CHAPTER VI

Scientists at War

Everyone recalls that prodigious and sudden effort that astounded all Europe and aroused admiration even among the enemy it thwarted. Monsieur Berthollet and Monsieur Monge were the moving spirits. It was according to their instructions that this immense movement was directed. The chemists who were commissioned to conduct tests for so many new procedures worked only by their instructions; and it is said that, if they had wished to follow up all the secrets they came upon, weapons more powerful than any we possess would have emerged from their laboratories.

It would be wrong to suppose that the use of such inventions is in the final analysis as harmful to humanity as their effects are alarming. Exactly the contrary is the case. It is not only that science, in furnishing civilized peoples with these means of defense, has been the sturdiest shield of civilization.

Nor is it merely that science has been able to count on the support of government only since it became one of the essential elements of the art of war.

But, paradoxical though the assertion may appear, it would be easy to prove that the means of destruction furnished by science, in rendering combat more decisive, have made wars less frequent and less murderous.

As for M. Berthollet, what he primarily saw in these extraordinary developments of human industry, motivated by the greatest of interests, were simply chemical experiments on a large scale.

Cuvier Éloge of Berthollet¹

1. THE MONGE CONNECTION

According to Madame Roland, Condorcet was the one who, amid the tur-moil following the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, suggested to her husband, who then returned to the Ministry of the Interior, that Gaspard Monge become Minister of the Navy in the provisional Council of Ministers dominated by Danton at the Ministry of Justice.² Monge held the post, which carried responsibility for the Navy, Merchant Marine, and Colonies, from 12 August 1792 until 10 April 1793. Only one of his original colleagues, LeBrun at Foreign Affairs, was still in office when he resigned. In effect, though not by intent, Monge thus became the center of a connection that replaced the former leadership of the Academy of Science in providing technical expertise to government.

The choice of Monge for the Navy was reasonable enough. Though a stranger to politics, he was a thorough Jacobin in sentiment, and he knew the service. In becoming Minister of the Navy, he followed in the steps of the first of his great patrons, the maréchal de Castries, who had held that post in the 1780s. De Castries had singled him out for special favor in 1774, while Monge was an instructor at the Royal Engineering School in Mézières, and brought him to Paris in 1783, first as examiner of naval cadets, then as supervisor of technical training for the Navy. In that capacity, Monge spent six months of every year visiting naval schools and bases around the country. So it was that, decided though his political opinions were, he was absent from Paris over half the time in 1789, 1790, and 1791.

Monge never set out to assemble an entourage. There did, nevertheless, form around him what may be better called a connection, in the sense the word then had in English polity. It there connoted a luminary and his associates in a ramification extending beyond politics into other sectors of life in society. In current parlance the term would be network. Though not a political grouping, the connection reached into politics through the Jacobin Society, where Monge himself was inscribed, in the persons notably of Pache, of Hassenfratz, of Audouin, of Vandermonde. Though not primarily scientific, it reached back ten years or more into technology in the collaborations of Monge with Berthollet, with Vandermonde, with Hassenfratz, with Meusnier. Though not based in the military, it was involved in disputes over tactics and strategy in the 1780s in the persons of Monge’s pupils in the Corps of Engineers, Carnot and Meusnier. Not, finally, an outgrowth of freemasonry, the connection partook of the enigma of the duc d’Orléans’ entourage in the instances of Berthollet and Choderlos de Laclos. Laclos and two other notables, Guyton de Morveau and Fourcroy, are to be seen not as participants of long standing but rather as fellow travelers amid the political and military crises of 1793–94. Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, finally, were at the center of affairs only after election to the Committee of Public Safety in August 1793. They then manifested the political mastery signally lacking in Monge, mathematician that he was and their onetime teacher.

In the nexus of opportunity and urgency created by war and mobilization, the Monge connection provided the agency through which the technical services made their transition from the practices of the Old Regime to institutionalization under the Directory. Expertise passed, to be more precise, from Lavoisier and the Régie des Poudres through the revolutionary fabrication of arms and munitions to the formation of the École Polytechnique and a science with a positivist imprint bent upon it by involvement in events. It will, therefore, be well to examine these persons and developments a little closely.

How did Monge appear in the eyes of his contemporaries? Testimony varies. On the part of those who knew him only in society and in affairs, all was scorn for the gaucherie of his manners and the nullity of his administration. To Madame Roland, he seemed a barbarian:

Simple soul, dull-witted and awkward (pasquin), Monge was once a stone-cutter at Mézières, where the abbé Bossut detected some aptitude and introduced him to mathematics. . . . In the habit of calculating with inalterable elements, Monge understood nothing about men or administrative affairs; Ponderous and unpleasing, whenever he tried to be agreeable he always reminded me of those bears that the city of Berne keeps in its moat, where they amuse passersby with gentle gestures suited to their size and shape.”³

His biographers, his students, those who knew Monge technically, have retorted on the severity of this judgment.

The Éloges of Arago are to be treated with caution in matters of fact. He knew Monge well, however, and had been one of the students who loved and admired him and resonated to the touch of a teacher who, endowed with special skills, imparted techniques he himself had found and taught them to his students as a set of discoveries both determinate and applicable. He would stand before them, a hero of their own world, indeed a maker of it, his achievements a rebuke to what they too lacked—grace, deportment, ease, in a word a liberal education and the idiom for giving pleasure in the drawing room. Ever a teacher, Monge in return prized that which he thought to have instilled in younger men—talent, skill, address, ambition. He was one of those teachers who side with the rising generation against their own, and who reassure the new world by joining in subversion of the manners of the old. Enveloped in his concern for youth, immaturity merged into vigor, rebellion into pride, vulgarity into a concern for humanity. Monge combined in his temperament, observed Arago, two qualities that might seem mutually exclusive: bravado and kindliness, la fougue et la dou-ceur. ⁴

No less problematic were his two most important friendships, with Bonaparte and with Pache. “Monge loved me as one loves a mistress,” Napoleon is reported to have said in St. Helena.⁵ Of that, more later. Incommensurably less famous, Jean-Nicolas Pache was no less political a personage, and also, even like Bonaparte (and Monge himself ), of modest background. With respect to Pache, testimony is largely negative. The Tartuffe of revolutionary politics, Madame Roland called him, insinuating himself into her husband’s favor and then manipulating within the Council of Ministers the puppet figure cut by Monge.⁶

Speaking little and writing less, Pache is known mainly through the enemies he made.⁷ He was Minister of War from 18 October 1792 until 2 February 1793. Forced out of office by the Gironde on the eve of its decline, he was elected Mayor of Paris with the support of Marat and served until March 1794, when his fellow Hébertists were arrested. In earlier life his qualities had recommended him to notable people. His father, a Swiss, was concierge in the Hôtel de Castries in Paris. Impressed by the young man’s intelligence and quiet demeanor, de Castries appointed him tutor to his son and heir, the comte de Charlus. Fellow protégés of de Castries, Monge and Pache became close friends in the 1770s, often vacationing together with their families in their patron’s country estate. When his son outgrew the need for a tutor, de Castries brought Pache into the Naval Ministry, where he rose to become first secretary. It was at his suggestion that de Castries appointed Monge naval examiner in 1783. In 1788 Necker named him to be Controller in the Ministry of the Royal Household, but Pache resigned in short order. In a later self-justification, he affected to have found himself so revolted by the spectacle of royal profligacy, prejudice, and indifference that he retired—with a pension—to Zug in the pastoral heart of his ancestral Switzerland. Liberty and equality were there his unique passion, to be satisfied only by the establishment of democracy in France. On receiving news of the fall of the Bastille, he wrote Monge asking his opinion of the significance of the event. Monge’s answer led him to gather up his daughters and effects and take the stage coach to Paris.

On arrival he ostentatiously renounced his pension and took lodgings in the rue de Tournon, five minutes from Monge’s address, rue des Petits Augustins, now rue Bonaparte. Resuming his old associations, he also entered into new ones, mostly political. Accounts differ about whether he or Meusnier was the founder of the radical Société populaire du Luxembourg in January 1792, but it seems likely that it was Pache, who often presided. Joining at the outset were others of Monge’s circle, Hassenfratz, Vandermnde, Audouin, and Vincent, all inscribed at the Jacobins.⁸ It was not through Monge, however, that Pache was reintroduced to ministerial circles.

Among the new friends drawn by the unassuming simplicity of his tastes and presence was one Gibert, a musical amateur known to Madame Roland from her youth. Gibert introduced his new friend to her salon in January 1792. Regular in attendance, Pache listened intelligently, talked little and to the point, and made the impression of a man dedicating to citizenship all the selflessness he could spare from the care of his children.

Roland first became Minister of the Interior in the bellicose Girondist government named by Louis XVI in March 1792. The officials and clerks who staffed its bureaus were at best lukewarm to the Revolution, and many were covertly hostile. They alone knew the workings of the machinery, however. He would have to use them as tools likely to turn in the hand until they could be replaced by trustier instruments. In these circumstances Roland had need of a confidant, a man Friday, who could be his eyes and ears.

The qualities of discretion thus required, he saw at once, were precisely those of Pache, who, moreover, had experienced the workings of a great department of state in the ministry of the Navy. The behavior of clerks, the tissue of influence, the texture of intrigue, the web of procedures—all would be familiar to him. Pache welcomed the assignment on the purist condition that he serve without pay. Madame Roland describes how, at once wise man and informer, he would bring a lunch of dry bread in his pocket and, given the freedom of Roland’s office, spend his days mediating between the Minister and his counter-revolutionary bureaucrats.⁹ War began in April 1792. On 10 May Colonel Joseph Servan, an intimate of the Rolands, took the War Ministry. With no administrative experience, and plagued by problems of fractious personnel in an even more sensitive department, he begged Roland for Pache’s services. His own staff brought to heel, Roland agreed.

Dismissal of the Girondist ministers on 12 June 1792 restored Pache to private life and political activity in the section of the Luxembourg. No detailed record survives, but clearly he was among the manipulators, as was Roland, who laid the groundwork for the insurrection of 10 August. Preparations for overthrowing the monarchy were complete at the end of the previous day. Late that evening some eighty-odd representatives of twenty-eight of the forty sections convened in the Hôtel de Ville, brushed aside the legally constituted Council chaired by the mathematician, Cousin, and declared themselves the Revolutionary Commune. The next morning they passed the torch to a larger assembly, over four hundred strong, which designated itself the Commune of 10 August and usurped de facto national sover-eignty pending election of the Convention. Names famous in the Revolution appear in both lists. What is surprising, however, is that only four members of the Revolutionary Commune continued in the Commune of 10 August. Still more surprising: three of those four, Pache, Audouin, and Laclos, figure in the Monge connection, while the fourth, Tallien, had served rather as secretary-general of his section than as a representative. Two others, Hassenfratz and Vincent, sat in the Commune of 10 August.¹⁰

On resuming office in the Provisional Council of Ministers, Roland offered Pache his old job in the Interior Department. Deep in the politics of the Commune, Pache declined what may have appeared a conflict of interest. He was still in Roland’s confidence a month later, however. In late September Roland thought briefly of resigning as Minister of the Interior in order to accept election to the Convention. Had he followed Danton’s example and done so, he would have recommended that Pache be the one to succeed him. The draft of a letter to that effect is among his papers.¹¹ Pache, meanwhile, had drawn back into close association with Monge, who was floundering in the Ministry of the Navy, and who had even then appointed his old friend to be Civil Commissioner in the port of Toulon.

Amid the general disarray, a rebellion in that important naval base was the most immediate problem confronting Monge as Minister. Galley slaves there, even like black slaves in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), considered that they too had a right to freedom. Breaking free of their chains, they rioted and hanged their oppressors, the administrators of the port, while the municipal authorities temporized. To the dismay of naval commanders on the scene, Pache’s resolution of the crisis consisted largely in concessions to the demands of the rebels, both sailors and civilians. While in Toulon Pache received word from the Rolands that Servan had resigned the War Office and that he was to be nominated to the Convention to fill the vacancy. Elected in absentia, Pache returned to Paris to take his place in the Council of Ministers beside Monge, who in the interim had doubled as acting Minister of War.

Thus did Monge preside over the Naval Ministry and Pache over the War Ministry throughout the triumphant campaigns led by Dumouriez in Belgium and by Custine in the Rhineland during the autumn of 1792. Their maladministration may not be held responsible either for those victories or their reversal following the formation of the First Coalition in February 1793. Ministers exercised slight influence over policy in general, which the Convention controlled, though never so polemically. Their part was little greater in discussions of strategy, which was distrustfully negotiated between the dominant faction in that body, its deputies on mission to the armies, and the commanding generals. At most the irritation that Pache provoked was a factor in driving Dumouriez to desertion.

In addition to near anarchy in Toulon, the problems facing the naval administration would have been daunting to any Minister at the time when Monge took office. Ships of the line, frigates, and brigs were in a bad state of repair. Indiscipline was rife. When discontent reached mutiny, as sporadically it did, Monge blamed the officers and sympathized with the crews. His directives advised commanders to reason with their sailors. Here, for example, are orders for Captain Landais of the Patriot, whose sailors had rebelled at Brest:

I urge Captain Landais to treat his crew with the consideration that the law calls for among free men, and I also urge the brave men who are honored to call themselves republican Frenchmen to reflect that ships of the State draw their strength only from subordination and mutual confidence. Tell my dear fellow citizens that, for their own sake and that of the Republic, they should conduct themselves well in the fu-ture. Otherwise I shall be forced to report them to the Convention.¹²

When not indulgent, his directives were often inconsistent. For example, he agreed to the tactic of sinking a derelict ship at the entrance to the harbor of Ostend in Belgium in order to block access. Out of consideration for the inhabitants, he ordered that machinery be installed for raising the hulk when need be. On objections from the local commander, he further stipulated that the device be disabled lest the enemy should use it. Successive decrees of the National Assembly had first emancipated the blacks in Saint-Domingue and then provoked revolt by returning them to slavery. Organizing an expeditionary force to restore order in this, the most profitable colony in the world, Monge detached an entire regiment from Dumouriez’s army, but allowed the crew of a transport in Bordeaux to disembark because they were reluctant to sail on that mission. A second expedition intended to pacify Corsica, occupy Sardinia, and dominate the coast of Naples bogged down in cross-purposes.

On the political side, Monge took little part in the meetings of the Council of Ministers. In company with all his colleagues except Roland, who resigned on 23 January 1793, Monge countersigned the administrative measures ordered by the Convention for the arrest, trial, and execution of Louis XVI. When a former naval officer, one Kersaint, quit the Convention over that action, Monge honorably restored him to the rank of vice-admiral and asked the Convention to exempt him from the law excluding a retired deputy from public office for six years. The request provoked an uproar, at which Monge retreated, saying he had not and would not appoint Kersaint to any command. In short, Monge was a passive, or at best a reactive, administrator.

Not so Pache, a quietist in person who proved to be an activist in office. In the first instance, his activity bore less on military operations than on the sector he understood, the military bureaucracy. As soon as he was installed, he set himself to ensure that his idea of the Revolution should be served in the persons of officers in the field and the clerical staff of the War Office. Only over the clerks, however, did he wield effective authority. Practiced by experience in three ministries, he systematically replaced seasoned officials, most of them counter-revolutionary in reputation, with men suited to the political temper of the time. A census exists of the personnel of the ministry under Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, the second of Pache’s successors, who held office from 4 April 1793 until the substitution of commissions for Ministers in April 1794. His workforce numbered approximately 450 clerks staffing some forty-seven bureaus, each with a specific province: pay, officer personnel, recruitment, commissariat, troop movements, uniforms, smallarms pro-curement, ordnance, and so on. These offices were in turn grouped into six major divisions coordinated by a secretary-general, whose task it was to carry into effect the Minister’s wishes. Of those functionaries, Pache had appointed the majority during the autumn of 1792.¹³

Elimination of counter-revolutionary personnel—purification in the parlance of the time—was thus Pache’s signal contribution to prosecution of the war. For a linkage between its political and more properly military and technical aspects, he drew upon others of the Monge connection whom he had come to know in the Patriotic Society of the Luxembourg. Thus Meusnier—though the evidence here is largely circumstantial—served as military and strategic counselor to a Minister quite without experience of the profession of arms. On the technological side, Pache relied on Jean-Henri Hassenfratz, whom Servan had named to oversee the Division of Materiel. Politically the most excitable of minor scientists, Hassenfratz had his moment in the limelight on 1 June 1793 when, having led the sans-culottes from Montmartre in the insurrection of 31 May, he headed the deputation that called on the Convention to proscribe the twenty-four leading Girondist deputies.¹⁴ Further, to confine attention to the inner circle, Pache confided the Quartermaster Office—Bureau d’Habillement—to an older member of the Academy of Science, the mathematician Alexandre Vandermonde. Monge’s senior in years and academic standing, Vander-monde here cut the figure of an adjunct. “La femme de Monge,” Madame Roland dubbed him, in a context that implied a relation both of dependence and henpecking.¹⁵ “Bureau de Déshabillement,” his office was called in the field, for the clothing failed to reach the troops.

