5
1
9780226793610
By Mary Terrall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226793605
1 - Portrait of a Man of Science
IN 1739, AT THE PEAK OF HIS SCIENTIFIC CAREER, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis sat for his portrait (see frontispiece). The finished picture represented this rather eccentric man of science to the cosmopolitan world of letters and to the smaller world of his immediate friends, admirers, and enemies. The painting was publicly displayed in the Salon exhibition in the Louvre palace in 1741 and discussed in the press. Copies were commissioned, in oils and in copperplate engravings, and sent to friends and patrons; subsequently a version of the same image appeared as the frontispiece to Maupertuis's collected works. The subject of the painting was a senior member of the Paris Academy of Sciences and the author of numerous technical and polemical books and papers, connected socially with prominent families in the capital and with men and women of letters across Europe. He worked with the artist, Robert Tournieres, to imbue the portrait with the marks of a carefully constructed persona as a mathematician, an explorer and adventurer, a man of action and wit. His central role in a tortuous dispute in the Academy of Sciences about the shape of the earth had recently enhanced his fame--ornotoriety. The painting contributed to a polemic that had engrossed the public and divided the Academy. Painted at a key moment in a controversial and publicly visible career, the image gives us some insight into the way its subject wished to be seen.
The face directs its confident and self-assured gaze outward to the viewer. Its untroubled and slightly bemused expression defies the observer to find it ridiculous. The face belongs to a man dressed in fur hat and reindeer-skin robe, sumptuous with gilt-embroidered red trimming. The costume, ostensibly the native dress of the northern regions of Lapland, marks him as the triumphant survivor of a journey above the Arctic Circle, where he made his most famous and controversial measurements. The landscape of those frozen mountains and rivers is just visible in the background, vaguely indicated by a conventional pointing finger. The outlandishly dressed mathematician presses firmly downward on the north pole of a terrestrial globe, marked with lines of latitude and longitude, deforming it into a slightly oblate shape, effectively claiming ownership of the flattened earth. The pose asks the viewer to agree that the calculator and voyager is also somehow responsible for flattening the earth itself. By advertising the truth about the earth's shape, Maupertuis also asserts his own power. This strength derives partly from the feat of having traveled so far, and partly from the mathematics indicated in the half-visible diagrams spilling over the windowsill. A contemporary viewer would have recognized something we cannot see directly, that this strength is also grounded in the power of the French king, who magnanimously authorized (and financed) the expedition. The mathematician supplied the knowledge and instruments, along with physical stamina and courage, but without the state's resources the expedition would never have left Paris.
The picture also domesticates the difficult and dangerous work involved in making astronomical observations in remote corners of the world, by dressing up the result in luxury. No frostbite or ravaged lungs are evident, nor are any of the many other participants in the expedition, including his closest collaborators. The painting effectively distills the meaning of the expedition into the person of one man. With its references to the far north, it appeals to a taste for the exotic in both learned and fashionable circles. Although the pose of the mathematician denotes strength and mastery, it is also slightly coquettish. The man of science presents himself as a denizen of high society; he is courting the same audience that frequented theaters and salons, performing a role much as his aristocratic friends performed their own theatricals. Maupertuis's reputation as mathematician was matched by a reputation as a conversationalist and man-about-town, even a libertine, at home in the salons and boudoirs of aristocratic women. The portrait, then, graphically demonstrates the way these audiences, the learned and the fashionable, overlapped and interacted. This overlap is emblematic of the practice of science in a setting where validation and rewards, as well as challenges and attacks, came from different sources simultaneously.
By sitting for his portrait, Maupertuis consolidated his public image. Painted in the aftermath of a painful and sometimes embarrassing controversy, the calmness and command of the portrait belie the contention surrounding the expedition by representing Maupertuis's controverted claim (the flattened globe) as a fait accompli. The controversy was not far from the minds of viewers, however. Jean-Francois Nollet described the portrait sardonically as the latest sally of a Don Quixote "defending his Dulcinea." Some years later, the journalist Charles Colle used the portrait as evidence that Maupertuis was "devoured by jealousy and thirst for reputation," since his collaborators were nowhere to be seen. Nothing was more unstable than reputation in this sociable world of privilege; Maupertuis's authority was controversial, however secure he appeared in his portrait.
The portrait crystallizes a moment in the convoluted story of how Maupertuis rose to prominence in a society where such arcane practices as precise astronomical measurements could translate into a variety of rewards, including status and honor. This book follows the movements and choices he made in his bid for fame and reputation, through the careful crafting of his mathematical and literary work, as well as through his sociability and conversation. His quest for knowledge was also a quest for a persona that would incorporate the posture of the portrait with an intellectual commitment to the rational investigation of nature. If we had only the portrait as evidence of this career, it would be a story of adventure and resounding acclaim. With the addition of his published works on diverse subjects and in many genres, the record of his activities in scientific institutions, and personal letters that document his social and intellectual networks, the story becomes more nuanced, more contested, and less directed toward a triumphant climax. The portrait can be read as one strategy among many--of mixed success as the reactions of his contemporaries attest--for the representation of the enlightened man of science. Maupertuis's biography, then, illuminates the place of science in the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, as well as the role of science in the making of his own identity.
