method of refining that he proposed to a later chapter, in a discussion of war production in general.¹⁰⁵ Suffice it to anticipate and observe here that in the six months before resigning definitively from the Gunpowder Administration after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, he developed simplified procedures that made possible the revolutionary production of saltpeter and gunpowder throughout the Republic in the year of Terror at home and victory abroad.

One further commission from government awaited Lavoisier. There having been no previous experience with paper money, it was inevitable that counterfeiting should accelerate the depreciation of assignats. In February 1793 the currency committee (Comité des Monnoies) of the Convention requested the Bureau de Consultation to investigate methods for fabricating bills that would be proof against faking. Deeply though the economist in Lavoisier deplored recourse to assignats, the scientist in him took on the technological aspects of the problem. Nothing in his career was more characteristic than his mode of formulating the problem.

What he expressly calls the theory of fabricating valid assignats depends on four principles, all of which turn on quality. First, highly skilled artisans must be employed in all operations. Second, these imaginative designers, fine engravers, excellent printers, and top-grade papermakers must work as a team. Such persons are in short supply to begin with, and few among them would wish or need to engage in false purposes. The rules of probability thus make it virtually impossible for a counterfeiter to find and then to assemble all the talented craftsmen he would need from different trades. Third, the design of bills must be simple and striking enough to be recognizable by people of no education. Fourth, the design of all notes of the same denomination must be rigorously uniform. Though warned at the outset, the Finance Committee of the National Assembly had ignored this last, fundamental point.

Before making specific recommendations, Lavoisier’s assignat commission conducted a comprehensive survey of the entire paper industry. The best techniques for watermarks, the optimal mix of rags from different fabrics for pulping, the method for coloring the pulp and shading paper used by the Montgolfier mill in Annonay, the laminated paper turned out by the rival firm of Johannot, the advantage of polytyping rather than printing the sheets from ordinary type—all these and other proposals were submitted by the leading entrepreneurs in each genre of industry. The commission examined and prepared reports on every one. There is no need to follow the detail, however. On none of it did the Convention take action. The recommendations might have guided the Treasury in the manufacture of paper currency in stabler times, but nothing was published of Lavoisier’s investigation, the last he ever made.¹⁰⁶

Still Treasurer of the Academy, though free of other administrative responsibility, Lavoisier devoted his best efforts throughout the spring and summer of 1793 to a would-be association of the interests of science with those of arts and trades. He was assiduous in attending to his duties on the Bureau de Consultation, where he and Desaudray met twice a week as colleagues until Lavoisier’s arrest on 28 November. So far as the record shows, Lavoisier kept his own counsel about the latter’s egregious Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Métiers of March 1792. Rather than contemn it, he entered fully into an enterprise in adult education that Desaudray now launched with a view to accomplishing the same ends by other means. Planning for an “École Athénienne” to be called Lycée des Arts had begun in June 1792. Earlier ventures answering to the vogue for self-improvement offered precedents. The Société linnéenne and the Société Philomathique were formed in that spirit, not to mention Freemasonry and the Mesmerist Société de l’Harmonie Universelle.

The name “Lycée” brought immediately to mind the model of another organization of that ilk which had catered successfully to the cultural appetite of a clientele more fashionable than any Desaudray had in mind. Founded as a popular science establishment in 1781 by the daredevil balloonist Pilâtre de Rozier, the lycée in the rue de Valois became instead a literary salon after 1785, when the would-be aeronaut met his death in the first air crash in history.¹⁰⁷ The organization was similar to that of an eighteenth-century library association. Members who bought shares in the company enjoyed its sociability as well as the formal lectures—La Harpe’s on literary topics, Garat’s on history and political philosophy, Fourcroy’s on chemistry—which were also open to a wider public for a fee. In 1790 a reorganization was undertaken in order to rid the lycée of its elitist tinge and of the onus attaching to its erstwhile patronage by the comte de Provence. Lavoisier, La Rochefoucauld, and Fourcroy then bought in as shareholders, as did A.F. Silvestre, secretary of the Société Philomathique. Nevertheless, attendance dwindled, and at the shareholders’ meeting on 4 November 1793 Fourcroy proposed, as he had done in the Academy the previous year, that the membership be purged of unpatriotic elements in order to win favor with the government.¹⁰⁸

In Desaudray’s Lycée des Arts, nothing if not patriotic, no time would be wasted on literature. Half the courtyard of the Palais Royal was then occupied by a large rotunda containing an auditorium, promenade, and reception rooms, all largely unused and fallen into disrepair. Desaudray formed a “ Société d’Artistes” to take a twelve-year lease, which they financed by renting out the shops in the surrounding arcade. The purpose:

To found in the heart of the capital, in the center of taste and talents, a sort of Free and Primary Assembly of Artisans;—To ensure that men of value be judged only by their peers;—To shield them thereby from the slow and abusive formalities of academic censorship;—To remind them constantly of their dignity in service to the single principle of common utility;—To establish a pattern of recognition the more pleasing in that general esteem alone will confer it;—To assist them in the implementation of their discoveries;—To put their talents on display and win the support of public opinion;—To combine in their interest, finally, a new plan of free education with powerful methods of incentive and support, even while tempering these serious undertakings with diversions and resources to be offered by the kinds of talent that give pleasure:—Such is the purpose of the new Lycée to be founded on the principles of the ancient Athenian School.¹⁰⁹

