Chameleons between Science and Literature: Observation, Writing, and the Early Parisian Academy of Sciences in the Literary Field

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe foundation of the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1666 is often seen as one of the landmarks of the so-called Scientific Revolution. The Academy, together with the Royal Society of London, gave the 'new philosophy' of the seventeenth century a state-sponsored framework, providing experimental philosophy with a stable setting and with the prestige stemming from royal patronage. This move supplanted the previous less-than-formal relations of patronage between nobles and natural philosophers and created a new home for a form of philosophy that had yet no clear place on the university curriculum.1 The new academies made possible what French author and philosopher Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle described as the crowning achievement of a long process leading to the founding of the Academy of Sciences: have left behind sterile physics, which hasn't developed in centuries. The reign of words and terms has come to an end. We want things.2 Historians of science, eager to examine the roots of modern experimental practice, have been lured by the siren's call of Fontenelle's history. They have produced groundbreaking works on laboratory experiments and the ways early modern Europeans started paying attention to things and not to mere words.3 But this focus on 'things' has, at times, carried scholars away from the wider context Fontenelle himself used for describing the developments in the study of nature: the world of letters. And he was quite explicit: we can date the renewal of mathematics and physics only to this era. Descartes and other great men worked on it so successfully, that everything changed in this genre of literature.4This article proposes to take Fontenelle seriously, by examining the emergence of the Academy of Sciences as a group of experts within the confines of the literary field.5 It argues that the Academy was obliged to draw on the world of letters in order to promote its philosophical programme and to serve Louis XTV and the powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, its founder. Moreover, the literary opportunities and constraints created by the Academy's relation to the monarchy and to literary circles in Paris shaped the nature of the cutting-edge scientific work in natural history done in mid-seventeenth century Paris. This article thus asks how the academy functioned within the wider literary field, and how the intellectual work of the academicians may be viewed as a response to their social position in the world of letters.A portrait of the Academy of Sciences as an institution deeply engaged with the world of letters, enriches the discussions on the institutional nature of scientific academies, since this discussion often stresses secrecy and the boundaries - based on considerations of status or on codes of civility - separating the academicians from other practitioners or literati. These boundaries, in turn, led to greater professionalism and autonomy for the 'new philosophy'.6 This article suggests, however, that the change in the character of early modern scientific institutions stemmed from the academicians' need to adopt practices of writing and publication shared with the world of letters. While university professors, the predecessors of the academicians as the producers of socially-legitimate philosophical discourse, acted within a clearly-defined institutional and pedagogical context, the academicians had to establish their institution within the literary field, in order to develop their research programmes within Louis XIV's system of patronage.7 Therefore, by clarifying what the Academy shared with the 'salon', as well as what was unique to it, this argument mitigates against the tendency to see scientific academies as embodying the process of 'autonomization' or 'professionalization' of natural philosophy.The fortunes and misfortunes of three chameleons, which arrived in Paris from Egypt in 1668 and 1672, He at the heart of this story. The first chameleon made its way to the Academy of Sciences, where the king's savants studied it, dissected it after its death, and published the results along with luxurious engravings (see Figure 1). …

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