Sociability
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the loose confederation of writers and readers who thought of themselves as enlightened identified enlightenment with what they called "sociability." As the element of human nature responsible for the social bond, this term carried connotations of citizenship as well as conviviality. Maupertuis participated in many of the forms of sociability, public and private, that have elicited scholarly interest in the wake of Jurgen Habermas's work on the public sphere. Cafes, public lectures, salon gatherings, public gardens, scientific and literary academies, and even royal courts provided the settings for the sociable exchange that characterized production of knowledge in the Enlightenment. As Roger Chartier has shown, this more or less public sociability depended on private reading and writing. These interlocking practices informed the strategies deployed by Maupertuis in building his persona and in solidifying his reputation as a member of a new elite that drew its status from scientific credentials, a status whose value was still being negotiated over the course of Maupertuis's life.
Enlightened prescriptions for the pursuit of natural knowledge placed it definitively in society, linking knowledge to social utility, but also to sociable behavior. The true philosopher, Denis Diderot told readers of the Encyclopedie, "knows how to divide his time between solitude and social intercourse." Unlike his less enlightened brethren, such a man recognizes the drawbacks of isolated reflection and rigid systematic thinking. "Man is not a monster who should live only in the depths of the sea or the farthest reaches of the forest.... Reason demands that he know and study the qualities of sociability and endeavor to acquire them." If philosophy was a sociable pursuit in self-consciously enlightened circles in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, it also required an awareness of the human mind's limitations and a willingness to give up constricting and all-encompassing theoretical "systems." Diderot's philosopher articulated his claims in dialogue with nature, much as the man of letters engaged in witty conversation with companions or wrote books for enlightened readers of both sexes.
Diderot was only one among many of his contemporaries who defined reason, wit (esprit), and good sense so as to put them to work in the service of a socially engaged philosophy that would challenge dogmatism and superstition. This definition was of course polemical, with enlightened or true philosophy standing opposed to the outmoded, rigid (and often-caricatured) "spirit of system" associated with Descartes and his followers. Diderot's portrayal of the philosopher exemplified the self-conscious impulse to articulate a new kind of identity, claiming a spot for "philosophy" in the society of men and women worthy of "this enlightened century." The trend, epitomized in the encyclopedia project of Diderot and d'Alembert, to ground knowledge in sensory experience and to derive both social utility and pleasure from it, made science sociable. The Encyclopedie itself, one of the most elaborate and controversial publishing ventures of its time, made manifest the connection of print to sociability. These convivial and reasoned forms of interaction permeated not only conversation and letter writing, but books and journals as well. Traces of dialogue and exchange abound in printed works, in footnotes, prefaces, dialogues, and critical reviews; this literary angle was essential to the connection between science and sociability. Reading might seem a solitary and unsociable activity, but discussion and debate about books dominated many social gatherings and epistolary exchanges. To be sociable meant, among other things, to converse and correspond about books, their authors, their attackers, their supporters, and any attendant scandal. Writers interested in making a reputation in this world attuned themselves to these discussions, and fostered them. Maupertuis meticulously positioned himself and his books in this complex web of audiences, not just in order to be admired but to provoke discussion and even controversy. Louis-Bertrand Castel, a Jesuit mathematician and journalist, recalled hearing this advice from Maupertuis: "He who causes himself to be often spoken of is always discussed, and that is everything. It was [some] years ago that the illustrious president M[aupertuis] said to me, 'Publish small works often, and you will dominate all of literature.'"
Much historical attention has been paid to the political consequences of a wide range of forms of sociability, for articulating challenges to the regime and for contributing to a newly significant public opinion. Enlightened salonnieres consciously promoted a code of sociability for their guests to distinguish their conversations and letters from the courtly civility of the previous century, a form of civility they branded as superficial. Salons were only one of many types of gathering where literature, philosophy, and politics were discussed and debated. The exchange between "institutions of sociability" (including male-dominated cafes and clubs as well as female-dominated salons) points to the multiplicity of venues where men and women pursued and promoted science, along with other forms of edification and amusement. Maupertuis's trajectory through the world of salons, cafes, and academies shows that science also belonged in the realm of conversation and wit. Discourse about natural knowledge--all the topics that might be grouped under the rubric of "the sciences"--took place in and among many kinds of social groups, including mixed-gender salons and public lectures, but also informal all-male gatherings in private homes or public cafes, aristocratic house parties, clubs, and a variety of organized institutions. The boundaries between these settings were never entirely rigid, though different rules of comportment and performance obtained in different settings. In fact, Maupertuis's career demonstrates the permeability of these boundaries, as he adapted his rhetoric and behavior to the appropriate context and exploited his ability to pass from one setting to another.
