The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

Introduction

Introduction ... Throughout the long nineteenth century that separated the Revolution of 1789 from the cataclysm of the First World War, science occupied a central place in French society and culture. In this, France resembled many other countries of Western and Central Europe and North America. But science and ways of thinking inspired by science mattered there to a degree that was arguably unmatched elsewhere. Moreover, they mattered in ways that reflected a history, political and cultural, of rare turbulence. Nineteenth-century France was scarred not only by war and violent changes of regime but also by enduring tensions between tradition and modernity and between widely divergent conceptions of what constituted the nation’s best interests both domestically and in the world. In many of these tensions, science became inextricably involved. Sometimes it was seen as the symbol of an enlightened postrevolutionary order, sometimes as a dangerous Trojan horse concealing the ever-lurking menace of philosophical materialism, sometimes as a source of material well-being or national pride, and sometimes as the focus for dispute about the legitimacy of the authority claimed either by the leading figures of the academic community or by the senior Parisian administrators who controlled, or sought to control,learnedcultureinallitsforms.Onalloftheseissues,thereweredebatesofanintensity that kept science consistently at the forefront of public concern. It is these debates and the various public arenas in which they were pursued that provide the focus for this book. The Savant and the State is a study, therefore, of the public face of science—as opposed to the professional achievements of scientists or their private discoveries—in a crucial period of the history of one country. Although its coverage is broad, it does not pretend to explore this public face exhaustively. It places special emphasis on the physical and life sciences and gives only incidental consideration to the potentially no less rich fields of medicine and the human and social sciences. It begins in 1814, when the long nineteenth century, as I define it, was already well under way. This is partly to avoid duplication of the major existing studies of revolutionary and Napoleonic science. But, more important, it allows me to begin by focusing on a society making a new start, resolved that the turmoil of the preceding quarter of a century should be relegated definitively to the past. Though profoundly marked by memories of revolution and war, French society in 1814 had no choice but to face up to the shock of peace and the challenge of reconciling an age of restored Bourbon monarchy with an acceptance of changes that the years since 1789 had rendered irreversible. No amount of reactionary nostalgia 2 The Savant and the State for a prerevolutionary age of absolute monarchy and the powerful estates of the nobility and the Catholic Church could conceal the fact that France was now set, for good or ill, on a different path. The country was headed toward a world that promised at least some measure of democracy, a national economy increasingly adapted to urban and industrial interests, and a culture guided more by secular than by religious values. At the other chronological extreme, the book ends in 1914. By that time, many of the transformations that had their roots in the first half of the nineteenth century had become areality.Formorethanfortyyears,Francehadbeenarepublic;economicdebateandpolicy had come to focus to an unprecedented degree on manufacturing, not least in anticipation of the war to come; and the Catholic Church had seen its power diminished in the face of atideofanticlericalismthathadculminatedin1905inthetempestuousseparationbetween church and state. Over the period that I treat, the changes had been disorderly, punctuated by revolutions in 1830 and 1848, the searing defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and swings of regime and political ideology that had taken the country from the clerically fired conservatism of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30) to the more liberal July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–48), the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–70), and finally the determinedly secular Third Republic (declared in 1870 and a survivor until 1940). Whatever broader analysis we adopt in trying to see our way through the thickets of the nineteenth century, it is no easy matter to identify the place of science in such a complex and troubled history. The overriding pattern was one of science’s growing prominence, both in governmental policy and in public perceptions of its importance in the life of the nation. But behind that general trend, the process had its fine structure, with subsidiary...