La Fabrique de la modernité scientifique: discours et récits du progrès sous l’Ancien Régime ed. by Frédéric Charbonneau (review)

One of the fundamental characteristics of the Enlightenment was the belief that the progress of the human spirit would lead to a better society. The word ‘progrès’ appears no fewer than thirty times in D’Alembert’s ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the Encyclopédie. This belief led, in the eighteenth century, to the creation of a new pantheon of scientific luminaries. The nine essays that comprise this informative volume, arising from a 2011 colloquium held at McGill University, examine how some of these icônes du progrès were constructed and, on occasion, destroyed in the Ancien Régime. Each contribution deserves mention. In the first, Hélène Cazes explains how Hermann Boerhaave and Siegfried Albinus’s 1725 re-edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De fabrica corporis humani libri septem (1543) was used to establish the latter’s pre-eminence in the history of medicine, through an epistemology that privileged a return to original sources in the transmission of knowledge. Claire Grignon then analyses how attempts to depict seventeenth-century English anatomist William Harvey as a modern-day Democritus in the various editions of his De motu cordis often had philosophical, scientific, political, and even theological resonances. For his part, Frédéric Tingueley focuses on the intellectual environment of seventeenth-century libertinism to show how the operative concept of serendipity lying at the heart of Cyrano de Bergerac’s États et empires de la lune staged a contemporaneous resistance to the increasingly dominant narrative of scientific progress. Josiane Boulad-Ayoub investigates the eighteenth century’s reception of the first great ‘icon’ of modern French philosophy, Descartes, demonstrating how his multivalent body of thought became the object of both admiration and critique. And while it is well known that, for the philosophes, Descartes’s star in physics and astronomy had been eclipsed by that of Newton, Joël Castonguay-Bélanger studies those writers who simply refused to grant Newton a place in the pantheon of modern science. Frédéric Charbonneau then examines how éloges académiques and other panegyric texts written for physicians of the time became hagiographies in which the médecin replaces the saint in an enlightened narrative of scientific progress. In a case study of this phenomenon, Catriona Seth retraces the rise to stardom and anticipated (but never fully realized) pantheonization of Théodore Tronchin, the Geneva physician famed for having inoculated several royal families against smallpox. As Seth shows, for Voltaire and the philosophes, Tronchin was a modern-day Asclepius whose ‘divinization’ represented a transfer of power from the religious to the secular. In the penultimate contribution, Swann Paradis asks whether or not the natural historian Buffon should be considered an icône du progrès, since his works were often criticized by the scientific community of his time for their imaginative excesses. Finally, focusing on the complex relationship between history and fiction in medical biography, Alexandre Wenger analyses the construction of the literary monument erected for the physician Théophile de Bordeu but dismantled after his death. One of the great strengths of this volume is that its contributions are in constant dialogue with one another. It opens many new perspectives on the question of progress, and will be a welcome addition to the libraries of historians and philosophers alike.