Into the post of Secretary-General, the nerve center of the Ministry, Pache brought Meusnier’s most intimate friend, Xavier Audouin. Born in Limoges in 1766, Audouin was a parish priest in Limoges before the Revolution. He came to Paris early on, secured a living as vicar of the parish of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, and by February 1791 had taken a leading place among Jacobins of advanced temper. Like others of the far left, his preferred milieu was the Paris sections. He represented Fontaine de Grenelle in the Committee of the Sections that began sitting informally alongside the legally constituted Commune on 23 July 1792. With Tallien and Collot d’Herbois, the actor who later sat on the Committee of Public Safety, Audouin served on the commission that drafted a manifesto insisting on deposition of the King, arrest of Lafayette, and creation of a fraternal continuum between the people of Paris and the armies in the field. The latter theme Pache thought to institutionalize by appointing Audouin to make over the civilian staff in the Ministry of War. On 15 January 1793, he married Marie-Sylvie Pache, the daughter to whom her father had ever been the very model of a Rousseauist parent. Three witnesses certified the vows: Meusnier, Jacques-René Hébert, editor of the scurrilous and extremist Père Duchesne, and Antoine-Joseph Santerre, commander of the National Guard since 10 August 1792. Less than a week later, the latter, known as the Père du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, ceremoniously conducted Louis XVI to the scaffold. Monge could have watched the execution from his windows in the Ministry of the Navy.

For Audouin’s assistant as Associate Director of the Bureau of Personnel, soon to be promoted Chief of a new Bureau of Replacement, Pache found a yet more exalted revolutionary, François-Nicolas Vincent.¹⁶ Son of the concierge in a Paris prison, he was twenty-five years old when appointed to the bureau of personnel. A tireless agitator, he was a youthful mover and shaker in the Cordeliers Club, which elected him recording secretary (secrétaire-greffier). Attributed to him are bloodthirsty sayings about strangling priests, wiping out aristocrats, and devouring the flesh of his enemies, instances of the atavistic strain of savagery that threaded through the tissue of revolutionary attitudes. As Mayor of Paris following his removal from the War Office, Pache kept closely in touch with his protégés there and with Bouchotte, named to be Minister after the shock of Dumouriez’s desertion on 4 April 1793. Having promoted Audouin to the subministerial level of commissaire-ordonnateur, Bouchotte acted on Pache’s further recommendation of Vincent to be Secretary-General. Vincent concentrated his efforts on completely eliminating the “antique, powdered bureaucracy” (his words) and replacing it with solid, active, honest, upright patriots. He succeeded so well that the Ministry had become a hornet’s nest of Hébertists. By March 1794 Robespierre came to consider these left-deviationists to be not merely a nuisance, but a danger to the governance of the Committee of Public Safety. Even while praising Vincent’s patriotism and probity, Bouchotte dismissed him on 13 March 1794 for not having exhibited “requisite wisdom” in his conduct.¹⁷ On that same day he was among the leading Hébertists whom Saint-Just denounced before the Convention. He and Hébert went to the scaffold in company with sixteen kindred spirits on 24 March.

With respect to Pache, Robespierre merely secured his removal from the mayoralty, while Audouin and Bouchotte left the Ministry on its conversion into a commission in April 1794. In 1795 all three were accused of complicity with the tyranny of the Terror and imprisoned for some months. It is owing to Audouin that there survives but a fragmentary record of their service in the Ministry of War. Like many another of like persuasion, like Monge notably, Audouin eventually found in Bonaparte the leader he would follow in the more mature interest of the Revolution, and also in his own. Under the Empire he became historiographer of the Ministry of War. His Histoire générale de l’administration de la guerre appeared in four volumes in 1811. During his responsibility for the archives, documents concerning the 1792–93 democratization of the ministry disappeared.¹⁸

Let it be recorded of Pache in passing that he did not follow his son-in-law and Monge in their new loyalty. Released from prison in November 1795, he retired to his manor of Thin-le-Moûtier in the Ardennes, where he busied himself with the local agricultural society, and kept a silence broken only by three polemical brochures. Years later, on 6 August 1803, Bonaparte spent a night in passing at Mézières. Monge was in the retinue and was sent round with a letter to his old friend there where they had met under the patronage of the maréchal de Castries. Now his mission was to affect the former mayor of Paris and Minister of War to the Bonapartist scheme of things. They talked into the night. Monge did not succeed. They never met again.¹⁹

During the four months when Pache served as Minister, he relied for professional military advice mainly on the most gifted of Monge’s onetime pupils, Jean-Baptiste Meusnier de la Place. The configuration of Meusnier’s career may be thought to prefigure the shift from ordering to acting on things that characterizes the transition between the two generations of science that concern us. Meusnier graduated from the Royal Engineering School at Mézières in 1775. Six weeks later, he stood before the Academy of Science and read a paper, a classic exercise in differential geometry, in which he derived a theorem on the curvature of oblique surfaces still known by his name.

His was an adventurous and not merely a mathematical intelligence. The problems Meusnier found attractive were those of rational technology: pyrolitic decomposition of water, on which he collaborated with Lavoisier, Laplace, and Monge; schemes for a plant in which desalination of sea water would be powered by the energy of waves; ordering the Academy’s collection of machines, of which Vandermonde was curator, and which was eventually incorporated in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Meusnier’s most dramatic flight of technical fancy was a work of aeronautical engineering avant la lettre. Named to the Academy’s 1783 commission to report on the Montgolfier invention of balloons, Meusnier put in hand an analysis of the problems of stability and locomotion in lighter-than-air craft. He incorporated his findings in detailed specifications for construction and navigation of two hypothetical dirigibles. The blimpsize model with a crew of six would have been 130 feet long. Its companion, an intercontinental airship of twice that length, would in principle carry thirty people and provisions permitting a flight of sixty days.²⁰

Meusnier undertook these investigations during the lengthy leaves of absence—six months annually and a full year for the aeronautical project—that the Royal Engineering Corps granted him at the behest of the Academy of Science. He was elected to be Vandermonde’s correspondent in 1776, at the age of twenty-two, and to membership in the section of geometry in 1784. Starting in 1779 he spent his time on duty in Cherbourg. Renovation, enlargement, and fortification of the port was one of the most considerable engineering feats of the reign of Louis XVI. The young Meusnier there made an important enemy. In company with colleagues in the Corps of Engineers and others from the Ponts et Chaussées, he quickly came to question the design of major constructions and the propriety of certain contracts approved by the commandant. The commandant in the ten years preceding the Revolution was none other than Dumouriez. Though a very junior officer, Meusnier took the lead in carrying these misgivings to higher authority. Both Carnot and Laclos, the one a military engineer, the other an artillerist, and at odds with each other, also came to distrust Dumouriez’s probity during brief tours of duty in Cherbourg.

Meusnier’s ambitions reached higher than the Corps of Engineers, where the ceiling rank for a commoner was normally a captaincy. Still only a lieutenant in 1786, he applied for transfer to the general staff corps, on the grounds that the goal of his career was to bring the exact sciences to bear upon the arts of war. Rather than lose him, the Corps of Engineers raised him to captain in 1786. On 19 July 1788 he was promoted to maréchal-général des logis, equivalent to a majority, while remaining attached to the Corps of Engineers.²¹ In the Revolution Meusnier moved rapidly along a diagonal, upward in rank and to the left politically. He reached lieutenant-colonel on 11 July 1789 and was named adjutant general with no advance in grade on 1 April 1791. On 5 February 1792 he received his colonelcy in the 14th Infantry regiment. As for his political dimension, there are scattered references to Meusnier rather than Pache as founder of the Society of the Luxembourg. It matters little: they knew each other through mutual intimacy with Monge and were drawn closer by mutual suspicion of Dumouriez.

In 1792 Meusnier was again called on to consult with colleagues of the Academy of Science, this time on the technical problem of engraving and printing counterfeit-proof assignats. He worked thereon in close association once again with Lavoisier, and now also with Berthollet, currently serving as an administrator in the Mint. Their collaboration continued into the early weeks of the war, in consequence of which interest revived in the possibility of concocting a propellent of unprecedented power through the substitution of potassium chlorate for saltpeter (potassium nitrate) in the fabrication of gunpowder—of that, more in the next section. Berthollet had run no further tests of that prospect after the fatal explosion in the arsenal of Essonne in 1788.22 In late May or early June Meusnier received orders to report to the Army of the Midi. He requested a two-week delay in order to complete the work on assignats, after which—so he petitioned the Minister of War—he would prefer assignment to the Army of the Rhine, “on the most exposed frontier.”²³ The request did not go down well. On 1 July 1792 Meusnier informed the Minister of Public Contributions that he could not continue the work on assignats. Being under orders, he must get horses and depart.

It appears almost, but not quite, certain that it was Monge who suggested to Servan that Meusnier be recalled to Paris in August 1792 to serve along with Choderlos de Laclos on the general staff. However that may be, the republican regime brought Meusnier rapid advancement. He was promoted to the rank of general officer, Maréchal de Camp, or Brigadier, on 7 September 1792, to hold rank (according to a revision of 5 October) from 1 September. With respect to strategy, his was the professional military mind behind Pache as Minister, and his the advocacy of massing on the Rhine instead of behind Dumouriez in the Low Countries.

A choice had to be made. During Pache’s first month in office, the military situation was as follows. Dumouriez was in command of the Army of the North. Having defeated the Prussian forces at Valmy on 20 September and the Austrians at Jemappes on 6 November, he readily occupied the whole of Belgium. The Army of the North was thus poised for just such an invasion of Holland as succeeded a year later following the second conquest of Belgium. From the Low Countries, so Dumouriez’s political enemies feared, and with reason, he would be in place to launch a proconsular coup d’état, undo the Republic, and place the duc d’Orléans on a restored throne.²⁴

Commanding the Army of the Rhine was Custine—“le général Moustache” the troops called him, responding to the patriotic familiarity of his way with soldiers. The Prussian defeat at Valmy had opened the Rhineland to him. A rapid offensive in September and October won control of Spire, Worms, and Mainz. It remained to secure the lower Rhine from Coblenz downstream. This mission, so Custine urged, should be assigned to the armies of the Moselle and the Vosges in the center and to Dumouriez in the north. The latter was to be instructed to move east out of Belgium in order to take Cologne and Bonn. With his left flank secure, Custine would be free to cross the Rhine and advance through Germany bringing the Revolution to its conglomerate of palatinates, duchies, bishoprics, and city-states. Their people would rally to the Republic at the mere sight of the tricolor. Such was the strategy that Meusnier supported in the councils of the Ministry of War.²⁵

Unwilling to be downgraded to a supporting mission, much less to be diverted from his designs on Holland, Dumouriez complied only to the extent of moving on Aix-la-Chappelle. A left turn would still take him into the Netherlands, but he was in no position to cover the Army of the Rhine. Impetuous, not to say feckless, Custine had crossed the Rhine anyway, pushed upstream along the Main, entered Frankfurt on 21 October 1792, and sent a lateral column as far as Marburg.

He had overreached. French exactions alienated the bourgeoisie through-out the Palatinate. The puppet republican regimes Custine set up remained dead letters. The Prussians regrouped, allied now with Hessian forces. Early in December they recaptured Frankfort, with the active assistance of its citizens. A wedge of Prussian-controlled territory now separated the Army of the Rhine from the Army of the North (just as Dumouriez had foreseen would happen), and Custine declared Mainz to be in a state of siege. Such was its precarious situation on 2 February 1793 when the Girondists, whose preferred general was Dumouriez, voted Pache out of office in the last political victory they were to win in the Convention.²⁶

Logistical rather than strategic failures were, however, the immediate reason for Pache’s dismissal from the War Office. The French military administration had never attempted to run its own supply system, a task beyond the capacity of the eighteenth-century bureaucracy, anymore than it had thought to fabricate its own munitions. Standard procedure was to contract out the provision of transport, uniforms, food, and fodder to private entrepreneurs. Thus when Pache took office, he found that under Servan contracts had been let to a company headed by one d’Espagnac, a former cleric of doubtful honesty, who undertook to provide baggage trains for Dumouriez’s Army of the North. Another supplier, one Doumerc, had agreed to furnish bread and fodder. A third outfit handled the purchase and distribution of meat for the soldiers’ mess. Two civilian commissaries-in-ordinary on Dumouriez’s staff, Malus and Petitjean, saw to the drawing and execution of these and less important contracts. Similar arrangements obtained for all the armies of the Republic.

The War Ministry for its part was to see to the distribution of munitions, shelter, uniforms, and above all money—specie, not assignats—for the sub-sistence and payment of the troops. Of these necessities Dumouriez had received nothing in Belgium since his victory at Jemappes. Without funds, he was reduced to borrowing 300,000 francs from d’Espagnac, and on arrival in Brussels to arranging forced loans from the Belgian clergy through the intermediary of Malus and Petitjean. Necessities and expedients such as these were, obviously, an invitation to speculation and profiteering in the business of supply, where Pache, Hassenfratz, and Vandermonde, incorruptible guardians of the public interest, felt competent to gather the reins into their own clean hands. So they set out to do. Malus had entered into a contract on 16 October with a supplier in Paris and another in Douai for 20,000 pounds of flour. Hassenfratz, chief of the bureau of matériel, disallowed the price. In the extremity of military emergency, Dumouriez went over the head of “Hassain Frats” (in his exasperated spelling) and forced Pache to reinstate the contract, only to find a few weeks later that Pache himself refused to ratify a further contract let by Malus on 8 November in Brussels.²⁷

Pache had by then conceived a plan characteristic of high-minded officialdom. He would consolidate all purchasing for the ministries of War, Navy, and Interior in a single office, a Directoire des Achats. Under his vigilant eye it would serve the needs of land, sea, and municipal forces. Thus would speculation be scotched. The new agency would be administered by a triumvirate appointed by the three ministers. Roland named Cousin, the mathematician, but withdrew his cooperation when the drift of Pache’s politics became clear. Monge guided himself on Pache, and they named respectively a Genevan merchant, Bidermann, and a Strasbourg fiMarx Berr. Bidermann and Berr in turn arranged with the brothers Théodore and Baruch Cerfberr to make purchases in the Rhineland and with one Mosselman to do the same in Belgium. A certain Simon Pick was to transmit orders to the latter from Dumouriez, who, apropos of the visit of a third Cerfberr brother, Lippman, refused roundly to have anything to do with this “échappé d’Israël.”²⁸ The whole imbroglio, indeed, is redolent of the conflict that in wartime situations always simmers between the rear and the front lines. Soldiers and their commanders in the field inevitably transvalue civilian values and improvise imperiously amid the inevitable shortages that they lay scornfully at the office doors of the bureaucrats who would smother them in paperwork and regulations.

