4. MUNITIONS AND GUNS

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

On 30 pluviôse (18 February), the day before the opening of the first revolutionary course, a deputation appeared before the bar of the Convention bearing a tribute of the first 6,804 pounds of saltpeter already harvested in the section of the Gardes-Françaises. The delegates concluded their address by singing a Marseillaise of Saltpeter, of which the first and third stanzas run:

Et cet esprit, c’est du salpêtre!¹¹⁷

All that, and far more, pertains to the popular as distinct, but not finally separate, from the technical aspect of the revolutionary production of salt-peter. For the whole story was more than a one-act drama. Performance of sans-culottes in city parks and peasants in village squares was real, wide-spread, and politically exhilarating. There the masses did the work of the Saltpeter Corps in the old regime, which had been limited to extraction of the salt from masonry, debris, alleys, cellars, caves, barnyards, stables, dove-cotes, manure piles, unfloored country kitchens, and certain natural deposits. Once obtained, crude saltpeter had to be refined, a task formerly reserved to the Régie des Poudres. Expansion and acceleration of the latter process required persons versed in chemical industry. Though included in the epithet “revolutionary” by the protagonists, enlargement of scale and innovative techniques for refining evolved commensurately with the growing needs of the armies throughout the time of political affect and afterward. It was in this phase, naturally enough, that participation of scientists was instrumental as well as hortatory.

It will be best to consider extraction and refining in order, beginning with a further caveat, to the effect that revolutionary saltpeter did not surge out of the ground all suddenly in response to the levée-en-masse of 23 August 1793. Only in March 1794, some five months into the year of the Terror, did the yield begin to materialize in any quantity. Before drafting the operative decree of 14 frimaire (4 December), Prieur and his scientific advisers in the Armaments Section had sought to prod the Régie des Poudres into expanding its possibilities. Among the last acts of the Constituent Assembly had been a law of 23 September 1791 nationalizing the munitions monopoly that had been a concession under Lavoisier’s leadership since 1775. The régisseurs, their headquarters still in the Arsenal of Paris, now reported to the Minister of Public Contributions (Finance) and were paid salaries instead of a share of the profits. They headed a considerable organization, beginning with a staff of twenty-two in Paris. Four inspectors-general oversaw the operations of another forty-seven refineries and powder mills of varying capacity throughout the country, each under the direction of a commissioner in one of three grades. All but eight subordinate members of the staff had worked under Lavoisier since before the Revolution, the mean time of service having been fifteen years.¹¹⁸

Piecemeal efforts began with a measure introduced by Carnot on 28 August 1793 lifting all restrictions on the operations of saltpetermen. Hence-forth they were authorized to enter and search all premises in any property whatever, without the owner’s permission. Especially to be exploited were ruined buildings and debris in the traitorous cities of Lyons and Toulon, demolished by order of the Convention after the defeat of their rebellious citizenry. The governing Committee added a fourth régisseur, Nicolas Leblanc, to the Régie des Poudres, exempted saltpetermen and powder-makers from military service, and requisitioned further workers to expand the corps. Representatives on mission spurred the search for saltpeter in regions where production lagged. Monge and a subcommittee of chemists in the Armaments Section were assigned funds to experiment with implementing the creation of artificial nitrification plants. It was recalled that in 1778 Lavoisier and his fellow régisseur, Clouet, had undertaken investigations of the Loire Valley downstream from Tours, and also of the Charente, and there discovered rich deposits that had never been exploited. Bypassing the Régie, Prieur enlisted the skills of a young chemist, Nicolas Vauquelin, Fourcroy’s former laboratory assistant and junior colleague. The assignment made his name. Appointed commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety on 31 August 1793, and given full powers to commandeer men, tools, and materials, Vauquelin and an associate, Joseph Jacotot, set up workshops for extracting crude saltpeter from the earths containing it throughout the region. 119

French victories in the autumn and early winter of 1793–94 may be thought to argue that these expedients and others like them, combined with a proportionate increase in size and number of powder mills, did in the event suffice to furnish the armies with the gunpowder needed to turn the tide of war. Such was not the view of Carnot, Prieur, and their scientific advisers. In what degree the further revolutionary saltpeter program was politically motivated, and in what degree logistically, it is impossible to say. The elements were inextricable. It appears likely, however, and Prieur’s report to the Convention on 14 frimaire suggests as much, that the quick and stunning success of the Vauquelin mission entered into the calculation in the decision of the Committee of Public Safety to transcend the capacities of the Gunpowder Administration, a holdover from the old regime after all, and to enlist the general public in augmenting the supply of raw material for munitions.

Initially the Régie des Poudres was to have been enlarged and supplemented, not supplanted. The decree of 14 frimaire enjoined private citizens to search everywhere for saltpeter save in locations reserved to the Saltpeter Corps. The Régie was to send one of its officials to every department in order to provide instruction to agents whom each district and municipality would name to organize the extraction of saltpeter locally. A common work-shop might be set up, or property owners might leach fruity deposits and evaporate the liquor on their own. In either case crude saltpeter was to be compensated at the fixed price of 24 sous a pound on delivery to the nearest installation of the Régie for refining.¹²⁰

Distrustful of routine, however, and impatient for results, the Committee of Public Safety incrementally took control of munitions into its own hands. A decree of 4 nivôse (24 December 1793) divided France into eight regions for the purpose.¹²¹ An inspector in each exercised the authority of the Committee of Public Safety and reported directly to it. Henceforth certification of district agents pertained to them, not to officials of the Régie des Poudres, as did responsibility for stimulating the zeal of local authorities, extending the search for saltpeter, correcting procedures in workshops and powder mills, and instructing a team of young workers who might educate their fellows both by precept and example. The Gunpowder Administration continued to operate its own arsenals and powder mills, but had no part in the proliferating revolutionary operations.

Named to oversee ten departments in west central France was Vauquelin. His erstwhile collaborator, Jacotot, a Dijonnais lawyer and science teacher who had distinguished himself as a volunteer in the artillery, headed the neighboring ten departments in central France. François-Antoine-Henri Descroizilles, a pharmacist of Rouen turned chemical manufacturer, covered ten departments in the Northeast. A onetime consultant of Roland, he had been arrested as a federalist early in the Terror. Descroizilles had conducted successful experiments on artificial nitrification, however, and a memoir on the subject composed in prison won him release and appointment as inspector. It is an almost certain surmise that Guyton and Berthollet were the ones responsible for selecting the eight inspectors, all of whom were competent in chemistry, several as apothecaries.

The one they named first, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, had charge of the largest territory, eleven departments in Provence and Languedoc. A brilliant chemistry teacher in his youth and author of a successful textbook, Chaptal had become an enterprising chemical manufacturer in Montpellier.¹²² Participation in the revolutionary munitions program brought him to the fore, as it did Vauquelin, with the difference that his became a far more important presence on the national stage. In later years Chaptal published path-setting works on viniculture, on industrial and agricultural chemistry, and on French industry in general.¹²³ Before that, as will appear, he served Bona-parte in the critical post of Minister of the Interior throughout the Consulate, during which term of office Chaptal in effect organized the Napoleonic administration of the country.

By February 1794 the flood of saltpeter began to outstrip the refining capacity of the Régie des Poudres, which was equally incapable of fabricating more than a fraction of the gunpowder it eventually made possible. Refining and powdermaking both required skills and a labor force as well as patriotism, however, and were none so easy to decentralize as was extraction from far-flung deposits. In the forefront of the action was another chemical manufacturer, Jean-Antoine Carny, rue du Harlay-au-Marais in Paris, to whom Berthollet had turned for industrial scale production of muriate powder in August 1793, and who on 12 April had already approached the first Committee of Public Safety with a proposal to fabricate the powerful new explosive.¹²⁴ Questions about Carny’s honesty accompany his name in many of the archival records where traces of his activity remain. He was well thought of by Berthollet, Guyton, and Prieur, however, and there is no doubt about his enterprise. On 15 December 1793 Carny came forward with the design of what he claimed to be a new machine for fabricating gunpowder in a safe, speedy, and inexpensive manner—of which more in a moment. At or near the same time, Carny further proposed adopting a process for refining salt-peter more expeditiously than by the traditional method.

By the end of January 1794 it became clear to Prieur and his colleagues that procurement of munitions and weapons must no longer be partitioned among the three ministries of War, the Navy, and Finance.¹²⁵ On 1 February 1794 (13 pluviôse) the Convention centralized all operations under a new Commission des Armes et Poudres under the direct control of the Committee of Public Safety. To coordinate the proliferating activities in the capital, the Committee had already on 26 January (7 pluviôse) created an Administration Révolutionnaire des Poudres et Salpêtres for Paris.¹²⁶ It was to have three administrators politically acceptable to the Commune and under the technical oversight of a commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety. On 3 February Carny was duly appointed to be munitions chief in Paris.¹²⁷

Decisions about revolutionary installations were taken at the same juncture. The governing committee had already instructed Carny and an associate to scout out properties in which new powder mills might be installed. On 29 January it accepted his recommendation of the château of Grenelle beyond the Gros-Caillou quarter and an estate near the Porte des Ternes in what is now the seventeenth arrondissement.¹²⁸ The section of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Unité in patriotic parlance) stepped forward simultaneously, no doubt at Prieur’s prompting, with a solution to the problem of mounting a refinery for processing masses of crude saltpeter from all over France. Their revolutionary committee, ever distinguished by patriotism, offered for the purpose the nave and precincts of their Temple of Reason, the once and future abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In exchange they requested allocation of a smaller church in which to celebrate the cult of the Supreme Being. On 14 pluviôse (2 February), in a decree signed by Prieur alone, the Committee of Public Safety accepted the proposal, stipulating that the paintings in the ancient structure be transferred to the Louvre before refining began.¹²⁹

At the end of February, Prieur and his consultants completed marginalization of the Gunpowder Administration. On the twenty-seventh the Committee of Public Safety extended the powers of the Administration Révolutionnairedes Poudres et Salpêtres from Paris to the entire Republic.¹³⁰Henceforth the district agents overseeing the people’s extraction of crudesaltpeter all over France would report to the Revolutionary Administration.It would establish refineries and powder mills where it thought proper, alwayswith the approval of the Committee of Public Safety. It would place attheir head qualified artisans, giving preference to those who had followedthe revolutionary courses in Paris. In charge would be two expert commissioners.The side-tracked Gunpowder Administration, renamed Agence Nationaledes Poudres, would still run its own installations, but have no furtherpart in improvising new ones.

Prieur and his scientific consultants had already decided on the two commissioners who would head the national effort. Descroizilles, inspector for Normandy and the Northeast, accepted forthwith. Chaptal, inspector in the South, was in Carcassonne when he received a letter from Berthollet, dated 25 February, which informed him that “the wheel of the Revolution would be calling him to other functions.” Chaptal demurred. His enthusiasm for the Revolution had extended no further than the work of the Constituent Assembly. A patriot he supremely was, but of Carnot’s ilk, not Robespierre’s. If Republic there had to be, and clearly the Monarchy had failed, it should be an orderly Republic of talents and merit. For Chaptal’s was a provincial sensibility, nurtured in Montpellier and steeped in the culture of the Midi.

Though Chaptal was anything but a political activist by temperament, in early 1793 he was among the leaders of local Federalist resistance to Jacobin domination from Paris. As a consequence he was arrested and detained in the Citadel of Montpellier after expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention in June. Fortunately, the Revolutionary Tribunal had not yet extended its reach to Montpellier, and he was released after a few days. Thereupon he and his family took refuge in a remote village in the Cévennes. He kept a low profile high in the mountains until late December 1793, when the Committee of Public Safety appointed him Saltpeter Inspector in the Midi.

Two months later, summoned to a Paris ruled by Terror, Chaptal initially responded that he thought himself to be more useful to the Republic where he was. Attempting to take no for an answer, Berthollet sought to persuade the Committee of Public Safety to respect Chaptal’s reluctance. He failed. “Your refusal and your delay are very damaging,” Berthollet wrote, and sent a further word the next day: “Are you aware that the [Gunpowder] Agency with all its facilities cannot fabricate more than six million pounds a year, and that we require, and must make, thirty million? . . . You are going to compromise your reputation. The Committee of Public Safety will certainly put you under requisition.”

Still Chaptal held back. A final message from Berthollet urges: “The Committee of Public Safety will have none of your refusal. It knows that you are very useful in your present mission, but it needs you at the center of the action. . . . Come! You will have the backing of the Committee of Public Safety to do good work, and to resist any malevolence that manifests it-self. . . . I think that any further resistance will be interpreted badly.” Finally, on 23 March a direct letter from Carnot and Prieur themselves left Chaptal neither doubt nor choice. In Paris on or about 1 April, he met Robespierre for the first time, and went to work, conscious all the while of the fate that would await him if “malevolence” should prevail. It took the form of repeated denunciations that the Jacobin leadership in Montpellier forwarded to Fouquier-Tinville, prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Whatever Descroizilles’s contributions, his part was secondary, and Chaptal had overall charge of revolutionary production of munitions. Documents are lacking, but it must have been he who decided to concentrate all powdermaking in the château of Grenelle rather than setting up a second mill near the Porte des Ternes. Vats, troughs, stoves, and ovens were installed in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and refining masses of crude saltpeter began there in April, some weeks before the improvised powder mill was ready to combine the finished product with charcoal and sulfur. Serving as commissioner of the Committee of Public Safety under Chaptal, Carny had the job of designing both operations. His virtuosity was much more important in improving the technology of gunpowder than in refining saltpeter, however, and beginning in early May, he focused his attention on perfecting powdermaking at Grenelle.

It soon appeared that refining saltpeter and milling it into gunpowder posed problems of a very different sort from extraction of the raw material. Extraction was a nationwide voluntary effort, modestly compensated as piecework, motivated by patriotism, conducted in public, sustained by civic spirit. Crude saltpeter from all over France had to be shipped to Paris for processing and fabrication into gunpowder. Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Grenelle were in effect factory operations. They required, not merely technical virtuosity, but firm management backed by political authority. Under the circumstances nothing weaker than the authority of the Convention embodied in Representatives of the People would suffice. To direct Grenelle, the Committee of Public Safety named a naval engineer, Joseph Niou, deputy from Charente-Inférieue. To direct Saint-Germain-des-Prés it chose Augustin Frécine, deputy from the Loir-et-Cher.

The terms of their instructions make clear that the problems Niou and Frécine were expected to resolve were other than chemical. They were to see to the proper organization of the revolutionary powder mill and refinery and to maintenance of order. They were to dismiss employees who did not perform well, whether because of incompetence or lack of civic spirit. To replace the delinquents, they were to find citizens capable of good work. If necessary they might requisition any not already engaged in national service.¹³¹ Thus did Niou and Frécine, in company with their counterparts managing the fabrication of ordnance and small arms, encounter what Marxist historiography considers to be the fundamental contradiction of the French Revolution. The material interests of the working class were contrary to those of the government it had enabled to seize power.

