How Men of Letters Invented a Scientific Revolution

Abstract

In contrast to other scientific renaissances, the culture forged in seventeenth-century Europe became an enduring phenomenon rather than dissipating within a few generations. In an effort to understand the persistence of European science, this article uses the case study of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to argue that men of letters played a crucial role in the legitimation of the nascent scientific movement. These men of letters enjoyed a social, intellectual, and aesthetic affinity with the “new science” and developed a narrative of scientific change that foregrounded the idea of a radical break with the past. They diffused this narrative among the cultural elite, mobilizing recent thinkers, discoveries, and scientific instruments as they participated in wide-ranging debates, regardless of whether they supported modern innovations or classical models. In so doing, they invented the narrative of a “scientific revolution,” a construction that has wielded a profound influence over the social and cultural history of European science.

Au contraire d’autres mouvements équivalents, le mouvement scientifique né dans l’Europe du xvii^e siècle s’inscrivit dans la durée au lieu de s’essouffler au bout de quelques générations. Afin de comprendre cette persistance, cet article s’appuie sur le cas de la France au temps de Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). Il soutient que les hommes de lettres ont joué un rôle crucial dans la légitimation du mouvement scientifique naissant. Ces hommes de lettres, qui jouissaient d’une affinité sociale, intellectuelle et esthétique avec la «nouvelle science», tissèrent le récit du progrès scientifique en mettant en avant l’idée d’une rupture radicale avec le passé. Défenseurs des idées modernes ou des modèles classiques, ils diffusèrent ce récit au sein de l’élite culturelle, mobilisant penseurs, découvertes et instruments scientifiques de leur époque à travers des débats variés. Ce faisant, ils forgèrent le récit d’une «révolution scientifique», qui exerça une profonde influence sur l’histoire sociale et culturelle de la science moderne.

The emergence of modern science in early modern Europe continues to be the subject of intense debate. Taking their cue from Joseph Ben-David’s classic 1971 study on the social role of the scientist, Stephen Gaukroger and H. Floris Cohen both rely on global contrasts to draw attention to the persistence, rather than the origins, of European developments in the scientific domain.¹ For these authors, while golden ages for scientific thought have emerged in numerous civilizations throughout world history, only in seventeenth-century Europe did one particular efflorescence gain enough momentum to sustain itself without “fizzling out.” In this same vein, Joel Mokyr has recently argued that this uniquely sustainable scientific ferment led to a burst of technological innovation associated with the roots of the Industrial Revolution and the vast transformations that swept through agrarian societies.² The stakes in understanding how the ideas developed by Galileo, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton gained the long-term momentum to become a movement of world-historical significance are thus high.³

Taking the France of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) as its case study, this article argues that men of letters played a crucial role in promoting awareness of recent scientific advances among reading elites. They created an image of a sharp break with the past, fostering a commitment to a relatively coherent cultural movement and thereby providing it with an indispensable social as well as scientific impetus. Of course, scientific practitioners were often men of letters themselves, and could devote considerable time and energy to literary or scholarly pursuits that had nothing to do with what we would define as scientific activities. Yet overall men of letters were a much more varied crowd than those who actively pursued scientific projects, and included influential authors who reached a range of different publics. Authors with no recognized scientific expertise shaped the perception of scientific innovations among social and cultural elites and participated in wide-ranging cultural debates. They took noteworthy discoveries, such as the moons of Jupiter; instruments, such as the telescope that made this discovery possible; and the “genius” responsible for them, in this case Galileo, and inserted them into a broad historical narrative that explained developments in natural knowledge in terms of an intellectual movement with a more or less well-defined set of actors and events. The most famous scientific author who contributed to this endeavor in ancien régime France was surely Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), perpetual secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Indeed, recent studies have demonstrated the importance of his institutional role in the Academy, his innovative blending of intellectual inquiry and literary form, and the ways that he codified existing knowledge while “inventing” the history of science.⁴

This article focuses, however, on men of letters who, unlike Fontenelle, were not part of the scientific establishment, and who did not themselves contribute to scientific discussions.⁵ These authors were for the most part “professionals of letters” who had forged their careers through connections to fashionable Parisian elites, to private and royal academies, and to the court. By mixing different aesthetic and intellectual conventions, they fashioned a narrative of heroic scientific change at an opportune moment: history had yet to become an academic discipline, and historical narratives were fashioned to fit the tastes of a growing and diversified reading public. The second half of the seventeenth century in fact saw a rapprochement between historical narratives and literary fiction, leading to the publication of innovative historical novels and fictionalized memoires, such as César de Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672) or the Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan (1700) by Courtilz de Sandras.⁶

Such authors and their works attest to the historical knowledge of scientific change prevalent among members of the educated elite. More importantly, they themselves played a transformative role in this process. Beyond the confines of the Academy of Sciences, men of letters produced synthetic narratives of scientific change and transmitted them to ever broader audiences, in texts that were read for a range of purposes. The “new science” emerged as a sociocultural movement thanks to the mediating role of authors who presented a new narrative to reading elites, not simply as a by-product of the scientific genius of its heroes and practitioners. Once it had become a prominent phenomenon of elite culture, rather than the exclusive concern of expert practitioners, this “new science” was far less likely to fade away within a couple of generations.

The crystallization of this new narrative of scientific change was a Europe-wide phenomenon. It took shape in German princely courts, Italian palazzi, Dutch seaports, and English coffee houses. Yet an intensive study of France in the age of Louis XIV is particularly valuable for several reasons. French high culture was particularly admired throughout Europe, and the texts it produced reached numerous readers across the continent.⁷ Paris served as a cultural capital, attracting luminaries such as the Dutch Christiaan Huygens, the English Thomas Hobbes, and the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for extended periods.⁸ More importantly, such a case study allows for a reconstruction of the cultural dynamics in a clearly delineated arena. This is a key question for current scholarship as it seeks to explain the rise of different yet related scientific cultures over the early modern period. Indeed, whereas around 1600 educated Europeans shared similar assumptions on the natural world, by 1730 England had developed a scientific culture distinct from that of the continent.⁹ Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) symbolize this divergence, contrasting a Cartesian Paris, in which the universe was composed of vortices and the Earth shaped like a melon, with a Newtonian London in which the universe allowed a void and the Earth was “flattened from both sides.”¹⁰ A close study of the French case can thus provide a new angle on some of these broader currents and questions.

