Emilie du Châtelet: genius, gender, and intellectual authority

Abstract

As Sarah Hanley's essay on Christine de Pizan and the Salic law demonstrates (chapter 13), France has a long tradition of women writing and writing on political subjects. In England the Civil War and Glorious Revolution increased the numbers and status of writers on many kinds of topics; Louis XIV's reordering and consolidation of monarchical authority had the opposite effect in France. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the French government gained more control over publications on all subjects whether by women or men. Every book required the “Approbation,” a testimony to the value of the work, and the “Privilège du roi,” royal permission granted to the printer to undertake publication. Permission was refused to any book deemed critical of the government, the established church, or offensive to the royal definition of “morality.” It was in this context that Emilie du Châtelet became the principal woman “physicien [physicist],” and “géomètre [mathematician]” of the first half of the eighteenth century. Ironically, of all the known European women writers of this era, she is the only one whose separate reputation has been lost. Although she has been remembered in traditional historical narratives, it is her liaison with Voltaire, not her own accomplishments as an interpreter of Newton's natural philosophy and Leibnitz's metaphysics that has justified her inclusion. Even scholars of eighteenth-century French history know du Châtelet from Nancy Mitford's Voltaire in Love , not from her own work, the Institutions de physique , and her translation of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia .

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