From the 1770s through the 1820s the French scientific community
predominated in the world to a degree that no other scientific
establishment did in any period prior to the Second World War. In
his classic "Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old
Regime," Charles Gillispie analyzed the cultural, political, and
technical factors that encouraged scientific productivity on the
eve of the Revolution. In the present monumental and elegantly
written sequel to that work, which Princeton is reissuing
concurrently, he examines how the revolutionary and Napoleonic
context contributed to modernization both of politics and
science.
In politics, argues Gillispie, the central feature of this
modernization was conversion of subjects of a monarchy into
citizens of a republic in direct contact with a state enormously
augmented in power. To the scientific community, attainment of
professional status was what citizenship was to all Frenchmen in
the republic proper, namely the license to self-governance and
dignity within the respective contexts. Revolutionary circumstances
set up a resonance between politics and science since practitioners
of both were future oriented in their outlook and scornful of the
past.
Among the creations of the First French Republic were
institutions providing the earliest higher education in science.
From them emerged rigorously trained people who constituted the
founding generation in the disciplines of mathematical physics,
positivistic biology, and clinical medicine. That scientists were
able to achieve their ends was owing to the expertise they provided
the revolutionary and imperial authorities in education, medicine,
warfare, empire building, and industrial technology.
General
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