Revolutionary Science

Charles Coulston Gillispie. Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. viii + 751 pp. $85.

Reviewed by Mary Louise Gleason

In this magisterial book, a follow-up to his Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), Charles Coulston Gillispie delineates the sweeping and dramatic changes that influenced French science and medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and examines how men of science and medicine reacted to the dynamic, revolutionary upheavals affecting French society and government. Gillispie’s most recent scholarly contribution presents an illuminating and penetrating examination of how these men—pensioned government administrators and political advisers as well as salaried researchers and professors—worked individually and collectively as a community of professionals. Official government reports, journal articles, books, manuscripts, and private correspondence provided rich archival resources for this study.

Notable among the casualties of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror were venerable scientific and educational institutions. The Académie Royale des Sciences was disbanded and only later supplanted by the Institut de France. The Jardin du Roi des Plantes was transformed into the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle with a comprehensive focus on teaching and research in natural history. Reformed medical programs usurped the traditional university
Faculté de Médicine, combining the education of surgeons with that of physicians and emphasizing clinical training in the Hôtel-Dieu and other teaching hospitals. New technical institutes, notably the École olytechnique, replaced the traditional clerical colleges.

These new institutions supported and encouraged the transformation of the scientific and medical curricula
with a new emphasis on analytical, positivist, and mathematical reasoning that replaced the earlier focus on synthesis and classification. A new generation of extraordinary talent, including Laplace, Lamarck, Berthollet, Monge, Guyton de Morveau, Gay-Lussac, Poisson, Fresnel, Biot, Arago, Coulomb, Lagrange, and Sadi Carnot, emerged in the 1790s and early 1800s as transforming leaders. Their work expanded the professionalization and institutionalization of science and medicine that had begun in the late years of the ancient régime and the early days of the Republic under the leadership of Lavoisier, Vicq d’Azyr, and Condorcet, victims of the Terror.

This new generation developed the analytical disciplines of mathematical physics, experimental physics, comparative anatomy and physiology, optics, electricity and magnetism, electrodynamics, heat and light, and thermodynamics. Botany, zoology, and natural history coalesced into the new science of biology. French chemists spearheaded the modernization of chemical nomenclature and theory and its industrial application.

Military campaigns dramatically affected French science, education, and medicine. During the early 1790s Paris was transformed into a virtual munitions manufactory. Technical and engineering courses proliferated, and research and development expanded. Medical curricula emphasized clinical and surgical training. A graduate of theÉcole Polytechnique, Napoleon patronized members of the scientific community. He enjoyed a warm friendship with the mathematician—that is, the geomêtre—Gaspard Monge and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, who supervised the selection and expropriation of cultural treasures, books, and specimens from galleries, libraries, and zoological and botanical gardens in Italy and Egypt.

On first reading this reviewer was distracted by a vague sense that certain chapters seemed discrete. In his dedication, the author acknowledges that some material has been previously published as articles. This may account for editorial inconsistencies in the use of French and anglicized words. And the reference to dates in the Thermidorean calendar without indicating Gregorian calendar equivalents was somewhat confusing. Overall, however, this work offers a compelling account of a transformative historical era. It presents an informed assessment of the dedication and commitment of men of science and medicine to the reform of government and policy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, as well as the concomitant evolution and transformation of French science and medicine into professional analytical disciplines. Scholars and students will find it an excellent resource and a rich compendium; general readers may find its length and descriptive detail somewhat daunting.

This remarkable study is a work of epic proportions, a brilliant coda to an eminent scholarly career dedicated to the history of French science and medicine. With his extensive research, penetrating analysis, and elegant prose, Gillispie has given the scholarly community a monumental and lasting legacy.