Recognizing the role of men of letters as scientific mediators takes some of the theoretical burden off the shoulders of natural philosophers and other practitioners. The landmark studies by Gaukroger and Cohen still foreground the ideas and techniques that brought about a sea change in European approaches to the natural world, without asking how they could generate anything more than an evanescent episode in intellectual history. For Mokyr, scholars such as Francis Bacon and Newton can be seen as “cultural entrepreneurs,” a useful shorthand for understanding their influence beyond the strictly scientific domain.¹¹ It seems to me, however, that someone as relatively reserved as Newton, for example, cannot plausibly be characterized as a cultural entrepreneur. The difference between his own work and comportment and “Newtonianism” as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon demonstrates that such movements cannot be reduced to the intentions—or even the monumental achievements—of their progenitors. Newtonianism was constructed by numerous actors over the course of many years, and could be appropriated for a range of purposes. It was decisively not the brainchild of the Cambridge mathematician, something of a recluse during his most productive intellectual years.¹²

What made European science sustainable was not the ideas themselves, however successful they were, but their anchoring in social space. After all, successful ideas featured prominently in other scientific renaissances without generating a self-propelled and continuous scientific movement. If we are to understand how, why, and when European science became sustainable over the longue durée, we need to understand the “culture” in “scientific culture,” and not merely the “science.” Significantly, until we have properly grasped the place of science in European culture, comparisons with other early modern scientific movements risk being incomplete and overly hasty.¹³

Men of Letters and the Public for Science

Men of letters enjoyed a particular affinity with the scientific movement because in early modern France the cultural sphere was undergoing a process of “literarization”: a growing number of texts were produced outside the context of the socially recognized corporate bodies, predominantly the universities, which had previously legitimized discourses explaining the natural world. This enabled men of letters to define themselves in new ways. If around 1600 they were still dependent to a significant extent on the university model, by 1700 the literary field had become much more self-sufficient in terms of its participants, their strategies, and their relations to different publics. Even so, these actors lacked a clearly defined social identity, often circulating in different social spaces and working as secretaries, tutors to the children of the nobility, or providers of textual services, from the composition of panegyrics to political pamphleteering on behalf of their patrons.¹⁴

These shifts in the literary world deepened the affinity between men of letters and the bourgeoning scientific movement on three distinct levels: intellectually, in the sense that their message on cultural change benefited from the new discoveries; aesthetically, in that just like men of letters, scientific practitioners produced texts that relied on new forms and diverged from the expected patterns of discourse on the natural world; and socially, since both social types lacked a fixed corporate identity. Ultimately, the question of the authority of the new science and of the institutions that legitimated it was critical for both men of letters and the practitioners of the nascent scientific movement.

During the seventeenth century, the dominant intellectual, aesthetic, and social models for men of letters underwent a profound transformation. Around 1600, authors mostly followed the conventions of learned humanism, which meant that they praised ancient exemplars, specifically in history and rhetoric, wrote and read largely in Latin, and received their strongest social support from masculine erudite circles, mostly related to the high courts of appeal known as Parlements. Over the course of the century, this model was eclipsed by authors who used the vernacular to write for an expanding reading public, and who praised aesthetic values as equal to, or even surpassing, the learning enshrined by the previous generation. These nouveaux doctes saw literature as superior to other forms of writing because of its aesthetic qualities, since in functional terms—its ability to instruct and impart virtue—it was not all that different from the supposed “pedantry” it sought to replace. The decline of the Parlements and of noble grandees as patrons, especially as the nobility increasingly abandoned the countryside for the towns, meant that men of letters became ever more reliant on learned and amateur urban circles for their careers and increasingly intermingled with a mixed reading elite.¹⁵

This elite reading public reflected the growing role of women in the world of letters. The seventeenth century saw an increase in the number and visibility of female authors.¹⁶ Women also played a crucial role in the transmission of learning and written culture: in some intellectual families they schooled their young children,¹⁷ and they increasingly contributed to the socialization of men of letters through their leadership of literary circles.¹⁸ Authors writing in the vernacular had to address this new reading public and its expectations, even if their explicit positions on women could range from Nicolas Boileau’s vicious satire to Charles Perrault’s defense.¹⁹ Regardless of their differences on this question—and on many others—we shall see in what follows that both of these authors in fact promoted a similar vision of scientific change.

Both scientific authors and men of letters adapted to the aesthetic expectations of a growing public interested in scientific developments. In 1639 the mathematician Girard Desargues published a short treatise on conic sections in preparation for a more developed treatment of the subject. Desargues sought the advice of Descartes on different audiences he might write for, from learned doctes to curious amateurs. In the latter case, replied the philosopher,

it is certain that your terms will be better received by amateurs … since they are in French, and their choice displays wit and grace; they could serve to attract certain readers to your works, just as they read works dealing with coats of arms, hunting, architecture, etc., having no desire to become either hunters or architects, only wishing to know how to properly speak about such topics.²⁰

Descartes recommended that the book be easy to read, no more difficult than “the description of an enchanted palace in a novel.”²¹

By 1650, interest in the natural sciences had taken hold of a significant fraction of the French cultural elite. They cultivated this interest thanks to tastes, publications, and forms of sociability emanating from the world of letters. Antoine Baudeau de Somaize’s Dictionnaire des Précieuses of 1660, which aimed at providing a panorama of fashionable aristocratic society, included fourteen portraits of men and women interested in the new science.²² They included, for example, “Circé” (a nickname for a certain Madame Chataignères), who hated singing and dancing, preferring astrology and above all chemistry (chimie): she “constantly worked on finding the philosophers’ stone,” and even had at her home ovens specially built for this purpose.²³ Mercure galant, the literary journal that catered to polite society, published mathematical riddles, stories of natural curiosities, and announcements on astronomical publications alongside news on the opera or obituaries of royal officers.²⁴ Popular lecturers like Jacques Rohault familiarized Parisian elites with the thinking of Descartes. Rohault published several works that presented a simplified version of Descartes’s system of natural philosophy, geared to readers who were not familiar with the scientific debates and often did not possess the mathematical skills to understand topics such as free fall or the structure of Saturn’s rings.²⁵ When Molière famously satirized the aspirations of women to master the new kind of learning, his broader target was also the emergence of this interest in science among the elite.²⁶

Further aesthetic and intellectual considerations led to something of an entente cordiale between literary authors and the scientific movement. After 1600, literary authors started to use a form of periodization that stressed a break with the past by crowning new founding authors.²⁷ Boileau’s L’art poétique, for example, hailed ancient models but presented seventeenth-century developments as a moment of rupture with the preceding period. For Boileau, François de Malherbe (1555–1628) was the first poet in France to introduce the proper cadence, placement of words, and precise rules for poetry. The rigor and harmony of his style was fitting for a new literary situation, in which Latin was still esteemed “but the French reader wants to be respected.”²⁸ Malherbe thus became the symbol of an aesthetic break with sixteenth-century poetry, represented by Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585).²⁹ A determination to innovate played a crucial role in one of the signature quarrels of the first half of the century, the debate on eloquence that followed the publication of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac’s letters in 1624. To his adversaries, Guez de Balzac shockingly proclaimed that “I would much rather invent than imitate; and just as our age has discovered new stars, heretofore hidden, I seek—even in the realm of eloquence—beauties previously unknown.”³⁰ As his reference to astronomical discoveries shows, the aesthetic and intellectual affinity between new poetic forms and the new science would play a key role in the formative debates of the seventeenth century.

