L’Aérostation au temps des Lumières (review)

This book is in keeping with a trend in postmodern historiography, most notably in France, wherein the focus is less on the events themselves than on their context and perception socially and culturally. Marie Thébaud-Sorger evokes the spectacular, not to say melodramatic, quality of balloon flights during their first year, 1783–84. She treats the impression they made on the public as a case study of the permeation of what had been a largely literary culture by a new awareness of the role of institutional, cognitive, social, economic, and practical factors deriving from science and technology.

Thus the account opens with the invention of the hot air balloon by Joseph de Montgolfier and its deployment in Paris by his brother Étienne as well as creation of the slightly later hydrogen balloon by J. A. C. Charles. The author treats the inventions themselves more or less incidentally to the interest they excited at many levels. Tout Paris watched the launches with fascination. Journalistic and literary coverage was dense. According to some accounts nothing less than a revolution in physics had transpired. What was the social and juridical situation of the inventors? Étienne de Montgolfier, manager of a provincial family paper business, was motivated by commercial and utilitarian considerations, unlike Charles, a physicist, whose purpose was scientific. Competition between the two approaches and methods was unstated but intense.

The Academy of Sciences established a commission to investigate the scientific interest in and improvement of aerostatics. At issue was the nature of air itself. In addition to officialdom, the public soon began to play its part, a large part, and not only in Paris. Provincial periodicals and pamphlets abounded. The nature of hot air and hydrogen preoccupied the public on a par with that of the electrical fluid attracted to lightning rods and the universal fluid underlying Mesmer’s animal magnetism.

What use would balloons have? Their very imperfections incited all manner of proposed improvements, for the most part having to do with methods of locomotion. The Academy of Lyons set a prize on that topic, never awarded, eliciting proposals from barely literate artisans to educated amateurs of science. Private persons made all sorts of experiments flying small balloons they made themselves, sometimes for pedagogical purposes, sometimes as simple diversions, sometimes with scientific pretensions. In short, public opinion became aware of conquest of the air as a technological frontier to be advanced in whatever ways possible.

Financing the many demonstrations drew on subscriptions from members of the public admitted to launches, on local scientific or municipal authorities, and on philanthropic aristocrats. Full-scale experimental and demonstrative flights were mounted in major commercial cities such as Lyon, Dijon, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes. There, and of course in Paris, the protagonists took care to stage the adventures as dramatically as possible, whence the lavish ornamentation of the envelopes and the fad of balloon iconography in all manner of prints and bric-a-brac.

Personal interest attached to the exploits of the first two professional airmen, J. P. Blanchard and François Pilâtre de Rozier. In company with an American co-pilot, Blanchard piloted the first international flight from Dover to Flanders. Having been one of a pair aboard the first manned flight, Pilâtre met death near Calais in the first air crash. Nothing if not thorough, Thébaud-Sorger has left no document unread, no page unturned, whether in Parisian or provincial, printed or unprinted, primary or secondary sources. Nor is any aspect of the topic untouched. Her approach precludes narrative treatment, however, and I find the presentation to be a little amorphous. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of detailed information conveys a sense of the dimensions of aerostatics in public sensibility in 1783–84.