At first the struggle went in Pache’s favor. Dumouriez wrote an angry letter demanding that he himself control the provisioning of his army. Blandly Pache communicated it to the Convention. Pierre-Joseph Cambon, controller of finance, supported Pache and denounced the malversations of Malus, Petitjean, and d’Espagnac. Ever ready to believe ill of procedures held over from the old regime, the Convention ordered that they be brought before its bar to give an account of themselves. Pache seized the opportunity to replace Malus with Charles-Philippe Ronsin, one of his Hébertist appointees, a friend of Vincent, who had left the army for a career as a poet and dramatist of trivial distinction. The tide turned on 1 December with the appearance before the Convention of Malus, Petitjean, and d’Espagnac, who in the event gave a very good account of themselves. Following repudiation of the old contracts, they charged, supply did indeed collapse. Troops were without food, shoes, or shelter. Horses were without fodder. Not so, held Pache. He was devoted to the welfare of the Army. He would protect the men from the rigors of winter. He had had his Purchasing Office order 100,000 bags of wheat, 40,000 of oats, 50,000 of hay, 50,000 of straw. He had ordered shoes and wood. He had appropriated assignats.

Dumouriez pressed the attack. He published his correspondence with Pache for all to see how the Minister, willful in his inexperience, had sacrificed the well-being of the army to doctrine and to politics. On 1 January 1793 Dumouriez arrived in Paris on a leave he had obtained with difficulty, since he was the last person Pache wanted in the capital. He had two purposes in mind (neither of which was to succor Louis XVI, whose trial was imminent, though he did think execution “very gauche”).²⁹ First of all, Dumouriez lobbied to secure repeal of the decree of 15 December, which imposed revolution in the French pattern on Belgium. In that he failed, though he proved to be right in foreseeing the disaffection it would cause. Second, he wished to persuade the Convention to dismiss Pache and his minions in the War Ministry. In that he succeeded. The quarrel between General and Minister had become one of the innumerable points at issue between the Mountain and the Gironde. In the matter of Pache and the scandalous nakedness of the Army, the Jacobins had a poor case. Even Pache’s political sympathizers—Danton, Couthon, Thuriot—agreed with the detractors of his administrative competence.³⁰

Not knowing whom to believe, the Convention had sent its own commissioners, Camus and Gossuin, to visit the armies in Belgium. Their report, presented on 21 January, vindicated Dumouriez. Pache, they concluded, had abolished the old method of supply by private enterprise without the administrative capability to replace it. He was at best naive to suppose that the agents of his Purchasing Office, seasoned jobbers that they were, would be disinterested. Nor in the prevailing disarray could the contracts let by Malus and Petitjean be simply reinstated. Even under this pressure, Pache, un-shaken in his conviction of the propriety of his intentions, held on to office. He had to be ejected by a vote of the Convention. On 2 February Barère moved adoption of a report of the Committee of General Defense calling for a reorganization of the War Office and a change of ministers. Two weeks later Hébertist strength in the Paris sections carried Pache to the mayoralty.

On 14 February Pache’s successor, General Beurnonville, posted Meusnier, as he had earlier requested, to the Army of the Rhine. A general officer, he might thus seek to reverse in the field the impending failure of the strategy he had advocated in the War Office. Custine at once assigned him to the defense of Mainz, where he was second-in-command under d’Oyré, a competent professional officer. The garrison Meusnier joined was an undisciplined and insubordinate conglomerate consisting of twenty-nine battalions of volunteers, four disorderly regiments of grenadiers, and a leavening of six line battalions and two mounted regiments. For the most part the French troops preserved their peasant skepticism about martial virtues. They were given to self-preservation and aversion to fatigue duty rather than to martial bearing, and were sometimes seen to thumb their noses at their officers. Among the officers, however, were a number destined to become generals in the wars. Two are known to fame: Kléber and Marigny.

D’Oyré held daily councils of war comprised of senior officers and four civilians. Two of them were delegates of the Provisional Council of Ministers. The other two, Reubell and Merlin de Thionville, were Deputies on mission from the Convention and fervent Montagnards. Reubell looked mainly to civil affairs, Merlin to military operations. Small in stature, muscular of frame, active as a monkey in the uniform of a simple cannoneer, Merlin was all over the place rallying the troops. The extent and ambiguity of his authority complicated d’Oyré’s sense of his own command. Merlin and Meusnier, on the other hand, hit it off and were much in each other’s company and confidence.

There are varying estimates, complementary rather than contradictory, of Meusnier’s contribution to the defense of Mainz. The facts are simply put. Mainz is on the left bank of the Rhine, just downstream from its confluence with the Main. D’Oyré placed Meusnier in command of his bridgehead, the town of Kastel on the right bank. The Prussians closed their siege lines around the French positions on 14 April. From Kastel, Meusnier led several forays intended to harass the enemy, to deny him vantage points, or to augment provisions. One such object was the enchanting village of Kostheim. Amusing themselves by torching a few cottages, Meusnier’s soldiers inadvertently burned down the entire village, after which he set sappers to fortifying the ruins. He formed, too, the more audacious project of seizing several islands in the Rhine. Meusnier threw himself, in a word, with passionate enthusiasm into the role of a combat commander. He ordered his men to do nothing he would not do himself and asked of them little less. He was ever mounting barricades disdainful of enemy fire. On 5 May he was promoted major-general. The Prussians grew to recognize his uniform.

Before dawn on 5 June the Prussian artillery loosed a massive cannonade all across the positions stretching from Kostheim through Kastel to the islands, where Meusnier had passed the night. Embarking for his command post in Kastel, he was in midstream when a musketball fractured his knee. The sedentary life of a scientist and engineer can scarcely have conditioned him for the demands that transformation into a combat commmander placed on his constitution. Infection set in, and on 7 June he was ferried across the Rhine on a litter to be tended in the parish house of the Cathedral. There he set a stoical example of silent suffering and died quite publicly on 13 June. The Prussians, used to his appearances on the fortifications, allowed a two-hour cease-fire for his funeral.

Thus did Meusnier, like any patriot, sacrifice his genius to what he saw as the cause of human liberty. It soon became political convention (following Merlin’s lead) to wish in retrospect that Meusnier had commanded, instead of the colorless d’Oyré, who capitulated on 23 June. Mainz might then have held. Custine might have escaped the guillotine (fortunately for himself d’Oyré remained in Prussian hands until December 1794). Thirty years later Gouvion Saint-Cyr in his reflections on the siege imagined a still more portentous might-have-been: Had Meusnier lived, he would have shown how to draw all the advantage that the art of war can derive from exact science. “He equalled Bonaparte in most of the qualities that make a general, and was his superior in some, above all in patriotism.” If only he had survived, the armies of France would have been under the guidance of two geniuses of the same temper.³¹

More recent military judgment has been less enthusiastic. Chuquet in his history of the siege considers Meusnier’s exhibition of daring to have been disruptive of the defense. The appeal of his valor to the troops was not what he calculated it to be. Their true colors were other than the revolutionary, patriotic hues his imagination painted. An engineering officer, he had never before exercised command. “When he foresaw heavy resistance,” commented one of his officers, “he increased the length of his levers. Unfortunately these were men under siege who could not be replaced. He accurately calculated the effect that he should produce on the Prussians, but he could not include in his computations the effects of friction and reaction set up in his own machinery.”³² Chuquet goes further. In his judgment, Meusnier overextended his defense works without authority and against orders. He led unnecessary and costly forays without informing d’Oyré and then demanded support. He put it about that d’Oyré was a lukewarm and irresolute commander. In short, he exploited his political credit and congeniality with Merlin to undermine d’Oyré with a view to supplanting him.

However that may be, what was special in Meusnier’s death was its unification of the scientific and revolutionary legends. Unlike Carnot, he belonged in full professional right to the scientific community. Unlike Monge, he was a man of the world. Unlike Lavoisier, he had the common touch. Certainly no one else so romantically combined in himself political zeal, technical brilliance, and personal heroism. After the surrender, his sword born by an aide-de-camp accompanied his remains in the retreat from Mainz. In the retinue of the Duke of Weimar, Goethe watched the evacuation. As the column passed, he heard the Marseillaise rendered softly in the tempo of defeat. The effect, he recorded, was “gripping, terrible.”³³ In 1799 Meusnier’s ashes made a second journey, from his native Tours to Paris. Covered with laurels and triumphant palms, the urn was presented to the students at the opening session of the École Polytechnique.

After the Convention dismissed Pache from the War Office on 2 February 1793, an orator at the Jacobins attributed his fall to the machinations of an infamous cabal who “also want to take Monge from us.”³⁴ To the dismay of Montagnards and sans-culottes, Monge did resign from the Ministry of the Navy on 14 February. Esteemed on all sides, however, he was prevailed upon to accept reelection and thus remained in office throughout the months of military and naval reverses in the late winter and early spring of 1793. He prudently opposed a set of vast schemes brought before the Council of Ministers for descents on Ireland, or on England itself, or on the Cape of Good Hope, or on India. The Navy was in no condition to undertake anything of the sort. With respect to overseas ventures, Monge confined himself to proposing that the Ile Bourbon in the Arabian Sea be renamed Ile de la Réunion.³⁵ As will appear, Monge during his last weeks in office authorized the first of the top-secret weapons programs to be discussed in the next section.

Amid the general disarray, the Convention demanded from Monge a report on the state of the Navy as if he were guilty of its unpreparedness. Worn out after eight months in office, on 8 April he asked to be replaced. “I offer the Republic all my services,” he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety. “I will be chief clerk in any of my bureaus, if it wishes. But I cannot continue as Minister. I request a replacement.” On 10 April he was released.³⁶ Thus ended in failure, in Meusnier’s case in death, the brief experiment with scientists in positions of direct authority, civil and military. Thereafter, as will appear, the same men and others played the more appropriate part, which has been the role of technicians ever since, that of consultants and experts, responsible for counsel and for development of instruments of power, but not for wielding them.

Guyton-Morveau, as he styled himself in the year II, may be considered the transitional figure, combining in his person technical competence with political standing.³⁷ He had just been elected chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, to which Monge submitted his resignation. That famous committee had been constituted only four days previously, on 6 April. Its first business was to deal with the consequences of Dumouriez’s desertion to the Austrians. Victory in Belgium having turned to defeat at the Battle of Neer-winden on 18 March, the Convention had then decreed that Dumouriez must appear before the bar to give an account of his operations. Instead, as we have seen, he arrested the four commissioners who, in company with Beurnonville, Pache’s immediate successor in the Ministry of War, had served the summons in Brussels, bundled the lot into the carriages that had brought them from Paris, and delivered them into the hands of the Austrians. Dumouriez himself went over to the enemy on 5 April.³⁸

Named in the wake of that shock, the Committee of Public Safety replaced a somewhat shadowy Committee of General Defense, on which Carnot had served at the outset and which Guyton had also chaired from the time of its creation on 3 January 1793. Though not dictatorial during its first three months, the newly formed Committee of Public Safety was vested with the authority of the Convention and exercised executive powers on an ad hoc basis. Danton was the leading figure politically, but his energy and influence were on the wane, and Guyton continued in the chair until 10 July. The second of the secret weapons programs that occupy the next section started at his instigation. Berthollet then resumed a series of experiments, the earliest of which had ended in a fatal detonation in the arsenal of Essonne in 1788. The goal was to produce an explosive far more powerful than anything known by substituting potassium chlorate for potassium nitrate (saltpeter) in the manufacture of gunpowder. A third project for more potent weaponry was the one that ultimately prevailed in the design of ordnance, though not for almost half a century. Its protagonist was Choderlos de Laclos, artillery officer and scandalous litterateur. His was the conviction that it should be feasible to replace castiron cannonballs with explosive shells and to revolutionize the order of battle through multiplication of firepower.

2. WEAPONRY

On 13 October 1792 Monge, beginning his third month as Naval Minister, responded to a memoir submitted by a citizen Mesbridrien, or perhaps Mesbridrian, of whom nothing else is known. Reporting experiments with a type of incendiary artillery used by the Russian Navy, the author developed a political argument for adopting such weapons. Monge rejected the proposal out of hand: “I think that the French Republic will never consent that its fleets should employ means of destruction of that nature, infernal machines, arms in short suited only to tyrants, and that it will always be repugnant to a free and generous people to make [use] of such means to defeat its enemies.”³⁹

Monge could afford to take the high moral ground in the autumn of 1792. French armies were advancing everywhere. Fortunes of war changed for the worse over the winter. On 22 February 1793, shortly after resigning and then resuming office, he received an anonymous letter. When de Castries had been Minister, so it informed him, an artillery officer called Bellegarde had invented incendiary cannonballs made of a composition inextinguishable even under water. Tests had confirmed their efficacy, but illjudged scruples had prevented their being developed to destroy an enemy who would not have spared us. “Today, now that we need to combine all our means, should not that one be employed?”⁴⁰

This time Monge reacted immediately and consulted the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Lebrun, whose department was responsible for intelligence. The answer confirmed that the marquis de Bellegarde was indeed known to be in England, where tests of his ammunition had succeeded at Portsmouth Navy Yard earlier in the month, and that his incendiary cannonballs were in production at Portsmouth, and also in Prussia. Monge had further learned, so he wrote in reply to Lebrun, that the officer who had fabricated the incendiaries under Bellegarde’s direction was even then in Paris. He would confer with him forthwith. Compunction was no longer an affordable luxury. “I beg you, therefore, to be persuaded that I shall not hesitate, in the present circumstances, to employ all means proposed that could give us any advantage in order to force our enemies to recognize our independence.”⁴¹

The officer in question, Captain Francois Fabre, was currently assigned to the artillery center at La Fère, some 100 kilometers north of Paris. Reading not very far between the lines makes it clear that Monge was manipulated into making this decision by underlings among the permanent staff of the Bureau of Artillery, headed by one Tréhoüart. Fabre had clearly been in touch with them. In all probability he was himself the author of the anonymous letter of 22 February, quite possibly written on their advice. Evidently Tréhoüart already knew, as Monge at first did not, that Fabre had secretly fabricated a number of his incendiary cannonballs at Metz in 1786 by order of the Minister of War. He and his clerks, not Monge himself, were the ones who actually conferred with Fabre. Normally the formal text of directives in Monge’s official correspondence was preceded by drafts composed by a member of the staff. The following instance, by Tréhoüart, was dated 1 March:

The definite news, transmitted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, about the use the English and Prussians intend to make of the incendiary cannonballs known under the name of Bellegarde, should decide the Minister to adopt these means of destruction. His humanity, his civic spirit, will make it his duty to put his brothers in a position to repel with weapons of equal power attacks that the satellites of despotism dare attempt against the defenders of Republican Liberty.⁴²

What could Monge do but approve? His signature is scrawled at the bottom of this minute, which went on to list the items Fabre would under-take to deliver on condition that he be provided with funds and priorities for workers and materials. The initial order called for 5,000 rounds of various calibers—1,800 for 36-pound cannon, 900 of 24 caliber, 1,800 of 18 caliber, and 500 of 12 caliber. Meanwhile the Ministry of War learned of the project, and ordered another 3,700 rounds to arm its coastal gunships. This ammunition was intended for naval warfare. Impacting above decks, the shell on bursting would incinerate the rigging of enemy vessels in a flash. Lodged in the hull, it would set fire to the entire ship.⁴³

Monge’s orders in hand, Fabre returned to La Fère and went to work. From further exchanges with Tréhoüart throughout the month of March, and other papers in the artillery archives, it appears that matters were more complicated than Fabre had indicated to the staff of the Ministry. In one respect, they were more advanced. His directions on how gun crews were to serve the weapons include instructions for howitzer shells and heavy mortar bombs as well as the rounds for naval cannon that he had led Monge to authorize. Fabre meant to use a portion of the funds he had been granted to rearm this ammunition, which had been fabricated in the 1780s and stored in a powder magazine at Versailles. The results of field tests conducted at Le Havre and Brest had shown, in the words of the Procès-Verbal,

that no ship-rigging could resist the action of these cannonballs, which moreover could be employed in land warfare to burn rations, fodder, clothing, faggots, barricades, and villages where the enemy might be dug in.

