Popular science and the arts: challenges to cultural authority in France under the Second Empire

Abstract

The National Institute of Science and the Arts, founded in 1795, consists of parallel academies, concerned with science, literature, the visual arts and so on. In the nineteenth century it represented a unique government-sponsored intellectual authority and a supreme court judgement, a power which came to be resented by innovators of all kinds. The Académie des sciences held a virtual monopoly in representing French science but soon this came to be challenged. In the period of the Second Empire (1852–70) we find a group of men carving out a new career for themselves as professional popularizers of science, commissioned to write regular articles in newspapers and journals. Although they had begun by simply reporting the meetings of the Académie des sciences, they soon widened their scope and even began criticizing the august Académie. Thus they represented the alternative voice of science, distinct from ‘official science’. These independent writers had their counterpart in painting and literature, both of which were developing radical new approaches in mid-century. When the very traditional Fine Art Academy refused to consider their paintings, painters like Cézanne and Manet found an alternative outlet. Writers too asserted their independence from the Académie française. There were not only many parallels between the independent practitioners in science, painting and literature but also new schools of ‘naturalism’ in painting and literature which looked to science as a model.