Just as practitioners of the new science tried to shatter the scholastic consensus in natural philosophy, authors at large consciously broke with the dominant model of textual commentary in presenting the new discoveries. It was true that the commentary model, like the composition of textbooks, remained an attractive option in certain cases—as attested by Descartes’s Principia philosophiae (1644). Nonetheless, this was a dramatic change of status: it was now one option among many for scholarly writing. True to his advice to Desargues, Descartes himself sought to address amateurs without incensing scholars who supported ancient models and might be alienated by new terminology. The result was an experimentation with a wide range of genres, including witty dialogues and a treatise on fencing.³¹

In contrast, university-based opponents of the “new philosophy” continued to rely on the scholastic conventions of commentary, a form closely tied to their role as recognized teachers, even in polemics destined for print. For example, in 1692 Jean du Hamel published an attack on Cartesian philosophy in which he prominently identified himself as a graduate in theology (licensié en Theologie) of the Sorbonne and a former professor of philosophy at the collège du Plessis-Sorbonne. His discussion of Cartesian philosophy consisted of commentary on quotations from Descartes and his popularizer, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, who had recently composed an entire course of philosophy based on Descartes’s ideas. Such commentary was supposed to expose the internal contradictions and essential problems inherent in notions such as Descartes’s use of doubt as the basis of philosophy. Even graphically, du Hamel’s text appealed to the format of the university commentary, dividing its topics into items numbered as primo, secondo, tertio, etc.—precisely the format of scholastic disputation ridiculed by Molière in his Malade imaginaire.³²

This attachment to commentary extended to authors who, acknowledging the need to engage with a new reading public, turned to French rather than Latin. In 1675, the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste de La Grange published an invective against the “new philosophers, Descartes, Rohault, Regius, Gassendi, Father Maignan, &c.” La Grange explained that in this text he would go beyond a limited defense of Aristotelian positions for two reasons: the ancient philosopher had not formulated explicit opinions on some of the topics La Grange planned to discuss, and, in any case, Cartesians and Gassendists did not recognize Aristotle’s authority. Despite La Grange’s reliance on Aristotle, he had to consider a new audience. As he informed his readers, he had originally composed much of his text in Latin, a language more appropriate than French for philosophical purposes, intending that only those preoccupied with study (gens d’estudes) should read it. This would not do, however, for the current situation, in which “most of the books by our new philosophers are in French, meaning that this is the pertinent [language] for disabusing those who study their books and accept their opinions.”³³ Even so, La Grange addressed this new public in a format befitting university instruction: a classification of and commentary on the opinions of his opponents, with chapters treating topics such as “the nature of a sensible object” or “how to know whether two things are really separate and whether these are two separate entities.”³⁴ In other words, university teaching continued to have a strong affinity with both Aristotelian approaches and the genre of commentary, mobilizing their structure and symbolic value to combat the new philosophy.

In contrast to this long-standing affinity between Aristotelian philosophy, the university as a legitimizing institution, and commentary as a textual model, literary authors presented their historical narratives of scientific change outside the university context and in a wide range of aesthetic forms. Despite the intellectual divides and personal enmities vaunted by their authors, together these texts offered a relatively coherent narrative of recent scientific change as a movement with a clear genealogy, and communicated this image to a broad audience in the reading elite. To fully grasp the emergence of this shift, we must thus consider all its dimensions, intellectual, aesthetic, and social. In a learned and subtle study of the early modern life sciences, Pascal Duris has made a strong argument for reading even the most extreme statements about innovation as hesitant and ambivalent, still deeply indebted to the “ancients.” For Duris, this amounts to denying that a scientific revolution, in the sense of a sharp break with the past, took place at all in the seventeenth century.³⁵ It is true that seventeenth-century authors acknowledged their admiration for the ancients and their indebtedness to previous traditions quite explicitly, even when they thought that the “moderns” could outdo past achievements. However, focusing on such intellectual elements risks neglecting the social and aesthetic dimensions of this shift.³⁶ In particular, Duris’s position underplays the question of who had the authority to speak about nature, a theme that underpinned these debates and rose to prominence in discussions about how to communicate science and new discoveries. In the broadest sense, my argument in this article does not even really concern scientific change per se. Rather, it highlights the emergence of a new canon of figures, instruments, and discoveries among the learned elite, organized into a narrative of scientific change by new kinds of text. As we shall see, supporters of the ancients or opponents of Descartes could not avoid discussing this new canon. And even in attacking it, they transmitted a narrative of sharp scientific change to their readers.

The case studies that follow show how literary texts accomplished this. Men of letters mobilized the narrative of scientific change in quarrels concerning a host of topics, from the religious controversy around Jansenism to debates on Descartes’s legacy and the relative merits of the moderns vis-à-vis the ancients. The circulation of particular representations can legitimate new practices, and this was especially true in a context of struggles over the status of scientific practitioners and their role in society.³⁷ From this perspective, men of letters certainly helped in spreading a historical narrative that legitimated the new science. The usefulness of this narrative of scientific change beyond the narrow confines of learned discussion gave it greater visibility and anchored it in the historical consciousness of the reading elite, thereby implanting the scientific movement in a broader culture.

Defending Science against Parlement and University: The Arrêt burlesque

In 1671, the archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, published a royal decree ordering universities to teach only the proper doctrine defined in their statutes. The king was concerned that “certain opinions that the faculty of theology had once censored, and whose teaching and publication were prohibited by the Parlement [of Paris], are now being disseminated, not only in the University, but also in the rest of this city and in other parts of the kingdom.”³⁸ This was a reference to a condemnation of atomism proclaimed in 1624, now being used to prevent the opinions of Descartes from circulating within these institutions of higher learning. Several universities—Angers, Caen, and Paris—did in fact try to implement this decree and block the teaching of Descartes’s doctrines.

This was a sensitive moment. During the 1660s, several of Descartes’s works, such as Le monde, had posthumously appeared in print, and the transfer of his remains to the church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris provided a festive occasion for celebrating the philosopher and his influence. But not all augured well for the fortunes of his “new philosophy.” Cartesian philosophy was censored in Leuven in 1662, and in Rome the following year Descartes’s works were placed on the index of prohibited books pending correction (donec corrigatur). While these condemnations did not immediately lead to the Parisian one, they did raise questions, most prominently about the implications of Descartes’s philosophy for understandings of the Eucharist. Conciliatory replies to this problem by Descartes’s supporters, including Antoine Arnauld and Rohault, did not satisfy their adversaries, and may even have galvanized the formal condemnation.³⁹

