Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (review)

Science and Spectacle originated in a conference hosted by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris in 2003, intended to enlarge historical studies of eighteenth-century science. The essays published under the editorship of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel reflect this goal, interpreting eighteenth-century science in light of several aspects of Enlightenment mentality: the desire to learn, to be entertained, to be enthused, and to consume. That these desires were by no means mutually exclusive is apparent throughout the book. The focus falls particularly on public courses in science, which were typically characterized by dramatic demonstrations and had economic ripple effects on invention, industry, and commerce. The essays demonstrate that before science divided into branches defended by specialists, it was not only popular but fashionable. It was also entrepreneurial. Many eighteenth-century practitioners (among them Mathurin-Jacques Brisson in physics and Joseph Priestley in chemistry) earned their living with courses of varying length offered to an eager public which they attracted and retained with experiments that simultaneously conveyed information and engaged the senses—the sight of boys suspended on silken cords, the buzz of communal shocks, the smells of chemical combinations. There might even be explosions! Truly, this was a time when entertainment and education were expected to go hand in hand, and often did.

Unlike mathematics, physics and chemistry were "hard" sciences, susceptible of the dramatic illustration that drew subscribers. As I reported in 1986, eighteenth-century Paris had at least twenty public courses in these two disciplines alone, most of them offered by now-obscure demonstrators capitalizing on the success enjoyed by giants such as Jean-Antoine Nollet, who claimed audiences of more than five hundred people. Reflecting this popularity, Science and Spectacle's chapters 1 and 3-6 (by, respectively, Larry Stewart, Jessica Riskin, Michael R. Lynn, Paola Bertucci, and Oliver Hochadel) discuss the drama with which the phenomena—if not necessarily the principles—of physics were absorbed by a public that integrated them into its belief system. Chapters 7-9 (Christine Lehman, Jan Golinski, and Lissa Roberts) treat the chemistry courses offered by Priestley and Guillaume-François Rouelle, giving attention to not only their mission but also their political, intellectual, aesthetic, and even theological significance. Chapters 2 and 10 (Liliane Pérez on technology, Jonathan Simon on anatomy) are anomalies within this overall context, sharing the collection's focus on sensation but displacing it from demonstration courses to public exhibitions. Still, Simon's chapter can be said to provide the antecedent for Bodies: The Exhibition, and it clarifies why French art students avoided anatomy classes whenever possible.

All chapters but one are between ten and twelves pages in length, certainly not long enough to exhaust their subject matter, and thus we should not be surprised that no effort is made to relate public courses in science to the broader movement of elective education to which they belonged, nor that none alludes to the (admittedly post-Enlightenment) moment when science retracted into academic departments. This larger picture could have been developed by the editors, but unfortunately the collection is marked, and marred, by editorial disengagement. While in fairness one may suppose that Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel were also constrained by page count, one may yet ask why they emphasize the contributions of only seven of their authors, while two are essentially dismissed and one is omitted from mention entirely. On the other hand, it may have been the editors who inserted references to companion chapters within each essay, perhaps as a way to further connect the dots. The attempt goes awry: in only two instances are the references reciprocal, as logic would dictate; several are incomplete and one is wrong.

A uniform approach to translated material would have been welcome, whether that of identifying the translator (one instance), providing the original in the notes (two instances), or simply placing translated quotations in the text (all others...