This ammunition is easy to fabricate, inexpensive, easy to store, and it gains in consistency and tensile strength as it ages.⁴⁴

In preparing the new ammunition, however, Fabre ran into bottlenecks. Subcontractors failed to deliver molds for shaping the charge and shell casings to contain it. By the end of March he had been able to produce only 216 rounds for 24-pounder cannon, half of which Monge ordered sent to Rochefort and half to Cherbourg. The crates were not ready when news came of Dumouriez’s defection. La Fère is only 65 kilometers south of the border, and Monge took alarm lest incendiaries fall into enemy hands. Un-willing to bear further responsibility alone, he informed the Council of Ministers about the whole project. His report, written in his own hand, left to them the decision whether to hold up further fabrication, to destroy Fabre’s installations at La Fère, and to bring the tools, raw materials, and Fabre himself to Paris. He might continue the work in a secure location if the Council so directed. This on 6 April, four days before Monge resigned.⁴⁵

The Council did so order. As virtually his last act in office, Monge dispatched Hassenfratz to La Fère. In a postscript to one report, Hassenfratz expresses patriotic dismay at the stream of malingering deserters he encountered crowding the highway.⁴⁶ The orders he bore were unwelcome to the recipient. His objections overridden, Fabre had to stop work, demolish his shop, pack his tools and material, crate the finished rounds, and persuade his unwilling crew to leave their families and depart for Paris, all this in less than a week’s time. On the road by 15 April, the convoy bumping toward the capital consisted of seven wagons loaded with 70 crates containing 897 incendiary bombs, shells, and cannonballs; 2,400 pounds of shell casings; 20 molds of different sizes; 4 big presses; and several barrels full of the incendiary substance.⁴⁷

Where were they to go? For no preparations had been made to receive them. Hassenfratz had suggested the Arsenal of Paris, but Fabre refused to work there, and insisted on some location near the Naval Ministry. Preceding him to Paris, Hassenfratz ran about the streets, turning first to Pache, now the mayor of Paris, who referred him to the Administrators of Public Works, none of whom were in their office. Rummaging in the unattended files, he and a couple of clerks found that a basement under the Palais Bourbon appeared to be empty. Only as the convoy reached the city did Hassenfratz manage to find the officials who could authorize Fabre to unload his bombs, shells, and inflammable composition and store them under-neath the present-day Chamber of Deputies while the Director of the Department of Paris canvassed the register of nationalized properties. All the local authorities were told was that a device important for the Navy had to be constructed in an isolated locale inaccessible to throngs of the curious.

Among the possibilities, Fabre’s choice for installing his weapons laboratory fell on a town-house, formerly the property of a nobleman called Malleu, at the junction of the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the Rue Basse du Rampart, now the Boulevard des Capucines. So far, so good. Nevertheless, the warning by the new Naval Minister, Dalbarade, that the slightest delay risked “incalculable consequences” failed to abbreviate the ritual of the inventory incumbent, war or no war, revolution or no revolution, whenever property changes hands in France.⁴⁸ Not until 30 May were Fabre’s supplies moved from the Palais Bourbon and his machinery installed in a new work-shop thrown together in the inner courtyard where he might resume work on his incendiaries.

In the meantime, while waiting to get into his new weapons laboratory, on 26 April Fabre received orders in the form of a request from Adjutant Tréhoüart, the grey eminence in the Naval Bureau of Artillery. The next day, he was told, a test of muriate powder, “as it is called,” was to be tried at the Arsenal of Paris. The Minister wished Fabre to be present in order to make a report that would guide him in responding to questions put by the Committee of Public Safety concerning possible next steps.⁴⁹

This was the first Fabre had heard of muriate powder, and also his first indication that the new Committee of Public Safety was subordinating the authority of the Ministry of the Navy to its own. The consequence, as will appear, was that his project became entwined with two other weapons programs: first, fabrication of the new muriate gunpowder; and second, development of explosive cannon shells. All three ventures had originated independently in the 1780s, fallen into abeyance in the interval, and now been revived, again quite independently until the bureaucracy linked them together amid the military urgencies that gave rise to the Committee of Public Safety itself, Guyton in the chair.

On 9 April 1793, its third day, the newly constituted Committee at Guyton’s request named an advisory commission of four citizens “expert in chemistry and mechanics, charged with exploring and testing new means of defense.”⁵⁰ The members were two chemists, Berthollet and Fourcroy, the elder of the Perier brothers, and a military engineer called Lafitte, examiner for the school at Mézières. Early in its deliberations the panel learned of Fabre’s incendiary program, probably from Tréhoüart, just as Fabre did of its interest in muriate powder. Although authority had shifted from the Ministry to the Committee of Public Safety, the same bureaucrats staffed the offices and administered the programs.

Berthollet had never abandoned his belief in muriate powder. A report on his work in general addressed to the Bureau du Commerce in February 1790 includes the following passage:

Though interrupted by the accident at Essone, . . . my experiments continued, and I propose to publish them very soon. I shall show that this explosive, the force of which is greatly superior to the best gun-powder known, can be fabricated with less danger than ordinary powder, that it offers great advantages for employment in mines, that it could be extremely useful for the defenses of Cherbourg—this in the opinion of Monsieur Meusnier, who is directing the work of fortification there—and that the cost will not much exceed that of good hunting powder.⁵¹

In the absence of wartime security, such things could still be published in 1791, when Berthollet’s account of his experiments appeared in Annales de chimie.⁵² He was there more guarded about the prospect for handling muriate powder safely, and there is no evidence of his having returned to the problem before February or March of 1793. He then resumed work, evidently at Guyton’s instigation, under the aegis of the Committee of General Defense prior to its transformation into the Committee of Public Safety.

By the end of March Berthollet had succeeded in preparing a pound of the material. That was enough for renewed testing, for which Guyton expected the Gunpowder Administrators at the Arsenal to make arrangements. Jacques-Pierre Champy, Lavoisier’s successor, had been his protégé and pupil in Dijon. To Guyton’s surprise and irritation, Champy balked. A letter of 27 March explains why he had to deny himself the pleasure of welcoming his mentor at the Arsenal and of meeting Berthollet, whom he did not know but much admired. There was no corner of the Arsenal unknown to the workers. Their memory of Essone remained vivid. Anything resembling those tests would lead them to spread the alarm. People in the neighbor-hood would see in the slightest explosion a project for blowing up the magazines. The Gunpowder Administration must at all costs avoid the least occasion for popular suspicion.⁵³

Champy’s resistance, compounded by problems in assembling the apparatus, delayed the muriate tests until 17 April, the date on which Fabre was ordered to attend. They succeeded well enough that the Committee of Public Safety ordered them repeated on a larger scale at Essone, site of the 1788 explosion. In attendance on 2 May were Guyton, Berthollet, Fabre, Rear-Admiral Landais, and two of the three Gunpowder Administrators, Champy and Dufourny. Dufourny, the political appointee who had taken to signing himself simply “L’homme libre,” reported that muriate powder exhibited all the superiority it had shown in the tests at the Arsenal. He seized the occasion to press for higher wages for the workforce there. Champy, the professional powdermaker, was more reserved. Nothing unfavorable to the new explosive should be inferred since the testing mortar was too light and its excessive recoil had dissipated the effect. He felt obliged, moreover, to warn Guyton that the chemical manufacturer, Jean-Antoine Carny, whom Berthollet had engaged to produce muriate powder on a large scale, was of doubtful probity.

Also informed about the muriate project was General Choderlos de Laclos.We know by a letter from Champy to Guyton of 5 April that Laclos had briefly visited the proposed testing site in the Arsenal in company with Berthollet. His involvement is the first indication that muriate research was converging with another, quite different line of weapons development. Laclos has remained famous, and in some eyes infamous, for his erotic masterpiece, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782 amid the manifold frustrations that attended the end of the old regime. He was then forty-one years old, an obscure captain in the artillery, scion of a family of the recent and minor nobility.⁵⁴ The present work is not the occasion, and its author is not the person, to emit yet another among the plethora of opinions concerning the social, political, or ethical import, if any, of that piece of cold-hearted, strong-willed sexual intrigue. Nor need we enter into the question whether his unfinished De l’Education des Femmes, written in 1783 and un-published until 1903, should have a place of honor in the women’s movement. Suffice it to observe that Laclos’s writings, stylish and spirited, bespeak a temperament much given to administering shocks and a mind as unconventional as it was literate.

Ironically enough, Laclos had first made himself known in military circles by a literary attack on Lazare Carnot, like himself an aspiring and frustrated officer, but in the rival Corps of Engineers. An open letter to the Académie Française made contemptuous fun of Carnot’s Éloge de Vauban (1786), in which Carnot celebrated the defensive strategy that had curbed the ferocity of eighteenth-century warfare.⁵⁵ Laclos was reinforced in the onslaught by his superior officer, General the marquis de Montalembert. The crossfire was a skirmish in a campaign Montalembert waged throughout much of the 1780s, the goal of which was to persuade the high command to adopt a novel “perpendicular” system of fortification. He would have replaced Vauban’s shield of horizontal fortresses by vertical redoubts studded with casemates. Cannon massed in these structures would have subjected attacking forces to a saturating firepower. Montalembert had carried out experimental demonstrations of his construction in the isle of Aix in 1780. Laclos served as a subordinate officer in this enterprise, which was the origin of his preoccupation with innovative weaponry.

Wearying of the inanity of a static military career in a peacetime army, Laclos took indefinite leave in 1788 and entered the retinue of Louis XVI’s cousin, the duc d’Orléans, whom he served in the capacities of private secretary and ghostwriter. Marginal at the highest level, redolent of free masonry, adventurism, and ambition, d’Orléans and his entourage were ever toying, not untreasonably, with the chance that a turn of the dynastic wheel might displace the mainstream of power into their channel. Laclos accompanied his master on a diplomatic mission to London in 1789. Back in Paris in July 1790, he joined the Jacobins. In company with Pache, Audouin, Vincent, and Hassenfratz, Laclos was, as we have seen, one of the prime movers in toppling the Monarchy on 10 August 1792. Days later he rejoined the Army at the instance of Danton, who dispatched him to the headquarters of the reserve army corps at Châlons-sur-Marne in order to keep a republican eye on its elderly, distrusted commander, the Bavarian-born Luckner.

Promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the course of that mission, Laclos served briefly with the Army of the Pyrenees. It is unclear precisely when he turned his attention from active duty to weaponry, and specifically to development of explosive cannonballs. He must have been back in Paris by February 1793, however, for a report from Fabre states that General Choderlos de Laclos had then proposed field trials in which hollow cannon-balls filled with gunpowder would be fired at the mock-up of a segment of a ship’s hull. In the meantime, Monge picked Laclos to be governor of the Ile de France (Mauritius) and remaining French outposts in India. Before taking up that post, however, and also before the tests he had ordered could be run at La Fère, Laclos was arrested in company with fellow Orleanists.

Although the duc d’Orléans had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries, taken the name Philippe Égalité, and voted in the Convention for executing his cousin, he and his intimates were nonetheless suspect in the spring of 1793. Among other dark possibilities, they were thought to be plotting a surrogate monarchy in league with Dumouriez. Laclos was imprisoned on 1 April and released on 10 May, remaining under house arrest for a brief time. He was thus unable to attend the tests of muriate powder at the Arsenal and at Essonnes.

Nevertheless, Laclos provided the impetus that brought the three projects for incendiaries, muriate powder, and explosive shells together in a unified program of weapons development. Berthollet had always intended muriate powder to be a propellant. Having been apprised of its power, Laclos, still in prison, proposed instead that the novel explosive be tried as the charge inside his “hollow cannonballs,” which were already under fabrication for test firing at La Fère. Before and also during his confinement, he was in touch with a colleague of Tréhoüart in the Ministry of the Navy, an adjutant called Saint-Fief, and through the Minister, Dalbarade, with Guyton and the Committee of Public Safety.⁵⁶ Although the mock-up of a naval hull had no initial connection with the incendiary program, Saint-Fief had assigned Fabre responsibility for overseeing its construction. The dummy was nearing completion in mid-April, when he left La Fère for Paris.

Guyton seized on Laclos’s proposition. Acting with the authority of the Committee of Public Safety, he accepted Fabre’s recommendations that heavier shells be ordered from the one forge capable of producing them, Dieudé’s establishment at Charleville in the Ardennes, and that a 36-pound cannon replace the inadequate 24-pounder at La Fère. Finally, he urged Berthollet to accelerate preparation of sufficient muriate powder to fill the reinforced shells for proving. Where might the work be done? Not at the Arsenal, though Champy cooperated to the extent of assigning a skilled powdermaker, one Fallot, to assist Berthollet. All these exchanges occupied the weeks of late April and May while Fabre was waiting for access to the property in which to fabricate incendiaries. Seclusion and secrecy were the requirements for Berthollet’s project as for his. Fabre allowed, albeit reluctantly, that the town house rue Basse du Rempart was roomy enough for both. Work began on 30 May 1793. What happened the next day is best told in the words of Fabre’s report to Dalbarade:

Citizen Minister,

You have no doubt been informed of the event that happened yesterday in the place where the workshop for fabricating incendiary ammunition is supposed to be established. By your orders, I gave Citizen Berthollet a location for making muriate powder. His workers having failed to take precautions, the powder being grained caught fire from the friction. There was an explosion. The three workmen were pretty badly burned. The casements in the windows were blown into the courtyard. People from the neighborhood, armed, crowded into the house. They threatened me, and also the noncommissioned officer on duty with me. We were accused of having tried to burn down Paris, of having bungled the attempt. A sabre was pressed against the chest of the noncommissioned officer, &c.57

Receiving no reply, Fabre wrote again on 5 June saying he had also sent a copy of his report to the Committee of Public Safety, “where it may have been forgotten.”⁵⁸ It may indeed. On Friday 31 May 1793, the day of the accident, leaders of the Paris sections, prominent among them Hassenfratz, “le républicain,” and Dufourny, “l’hommelibre,” mobilized the mob of sans-culottes that surrounded the Tuileries demanding expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. The site of Fabre’s laboratory was some 800 meters distant from that scene. Detonation of the muriate powder must have come as an unidentified blast amid the cacophony of the day.

Champy gives more detail in his letter to Guyton, defending Fallot and bespeaking payment of damages to him and his assistant:

He [Fallot] had taken on himself the job of granulation of the powder, for which, in order to lessen the danger of its taking fire, he did not wait for it to be perfectly dry. He wanted to work on a batch of about six pounds. It was too damp, and it plugged up the holes in the sieve, which prompted him to defer the operation until after his dinner.

When he returned to work, fire broke out at the first shake of the sieve and spread immediately to about twelve additional pounds of powder, which was still very humid and was being dried in the sifters on the floor. His fellow worker, who was by the window, was badly burned by thick flames carried his way by a draft of air. He scrambled out through the window, and hung on to the iron hooks set in the wall two stories high.⁵⁹

Neither Fabre nor his workers were willing to remain in Paris. To a man they wished to return to La Fère, where they could work at their ease in the facilities of the construction arsenal. Its military insecurity had been much exaggerated in the panic over Dumouriez, so Fabre argued. Even were the enemy to mount an invasion, he would still have time to evacuate his materials. He would, moreover, be on site to oversee the proving out of explosive cannonballs. The Artillery Bureau rejected the reasoning out of hand. Failing to persuade an equally obdurate Fabre to settle for a location in the suburbs, Tréhoüart advised Dalbarade to approve his alternative demand, which was to move the incendiary project to Châlons-sur-Marne. There Fabre would find peace, quiet, and skilled workers, and also be within reach of La Fère and the forges of the Ardennes. Moving and reinstalling his shop once again occupied Fabre throughout the rest of June and the first weeks of July.