Men of letters were quick to react. August 1671 saw the publication of a short satirical text with a long title: Request by the Masters of Art, Professors, and Regents of the University of Paris, Presented to the Sovereign Court of Parnassus, Including the Ruling on the Said Request against All Those Who Claim to Teach or Believe in the New Discoveries Not Included in Aristotle.⁴⁰ Parodying the pompous tone and conservative position of the university, it consists of a mock petition followed by the court’s verdict, shot through with ridicule for those who denied the advances of the new science. The satire extends even to the material presentation of the work, whose title page announces that it was printed “in Delphi, by the Society of Regular Printers to the Court of Parnassus.” Though it initially appeared anonymously, it was authored by François Bernier, a famous traveler and orientalist who published letters to his patrons (Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Jean Chapelain, François de La Mothe Le Vayer) describing his stay in the Mughal court,⁴¹ together with Boileau, a poet and ardent supporter of the ancients in the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” Jean Racine, one of the most celebrated playwrights of the age, perhaps contributed, while advice on the juridical vocabulary may have been provided by Nicolas Dongois, a legal clerk (greffier) at the Parlement of Paris and Boileau’s nephew.⁴² This text, known today as the Arrêt burlesque, included several sections, probably penned by the different authors, and circulated in at least two versions, the first of which I shall call the “Bernier version.” The second, shorter text will be called the “Boileau version,” as it appeared in 1701—after numerous modifications—in the poet’s collected works.⁴³

Although appearing in the mouths of members of the university as they comically seek to decry them, the list of scientific discoveries highlighted in the Bernier version reads like a modern textbook account of the “Scientific Revolution,” citing the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, the superlunary trajectories of comets, and other astronomical phenomena (see appendix 1).⁴⁴ It also enumerates discoveries held to refute Aristotle, such as the weight of the air or the existence of the vacuum, or to counter ancient medical authorities, such as the circulation of the blood and the fact that the head, rather than the heart, is the center of the nervous system.⁴⁵

The Boileau version is narrower in scope. It principally highlights three issues related to the authority of the university, especially in the context of medicine: new discoveries concerning physiological features, new medical treatments, and the publication of texts challenging authorities associated with the University of Paris. For example, it recounts that:

[an] unknown named Reason has ventured to break into the Schools of the aforementioned University … [and] using a procedure that is absolutely not valid, attributed to the aforementioned heart the role of receiving the chyle that used to belong to the liver; [Reason] also had the blood circulate in the entire body, giving the aforementioned blood the full authority to wander, err, and circulate with impunity through the veins and arteries. The only claim and title for these vexations being Experience, whose testimony has never been accepted in the aforementioned Schools.⁴⁶

The text also purports to be scandalized by the fact that instead of relying on bleeding and purging, the new methods use pure wine, powders, and quinine (quinquina) to treat numerous kinds of fever. These complaints are backed up with mock-outraged references to real publications, including “the Physics of Rohault, the Logic of Port-Royal, Treaties on Quinquina, even the Adversus Aristoteleos by Gassendi, and other pieces submitted with this request.”⁴⁷

If the list of scientific discoveries cited reads like a textbook version of the “Scientific Revolution,” in aesthetic terms the Arrêt does something quite different. In satirizing the pedagogical institution of the university and the views of its members—an issue directly related to the circulation of scientific information among new audiences and in new genres—the text reflected the aesthetic, social, and intellectual commitments of the new philosophy. The preface to the Bernier version, entitled “Alitophile [Lover of Truth] to the Reader,” explains the circumstances of its composition in these very terms. It recounts how several members of the University of Paris had tried to obtain a ruling by the Parlement that would prohibit the teaching of Descartes. They presented him as an atheist, but this charge would not stick: Descartes had dedicated his Meditations to the Sorbonne, as several doctors still recalled. Even worse for the attempts to frame him as an atheist, Alitophile observes, Descartes strove to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and the Sorbonne had been obliged to recognize the excellence of his arguments. The judges in the Parlement prudently rejected the efforts to prohibit his works, claiming that such measures could bring ruin upon the university and decreeing that new discoveries contradicting Aristotle should be taught. The text thus stages the competition between authorities and the publics they could enlist: the king himself, claims the preface, sponsors “those who work to embellish the sciences and make new discoveries.”⁴⁸

In aesthetic terms, the Arrêt relied on a mixture of genres for its comic effect. Ironically framing scientific claims in ponderous legal language, it presented Parnassus (home of the muses and a symbol of poetic art) as the appropriate authority for judging language and taste, underscoring the inappropriate character of the convoluted and pedantic language current at the Sorbonne. In the 1701 version, Boileau remarked that the satire was perhaps “somewhat low, and all in the terms of the [legal] Practice.”⁴⁹ This blending of genres is also highlighted in the preface’s description of the text as both “burlesque” and “savant.” While the comic allure of the work was clear, it aimed for more: “This piece … covers the major discoveries of this age, … and shows that if Descartes is to be condemned for writing something not included in Aristotle, all those who took part in the new discoveries should be censured, and Gassendi first and foremost.”⁵⁰ Pierre Gassendi’s intellectual renown is a key theme in this text, and the humoristic condemnation explains that “Gassendi should be given a harsher punishment, for he is the most criminal and dared display seditious posters (placards), which were taken, out of ignorance, as great and long chapters, very learned and judicious”; what is more, his titles are all explicitly anti-Aristotle.⁵¹ Considering that Bernier was to become the most important popularizer of Gassendi in the seventeenth century, it is not surprising that the Arrêt presented a coherent picture of recent scientific changes, going far beyond Descartes’s work.⁵² It no doubt appealed to readers as a brief and frankly funny text, offering passing amusement without requiring a substantial investment of time or money. On another level, given its weaving together of numerous satirical allusions, it probably required familiarity with legal and scholarly jargon to appreciate its humor. It is likely that its readers had a similar profile to its authors: educated men who kept abreast of recent scholarly scandals.

The Arrêt certainly gained some public notoriety, especially in the more detailed Bernier version. As early as 1671 it was also published in the Low Countries, in an edition that included a text discussing “Parnassian” wars between authors who supported the ancients and those who favored the moderns. It probably appeared in two further editions in 1672 and 1674, and was still being published in the Low Countries in 1702, in a version that updated the names of some of the scientific practitioners—Joseph-Guichard Duverney and Jean Méry replaced Nicolaus Steno and Theodor Kerckring, and the list of names to be censored expanded to include Régis and Pierre Bayle.⁵³ Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Arrêt and its use of convoluted legal language continued to serve as a model for authors seeking to ridicule their opponents in scientific debates. It was explicitly used as a model in a satire of a 1766 work that claimed to offer a cosmology to supersede both Descartes and Newton, and in a pamphlet of 1785 supporting Mesmerism.⁵⁴ The Bernier version enjoyed a long afterlife, while the Boileau version appeared as a minor sidenote in the oeuvre of the poet, whose fame rested mostly on his satires and his theoretical works on poetry.⁵⁵

With its combination of genres and linguistic registers, the aesthetic choices of the Arrêt echoed the social and intellectual position of men of letters and gave shape to their vision of a quick and deep scientific change. What is more, it transmitted this vision to elites in a convenient and accessible form, an effective tactic that was also adopted by the opponents of the new philosophy, as we shall see in the next section.