Eighteen public courses would be offered, tuition free, on all fields of applied science and “technologie” (this may be the coinage of that word). The design of the curriculum followed the classification of science Desaudray had devised for his Nouvelle Constitution des Sciences, Arts, et Métiers. Circuses would leaven the bread, however, and entertainments would be offered. There would be a weekly lottery. Women might subscribe to the programs as well as men, though at a different location. Exhibitions of machines, of new inventions, of natural history, and of chemical and physical objects and apparatus would occupy side rooms. Regular ceremonies would be held for the award of gold and silver medals in recognition of inventions judged to be the most useful.¹¹⁰

Only in April 1793 were renovations of the premises complete. The grand opening on Sunday the seventh attracted a great throng. Among them were members of the Academy of Science who had followed Lavoisier’s example in joining the Lycée des Arts. According to the first issue of its journal, all present were struck with astonishment by the taste that had governed the decoration in Gothic style of the auditorium, shaped like a bowl with the dais in the center. Fourcroy there presided, flanked by four deputies from the Convention. Behind them could be seen a relief plan of a proposed canal passing through Saint-Maur. Also in places of honor were representa-tives of the Commune of Paris, of the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and of the several societies who had joined to elect the Directoire des Arts.Fourcroy’s address, eloquent as always, dealt with utility as the object of science. Hébert next took the floor to speak for the Commune and urge that the sanctuary of arts be invested with the spirit of liberty. A. L. Millin, secretary of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, then gave the one substantive talk of the evening, a report on the works of a specialist in silkworms, Salvatore Berthesen. Prizes went to two engineers who had designed the Canal of Saint-Maur. The formal session closed with a concert featuring a hymn to Apollo composed by none other than Desaudray himself. A festival for wives of members in the evening started with a performance by Citizen Val, who gave “des tours de Physique Amusante.”

Regular courses held every weekday evening began on 15 April. The schedule was a good deal less ambitious, and also less artisanal, than the prospectus had foretold: natural history taught by Millin on Mondays, amphibians by Brongniart on Tuesdays, mineralogy by Tonnelier on Wednes-days, vegetable physics by Fourcroy on Thursdays, technology by Has-senfratz on Fridays, and physiology by Sue on Saturdays.¹¹¹

Lavoisier sat on the governing board, the Directoire, of the Lycée des Arts and served a term as president in June 1793. His report on the work of the scientific societies during the preceding two months sounds weary. Engrossed in their work, scientists are scarcely aware of contributing to their larger cause, the general advancement of knowledge. They would feel them-selves to be standing still if the weight of ignorance, stupidity, and attendant prejudices did not provide a fixed frame of reference against which the common movement forward may be detected. The Directory of the Lycée des Arts is placed between the scientific societies and other classes of society. Its purpose is to take from the one and communicate to the other, to seek to follow this slow march of science ever directed toward the progress of human reason. It must strive to open to all the benefit of the treasures that a small number seem to have kept to themselves.¹¹²

The strategy for saving the Academy of Science at the expense of the others originated in the collaboration between Lavoisier and Lakanal, the go-between who was even then busying hinmself in the legislative transformation of the Jardin des Plantes into the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. In April Lavoisier addressed a report to the Comité d’Instruction Publique to the effect that the personnel of the Academy, reduced in number by current circumstances, were unequal to the many undertakings assigned to it in the public interest, beginning with the reform of weights and measures. Might the committee “in its wisdom” consider whether the national interest does not require exempting it from the decree (of 25 November 1792) forbidding all academies to nominate new members? The démarche worked. The committee did so consider. On 17 May Lakanal presented such a measure to the Convention, which adopted it.¹¹³

Amid the political turmoil of the summer of 1793, no further members were ever elected. The Convention (it will be recalled) expelled the Girondist deputies in the wake of the uprising of 31 May. On 1 July David launched a renewed attack on the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture. Responding to his demand that it be dissolved, the Comité d’Instruction Publique resolved to take under advisement the long-simmering question of all academies supported by the nation. Charlotte Corday thereupon provided David with the subject of the most dramatic of his paintings by assassinating Marat on 13 July. On 17 July Lavoisier addressed a letter to Lakanal hastening to supply observations the latter had requested on the need to preserve the Academy of Science.

Lavoisier hopes his memorandum is not too long. Perhaps Lakanal will think he omitted something essential. In his haste he has overlooked mentioning the Academy’s representation on the Bureau de Consultation, and is adding a postscript. At first he intended to include the names of everyone serving on all the different commissions on Weights and Measures, but thought better of it since that great enterprise belongs to the whole Academy. He has not mentioned Lakanal’s request to any of his colleagues. There is no use spreading alarm. Anyway, nothing is hopeless as long as Lakanal is there to defend so good a cause.

