ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A concluding remark in an earlier work suggests that it may be appropriate for acknowledgments to appear not at the beginning of a book, but at its end, after the author has done his job and the reader can take its measure. Such will again be the practice here. To mention all the colleagues and friends who have contributed to the research and writing of this book over many years would require as much space as does the bibliography, in which many of their names appear.

Among those who have been most closely involved, let me mention first of all the late Robert R. Palmer. Leading preceptorial discussions in his undergraduate course during my early years on the faculty in Princeton University was my introduction to the study of the French Revolution. The colleagues of my generation in France who welcomed and encouraged my interest in their history from the outset were René Taton, the late Maurice Daumas, and the late Father Pierre Costabel. To Monsieur Taton I am especially indebted for having arranged, jointly with the late François Furet, for me to give a seminar under the auspices of the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales during part of each year from 1980 to 1984, in the course of which much of the material took its present form. The response and criticism of members of that seminar, as in graduate seminars in the Program in History of Science in Princeton University, were both stimulating and corrective. No one who has benefited from the hospitality of the Centre Koyré over the years can fail to feel special gratitude to its devoted executive secretary, now retired Myriana Ilic.

Two friends of recent times who have added greatly to the pleasure of working in Paris are Emmanuel Grison, the equivalent of Dean of Students at the École Polytechnique before his retirement, and Jean-Pierre Poirier, biographer of Lavoisier and of Turgot. Among younger French colleagues with whom I have consulted, also in recent years, I should like especially to mention Bruno Belhoste, Michel Blay, Patrice Bret, Eric Brian, Bernard Bru, Jean Dhombres, the Rev. Goulven Laurent, and Antoine Picon.

Foundations that have supported this work and its predecessors through-out an entire career are the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Fondation de France, the research fund in Princeton University, and finally the Fondazione Balzan. Among specialized collections, the most helpful have been the Archives of the Académie des Sciences in the Institut de France, the library of the École Polytechnique at Palaiseau, the Bibliothèque Centrale of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and the division of rare books in Firestone Library of Princeton University.

A longtime friend, Joseph Wisnovsky, science editor at Princeton University Press, has taken this book under his protective wing and arranged for concurrent republication of its predecessor, the now slightly renamed Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime. I am equally indebted to Gail Schmitt, production editor at the Press, who has shepherded the current volume through the various stages of ever higher technology with matchless efficiency. Further, I am profoundly grateful to Theodore M. Porter and Robert Fox, two of the three readers for the press. They read closely and critically, kindly identified themselves, and made enormously valuable suggestions that have modified and streamlined the plan of the book and eradicated numerous flaws. Thanks go also to Jed Z. Buchwald, who generously read a draft of the last chapter. Responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation that escaped their vigilance is as always the author’s.

This volume, like its companion, is dedicated to my wife of over fifty years, Emily Ramsdell Clapp Gillispie, best and dearest friend and critic. In her company a life of scholarship is a life of joy.

Chapter 6, section 2 and Chapter 9, section 4 are adapted, respectively, from my 1992 and 1991 articles listed in the bibliography and copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California and the publisher of Science et Vie. That material appears here with the kind permission of the University of California Press and the editor of Science et Vie. Chapter 8, section 2 combines material previously published in the “Historical Introduction” to Monuments of Egypt (Gillispie and Dewachter [1988]) and my 1989 article. It appears here with the kind permission of Princeton Architectural Press and the American Philosophical Society, respectively. Chapter 9, section 2 includes material adapted from my essay (1997b) in the collection Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, edited by Claude Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi, and Jean-Louis Fischer. It appears here with the kind permission of the copyright holder, Publications Scientifiques du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris. Chapter 7, section 5 contains material adapted from my 1994 essay in the collection La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994, edited by Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, and Antoine Pico, published by Éditions Dunod.