Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777-1809 (review)

Although the chemical revolution is one of the paradigmatic examples of scientific revolutions, there has always been something rather abstract and nonsocial about the way it has been narrated. Often the focus is fixed on one man, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the scientist who himself claimed sole credit for it; sometimes it is treated as a duel between Lavoisier and one of his phlogistic adversaries, usually Joseph Priestley. What has not been done to date is to examine this revolution in terms of the changing relationships between the communities of practitioners that constituted the chemical enterprise in the eighteenth century. In this regard, it is indicative of the state of scholarship on the subject that, although France was the locus of this revolution, the French chemical communities have never received the kind of aggregative analysis that Karl Hufbauer provided for the eighteenth-century German chemical enterprise many years ago.¹

Jonathan Simon has not done for eighteenth-century France what Hufbauer did for Germany, but he has written a highly illuminating book on the relationship between the community of pharmacists, recognized today as the most important constituency of the eighteenth-century French chemical enterprise, and the leaders of the development of "philosophical chemistry" (what became the new Lavoisian chemistry). The trajectory of Simon's narrative is this: Up through the early eighteenth century, chemistry (as inscribed in textbooks, such as the famous Cours de chymie (1675) of Nicolas Lémery, was largely a matter of drug preparations. During the eighteenth century a number of writers on chemistry, such as Gabriel-François Venel, espoused broader, more philosophical visions of chemistry. Venel's contemporaneous textbook writer, Pierre-Joseph Macquer, did much the same thing in his Élémens de chymie théorique (1749) and Élémens de chymie-pratique (1758).

The moves to broaden and raise chemistry to a more philosophical (as opposed to artisanal) status came to fruition through the work of a number of chemical generalists ("amateurs" to Simon), led by Lavoisier. One feature that marked the new chemistry was the marginalization of pharmacy. Unlike most of the chemical leaders of the Académie des Sciences at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the leadership of the new antiphlogistic chemistry had little or no interest in pharmacy—with one exception: Antoine-François de Fourcroy. And even he was not trained as an apothecary.

Although Lavoisier himself was a casualty of the French Revolution, the chemistry he initiated was a major beneficiary: in the revolutionary reconstitution of higher education, the new chemistry became institutionalized within it. Pharmacy had retained much of its prerevolutionary guild organization throughout the revolutionary period—but its day of reckoning ("reform") came in the Napoleonic period, and the scientific impresario behind the changes was Fourcroy. On 21 Germinal year 11 (11 April 1803), denominated by Simon as "probably the most important date in the history of modern French pharmacy" (p. 119), the apprentice guild system was replaced by state-organized scholastic institutions in which pharmacy itself became the artisanal handmaiden to the new scientific chemistry. Its earlier luster as the focus and pivot of chemical interest was lost, never to be regained. As Simon puts it in a more positive light:

More than any other man, it was Antoine-François de Fourcroy who placed French pharmacy on the path to its modern scientific form. Following in the wake of the eighteenth-century movement towards a more philosophical chemistry, he actively redefined pharmacy as a separate art dependent on chemistry, specifically the new chemistry developed by Lavoisier just before the French Revolution. (p. 93)

The result was a new type of elite pharmacist, institutionalized in state-supported schools and with "close association with chemists and chemistry, as opposed to pharmacists and pharmacy" (p. 146). The new occupational/disciplinary state of affairs was embodied in the journal founded in 1809, Bulletin de pharmacie. Significantly, the word "pharmacology" made its first appearance in the...