On 23 prairial (11 June 1794) Frécine found himself obliged to address the following proclamation to his labor force:

I feel the most painful regret at finding myself forced even for a moment to drop the language of fraternity with you in order to make you hear only that of severe reason. I learn with surprise and sadness that there are individuals among you who obstinately want a raise in pay at the expense of the Republic. What then, citizens! Has the detestable spirit of greed that national justice has just annihilated among monopolists infected the pure soul of sans-culottes? Such a suspicion is too odious for me to be willing to entertain it, and you will not allow it to hang over your heads.

Did they not understand, continued Frécine, that price controls (the maximum enacted on 29 September 1793) entailed fixing the price of their labor? None among them was earning less than twice what he had in 1790. Let there be no more talk of raises. Let them remember that they are under requisition, and that the law of 13 pluviôse (2 February) prescribes arrest for whoever “impedes or delays the extraordinary fabrication of saltpeter and gunpowder.”¹³²

In the event nothing was allowed to impede it. From mid-April until mid-June 1794, the Régie, renamed Agence Nationale des Poudres, ran its old installations while Chaptal’s Agence Révolutionnaire expanded the improvised ones. Finally, on 17 messidor (5 July 1794) the Committee of Public Safety, on recommendation of the overall Commission des Armes et Poudres, combined them into a single Agence des Poudres et Salpêtres.¹³³ A triumvirate directed it: Champy from the Agence Nationale (the old Régie), Chaptal from the Agence Révolutionnaire, and François-Joseph Bonjour, formerly Berthollet’s laboratory assistant, employed since early 1794 in procurement of naval munitions.

The ultimate success of the munitions program virtually justified the rhetoric. By the time the Terror ended, in mid-summer 1794, some 6,000 workshops extracting crude saltpeter had sprung up throughout France, over sixty of them in Paris. In round numbers, the harvest of crude saltpeter in 1793 had fallen to just short of 2,718,000 pounds from an annual average of 3,500,000 during the preceding ten years. Prieur later claimed that in 1794 the revolutionary procedures had yielded 16,754,000. The most careful recent analysis of all the data, which at best are not precisely verifiable, reduces that estimate, though not drastically, to 14,750,000. What with the additional 4,830,000 pounds delivered to the former Gunpowder Administration, France produced 19,580,000 pounds of crude saltpeter from its own soil in 1794. The yield was less than the hyperbolic 30 to 40 million Prieur had called for in the report of 14 frimaire (4 December 1793) that launched the effort. Nevertheless, the achievement is no less remarkable in retrospect than it was at the time.

Refining would reduce the total to twelve million pounds of pure salt-peter. In theory that would have sufficed for fabricating 16 million pounds of military gunpowder, over five times the average annual production of explosives of all grades from 1775 through 1792. In practice powder mills were able to turn out seven million pounds of gunpowder in 1794—28. 6 percent from Grenelle, 20 percent from improvised mills elsewhere, and just over half from experienced installations of the former Régie des Poudres.¹³⁴

What of the technology? Contemporary political commentaries echo Carny’s claim that he had invented the revolutionary procedures both for refining saltpeter and for fabricating gunpowder. The facts are otherwise. There is no doubt that he was a skilled manipulator of chemical apparatus, an effective manager, and a successful entrepreneur. He undoubtedly perfected and accelerated procedures on the factory floor both at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and at Grenelle. The principles were already known, however. With respect to saltpeter, the starting point was Lavoisier’s last chemical investigation.¹³⁵

War was imminent when Lavoisier, having resigned from the Treasury, provisionally resumed his place in the Régie des Poudres.¹³⁶ Still bedeviling procurement of munitions was the chronic dispute between the Régie and its suppliers, the saltpetermen of Paris, over estimating the quality, and thereby determining the price, of the crude saltpeter they dumped fort-nightly in the yard of the Arsenal.¹³⁷ Manual laborers now had access to lawyers who knew how to make their grievances felt. “The Régie des Poudres,” they complained in a memoir to the National Assembly late in 1791, “had conceived the design, why it is difficult to say, of keeping the saltpetermen in entire dependence.”¹³⁸ The one chemist of the Academy they trusted was Antoine Baumé, apothecary turned manufacturer, who looked at chemical operations from a practical point of view akin to their own. In 1788 he had served on an academic commission that investigated the assaying of crude saltpeter. The test they recommended was novel. It consisted of washing a sample of crude saltpeter with a saturated solution of saltpeter itself on the theory that impurities would be dissolved and carried off leaving a residue of the pure salt. In later years Baume claimed that the suggestion was his, though Lavoisier attributed it to Riffault des Hetres (Desestres in his spelling), the Régie’s commissioner at Tours.¹³⁹ In either case, Baumé was party to the proposal, and the saltpetermen expressed willingness to abide by it on condition that their representatives be present every time a delivery was tested: “It makes little difference whether this procedure is or is not capable of improvement; the question here is not of the effect of salt-peter, but of the price the Administration ought to pay for it. This is no operation of chemistry, to be carried to the highest degree of precision; it is rather a rule of proportion, to be established between buyer and seller.”

On 14 May 1792, three weeks after the declaration of war, a decree of the National Assembly addressed the problem. The Minister of Public Contributions, Etienne Clavière, was to consult the Academy of Science and the Regie in order to find a formula that would resolve the issue. Clavière turned, inevitably, to Lavoisier. Ever intent on balancing whatever books, Lavoisier set to work. From mid-May through mid-August he labored virtually full-time on the problem of assaying crude saltpeter.

He experimented, not on a laboratory scale, but with randomized 5,000 pound samples shoveled out of the great mass of a normal delivery. This was the first time that a serious chemist, or any of the régisseurs, had refined saltpeter with his own hands, instead of merely studying the principles and overseeing the refinery. Lavoisier began with the test the saltpetermen were willing to accept—washing crude saltpeter with a saturated solution of the salt. Variations in temperature and concentration of other salts presented difficulties, but he thought to average out discrepancies by testing not one, but twelve samples from the first batch of crude saltpeter to be refined.

As always the saltpetermen had extracted their product by boiling the mixture of salts out of waste materials, throwing a bit of potash into the cauldron in order to convert the “eau-mère” (nitrates of calcium and magnesium) into saltpeter, and cooling the evaporated liquor to the point of crystallization. Lavoisier also carried out the traditional process of refining. It consisted of two further recrystallizations, after each of which the additional saltpeter washed out in the solvent water had to be recovered by further evaporation over high heat. Comparing the yield to what the assay had predicted, he discovered that up to 7 percent of the original saltpeter had boiled away with a portion of the liquid in these repeated firings. It followed that:

The saltpetermen were correct in saying that the crude saltpeter they delivered contained so much pure saltpeter, but that the Gunpowder Administration was no less right in holding that on refining the same material produced only some lesser amount.

From the moment that one perceives a truth that has been long sought and elusive, everything seems to join together to confirm and establish it.140

Lavoisier gave Baumé full credit, not for the idea of the test he had just used, but for imagining the application that immediately suggested itself: Might it be feasible to refine saltpeter cold by a similar procedure carried out on a large scale, and thus eliminate the loss to ebullition? Crude salt-peter could be washed in bulk with a saturated solution of itself that would dissolve and carry off impurities. Water alone would do as well, Lavoisier noted, since it would quickly become saturated in the process. Baumé had tried his notion, but only in the laboratory with a 100-ounce sample, and had reported positive results to the Academy of Science in a memoir read on 24 March 1792.141 He had been unaware of the effect of ebullition, which though it strengthened the case for trying the procedure, would still cause considerable waste since the “eau-mère” (solvent water containing nitrates of calcium and magnesium) would have to be treated with potash and evaporated before crystallization. A further large-scale experiment was the only way to test practicality.

Lavoisier proceeded to have a second 5,000-pound sample from the same randomized pile loaded into a large vessel. Over it his assistant poured a third of its weight of cold water—1,500 pints. After long stirring, he let the mixture settle before draining off the wash water. He then had the residue shoveled into large willow baskets placed in pans so that none of the drip should be lost. The saltpeter he obtained after this first lixiviation was grayish and looked rather like rock salt, of which it still contained a good deal. A second washing, this time with 2,400 pints of cold water (48 percent of the weight of the sample), left 2,593 pounds of saltpeter. Another 780 pounds precipitated out of the wash water and “eau-mère” on evaporation and cooling. The total yield from the cold process was thus 3,373 pounds, 128 more than he had obtained by the traditional method. The product was yellowish rather than pure white. It may still have contained up to 2 percent ordinary salt, but was certainly good enough for commercial use, especially in the manufacture of mineral acids. It would probably also have sufficed for fabrication of hunting-grade powder.

Whether cold refining was capable of yielding a usable saltpeter for the finest grade of military gunpowder, Lavoisier could not say. Before finishing the experiments he had planned, he had to abandon his laboratory. Un-nerved by the violent overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August, he and his wife moved out of the Arsenal on 15 August. They were none too soon. Three days later members of the revolutionary committee of the section, Les Piques, forced their way into the Arsenal, arrested his two colleagues, the Le Faucheux father and son, and jailed them in La Force. The elder Le Fau-cheux committed suicide in prison. After five days the son was released. Named to join him as régisseur was Fourcroy, who, ever adept at trimming his sails politically, had the prudence to refuse. Jacques-Pierre Champy, the second choice, accepted. Having been Gunpowder Commissioner for Burgundy, and a member of Guyton’s chemical circle in Dijon, Champy was admirably qualified.¹⁴² Less so was the one later named to the third place. A radical engineer, Louis-Pierre Dufourny was a member and for a time president of the revolutionary Commune of Paris. He took to signing himself simply “L’Homme Libre,” nothing more.

Further horrified by the September massacres, Lavoisier decided to leave his temporary lodging and escape Paris for the relative shelter of his manor of Freschines. He and his wife remained there until November, returning to take up his forlorn defense of the Academy in 1793. While in the country he wrote up his incomplete experiments on cold refining of saltpeter.

I am far from proposing to make so great a change lightly. I did not intend to suggest it at all until I should be able to demonstrate the possibilities and advantages by repeated and more developed experiments. Indeed, I mention it in this memoir only because, being no longer provided with the same means to pursue the large-scale experiments that I had intended in the matter, I thought it my duty to transmit the results of my observations to the Ministry and to my successors.¹⁴³

Lavoisier published his memoir in two installments in the October 1792 and January 1793 issues of Annales de chimie.¹⁴⁴ It concludes with an exact description of the apparatus he would have set up and the procedures he would have followed in order to verify the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of cold refining of saltpeter. The arrangement would have been simplicity itself. Two lead-lined trenches, one and a half to two feet deep, six feet wide, as long as space permitted and sloping slightly end to end, would have been lined with lead. A bed of crude saltpeter up to eigh-teen inches deep would be spread in each. Over it would be poured 25 to 30 percent of its weight of water. After long stirring and soaking, the wet salt-peter would be heaped into a pile at the upper end of the trough, and the liquid drained from the lower end through one of two taps. That would carry off all the “eau-mére” (calcium and magnesium nitrate) and much of the salt. A second washing of the residue, with 35 to 45 percent of its weight in water, would remove the rest of the salt and be drained through a second tap into a separate container. Potash would be added to the rinse water from the first washing in order to recover saltpeter on evaporation. The solution from the second rinsing would simply be evaporated in order to recover the salt.

What followed on the ground was cruder and more complicated. Du-fourny, now a successor in the Régie des Poudres, drafted the official instructions circulated throughout France by order of the Committee of Public Safety in implementation of the decree of 4 December 1792 calling for the popular extraction of saltpeter. The phrasing is suited to the readership and devoid of chemical terminology. Whether or not Dufourny had read Lavoisier’s final memoir, he certainly consulted with people who had. So far as it goes, the procedure he outlines for extraction of saltpeter by washing the materials containing it with cold water is similar in the essentials to Lavoisier’s proposal for refining.

Instead of lead-lined troughs in the refinery, washtubs or wine tuns are to be split lengthwise. The half-cylinder tubs, fitted with taps, are arranged in sets of three. All three in each set are filled with the earth or pulverized debris to be leached. Water poured into the first is to cover the contents to a depth of two fingers. After three hours of soaking, the mixture is stirred vigorously, and allowed to soak another three hours. The water drawn off is then passed in the same way through the second tub, and set aside to be evaporated to crystallization. A second charge of water is passed in succes-sion through all three tubs. The first tub is then filled with new earth or rubble and becomes the third for the next sequence, in which a third charge of water is passed in reverse order through all three tubs. The process con-tinues back and forth in such wise that the solution to be evaporated will have passed through three tubs, of which the last is filled with new earth after every third washing.

Evaporation then consists in simmering the liquor in a large boiler or cauldron. At the end of the first stage, the solution is sufficiently concen-trated for the saltpeter to crystallize on cooling. That point has been reached when crystals form in a test spoonful. The solution is next poured into earthenware, copper, or iron vessels and left to cool and settle for three or four days, in which time crystals of saltpeter form all along the sides and bottom. The liquor is then poured off and the saltpeter allowed to drain into it. That liquor contains further saltpeter in solution along with impurities, of which common salt predominates. In the course of a further evaporation, gobbets of salt are skimmed off the surface as they appear. When the volume is reduced by about half, a saltpeter bonus crystallizes out on cooling. There is, finally, still more saltpeter to be obtained from the remaining “eaux-mères,” but recovering it requires potash or wood ashes and the specialized skills of professional saltpetermen. The ordinary citizen will do better to collect this last liquid and hand it over to the nearest refinery. Such were the layman’s instructions for the revolutionary saltpeter program.

The next contemporary document consists of the program of the Revolutionary Course on the Fabrication of Saltpeter and Gunpowder.¹⁴⁵ It was completed on 30 ventôse (20 March 1794), some four to six weeks before refining got under way at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Except for the exordium “Mort aux Tyrans,” the language is that of chemistry, not of the streets. The level was the same as it would have been a little later in the elementary chemistry course in one of the educational institutions of which the revolutionary courses were a precursor. Although purporting to describe how salt-peter is extracted and refined, the account is really of how things should be done.

The third lecture deals with extraction. The process it describes is the same in principle as that called for in the Instruction (above) circulated throughout the country in December 1792. Instead of sets of three impro-vised troughs, however, the proper atelier is now said to be furnished with at least thirty-six barrels, preferably fitted with false bottoms for filters as well as machined taps. They are arranged twelve to a rack on three levels. A system of pumps, conduits, and pipes facilitates circulating the wash waters. After leaching, crude saltpeter is recovered from solution by evaporation in egg-shaped copper vessels set into wood-burning brick ovens. It would be preferable to substitute shallow copper basins since rate of evaporation is proportional to surface area. Finally, the most extensive discussion in the lecture on extraction treats the theory of specific gravity in liquids. The hydrometer invented by Baumé is to be used to measure the relative concen-trations of the various salts mingled in solution with saltpeter, and evaporation is to be controlled accordingly.

