“Port de l’Hotel-de-Ville, Paris 18th Century,” via Wikimedia Commons.

Touring late 18th century Paris, the European capital of science

Paris was the capital of science in the Western world in the 18th century. In this excerpt from Paris Savant, Bruno Belhoste describes a visit to the city by a Dutch physicist in 1785 as he takes in the great variety of scientific research and cultural flourishing underway at that time in the City of Lights.

On July 6, 1785, the physicist Martin van Marum, director of the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, one of the most beautiful science museums in Europe, arrived at the Hôtel d’Anjou on the rue Dauphine, close to the Pont Neuf. It was his first visit to Paris. At the Louvre, he attended five meetings of the Academy of Sciences, of which he was a correspondent, as well as a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine; he visited the King’s Library, the Collège de France, the Royal Botanical Garden and its cabinets of natural history, the Mint, and the machine depository at the Hôtel de Mortagne.

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Around 1700, Paris numbered around five hundred thousand inhabitants. At the end of a period of steady growth that accelerated after 1750, the number of Parisians had certainly reached six hundred thousand at the end of the century. Meanwhile the city was enlarged by its faubourgs well beyond the boulevards that had been built where the old ramparts had been. In 1784, the construction of a tax wall known as the Farmers- General Wall (where the “exterior boulevards” are today) marked its new boundaries. Paris would not reach its current scope until 1860 when several neighboring villages, including Belleville, Montmartre, and Passy, were annexed to the city.

Corresponding approximately to today’s first twelve arrondissements, eighteenth- century Paris was still a city of human scale, which Van Marum could easily cross on foot, if he did not fear either the muddy streets or the jumble of carriages. This did not prevent each quarter, each parish, and almost each street from having its own character.

Such diversity was as true for science as for eve­rything else. During his stay in Paris, Van Marum primarily went back and forth between the elegant neighborhoods to the west and the Latin Quarter, but he sometimes also crossed through the center of the city to reach the eastern faubourgs. On occasion, he even ventured outside the city. On his treks about town, the Dutch scientist met many people. His itineraries trace the way in which the sites of the sciences were distributed around the city — at least the ones that interested him.

Van Marum was not content to visit the monuments of official science vis­ible from a bird’s- eye view of Paris. Many other less visible places in the area attracted him. Moreover, even these sites were well integrated into their environ­ment. Surrounded by shacks and shops, they were far from being impregnable fortresses; people could wander into them pretty freely. As for the savants of the Academy, they confined themselves neither to the Louvre nor to the townhouses and palaces where they conducted their official duties. Like Van Marum, they crisscrossed the city, its offices, its stores, and its workshops, where they met a thousand merchants, clerks, dilettantes, masters of minor trades, artisans, and workers without whom they would never have been able to complete their tasks. All these places and people represented vital resources for Parisian science. They provided it with raw material, equipment, and processes. The whole ensemble formed a complex system of relationships and interactions, which was itself deeply embedded in its urban environment.

The integration of the savant world into the space of Paris proved a powerful factor of differentiation at the heart of official science. It contributed to the construction of disciplinary boundaries between specialties and to the division of the savant world according to lines of cleavage relating directly to the struggles between various actors with whom the men of science entered into contact. For example, within the medical profession there was a split between physicians and surgeons, and within industry between artisans and manufacturers. At the same time, this immersion gave the savants various means of extending their influence well beyond the tight circle of intellectual and bureaucratic elites. Throughout these relationships were woven networks corresponding to different realms of expertise: mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, mineralogy, and so on. Each one was unique, denser in some quarters, more diffuse in others. These different patterns defined specific zones of scientific activity in Paris.

Thus official science touched all aspects of urban life, either directly or indirectly. It went out to meet worlds of knowledge that were poorly known or unrecognized, kinds of expertise that were in some way invisible.

High society was among the most accessible worlds. There the savants found enlightened protectors and collectors, but also charlatans and system makers who had to be reckoned with: their very success meant that they could not be ignored. It was hard to draw a clear line between invention, fantasy, and pure and simple fraud. The Academy of Science thought it had to take charge of these matters in the 1780s because the influence of a kind of spectacular and sometimes sulfurous science had traveled well beyond the salons. Public courses, public dissections, physics demonstrations, and balloon launches: Paris welcomed a multitude of more or less serious demonstrations that took place under the suspicious eyes of the savants.

Professor Belhoste studied history and history of science at the University Paris 1, obtaining his PhD in 1982 with a dissertation on the life and work of the mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy. He obtained his Habilitation in 2001 with a dissertation on the history of the École polytechnique from 1794 to 1870. He was a researcher at the National Institute for Pedagogical in Paris (1986–2003) and a professor in the history of science at the University Paris 10 Nanterre (2003–2007) as well as at the University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (2007–2018). He was also the head of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS-ENS-Paris 1) (2014–2017), and has been Emeritus Professor since September 2018.