Enlightenment Science and the State in Revolutionary France: The Legacy of Charles Coulston Gillispie

Abstract

A quarter century ago, Charles Coulston Gillispie published Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (1980). A landmark in the history of science, in Science and Polity, Gillispie authoritatively illustrated how historians could integrate the local knowledge embodied in biography, a mastery of institutional detail and a close attention to the day-to-day realities of the lived experience with the more universalistic concerns that drive the history of science. Happily, Gillispie has anally produced the long-awaited sequel, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (2004). To understand the scholarly stimulus provided by the arst volume and to place that masterwork into the context both of Gillispie’s lifetime of historical inquiry and the changing contours of the contemporary aeld, this essay will survey the evolution of recent studies of science and technology in Revolutionary France (1789– 1815) through an exploration of the new and culminating volume of Science and Polity in France. With the appearance of volume one of Science and Polity, Gillispie unveiled his arst sweeping synthetic work since 1960’s The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientiac Ideas. Divided into three parts: Institutions; Professions; and Applications, the former work put into practice the implied criticism of his system-building colleague Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) embodied in the latter study. In Science and Polity, those interested in science and technology do not just sit at home reviewing the texts already found in their libraries. Instead, they get their hands dirty in laboratories, workshops and factories, they join groups of like-minded people who take action in the public sphere, and they work for the state. In short, they are not cut off from the rest of society; the close interaction of “sci-