The Academy of Sciences was the most exclusive venue for scientific investigation, but it was integrated into the Republic of Letters, and many of its members wrote for that unstructured, cosmopolitan, and often contentious wider community of readers. Maupertuis himself was one of a small number of members of the science academy who was also elected to the elite literary academy, the Academie francaise, which in turn was closely linked to the salons of powerful aristocratic hostesses. One anecdote about the early part of his career is telling in this regard. Although he later broke with Fontenelle, in the 1730s the patronage of the star of salon society served Maupertuis well. As the story goes, Maupertuis "wished to be admitted chez Mme Lambert, who assembled men of letters at her home. Fontenelle, in introducing him, said, 'I have the honor of presenting M. de Maupertuis, who is a great mathematician and who nevertheless is not afool [sot]."
Crossing Intellectual Boundaries
The idealized sociability of reasoned and witty conversations coexisted with vigorous and often vitriolic contention in the letters and sciences of the eighteenth century. Maupertuis lived the life of the sociable enquiring philosopher described by Diderot, embroiled in intellectual controversy and intrigue, and exploiting the medium of print to further his goals and enhance his reputation. His career exemplifies the way in which the various scientific disciplines were interleaved with literature and philosophy in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Although he did not write for the Encyclopedie, he belonged to the diffuse community of "gens de lettres" from which it drew its authors and its readers. His many works, primarily academic papers and short books, range across an encyclopedic variety of topics, belying anachronistic notions of specialization or expertise. Reviews and abstracts of his books appeared in the pages of all the leading literary and scientific journals of the day. Citations and summaries are sprinkled throughout the volumes of the Encyclopedie in articles on mathematics, physics, life science, reproduction, navigation, astronomy, epistemology and language. All of this made him a visible figure, admired by some and reviled by others, in the world of enlightened science and letters.
Maupertuis set out in the 1720s to make his way as a mathematician; he learned Leibnizian analysis from Johann Bernoulli and applied it to problems addressed by Newton in the Principia. This was a way to stake a claim at the cutting edge of mathematical physics, where methods and concepts gave rise to rancorous debate. He went on to write about geodesy (the shape of the earth) and mechanics, both mathematical disciplines, but then ventured into life science, cosmology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Maupertuis has been remembered, in the history of science and in physics and biology, for certain of his ideas that gained significance later by virtue of some relation, genealogical or not, to more modern concepts like evolution or the principle of least action. Most often, in the historical literature, his works have been treated piecemeal, in isolation from their context in the social and political environment of old-regime France and Prussia. Even when they have been examined as the product of a single thinker, as in studies by Pierre Brunet and David Beeson, the theories and arguments have not been read in light of what it meant to do science and be a man of science in the eighteenth century. This was above all a literary world, where books and periodicals provided not only reading matter, but stimulated conversation and gossip as well. In this world, hierarchical structures and power relations coexisted with the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the Republic of Letters. These features of the social location of science informed the way Maupertuis formulated his ideas, his presentation of them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked. He maintained friendships and collegial relations with men of science and aristocratic women across Europe. He frequented the fashionable intellectual salons of Paris, as well as Louis XV's court, and the intimate circle of Frederick II of Prussia. His success in these venues aroused jealousy, pique, and ridicule, but also admiration and flattery.
Reputation was crucially important in this world of gossip, performance, and reading, and the sciences could foster reputation in a sphere that extended beyond the limited specialist elite of the academy. As a man of science and a man of letters, Maupertuis systematically crafted his public identity by building relations with a variety of constituencies and patrons, and by writing for several overlapping audiences. He first established his reputation in the cafes and salons of Paris, then in the Paris Academy of Sciences, and went on to dominate the Francophone scientific world of Prussia under Frederick the Great, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences. His books, in form as well as in content, projected an image of the author as adventurer, wit, and philosopher, equally comfortable in salon and academy, fluent in the language of mathematics and astronomical measurement but also the master of an elegant literary style. He wrote for an elite readership avid for books on provocative subjects, as well as for academicians versed in technical evidence and arguments. To call him a popularizer would be to miss the point of his concerted efforts to build a career and reputation among the social and intellectual elite, including technically adept men of science. Along the way, he aspired to asserting the aristocratic status of science, compatible with nobility as well as with the freewheeling and even freethinking world of the philosophes.
Continues...