The memorandum develops two points of view from which to judge of the Academy. In the one, it is a company of savants working for the advancement of science, the progress of arts and trades, and the stability of the human mind. In the other, it is a reference commmission available to the government in all matters requiring technical expertise. He will not list all its services. What must be appreciated is that science is not like literature. A man of letters finds all the material he needs in the larger society. Not so science, which cannot be cultivated in isolation. The mathematician would perform only hypothetical computations if astronomers and mechanicians did not provide him data. Chemists, physicists, and astronomers would draw no benefit from their experiments if mathematics did not supply analysis. Also, science is expensive. Government support is indispensable for navigation, observatories, instruments, and other facilities. Finally, criticism of memoirs in scientific meetings is essential to perfecting them. Does the Convention wish to end all this, the progress of science, arts, and trades? Does it wish to terminate the operations it has ordered? Or, does it on the other hand wish to assure France a lasting predominance among the industrious nations of the world?¹¹⁴

A second letter, sent in near panic, went off to Lakanal the next day. He lacks information, writes Lavoisier, about the projects being presented for suppression of the Academy and cannot tell whether his observations of yesterday are what Lakanal wants. He has heard, however, that there is a proposal to transform the Academy into a Society of Arts and Crafts (Société des Arts). He is appalled (but does not say that he had never imagined that association of the interests of science and industry would thus end with their identification):

The spirit that animates scientists, if you allow me to remind you, is not at all that which animates, and should animate, artisans. The scientist works only for love of science and to increase his reputation. Should he make a discovery, he publishes it, and his object is fulfilled if he is assured that it belongs to him . . . ; The artisan, by contrast, whether in his research or in the application he makes of the discoveries of others, always has in view the chance for profit. He publishes only what he cannot keep to himself and reveals only what he cannot hide.

Society benefits from both, from the scientist’s disinterestedness and from the artisan’s quest for profit. Mix them up, and each loses its proper spirit. The scientist would become a speculator, working neither for reputation nor for the advancement of knowledge, but for his own profit. In that case, “The noblest of associations, where morality, simplicity, and virtue prevail in the highest degree, the Academy of Science, is no more.”¹¹⁵

So it came about, though not for that reason. Lakanal’s and Lavoisier’s maneuver to exempt the Academy of Science from the impending repudiation of the whole academic structure succeeded in the Comité d’Instruction Publique. As we have seen at the opening of the current chapter, however, the provision failed to withstand David’s onslaught on the floor of the Convention on 8 August 1793.

Never one to let go, Lavoisier met with other members of the former Academy on 10 August. They then resolved to take advantage of their constitutional right to form a voluntary society, a “ Société libre et fraternelle pour l’avancement des sciences” in order to carry on their work. Writing to Lakanal for approval of this course, Lavoisier now spelled out in what he meant to be overpowering detail the nature and state of all the projects entrusted to the Academy: the Academy was trustee of expensive astronomical instruments and has begun the construction of new ones; Vicq d’Azyr has undertaken an anatomical treatise, for which 6,000 livres have already been expended; the Academy intended to publish the voyage of Desfontaines along the coast of North Africa, financed by the nation; Desmarets has been assigned funds for a mineralogical map of France; money has been awarded to Fourcroy for research on alkalis, to Berthollet for work on dyes, to Coulomb for investigations of magnetism, to Sage for mineralogical experiments, to Hauy for studies of crystallography; the entire section of chemistry has a grant for work on the combustion of diamonds; agreements have been made for publication of many manuscripts; the Academy’s own Mémoires are three years in arrears, and the work will be lost if it is not printed. Most important of all is the great project on Weights and Measures. Contracts have been signed with many artisans, whom the Convention will surely not disappoint. Standard weights and measures are under construction. The survey of the meridian is in progress.¹¹⁶

It is unthinkable that all this will simply be abandoned.¹¹⁷ If, however, the government does indeed intend to take over the direction, will it please send precise instructions covering every particular? And for a fleeting moment this last-ditch strategy seemed auspicious. The Société libre was authorized on 14 August. On the seventeenth, however, Lavoisier found the door locked. That morning the authorities had placed the papers of all members under seal.¹¹⁸ By 1 September Lavoisier had nearly despaired. His colleagues, he wrote in his last letter to Lakanal, dared not proceed even on a voluntary basis. To do so would flout the dominant opinion in the Comité d’Instruction Publique and the dominant party in the Convention. He has little hope for a further report promised by the Committee. He fears it impossible to reconcile the interests of science with the politics of the moment. “We are in a position where it is equally dangerous to do something as it is to do nothing.”¹¹⁹

He had nearly despaired, but not quite. One move remained. As a last resort, Lavoisier reverted to Condorcet’s strategy of sheltering the essential functions of an academy within a new educational system, but with a difference. Lavoisier’s scheme was calculated to elicit support in the artisanal circles that Condorcet had ignored and alienated. At the 10 July meeting of the Bureau de Consultation, an unidentified member called attention to the importance of establishing a system of primary education for children who would become artisans and craftsmen. The Convention had received a petition to that effect on 5 July from a group of artisans whose spokesman was Hassenfratz. A similar petition was known to be under discussion in the Lycée des Arts, which submitted it to the Convention on 21 July. Not to be left out, the Bureau de Consultation named its own commission consisting of Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Desaudray, Hassenfratz, and Borda.

