Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences

Given our familiarity with the exclusion of women from the practice of science, it may seem trivial to note the men-only nature of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Knowing what we do about patriarchy and hierarchies of authority, we are hardly surprised to find an exclusive group of men at the center of scientific practice in the eighteenth century. We might ask, however, how the exclusivity of the primary French scientific institution came to be articulated and maintained. This particular form of elitism depended on relations with the very people it excluded. Though a substantial part of their work consisted of addressing each other in a specialized language developed for that purpose, the academicians also took care to address other audiences in carefully formulated ways. In this paper I argue that the makers of scientific knowledge needed to convince their public of the value of mathematics and experiment. Just as theatrical actors need an audience to give a performance meaning and value, the academic player depended on an audience wider than his immediate colleagues—readers, auditors, and patrons—to validate his work and to keep it going. This meant developing ways of relating to that audience, and ways of marking the differences between actor and audience. In highlighting that difference, academicians defined their practices and values. Because elite women made up a significant part of the nonspecialist audience for the academy’s work, their attitudes and responses affected the status of science and its practitioners in the cultural world outside the academy.

I start by examining Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s efforts to define an identity for science and for the academy compatible with elite social status. Fontenelle regarded aristocratic women as potential allies, but he carefully articulated academic standards and behavior to contrast with the salon conversation facilitated by women. Thus gender enters the story. Recent scholarship has shown that the salon movement of the 1670s and 1680s gave women a new prominence, especially with respect to intellectual and cultural matters, which in turn suggests why their support would have been significant for the academy. ¹ By the middle of the eighteenth century, as Fontenelle himself gradually faded from the academic and salon scenes, a significantly female audience listened to, read, and admired the products of academic science. In the second part of this paper, I look at the ways academicians used masculinity as part of their self-representation to this female audience. Finally, I take up the example of Émilie du Châtelet to explore the gendering of scientific identity from the female side. Du Châtelet worked hard to redraw the boundaries separating active production from secondhand consumption of knowledge, and her efforts illuminate the way those boundaries functioned.

Colbert created the Academy of Sciences in 1666 to serve the economic, political, and ideological interests of the absolutist state. As their mandate crystallized over the subsequent years, academicians performed services that ranged from reviewing patents to solving problems of hydraulics, navigation, cartography, and agricultural pest control. ² From the crown’s point of view, the academy was a worthwhile investment as a boost to both mercantilist economic policy and the sovereign’s glory. In its early years, the academy occupied only a tiny corner of the French administrative structure. But the official establishment of the institution in 1666 hardly guaranteed its success, for it was not immediately clear how far the “new science” would be able to go. Claims about utility and glory sounded good, but would the academicians be able to deliver on those promises? An affirmative answer would require not just profound thinking, but public relations as well.

The crown’s use of the academy as a consulting body of experts and the display of its discoveries for the glorification of the monarch were mutually reinforcing goals. From the academicians’ point of view, the image projected to their patrons, their readers, and their spectators would determine the stability and long-term viability of their institutional base. While they acquiesced fully in the crown’s project for them, they also used the crown...