None of this can have had any but a coincidental bearing on the revolutionary saltpeter patriotically extracted in village squares and in workshops cobbled together in the Place Maubert and other places like it throughout Paris. The reference workshop (if not hypothetical) must have been some installation, unidentified, of the Régie des Poudres.

The fourth lecture, on refining crude saltpeter, is even more theoretical. It opens with a method that is of interest merely in illustration of chemical properties. Saltpeter may be refined simply by exposing it to the air. In a humid atmosphere the impurities, which are deliquescent, slowly dissolve out and may be drained off. That is feasible only on the laboratory scale, however, and the main subject of this lecture is a detailed account of the standard procedure for refining crude saltpeter by two further recrystallizations together with a description of the apparatus and an explanation of the underlying theory. The auditor is told that this is what happens in refineries, though with no mention of the Régie des Poudres, which still ran them. Only at the end, almost as an afterthought, did the lecturer devote two paragraphs to an outline of the more rapid method of cold refining that the “Revolutionary Genius” had required and created, and that could take the place of the old process. That was in February and March 1794.

Six months later the new process had replaced the old one. In October Chaptal drew up full instructions for the treatment of crude saltpeter that “national factories,” by which he meant Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had developed. ¹⁴⁶ Henceforth the method was to be standard in refineries throughout the country. Leavening the workforce that developed it, first under Carny’s direction and later under Frécine’s, were artisans (unfortunately nameless) who had followed the Revolutionary Course all jammed together on the benches of the amphitheater in the Jardin des Plantes. The equipment was far more elaborate than the lead-lined troughs Lavoisier had imagined. Experience also led to certain modifications in the procedure he had suggested. The recipe now prescribed three rounds of rinsing instead of two, each time with proportionally less water than he had called for, and Chaptal specified shorter intervals of soaking. Also the residue after the third washing was dissolved in boiling water and filtered to screen out insoluble impurities before final crystallization. Nevertheless, it was Lavoisier, Chaptal acknowl-edged (though only later in a textbook account), who had first carried out cold refining, and Carny who implemented and perfected the process in the emergency production of 1794.

That is not the end of the saltpeter story, though it is as far as we shall follow it. In 1810 Bottee and Riffault describe an industry transformed by the interpenetration of chemistry and technology throughout a further fif-teen years of wartime.¹⁴⁷ Cited are subsequent researches by Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, Vauquelin, and Bérard concerning the chemistry of nitrates, potash, sulfates, and other salts.¹⁴⁸ Still more striking, however, is the sophistication of the language, the instrumentation, and the procedures. The operators clearly knew the behavior of their materials from experience and had learned their chemical properties by studying the science. Neither extraction nor refining were now carried out in cold solution. Instead, temperatures were carefully controlled to avoid ebullition, and concentrations regularly titrated to determine the amount of each impurity at every stage. Treatment was modified accordingly in order to recover the last grains of saltpeter from recrystallization, now reduced to one operation, and subsequently from the several wash waters. The very scale was on another order of magnitude. By Chaptal’s account, 500 to 600 pounds of crude saltpeter went into each vat. In 1810 the amount was ten times as great—3,000 kilograms. The restored Administration of Saltpeter and Gunpowder, in short, was running an oper-ation of modern quantitative chemistry on a fully industrial scale.

Converting other nitrates, mainly of calcium and magnesium, into po-tassium nitrate required stirring potash (potassium carbonate) into solution both during extraction and refining of saltpeter. Potash (Vegetable alkali) was obtained from wood ashes and the incineration of plants and under-brush.¹⁴⁹ The need for it in the production of revolutionary saltpeter failed to elicit a comparably patriotic response. Housewives were unwilling to sacrifice the ashes from hearth and stove that they mixed with fat to serve as soap. Though urged, they largely failed even to carry their buckets of dirty wash water to the nearest saltpeter workshop. Chaptal’s successor as Inspec-tor of Saltpeter and Gunpowder in the Southwest, Raymond, was partic-ularly severe: “Ashes are in some sense the property of women citizens, not all of whom are Republicans. For most of them that stuff is more precious than liberty.” They think only of the laundry, not of their sons and hus-bands at the front. “Free and enlightened Men, about this you will hear only the voice of the Fatherland. You will not allow the avarice of a sex, incapable by itself of sensing the price of the small sacrifice asked of it, to compromise for a single moment the security of our country.”¹⁵⁰ Unable to rely on volun-teers, he and his fellow inspectors, reinforced by deputies on mission, had to compel local authorities to requisition working parties for incinerating brush, herbaceous plants, weeds, and the lies of wineries, all of which yielded “salin,” or crude potash in varying measure.

The Committee of Public Safety sought further to encourage the production of synthetic sodium carbonate in order that artificial “mineral alkali” might be substituted for potash in the textile industry and in manufacture of soap and glass. The main source of natural soda in the eighteenth century had been certain seashore plants that convert sodium chloride from sea water into organic salts and yield sodium carbonate on incineration and lixiviation. The best quality, known as barilla, came from the beaches around Alicante in Spain. The supply was inelastic. Growing demand in the 1780s, combined with obvious mercantilist considerations, had led the Bureau du Commerce under Tolozan’s direction to promote efforts already under way to find a practical method for converting sea salt directly into commercial soda. By the time of the Revolution, at least eleven such processes had been proposed, by Carny and by Guyton de Morveau among others, and several were in operation. Chaptal’s chemical works at Montpellier produced soda from the action of brine on litharge (lead oxide). The partnership of Mal-herbe and Athénas in Brittany made it from the action of Glauber’s salt (sodium sulfate) on sodium chloride in the presence of iron scrap and char-coal. The glass factory at Muntzthal and the bleaching plant at Javelle used other methods. Nowhere, however, could artificial soda be made as cheaply as barilla, and none of these processes survived commercially.

The one that eventually did, and that became the main basis of the alkali industry in the nineteenth century, exploited the reaction discovered by Nicolas Leblanc. He succeeded in converting sodium sulfate into soda by fusion in the presence of limestone and charcoal. A surgeon in the retinue of the duc d’Orléans, Leblanc made the discovery sometime in the latter half of 1789. Lacking any capital, he formed a partnership with the Duke himself and two others, the Duke’s agent, Henri Shée, and J.-J. Dizé, Darcet’s laboratory assistant at the Collège de France. They chose a site near Saint-Denis for their factory, La Franciade. On 25 September 1791 Leblanc received the fourteenth patent issued under the patent law of 7 January 1791.151 La Fran-ciade never came on line to reach its theoretical capacity of 275,000 pounds of soda annually. Throughout 1792 and the first half of 1793 its operation consisted merely of large-scale experiments performed to perfect the several stages of the process. In July 1793 the impossibility of obtaining sulfuric acid amid wartime shortages forced Leblanc to shut down. Throughout the year of the Terror, he worked with revolutionary saltpeter in Paris. On 29 December 1793 (9 nivôse an II) the Committee of Public Safety named him to the Régie des Poudres to assist Champy, LeFaucheux, and Dufourny as fourth régisseuer. In the meantime his plant was visited and its procedures inspected, also by order of the Committee of Public Safety. A decree of 28 January 1794 (8 pluviôse an II) ordered that the revolutionary mode of war production be extended to the manufacture of alkali, and Prieur appointed a commission headed by Jean Darcet to examine, evaluate, and publish all procedures and to make recommendations. Their clear and thorough report is our main source of information for the state of the industry.¹⁵²

The legend of Leblanc, spread upon the annals of invention by himself and his descendants, features the patriotic innovator of a flourishing enter-prise destroyed by the Committee of Public Safety’s order to publish his discovery. He thus becomes the innocent victim of the Revolution, his rights sacrificed to the war effort, he himself compromised and excluded from his own factory because of tainted capital provided by the Duc d’Orléans. Betrayed by his scientific colleagues, he is ruined by competitors who take advantage of his patriotism to secure a commanding lead in exploiting his own process. The benefactor of his country, broken by its ingratitude, he dies by his own hand in 1806, having won for his pains only a pathetic place in the martyrology of inventive genius.

Leblanc did commit suicide, but the story has no other substance. He was a clever chemist but nothing of an entrepreneur. Berthollet and Fourcroy made every effort to protect his interest and to enable him to reopen his plant. His conduct assured their failure. He made impossible conditions: forgiveness of debts, huge subsidies, a monopoly on all the sodium sulfate produced in France. Leblanc finally managed to regain title from his credi-tors in 1801, but failed to make a profit from his process. Nor did anyone else for over twenty years. Artificial soda was manufactured by that and other methods in the interval, but succeeded economically only as a by-product. Until well into the nineteenth century it could not compete as a principal object of manufacture with the importation of natural soda from Spain and the Natron Lakes of Egypt.¹⁵³

Gunpowder is what finally counts in any assessment of the material effect of the revolutionary munitions program. Acceleration of production, expan-sion of yield, and modification of the physical character of the product were its main features, all pertaining rather to persons versed in the technology than to consultation of scientists, intervention of politicians, or participation by the general public. Guyton, Carny, and Berthollet did, however, give the three lectures devoted to fabrication of gunpowder that concluded the revo-lutionary course. The first lecture ended with a warning: “The effects of gunpowder can never be too terrible when it is employed against wild beasts or tyrants, but it can be fatal to those working on it if they commit the slightest imprudence, so that for their own protection discipline in the workshop must be very strict.”¹⁵⁴

Powder mills of the Régie des Poudres fabricated their product in the classic proportions of 75 percent saltpeter, 12.5 percent charcoal, and 12. 5 percent sulfur. The machinery consisted of batteries of twelve mortars and pestles arranged six on either side of a camshaft run by water power. Weighing eighty pounds each, the pestles were fitted at the foot with shoes of copper sheathing. They delivered fifty to fifty-five strokes a minute dropping a distance of fourteen inches into mortars hollowed out of a solid block of hardwood. The charge in each consisted of a twenty-pound batch of the ingredients, which had been separately pulverized and stirred together man-ually. The composition was moistened with a pint of water before starting the mill. Pounding lasted twenty-one hours. At the end of the first hour, and every three hours thereafter, the clutch was thrown to stop the cam-shaft, and the pestles were lifted in order to allow the charge in each mortar to be stirred, transferred to the next, and remoistened. Compacting finished, the powder was spread out to dry for several days, during which it hardened to the consistency of a flat pastry. Broken into pieces manually, it had then to be crumbled and grained or corned by pressing the powder gently with a small wooden pestle through a succession of two sieves made of sheep-skin stretched on a wooden frame. The holes punched in the first were about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and smaller in the second. The granulated gunpowder was then further dried and the dust sifted out by shaking on a strainer of cloth. The dust, which might amount to 20 percent or 30 percent of the original weight of powder, had to be collected, compacted, and recycled through the graining stage. Depending on the weather, which deter-mined the time for drying, fabricating a batch of gunpowder in the classic manner required up to a week.

Our most detailed contemporary account of the technology comes from two officials who had served under Lavoisier and whose careers in the Gun-powder Administration spanned the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic era.¹⁵⁵ While Bottée and Riffault pay tribute to the élan of popular involvement in the munitions crisis of 1793–94, their tone is deprecatory with respect to the techniques improvised in the emergency. They leave the unin-tended impression that it was the push of an oversupply of saltpeter rather than the pull of supplying the armies that motivated adoption of expe-ditious methods of fabricating gunpowder.

However that may have been, the established arsenals of the Régie des Poudres continued to work with the machinery at hand while the “revolutionary” procedure that Carny introduced at Grenelle dispensed with stamping mills altogether. Instead, he composed gunpowder in a centrifuge. A barrel thirty-two inches long by sixteen inches in diameter and pierced by a horizontal axle rested on two sawhorses with a crank handle at either end. The charge consisted of seventy-two pounds of separately pulverized saltpe-ter, charcoal, and sulfur in the standard proportions. With the ingredients were loaded two hundred copper balls just under an inch in diameter. Two men in two-hour shifts whirled the barrel as fast as might be for twelve hours.

The result was not the compacted composition produced by a stamping mill, but a uniform mixture of loose powder. After a little moistening it could be compressed into sheets at once. The press consisted of a pile of thirty trays, two feet by eighteen inches, with tongue-in-groove rims. A quarter-inch deep layer of powder was spread evenly onto each. A vise and lever arrangement permitted squeezing the pile hard enough to compress the layers into “galettes” or press cakes a sixteenth of an inch thick. Graining could be carried out in one of two ways. The press cakes could be spread inside a sheet folded over them and crumbled under a rolling pin. Or, and this was more efficient, a piece of coarse canvas could be placed on each tray before the powder was layered onto it. The threads would be squeezed into the press cake and grain the powder into roughly cubic morsels of close to the right size for military gunpowder. Neither method of graining left ap-preciable dust to be recycled. The whole process required a couple of days.

Carny proposed the elements of just such a system to the Committee of Public Safety as early as 15 December 1793, well before the powder mill at Grenelle had even been imagined. A commission consisting of Monge, Has-senfratz, and Berthollet reported favorably.¹⁵⁶ Carny later put it about that, even like refining saltpeter in cold solution, the idea of dispensing with stamping mills was his own. In fact, powder mills in England had been composing gunpowder by use of millstones since the middle of the century.¹⁵⁷ In 1781 a French engineering officer, Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, on duty in the Ile de France (now Mauritius), had tried the centrifu-gal technique successfully in a colonial powder mill. His repeated attempts to break the monopoly of the Régie des Poudres and interest a succession of Ministers of the Navy and of War fell on deaf ears in the late 1780s and early in the Revolution. In April 1794 he approached Berthollet, who in-formed the Committee of Public Safety but returned a noncommital answer. At the same time Cossigny, a former nobleman, was obliged by the law of 16 April (27 germinal) to quit Paris for the provinces, whence he returned after the fall of Robespierre to win the attention of Chaptal and Champy.¹⁵⁸

Champy, a veteran of the Régie des Poudres, developed the last of the procedures deriving from revolutionary techniques, although he perfected it only in 1796, two years after the levée-en-masse had run its course. Swiss gunpowder had long had the reputation of being the finest anywhere pro-duced. Its superior quality was thought to be a function of the physical form of the grains, which were spherical rather than angular and irregular in form. Private craftsmen, mainly in the canton of Berne, produced it in small quantities. Where known at all, their jealously guarded procedures were thought to be inapplicable to large-scale exploitation.

Champy hit upon a method of fabricating just such spherical grains. In April 1795 two powdermakers in the Agence des Poudres et Salpêtres, Barthélemy and Paillart, gave a demonstration in the new powder mill in Vincennes of a method the former had invented for compressing loose powder composed centrifugally. Instead of transferring it to a press, they moistened it and ground the paste by means of two vertical millstones turning in a wooden trough. After eight minutes, it took on sufficient consistency to be granulated by shaking it through the sieve in a brass sizing drum. Quite unexpectedly the gunpowder grains that thus formed were perfectly round, albeit too humid. There was the further, seemingly insurmountable, diffi culty that the millstones and the drum were so gummed up that they had to be laboriously cleaned after every operation.

