Emilie Du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science (review)

Émilie le Tonnier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (1706–49), was a colourful figure of the French Enlightenment, high-living, highly cultured, and highly intelligent, aptly described by Voltaire as "une dame qui entend Newton et qui aime les vers et le vin de Champagne." Her parting gift to posterity was her French translation of Newton's Principia mathematica, which was completed just before she died in childbed in 1749 though not published until 1759. In a period when few women had advanced mathematical education of any kind, and when few men had the mathematical expertise to be able to read Newton's book, Du Châtelet's translation is a remarkable achievement, enough by itself to mark her as a woman of distinction. More remarkably still, she was femme de lettres every bit as much as femme savante, who wrote poetry and plays, a treatise on happiness (Traité de la bonheur), and a commentary on the Bible as well as a translation of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her championship of Newtonianism ran counter to the Cartesian science that prevailed in France at this time. Newton was not the only modern whom she promoted; she also wrote a textbook of physics, her Institutions de physique that served, inter alia, to make the philosophy of Leibniz generally known in France. Her achievements were recognized in the eighteenth century: Diderot acknowledged her eminence in his article "Newtonianisme" in his Encyclopédie; her Institutions de physique was translated into German and Italian. A signal mark of her fame was her inclusion in Pinacotheca scriptorum nostra aetate literis illustrium (1741–55), by Jakob Brucker and Johan Jakob Haid. Since then, however, Mme du Châtelet has suffered the kind of selective historical amnesia so often visited on remarkable women of the past. Her writings were either depreciated as mere translations, or presumed to be the work of the men of her circle. Her sexual exploits attracted far more attention than her intellectual achievements, with the result that she is now most widely remembered as mistress of Voltaire. Even the most recent English biography of her, by David Bodanis, who claims to redress the balance, is dominated by the Voltaire liaison in which she figures as "Bridget Jones with IQ."

Fortunately this situation is changing. Several projects to edit her writings are currently underway in France. The tercentenary of her birth was marked by an exhibition plus a two-day colloquium at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. It is a measure of the extent of the revival of interest in her that no fewer than fifteen scholars contributed to this volume under review. These include scholars from within France (several of whom also contributed to the Paris colloquium) and beyond. Since no single individual could possibly match the breadth of Mme Du Châtelet's interests, Judith Zinsser and Julie Candler Hayes have assembled a diverse group of contributors, whose collective expertise covers the range of her accomplishments. Within this range, due emphasis has, of course, been given to her science and philosophy, beginning with a reprint of W.H. Barber's seminal article on Lebnizianism in her Institutions de physique, and a joint assessment of her as philosophe by both editors. Paul Veatch Moriarty writes on her Institutions de Physiques, while Jean François Gauvin reconstructs the context of her pursuit of natural philosophy in an excellent account of the cabinet de physique at her home at Cirey. Two articles evaluate her activities as a translator: one by Adrienne Mason, and a joint article by Antoinette Emch-Dériaz and Gérard Emch, both of which revalue translation as an important intellectual and cultural activity. Taking us beyond her science, J. Patrick Lee writes on her Recueil de poésies, Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach on her Examens de la Bible, and Barbara Whitehead on Discours de la bonheur...