Berthollet for his part simply lost his nerve. No more than Champy did he blame the workmen for the explosion on 31 May. We took all possible precautions, he wrote to Guyton. “You see, my dear colleague, that it is impossible to handle so hazardous a reagent. . . . We must, therefore, abandon our attempted projects.”⁶⁰ Such was not Guyton’s opinion. A memorandum of 7 July is one of his last directives as chairman of the Committee of Public Safety. It orders that the relative effectiveness of muriate powder and ordinary gunpowder be compared in the tests of explosive cannonballs to be run at La Fère.⁶¹

On 10 July Guyton and all but two of his colleagues on the first Committee of Public Safety were replaced by montagnard hardliners. The administrator who carried out Guyton’s intentions in the ensuing weeks was a fellow chemist, Pierre-Auguste Adet, who had succeeded Tréhoüart as adjutant in the Artillery Bureau in mid-June. Laclos was released from house arrest on 21 June. The idea of explosive shells in general and muriate shells in particular had come from him. Accordingly, he was not simply invited to attend the projected tests. On 12 July Adet put him in charge and directed Berthollet and Fabre to place themselves at his dispositon. Barely installed at Châlons-sur-Marne, Fabre had to interrupt his own program yet again and return to La Fère, not to work on incendiaries as he had wished to do, but to oversee the proving of explosive cannonballs. Neither he nor Berthollet was to be excused from further participation in the muriate program, whatever their reluctance. The Committee of Public Safety had been informed of the arrangements. The Minister, wrote Adet to Berthollet, was “of the opinion that the event that caused suspending fabrication of that powder is not a strong enough reason to lead us entirely to give up the advantage that so valuable a discovery can hold for the Republic.”⁶² Firing experimental rounds at the ship’s dummy began at the La Fère proving ground on 20 August. Results in the first days were encouraging both for 24-caliber and 36-caliber shells filled with ordinary military gunpowder. Fabre’s report of the twenty-ninth to Adet, who had been present at the outset, explains why the tests had to be suspended.

Citizen Adjutant,

I have the honor of presenting an account of an unfortunate event that has just taken place owing to the effect of the too ready inflammability of muriate powder.

You will remember that the first 24-pounder round filled with that powder, having missed the ship’s dummy, ricocheted without exploding and disappeared behind the embankment of the polygon, and that the three men we sent to retrieve it could not find it. An unfortunate day laborer came on it yesterday 300 yards (150 toises) behind the embankment in a field of oats that he was mowing. Thinking to retrieve the powder it contained, he sat down with the cannon-ball between his legs and tried with his hammer to drive the point of a little file that he used to sharpen his scythe into the fuse, which, as you know, is attached to the thick side. You can judge of the effect of the friction, iron on wood; the round exploded; the man was blown to pieces, his limbs and his intestines were scattered over a great distance.

He leaves a wife and three children whom he supported by his work, and she is pregnant.⁶³

Discounting the misfortune of this further accident, the Artillery Bureau advised the Committee of Public Safety that the ammunition tested at La Fère was promising enough that trials should be continued and expanded, though at another site. Initially the choice fell on Rochefort. Laclos, his adjutant Bellot, Fabre, and Berthollet received orders to that effect from Adet. They were to cooperate with Guyton, to whom Adet appealed in urgent terms. No one, he wrote, was better placed to appreciate the importance of this experiment, and no one better qualified to assure success, “not just with respect to the experiment itself, but in order to overcome moral obstacles that could oppose it. Your dual capacity of Scientist and Representative of the People will serve to dismiss them.” He trusts, Adet continued, in Guyton’s patriotism and zeal. Were he to refuse this mission, it would become impossible to continue the experiment and to benefit from the immense advantages it holds.⁶⁴

Whether Guyton responded is uncertain. Perhaps he too had become persuaded of the intractability of muriate powder. Or else, or also, Prieur, beginning to exercise his kinsman’s former responsibility for military technology on the Committee of Public Safety, preferred to reserve Guyton for the more comprehensive mission of its newly formed Armaments Section, whereon he served throughout the Terror in tandem with Monge, Fourcroy, Hassenfratz, Berthollet, and others. At all events Laclos succeeded Guyton as the driving force behind the top secret munitions program in the weeks following the accident at La Fère.

With the energetic support of the Naval Artillery Bureau, now headed by a new adjutant, Chappatte, and drawing on the authority of the Committee of Public Safety, Laclos enlarged the prospective scale to the dimensions of battle. The object now was to repeat the muriate powder experiments done at La Fère with thirty-six-and twenty-four-caliber cannonballs and to extend them with eighteen-and twelve-caliber ammunition. Techniques must be found for manufacturing the powder less dangerously and less expensively. The hull of an entire ship of the line, bridge and superstructure included, must serve for target. Methods must be developed for defending a fort against muriate cannonballs, and also against incendiaries. Both types of ammunition were also to be fired experimentally from aboard ships. Compounding the powder would require a platoon of at least eighteen artillerymen, commanded by a sergeant. They might come from either the Army or the Navy but must include at least six artificers. All must be intelligent and sober. It must not be given out that they are to fabricate muriate powder, but rather “to work on a newly contrived composition still little known and thereby a little dangerous.” None of these men should be the father of a family. It would be only fair to give them extraordinary payment.⁶⁵

In anticipation of success, the plan called for production of a sufficient quantity of shell casings and of muriate powder for use in the field and eventually in combat. Fabre was to identify all the forges in the country capable of casting hollow cannonballs. All told, a supply of 50,000 or 60,000 shells must be obtained with minimum delay. C. A. Carny, who had filled Berthollet’s orders for small amounts of “oxygenated muriate” (potassium chlorate), had his shop in rue du Harlay-au-Marais. To the demand that he increase production, he replied that he needed payment in advance. At Prieur’s behest, the Committee of Public Safety also accepted his further demand that three of his most skilled laborers be exempted from imminent conscription. With their help he had already prepared eighty pounds, at great price. If much larger amounts were ordered, he could greatly lower the unit cost. In that case, he would set up a separate shop for that one product and produce sixty pounds a day.⁶⁶

All these preparations occupied most of September 1793, the first month of the Terror. As the project expanded in the imagination of Laclos and the staff of the Artillery Bureau, it became clear that facilities at Rochefort were inadequate. What was required was nothing less than a permanent weapons laboratory. On 28 September a directive to Laclos, drafted by himself for the signature of the Artillery Adjutant, ordered him to find a location in the environs of Paris.⁶⁷ In all probability he had already decided where it would be. His choice fell on the château and park of Meudon, site of the present-day observatory. On 21 October the Committee of Public Safety decreed the installation there of what it is not fanciful to define as the distant forerunner of Los Alamos.

Laclos took title in the name of the Navy on 4 November. The next day he was arrested in his lodgings in Paris. The coils were even then closing around his onetime patron, now Philippe Égalité, who was indicted before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the sixth and executed on the seventh. Laclos remained in prison for thirteen months, first in La Force, then in Picpus. Rumor had it that he saved himself from the guillotine by ghostwriting speeches for Robespierre. On the sidelines under the Directory, and ever drawn to conspiracies issuing in strong measures, he was certainly a partisan and probably an agent of Bonaparte in preparing the coup d’état of 18 brumaire (9 November 1799). Restored to active duty, Laclos died during the siege of Tarento on 5 September 1803.

Apart from Laclos and Adjutant Chappatte in the Artillery Bureau, no one, not Berthollet, not Guyton, and certainly not Fabre, had wished to push forward with experiments on muriate powder in the winter of 1793– 94.68 Only after a further fatality on 16 July 1794 did the Committee of Public Safety formally abandon the program, however.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the weapons laboratory founded for that purpose became a regular installation of the French armed forces. Les Épreuves de Meudon, the Meudon Proving Grounds, were an active site of military research and development into the Napoleonic period. On 23 April 1794, the Committee of Public Safety designated a member of the Convention, Jean-César Battelier, to exercise over-sight and expedite the work.⁷⁰ A clockmaker by profession, he had already been named director of the national Porcelain Manufactory at nearby Sèvres in September 1793. Neither the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), nor the transition to the regime of the Directory in December 1795, interfered with the testing and development of weapons at Meudon. The logo on its stationery conveys the spirit. A montage of mortar, howitzer, and cannon barrels over the legend “MORT AUX TYRANS” is surmounted by a phrygian bonnet and framed by the words ACTION, CÉLÉRITÉ, CONFIANCE, DISCREÉTION.

Activation of the first military units formed and trained for aerial warfare is the most famous, although it did not prove the most effective, of the enterprises undertaken at Meudon.⁷¹ It was said of Joseph de Montgolfier that he had hit on the idea of hot-air balloons in 1783 amid a meditation on ways by which Gibraltar might be taken.⁷² Enthusiasm for aerial stunts in ensuing years issued, inevitably, in proposals for military applications. Guyton had himself staged one of the early flights, in April 1784. Preferring a diluted hydrogen to hot air, he succeeded in soaring above his native Dijon but failed in his attempt to achieve locomotion. He returned to the subject in the summer of 1793 while chairing the first Committee of Public Safety.

A report Guyton addressed to his successors on 14 July, four days after leaving the Committee, explores the prospect for adapting aircraft to war-fare. Observation from tethered balloons would, he foresaw, be the most practical possibility. A major obstacle was the cost of obtaining hydrogen. Besides being expensive, the standard procedure, which was the action of sulfuric acid on iron filings, had the further disadvantage of requiring saltpeter for production of the acid. An alternative method was decomposition of water in the presence of redhot iron, which Lavoisier and Meusnier had achieved in their famous experiment of 1783. Although Guyton refrained from mentioning the source of the process, Lavoisier was nevertheless included in a commission named at Guyton’s instance on 18 September to reproduce the reaction on an industrial scale. Meusnier had been killed three months previously. Lavoisier’s participation was one of the last acts of his career.

Besides Guyton himself other commissioners were Fourcroy, Monge, Berthollet, and Périer. Handling the apparatus and performing the operations were two skilled technicians, both recruited by Guyton. The first, Jean-Marie Coutelle, had been formed in experimental physics by Charles, and had learned the trade serving as demonstrator in his teacher’s public courses. Though not a member of the commission, Charles (who had built and flown the first hydrogen balloon in 1783) lent a hand in analysis of the quality of gas produced. The name of the second operator, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, has been immortalized in the invention, also under the pressure of wartime shortages, of the graphite pencil still in daily use throughout the world. Though the most famous, that was perhaps the least astute of the inventions created by one whom the cliché wholly fits, a mechanical genius.

The terrace of the Feuillants adjoining the Tuileries served for outdoor laboratory. Experiments run there from 20 September to 5 October 1793 succeeded admirably in liberating a volume of 23.82 cubic meters of hydrogen, more than enough to lift a balloon. Such was the enthusiasm at the prospect that almost instantly, in late October, the Committee of Public Safety dispatched Coutelle, his assistant Lhomond, and the requisite equipment to the Army of the North. They bore a letter signed by Carnot to the effect that the foremost scientists endorsed his mission. “Citizen Coutelle is not a charlatan,” he wrote, enjoining the commanding general, Jourdan, and Duquesnoy, the representative on mission, to afford him every facility. Neither one could be bothered. Once on the ground Coutelle himself recognized that an attempt in the field would be premature. Personnel and equipment required further preparation, if with all deliberate speed.

Meudon provided the ideal site. On 24 November 1793 the Committee of Public Safety ordered establishment there of an Aerostatic Development Center (Centre des Épreuves Aerostatiques). On the technical side Conté set out to determine the optimal shape of a tethered balloon, to improve procedures and apparatus for liberating, storing, and handling hydrogen, and to concoct a varnish that would preserve the flexibility of the fabric while eliminating leakage of gas. Throughout he worked in close consultation with Monge, Guyton, and Vandermonde. Vandermonde undertook a mission to Lyons in order to ready the silk industry to produce a sufficient supply of sturdy taffeta for mass production of balloons. On 29 March 1794 a series of trial ascensions succeeded perfectly in the presence of Guyton, Monge, Prieur, and Barère. Each of them tried a flight, in Monge’s case accompanied by his daughter. On 2 April the Committee of Public Safety accepted Guyton’s draft of the decree creating a military Company of Airmen (Aérostiers). The new branch, or rather twig, of the armed forces consisted of forty men and three officers, Coutelle in command.

Three weeks later the fledgling unit had orders to ready itself for combat with the Army of the North. Reporting to Maubeuge on 7 May, Coutelle and his men had less than a month to set up their furnace, extract their hydrogen, inflate their balloon, L’Entrepreneur, and mount a series of trial flights. Reports of subordinate commanders and staff officers who made ascents were very positive. On 21 June a decree of the Committee of Public Safety declared: “It is no longer a question of calculating the difficulties, but of overcoming them. Fortune follows boldness.”⁷³ The next day orders came to move to the plain of Fleurus in front of the Austrian defenses of Charleroi. A team of twenty men dragged L’Entrepreneur, fully inflated, across country the thirty-odd miles from Maubeuge.

Whether the signals semaphored from the gondola to inform Jourdan of enemy dispositions contributed to French victory on 26 June is unclear.Jourdan was dismissive and thought they did not. Guyton, who was present throughout, was satisfied they did. The previous day, almost surely at his instance, a second company of airmen had been activated at Meudon. Its training completed, it was attached to the Army of the Rhine in March 1795, while the first company went over to the Army of the Sambre and Meuse. Replacements and further recruits were then to be trained in a formal École des Aerostats created at Meudon in October 1795 and directed by Conté.

In no engagement other than Fleurus, however, did either company see action. Army commanders—Jourdan, Moreau, Hoche—thought balloons a nuisance. Aerial observation, it is fair to say, was an innovation that scientists and engineers who momentarily had the ear of politicians sought to impose on generals in the field. Bonaparte did include airborne units in the Italian campaign of 1796–97 and in the Egyptian expedition of 1798, perhaps in deference to Monge, his favorite retainer in both. He occasionally ordered a balloon lofted, but only for psychological effect, not for use in combat. Regular employment for military observation awaited the American Civil War.

Proposals for weaponry of all sorts streamed in upon the Committee of Public Safety, as upon any government in wartime, and were regularly referred to Meudon for examination and, if they were promising, demonstration and testing. Prominent among them were incendiaries of various types—rockets fashioned out of pikes carrying inflammable warheads, cannonballs heated red hot before loading, a terra cotta projectile that would hold its heat longer than iron, a composition concocted by a certain citizen, Pinelly, that risked setting fire to the woods around the new proving grounds. Throughout the autumn of 1793 Fabre and his incendiary project were still based in Chalons. Promoted to the rank of major (chef de ba-taillon) on 31 October, he received orders in November to ship a quantity of his incendiaries to the forces assembling for the effort to retake Toulon and the Mediterranean fleet, which had been betrayed into British hands by royalist officers and residents in August. He demurred on the grounds that the enemy ships were out of range, and that unsuccessful employment would tip off the enemy to the existence of the still secret weapon.⁷⁴ In January 1794 he also demurred, in a long-suffering way, to orders to move his shop yet again, this time to Meudon. Grudgingly he had to agree, of course, though it would take him six weeks to resume operations.⁷⁵

Though Fabre continued to experiment with modifications of his incendiary composition, perfecting explosive projectiles became his principal occupation at Meudon. He served there for eighteen months, from the spring of 1794 until late in 1795. Monge maintained his interest and made valuable suggestions throughout. In a later series of memoirs Fabre recognized that the idea of serving cannon with explosive shells had originated with Laclos in 1792. The latter’s experiments never worked, however. All the shells that Laclos actually tried firing fractured in the barrel of the gun. Only he, Fabre, drawing on his long experience with the fabrication of incendiaries, and with signal help from Monge, had succeeded in adapting shell casings to serve also in the production of hollow cannonballs that could withstand the shock of firing when filled with gunpowder. Although Fabre’s testimony is the sole direct authority for these statements, there is much circumstantial evidence to confirm and nothing to contradict it.⁷⁶

Preliminary trials of thirty-six-pounders, run in the presence of Monge and Hassenfratz on 20 May 1794, were altogether encouraging.⁷⁷ Prieur kept in close touch with all this work. At his instance the Committee of Public Safety ordered production of no less than 300,000 rounds of the new ammunition, half explosives and half incendiaries. In late November 1794, Vice-Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, Commander of Naval Forces of the Republic, invited a deputation of captains and general officers from Paris to a test of Fabre’s explosive shells and incendiaries aboard his flagship, La Montagne, anchored in the shelter of the breakwater at Brest. To his disappointment, the incendiaries became soaked in a rainstorm and could not be fired. The shells succeeded impressively, however: “I am very much in favor of the shells [très partisan des obus],” the Admiral wrote afterward to Dalbarade, again Minister of the Navy.⁷⁸

He was the only commander who was. The ammunition ordered by the Committee of Public Safety was duly manufactured and distributed to the principal ports by mid-1795. Frigates and ships of the line were armed with it and furnished with printed instructions that Fabre had prepared. Only on one relatively trivial occasion did any of it see action at sea. In the battle off the Corsican Cape Noli on 24 March 1795, a deputy on mission in charge of a frigate, Etienne-François Le Tourneur, ordered its explosive shells fired against three English ships. All three were put out of commission. A graduate of Mezières, Le Tourneur had been a captain in the Corps of Engineers assigned, in company with Meusnier, to the fortification of Cherbourg in the late 1780s. Elected to represent the department of la Manche in the Legislative Assembly and reelected to the Convention, he focused his energy and experience on naval and military problems. In spirit and outlook, he was close to Carnot, through whose influence he was elected to the Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety in August 1795. More important, in October Carnot saw to it that both should be elected to the five-man Directory, the new governing body, on which Le Tourneur served until May 1797.