The New Philosophy and Religious Polemics: The Voyage to the World of Descartes

Even self-proclaimed opponents of the new philosophy were obliged to confront the discoveries championed by the authors of the Arrêt. The fact that hostile authors felt the need to refute, reinterpret, or ridicule this scientific canon was evidence of just how well established it already was. The satirical work by the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel, known as Père Daniel, is one such example. His popular novel, A Voyage to the World of Descartes, was first published in 1690; it then went through eleven editions and was translated into four languages by the middle of the eighteenth century.⁵⁶

In Daniel’s novel, the narrator meets a Cartesian who discloses to him the secret for separating one’s soul from one’s body: sniffing special tobacco from China mixed with herbs. Thus liberated, the two travel to the Moon, where they meet the souls of renowned philosophers, from Socrates and Aristotle to Girolamo Cardano and Marin Mersenne; they even have a pleasant conversation with a Chinese philosopher who has encountered Descartes’s principles. Finally, the narrator meets Descartes himself, who is constructing a new world in space according to his philosophical principles. The book is undoubtedly intended as a critique of the new philosophy: the encounters with philosophers and the dialogues that ensue are meant to convince readers that Aristotelian philosophy, as taught in the universities, has good answers to the many criticisms leveled at it, while Descartes’s philosophy is riddled with contradictions and built on erroneous assumptions.

Book four of Daniel’s text masquerades as a letter written by the narrator to Descartes. After his conversion to Cartesianism, the narrator returns to Earth and starts to spread the philosopher’s doctrines at social gatherings, claiming to be the “most zealous disciple for the honor and the growth of the Sect.”⁵⁷ He manages to make inroads in this endeavor, and converts several supporters of Aristotelian philosophy. Others, however, are not swayed by his arguments and present him with objections that require answers from the master himself. The putative letter uses this conceit to sketch out potential problems in Descartes’s physics, touching on topics such as subtle matter, the vacuum, and the rotation of particles. Significantly, the arguments it mobilizes are common-sense scholasticism, “used every day in class,” rather than the observations, experiments, and mathematical discussions that formed the backbone of counterarguments by other participants in the scientific movement.⁵⁸ Moreover, Daniel frames the argument as taking place between the new philosophy and the scholastic establishment, firmly entrenched in pedagogical institutions. It seems that in the public eye, the university remained inextricably linked to Aristotelian philosophy up to the final decade of the seventeenth century.⁵⁹

By the time the Voyage was published, both opponents and proponents of the scientific movement faced a veritable canon of new philosophical problems, new instruments, and newly identified natural phenomena. Daniel was thus obliged to reinterpret the same repertoire of problems and discoveries that authors like Bernier and Boileau had presented as proof of the triumph of scientific innovation. This included phenomena central to the new science, such as the moons of Jupiter,⁶⁰ although he avoided addressing other discoveries such as the phases of Venus.⁶¹ While Daniel mostly concentrated on physical problems amenable to conceptual discussion in the scholastic tradition, he also covered contested topics such as whether animals had souls.⁶² He even used newly established phenomena, including the existence of the vacuum, to argue against Descartes and to suggest that Aristotle’s position on these issues had been misunderstood.⁶³ Overall, the Voyage was probably a very accessible text: presented as a novel of cosmic travel, it did not require the familiarity with Descartes or scholastic forms of discussion demanded by the Arrêt. Since it could also serve as a critical introduction to Descartes’s ideas, it would not lose readers who lacked a comprehensive education. Nor did it depend on knowledge of recent scandals to make its arguments. Like Fontenelle’s Conversations (1686), its readership may well have been much more mixed than that of the Arrêt, including in terms of gender.

For its advocates and critics alike, the new philosophy was embedded in an informal institutional framework that facilitated the circulation and discussion of texts outside the university. Even authors critical of the new science were obliged to recognize these new conditions for the transmission of ideas. When the narrator of the Voyage returns to Earth after visiting Descartes’s world and converting to Cartesianism, his life changes dramatically. He speaks with contempt of scholastic philosophy, good only for filling people’s minds with confused ideas. When invited to attend the defense of a philosophy thesis, he forces himself to go, observing the proceedings with pity. He culls from his library books by scholastic philosophers such as Francisco Suárez and Pedro de Fonseca, and “abandons them in a dank side room, at the mercy of dust and worms.”⁶⁴ The shelves are restocked with a lavishly bound volume of Descartes and works by his followers. Where once he could not stand the sight of a dead chicken, the narrator is now able to slaughter an entire town’s population of dogs for the purposes of dissection. Finally, Daniel describes the “conferences and assemblies” that the narrator holds with other savants to spread the ideas of his master.⁶⁵ Ultimately, for Descartes’s opponents, Cartesian ideas were so patently false that their success was predicated on the social and institutional framework that made their popularity possible even in the absence of intellectual merit.⁶⁶

While this stress on the social context of the new science remained a constant, the particular circumstances of the early 1690s had a significant impact on Daniel’s authorial choices. There was definitely a sense that the last word had not been said about Descartes, even forty years after his death. The year 1691 saw the publication of Adrien Baillet’s two-volume biography of the philosopher, which provoked furious reactions in certain quarters. Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, one of the foremost scholars of the age, published a satire of Descartes in 1692, having reached an impasse in his own philosophical arguments with the latter’s positions.⁶⁷ Daniel’s work was part of a current of reassessments of Cartesianism, not all of them scholarly in the traditional sense. But in other, probably deeper ways, the Voyage was also conceived as a part of a religious polemic against the Jansenists and their philosophical supporters.

The attack on Jansenism is particularly evident in the association Daniel wove between the reception of Descartes’s philosophy and a shifting religious context. When they first meet, Descartes asks the narrator of the Voyage for an update on the fortunes of his philosophy. Conscious that his response will disappoint, the latter recounts how, after an initial period in fashion, it had begun to decline. In particular, the “conversion of the Huguenots,” as Daniel calls the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, had lost the philosopher many disciples—as new converts to Catholicism, convinced of the real presence of the body of Christ in the host, they had seen the errors in his arguments.⁶⁸ Daniel’s account of the history of Cartesianism foregrounds its links to religious institutions even further: when Descartes failed to find support among the Jesuits, he embraced the positions of the Jansenists, while the survival of his philosophy depended on the Oratorians, a competing teaching order.⁶⁹

The anti-Jansenist polemic that structured the Voyage and Daniel’s literary career more widely found a focal point in the person of Blaise Pascal, the celebrated philosopher, experimentalist, and Jansenist polemicist. In the Voyage Daniel initially celebrates Pascal’s experiments on the vacuum, as they help refute Descartes’s physics and his assumption of a plenum. But the text goes on to discredit Pascal as an author across a range of topics, asserting that his most famous experiment on the vacuum was carried out by Florin Périer, his brother-in-law, and really should have been named after Descartes, who claimed to have encouraged Pascal to perform it. Further, Pascal’s work on conic sections had been strongly inspired by Desargues, and his father, Étienne Pascal, was probably its real author. The narrator and Descartes then deconstruct the story of the young Pascal’s discovery of Euclid’s first thirty-two propositions, as recounted in the biography written by his sister, Gilberte Périer. All this leads up to a direct attack on Pascal’s authorship of the anti-Jesuit Provincial Letters, which Daniel claims were based on briefs prepared by other Jansenists “that he thought were correct, even though they were false, not recognizing sufficiently the spirit of the party he supported.”⁷⁰