Champy was present at the demonstration. He knew that the Swiss procedures involved a rotary method of graining, and it occurred to him that substituting a second round in the rotating barrel for the milling and sieving of the Barthélemy experiment might avoid the inconvenience of the latter while emulating the success of the former on an industrial scale. So it proved. Slightly different proportions of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur—75 percent saltpeter, 16 percent carbon, 9.0 percent sulfur—were mixed in the rotating barrel for about three and a half hours. The loose powder was then slightly moistened in a kneading pan with a saturated solution of saltpeter to make up the small initial deficit. Passing the pasty mixture through a sieve reduced it to globules which, and here was the original feature, were then reloaded into the barrel, without the copper balls this time around, and whirled dry for roughly half an hour. The grains of powder that emerged from this, the earliest mechanical method of corning, were perfectly spher-ical.

The advantages were considerable. Mechanical graining saved a third to a half of the time and labor required for manual processing; dampened pow-der was safe to handle; and round grains held up better during storage and shipment than did angular ones. Also, and this was apparently important, they were easier to recognize as stolen if a shipment was hijacked. The only disadvantages appeared to be that getting the degree of moisture right was pesky and that round powder, while comparable in force to ordinary powder when proved in mortars and artillery pieces, was less suitable for small arms. In October 1796 a blue ribbon commission consisting of François-Marie d’Aboville, presiding General of the Central Artillery Committee, and two members of the newly established Institut de France, Borda and Pelletier, reported enthusiastically on both the fabrication and tests of round powder run in the proving grounds at La Fère. They recommended that it replace traditional black powder and become standard issue for the armed forces. In May 1797, the government ordered fabrication of 100,000 pounds for fur-ther tests on a still larger scale.¹⁵⁹

That never happened. The urgency of the year II was long past. Carny had returned to private industry attempting to exploit, not his own process for converting marine salt to soda, but Leblanc’s. Chaptal had gone home to Montpellier, where he accepted the chair of chemistry in the reformed med-ical faculty, the École de Santé. The Directory had replaced the Committee of Public Safety while exercising nothing like comparable authority. Munitions were again the monopoly of the Agence Nationale des Poudres et Salpetres, the old Régie redux. Bureaucratic infighting and obstruction de railed Champy’s invention and delayed the introduction of round powder until his procedures were perfected by his son fifteen years later. Meanwhile, Bottée’s colleague and co-author, Riffault, had devised modifications in the stamping mill that permitted fabricating gunpowder more speedily than by the revolutionary centrifugal method. It was a near thing, and fortunate in Bottée’s view, that Prieur had intervened to prevent junking the stamping mills in favor of rotating barrels amid the flush of enthusiasm for the latter at Grenelle.¹⁶⁰

For production ended at Grenelle on 31 August 1794. On that day 300 of the 1,800 laborers perished in an explosion that destroyed the mill. One of them, according to contemporary accounts, had taken his pipe out of his mouth before entering and put it in his pocket with the tobacco still smol-dering. New mills using the same procedure, and separated for safety, were installed in four nearby locations, a former convent in the Bois de Vin-cennes, a onetime abbey in the Forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a her-mitage in the forest of Senart near Corbeil, and a monastery close by Es-sonnes. It was months before they could be in production, however. An accident twelve days earlier had stemmed the flow of saltpeter. On 19 Au-gust, three weeks after the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror, an overheated drying oven started a conflagration that raced through the refin-ery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, consuming all the stocks of saltpeter on the floor. Refining resumed after a few weeks, and continued at a reduced pace through 1795, but the zest had gone up in smoke.¹⁶¹

There is no dispute but that the emergency programs both of saltpeter and gunpowder met the needs of the armies in 1793–94. There is also no doubt that the example of its success, the brief stimulus of competition, and the exposure to scientific scrutiny forced a restored establishment to acceler-ate and modify its own procedures. The problem of the chemical role of the constituents in producing the detonation of gunpowder had preoccupied chemists for at least a century. Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Gay-Lussac all ad-dressed it, albeit in a somewhat peripheral manner, without successfully deriving the properties of the phenomenon from their respective theoretical standpoints. The earliest comprehensive research was the work Joseph-Louis Proust carried out in Spain. Between 1785 and 1806 he served as professor of chemistry at the Royal Artillery School in Segovia and munitions adviser to the Spanish Government. In 1812 Bottée and Riffault annotated a separate printing of the seventh in the series of nine memoirs on gunpowder that Proust published in the Journal de physique between 1810 and 1814. The chapter that concludes their 1811 treatise is a discussion of potential improvements in the technology of gunpowder. They there cite appreciatively his experiments on measuring the volume of gas produced by burning saltpeter in the presence of varying proportions of sulfur and charcoal.¹⁶²

The phenomenon of detonation thus presented chemistry with problems, but so far at least chemical theory had nothing to offer the technology of gunpowder. Modifications were empirical in nature deriving, not from the chemistry of the ingredients, but from increasingly detailed scrutiny of the physical properties of gunpowder—its shape, density, the size of grains—and the relation of these variables to the design of ordnance and small arms. The influence of science in modernizing the technology of gunpowder was real but indirect, as it was in the intimately linked instance of saltpeter. In the aftermath of revolutionary exposure to the scrutiny of scientists, technicians became better educated than formerly. They conducted their work in a far more scientific fashion than they had done. They understood what they were doing in a more sophisticated manner. Scientific knowledge and behav-ior penetrated industry. Theory no doubt entered here and there, but it did not transform practice. Not quite yet.

What, finally, of the weapons to be fired by revolutionary gunpowder? On 3 November 1793 Carnot reported to the Convention on the installation of the Manufacture Extraordinaire d’Armes of Paris pursuant to the levée-en-masse of 23 August.¹⁶³ The goal was to turn out 1,000 muskets a day in a city where none had ever been made and a country where the annual production had averaged a mere 50,000. Already, in just over two months, hammers were clanging on anvils and fashioning cast-iron strips into barrels in the first of 258 open-air forges, 140 to be installed on the esplanade of the Invalides, 54 in the Luxembourg garden, and 64 in the Place de l’Indivisibilité (now the Place des Vosges). The Committee of Public Safety had commandeered forges and blacksmiths from the departments of the Cher, the Allier, the Nièvre, the Haute-Saone, the Haute-Marne, and the Côte-d’Or, the nearest regions in which ironwork of good quality was produced. The strips being forged, however, had to be shipped from foundries around the country. The cost of moving trip-hammers for flattening bars at the foundry would have been prohibitive.

Moored in the Seine, five large barges held sixteen gun lathes and reaming apparatus for calibrating the bore. Alongside were millstones and grinding tools for removing spurs and polishing surfaces. All were to have been driven by water power, but the river was so low that hydraulic machines had to be supplemented by a manually operated mill in the cloister of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and by steam power on the Ile Louviers and in several suburban locations. Installed in former convents, town-houses of émigrés, and halls of the university, and hence less in evidence, were seventeen work-shops for boring priming holes, fashioning stocks, fabricating flintlocks, and finally assembling and testing muskets. Already 240 fabricators of flintlocks from the armory of Maubeuge, occupied by the enemy, were lodged in the cells of the former Charterhouse near the Observatory and at work in the cloister. Bayonettes and ramrods, however, were contracted out to private workshops.

When fully organized in the winter of 1794, the administration of the Manufacture d’Armes de Paris was staffed by bureaucrats who had run pro-curement in the former ministries of War and the Navy. They reported through the overall Commission des Armes et Poudres to Prieur and the Committee of Public Safety. By a decree of 24 August 1793, the Committee itself had already selected eight accomplished ironworkers in Paris and sent them to the armory in Charleville to learn the trade of gunsmith, and fast. They were to follow and practice every step in the fabrication of muskets and to bring back to Paris samples of all the parts at each stage in their fashioning. They would thus be prepared to direct the revolutionary workshops.

In addition the Committee requisitioned all laborers who could be spared from existing arsenals throughout the country. The sections of Paris were required to take a census of ironworkers and an inventory of their tools. Common laborers were to hire themselves out to the public workshops. Artisans who had the equipment and wished to work in their own shops under contract were encouraged to do so. The most accomplished cohort consisted of clockmakers and watchmakers in Paris, a company “known for their patriotism,” who resolved to suspend their own work and devote themselves to making the parts for which their skills were best adapted.

Piece-work was the basis of payment for all but unskilled laborers. Prices and wages had been fixed by an arbitration commission consisting of representatives of the Paris sections, of the municipality, of workers from the armory at Maubeuge, of the War Ministry, and of the Administration of the Manufacture de Paris. The chairman was Hassenfratz, whom the Commit-tee of Public Safety named on 12 November 1793 to be its commissioner and liaison with the whole enterprise.¹⁶⁴ The manual he undertook to produce on fabrication of muskets never reached publication, however, and iron-workers from other trades had to learn the art of making guns as best they might on the job.

In the old regime, Maubeuge and Charleville in the North, Saint-Etienne in central France, and Liège in Belgium were the centers for manufacture of small arms and sporting guns. At the outset the Manufacture de Paris was to follow procedures long established there. The Committee intended, how-ever, to create incentives for inventive artisans to simplify, rationalize, and improve techniques throughout. Carnot recognized that difficulties were bound to arise and errors to occur in organizing so enormous and novel an enterprise. Persons hostile to the Revolution had denigrated the effort from the start and sought to hobble it in all sorts of ways—by bidding up the raw materials, by harassing the cadre of skilled workers, by subjecting them to conscription, by inciting in them avaricious pretentions to higher wages. For Carnot was not immune to the strain of political paranoia infecting the revolutionary leadership.

The structural fault lines proved to be real, however. A thorough and original recent study exhibits how deeply they ran both into the body politic of the labor force and into the technical problems encountered in mass-producing muskets.¹⁶⁵ At the height of the effort in the late spring of 1794 the Manufacture de Paris employed over 5,000 workers. They had little in common, not even their grievances. Locksmiths from Maubeuge and Liège, many separated from their families and all badLy lodged, detested Paris.They evinced impatience bordering on scorn for thE clockmakers, instrument makers, and other skilled artisans assigned to learn the trade by working under them. Experts normally turned out five flintlocks in a ten-day work ueek. Novices did well to make one or two. The inequity of payment by the piece left the latter far worse off than they had ever been in their proper trades, and they demanded a daily wage.

The largest contingent of workers engaged in calibrating and finishing barrels and assembling muskets were masters, journeymen, or apprentices from the metal trades in the capital—swordsmiths, ordinary locksmiths, ornamental ironworkers, cutlers, scissor-grinders, jewelers, goldsmiths, watchmakers, machinists, and so on. Their skills were as varied as their experience. Used to their own shops, many now spent long days in impro-vised factories under the direction of armorers requisitioned from the old arsenals. Casual laborers from the sans-culotte seedbeds of the capital per-formed the merely manual tasks. None at any level were more content than working people in general to rest one day in ten instead of every Sunday.

One other thing all had in common. They could not feed their families with the revolutionary patriotism attributed to them by the governing Committee. Like laborers in the saltpeter refinery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they soon demanded better pay. Prices were rising despite the maximum. As early as December 1793 a riot in the Capucins workshop and walkouts in two others slowed production. The Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of six Maubeuge armorers responsible for the former. Late in the month Hassenfratz found that a majority of workers were absent after an attempted mutiny in a flintlock atelier at Marché-aux-Puces. Again its direc-tor went to prison. The Committee proceeded to invoke the LeChapelier law of 1791 that forbade trade associations, and decreed that all instigators of collective action among armaments workers would be jailed in irons for two years. Discontents nonetheless simmered, and rumors circulated of a general strike in the Manufacture d’Armes. Whatever their revolutionary zeal in the early months of Jacobin governance, armament workers shared with others a gathering alienation from the ruling party. Execution of leading Hébertists in March 1794 exacerbated mutual mistrust.

Despite all this, production of muskets surpassed 500 a day for most of the time between March and December 1795. The goal of 1,000 was reached briefly in September. True, about 10 percent of the output consisted of repairs to old muskets, and quality was another matter. There was nothing like the rigorous verification of calibers and testing on the range imposed by procurement officers in the old regime. Proving the completed musket con-sisted of a single firing in the ditch alongside the Arsenal. Fabrication of flintlocks, however, was the limiting bottleneck. Forging the barrel was a comparatively simple and straightforward task. The flintlock was a work of precision consisting of nine finely machined principal parts. By April 1794, the revolutionary ateliers were managing to deliver a mere handful, at most eighty a day, a fifth of the rate of production at the end of the old regime, and at an exorbitant price. Even so, repairs to old weapons accounted for most of the output.

In order to break out of the impasse, Prieur and his advisers acted on the Committee’s intention to encourage innovation. Scholars who frequent tech-nical reaches of the archives have long been tantalized to come upon fragmentary records of the revolutionary Atelier de Perfectionnement, in effect a research and development laboratory. From those papers it immediately ap-pears that Eli Whitney was by no means the first to imagine the advantage that interchangeability of parts would entail in the production of muskets. Now Alder in his recent study of revolutionary arms production has discov-ered that the notion was nothing novel by the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁶⁶ Standardization was already a desideratum in Gribeauval’s reform of the French artillery after defeat in the Seven Years War. Honoré Blanc, designer of the musket adopted in 1777, standardized flintlocks on an experimental scale at Saint-Étienne, only to be frustrated by resistance amounting to po-tential mutiny among the established gunsmiths, each in his own small shop. In the traditional practice of their trade, master locksmiths aided by one or several journeymen fabricated all the parts for each flintlock individ-ually. They produced one at a time, adjusting the pieces to each other as they worked along. The general design was the same, but the tumbler of one might or might not fit into another.