By the next meeting, 24 July, a draft “Mémoire sur l’Education Publique” was ready. Meanwhile (it will be recalled) the Convention had named an ad hoc Commmission of Six to take over the issue of public education from the Comité d’Instruction Publique. Currently before it was LePeletier’s Spartan educational plan, which Robespierre, who was a member, had coopted and presented as his own.¹²⁰ The Bureau de Consultation must make haste, one member pointed out, if the Convention were even to hear its views. Accordingly, it voted to adopt and print its own memoir forthwith and to distribute copies to all members of the Commission of Six, the Comite d’Instruction Publique, and the Convention.¹²¹

Entitled Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique présentees à la Convention Nationale par le Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, the memoir came off the press at Dupont de Nemour’s printery. No name appears on the title page, but Lavoisier was almost certainly the author.¹²² An initial octavo edition of 2,000 copies was printed on 5 August. It sets forth commonplace pedagogical principles of the associationist psychology and outlines an educational program. One hundred copies of a second quarto edition were ready a month later, on 2 September, and another 2,000 on 13 September. In this, the definitive printing, the “Réflexions” are merely the preamble to an elaborate Projet de Décret, a blueprint for an entire educational system.¹²³ In the meantime, the Academy had gone under. Evidently, therefore, Lavoisier had spent the interval contriving, in a detail he could not possibly have assembled in time for the hasty 5 August printing, yet another way in which the wreckage might be salvaged.

The structure and much of the terminology come straight out of Con-dorcet. The four levels of primary school, secondary school, institute (high school), and lycée (higher education) are the same. The tables of organization and teaching programs for every school are adaptations of Condorcet’s, and no less detailed. In Lavoisier’s scheme, however, the spirit and content of education would be different. Condorcet made no provision for manual training. He would have pupils learn principles, not skills. Even in courses on applied science, mechanical arts were to be considered only in relation to the appropriate theory. The purpose of education was to produce citizens steeped in truth, not workers.

In the plan Lavoisier fathered on the Bureau de Consultation, nothing is said of inculcating truth through principles drawn from nature. Nor is there any question of insulating education from politics. Out and out vocational training was what he had in mind. Primary schools would teach the three R’s. At the secondary level, youngsters would confront a parting of the ways between those headed for public service, who learn languages, science, and literature, and those destined for mechanical arts. Traditional education had made some provision for the former, but none at all for people who would earn their livings in agriculture, industry, navigation, or manual labor. Certain topics, notably drawing and design, are common to all crafts. They may be considered a language that all should learn. Beyond that, the trades fall into two broad classes, mechanical or chemical in basis. For the former, people need instruction in the art of machines and the elements of statics and dynamics, for the latter instruction in the properties of natural substances and the operations involved in analyzing, dissociating, and combining them. All students, moreover, should follow a course in political economy.

There is no need to trace the bent toward practice up through the two higher levels of education to the programs of professional training Lavoisier lays out for experts in every field. The orientation toward trade and commerce is consistent. In further contrast to Condorcet, Lavoisier had no notion of some governance by science in the administration of the school system. Public education in the elementary and secondary schools would be supervised by boards composed of selected teachers, while the institutes and lycees would be under the oversight of a General Council of the Professors, who would elect an executive committee. It would be up to the National Convention to specify the authority to whom they would report.

The Academy having just been abolished, institutionalizing its functions in a new form was a far more immediate motivation for Lavoisier than for Condorcet. Instead of placing an equivalent organization over the educational system, he would make it a coordinate branch in a tripartite division. Teaching and learning at all four levels would be the work of the first division. The advancement of science and the arts would be the responsibility of the second. The program of support for science, arts, and industry would occupy the third. The second division, in effect a resuscitated Academy, would be called “ Société Nationale des Sciences et des Arts.” It would thus be flanked by the school system on one side and a “Jury des Arts,” a continuation of the Bureau de Consultation on the other.

Citizen representatives—to paraphrase the peroration—the future of the Republic is in your hands. Organize a national education! Vivify Science and Technology. Consider neighboring nations, our rivals, busying them-selves with the means of augmenting productivity. A nation in which science and industry languish will fall behind, little by little, into stagnation ultimately, and will eventually see its wealth, its territory, its resources invaded by its neighbors.¹²⁴

Lavoisier’s final plea went unheard, not only by the Convention, which never received it, but by his colleagues on the Bureau de Consultation, who failed to send it there. The last mention in their minutes is at the meeting of 4 November, when it was decided to postpone action. Lavoisier entered prison on the twenty-eighth.

The concluding word was not his, therefore. It came rather from De-saudray and the Point Central des Arts et Métiers. On 26 September 1793 that organization resubmitted its New Constitution for the Arts and Trades to the Convention along with its congratulations on having delivered the Academy of Science its “death certificate in good form:”

From the summit of their Mountain our Legislators are on guard. They gaze down. They are on the watch for malevolence everywhere, and if in one hand they hold thunderbolts always on the ready to strike down traitors, from the other they dispense benefactions. We can thus be assured that neglect of the arts and crafts will not elude their vigilance. . . . Leave it to the Voluntary Societies to take care of expanding the limits of our knowledge by improving it! Let practical industry gather true artisans in primary assemblies of the arts and trades, and let them freely choose provisional commissions for all parts of the new administration! Liberty will do the rest, and the fruits, make no doubt of it, will be abundant. . . .

