There has been a tendency to view science in nineteenth-century France as the exclusive territory of the nations leading academic centers and the powerful Paris-based administrators who controlled them. Ministries and the great savants and institutions of the capital seem to have defined the field, while historians have ignored or glossed over traditions on the periphery of science. In The Savant and the State, Robert Fox charts new historiographical territory by synthesizing the practices and thought of state-sanctioned scientists and those of independent communities of savants and commentators with very different political, religious, and cultural priorities.Fox provides a comprehensive history of the public face of French science from the Bourbon Restoration to the outbreak of the Great War. Following the Enlightenment, many different interests competed to define the role of science and technology in French society. Political and religious conservatives tended to blame the scientific community for upsetting traditional values and, implicitly, delivering France into the hands of revolutionary extremists and Napoleonic bureaucrats. Scientists, for their part, embraced the belief that observation and experimentation offered the surest way to the knowledge and wisdom on which the welfare of society depended. This debate, Fox argues, became a contest for the hearts and minds of the French citizenry.
Preface Introduction 1. Science and the New Order The Return of the Bourbons Patronage, Authority, and the Profession of Science Science and the Industrial Age A Philosophy for the Times: The Roots of Positivism 2. Voices on the Periphery Academies and Societies The Devotee: Nature, Learning, and Locality Science and Decentralization The Triumph of the Center 3. Science, Bureaucracy, and the Empire The Trials of Academic Science Education, Industry, and the Imperial State The Bureaucracy of Learning The Roots of Academic Reform 4. Science, Philosophy, and the Culture of Secularism The Midcentury: Conformity and Dissent in French Philosophy The Nature of Life: PasteurPouchet Revisited The Radical Synthesis and Its Enemies A Faith for the Age: The Religion of Humanity 5. Science for All Fashioning the Audience Masters of the Mass Market: Flammarion and Figuier The Spoken Word Broader Audiences, Bigger Stakes 6. The Public Face of Republican Science The Savant at War and Peace Countercurrents: Science in the Catholic Tradition The Republic of the Savants Fin de Siècle: From Inspiration to Anxiety Conclusion Appendix A: The French System of Education and Research Appendix B: Exchange Rates and Incomes in Nineteenth-Century France Abbreviations Notes Bibliographical Note Index
""A valuable synthesis of the variety of political and cultural roles played by the scientific enterprise in France from the end of the First Empire to the outbreak of World War I... A broad-ranging, balanced survey of the state of the field... In The Savant and the State, Fox has written what is likely to remain the definitive survey of public science in nineteenth-century France for some time to come.""