Late in the 1780s the artillery high command installed Blanc in a laboratory workshop located in the security of the dungeon of Vincennes. In No-vember 1791 he was ready to go public and staged a demonstration in front of the Invalides. A gunsmith there assembled a number of flintlocks from parts taken at random from a bin holding enough to equip 500 muskets. Commissions of the Academy of Science and of the Artillery verified his success. The artillery officers worried, however, about the impact of such a system on the old armories, and about the social desirability of replacing skilled craftsmen with low-paid workers stamping out gun parts by rote. Whether for that reason, or out of inertia, the government took no action. Blanc ultimately elected to go into business for himself, but did not get into production in the factory he established at Roanne before 1797.¹⁶⁷

Prieur and his scientific advisers, most immediately Vandermonde and Hassenfratz, thought to emulate and enlarge on Blanc’s achievement when the Committee of Public Safety created the Atelier de Perfectionnement by an order of 4 May 1794.168 Situated in the former townhouse of the Mont-morency family, virtually a palace at 169 rue Marc, it was a considerable undertaking. Installed were drop hammers, a rolling mill, drill presses, a stamping machine, and machine tools of various sorts. Twenty of the best locksmiths were transferred from the Manufacture de Paris, and a famous mechanic, one Glaësner, was requisitioned from Lyons. At the height of activity, in January 1795, the personnel consisted of ninety-five people. In charge was Vandermonde, who had directed the collection of machines that had been built around the legacy of Vaucanson and maintained by the Academy of Science. Assisting was Hassenfratz, who had busied himself in armaments from the time he served, first under Pache in the Ministry of War, and then under Monge in the Ministry of the Navy. At the outset, the foreman on the shop floor, with the title of Inspector, was Pierre-Bernard Mégnié, Mégnié le Jeune, who with Fortin and Lenoir was one of the three leading instrument makers of Paris.¹⁶⁹

The initial purpose was to speed up the production of muskets and, in the words of Hassenfratz, “to simplify it in such a manner that any type of citizen can henceforth perfectly well fabricate separate pieces of muskets.”¹⁷⁰ Mégnié describes his attempt to divide the labor of producing tumblers, hammers, springs, triggers, pans, vises, and so on by means of a proto-assembly line:

We began installing the flintlock workers by making various experiments [essais] on the labor going into the parts of a flintlock, such as passing the same piece through several hands in the sequence of the different stages in its fabrication in order to find out whether time would be saved or quality improved by restricting each worker to han-dling the same tool for the same task. But the French temperament, especially in a town like Paris, is ill suited to such regimentation [con-centration], so that our experiments did not have the result we ex-pected of them. Accordingly, since then the locksmiths are following the usual procedures until such time as we can complete the machines that will save time and improve quality by use of lathes, dies, stamping machines, screw presses, and so on.¹⁷¹

As in the pioneering work of Honoré Blanc, the experiment was a techni-cal success and for the time being a practical failure. The Atelier de Perfectionnement did succeed in fabricating a handful of flintlocks made of inter-changeable parts. The artisans followed the new system only under duress, however, and reverted to traditional methods there and throughout the Manufacture de Paris for most of their output, which did increase in the late spring and summer of 1794.

After Thermidor discontent was rife and discipline in the Atelier a problem. Mégnié quarreled with the administrative director, a bureaucrat called Anthelmy, and vanished under a financial cloud, as indeed he had done once before in his career. Appointed to succeed him was Francois-Philippe Charpentier, a noted machinist who had designed a horse-powered mill for boring six cannon at once, and whom Thomas Jefferson had engaged to construct a portable press. For the Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety, on which Guyton and Fourcroy served along with Prieur and Car-not, believed in the promise of research and development. The Atelier de Perfectionnement broadened its mission to making machine tools and stan-dard weights and measures for the metric system. It survived liquidation of the Manufacture de Paris. In the end, reinstitutionalization of science and technology under the Directory combined the Atelier de Perfectionnement with Vandermonde’s collection of machines in the new Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

On 13 November 1794, two to three months after the fire in Saint-Ger-main-des-Prés and the explosion at Grenelle, the Commission des Armes et Poudres submitted a report to the Convention calling for a great reform, in effect the abolition, of the Manufacture de Paris. One of the “prodigies of the Revolution,” in operation for just a year, it had outlived its usefulness. Four months into the thermidorean period, language about the great effort had changed in tone. It was now held to be impossible that the Manufacture should have been well organized. Everything had had to be created at once. The raw materials were often defective. The workers were not all experi-enced. Their instructors were often incompetent. Much of the effort went into repairs. In order to keep the workers busy, muskets to be fixed were shipped at great expense from provincial centers where they could have been serviced more rapidly and cheaply. The cost of the enormous operation was incalculable. Private enterprise was in any case always preferable. Finally, the needs were no longer urgent. French armies were victorious everywhere, and had captured quantities of weapons from the enemy. Acting on the report it had no doubt planted, the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety over a period of months wound down the Manufacture de Paris, sent the artisans that its predecessor had requisitioned back to their own trades and localities, and laid off the sans-culottes mobilized from the working quarters of Paris with modest severance pay. It did so in the face of protest by deputations to the Convention, street demonstrations, and severe unrest verging on insurrection. For hostility between the working population and the regime was now in the open.¹⁷²

Procurement of small arms, like production of saltpeter and gunpowder, returned to normal channels, though of increased capacity. Critics objected at the time, and skeptics have considered since, that rather than turn Paris into a munitions and weapons factory, the Committee of the year II would have done better in a material sense to arm the country by augmenting and adding to existing arsenals and armories. It may be so. Guyton’s report of 2 January 1795 on the state of arsenals and armaments rejects that view, but makes clear that it was in just such wise that foundries in Douai, Strasbourg, Rochefort, and Toulon, as well as those of the Périer brothers and Brézin in Paris, were able to supply the armies with cannon, howitzers, and heavy mortars.¹⁷³ But the goal had not been merely a material one. Carnot had made clear at the outset that he and his colleagues had more in mind than productivity: “The purpose of the Committee of Public Safety in distributing them [the forges] massively in public places and along promenades adequate to accommodate them was to inspire the people with the confidence they should feel in their resources and to make the populace itself the watchman over the impediments that this great effort of fabrication might encounter.”¹⁷⁴

5. INVENTIONS

On the face of it military urgency in revolutionary France acted as a forcing house of scientifically based inventiveness. Artillery shells charged with gun-powder, incendiaries, high explosives, aerial warfare, interchangeable parts, synthetic alkali, chemical tanning, mass produced steel—all these innovations lay in the future of warfare and industry. In fact, the births were premature. Novel techniques and processes met with resistance, incomprehension, or both on the part of those who would have had to put them into effect: generals and admirals, on the one hand, artisans and manufac-turers on the other. The new possibilities made no practical difference until decades later, when military, economic, and industrial structures were ready to accommodate technology. Even in the munitions industry proper, revolutionary saltpeter and round gunpowder were left aside in the course of a more widespread rationalization of the producing services. Of the industrial manuals thrown together by scientists in the autumn of 1793, only the directions for recovering copper from bell metal were followed at the time. The report of a deputy on mission concerning Vandermonde, Monge, and Ber-thollet’s guide to steelmaking could equally have applied to the others. “Do not believe,” wrote Roux-Fazillac to the governing committee in April 1794, “that it is possible for ironworkers to make steel with the sole help of the memoir you have had distributed; it is too scientific and intelligible only by workers who already know how.”¹⁷⁵ The revolutionary courses, too, were over the heads of most of the auditors.

Among inventions properly speaking, the two that succeeded right off, the telegraph and the misnamed lead pencil, pertained to communication rather than weaponry. Besides practicability, a further critical factor explains their immediate success. Neither one displaced established procedures or invaded an existing craft. The mode of genesis differed, however. The pencil responded to a need and was commissioned. The telegraph no one had imagined.

On 12 July 1793 the following token message was relayed in eleven min-utes from Paris by way of Écouen to the village of Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, a distance of twenty-six kilometers to the north: “Daunou has just arrived. He announces that the National Convention has just authorized its Committee of General Security to seal the papers of representatives of the people.” The acknowledgment required nine minutes: “The inhabitants of this beautiful region are worthy of liberty by reason of their respect for the National Convention and its laws.”¹⁷⁶ Sending from the Park of Saint-Fargeau in Ménilmontant was the inventor, Claude Chappe. The name of rue du Télé-graphe in the twentieth arrondissement commemorates the site. Responding from the top of a hill on the edge of the village was his brother, Abraham. The Écouen relay was on the height above the château. Members of the commission that reported to the Convention were Daunou, Arbogast, and Lakanal, the latter two of whom accompanied Abraham Chappe. The tele-graph itself was as ingenious as it was simple. Pivoted on top of a ten-foot pole, the “regulator,” a balance arm in the form of an elongated framework, carried two wings hinged in the middle and tapered at opposite ends. A system of cords and pullies worked by a crank enabled the signaler to tilt the regulator at any angle to the horizontal and either wing at any angle to the regulator. A shorthand code permitted translating the ninety-two defined configurations from sign language into French. Each set of positions had a different meaning depending on which of ninety-two lines of code an initial signal specified. The total number of elementary combinations was thus 8,464.

Nephew of the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, who had died of dysentery in Baja California while observing the second transit of Venus in 1769, Claude Chappe was the second of four brothers. Even like his uncle, he combined a dutiful commitment to holy orders with a passion for instrumental science, and was an enthusiastic member of the Société Philomathique. He and his brothers began working on the old problem of communication at a distance in their native town of Brulon (Sarthe) in 1790. They tried and failed to build an electric telegraph. Attempts at a combination of audio with visual signals were no more successful. Chappe then turned to the famous clock-maker, Bréguet, to construct the eventual device he designed, while himself encrypting a code. On 21 March 1792 he requested permission to dedicate to the Legislative Assembly, wherein his older brother, Ignace, was a deputy, his “discovery” of a way “to communicate rapidly over a great distance the account of any event whatever.”¹⁷⁷ The Assembly referred the proposal to the Comité d’Instruction Publique, which appointed one Gibergues to bring in a report. France was not yet at war. He never did.

On 14 May 1792, no doubt prompted by the declaration of war three weeks earlier, the Committee commissioned Romme to join in the investigation. Before he could do so, suspicious patriots in the Belleville quarter destroyed the mysterious contraption in their midst. On 15 October 1792 Chappe petitioned the Convention for an indemnity and authorization to reconstruct his apparatus. Referred again to the Comité d’Instruction Publi-que, the request languished until Romme brought it before the Convention once more on 12 March 1793, asking that the Committee on War also be seized of the proposal. His initial judgment, reported on 1 April, was alto-gether favorable, and the Convention accepted his recommendation that

further tests be conducted over a distance sufficient for the results to be conclusive.

Accordingly, on 6 April Daunou and Lakanal were added to the Commis-sion, while Arbogast replaced Romme, overburdened with other duties. Pop-ular suspicions had not been allayed, and on 2 July the Convention accepted their recommendation that the communal authorities of Belleville, Écouen, and Saint-Martin-du-Tertre be ordered to inform local people that Chappe’s installations were in the national interest and to place them under the pro-tection of detachments of the National Guard. Lakanal reports that he and his colleagues were accompanied by several “savants,” whom he does not name, to observe the trial that succeeded brilliantly on 12 July. After the opening exchange, the two parties continued to correspond until the Écouen post signaled it could no longer transmit. The only operators who would need to know the code were the two at either end. Intermediate way stations would simply relay signals in ignorance of their meaning. The average time required to transmit a signal from one post to the next proved to be twenty seconds. A normal, and confidential, dispatch could thus reach Paris from Valenciennes in twenty-three minutes and forty seconds.

Arbogast and Daunou had been skeptical at the outset. The demonstration dissipated all indifference, however, and they joined Lakanal in an un-usually emphatic recommendation. Their report of 26 July 1793 virtually told the Convention what it should do. They think that body will hasten to nationalize this interesting discovery. They think it will not neglect the op-portunity to encourage the useful sciences. If ever these should be alienated, fanaticism would rise up again and servitude cover the earth. The law Lak-anal proposed had two articles. The first named Chappe Ingénieur Télégraphe with the salary of a Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. The second instructed the Committee of Public Safety to determine which tele-graph lines it was important for the Republic to establish. The decree passed the same day with no dissent.¹⁷⁸

On 4 August, nine days later, the Committee of Public Safety duly or-dered construction of a telegraph line from Paris to Lille. Enlisting the help of his three brothers, Chappe threw himself into the task throughout the time of the Terror. The line was ready for testing on 4 April. A Chappe cousin, one Delaunay, devised an improved shorthand code, and the line officially opened on 16 July 1794. The first military dispatch reached Paris on 15 August, announcing the recapture of Quesnoy. For some reason, per-haps distrust of the new system, the Committee of Public Safety refrained from notifying the Convention until it received written word from the field, hard copy, two days later. News that Valenciennes had been taken came by telegraph on 28 August and was reported immediately. Two days later Car-not appeared before the Convention in the early evening to read the third dispatch from Chappe: “Condé restored to the Republic. The surrender took place this morning at six o’clock.”¹⁷⁹ This time the triumph of the telegraph accentuated the triumph of the army, and the Convention erupted in applause. Flush with success, the Chappe brothers constructed a Paris-Strasbourg line in 1798 and Paris-Brest in 1799. England, Spain, and Sweden followed suit with variants of the Chappe system. During the first decade of the nineteenth century semaphores spread across much of Europe in antici-pation or in the wake of Napoleon’s armies.

It is a nice near-coincidence that two notable inventors should have begun as gifted painters: Samuel F. B. Morse of the electromagnetic telegraph that displaced Chappe’s in the 1840s, and Nicolas-Jacques Conté of the modern pencil. When in Egypt with Conté in 1798–99, Monge famously said of him that he had “all the sciences in his head and all the arts in his hand.”¹⁸⁰ Born into a well-to-do farming family in what is now the Orne, he preferred making things to tilling the soil. At the age of nine he whittled himself a violin with a pocket knife. When he was fourteen he replaced an artist called Couin, who had fallen ill, and completed a painting in the chapel of the hospital in Séez, run by nuns who were his aunts.

In Paris in the 1770s Conté studied under Greuze, earned his living by portraiture, and attracted a considerable clientele. At the same time he fol-lowed Charles’s course on experimental physics and also picked up a working knowledge of chemistry. Early in the Revolution he proposed ideas for utilizing the white-elephant Machine de Marly, for minting coins, and for bleaching fabrics. Conté’s talents were known to Charles, Berthollet, and Guyton, the last of whom had him called to the weapons laboratory at Meudon. There he was at work on improving methods for generating hy-drogen (in the course of which an explosion cost him the sight of his left eye), for compounding an impermeable varnish to coat the fabric of bal-loons, and for determining the optimal form of the inflated envelope—all that when in April or May 1794, he received the commission to develop a substitute for pencils no longer obtainable from England.¹⁸¹

Ever since the sixteenth century the graphite used in fine pencils came from a single source, a mine of ore misnamed plumbago or black lead, in Borrowdale, near Keswick in the county of Cumberland. Several deposits in Germany yielded a barely usable quality, but no other mineral in Europe was comparably rich in carbon of the right texture. None was exported, and English pencilmakers monopolized the world market for what in France were called “capucines” until the end of the eighteenth century. Several engravers and artists had devised substitutes in the face of rising prices and impending exhaustion of the Borrowdale mine, but had succeeded only par-tially and on the scale of their own shops when war cut off the supply. Given the assignment to develop an artificial graphitic substance in quantity, Conté was responsible to the Agence des Mines, created by the Commission des Armes et Poudres in June 1794. Fourcroy explained the problem in a report to the Institute on the pencils Conté submitted for its approval two years later. He had set out to prepare a hard paste that would be perfectly homogeneous and finely grained but capable of taking various colors and assuming different degrees of hardness. The composition must be nonmelting and totally resistant to exposure to air, to water at any temperature, and to other liquids. It must be superior to English pencils in point of unifor-mity of grain, consistency, and hardness throughout the entire length of each pencil and among all the pencils produced.