By sustaining the Fathers of Arts and Crafts, by having them serve in public education, you will engage, you will steel those in ardent youth whose spirits must be readied above all for the prime duty of the citizen, that of being useful to his fatherland.—There is the true republican morality!—Hypocritical priests say: “Know how to control your passions,” and call that morality. The fiery and active republican should say: “Leave men their passions, but know how to direct them.” Passions are what give him energy. A man without passions is only a moderate federalist, or a hypocritical liberal, incapable of great things. The true Sans-Culotte is he who works.¹²⁵

Or, as even the abbé Grégoire put it in the heat of the moment, “Real genius is almost always sans-culotte.”¹²⁶

To be fair, be it quickly said, the statement cited in the opening of our next chapter is more characteristic of Grégoire. It introduces consideration of the one enterprise, preparation of the metric system, that the Convention did exempt, albeit provisionally and only for a time, from its prohibition of academic activity.

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

2 Gillispie (1959).

3 Gillispie (1980), pp. 261–89; Darnton (1968).

4 The point is developed in Gillispie (1976b).

5 Le Réve de d’Alembert in Oeuvres philosophiques de Diderot , ed. Paul Vallière (1956), pp.299–300.

6 Diderot, Article “Art,” Encyclopédie.

7 Gillispie (1980), pp. 283–284.

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

9 The 1954 Dictionnaire de Biographie Française article on Bosc by Roman d’Amat is informative. There is an éloge by Cuvier (1829) based on documents in the Fonds Cuvier, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MSS 186, 157. A manuscript of Bosc’s journal of his time in America, where he was viceconsul in Wilmington, N.C., and consul in New York from 1797 to 1800, is in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. See also A.-F. Silvestre, “Notice biographique sur . . . Bosc,” Memoires de la Société Royale et Centrale d’Agriculture 1 (1829), pp.1–27.

10 Cuvier has an éloge of Olivier, Recueil des éloges historiques (3 vols., 1817–1827) 3, pp. 233– 66.

11 On Millin, see Krafft (1818).

12 Éloge historique de M. Bosc, read on 13 July 1829.

13 According to the account of Thiébaut de Berneaud, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MSS 4,441, cited in n. 16.

14 Adresse des naturalistes à l’Assemblée Nationale du 5 août 1790. BN Le29. 826. For the ceremony, see Duris (1993), pp. 77–87.

15 The important documents bearing on the transformation of the Jardin du Roi and Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle into the Muséum were published with a useful introduction by E. T.

Hamy on the occasion of the centennial (Hamy 1893).

16 Ibid., pp. 75–78.

17 Ibid., pp. 5–10.

18 Mémoire sur le Jardin du Roi. BMHN, MSS 1934. For a full account, see Gillispie (1980), pp. 183–184.

19 Hamy (1893), pp. 23–30.

20 The staff ’s Procès-Verbaux are in AN, AJ1596.

21 Hamy (1983), pp. 30–35.

22 Opinion de M. J. A. Creuzé-Latouche . . . au sujet du Jardin des Plantes et des Académies. 1790. BN, Le29.868. Reprinted in part in Hamy (1893), pièce 10, pp. 93–97.

23 Hamy (1893), pp. 107–129.

24 His first memoir on shells was “Prodrome d’une nouvelle classification des coquilles, comprenant une redaction appropriee des caractères génériques, et l’établissement d’un grand nombre de genres nouveaux,” Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris 1 (an VII, 1799), pp. 63–90. Lu à l’Institut de France le 21 fromaire an VII.

25 Adresse et projet de règlement presentes à l’Assemblée nationale par les officiers du Jardin des Plantes et du Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle (1790).

26 The Procès-Verbaux of the Society may be consulted in the Bibliothèque Centrale of the Muséum, MS. 464.

27 “Buceros Africanus: Le Calao d’Afrique,” Actes de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris 1 (1792), pp. 18–20.

28 “Sur les ouvrages généraux en Histoire Naturelle; et particulièrement sur l’ Édition du Systeme Naturae de Linnaeus que M. J.-F. Gmelin vient de publier,” ibid., pp. 81–85.

29 “Recherches sur une nouvelle méthode de classification des quadrupèdes, fondée sur la structure mécanique des parties osseuses qui servent à l’articulation de la mâchoire inférieure,” ibid., pp. 50–60.

30 His earliest paper on invertebrate zoology, “Sur les genres de la Sèche, du Calmar, et des Polypes vulgairement nommés ‘Polypes de la Mer,’” appeared in 1799 in the one-volume Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris (prairial an VII, see above, n. 24). It was read in two installments to the Institut de France on 21 floréal and 26 prairial an VI (10 May and 14 June 1798), PVIF 1, pp. 395, 407.