Daniel also critiqued Pascal in other publications during the 1690s, reacting directly to the praise heaped upon him in Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, and quoting directly from the second volume, which appeared in 1690.⁷¹ Pasquier Quesnel, an Oratorian and prominent Jansenist theologian, even alleged that Daniel’s works were deliberately intended to provoke Arnauld, the notable Jansenist theologian and scholar, who as a supporter of Cartesian ideas might be lured into a public conflict with an author “trying to make a name for himself.”⁷²

Daniel did indeed make a name for himself, and by his death in 1728 was well known for a History of France (1696–1713) and a History of the French Militia (1721). The Voyage certainly contributed to his international renown, and it quickly appeared in English (1692), Latin (1694), Spanish (late seventeenth century), Dutch (1700), and Italian (1703). These translations reveal how such a text could fit into different philosophical and religious contexts. The English translator, T. Taylor, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, would also translate Nicolas Malebranche, and appeared deeply interested in the continental debates on Descartes and his followers.⁷³ The Italian translation, in contrast, was the work of Giovanni Battista De Benedictis, an influential Jesuit active around Naples who was fiercely opposed to reformist currents in the Church. A later Spanish translation of 1742 was the work of Alonso Ambrosio, the general chronicler of the Cistercian order in Spain.⁷⁴ In contrast to the reception of the Arrêt, which remained part of a scientific and philosophical discussion even in the late eighteenth century, the transmission of the Voyage relied on the networks of religious orders, probably indicating its reach into different sets of publics, both scholarly and ecclesiastical.

Daniel’s Voyage shows how a seemingly well-defined set of intellectual problems—namely, how to react to Descartes’s philosophy—became entangled in a new religious polemic and spread through different channels. But it also points to important commonalities. Seventeenth-century authors understood the shifts brought about by the new philosophy in terms that transcended changing ideas about nature. In their eyes, the diffusion of the new philosophy in print and through informal academic circles led to the formation of a canon of problems and phenomena that went beyond the limits of a particular philosophical current, even a central one like Cartesianism. Men of letters presented this canon for their own reasons: Daniel used criticism of Descartes as part of an attack on Jansenism, the religious current that formulated the sharpest criticisms of the Jesuits’ supposed moral laxity in the seventeenth century. Such debates clearly resonated widely, and these different uses helped spread the image of a sharp, recent, and deep scientific break among the reading elite.

Science in an Aesthetic Quarrel: Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes

Sometime before October 1688, Perrault addressed a letter to Huygens, who, besides being one of the greatest luminaries of seventeenth-century science, was a close friend of the Perrault family. Perrault sought Huygens’s opinion on the thesis he was trying to support, namely that “in all the arts and sciences, the moderns are at least equal to the ancients, and the moderns outdo the ancients in many respects.”⁷⁵ Perrault asked Huygens to send a brief on the greatest discoveries of the age in astronomy, mathematics, and mechanics, and to include Huygens’s own achievements. He also asked for references to works he could use to delve deeper into the issue. Huygens hesitated about whether he should discuss developments in mathematics: as a mathematician himself, he might appear presumptuous. Nonetheless, he listed advances in geometry made thanks to developments in algebra, and jotted down that “eighty years ago, astronomy was nothing compared to what it is today. It was all conjecture, and now we know the truth. On top of all the new discoveries.”⁷⁶ This exchange fed into Perrault’s broader thinking about the accomplishments of his day. He had asked Huygens for a concise list of achievements, stamped, as it were, with his imprimatur, but what Perrault produced was a volume of more than three hundred pages, the last of a four-part series, polemically presenting the cardinal accomplishments of seventeenth-century science and technology. In all probability, he already possessed fairly accurate historical knowledge regarding the scientific transformations that had taken place in that century, which he had developed over a long career as a man of letters.

Today, Perrault is known mostly for his famous fairy tales, including Cinderella and Puss in Boots. But he was one of the most renowned authors in seventeenth-century France. An aide and cultural adviser to the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, he held a seat in the Académie française and published in a range of genres, from fashionable gallant poetry to discussions of painting and political encomia. In 1687, a reading of his poem celebrating the achievements of the age of Louis XIV reignited the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” Between 1688 and 1697, Perrault, who favored the modern case, published four volumes on parallels between the achievements of the ancients and the moderns, with the first three focusing respectively on art and architecture, eloquence, and poetry (the second was the text that provoked such a strong reaction from Daniel for its praise of Pascal). He devoted the final volume, published in 1697, to scientific and technological achievements.⁷⁷

The quarrel pitted supporters of authorities dating from antiquity against those who, like Perrault, considered modern achievements superior to those of their ancient predecessors. Despite the heated debate—Boileau apparently became so incensed by Perrault’s claims in the poem read to the academicians in 1687 that he shouted until he lost his voice⁷⁸—there was consensus on the recent developments in science. The protagonists of the quarrel carefully distinguished between the progress possible in the sciences, where modern achievements seemed indisputable, and progress in the arts, a notion that left more room for differing visions of historical change. Even Hilaire-Bernard de Longepierre, who published his Discours sur les anciens in 1687 as a direct reply to Perrault’s poem, praised recent accomplishments in “physics, astronomy, and other sciences whose perfection depends on the great number of experiments, observations, and discoveries that are made each day.”⁷⁹

Nonetheless, Perrault treated the sciences as the cornerstone of his argument for the modern position. Though his volume on the topic only appeared in 1697, he had consulted with Huygens a decade earlier, and had originally planned to publish his work on the sciences as the second volume of the Parallèle. According to Perrault, he ultimately decided to devote the second volume to eloquence rather than “astronomy, geography, navigation, physics, mathematics, etc.,” because avoiding topics such as eloquence and poetry might suggest that the modern case was weaker there.⁸⁰ Taken together, the attitudes of Perrault and Longepierre show that both sides in the quarrel distinguished between science-based topics and poetry, and considered the progress of the specifically scientific and technological domains to be ultimately self-evident.

The way that Perrault’s polemic classifies the broad range of the arts and sciences is especially remarkable. First, the selection of scientific topics for his fourth volume is not limited to an early modern category of “natural history” or “natural philosophy,” but is much closer to an expansive notion of “science and technology” as we understand it today, ranging from mapmaking and navigation through clockmaking and mathematical techniques to astronomical observations of the solar system and the invention of the microscope (see appendix 2). “Philosophy” appears in the traditional guise of the university discipline, divided into logic, morals, physics, and metaphysics. But even here, the bulk of the discussion is devoted to topics of scientific interest, notably whether animals have souls or are pure machines (also treated at length by Daniel).⁸¹ The way that Perrault divides up the discussion thus implies a coherence of scientific and technological topics, distinct from the aesthetic and literary issues discussed in the other volumes of the Parallèle but not limited to the disciplinary demarcations and subdivisions of philosophy as enshrined in the university curriculum.

