Lewis Pyenson - Servants of Nature - A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

It was through the Montmor Academy that the Royal Society began to influence the future shape of science in France. Members of the two organizations were linked by correspondence and personal visits; some individuals, like the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, belonged to both. The French admired the new spirit of critical enquiry exemplified by the English cultivation of empiricism and experiment. It remained unclear, however, how the English model of cooperation among men of different social backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious convictions might be applied in the French milieu. Personal rivalries – fuelled by competing philosophical doctrines like Cartesianism and experimentalism – helped to spell the collapse of Montmor Academy by 1665. The instability brought about by its indifferent financial support strengthened pleas by Melchisédech Thévenot (ca.1620–1692), Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) and Pierre Petit (ca.1594–1677) for the creation of a subsidized society for experimentation.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, responded sympathetically to the advances of the former Montmorans. He adapted the plans put forward by Thévenot and his friends, in the end calling for fifteen salaried academicians, hand-picked from among the most distinguished scientific names of Europe. The positions were divided between two categories or classes: ‘mathematicians’ (also including astronomers) and ‘natural philosophers’, made up of chemists, physicists, and anatomists. (The decision to emphasize the physical sciences resulted from Colbert’s concern to minimize conflict with other established bodies, such as the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.) In contrast to the Royal Society, members were expected to specialize in a particular area of study. Their first meeting was convened in the Royal Library in 1666. Subsequently, meetings were held twice a week: mathematicians met on Wednesdays; natural philosophers on Saturdays.

There were strings attached to this act of royal munificence, especially on the part of the mercantilist Colbert. The Académie des Sciences joined the Académie Française in the Sun King’s intellectual firmament; at the very least, it was intended to proclaim, affirm, and reflect his glory. Academicians, in addition, were expected to deliver on the experimentalists’ utilitarian promises, which linked scientific investigations with advancement in industry, trade, and military prowess.

As a result of being given a clear mandate from the government, the early Académie des Sciences appeared to embrace the Baconian programme of cooperative research in at least two concrete ways that the Royal Society did not. The establishment of the Observatoire de Paris in 1699 allowed Academicians to carry out a continuous programme of observing the heavens and mounting scientific expeditions, with these undertakings ultimately leading to the solution of navigational and astronomical problems. The Académie also required its members to cooperate on a regular basis in order to adjudicate the merit of technical processes and to bestow patents on worthy inventions. The practice of the early Académie des Sciences suggests that cooperative efforts were more effectively applied to evaluating new ideas than to creating them.

The workings of the early Académie des Sciences remain somewhat obscure, at least until a total overhaul occurred in 1699. Before this date, the Académie had possessed neither rules nor constitution. Colbert himself had selected the first academicians, foreign as well as French, the most distinguished being the Dutch natural philosopher Huygens. Later appointees to the working membership of fifteen pensionaries – rigidly divided according to scientific speciality (geometry, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, or chemistry) – included the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and the polymath Leibniz. The Académie possessed, in addition, ten honorary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, Cartesians were excluded in this, the home of Descartes; activists like Auzout and Thévenot were marginalized. At this early stage in its history, the Académie des Sciences functioned under Baconian inspiration, with a small membership undertaking joint experimental investigations on a range of topics. It was an elitist association, limited in size with an exclusive admissions policy. 9

To some extent the early Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences may be seen as typifying the English and French scientific traditions. The Royal Society grew out of individual initiative and received royal recognition only after the fact. From its inception, it drew heavily upon the landed gentry for its membership and treasury; as a result, the breadth of its interests wandered away from the narrowly scientific. The Académie des Sciences, by contrast, functioned more as a branch of the French civil service, with a high degree of regimentation and control exercised from above. It remains difficult to assess the relative merits of the two scientific systems: the French, with its strong stamp of centralization and control, versus the English tradition, which cultivated individual self-reliance, perhaps as a direct result of the lack of state support. Whatever the advantages of either system, we see here the first crystallization of national differences in scientific traditions. The rise of nation states in the nineteenth century enhanced these distinctions.

Science flourished in Britain during the last half of the seventeenth century, despite the collapse of earlier humanitarian projects and the cynicism displayed by the king. Any decline in membership in the Royal Society was more than counterbalanced by the rise of new provincial centres of scientific activity, for example, in the creation of philosophical societies at Dublin and Oxford, both founded in 1683. As Michael Hunter has explained, seventeenth century English society showed a penchant for establishing public bodies, as opposed to impermanent, highly mutable structures dependent on personal whim.

France, on the other hand, failed to emerge as a centre of scientific excellence, despite the elaborate designs of enlightened despotism which had brought the full support of the state to a host of scientific projects. By the late seventeenth century, these programmes fell afoul of political and economic contingencies. The increasingly extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, ushering in an era of prolonged warfare with England, meant a decline in financial support for science. A period of domestic intolerance, inaugurated with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, further contracted opportunities for the free exchange of scientific ideas, and Protestant intellectuals like Henri Justel (1620–1693) were marginalized.

The rise of the scientific correspondent

The creation and persistence of the new institutions attests the strength of the scientific movement. An additional ‘barometer of intellectual health’, in the words of Harcourt Brown, was the ‘exchange of news, books, and journals’ among these organizations, particularly through official or unofficial representatives. Operating from the Place Royale in Paris, for example, Mersenne circulated information to an informal network of French natural philosophers, including Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), Gilles de Roberval (1602–1675) and Blaise Pascal. Mersenne constructed an unprecedented system of scientific communication, with nearly eighty participants. An even more elaborate correspondence network was established by the Royal Society’s Henry Oldenburg, who as secretary from 1662 until his death in 1677, exchanged information with Mersenne and Henri Justel, secretary to Louis XIV. Modern science began as an international undertaking.

Justel disseminated English scientific news and books across continental Europe. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1693, he was Henry Oldenburg’s most important link with Europe; he lent incalculable assistance to advancing the Royal Society’s reputation. Justel channelled information through a circle of intimate acquaintances who attended his ‘conferences’ in Paris, as well as through a more widely ranging network of contacts with the leading intellectuals of Europe. French members of his circle included Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), founder of the Caen Académie des Sciences and the Abbé Charles, one of the editors of the Journal des sçavans. Despite Justel’s illustrious collaborators, his correspondence has been seen as valuable not for its coherent exposition of a particular point of view, but for ‘the mass of dissociated facts and opinions … conveyed’. 10 Even a cursory examination of the letters exchanged between Oldenburg and Justel reveals how much useful scientific information could be gleaned from what appears to be, on the surface, just delightfully candid gossip.