31 Recherches sur les causes des principaux faits physiques, 2 vols., an II (1794). See Gillispie (1956a), Burkhardt (1977), Corsi (1988). The sequels were Réfutation de la théorie pneumatique ou de la nouvelle doctrine des chimistes modernes (1796) and Mémoires de physique et d’histoire naturelle, établis sur des bases de raisonnement indépendantes de toute théorie (1797).

32 Bernardin de St.-Pierre, Studies of Nature (Boston, 1801).

33 Rey (1992).

34 Hamy (1893), p. 55.

35 Ibid., p. 63. On Dombey’s life and career, see Hamy (1905).

36 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire sur la nécessite de joindre une ménagerie au Jardin national des plantes de Paris (1792), quoted in Rey (1992), p.318.

37 On the menagerie, see Burkhardt (1997).

38 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1847), pp. 7–23.

39 Lakanal, Expose sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal . . . pour sauver, durant la révolution, les sciences, les lettres, et ceux qui les honoroient par leurs travaux (1838), p. 1.

40 PVCd’IP 1, p. 480.

41 Ibid., pp. 479–481; Hamy (1893), pp. 63–66.

42 Ibid., pp. 483–486.

43 Chapitre deuxième, article XVI, “Projet de règlement pour le Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle présenté par les professeurs au Comité d’Instruction Publique de la Convention Nationale d’après le décret du 10 juin 1793.” Hamy (1893), pp. 146–160, p. 151.

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

45 PVAS, 4 and 8 July 1789.

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

47 Hahn (1965) gives the text of La Rochefoucauld’s address, the draft of which is in the Archives de l’Académie des Sciences. For further discussion of the proposed reform, see Hahn (1971), pp. 167–173.

48 Gillispie (1980), pp. 80–81.

49 PVAS, 10 March 1790, p. 74. Printed in OL 4, pp. 597–614, where the editors misidentify the text as that of the 1785 reform.

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

51 Opinion de M. J.-A. Creuzé-Latouche au sujet du Jardin des Plantes et des Académies (1790), BN, Le29.863, pp. 11–14. For the proposal submitted by the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture, see AN ADVIII, II, pièce 3; and for those submitted by the Académie Royale de Chirurgie and the Société Royale d’Agriculture, see AN F¹⁷1310, dossier 14. On this debate, see Hahn (1971), pp.194–200.

52 On these disputes, see Hahn (1971), pp. 171–2.

53 PVAS, 19 February 1791, fol. 257.

54 Méchain to Borda, 10 January 1794, Bibliothèque de l’ École des Ponts et Chaussées, MS 1504.

55 Coquard (1993) supersedes all earlier biographies.

56 Gillispie (1980), pp. 290–330. See also Marat, homme de science? , ed. Jean Bernard, J.-F. Lemaire, and J.-P. Poirier. Collection les empêcheurs de penser en rond.

57 L’Ami du peuple no. 194, 17 September 1790.

58 For a thorough discussion of Marat’s optical research, see the annotation in Michel Blay’s edition (Christian Bourgeois, 1989) of Optique de Newton, traduction nouvelle par M. ***.

59 Marat, Les charlatans modernes, Notice de l’éditeur.

60 Ibid., p. 32.

61 Gillispie (1980), p. 246.

62 Ibid., pp. 36–37.

63 Gillispie (1983).

64 Ibid., p. 40.

65 Isore (1937).

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

67 Gerbaux and Schmidt, Procès Verbaux des Comités d’Agriculture et de Commerce de la Constituante,de la Législative, et de la Convention, 1 (1906), p. 524 (hereafter PVCAC). On British patent law, see Boehm (1967).

68 Maugras (1907).

69 Rapport fait à l’Assemblée Nationale au nom du Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce . . .sur la propriété des auteurs de nouvelles découvertes inventions en tout genre d’industrie (1791).BN, Le²⁹.1206. The title page has the motto “A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos.”

70 The text follows the Boufflers report, n. 69, above. It is also printed in PVCA&C, n. 67, above) 1, pp. 655–659.

71 AP 23, p. 54, séance du 8 février 1791. Procès-Verbaux survive from two meetings of the Société des Inventions et Découvertes, those of 27 January and 2 February 1792, BN MSS Français, ancien supplement francais 8045. They are miscatalogued as pertaining to the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers. An interesting entry in the former records that a deputation from the Cordeliers requesting them to join in signing a petition on popular education was referred to a commission consisting of Fortin and Mercklein. They replied that since the Society was concerned with the advancement of arts and crafts, and not with politics, it could not take a position collectively.

72 “Respectueuse pétition,” op. cit., n. 66 above.

73 Boufflers, Rapport, n. 6, p. 12.

74 AP 24, pp. 450–462, 482–484, 632–644; 26, pp. 76, 79–80, séances du 29 mars, 31 mars, 7 avril, 14 mai 1791.

75 Adresse des artistes-inventeurs au Comité d’Agriculture et de Commerce, 11 avril 1791, BN, Lb39. 9860.

76 The Archives de l’Institut de Propriété Industrielle contains an État-Général par ordre alphabétique des brevets d’invention, de perfectionnement, et d’importation délivrés en vertu des lois du 7 janvier et 24 mai 1791 jusqu’au 1^er janvier 1812.