Fourcroy could not divulge the secret of Conté’s success without infringing on his property in the discovery. In fact, the technique consisted of mixing potter’s clay freed of all impurities with finely powdered graphite enriched with lamp black to enhance the carbon content. For colored crayons he stirred in the appropriate metal oxide. Conté then fused the mixture in a crucible at red heat. The melt was poured in a thin layer onto a mold of semi-cylindrical grooves machined into a wooden plank that was imme-diately covered by a twin mold so that the two could be pressed tight against each other by a vise. Cooling and absorbing air from either end, the solidifying stems shrank away from the mold. After thorough drying in an oven at low heat, they were encased mechanically in grooved wooden halves to be glued together and rounded.

The research consisted in varying the duration and intensity of firing and the identities and proportions of ingredients in order to obtain the properties of texture, color, and hardness desired in pencils and crayons for many pur-poses. Conté accomplished that in the laboratory within six months, and reported success to the Agence des Mines in October 1794. The hard part remained. Developing industrial equipment and procedures required another two years. Initially the thermidorean Committee of Public Safety offered to allocate a nationalized property and funds to establish a factory. Conté refused. He had not at first thought to patent his invention or to go into production for himself. Family and and friends persuaded him otherwise, however, and on 7 January 1795 he took out a patent. In partnership with his younger brother, Jacques-Louis, Conte raised the capital, designed and built the machinery for the factory he installed in the Fontaine-de-Grenelle quarter at 910 rue de l’Université, opened a retail shop on the right bank, and by 1797 was taking orders for hundreds of thousands of pencils at a time.

Fourcroy goes on to describe their quality:

Twenty-six months of experiments, of researches no less various than numerous, of felicitous application of science to all aspects of this new fabrication, have led Citizen Conté to the complete solution of the problem he set himself: a paste that imitates but surpasses natural plumbago, a color diversified and modified at the artist’s pleasure from a normal gray to a thick black, diminution of the metallic sheen which is a drawback of the natural product in drawing, new instruments, simple and ingenious machines for all the modifications, forms, and in general different procedures required both for the composition of the basic material of the pencils and the wooden casing that cover it. . . .Nothing is missing from the procedures imagined by Citizen Conté.We assure the Institute that this artist has truly created a new and ingenious art founded on the most exact knowledge of chemistry and mechanics.¹⁸²

6. NATURAL HISTORY AND CONQUEST

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

A decree of the Convention annexed Belgium (or more precisely the ten provinces constituting the Austrian Netherlands) to France in February 1793 following conquest by Dumouriez.¹⁸⁴ After his defection in April, Austrian forces counterattacked, expelled the French from onetime Hapsburg territory, and established outposts inside the French frontier. Retreat from the Rhineland and armed rebellion in the Vendeé compounded Republican reverses in the late spring and summer. Reorganized by Lazare Carnot, newly conscripted French armies stabilized the internal and external military situation in the autumn and winter of 1793 and resumed their offensive toward the North and East with the capture of Charleroi on 25 June 1794. The next day the Austrians suffered further defeat at Fleurus. Jourdan and Pichegru reoccupied Brussels on 8 July. Antwerp and Liège were retaken on the twenty-fourth. The downfall of Robespierre on the twenty-seventh, 9 ther-midor, in no way impeded the continuing French advance into the Rhine-land and Holland.

Two novelties mark this campaign in military history, albeit in a small way. First, aerial warfare made its debut in the Battle of Fleurus. Second, and as already noted, on 13 May 1794 the Committee of Public Safety or-dered creation of commissions of science and arts to accompany the armies in occupied countries. Accordingly, on 30 messidor (18 July 1793) the Commission Temporaire des Arts requested the staff of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle to name two of its members to the “Commission d’Extraction près les Armées.” The Assembly of Professors obliged, and on 4 thermidor (22 July) delegated Thouin and Faujas to continue the operations they had nearly completed in Picardy and Flanders north of the border.¹⁸⁵ On 3 fruc-tidor (20 August 1794) the (thermidorean) Committee of Public Safety fur-ther decreed that they were to be joined as commissioners by the anti-quarian Michel LeBlond, former librarian of the Collège des Quatre Nations, and the architect Charles Dewailly. The orders were “to betake themselves to Belgium and other countries occupied by the Armies of the North and of Sambre and Meuse in order to collect all the monuments, all things of value, and all resources of learning that had any relevance to arts and sciences in order to enrich the Republic.”¹⁸⁶

Departing Paris on 5 September 1794, the four commissioners arrived in Belgium to find they were not the first in the field. Passing through Malines, they discovered that a Deputy on Mission, Claude-Hilaire Laurent, had there appropriated a large collection of old manuscripts, both paper and parchment, which filled twenty-four large cases loaded onto twelve wagons. Already on the job in Brussels since mid-July was Lieutenant Luc Barbier of the Fifth Regiment of Hussars, in civilian life a painter of modest talent. Three deputies to the Convention, of whom the principal was Guyton de Morveau, accompanied the army in its campaign. Apprised of the artistic richness of the country, and “considering that, for the honor and progress of the Arts, the proper place of works of genius is in the abode and in the hands of free men,” Guyton and his colleagues detached Barbier and an aide, one Niger, from their military duties. Their orders, issued on 18 July, were to seek out and transport to Paris the chefs d’oeuvres of Rubens, Van Dyck, and other masters of the Flemish school. Added to the team three days later were two others, the canonneer Floriot and a simple soldier, Franiske, both recommended as capable artists.¹⁸⁷ Barbier conducted the first shipment of over a dozen Rubens paintings to Paris. Announcing their arrival on 21 September 1794, Guyton moved the admission of Barbier before the bar of the Convention, which duly applauded his diligence and patrio-tism. 188 Returning at once to Belgium, Barbier rejoined his helpers, who had moved on from Brussels to Antwerp and Ghent. The haul of Rubens alone came to some thirty-two canvases removed from seventeen convents and churches in those three cities and the Flemish towns of Lierre, Malines, Afflighem, and Alost.¹⁸⁹

Nor did Barbier’s team limit themselves to paintings. In addition to two fine Rubens drawings, the Bishop’s Palace in Ghent yielded a splendid tall clock with harmonic chimes in a superb mahogany casing, three other time-pieces of remarkable design, two antique marble vases, two fine porcelain vases, a floral design incised on a black marble tablet, five elegant tables with gilt trimmings and elaborately carved legs, a splendid mahogany desk, two ornate épergnes of white porcelain trimmed in bronze gilt, a pair of crys-tal chandeliers, and the entire library, which was packed in twelve crates.¹⁹⁰ Before returning to active military duty in early October, Barbier was critical of the newly arrived Thouin-Faujas group. He had been informed, he warned the Commission Temporaire des Arts, that at Tournai they had dismounted three Rubens masterpieces and, contrary to all sound conservation principles, had had the canvases rolled on very thin cylinders with the paint inside. It was decided that the Comite d’Instruction Publique should be so advised in order that it might take steps to prevent such damage, which was merely the fruit of ignorance.¹⁹¹

Thenceforth paintings formed a small, though not negligible, part of the material gathered by the official commissioners. Writing from Brussels on 20 September 1794, Thouin, Faujas, LeBlond, and Dewailly report having passed through Valencienne, Cambrai, Mons, and Laaken. Only in Cambrai had the administrators heeded instructions from Paris to assemble in one place all the objects that might interest them. Except for the collection of Burtin, a noted naturalist in Brussels, which formed their first shipment to Paris, the botanical gardens and natural history galleries contained little wor-thy of transporting to Paris. Not so the libraries: they had visited eight so far, the most important being the Royal Library of Burgundy in Brussels. From these rich repositories they had drawn about 8,000 volumes, of which 5,000 were already packed in cases and en route for Lille. Included were a large number of incunabula, among them a Xenophon of 1467 and an Isi-dore of Seville of 1469. Editions of Thucydides, Homer, and Sophocles were of slightly later date. As to the manuscripts, they had concentrated on those in French. Particularly interesting was a copy of the sermons of Saint Ber-nard, since it exhibited the state of the French language in the twelfth cen-tury. 192

Thouin and company left Brussels on 27 September. “The wish to ad-vance our literary conquests along with those of the Armies of the Republic led us to suspend our operations in Belgium,” wrote the commissioners in their next report, written from Liège and addressed directly to the Committee of Public Safety on 23 October 1794.193 In emulation of their co-linguists in France, the democratic faction in the former prince-bishopric (never part of the Austrian Netherlands) had already risen against their old regime, and popular assemblies in many localities had petitioned the Convention for annexation to the French Republic. En route, it appears, and also back in Brussels, the Commissioners of Science and Art had met with unspecified impediments on the part of the military authorities to which they were attached. Already with Pichegru’s headquarters in Liège, fortunately from their point of view, was the Representative of the People Augustin Frécine, the same who had directed the saltpeter refinery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés prior to the fire. He ironed out their difficulties with the generals and en-tered wholeheartedly into their work of inspection and acquisition. (Ten years later, on learning of Napoleon’s proclamation of the Empire, Frecine enjoyed a convivial dinner with friends in Tours, after which, at once gour-met and pure republican, he shot himself.)

Still working as a team, with the collaboration now of Frécine, the four commissioners gave a full account of their operations since leaving Brussels. Having passed through Louvain, wrote LeBlond on behalf of Dewailly and himself, they had not failed to put the library there as well as those in Liège under contribution. The harvest was abundant, though with the exception of a few treasures, among them a Nuremberg Bible of 1479, the quality was lower than in Brussels. Many old volumes, he acknowledged, might scarcely be thought worthy of transporting to France. Still, however tedious the con-tents, they offered useful evidence for the history of typography. As for paintings, Liège had little of merit to offer. There were half a dozen painters whose work approximated the Italian style. It did seem worthwhile to send along samples of their work, but that was all.

Thouin, however, was delighted with the variety of botanical gardens. Among the thirteen he visited, he found sixty-four vegetable species un-known in the Jardin des Plantes, many novel medicinal plants, and a Chi-nese olive. Best of all were a range of exotic fruit trees virtually unknown in France. But the most surprising discovery was a variety of enormous chicken that laid eggs with near abandon and was remarkably tender when roasted. He had come into contact with several enlightened cultivators whose views on reclaiming wasteland were eminently practical and who sympathized with Republican principles. Following in the footsteps of valorous conquerors, he and his colleagues could not fail to be reminded of glorious battles at every turn. Nor could they deny themselves the pleasure of sharing their pride with their fellow citizens. Accordingly, they engaged several young artists among the soldiers to make sketches of the finest scenes, and sent a portfolio of drawings to the Committee along with their report.

There had been one extensive natural history collection in Liège, wrote Faujas, but it belonged to an émigré who, unfortunately, had sent it to London. Although nothing suitable was left for him to harvest, he was greatly impressed by the advanced state of the extractive industries in this old region of coal mining and had been able to gather a wealth of information relevant both to improving French technology and to illuminating cer-tain issues in the theory of the earth. He had had drawings made of the most powerful steam engines used for pumping water out of mine shafts. Liège was surrounded by important marble quarries. Unfortunately the Aus-trians in the anger of their retreat had put the torch to a superb chemical plant producing sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), of which the propri-etor was a Republican sympathizer who had taken refuge in France.

Following the last shipment from Liège on 19 October 1994, the Commis-sion of Science and Arts proceeded into the Rhineland by way of Spa, Aix-la-Chappelle, Cologne, and Bonn. “It’s in Cologne that we shone,” reported LeBlond on 1 January 1795 from Coblentz, their furthest point. Twenty-five cases of books, prints, and drawings, three enormous culverins, one of which had been cast in 1400, ancient gold and silver medals and monuments, fragments of an antique mosaic, Greek and Egyptian figurines, a huge pre-historic stone sarcophagus—“There is what this ancient city of the Ubians has furnished to the Republic.” All that was in addition to an abundant artistic harvest: paintings and drawings of Durer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mantegna, and an infinity of other masters. “Little did it matter to me to be treated as a literary pirate,” LeBlond wrote in one of the rare admissions that he and his colleagues met with any resentment, let alone resistance.¹⁹⁴ Unfortunately several emigrés had preempted relics of the three kings, a quantity of gold and silver, and a few precious stones, while the Elector Palatine had managed to send his whole library from Bonn to Munich along with his entire natural history collection except for the birds and quadru-peds. All they had acquired consoled them for having missed out on that.

Thouin and Faujas, by contrast, were a little disappointed in the botanical gardens and natural history of the neighborhood of Cologne. The richest by far belonged to an enlightened collector and friend of the French Revolution, the baron de Hupsch. A philanthropist, he regularly distributed food to the poor and kept his gallery open for the benefit of the public. In view of his beneficence, Frécine thought it in keeping with French dignity to exemplify the importance the Republic attached to science and the arts by assigning de Hupsch the house and garden of an emigré in order that he might display his collection to better advantage and cultivate medicinal plants. That generous decision left little in the way of specimens worthy of the Muséum in Paris.¹⁹⁵ A very detailed letter from Bonn on 6 January 1795 lists a number of botanical specimens but concerns mainly the topography, agricultural economy, and horse-breeding practices of the Rhineland.¹⁹⁶

The weeks in Germany produced considerable friction between the two naturalists and their scholarly partners. Faujas and Thouin wished to return to Paris, wrote LeBlond disapprovingly in his long letter from Coblenz, whereas Dewailly and he, though they too had business at home, had gath-ered in barely half the available crop and were eager for more time to do a thorough job of culling the local libraries. When they did turn back, they intended to pass through Louvain (again), Antwerp, Ghent, Tournai, Ypres, Bruges, Ostende, and several other cities still to be exploited.¹⁹⁷ The initial reaction of the Comité d’Instruction Publique was to replace Faujas and Thouin, although nothing in their own letters betrays any loss of zeal.¹⁹⁸ That decision changed after Pichegru invaded Holland, led the Army of Sambre and Meuse across the frozen Waal on 8 January 1795, and captured Utrecht, The Hague, and Amsterdam virtually without resistance. The stadtholder, William V of Orange-Nassau, fled to England. By the end of January the French controlled the entire country, declared to be the Batavian Republic on 4 February 1795.