Fabre blamed the failure to make further use of novel weapons on the top brass of the regular Navy, “which has always refused to use any invention at all, let alone this one.” He reports discussions in which admirals justified their refusal on the grounds that if the Navy were to employ such shells, the enemy would have the same thing to fire back within a year. Since two ships so armed would destroy or burn each other in short order, and since the English had naval superiority, the discovery would redound to the disadvantage of the French. In Fabre’s view, the high command missed the point that the opportunity lay before the Navy to blast enemy ships out of the water and mount an invasion before the English had time to respond. It behooved them further to reflect that the English and other powers were bound to discover that cannon are capable of firing explosive ammunition, and the French would thus have lost the inestimable advantage of the first strike.⁷⁹

Fabre reported those exchanges in memoirs addressed to the Directory in November 1797 and to the Minister of War in January 1798. Although promotion and assignment to other duties had removed him from Meudon late in 1795, he never put his work there out of mind and was again calling attention to the still open opportunity. His appeal was heard. A decree of 20 December 1797 ordered the Minister of War, General Barthélemy Schérer, to arrange for conducting secret experiments at Meudon. Their object should be to establish in a precise manner the effectiveness of the incendiary ammunition and shells fabricated under Fabre’s direction, and further to make recommendations concerning their possible use in combat.⁸⁰

Schérer appointed a highly distinguished commission. It consisted of Admirals François-Etienne de Rosily (the chairman) and Edouard-Thomas de Missiessy; of two colonels from the artillery, Antoine-François Andréossy and Jean-Jacques Gassendi; and of three mathematicians from the Institute of France, Jean-Charles de Borda (himself a career naval officer in the old regime), Monge, and Laplace. Borda and Monge were as well qualified to judge of mechanical and technological as of mathematical matters, while important instruments of experimental physics owed their design to Laplace, otherwise the complete mathematician. By the time the first tests were run, Monge had departed for Rome, preparatory to embarking in May 1798 to join Bonaparte in the Expeditionary Force bound for Egypt. Replacing him was the industrialist Jacques-Constantin Périer, elder of the brothers in the famous foundry, which had turned from steam engines to ordnance in 1793– 94. In addition the commission coopted a politician with some technical competence who was already familiar with Meudon, Etienne Deydier, a longtime associate of Guyton de Morveau and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, now a member of the Conseil des Anciens, the upper house of the legislature, and formerly a deputy in the Convention.

Preparations were complete in early March 1798. At the far end of the test range, the naval carpentry foreman, one Lesquivit, had built a massive oaken target 5.2 meters wide by 6 meters, exactly simulating a segment of the hull of an 80-gun ship of the line. The gun battery consisted of four cannons, a castiron 36-pounder from the Navy, a bronze 24-pounder from the artillery, an iron 18-pounder mounted on a carriage, and a naval 12pounder. Rounds of all four calibers, both incendiary and explosive, were randomly selected for testing by members of the commission from stocks stored in the basement of the château, serving as powder magazine.

The testing program was thoroughness itself. It required six sequences of several days each from March until mid-July. At each session, the entire battery fired from three to six salvos. Every round was tracked and its effect, or lack of it, recorded in detail. The first two firings, on 10 and 23 March, and the last on 17 July, were devoted to incendiaries. The delay was occasioned by the decision to bring up additional ammunition from Le Havre in order to determine whether ammunition distributed to the main ports in 1795 was still good.

It was. Apart from that, however, the results were disappointing. One round lodged itself inside the planking and ignited smartly, just as it was designed to do, but guttered out for lack of air. A number failed to burn. Others that missed the target set fires in the woods beyond the range. One mishap was inadvertently encouraging. Returning in the morning of 26 March for a third day in the second series of tests, the Commission found the target consumed by fire. A round that had looked to be a dud the previous evening had evidently flared up in the night. The commissioners were also impressed by the extreme flammability of the composition. Thrown into a basin, one round continued burning under water, surfaced, and hurled sparks in every direction. Nevertheless, they were not altogether persuaded that incendiaries were a combat-ready weapon.

Still less so was the artillery commander of the Army of England. With his headquarters at Le Havre, General Augustin Lespinasse had conducted his own tests when ordered to send incendiaries from the magazine there to Meudon. A letter to Schérer of 8 July reports finding the six-inch incendiaries fired from a 24-pounder to be perfectly useless, whereas explosive shells of the same caliber had succeeded perfectly. He had, he added in an interesting aside, employed that same ammunition with great success in the Army of the Pyrenees, whose artillery commander he had been in 1794–95. In a second letter of 1 August, he did allow that further experiments with the 36pound incendiaries would be advisable, “for in war one should neglect nothing.” ⁸¹

For its part, and this was the main part, the Meudon Commission also found explosive shells to be an altogether different matter from incendiaries. Three sets of tests were run during which some twenty-six rounds of all four calibers were fired, half at a range of four hundred meters and half at six hundred. Laying the guns at proper elevation was tricky since conventional castiron cannonballs were much heavier than explosive shells. Propellant charges had also to be adjusted by trial and error. That many rounds missed the target was no reflection on the gunner. Of those that hit home, several pierced right through the simulated shipside and exploded in the area behind, which would have been amidships in a real vessel. Another penetrated eighteen inches of wood and splintered off two strips of inside sheathing, one of them eight feet long. A further shell knocked four planks loose, one by as much as thirty inches, destroyed a three-foot length of one of the ribs, hurled a piece of planking a distance of twenty-six feet, and detached one of the interior mountings, scattering clamps, bolts, and nails every which way.

Much the most damaging, naturally enough, were the thirty-six-pounders. Even so, in the tests run on 27 April the twenty-four-pounders were impressive enough that Gassendi, who had been commander of the company in the La Fère Regiment in which the youthful Bonaparte served as a second lieutenant, wrote this account to his former subordinate, now general-in-chief of the Army of England. He could not know that Bonaparte would soon embark, secretly and instead, for Egypt:

You will, perhaps, be very glad to know of the effect of a shell fired into the side of a vessel and exploding there, such as we have observed in today’s test. The piece—a bronze cannon firing at 203 toises (about 400 yards);—The shell, 24 calibre weighing 16½ pounds;—The powder charge in the piece, 3 pounds;—Powder charge in the shell, one pound;—Oak target [of density] 76 pounds the cubic foot, with the dimensions of the sides of an 80-gun ship;—The ribs 12 inches thick;—The interior planks 5 inches, and the exterior 8;—With the piece aimed at 10 feet above the waterline, and the target struck at 5 feet above that line, the shell penetrated into the middle of the rib and exploded. At the level of the fourth row of planks, above the main wale 8 inches thick, a 2 to 3 foot length of the 12-inch limb was torn apart in all directions. Three rows of planks less than 5 inches thick came completely unnailed and were blown off, and three thicker than 8 inches were loosened.⁸²

Anyone who has ever participated in the testing of ordnance would have to call these experiments a considerable success. Such, clearly, was the opinion of the Commission, consisting of people who did not give their assent lightly in technical matters:

The Commission . . . thinks that these two types of cannonballs could be employed very usefully on warships. Its opinion is that cannon shells could cause considerable damage to an enemy vessel when they explode in the side of the ship, and that they would put it in such condition that it would sink very promptly if they exploded beneath the water line. It also thinks that when these cannonballs pierce through the side or land in the batteries, not only will they kill many men, but more than that will cause great disorder among the crew, and are more fearsome on that score, it seems to us, than for the explosive effect itself, because very few rounds will penetrate below the water line.

As for the incendiary cannonballs, although they are much superior to all the other inventions of this sort that have been proposed for the last several years, and although in certain conditions they could have a more terrible effect than would the shells, we think that generally speaking they are less fearsome. For one thing, we consider that when they are embedded in the side of a ship, the caulking of the sheathing inside and outside, as well as the flat planking, will impede the flow of air needed to ignite the wood and to keep it burning.

The effect of incendiary cannonballs in the interior of a ship is still less dangerous in that anyone can grab hold of them without risk and throw them into the sea.⁸³

The Commission concluded by recommending (with an imminent invasion of England in mind) that warships be equipped immediately with ten rounds of explosive shells for all cannon of eighteen, twelve, and nine kilo-grams (i.e., thirty-six-, twenty-four-, and eighteen-pounders). As for incendiary shells, five rounds of each caliber per gun would suffice. In neither category would shells of lesser caliber be worth employing. A range of eight hundred meters was the maximum at which the explosive shells would penetrate the side of a ship deeply enough to be effective, while the limit for incendiaries was four hundred to five hundred meters. Precautions were suggested for storing and handling the ammunition on shipboard. The commissioners called, finally, for further experiments to determine the optimal ratio of charge to empty volume inside the explosive shells and to decide whether certain modifications in the design of the exterior would be desirable. 84

The Meudon tests envisaged naval combat, with emphasis on the heaviest artillery, the thirty-six-pound cannon. Further experiments looking to the employment of explosive shells in land operations were run in the presence of the Army Artillery Committee at Vincennes in November 1799. The scale was smaller than at Meudon. Since the heaviest weapon used by the Field Artillery was the twenty-four-pound cannon, the trial was limited to shells of that caliber. Nine of the thirty rounds penetrated the rampart of a siege battery used for target, and one explosion left a crater of thirty cubic feet. Among the observers was Scharnhorst, who expressed admiration.⁸⁵

Variants of the type of devices proposed or tried at Meudon—aircraft, rockets, incendiaries, exponentially more powerful explosives—figure in the armory of modern warfare. In the important instance of cannon shells the lineage was direct. The tests at Meudon and Vincennes were the most encouraging precedents, not just cited but reported in detail, by Henri-Joseph Paixhans, the ordnance reformer who initiated the first program for developing explosive ammunition for cannon that was ever systematically carried through to fruition in combat.

A graduate of the École Polytechnique in 1801, Paixhans had completed his education at the Artillery School, seen action in the Austrian, Prussian, and Polish campaigns of 1807, been decorated with the Croix de Guerre, served with Napoleon all the way to Moscow in 1812, and in 1814 commanded the batteries defending the Butte Chaumont and Belleville against the allied advance. His extensive military experience having persuaded him of the need for a clean break, he went over the heads of the Army and Navy and put his proposal directly before the civilian authorities, the Academy of Science, and the public in a book, Nouvelle force marine, published in 1822. 86

His initial target was the Navy. In Paixhans’s argument, the 80-to 126gun ship of the line, the classic three-decker with its high profile, its large skilled crew, its intricate but vulnerable fittings, this floating monster to which England owed her command of the seas, was a ruinously expensive dinosaur awaiting extinction. The agent of its destruction was already at hand in the form of explosive projectiles for naval artillery of the sort tested at Meudon. Cannon on both sea and land had repeatedly been shown to be capable of firing shells and bombs at flat trajectory. Why, then, had they never been adopted systematically? Paixhans put the blame right where Fabre did, on the resistance to innovation characteristic of ranking naval officers, who feared lest they themselves become obsolete along with the ships and personnel under their command.

What was needed was not invention, but creation of a new order of battle. Combination of three measures would achieve the transformation: first, increasing the caliber of naval artillery pieces; second, greatly decreasing the number on each ship; third, replacing cumbersome sailing vessels by smaller steam-powered warships. Though Paixhans gives an appendix on field artillery, he began with the naval application of explosive ammunition for the same reason that Fabre had done with incendiaries at the outset, and later with explosives at Meudon. Only by such a revolution in weaponry could the French hope to engage the British Navy on a level fighting field.

Paixhans’s treatise is a summons to experiments, not a report on them. He was referred to the Academy of Science, before which body he read a memoir on “La puissance navale” on 8 May 1820.87 Experiments came later, in December 1823 and January 1824. Among the commissioners who recommended trials in 1820 and observed the execution at Brest in late 1823 and early 1824 were two who had observed the Meudon tests, Admiral de Rosily and Laplace. Others were Charles Dupin, mathematician, engineer, and technological reformer; Gaspard Riche de Prony, Director of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and foremost among civil engineers; and, finally, Louis de Marmont, Marshall of France. This time, the high command did not resist the recommendations of the scientists. Marmont wrote the report: “The results are such that, whatever idea one may have formed of the terrible effects of this weapon, those that were obtained surpass them.”⁸⁸

The apology with which Paixhans begins his book resonates with the justification Cuvier advanced for Berthollet and that many another concerned with the perfecting of weapons has expressed in one way or another throughout the course of history.

Perhaps we should defend ourselves from incurring the horror justly inspired by the progress of the cruel art of destruction. We have done so several times in the course of our book. Here we shall say only that all honest and enlightened men, when they engage themselves in these matters, have clearly recognized that the improvement of weapons (which is inevitable anyway) is in no way to be deplored. It confers on the physically weak the means for battling against unjust force, and it has always been favorable to civilization, the truly courageous, and the interests of humanity.⁸⁹

3. THE MOBILIZATION OF SCIENTISTS

Ever since Albert Mathiez’s classic La Révolution française, it has been canonical to credit mobilization of science with having armed the forces that turned defeat into victory in 1793–94, the year II of the Republic.⁹⁰ What are the grounds?

By any standard the prospects for the French Revolution reached their nadir in the summer of 1793. Following the Convention’s expulsion of the Girondists, the cities of Lyons and Nantes, ever restive, threw off the control of Paris. In Toulon and Marseilles leaders of the dissidents appealed for support to Admiral Hood, commander of the British Mediterranean fleet. Counterrevolutionary peasants and nobles in the West and South controlled almost half the countryside. The British Navy blockaded major ports. Former slaves led by Toussaint l’Ouverture were in control of Saint-Domingue, the source of colonial riches. Military disaster threatened on all frontiers. Valenciennes, its fortifications a link in Vauban’s chain of frontier strong points, capitulated to the Austrians on 2 August. Austrian, Prussian, British, and Dutch forces stood ready for deeper invasion from the North and East while Spanish regiments were poised to strike from the Pyrenees and Pied-montese troops from the Alps.

In the French ranks desertion was epidemic. Paris was itself chaotic. Prices climbed. Bread disappeared. Spies, zealots, disguised priests, deserters, madmen, thieves, desperate women, and agitators of every sort roamed the streets and held forth in public. What authority there was resided in political clubs and the municipality rather than in the Convention. Such were the straits in which the Committee of Public Safety, chaired by Guyton in its earlier phase, reinvented itself in July and August as a dictatorship in commission, a government “revolutionary until the peace.”

Two decrees defined its nature from the outset, the levée-en-masse of 23 August calling for total war, and the law of 5 September introduced by Robespierre declaring Terror to be the order of the day. Drafted by Carnot as his first act on joining the Committee, and embellished for delivery by Barère, the former summoned the nation to total war in terms famous from its first article:

Article 1. Young men will go into combat. Married men will forge weapons and transport supplies. Women will make tents and uniforms and serve in hospitals. Children will make bandages of used linen. Old men will have themselves carried into public places to arouse the courage of warriors and to preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.

Article 2. Nationalized houses will be converted into barracks; public parks into weapons workshops; the earth of cellars will be leached to extract saltpeter from it.

Article 3. Calibrated weapons will be exclusively reserved to those marching against the enemy. Internal security will be maintained with sporting guns and sidearms.

Article 4. Saddle horses are requisitioned to bring the cavalry up to strength. Draft horses, except for those used in agriculture, will haul artillery and provisions.