77 Gillispie (1957a); cf. J. G. Smith (1979). Leblanc and his partner, Dizé, took advantage of a provision in the 7 January law to the effect that inventors might keep their processes secret provided they could show it necessary for political or commercial reasons. PVCA&C 2, pp. 400–401, Séance du 2 septembre 1791.

78 Plaisant (1969). The text of the 25 May law is printed in Gerbaux and Schmidt (op. cit. n. 67 above) 2, pp. 78–89. For further contemporary discussion, see two reports, “Sur les brevets d’invention,” Conseil des Cinq-Cents, Corps Legislatif 14 pluviôse and 12 fructidor an VI (2 February and 29 August 1798); and C. Costaz, “Notice sur les brevets d’invention,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 1, no. 5 (nivôse an XI, January 1803), pp. 81–85.

79 AP 30, p. 401, séance du 9 septembre 1791.

80 Boufflers, “Rapport . . . sur l’application des récompenses nationaux aux inventions & découvertes en tous genres d’industrie,” AP 30, pp.397–401. Séance du 7 septembre 1791. Also published separately.

81 Journal du Point central des arts et métiers, BN, 8 oct. Lc2 .6381.

82 AP 30, p. 401; 31, p. 368 (9 and 27 September 1791).

83 Journal des sciences, arts, et métiers, 22 January 1792 (BN V.42735).

84 For the history and regime of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, see Vitet (1861).

85 The literature on David is voluminous. Recent biographies are Brookner (1980) and Roberts (1989). For David’s politics, see Dowd (1952) and Bordes (1993).

86 Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (10 vols., 1875–92) 10, pp. 38–39 (5 Dec. 1789), pp. 44–45 (30 Jan. 1790), pp. 45–46 (5 Feb. 1790), pp. 67–68 (3 July 1790). Hereafter PVARPS.

87 Ibid. 10, pp. 74–77 (7, 17 August 1790). The David faction’s lengthy Adresse et Projet de Réglement (1790) and the officers’ justification of their position, Esprit des Statuts et Réglements de l’Academie de Peinture et Sculpture (1790), will be found in AN ADVIII, dossier 11.

88 Mémoire sur l’Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture par plusieurs membres de cette Académie (AN ADVIII, dossier 11, pièce 5) calling for creating a Commune des Arts is signed by David, Restout, Massard, Robin, Girout, Beauvallet, Julien, Echard, Bouillard, Henriquez, Wills fils, Monot, Hyet, and Pasquier, acting as Secretary. A more extreme manscript, “Mémoire de la Commune des Arts qui ont le Dessin pour base” (AN, F¹⁷ 1310, dossier 14, pièce 156), proposes the draft of a decree to be presented to the National Assembly. Article I reads,“L’Académie de peinture, sculpture, et celle d’architecture sont supprimées. Les artistes qui exercent les arts recus dans ces academies seront libres de se réunir en une seule commune dite des arts du dessin, laquelle s’organisera selon le mode des assemblées déliberantes.” Undated, but evidently September or October 1790.

89 The Point Central des Arts et Métiers began meeting in the Église du Saint Sepulcre in Saint-Denis and moved to the Louvre in February 1792 (AN, F¹⁷1097, dossier 3). According to an 1803 “Recueil des Sociétés savantes et littéraires de la République française” (messidor an XI), the three societies still met in the Louvre. Of the other organizations listed, those marked with an asterisk antedate 1795: with quarters in the Louvre were the Société libre des sciences, lettres, et arts, the Société Polytechnique, the Société Academique des Sciences, the Société de Medecine, the Société des Belles Lettres, and the Société Libre d’Institution. With quarters in the École de Médecine were the Société de l’Ecole de Medecine, the Société Medicale d’ Émulation*, and the Société Libre d’Instruction. With quarters in the Oratoire was the Lycée des Arts*. In private, rented quarters were the Société philomathique*, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle*, the Société des Obervateurs de l’Homme, the Lycée Republicain*, and the Lycee de Paris. Bibliothèque du Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (8o Ka 13). I owe this citation to the late Maurice Daumas.

90 Le Point Central des Arts et Métiers à la Convention Nationale, 25 September 1793.

91 Private communication from the late Maurice Daumas; Gillispie (1980), pp. 463–478.

92 PVAS, 13 January 1790 and 7 September 1790. On this long drawn-out affair, see documents in AN, ADVIII, 11, pièce 2; a pamphlet by Trouville, L’Hydraulique naturelle, slnd (BN, Vp.9874); a petition, Au Sénat conservateur, 30 germinal an VIII (BN, 4Ln27.6041); and an anonymous “Notice sur les Machines hydrauliques de M. de Trouville,” Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale 13 (1814), pp. 25–28.

93 AN, F¹⁷1097, dossier 3.

94 Nouvelle Constitution des Arts et Metiers, avec le Projet de Decret presente à l’Assemblée Nationale, rédigé par la Société du Point Central des Arts et Métiers en prénce des MM. les Commissaires des Sociétés des Inventions et Découvertes et de la Commune des Arts. Mars 1792. BN, Inv. Rz 3001.