Instead of returning home, Faujas and Thouin received orders to proceed forthwith to The Hague, there to see to conservation of the Stadholder’s reportedly magnificent natural history collection, and to transport to Paris whatever might enrich the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle.¹⁹⁹ The prospect rekindled their enthusiasm if, indeed, it had ever flagged. From Maastricht Thouin sent a detailed summary of their shipments to date: from Malines on 22 September 1794 a convoy of twelve wagons loaded with twenty-four large cases of books and manuscripts; from Brussels on 24 September five wagons with nine cases of books and two carriages full of natural history specimens; from Liège on 19 October eighteen wagons with twelve cases of books and manuscripts, one carriage of living plants, one of paintings, and one with a cage of live animals; from Cologne on 30 November fifteen wagons with thirty large cases of books, antiquities, tools, minerals, cannon, and the three culerins; from Aix-la-Chappelle on 12 December twenty-four wagons with nine cases of books and manuscripts, nine marble columns, a bronze statue, and a collection of minerals, insects, and butterflies; from Bonn on 30 December twenty-six wagons with thirty-four cases of natural history and books; from Maastricht, finally, on 3 January 1795 three wagons with thirty-two cases of books and natural history specimens.²⁰⁰

LeBlond and Dewailly parted from Thouin and Faujas at Maastricht whence, on Frécine’s orders, they undertook a side trip to Stavelot and Malmédy in order to inform themselves about the paper and cardboard industry that flourished there. LeBlond took advantage of the occasion to appropriate a number of valuable works from the library of the Benedictine order, for-merly sovereign in the tiny ecclesiastical principality containing those two towns. At his behest, a pair of volunteers from the military balloon company, no doubt at loose ends since the Battle of Fleurus, made a shopping trip through several abbeys he had not time to see and collected manuscripts and fifteenth-century editions that their captain, Coutelle, undertook to send to Paris. The partners then made their way to Amsterdam, where they arrived on 20 February to find instructions from Frécine that they were to rejoin him in The Hague. It appeared that the political dispositions taken for Holland would not permit operations of the sort they had conducted in other conquered countries, and LeBlond contented himself with going through the library and collection of antiquities in the Stadholder’s palace in order to note the most remarkable objects and pieces of furniture in an inventory that the Representatives of the People might consult as circum-stances permitted.²⁰¹

LeBlond and Dewailly returned to Brussels by way of Antwerp with still another side trip for further gleaning in Louvain. After sending off a final shipment of fifty-four cases of books and manuscripts, they found that in Belgium too matters were on a different footing. Incorporation of the coun-try into the departmental structure of the French Republic, like the conversion of Holland into a sister republic, no longer permitted simple appropriation of what was no longer enemy property. A decree of the Committee of Public Safety of 20 February 1795 abolished the “Agences d’Extraction” at-tached to the armies.²⁰² On 3 March the entire membership of the new Central Administration of Belgium, eighteen strong, addressed a sharply worded memorandum to the Comité d’Instruction Publique denouncing the high-handedness of its agents, demanding restitution of Belgian patri-mony, and noting that the Committee had been presented with a series of illuminating reports on vandalism, of which the treatment of Belgium was a cardinal example. On 4 March Frécine, then in Antwerp, ordered that henceforth agents might not take possession of goods belonging to religious bodies or private corporations except by mutual accord and at a fair price. As to objects in public buildings or in emigré properties, regular procedures were to be followed in the presence of a commissioner of the local munici-pality. 203 In the light of all this, Le Blond and Dewailly sent repeated requests to Paris for instructions. Receiving no reply, they concluded that they

Meanwhile, Thouin in The Hague learned on 22 February that he too was being recalled to Paris, ostensibly because his presence was needed to supervise subdivision of a parcel of land being joined to the Jardin des Plantes. Nothing could give him greater joy, he replied. Despite the frigid weather, he would have set forth at once, except for certain considerations he thought it useful to convey before complying. The conquest of Holland, he points out, has given France possession of the properties of the Stadholder. Among other things of value, the Natural History Collection is unique in the world. Drawn from the Dutch colonies, inaccessible to others, it contains specimens little known or totally unknown elsewhere. But what heightens its merit is the extraordinary state of conservation of the contents. The birds and reptiles of Surinam, the quadrupeds and insects of the Cape of Good Hope, the molluscs and fish of the East Indies—all the preparations exhibit incomparable ingenuity and great taste.

A handsome hippopotamus nine feet long, well stuffed and in a natural pose; a wild boar from the Cape, of which no good drawings exist; three little deerlike quadrupeds from the same country and totally unknown; a tufted pheasant from China and a pearly pheasant from Sumatra, two birds few naturalists have seen; the skeletons of a fifteen-foot giraffe and a huge orangutan; and finally a great quantity of fish, serpents, and insects un-known to science. He has examined all this carefully, and is persuaded that at least two-thirds of it would improve, augment, and complement the con-tents of the galleries in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and would make the national collection the greatest the world will ever see and the most useful to the progress of natural science.

Independently of these riches, others are to be found (unless the English have destroyed them) in a country house called Loo in Guelderland. In-stalled there is a menagerie in which are two young elephants, a male and a female, a “cazouart” (emu?), one of the largest birds known, and several other strange and wild creatures. Their acquisition would greatly enrich our menagerie. Only the expense deterred the Representatives of the People, Charles Cochon and Dominique Ramel, who were on the scene. The Stadholder had left a pile of debt, and his collections might be considered assets for the value of which his creditors would bill the Republic. But there ought to be ways around that.²⁰⁵

Evidently Thouin was allowed to stay in The Hague, and evidently ways were found. On 31 December 1795 two auditors for the Director General of Public Instruction presided over the opening of the crates he had sent from Holland in the preceding months. The first shipment consisted of one hun-dred forty-seven cases containing hundreds of the choice specimens he had described. The second of seventy-four containers included seventeen additional cases of natural history, ten full of scientific books, and a number of trunks packed with the personal effects of Faujas, Thouin, and several other Frenchmen leaving the Hague. Among them was one Coqueret, the Stadholder’s “ci-devant” head chef. Tucked in here and there were a magnifi-cent ivory model of an elephant hunt, a superb solar cadran, and a beautiful Delbarre microscope. A single crate composed the third and last shipment, a miscellany of Dutch books, plans and models of fortifications, natural history, and additional personal effects. Nothing more is awaited from Hol-land, concludes the report, except the living animals, of which there are fifty-two individuals.²⁰⁶

The animals had to wait, probably because of the expense. For that reason, early in 1796 Ginguené, Minister of the Interior under the Directory, instructed local administrators in Cologne to refrain from sending pieces of sculpture, architectural columns, and other heavy objects that LeBlond and Dewailly had collected and failed to ship. Perhaps transportation could be arranged when calls on the Treasury slackened.²⁰⁷ Evidently the budget eased later in the year, for the menagerie of the House of Orange could then be moved to Paris, all but the two elephants, Hans and Parkie. For them a heavy-duty carriage and special cages, the first of which Hans smashed, had to be constructed. A somewhat embroidered account tells of their passage, pulled by a team of a hundred horses to Deventer, and thence by barge along canals to the Seine and Paris. Once the great beasts were safely docked alongside the quai at the bottom of the Jardin des Plantes, the boards were knocked from their cages. Raising her trunk (it is said) Parkie looked about, first at the vista of Paris, then at Hans, and trumpeted twice, once for liberty and again for love.²⁰⁸

No hint that anyone in Paris felt the slightest compunction about all this has come to light in the archives. From Liège one complaint survives. After dissolution of the Agences d’Extraction, the agent in charge of objects of science and art there was a painter, one L. Defrance, who was also a member of the local administration. On 22 September 1795 he addressed a letter to the Comité d’Instruction Publique concerning shipment of further booty which, as in Cologne, LeBlond and Dewailly had left behind. The princi-pality of Liège, he reminded the Committee, had already staged its Revolution before the French arrived and had declared for the Republic. Devas-tated by the Austrians in retreat, its reward from the French was to be treated as a conquered country, to be stripped of its cultural heritage, and to be left in misery and anarchy, its industry destroyed. “There are the fruits of its resolute love of liberty. Pardon a friend of liberty this digression.”²⁰⁹ Whether Defrance was a Frenchman or Liègeois is unclear.

The post-Thermidor reports on vandalism perpetrated under the Terror, to which the Brussels administrators alluded, were submitted to the Comité d’Instruction Publique by Grégoire. While he praised the work of the Commission Temporaire des Arts in France, his judgment of the early operations in Belgium is an instance of the capacity of even the most balanced minds to take a set:

Still more than the Romans, . . . we have the right to say that in combatting tyrants, we are protecting the arts. We are collecting their monuments even in the countries where our victorious armies pene-trate. Besides the plates of the famous map of Ferrari, twenty-two cases of books and five carriages of scientific objects have arrived from Bel-gium: among them are manuscripts lifted from Brussels in the war of 1742 and returned in 1769 as stipulated by the treaty of peace.

Thanks to its courage, the Republic acquires what Louis XIV could never obtain even for an enormous price. Crayer, Van Dyck and Rubens are en route for Paris, and the Flemish School steps forth en masse to ornament our museums.210

More germane to the present history, the Republic also acquired a cache of scientific books that enriched the collection at Mézières to form the nucleus of the library of the École Polytechnique. Among the treasures were David Gregory’s 1703 edition of Euclid, a first edition (1634) of the Oeuvres mathématiques of Stevin, a 1621 Diophantus, a 1624 Opera geometrica of Torricelli, and a 1728, six-volume Opera omnia of Leibniz.²¹¹

Such, in sum, was the precedent that Bonaparte followed in 1796–97 when he named a Commission of Science and Art headed by Monge and Berthollet to accompany the Army of Italy. He enlarged on it still more dramatically in Egypt, where the clone of French science he implanted on the banks of the Nile flourished from 1798 until 1801.

7. EFFECTS OF WARTIME: SCIENCE AND THE STATE

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

1 Éloges historiques, ed. M. Flourens (1860), pp. 301–302.

2 Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (1966), p. 164.

3 Ibid., p. 164.

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

5 Ibid., p. 578.

6 Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 107.

7 An exception is the sympathetic account given by Pierquin (1900), in an edition of the political memoirs Pache wrote in retirement.

8 Grison (1996), pp. 124–125.

9 Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 106.

10 Braesch (1911), pp. 222, n. 2; pp. 245–264.

11 Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 105.

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

13 Herlaut (1946), 1, chapter 2, pp. 31–102.

14 On Hassenfratz in the Ministry of War, see Grison (1996), chapter 12.

15 Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. 170. On Vandermonde, see Birembaut (1953).

16 Herlaut (1946), 1, pp. 37–40.

17 From the notice on Vincent in Tuetey (1890–1914), 11, pp. xxi–xxvii. See also Herlaut (1946), 1, pp. 37–40 and elsewhere.

18 Herlaut (1946), 2, pp. 297–298.

19 Pierquin (1900), pp. 157–158. Pierquin reprints Pache’s three political memoirs, pp. 29–54.

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

21 Meusnier to maréchal de Ségur, 12 July 1786, pièces 39–40 in Archives de la Guerre, Général de Division, 32, which dossier contains Meusnier’s “États,” or service record.

22 Gillispie (1980), pp. 71–73.

23 Dossier cited n. 21.

24 On Dumouriez and the conquest of Belgium, see Chuquet (1886–95), vol. 4.

25 On Custine and the Rhineland campaign, see ibid., vol. 6.

26 On the siege of Mainz, see ibid., vol. 7.

27 Dumouriez appended his exchanges with Pache, “Correspondance du général Dumouriez avec Pache,” to his Mémoires (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1794). On these exchages, see Grison (1996), pp. 137–145.

28 Chuquet (1886–95), 4, p. 167.

29 Ibid., 5, p. 2.

30 Ibid., 5, pp. 11–12.

31 Gouvion de Saint-Cyr (1829), 1, pp. 271–72, n. 1.

32 Chuquet (1886–95), 7, p. 154.

33 Ibid., 7, pp 272–73.

34 Aulard (1889–95), séance du 3 février 1793, 6, p. 16.

35 Lacroix (1932), 4, pp. 95–99.

36 Launay (1933), pp. 97–100.

37 On Guyton’s role in military research, see Bret (1992a).

38 See above, chapter 2, section 6.

39 Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France (2191). The documentation on which this section is based is reproduced extensively in Gillispie (1992). See also Bret (1992b).

40 AN, AFII 223, 1926.

43 The components were sulphur, colophane resin, sarcocelle (a vegetable resin), nitre (po-tassium nitrate), pulverized gunpowder, turpentine, linseed oil, and alcohol. For the exact proportions and the recipe for preparation, see Gillispie (1992), pp. 74–75.

44 Archives de l’artillerie, 6f4,b3A7.

45 AN, AFII 223, 1930.

46 Hassenfratz to Monge, 10 April 1793. AN, AFII 223, 1930.

47 Hassenfratz to Ministre de la Marine, 13 April 1793; AN, AFII 223, 1930.

48 Dalbarade memorandum, 8 May 1793; AN, AFII 223, 1925.

49 AN, AFII 223, 1925.

50 Bret (1989).

51 AN, F12.

1329.

52 “Observations sur quelques faits que l’on a opposé à la doctrine antiphlogistique,” Annales de Chimie 11 (1791), pp. 3–26.

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

54 A recent biography is Poisson (1985).

55 Choderlos de Laclos, Lettre à MM. de l’Académie française sur l’Éloge de Vauban (1786).

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

57 AN, AFII 223, 1927.

58 AN, AFII 223.

1927.

59 Guyton papers, cited note 56.

60 Berthollet to Guyton, 1 June 1793, papers cited note 52.

61 AN, AFII 223, 1924.

62 AN, AFII 223, 1925.

63 AN, AFII 223, 1928.

64 AN, AFII 223, 1926.

65 AN, AFII 223, 1924.

66 AN, AFII 223, 1930.

67 Ibid.

68 Fabre to Artillery Bureau, 29 nivôse an II (13 January 1794), AN, AFII 223, 1924.

69 Arrêté du 7 thermidor an II, AN, AFII 220, 1869, pièce 69.

70 AN, AFII 220, 1896.

71 For the story of military aerostatics, see Bret (1990a) and (1991a); Robineau (1990).

72 Gillispie (1983), pp. 15–17.

73 Robineau (1990), p. 422.

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

75 Memorandum of 29 nivose, an II (19 January 1794); AN, AFII 223, 1924.

76 Fabre to the Executive Directory, brumaire, an VI (October 1797); Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4,b350.

77 Resumé de l’épreuve sur le tir des obus de nouvelles dimensions, faite le 1^er Prairial, en présence des Citoyens Monge et Hassenfratz. AN, AFII 220, 1896.

78 Villaret to Dalbarade, le 5 frimaire, an III (26 November 1794), AN, AFII 220, 1899.

79 Fabre to the Minister of War, 18 nivôse an VI (7 January 1798), Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4.,b350(5).

80 Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4, b350 (6).

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

82 Quoted in Henri-Joseph Paixhans, Nouvelle force maritime (1822), p. 99.

83 Archives de l’Artillerie, 6.f.4, b350 (6).

84 Ibid.

85 Paixhans, Nouvelle force maritime, “Réponses aux objections,” pp. 223–239.

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

87 Institut de France, Académie des Sciences, Procès-Verbaux 7 (1820–23), Séance du lundi 8 mai 1820, p. 48.

88 Institut de France, Académie des Sciences, Procès-Verbaux 8 (10 May 1824), pp. 79–80.

89 Nouvelle force maritime, pp. ix–x.

90 Mathiez (1922). The citation is to the 1959 ed., pp. 427–428.

91 AP, 1st series, 72, pp. 674–675.

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

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

94 Reinhard (1994), pp. 238–268.

95 The Éloge de Vauban is reprinted in Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 391–406.

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

97 Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 101–117, gives an excellent summary and analysis of Carnot’s military leadership, and reprints Carnot’s signal directives to the armies and reports to the Convention in volume 2.

