BOOK REVIEW
Revolutionary Science
Jed Buchwald
Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Years. Charles Coulston Gillispie. xii + 751 pp. Princeton
University Press, 2004. $80.
The first two decades after World War II witnessed a series of
remarkable works in the history of science written by a small but
devoted group of scholars. Among them were Clifford A. Truesdell, a
specialist in continuum mechanics who wrote its history and founded
the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences; Stillman
Drake, who put experiment back at the center of Galileo's interests;
I. Bernard Cohen, who wrote extensively on Newton and many other
topics and produced the first modern edition of the great
Principia; Richard S. ("Sam") Westfall, Newton's
biographer; Thomas S. Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions has been immensely influential; Henry Guerlac, who
wrote on many subjects, notably on Lavoisier and Laplace; Otto
Neugebauer, whose A History of Ancient Mathematical
Astronomy remains unsurpassed; and others. The only member of
this extraordinary postwar group of scholars still alive is Charles
Gillispie, whose first book on the history of science dates to 1951,
more than half a century ago.
Like everyone in this cohort, Gillispie managed to remain an active
and acute scholar long past the age when most people cease
productive work. And he has now given us the full fruits of many
decades of research into science in France in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, when (and where) the endeavor was shaped both
intellectually and institutionally into its modern form.
Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Years is the second of two volumes; the first, which dealt with
the period at the end of the ancien régime in
France, was originally published in 1980 and has now been reissued
by Princeton University Press. Taken together, the two parts of
Science and Polity carry the reader into the heart of
French science just before and after the revolution. But they do far
more than that, for both volumes, and especially the second, paint
gripping portraits of individuals as they struggled to create places
for themselves and for the institutions that they envisioned in
circumstances filled with strife and opportunity.
The story has so many parts, some overlapping, others only
indirectly connected, and so thoroughly does Gillispie know his
subject, that his account reads more like Thomas Carlyle's gripping
The French Revolution: A History than a dry and
bloodless effort of modern scholarship. Like Carlyle, Gillispie
seems to feel what his subjects felt, to enter with them into the
stresses, difficulties and challenges of the moment. And Gillispie's
history, like Carlyle's, must be read as a journey through the
period, with all its vicissitudes, and not as a linear narrative or
as a monograph aiming to prove a point of interest to only a few specialists.
The pose of detachment that so often characterizes much modern
scholarship (even when it is hardly detached at all) is clearly not
for Gillispie—despite the fact that one of his most
influential books is titled The Edge of Objectivity. But
there is no inconsistency here, because Gillispie holds himself and
his subjects up to moral scrutiny, a morality based on the
conviction that scientific work, more than any other form of human
endeavor, aims to overcome the prejudices and demands of the moment.
Criticizing historians' tendencies in recent times to play up the
underdog and to downplay the importance of individuals, Gillispie
writes (for example) of the metric system that
... much historiography of science has become as
sociopolitical in vein as ordinary history, and certain of its
practitioners discount the claims of science to be the rational
mediator between humanity and nature. Instead, such authors explain
the success or failure of theories as a function of the structure of
power and attribute the choices scientists make, not to technical
factors, which are taken as pretenses to be seen through, but to
their interests, more or less disguised.
Gillispie's history has no truck with this way of thinking, for it
presents instead a detailed account of these technical factors, as
well as of the institutions and personalities, that forged science
in France.
The book's nine chapters range from a careful account of the
involvement of scientists in the early revolutionary Constituent
Assembly, through discussions of education, the profoundly important
creation of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, the development
of the metric system, and the years of the Terror, war and reaction.
Along the way we meet some astonishingly colorful and often tragic
characters. There are, for instance, the unfortunate Jean-Sylvain
Bailly, a mediocre astronomer who became Mayor of Paris and met his
end during the Terror, and the great chemist Lavoisier, a member of
the General Tax Farm, who never could do things halfway and who
thought that rational deliberation would always trump emotion. He
too felt the kiss of Madame Guillotine, and none of his politically
well-placed confreres (including the mathematician Gaspard Monge and
the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet) "said a word or lifted a
finger." We meet as well the young Laplace, onetime
collaborator of Lavoisier and eventually a central figure in French
mathematics and physics, as well as a sometime administrator, of
whom Napoleon remarked that "he brought the spirit of
infinitesimals to administration."
Gillispie includes a fascinating chapter on the Egyptian expedition
organized by Napoleon, who brought along on it many
savants, as scientists and other scholars were known at the
time. Although the expedition was a military failure, it gave rise
both to scientific archaeology and to unfortunate interactions
between Europe and the Near East, which bedevil the world to this
day. In the chapter "Scientists at War," Gillispie shows
that the initiative for the production of novel weaponry came from
the scientists themselves, who had to persuade a reluctant military.
He notes, however, that "the more innovative weapons and
techniques devised by the experts overreached either the capacity of
industry or the imagination of commanders, or both, and awaited
future realization." Gillispie also describes and analyzes the
final development of the metric system and the foundation of the
first modern school of engineering, the École Polytechnique,
with its elaborately structured curriculum, which at Laplace's
instigation included intense training in pure analysis.
The book concludes with a chapter on what Gillispie terms
"positivist science"—a chapter that largely neglects
specific theories and experiments and instead concentrates on the
process by which disciplines formed during a crucial period
(circa 1800 to 1830), one that witnessed the creation in
France of an extraordinary array of novel advances. These included
the wave theory of light, the theory of thermal diffusion, the
concept of adiabatic change and its application to gases (under the
assumption that heat is a conserved substance), the application of
advanced analysis to electricity and magnetism (Siméon Denis
Poisson), the origins of electrodynamics (André Marie
Ampère), elasticity (Sophie Germain and Augustin Louis
Cauchy) comparative anatomy (Georges Cuvier), thermodynamics
(Sadi Carnot) and many others.
Indeed, no other period since the 17th century matches those years
for the broad production of new and (for the most part) enduring
science, except perhaps the first third of the 20th century. All
this during and in the aftermath of Napoleonic conquest and defeat.
Paraphrasing with approval Auguste Comte, the philosopher of
positivism, Gillispie writes that science in Comte's
"positive" stage "is no longer a quest for
metaphysical truth"; it is "composed of laws, not
theories," and laws are "correlations of observable
facts." And "the goal of science" becomes the making
of "accurate predictions based on exact knowledge of the facts."
Some might argue that Gillispie here and there delves too deeply
into the work and fate of individuals (such as the unfortunate
Condorcet, who was spared the guillotine only because he died,
probably of a stroke, in his prison cell ), but they would be wrong,
because it is precisely these intimate details that breathe life
into what might otherwise have been a solid and illuminating but
rather dry narrative. And some might also argue that Gillispie
somewhat underplays the degree to which scientists of the
period—even those who were not direct contributors—were
gripped by the drama of so many new theoretical and experimental
discoveries. But they would also be wrong, because Gillispie's aim
was to portray the emergence of professional disciplines, of a
physics based on mathematics, a comparative anatomy based on
correlating parts and a physiology based on vivisection. And in that
he has succeeded admirably. Scientists will enjoy this book for its
insight into the life of science at a critical period in the
formation of modern disciplines; historians will learn a great deal
indeed from Gillispie's extensive coverage and perceptive remarks.