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Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years

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On the eve of the Revolution, France was the world's leader in scientific research and Paris was the scientific capital of the world. Under the Ancien Regime, a combination of fine educational institutions, largely sponsored by the Catholic Church and almost inadvertantly providing good training in mathematics and other important disciplines, and government support for institutions that supported science led to the broadest and deepest scientific community in Europe. Gillispie provides a careful and superbly documented chronological account of what happened to French science during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. This is not, strictly speaking, a conventional history of science. While Gillispie does discuss important scientific developments, his focus is on the institutional history of French science and the role played by the French scientific community is larger affairs. Given the relative generosity of the French state towards science, and the prominent role of French scientists in the Enlightenment movement that sought to supplant traditional social and political institutions, Gillispie is particularly interested in the relation between government and the scientific community during this turbulent period.
Gillispie covers the treatment of French science by the various revolutionary governments and by Napoleon's governments. The history of major scientific institutions is covered well, as is the treatment of educational policy. The careers of a number of important French scientists and mathematicians; Laviosier, Condorcet, Monge, Laplace, Berthollet, etc., are followed carefully. Gillispie pays particular attention to the role of scientists in politics and government. Several French scientists, including some who had benefited considerably from the policies of the Ancien Regime, played important roles in revolutionary and Napoleonic governments. Gillispie looks also at the major developments in French science, which he sees as evolving from a descriptive, "encyclopedic" mode to a more experimental, rigorous, and quantitative "positivist" mode. Examples include the development of comparative morphology by the great anatomist Cuvier and other important French biologists, the later emergence of physiology as a experimental science independent of medicine, the increasingly clinically oriented and empirical nature of medical training and practice, and the mathematization of physics. Despite all the political stress of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, French governments continued their support of science and French predominance in science lasted for decades after 1815. This book is deep, broad, written well, and has excellent references.
A bonus is Gillispie's well considered and insightful comments on key features of the Revolution.