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

96 PVBCAM, p. 36. Séance du 21 decembre 1791.

97 On Hassenfratz, see Grison (1996), pp. 107–110.

98 PVBCAM, pp. 42, 43, 50, 51, 56.

99 Dictionnaire des manufactures, arts et métiers (3 v., 1784–1790). For Roland’s attack on the Bureau de Consultation, see PVBCAM, pp. 70–80, PVCd’IP 1, 105–119; Bernardin (1964), pp. 236–243.

100 Ministre de l’Interieur au Président de la Convention, 12 November 1792, PVCd’IP 1, pp.

106–107.

101 PVCd’IP 1, p. 105, 1 December 1792.

102 PVBCAM, p. 80; PVCd’IP 1, p. 225, n. 1.

103 Letter of transmittal to Institut National, PVBCAM, pp. 28–29. For the brevets d’invention, see n. 76 above. There is no single summary of the Bureau’s awards. Ballot consulted a “Tableau des récompenses, gratifications, encouragements accordés par le Bureau de Consultation” in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. It runs from 1 vendémiaire an IV until its dissolution on 30 prairial an IV. Other reports are contained in fiscal documents in the Archives Nationales (^F42328, ^F42556, and ^F12*110). The publisher, one Chemin, of Journal des sciences, arts, et métiers (n. 83 above), attempted to report the proceedings of the Bureau de Consultation, but complained of its failure to furnish information. Altering his plan, he un-dertook a comprehensive coverage in Mémoires du Bureau de Consultation des arts, ou Journal des inventions, découvertes, et perfectionnements dans les sciences, arts, et métiers, accompanied by a twelve-page Supplément pour l’explication des planches (1793). A second volume with a reduced title, Journal des inventions, déouvertes (an III), contains only two numbers. The members of the Bureau de Consultation found these accounts very imperfect. The only copies Ballot could find are in the library of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (4 Oct. Ky 2).

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

105 Below, chapter 6, section 4.

106 “Rapport sur la fabrication des assignats,” OL 4, pp. 669–712; “Rapport à la commission des assignats,” which concerns proposals on polytyping (OL 6, pp. 706–710).

107 Gillispie (1983), pp. 118–120.

108 On the Lycée de la rue de Valois and the Lycée des Arts, see Dejob (1889), Smeaton (1955). On 4 May Lavoisier gave an interesting account of the new Lycée to the old one: “Sur le Lycée des Arts,” OL 6, pp. 559–569.

109 Établissement d’une École Athenniene, sous le nom de Lycée des Arts et Métiers (1792), pp. 2– 3. BN, Rz3008.

110 Details were printed separately from the general prospectus under the title Lycée des Arts (1790). BN Rz3007. For a slightly different version, see AN, ADVIII, 29.

111 Journal du Lycée des Arts, no. 1, 15 April 1793. BN, V28667. For the further development of the Lycée des Arts, see its Annuaire, an III (BN R26689), an IV (BN, V25851), an VI (BN, V25856). No Annuaire was published in an V (1796–97). The rotunda burned down in 1798, and the lycée was transferred to the Oratoire, where it languished and died.

112 Lavoisier, “Notice sur les Travaux des Sociétés Savantes de Paris pendant le mois d’avril 1793 et une partie de mai dernier,” Journal du Lycée des Arts, 22 June 1793.

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

114 Lavoisier to Lakanal, 17 July 1793, accompanying “Observations sur l’Académie des Sciences,” OL 4, pp. 615–623.

115 Lavoisier to Lakanal, 18 July 1793. OL 4, p. 624.

116 Lavoisier to Lakanal, 10 and 11 August 1793, PVCd’IP 2, pp. 314–317.

117 Lavoisier to Delambre, 8 August 1793. This letter should appear in a forthcoming volume of the Correspondance de Lavoisier. Many years ago the late M. René Fric, the initial editor, kindly allowed me to read through copies of the letters he was preparing for publication.

118 PVCd’IP 2, 14 August 1793, p. 319; Lavoisier to Comité d’Instruction Publique, 17 August 1793, PVCd’IP, p. 320.

119 PVCd’IP 2, pp. 331–332.

120 Above, chapter 2, section 7.

121 Here as in several other instances, Ballot’s transcription of PVBCAM is incomplete. Full transcriptions of the minutes concerned with the educational proposal that emanated from the Bureau de Consultation are given in PVCd’IP 2, pp. 902–907.

122 “Réflexions sur l’Instruction Publique, présentées à la Convention Nationale par le Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers, suivies d’un Projet de Décret,” OL 6, pp. 516–558. A slightly different and clearly preliminary draft left in manuscript is printed in OL 4, pp. 649– 668. K. M. Baker’s and W. A. Smeaton’s argument that the resemblance to Condorcet’s proposal casts doubt on Lavoisier’s authorship has not proved convincing to later scholars (1965).

123 Guillaume printed a transcription of Dupont’s bills in PVCd’IP 2, p. 907.

124 OL 2, p. 532.

125 AN, ADVIII 40, T. 1, pièce 18.

126 In the report accompanying the draft of the decree suppressing academies, 8 August 1793, PVCd’IP 2, p. 255.