Article 5. The Committee of Public Safety is enjoined to take all the measures necessary to establish without delay an extraordinary production of weapons of all sorts in a mode corresponding to the energy and élan of the French people. Consequently, it is authorized to create the establishments, factories, and plants judged necessary for carrying out the work, as well as to requisition for the purpose the artisans and workers throughout the Republic who can contribute to its success. . . .

The central establishment of this system of production will be Paris.⁹¹

The execution matched the rhetoric. In consequence, a foreigner brave or foolhardy enough to visit Paris in late spring 1794, perhaps to attend the festival of Reason on 8 June, would have found the capital of France outwardly transformed into an open-air armory and a collective munitions factory supplying the armies of the Republic. All churches were closed to religious worship. The abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, now the Atelier de l’Unité, had become a huge saltpeter refinery treating 25,000 pounds of the crude salt a day. Individual citizens and teams of patriots everywhere supplemented the official scavenger crews, the saltpetermen of Paris, in ransacking cellars, poking through humid reaches of dirty masonry, and turning over piles of debris in search of encrustations from which to leach out the crude salt. A workforce of 1,800 powdermakers, most of them new to the trade, used a novel process for mixing fine charcoal and granulated sulfur with the refined saltpeter in a makeshift gunpowder plant on the plain of Grenelle.⁹²

Directing the war were Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, the only two members of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety with the benefit of either technical or military training. Carnot took charge of military operations, Prieur of war production. In the overall scheme of things, Carnot’s was by far the greater responsibility. Despite the objections of Robespierre, who was not yet dominant, the Committee itself requested the Convention to elect Carnot to membership. He took his place on 14 August 1793. It is possible that Guyton had called his qualifications to the attention of his successors. He hardly need have done, for Carnot had amply demonstrated his military capability. It is, on the other hand, highly probable that Guyton was behind the election of Prieur, also on 14 August. If so, he sensed in his young cousin a latent organizational capacity that nothing in either Prieur’s political activity, or his previous inactivity in the Corps of Engineers, had made evident.

There is no record that Carnot or Prieur ever spoke at the Jacobins or attended meetings of the Society in Paris. Neither one was a stirring orator. The member of the Committee who normally dressed out their reports in revolutionary rhetoric was Bertrand Barère. Serving in the Legislative Assembly, Carnot had initially been overshadowed by his younger brother, called Carnot-Feulint, also a military engineer, also elected in 1791, and by a larger majority, to represent the Pas-de-Calais, where both were stationed. Feulint was of an affable and outgoing personality and more active in local politics. After the declaration of war, however, the fundamental untrust-worthiness and unworkability of the monarchy brought out a kind of latent republicanism in Lazare, who proved the steadier in his principles. Never a democrat, never an idolater of the people, he nevertheless moved leftward in his political sympathies, his goal an orderly society in which people of his sort, the enlightened, hard-working bourgeoisie of moderate means and respectable background, would lead a dignified, responsible, patriotic life, neither deferring nor condescending to fellow citizens. In such a society the use a man made of his talents would determine his fortunes in life.⁹³

Carnot first manifested his talent for military leadership on the morrow of the fall of the monarchy. On 11 August 1792 the National Assembly named commissioners to the armies to secure their allegiance to the republican order. Carnot headed the mission to the Army of the Rhine. His colleagues were Coustard, a former officer in the musketeers, and Prieur, with whom he now collaborated for the first time. Arriving at Phalsbourg on 14 August, they summoned commanders, staff, and high-ranking officers and without ado put to them the straight question: “Do you purely and simply accept the decrees of the National Assembly, YES or NO?” The few who hesitated were cashiered on the spot. Thereupon the three deputies moved among the rank and file to explain events in Paris, staged a triumphal entry into Strasbourg in the name of the Republic, straightened out border problems with the Swiss on their own terms, and on 4 September reported back to the National Assembly that the Army of the Rhine was loyal and the eastern departments politically secure.⁹⁴

Further missions to the Army of the Pyrenees and the Army of the North led to Carnot’s appointment to the commission sent by the Convention to relieve Dumouriez in early April 1793. Carnot was lucky to be on a side errand to Arras when Dumouriez took his colleagues into custody and turned them over to the Austrians before deserting. Incarnating the authority of the Republic, Carnot assumed temporary command of the leaderless army and retrieved certain positions, notably the town of Furnes, before the arrival of Custine, transferred in the emergency from the Army of the Rhine prior to his own arrest and execution. Carnot commanded troops in the field once again, joining with Jourdan in the capture of Wattignies on 24 September, four weeks after his election to the Committee of Public Safety. Thereafter, he combined in himself functions of a Minister of War with those of Chief of a General Staff.

Carnot was neither a high-flown military thinker in the manner of Guibert, Clausewitz, or Mahon, nor a great commander on the order of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or Washington. He was simply the first military leader who thoroughly believed in the Revolution that brought him to power. The war to be won was dynamic. It had little in common with the static military operations for which he had been trained as a military engineer, wherein fortification was the basis of defense and siegecraft of offense. His youthful Éloge de Vauban (1784) is an eloquent defense of the merit of thus channeling the dogs of war away from civilian populations, and he has sometimes been charged with inconsistency for having mobilized mass armies to wage campaigns of fire and movement aiming at conquest and even conversion to the victor’s cause.⁹⁵ The world had changed, however, and Carnot was no less a pragmatist than a republican. He took charge of a war of principles, not of dynasties; of peoples against kings, not of kings against each other. It had to be fought, not by noble officers animated by fading notions of chivalry in command of professional soldiers serving for pay, but by untrained, patriotic citizens in all ranks taking up arms to defend liberty and equality at home and impose those boons abroad.

Acting with the revolutionary authority and in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, he first of all centralized control of the armies in his own hands. No longer might insubordinate generals—a Lafayette, a Dumouriez, or a Custine—pursue their private designs. On 30 January 1794 Carnot drew up a comprehensive plan for the next campaign that exhibits the range of his thinking. All nine armies of the Republic were to go on the offensive, but not all with the same means or intensity. The decisive thrusts should be concentrated in two or three sectors. The crucial theater was the North, where the enemy was strongest and from where Paris was most vul-nerable. The Army of the North was to be supported by the Army of the Ardennes, while the Armies of the Moselle and the Rhine were to force the enemy to divert a portion of his forces and to keep him constantly on edge, but not to overextend themselves in an invasion. As for the Armies of the Alps, Italy, and the Pyrenees, their mission was to liberate towns and regions occupied by enemy troops, to seize strong points on or beyond the border, and thereupon to conduct holding actions. In the West the armies of Brest and Cherbourg were to complete pacification of the Vendée and to prepare bases for the assault on England that was to follow the reconquest of Belgium and the mouth of the Scheldt. Only then would France free herself from strangulation, commercial as well as naval, by British sea power.⁹⁶

To those ends, of the 700,000 men under arms, two-thirds were assigned to the north and northeast. No less important were logistical factors. Men and materiel must be readily moveable from one sector to another. Existing fortresses must be manned and maintained, and interior lines of transport and communication kept open in a kind of great circle behind the fronts. None of all that, it may be thought, was original with Carnot. Similar considerations deriving from the geopolitical situation of the country had governed the classic strategy of the monarchy throughout early modern history. Carnot’s contribution was that of a well-trained engineer in power. The voice that protested his inclusion when in 1795 the Thermidorean Convention debated the arrest of members of the great Committee had it right: “Carnot organized the Victory,” cried an unidentified deputy.

Carnot’s tactical directives, on the other hand, were revolutionary in the literal sense that they were dictated by the circumstances of the Revolution. Armies largely composed of raw recruits and conscripted peasants could only have their effect through the mass and spirit of patriotic fighters rather than the training and skill of professional soldiers. Instead of advancing along a line of battle, infantry would be deployed in deep columns supported by sharpshooters on either side. Frontal assaults were to be avoided in favor of attack on the wings of the enemy’s position, to be followed by enveloping movements from both sides. The soldier’s surest weapon was his bayonet—at one juncture Carnot supported a proposal, not finally adopted, of arming foot soldiers merely with pikes! The battle would culminate in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy demoralized by cries of “Fonçons—Stab them” as the French closed in for the kill. For the purpose was not merely to outmaneuver and defeat the enemy forces, but to destroy them totally.⁹⁷

The interrelations of Carnot’s military leadership, his scientific work, and his politics have been much discussed among biographers and historians.⁹⁸ At one extreme he is seen as fundamentally an apolitical technician, a patriotic military strategist serving in the government of the day, whatever its complexion. At the other, in keeping with the postmodernist vogue for politicizing actions of every sort even while deploring the exercise of political power itself, Carnot is taken to have infused governance by Terror with the domineering spirit of the engineer. He would have recognized himself in neither caricature. Certainly his talents were those of an engineer, trained in the adaptation of means to ends, decisive and unsentimental in judging of results. In politics his will was that of a tough republican, a reliable and, when need be, a ruthless patriot. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI, moved the decree to annex Monaco and Belgium, proposed conscription for all men betwen twenty and twenty-five, and as basis for a declaration of rights proposed that “the safety of the people is the supreme law” and further that “every political measure is legitimate if it be required for the safety of the state.”

Among the measures Carnot thus judged legitimate were orders to put down rebellion in the Vendée and “exterminate the brigands to the last man”; to recapture Lyons from the rebels “torch in hand and bayonets fixed”; to bombard Toulon “with red-hot cannonballs setting fire to the city”; and to put to the sword every soldier in enemy garrisons on French soil that failed to surrender on demand. His name also appears alongside those of other members of the Committee of Public Safety on numerous directives by which it enforced domestic policy and security, which is to say Terror. On any given day hundreds of such papers passed across the table around which sat those members who were not absent, as some always were, on particular missions of political, economic, or military urgency. No one could have considered, or even read them all. Whether as a matter of routine, or out of governmental solidarity, the Committee members concerned primarily with administration—Jeanbon Saint-André for the Navy, Lindet for commerce and subsistence, Prieur for war production, Carnot for military operations—generally went along with the political measures initiated by the triumvirate of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just.⁹⁹

They did until near the end. Early in July 1794 latent hostility between Robespierre and Carnot, the ideologist and the war leader, broke into the open. Differences over strategy precipitated the break. Saint-Just accused Carnot of treason for massing French forces in the North and in Belgium rather than pushing the Revolution into the Rhineland. Carnot in return accused Robespierre of demagoguery and tyranny. Though not a prime mover in the coup that overthrew the triumvirate on 9 thermidor (27 July), Carnot welcomed their downfall and execution. The next day he addressed a manifesto to “the incomparable armies of the Republic” hailing the disappearance of the “infamous tyrants who had usurped the name of patriots.”¹⁰⁰ Henceforth he need consult only his own lights, political as well as military, in directing the armies.

The role of Prieur de la Côte-d’Or is more difficult to assess.¹⁰¹ After the mission headed by Carnot to the Army of the Rhine, he served on further missions, to Brittany in January 1793 and, in company with Romme, to Normandy in May and June. The latter culminated in his arrest in Bayeux and detention until late July by the municipal authorities of Caen, outraged over the proscription of the Girondist deputies from the region. Thereafter, Prieur exercised major responsibility for the first and only time in his life as a member of the Committee of Public Safety. He was elected on 14 August, the same day as Carnot. What he brought to the organization of war production was primarily political authority. Initially he channeled it through the appropriate bureaus of the Ministries of War, the Navy, and Finance, which were often at odds with each other. On 1 February 1794 (13 pluviôse an II) the Committee of Public Safety put all these offices under the control of a single commission, in effect a ministry of munitions. The Commission des Armes et Poudres had five branches: Heavy Artillery, Small Arms, Logistics, the former Régie des Poudres, and the new Revolutionary Agency of Saltpeter and Gunpowder.¹⁰²

On substantive, technological matters Prieur and his staff, often enlisting the agency of deputies on mission, implemented the advice of a set of scientific consultants. Officially an agency of the ruling committee, the Armaments Section—Section des Armes du Comité Salut Public—was assigned working space in offices in the Pavillon de Flore of the Louvre, hard by the chamber wherein the great Committee ruled the country. No record survives of the procedures or internal organization, if any, of the Armaments Section. It is unclear whether its members constituted a collective panel, or whether they came and went, initiating projects and responding individually to calls on their skills and expertise. The latter scenario seems more likely. What seems unlikely is that the inexperienced Prieur should have conceived such a system on his own. The obvious candidate for éminence grise would be Guyton-Morveau, by now an elder statesman of science, who could advise his young kinsman on men, measures, and possibilities. For clearly the functioning of the Armaments Section exhibited a regularization of the ad hoc consultation of experts by the earlier Committee that Guyton had chaired.

No definitive roster of the Armaments Section exists. Of the names that appear under its letterhead on directives and publications engendered by the manifold activities, the most prominent was Monge. Berthollet was his closest associate. Deeply involved were not only Guyton but the fellow chemist who was also a deputy in the Convention, Fourcroy. The industrial chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal was summoned in December 1793 to organize salt-peter production in the south of France, and was later given oversight of the nationwide effort to that end and also of the manufacture of gunpowder. Running a new weapons laboratory, the Atelier de Perfectionnement, was Vandermonde, whose main mission was to perfect fabrication of gunlocks made of interchangeable parts. After having headed the Bureau of Matériel in the Ministry of War under Pache, and been sent by Monge to move Fabre’s incendiary project from La Fère and install it in Paris, Hassenfratz was named, probably at Monge’s instance, to be handson coordinator of the many enterprises constituting the Arms Manufacture of Paris. The chemists Adet, Darcet, and Vauquelin, the pharmacist Pelletier, and the industrialist Périer brothers participated more peripherally. The chemical entrepreneur C. A. Carny, who had fabricated muriate powder for Berthollet, developed the novel method for corning gunpowder first used at Grenelle and then generally. Ancillary to munitions making was Nicolas Leblanc’s effort to bring his process for the conversion of salt to soda into profitable production at Saint-Denis.¹⁰³

Thus did sovereign political power and scientific knowledge assume the stance they have exhibited in relation to each other in times of military stress throughout modern history. The structure has been more systematic than in the relatively incidental instances of the early Galileo and Lavoisier, not to mention Archimedes, situated in their respective arsenals, for the most part in peacetime. When it is a question of novel weapons, the initiative normally comes from the scientists, who approach government, as did Berthollet in the instance of muriate powder, as would Fritz Haber introducing poison gas in World War I, as would refugee physicists pressing for development of atomic bombs in World War II. It could only be thus. Military commanders could have had no advance notion of the properties of potassium chlorate, chlorine and mustard gas, or uranium-235. Far from welcoming, let alone seeking, such munitions, they have characteristically resisted innovation, at least in the early stages. On the other hand, when it is a question, not of invention, but of maximizing the effectiveness of existing weapons and technology, government takes the initiative in calling on scientists. Such, to cite a recent example, was the origin of the Radiation Laboratory that developed radar technology at MIT in World War II. Even so did the Committee of Public Safety constitute its Armaments Section.

What specifically did they do? They did the sort of thing scientists have done in wartime ever since. They wrote technical manuals. They taught courses. They advised on, but did not direct, production of saltpeter, gun-powder, small arms, and ordnance.

First to consider are the publications ordered by the Committee of Public Safety in September 1793 for distribution within the several industries. In very short order a set of well-illustrated technical manuals patriotically issued from the press. The principal titles and, where known, the size of the press run will exhibit the dimensions of the effort:

Glancing through the above writings, and turning over many handsome plates, one may at first take them for a continuation in revolutionary circumstances of the treatment accorded arts and crafts in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert and the multivolume Description des arts et métiers of the Academy of Science. So they were, in a sense, but with a signal difference reaching farther than the military urgency that motivated their composition. The Encyclopédie was conceived as a literary enterprise wherein technical subjects were treated, sometimes by amateurs, sometimes by practitioners, in an informed manner. Among the purposes was raising the prestige of the arts and crafts in the republic of letters and the world at large. The Academy’s compilation, by contrast, was brought to completion by Duhamel du Monceau, who had no ulterior ideological purposes.¹⁰⁵ A stalwart of useful knowledge, he enlisted leading figures in the trades themselves and persons who for economic or administrative reasons were knowledgeable about the specialties they treated. Three minor academicians took on a number of small articles as a favor to Duhamel, but no leading member of the Academy of Science participated. The title is accurate. The enormous work, invaluable and value free, is descriptive, not analytical, and what it describes are techniques.