Like Daniel or Bernier and his coauthors, it is evident that Perrault was referencing a relatively clear canon of discoveries and scientific problems that was shared among French authors. This canon included illustrious figures such as Galileo, Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and William Harvey; famous discoveries, such as the mountains and valleys of the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, the existence of the vacuum, the circulation of the blood, and the mapping of new continents; and the instruments and techniques that made such discoveries possible, including the telescope, the microscope, the use of dissection in anatomy, and observatories (such as Uraniborg on the island of Hven or that of the Academy of Sciences on the outskirts of Paris). As a longtime aide to Colbert, Perrault was highly conscious of the patronage value of some of these discoveries, and in this his text displays some continuity with earlier histories of art and invention, especially Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) and Johannes Stradanus’s series of prints, Nova reperta (1590).⁸² Just like the Bernier version of the Ârret, Perrault’s text included topics that could be portrayed as useful to potential patrons, such as geographic exploration, alongside discoveries that stressed truths about nature, such as the dimensions of the Sun’s orbit or the hypothesis that other planets revolve around their axes.⁸³ This kind of text could thus build on Renaissance traditions while innovating in presenting a composite image of a substantial scientific transformation.

Other authors made the same distinction as Perrault between the scientific movement and broader changes in philosophy. In 1683, the Oratorian professor Bernard Lamy published his Entretiens sur les sciences, a text setting out his views on recent scientific developments. As befits a scholar who was suspended for teaching Cartesian doctrines, Lamy praised Descartes for “opening the way for a true physics,” thereby glorifying France and the period as a whole.⁸⁴ Like Perrault, however, Lamy conceived of scientific change in terms broader than the developments prompted by Descartes. He emphasized the contribution of instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, and the air pump, and with some intellectual dexterity even praised the last item specifically for confirming Descartes’s claims. He also recognized that these claims themselves could become outmoded, observing for example that Marcello Malpighi’s work showed the “very imperfect” nature of Descartes’s thinking on the human machine.⁸⁵

Lamy’s explicit reference to Galileo, Huygens, and John Wallis further confirms his conception of recent changes as a movement broader than Cartesianism. Drawing on the same canon of names, discoveries, and instruments as Perrault, Lamy likewise recognized scientific development as a particular topic with its own logic within the broader world of scholarship. “The ancients,” he explained, “knew hardly anything [in physics], … their learning was confined to morals.” Even though Democritus and Epicurus are held to be the first physicists (phisiciens), their knowledge was rather limited. Lamy underscored the importance of explaining “everything in terms of matter and the configuration of its constituent parts, in terms of motion or rest.” From this perspective, the ancients, ignorant of the laws of motion, lacked “the principles of physics” that were as fundamental as the principles introducing Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.⁸⁶

Men of letters were not simply popularizers of a historical image created by scientific practitioners.⁸⁷ While they certainly recognized a canon of personalities and discoveries, these authors sometimes attempted to modify or augment it, especially at its fringes. Perrault, for example, listed the achievements of his brother Claude as an authority on ancient music, and referred to the advances made by his colleagues under Colbert in the arts of physiognomic drawing, gardening, and firework displays.⁸⁸ In the Arrêt, Bernier and his coauthors included anatomical information on the circulation of blood and bile obtained through the vivisection of dogs.⁸⁹ Nonetheless, the most significant items, those that formed the core of a scientific canon, were widely shared, and there was a consensus on their importance, if not their interpretation.

Men of letters built their texts around fictional elements in ways that supported their arguments or expanded their appeal to a wider readership, as well as distancing them from the model of academic commentary. Perrault composed his Parallèle as a series of conversations among three characters: an Abbé, supporting the position of the moderns and serving as a thinly-veiled mouthpiece for the author’s own opinions; a judge or Président, hailing from the provinces and representing the position of the ancients; and a Chevalier, representing a more naïve and less biased approach to the quarrel, though he progressively becomes convinced by the Abbé’s reasoning.⁹⁰ This aesthetic choice was a clever device for furthering Perrault’s arguments. For example, when he has the Président claim that Descartes’s philosophy was nothing but the “slightly disguised opinion of Democritus,” the Abbé can conveniently refute this statement by pointing to differences concerning the divisibility of the “corpuscles” of matter and the role of God in creating matter.⁹¹ Perrault’s choice of Versailles as the setting for their learned exchanges also allows the Abbé to use the example of the palace and its treasures as further evidence to support the modern position.⁹² On the other side of the debate, Daniel relied on the conventions of the fantastic voyage—a model going back to Lucian of Samosata, a clear source of inspiration for his text—to convey his critique of Descartes to the relevant public: readers who indulged in frivolous pastimes such as marvelous voyages or parodies of Cartesian philosophy. Bernier applied the precepts of legal writing to parody the plight of scholastic philosophy. This appealing blend of philosophy, history, and literature enabled the authors to convey their intellectual positions and to impress readers with the changes in natural philosophy in an accessible way that also reflected broader social and aesthetic shifts.⁹³

Perrault’s text certainly caught the attention of his contemporaries. Published in a convenient duodecimo format, it probably appealed to a readership similar to that of Daniel’s Voyage: well-off men and women who sought to keep abreast of cultural events. With its Versailles setting, the presence of a “provincial” character in the Président, and a didactic style of discussion suited to novices, the text’s audience likely overlapped with that of the fashionable Mercure galant or Perrault’s own fairy tales, published in the exact same period. In a testament to their success, the first volumes of the Parallèle had appeared in a second edition in 1692–1693, even before the publication of the fourth volume.⁹⁴ After Perrault’s death in 1703, his obituaries listed his controversial poem on the age of Louis XIV and ongoing involvement in the debates it ignited among his most prominent achievements. Though a few contemporaries may have claimed that Perrault had exaggerated in his support of the moderns, his works provided a highly visible platform for the new scientific canon that emerged over his lifetime.⁹⁵

The examples of Bernier, Daniel, and Perrault collectively attest to the affinity between literary composition and the new science on the intellectual, aesthetic, and social levels. Indeed, all of these figures—with the telling exception of the Jesuit Père Daniel—lived the in-between lives of literary authors, serving as cultural mediators between different spheres. Literary support for the scientific movement was not limited to a particular cultural current: supporters of both the ancients and the moderns made a case for the new philosophy. Even authors at the opposite ends of the spectrum—and bitter personal rivals—like Perrault and Boileau still conformed to the new model of the man of letters, the nouveau docte, who sought to distinguish himself from the pedantry of their predecessors. Daniel, a Jesuit committed to the goals of his order and limited in his ability to formally espouse the new philosophy as a whole, had to interpret the same canon as his opponents and even found stylistically innovative and appealing ways to do so.