98 See my preface to the second edition of Reinhard (1994).

99 Charnay (1984–85), 1, pp. 101–102.

100 Le Comité de salut public aux représentants près les Armées, 10 thermidor an II (28 July 1794), in Charnay (1984), 1, p. 239.

101 The standard biography is Bouchard (1946).

102 Guyton, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public sur l’état de la situation des arsenaux des armées de terre et de mer de la République, 14 pluviôse an III (2 February 1795), BN, Le³⁸1195; Richard (1922), pp. 633–640.

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

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

105 Gillispie (1980), pp. 344–356. On Duhamel, see Dupont de Dinechin (1999); Académie d’Orleans (2001).

106 “Mémoire sur le fer, considéré dans ses différens états métalliques,” MARS (1786/99), pp. 132–200. For an analysis, see Gillispie (1980), pp.438–443.

107 Avis aux ouvriers en fer, p. 21.

108 Richard (1922), pp. 228–232.

109 Aulard (1889–95), 6, p. 89, and elsewhere. Instruction sur l’art de séparer le Cuivre du Métal des Cloches (1793).

110 Fourcroy, “Recherches sur le Métal des Cloches, et sur le moyen d’en séparer le cuivre,” Annales de chimie 9 (1791), pp. 305–352. Besides Dizé, others working on the problem at the same time were two minor chemists, Auguste and Jeannetty.

111 Supplément à l’Instruction sur l’art de séparer le cuivre du métal des cloches, publié par ordre du Comité du Salut Public: Rapport sur les essais faits à Romilli, pour faire en grand l’affinage du metal des cloches. 22 ventôse, an 2 (1794).

112 Lelièvre et Pelletier, “Rapport au Comité de Salut Public sur les nouveaux méthodes de tanner les cuirs, proposées par le citoyen Armand Seguin,” 3 brumaire an III (24 October 1794), Annales de chimie 20 (1797), pp. 15–77.

113 Fourcroy, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, sur les arts qui ont servi à la défense de la République, Sur le nouveau procédé de tannage découvert par le citoyen Seguin. Séance du 14 nivôse, l’an troisième de la République française. BN, Le³⁸1127. Cf. Bret (1994), pp.197–200.

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

115 Richard (1922), p. 477.

116 Prieur, Rapport sur le salpetre, fait à la Convention Nationale, au nom du Comité de Salut Public, 14 frimaire an III (4 December 1793). BN, Le³⁸.591. Also printed in AP, 1st series, 80, pp. 616–621. For general accounts of the revolutionary program in saltpeter and gunpowder, see Richard (1922), chapters 11–13, 16; Payen (1934), chapter 5; Bret (1994), pp. 216–274; and Le Service des poudres, numéro spécial de la revue Croix de Guerre (1961), pp. 63–74, 145–154.

117 Richard (1922), pp. 460–461.

118 A report to the Minister by the régisseurs gives a complete État, or Table of Organization, as of 17 May 1793. AP, 1st series, 73, pp. 609–617. For the location of refineries and powder mills, see Payen (1934), pp. 166–167, and charts in Bret (1994), pp. 622–623.

119 AN, AFII*130.

120 AP, 1st series, 80, pp. 616–619.

121 Aulard (1889–95) 9, p. 626.

122 Ibid. 10, p. 101 (7 January 1793). On Chaptal, see Pigeire (1932); Péronnet (1988); and Louis Bergeron’s introduction to the 1993 reprinting of Chaptal, De l’industrie française (1819).

123 Chimie appliquée aux arts (4 vols., 1807); L’art de faire le vin (1819); De l’industrie française (2 vols., 1819); Chimie appliquée à l’agriculture (2 vols., 1823).

124 Aulard (1889–95), 27 April 1793, 3, pp. 484–485.

125 Barère, Rapport et Projet de Décret sur l’établissement d’une Commission nationale des poudres et armes de la République, 13 pluviôse an II. BN, Le³⁸ .677^a.

126 Aulard (1889–95), 10, pp. 460–461.

127 Ibid., 15 pluviôse (3 February 1794), 10, pp. 635–636.

128 Ibid., 10 pluviôse (29 January 1794), 10, pp. 506–507.

129 Ibid., 14 pluviôse (2 February 1794), 10, pp. 617–618.

130 Ibid., 11, pp. 434–435.

131 On Niou’s mission, see ibid., 1, p. 500n; 12, pp. 455–456; 14, pp. 174, 712–713. On Frécine’s, ibid., 13, pp. 367–368, 455; 14, p. 356; 16, p. 224.

132 BN, Lb⁴¹ .1120.

133 Barère, Rappport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, Sur l’état de fabrication du salpêtre & de la poudre, sur la nécessité de supprimer l’Agence nationale, ci-devant Régie des poudres et salpêtres, 17 messidor an II (5 July 1794). BN, Le³⁸ .837.

134 Bret (1994), 270–271. Prieur’s figure is for the twelve months following 4 December 1793 (14 frimaire), “Notice sur l’exploitation extraordinaire du salpêtre, qui a eu lieu en France, pendant les années 2 et 3 de la République,” Annales de chimie 20, (an V, 1797), pp.291–307. For data from the Régie des Poudres and its successor, Agence nationale, see Bottée and Riffault (1811), tables 1 and 3.

135 “Mémoire sur les différentes méthodes proposees pour déterminer le titre ou la qualité du Salpêtre brut; Sur la volatilisation de ce sel, qui a lieu par la simple ébullition; Et sur les changemens qu’il paroît convenable de faire aux opérations usitées jusqu’à présent pour le raffinage du Salpêtre,” OL 5, pp. 614–664.

136 Above, chapter 1, section 7.

137 For a contemporary analysis by two chemists who were not party to the issue, see Fourcroy and Vauquelin, “Mémoire sur les incertitudes et les causes d’erreurs qui se trouvent dans la méthode d’essayer les Salpêtres bruts par la dissolution saturée du Nitre,” lu à l’Académie des Sciences le 27 juillet 1791, Annales de chimie 11 (October 1791), pp. 125–142.

138 BN, Lf⁶⁵.11, Mémoire à l’Assemblée Nationale, pour les vingt Salpêtriers du Roi, établis dans la Ville, Faubourgs, et Banlieue de Paris, par le M^e Lavaux, avocat aux Conseils, pp. 41, 43.

139 OL 5, p. 620). Riffault was co-author of the treatise on gunpowder with Bottée (1811). Guyton confirmed Lavoisier’s attribution in a report on methods of assaying crude saltpeter, Institut de France, Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie des Sciences, 26 thermidor an V (14 August 1797), 1, 244–256.

140 Op. cit., n. 125, OL 5, pp. 630–631, 654–646). Multhauf (1971) considers that Lavoisier was mistaken about vaporization of saltpeter, and that the deficit in yield was due to entrainment in the course of repeated ebullition, which would have the same effect.

141 “Mémoire sur le raffinage du Salpêtre brut,” lu à l’Académie des Sciences le 24 mars 1792, Annales de chimie 17 (April 1793), pp. 84–101. Baumé says that the personnel of the Arsenal had resisted his proposal on the grounds that workers would be unwilling to change their routine.

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

143 Op. cit. n. 134, (OL, 5, pp. 645–646).

144 Annales de chimie 15, pp. 275–267; 16, pp. 3–39.

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

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

147 Bottée and Riffault (1811), chapter 1, pp. 3–111, treats saltpeter.

148 Berthollet, “Observations sur les proportions des élémens de quelques combinaisons,” and Gay-Lussac, “Sur la vapeur nitreuse, et sur le gaz nitreux considéré comme moyen eudiométrique,” both in Mémoires de physique et de chimie de la Société d’Arcueil 2 (1809), pp. 42– 67 and 235–253, respectively. The Berard and Vauquelin references are not specified.

149 Vauquelin and Trusson, Instruction sur la combustion des végétaux, la fabrication du salin, de la cendre gravelée, et sur la manière de saturer les eaux salpètries (1793).

150 Raymond, Aux administrateurs et Sociétés populaires des départements du Tarn, de Haute-Garonne, de l’Ariège . . . etc., 13 messidor an II (1 July 1794), pp. 2–3. BN, Lb⁴¹. 3924.

151 Above, chapter 3, section 4.

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

153 On the history of the Leblanc process, see Gillispie (1957a) and J. G. Smith (1979), and on the Leblanc patent, see above, chapter 3, section 4.

154 Cours révolutionnaire (n. 28), 6e Lecon, p. 4.

155 Bottée and Riffault (1811).

156 Aulard (1889–95), 15 December 1795, 9, p. 416.

157 For English procedures, see West (1991), pp. 167–187.

158 Bret (1994), pp. 221–225, points out Cossigny’s priority. Cossigny published his own account with documentation in Recherches physiques et chimiques sur la fabrication de la poudre à canon (1807), followed by Supplément (1808).

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

160 Bottée and Riffault (1811), pp. cxxxvi, 289.

161 Ibid., pp. cxxxix–cxli.

162 Ibid., pp. 296–297. Bret (1994), p. 675, gives a complete list of Proust’s memoirs. On Proust, and on chemistry and gunpowder generally, see Mauskopf (1988) and (1990).

163 Carnot, Rapport sur la manufacture extraordinaire d’armes établie à Paris, fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public, 13 brumaire an II. BN, Le³⁸546.

164 AN, AFII 214^A, plaq. 1834, pièce 40.

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

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

167 Alder (1977), pp. 221–249.

168 AN, AFII 215^A, plaq. 1845, pièce 33.

169 Daumas (1953), pp. 360–365.

170 Rapport, undated, but in response to request from Committee of Public Safety, 3 pluviôse an III (22 January 1795). AN, F¹²1310.

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

172 Richard (1922), pp. 770–792.

173 Guyton, Rapport fait au nom du Comitéde Salut Public Sur l’état de situation des arsenaux et de l’armement des armées de terre et de mer de la République, 14 pluviôse an III. BN, Le³⁸1195.

174 “Rapport à la Convention,” le 13 brumaire an II (3 November 1793), AP, First series, 78, p. 211.

175 Quoted in Woronoff (1984), 353.

176 “Rapport sur le télégraphe . . . par Lakanal,” PVCd’IP 2, p. 5.

177 PVCd’IP(L), p. 162.

178 Ibid., pp. 16–162, 294; PVCd’IP 1, pp. 385–388, 403, 434–435; 2, pp. 3–6.

179 PVCd’IP 4, pp. 943–944; On Chappe and early telegraphy, see Ignace Chappe (1840), Butrica (1992), and Businelli (1993).

180 Jomard (1852), p. 7.

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

182 PVIF, 6 prairial an IV (5 May 1796) 1, pp. 43–45.

183 Saunier (1902) gives a full account of French acquisitions and restitutions in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period.

184 On Belgium during the French Revolution, see Palmer (1959–64), 1, pp. 341–357; 2, pp. 69–82; and for an exhaustive account, Tassier (1930).

185 PVCTA 1, p. 306; AN, F¹⁷1223–1224, dossier 3. Published posthumously, Thouin (1841) is a journal of his forays into Belgium, Holland, and Italy.

186 AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 4, pièce 189.

187 AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 100. Arrêté des Rep^tsdu peuple près l’Armée du Nord, à Bruxelles le 30 messidor l’an II de la R.; and Arrêté . . . le 2 thermidor . . . , both s. L. B.

Guyton.

188 PVCd’IP 5, pp. 75, 89.

189 PVCTA 1, pp. 420–421. See p. 432n. for the list of paintings.

190 AN, F¹⁷1276. Extrait du Procès-Verbal du 3 thermidor 2^ieme année des objets tirés de l’Éveché de Gand.

191 5 vendémiaire an III, F¹⁷726, dossier 4, pièce 167; PVCTA 1, p. 420, 26 September 1793; Thibaudeau (for Comité d’Instruction Publique) to Membres du Comité et aux Commissaires chargés de recueillir des objets des sciences et arts dans la Belgique, 16 vendémiaire an III (6 October 1794), AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 3, pièce 122.

192 Faujas, Thouin, LeBlond, and Dewailly to “Citoyens Représentants,” le 4^eme jour compl émentaire de l’an II. AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 78. See also PVCTA 1, p. 446 (6 October 1794).

193 LeBlond, Thouin, Faujas to Comité de Salut Public, le 2 brumaire an III. AN, F¹⁷1726, received 2 brumaire an III (23 October 1794).

197 AN, F¹⁷1726 (n. 11 above).

198 PVCd’IP 5, p. 433 (17 January 1795).

199 Extrait du Procès-Verbaux de la Commission Temporaire des Arts, le 10 pluviôse an III (29 January 1795). AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 94. Not included in printed PVCTA.

200 AN, F¹⁷1229, dossier 12, pièce 261. Records of the receipt of the various shipments in Paris are in AN, F¹⁷1240^A, dossier 9; F¹⁷1245, dossier 7; F¹⁷1261; F¹⁷1277, dossiers 1, 2, 6–9.

201 LeBlond to Citoyens Répresentatifs, La Haye, le 27 pluviôse an III (15 February 1795).

202 The Secretariat of the Commission des Approvisionnements, Motet, transmitted the or-der to Brussels on 11 ventôse an III (1 March 1795). AN, F¹⁷1726, dossier 1, pièce 26.

203 Les Membres Composant l’Administration Centrale de la Belgique au Comité d’Instruction Publique, 13 ventôse, an III (3 March 1795), AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 4, pièce 187. Frécine’s order is repeated and clarified by an adjoint, one Paris, 4 germinal an III (24 March 1795). AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 71.

204 Note addressée au Comité d’Instruction Publique relative aux voyages des commissaires envoyés dans la Belgique . . . le 30 vendémiaire an IV (22 October 1795) AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 69.

205 Thouin to Comité d’Instruction Publique, 4 ventôse an III (22 February 1795), AN, F¹⁷1276, dossier 2, pièce 83.

206 Rapport au Directeur-Général de l’Instruction Publique par les C.^ens Cuvelier et Madaye, 10 nivôse IV. AN, F¹⁷1229, dossier 12, pièce 302. See also Thouin’s dispatches to his colleagues of the Muséum detailing his findings from February through June 1795, AN, AJ¹⁵823; AJ¹⁵836, dossier D19, Collections du Stadhouder. The Procès-Verbaux of the staff meetings at the Muséum summarize Thouin’s reports, AN, AJ15*97. The record of the expenditures in shipping the menagerie is in AN, F¹⁷ 1019, dossier 4. An inventory of objects returned to the Netherlands in 1815 will be found in AN, AJ¹⁵840, dossier A.

207 24 pluviôse an IV (13 February 1796) AN, F171726. dossier 7, pièce 215.

208 J.P.L.L. Hooel, Histoire naturelle des deux éléphans, mâle et femelle, du Muséum de Paris, venus de Hollande en France en l’an VI (an XII, 1803). The booklet includes a plate of the elephants copulating.

211 Pepe (1996b), pp. 160–163.