The revolutionary manuals are deeper in vein, though not more practical. They may properly be defined as early items in the literature of technology, where the word is taken in its original and literal sense meaning not, as it soon came do to, a whole body of techniques, but rather scientific knowledge of particular techniques. The authors were important scientists. Their treatment was analytical as well as descriptive and reached to the scientific principles underlying the processes in question. What brought them to the problems, however, was neither scientific curiosity, nor a wish for recognition from their peers in a defunct Academy. It was the summons from the Committee of Public Safety. Nevertheless, the prototype antedates the military emergency and the Revolution. In 1786 Vandermonde, Monge, and Berthollet had already prepared a fully technological memoir on the nature of iron.¹⁰⁶

Their principal finding was that the solubility of carbon in molten iron is responsible for the properties of steel. The trio of authors begins the revolutionary postscript with an abbreviation of their earlier account of the chemistry of smelting, making use now of the vocabulary of modern chemical nomenclature unavailable to them in 1786. Their main purpose is to instruct iron masters on methods for converting iron into the three main types of steel. The first type, “natural” or ingot steel, was generally called German steel, since it predominated east of the Rhine. In order to produce it, the amount of charcoal in the blast furnace is increased. The resulting pig iron is then fused directly while shielded from air by a coating of slag. The best quality came from Styria and Carinthia, and our authors draw their information from Hassenfratz, who had visited that region for the government office of mines in 1783–84.

Cementation, practiced mainly in England, produced the second type of steel. Success required the finest grade of iron, which the English imported from Sweden. Iron bars coated with charcoal dust were packed into a crucible and covered with a layer of damp sand before heating to incandescence and baking in a beehive furnace fired by coal. French iron masters are advised to begin converting their shops to steelmaking on a small scale. To guide them Vandermonde and his colleagues include a plate of the furnace Gabriel Jars had constructed on returning from his tour of inspection in England in 1764–65. The model to which they might eventually aspire is illustrated in plates of the splendid Newcastle Furnace that Panckoucke allowed the authors to print in advance of a forthcoming volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique.

Crucible steel (acier fondu), finally, or Sheffield steel, is produced by fusing either of the other types a second time. The hardest of all, it is the best suited for jewelry, watchmaking, surgical lancets and scalpels, other fine blades, and bits for small drills, but it is brittle and hard to work. German steel is the toughest and best adapted for heavy implements and use in construction. For the present purpose, however, attention is to be focused on cementite, which is altogether superior for lances, pikes, battle-axes, sabres, and gun locks. Where to obtain the best iron? “Fellow citizens, let us transport to our forges those prideful balustrades, those grills that have nothing to preserve, and if we find the qualities of good iron there, let us convert them into steel.”¹⁰⁷

Vandermonde, the principal of the three authors, further received orders on 12 September to visit Klingenthal in Alsace, seat of the only manufacturer in France capable of producing sabres of high quality. The mission was to draft instructions for steel workers making other sorts of blades. Before the end of October he had compiled a 106-page quarto illustrated with nine plates exhibiting the techniques for fabricating bayonets, ramrods, and the seven main types of sabres. Meanwhile Monge turned out the manual on casting and boring cannons. There, as in his lectures in the Revolutionary Course, he expressed impatience with hide-bound foundry owners who refused to substitute for earthen trenches the more expeditious method of modeling the molds in a bed of sand. Onetime iron-master as well as mathematician, and former Minister of the Navy, Monge was most at home with castiron naval and coast artillery ordnance. The lighter and far more expensive bronze howitzers and cannon for field artillery formed no part of the public display in Paris. They were cast in the Périer brothers foundry at Chaillot, by Michel Brézin near the Arsenal, in two lesser establishments where the masters, Héban and Thury, also converted their foundries to bronze, and in several new foundries started in the spring and summer of 1794.¹⁰⁸

Shortage of copper was the problem limiting these and provincial foundries in production of weapons for the field artillery. A solution lay, or rather hung, in the church bells of France. Resolutions of the Convention on 23 July and 3 August 1793 decreed that they be taken down from their belfries and converted into cannon, leaving one per village for sounding alarms. “Bells with which superstition has overloaded churches,” so begins the Instruction on their destruction, “offer a fertile resource, a sort of mineral abundant enough to suffice for our needs.”¹⁰⁹ At this moment all the sciences, all the arts, all branches of human knowledge, highly perfected by the French, must cooperate in the defense of liberty and equality and the destruction of enemies of the Republic. Indifference to the public interest is almost as culpable as enmity. Physics and chemistry must take the lead in clarifying the work of manufacturing weapons.

With that call to armaments, Pelletier and Darcet launch into a detailed technical account of the metallurgy of bronze and the theory of oxidation applied to alloys. The best bells contained eighty-five pounds of copper in a hundredweight, the poorest seventy-five pounds, the complement being tin with traces of lead, antimony, zinc, and bismuth. There had been no occasion in the old regime to recover copper from bell metal. A new monetary system would require copper coins, however, and Pelletier had undertaken experiments in 1790 and 1791 at the instance of the Monetary Committee of the Constituent Assembly. Since tin oxidizes more readily than copper, his strategy was to melt cut-up bell metal in a reverberatory furnace. Oxygen was supplied by stirring in oxidized copper scale, or if available manganese oxide, as an intermediary. The procedure worked on a laboratory scale. Enlisting the services of J. J. Dizé, Pelletier repeated it in the copper foundry in Romilly, near Rouen, and succeeded in recovering the copper from five hundred pounds of fragmented bell metal. In the first experiment, copper oxide was the oxidant, in the second manganese oxide, which he now thought to be superior. He completed those trials on 30 July 1791, and reported his results both to the Monetary Committee and the Academy of Science. The only publication in 1791, however, was a memoir of Fourcroy, who independently conducted a series of experiments. He appreciated Pelletier’s work, but considered that copper oxide was preferable to manganese oxide for reasons of economy and availability.¹¹⁰ What with delay in the reform of currency and the resort to assignats, shortages of copper did not appear before the military crisis of 1793, and in the interval these investigations dropped from view.

Conforming to the September order of the Committee of Public Safety, an Instruction was rushed into print. No author is given, but from internal evidence Pelletier must have drafted it. Since the object of the earlier experiments was to obtain copper for coinage, he had then carried the oxidation of the tin in molten bronze to completion and recovered pure copper. Gun metal, however, was 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin. In principle the process could be arrested when all but 10 percent of the tin was oxidized. Whether that would work in practice was uncertain. Joined by Darcet, he returned to Romilly in February 1794. Working there with the director and chief inspector of the plant, Darcet and Pelletier conducted a series of trials with four-hundred-pound batches of bell metal. Their experiments confirmed Fourcroy’s finding that copper oxide was the simplest oxidant. Even more important, taking samples from the melt as oxidation proceeded made it perfectly possible to detect the point at which the ratio of copper to tin had reached 90:10. The molten alloy might then be run directly into cannon molds. Publishing a supplement to their manual in April 1794, they conclude, “Thus this brazen source of noise, hanging so uselessly in the air for centuries, which served only to fatigue us by the importunity of sound, today becomes one of the most powerful means of our defense, and one of the most abundant resources to supply the arts.”¹¹¹

One important item was published only later. Unlike all the foregoing, it concerned an entirely new procedure. On 1 November 1793, the governing committee instructed Berthollet to seek expeditious ways to meet the needs of the army for shoe leather. He was aware that Armand Seguin, who had collaborated with Lavoisier in the latter’s concluding researches on respiration, had begun work on that problem several years previously. At Berthollet’s instance, the Committee of Public Safety enjoined Seguin to continue his research and report his results as soon as possible. He set to work and on 23 prairial (11 May 1794) addressed a memoir to the Committee. Berthollet had it referred to Lelièvre and Pelletier, who were instructed to follow every step in Seguin’s tanning of a sample of at least 100 hides. A location in Mousseaux, site of the present Parc Monceau, was assigned him for the trials, which began in the heat of the summer on 19 July. Prieur, Guyton, Monge, and Berthollet attended at intervals. Pelletier and Lelièvre submitted a preliminary report to the Committee of Public Safety on 28 July (10 thermidor, the day of Robespierre’s execution), and confirmed their very positive judgment in a detailed account on 25 October 1794.¹¹²

Traditional artisanal methods for tanning hides required two to three years. First the hair and flesh had to be removed. Tanners used one of three methods: packing in lime, packing in fermented barley, or rotting in heaps. That took anywhere from two or three to fifteen months. Tanning itself consisted in stacking the depilated hides separated by layers of dried tannin in a ditch and covering them with dirt for eighteen months to two years. Nut gall, oak bark, or sumac were the sources of tannin. No one in the trade of tanning knew why it worked. Seguin began his research with chemical analysis of tannin itself, and of the organic matter in fat and follicles. His process got rid of the latter by the action of sulfuric acid. First, he soaked hides for a day or two in a lightly acidulated solution of bark from which the tannin had been extracted. The cleansed and softened hides then under-went a second soaking in a solution of tannin. With that the job was done. Calf and cow hides would be ready in a few days. The thickest steer hides needed two weeks.

The Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety considered Pelletier and Lelièvre’s report in early October 1794, and initially decided not to publish the method lest enemy countries reap the benefits. The first intention was to set up several factories to supply the armies in secret. The shortage of leather generally, and drastically rising prices, soon led to second thoughts. Seguin refrained from taking out a patent, and instead reached an agreement by which the government supplied the means to go into production. He received a fifteen-year lease on the Ile des Sèvres, where he would build a factory. The Committee of Public Safety further advanced him the capital from funds under its control.¹¹³ By April 1795 Seguin had received 195,000 livres. He was also allocated large quantities of salt, copper, sulfur, and iron. Much of the lead for pipes, and for making sulfuric acid, came from the roof of Notre Dame. By April 1795 the revolutionary tannery was in production with a workforce of four hundred. Intended as a pilot plant to reform the industry, it included a school where candidates nominated by the Committee would be trained. Between June and October 1795, Seguin put one hundred fifty students through a series of six courses.

This is not the place to follow the further history of tanning in France. Suffice it to say that the seed fell on infertile ground. The tannery on the Ile de Sèvres continued in operation into Napoleonic times, when Seguin was accused of profiteering from the needs of the army. A number of his pupils attempted to replicate his procedures in the provinces. None of the efforts took root, however, and not until well into the nineteenth century did procedures such as his prevail over the fidelity to traditional ways of tanners all ignorant of chemistry.

Whatever the influence of these manuals in the several trades, it was rather on the lecture podium that scientists appeared briefly at center stage in the theater of the Revolution. The notion of offering instruction for artisans and others on extraction of saltpeter originated with the Régie des Poudres, which announced a series of lectures with practical demonstrations at the Arsenal of Paris on 30 January 1794 (11 pluviôse). With the enthusiastic concurrence of Monge and his colleagues of the Armaments Section, and very possibly at their instigation, the Committee of Public Safety seized on the idea. Its decree of 2 February called for enrolling candidates from all over France in a program of crash courses on the fabrication of arms and munitions.

Every district in the country was to designate two “robust, intelligent, and hard-working citizens.”¹¹⁴ They must leave for Paris within five days. To be preferred were men twenty-five to thirty years of age who were already in service in the artillery or active in the National Guard. One of the pair must be able to read and write. In Paris they would be lodged by the good offices of the municipality for thirty days (three décades) and paid three livres a day. Each of the forty-eight sections of Paris would also name two men. In addition fifty carpenters from the capital were to attend the courses on casting and boring cannon. Each section would nominate six intelligent representatives of that trade to an assembly meeting in the hall of the Electors in the Eveché. There the fifty deemed most capable would be elected by their fellows. On completing the course they would go out to the provinces to erect new foundries, forges, and boring mills.

Curriculum and staff were ready in a fortnight. Two courses of instruction were taught by nine professors. The first treated preparation of saltpeter and gunpowder, the second the casting and fabrication of cannon. Both met daily for eight days and were offered three times in a row, the starting dates having been 19 February (1 ventôse), 1 March (11 ventôse), and 10 March (20 ventôse). On every day each lecture was also given in three versions, always by a different professor, on the theory that hearing the same material presented thrice in as many voices would drive it home. In the five mornings allotted to saltpeter, students who crowded onto the benches of the amphitheater in the Jardin des Plantes listened first to Fourcroy, then to Pluvinet, and last to Dufourny, each speaking to the identical lesson plan. In three sessions on gunpowder, Berthollet, Guyton, and Carny followed the same pattern. Those who wished might then troop over to the Hall of the Electors in the Bishop’s Palace where at two o’clock Monge, Hassenfratz, and Périer held forth on the occurrence of ore, the smelting of iron, and the founding, casting, and boring of cannon barrels. The last three afternoons of that series were spent visiting foundries, forges, and smithies engaged in revolutionary fabrication of cannon, muskets, and side arms. A student conscientious or bewildered enough to attend all the sessions throughout the month of ventôse thus heard every topic and watched every demonstration nine times over.

Pedagogy graduated into pageantry. Revolutionary Paris opened its arms to the several hundred provincial pupils from deepest France. They were welcomed like the Marseillais volunteers who had surged into the capital on 10 August 1792 chanting what became the national anthem. On 7 ventôse a deputation from the Convention and Committee of Public Safety attended the morning lesson, after which the pupils invited the “citoyens députés” back to their barracks to share their frugal repast and join in planting a tree of liberty. The next evening the students repaired after class to the Jacobin Club. Their entrance excited acclamation on all sides. One of their professors, Hassenfratz, rose to praise their zeal and to laud the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety, “which sees to it that Enlightenment is for all citizens and proscribes the aristocracy of academies.” On 10 ventôse, preceded by drums, the whole student body was presented before the bar of the Convention carrying a banner with the inscription, “Sent from the districts, guided by the Genius of Liberty, we know how to undertake everything for the Fatherland and to die in its defense.”¹¹⁵

On the closing day of classes, 30 ventôse, the Commune of Paris declared a festival culminating in an immense parade. Trumpeters, mounted gendarmes, cannoneers with two artillery pieces on horse-drawn gun carriages, drummers, a platoon of sappers and miners, justices of the peace, commissioners of police, more drummers, members of the Civil and Criminal Tribunal, the Revolutionary Tribunal itself—all these bearing appropriate banners preceded delegations from the revolutionary saltpeter workshops, the revolutionary forges and gunneries of the capital, a large band, two mothers and babies from each section of Paris, and as centerpiece the nine professors of the Revolutionary Courses followed by their students. Advancing twenty-five abreast with linked arms, each student held high a copy of the Instruction furnished them. They marched in three groups. Borne aloft ahead of the first was a draped and garlanded framework on which rested a basket of saltpeter. Carried in front of the second contingent, a centrifuge for revolutionary gunpowder (of which more in the next section) was inscribed with the legend “Mort aux Tyrans.” The third group pulled in their train a gun carriage and cannon they had fabricated. Astride the barrel rode a young citizen in a red liberty bonnet wielding tools of the trade and applying finishing touches. Next marched the fifty carpenters followed by a second band, and finally the municipal authorities of the Commune, the Department of Paris, and the Council of Ministers. The route lay along the quais of the Left Bank, across the Seine to the Place de la Révolution, and through the Tuileries Garden to the Hall of the Convention. There the Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpetrês presented a Phrygian liberty bonnet made of saltpeter, only to be outdone by the deputation from the Fontaine de Grenelle, which placed on the altar of the Fatherland a saltpeter model Mountain topped by a saltpeter bust of Marat.

A distillation of the revolutionary spirit, the celebration of the Revolutionary Courses served in effect as a dress rehearsal for Robespierre’s festival of the Supreme Being on 20 prairial (8 June 1794). The whole experiment, however, had lasting consequences of quite another sort. The idea of revolutionary courses became a talisman for the renewal of higher education. Selection of talented young people from the entire country who would receive intensive instruction given by masters in technical and other modern disciplines—such was the model. Instantiating the principle were, in addition to lesser examples, the École Polytechnique, the new medical schools, and the no less portentous, if short-lived, École Normale of the year III (1795).