Biographical Material and the Construction of a Canon

By the late seventeenth century, the lives of the learned had been documented in an increasingly dense web of scholarly journals, obituaries, and biographical dictionaries that made their careers and achievements accessible to a broad reading public. This public would perhaps not want to delve into the intricacies of philosophical discussion, but was eager for a means to identify the names and personalities who had marked the intellectual, political, and ecclesiastical worlds.⁹⁶

Such biographical materials provide a sense—if only a rough one—of what educated readers were supposed to know about the protagonists of the new philosophy. If men of letters did indeed help shape the narrative of a veritable scientific revolution, we should expect to see significant continuity between the information available to seventeenth-century readers and that contained in equivalent texts from the High Enlightenment, by which time this historical narrative was widely recognized.⁹⁷ To this end, I examined the 1683 edition of Louis Moréri’s biographical dictionary, the most widely available biographical source in late seventeenth-century France, which went through twenty-four editions between 1674 and 1759. I compared the space devoted to a list of more than 150 persons connected to scientific endeavors, and arranged these figures in descending order according to the number of lines dedicated to each one. I then repeated the process with the final, 1759 edition of the same dictionary. I also analyzed the sections dealing with scientific change in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie of 1751—a major source for Enlightenment understanding of the previous century’s revolution in science—and divided them into two groups, again based on the space attributed to them in the text.⁹⁸

This analysis furnished a basic benchmark for the visibility of actors involved in scientific change in the cultural sphere prior to the High Enlightenment. Since we do not have detailed information on the authorship and composition of these biographical entries, this kind of quantitative assessment can lead to facile or circular arguments: data that do not fit a given interpretation can be explained away on an ad hoc basis as exceptions or irregularities. Nevertheless, it does give us at least an approximate idea of the general information available to the educated elite, and thus provides a useful counterpoint to focused case studies.

An examination of the rankings generated (see appendices 3–5) yields four complementary observations. The first is simply that even in the 1683 edition of Moréri’s dictionary, the expected names are largely present, from the famous to the (more numerous) not-so-famous, broadly arranged in the order of influence one would anticipate for France circa 1680: the first ten names include Gassendi, Descartes, and Galileo; the “top twenty” include Pascal, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Paracelsus, Petrus Ramus, and Cardano. It perhaps comes as something of a surprise that Francis Bacon only makes it into the top thirty, where one can also find Mersenne, Giambattista della Porta, Regiomontanus, and Gilles Personne de Roberval. Kepler is also lower than one might expect to find him, but his place seems to reflect the fact that the influence of his work would only gain wide recognition toward the end of the seventeenth century. If one adds the names of those figures who died after this edition was printed—and were therefore not included in it—it is really not a great leap to the canon presented by d’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse” nearly seventy years later.

Second, the persons cited and the amount of space their descriptions occupy conform quite well to the intellectualist bias of classic narratives of the “Scientific Revolution” found in twentieth-century historiography. The intermingling of names like Bacon, Leibniz, and John Locke with those of Newton, Robert Boyle, Galileo, and Isaac Barrow, so characteristic of the “Preliminary Discourse,” is furthermore found not only in the early edition of Moréri’s dictionary, but also in the literary texts discussed above. The emphasis that these sources place on names such as Gassendi, Descartes, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola shows that the current bias toward theory over craft and hands-on experimentation is not simply a product of Cold War scholarship but has strong roots in seventeenth-century perceptions.⁹⁹

The third observation concerns the balance between international names and figures that had been active in the French literary field since the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The emergence of a scientific culture was a phenomenon on a European scale, and it brought together scholars working in the broad urban and commercial corridor that stretches from northern Italy through the Rhineland and northern France to the Low Countries and England. The European pantheon that included Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Regiomontanus, and Bacon is as familiar to a modern audience from any of those countries as it would have been to French readers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Yet recent scholarship’s emphasis on such transnational factors should also be balanced with the local configurations that modified perceptions of the scientific movement overall. As seen above, literary texts written in France foregrounded particular local contexts and tensions, such as the censorship of Descartes’s work or the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. In a similar vein, it is striking to observe the remarkable prominence given to Arnauld and Fontenelle in the 1759 edition of Moréri’s dictionary. Arnauld was a dominant Jansenist theologian and a hugely important figure in the cultural sphere of late seventeenth-century France.¹⁰⁰ Aside from his role as secretary of the Academy of Sciences over nearly half a century, Fontenelle authored numerous popular works and was also a powerful presence in the French literary field. Together, these two authors point to the specific religious and cultural developments that led to the establishment of a particularly French national scientific culture. The French case also demonstrates the crystallization of a narrative of scientific change even before Newton’s work—the crowning achievement of the scientific movement at the European level—became widely known in France after 1730.¹⁰¹ The different dynamics of local scientific cultures played a major role in Ben-David’s foundational 1971 work, and the affinities between science and the world of letters open up a range of new possibilities through which to explore this question.¹⁰²

Finally, the timing of this canonization mattered. The middle decades of the seventeenth century were precisely the period in which the scientific movement in Europe itself seemed to enter a lull, potentially at risk of petering out. Regaining momentum required a serious institutional transformation, culminating in the establishment of the Royal Society in London around 1660 and the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1666, in whose foundation Perrault was intimately involved as Colbert’s aide.¹⁰³ By this point men of letters and their readers were already taking an interest in scientific changes; even if they would not play a direct role in the institutionalization of science, they surely contributed to the emerging public interest that ultimately offset the apparent slowing of new discoveries. However, as distinct scientific cultures developed by 1730 or so, the mediating role of the world of letters became somewhat ambivalent. In lending support to a movement that was in danger of vanishing or at least losing momentum, the interest of men of letters had also tethered science to divergent literary cultures across the continent. This in turn would lead to an increasing need for tools of scholarly communication, from a lingua franca to international institutions, to counterbalance the pull of local influences. This fascinating tension merits further investigation that will no doubt reveal much about the role of letters in shaping early modern science.

Men of letters presented their readers with a narrative of dramatic scientific change, with a clear core of heroes, celebrated discoveries, and technologically advanced instruments. This article has suggested several complementary approaches—from the study of particular texts or the social and intellectual commitments of individual men of letters, to an analysis of the emerging genre of reference works—that collectively show how this presentation functioned. Yet my argument does not seek simply to prove that eighteenth-century understandings of a scientific revolution were underpinned by a seventeenth-century reality. My goal is more dynamic: to observe how men of letters produced texts that gained traction among an elite audience and shaped its perception of a historical watershed. Historians of science have tended to overlook these texts, perhaps because they lean toward compilation over innovation and popularization over original argumentation.¹⁰⁴ They nevertheless shed light on the emergence of a sustained scientific movement that did not fizzle out as equivalent movements already had in other contexts. Thanks to these literary “go-betweens,” it reached wide publics among the continent’s reading elites, expanding the broader impact of the new science even before the Industrial Revolution demonstrated its utilitarian applications. Such figures and their efforts are easy to overlook when our analytical gaze is trained primarily on practitioners and their immediate patrons.¹⁰⁵ Yet we cannot understand the cultural meaning of the “Scientific Revolution” without men of letters, who did so much, I argue, to transform activities that were difficult for contemporaries to understand into a hallmark of modern society as it emerged in Europe.