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Translations
1. Portrait of a Man of Science
2. From Saint-Malo to Paris
3. Mathematics and Mechanics in the Paris Academy of Sciences
4. The Expedition to Lapland
5. The Polemical Aftermath of the Lapland Expedition
6. Beyond Newton and on to Berlin
7. Toward a Science of Living Things
8. The Berlin Academy of Sciences
9. Teleology, Cosmology, and Least Action
10. Heredity and Materialism
11. The Final Years
Bibliography
Index
The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment available in Hardcover, Paperback
The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment
by Mary Terrall
Mary Terrall
- ISBN-10:
- 0226793613
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226793610
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226793613
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226793610
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment
by Mary Terrall
Mary Terrall
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Overview
Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works to explore what it meant to do science and to be a man of science in eighteenth-century Europe. Beginning his scientific career as a mathematician in Paris, Maupertuis entered the public eye with a much-discussed expedition to Lapland, which confirmed Newton's calculation that the earth was flattened at the poles. He also made significant, and often intentionally controversial, contributions to physics, life science, navigation, astronomy, and metaphysics. Called to Berlin by Frederick the Great, Maupertuis moved to Prussia to preside over the Academy of Sciences there. Equally at home in salons, cafés, scientific academies, and royal courts, Maupertuis used his social connections and his printed works to enhance a carefully constructed reputation as both a man of letters and a man of science. His social and institutional affiliations, in turn, affected how Maupertuis formulated his ideas, how he presented them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked. Terrall not only illuminates the life and work of a colorful and important Enlightenment figure, but also uses his story to delve into many wider issues, including the development of scientific institutions, the impact of print culture on science, and the interactions of science and government. Smart and highly readable, Maupertuis will appeal to anyone interested in eighteenth-century science and culture. "Terrall's work is scholarship in the best sense. Her explanations of arcane 18th-century French physics, mathematics, astronomy, and biology are among the most lucid available in any language."--Virginia Dawson, American Historical Review Winner of the 2003 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226793610 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 468 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Mary Terrall is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment
By Mary Terrall
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2002 Mary TerrallAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0226793605
1 - Portrait of a Man of Science
IN 1739, AT THE PEAK OF HIS SCIENTIFIC CAREER, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis sat for his portrait (see frontispiece). The finished picture represented this rather eccentric man of science to the cosmopolitan world of letters and to the smaller world of his immediate friends, admirers, and enemies. The painting was publicly displayed in the Salon exhibition in the Louvre palace in 1741 and discussed in the press. Copies were commissioned, in oils and in copperplate engravings, and sent to friends and patrons; subsequently a version of the same image appeared as the frontispiece to Maupertuis's collected works. The subject of the painting was a senior member of the Paris Academy of Sciences and the author of numerous technical and polemical books and papers, connected socially with prominent families in the capital and with men and women of letters across Europe. He worked with the artist, Robert Tournieres, to imbue the portrait with the marks of a carefully constructed persona as a mathematician, an explorer and adventurer, a man of action and wit. His central role in a tortuous dispute in the Academy of Sciences about the shape of the earth had recently enhanced his fame--ornotoriety. The painting contributed to a polemic that had engrossed the public and divided the Academy. Painted at a key moment in a controversial and publicly visible career, the image gives us some insight into the way its subject wished to be seen.
The face directs its confident and self-assured gaze outward to the viewer. Its untroubled and slightly bemused expression defies the observer to find it ridiculous. The face belongs to a man dressed in fur hat and reindeer-skin robe, sumptuous with gilt-embroidered red trimming. The costume, ostensibly the native dress of the northern regions of Lapland, marks him as the triumphant survivor of a journey above the Arctic Circle, where he made his most famous and controversial measurements. The landscape of those frozen mountains and rivers is just visible in the background, vaguely indicated by a conventional pointing finger. The outlandishly dressed mathematician presses firmly downward on the north pole of a terrestrial globe, marked with lines of latitude and longitude, deforming it into a slightly oblate shape, effectively claiming ownership of the flattened earth. The pose asks the viewer to agree that the calculator and voyager is also somehow responsible for flattening the earth itself. By advertising the truth about the earth's shape, Maupertuis also asserts his own power. This strength derives partly from the feat of having traveled so far, and partly from the mathematics indicated in the half-visible diagrams spilling over the windowsill. A contemporary viewer would have recognized something we cannot see directly, that this strength is also grounded in the power of the French king, who magnanimously authorized (and financed) the expedition. The mathematician supplied the knowledge and instruments, along with physical stamina and courage, but without the state's resources the expedition would never have left Paris.
The picture also domesticates the difficult and dangerous work involved in making astronomical observations in remote corners of the world, by dressing up the result in luxury. No frostbite or ravaged lungs are evident, nor are any of the many other participants in the expedition, including his closest collaborators. The painting effectively distills the meaning of the expedition into the person of one man. With its references to the far north, it appeals to a taste for the exotic in both learned and fashionable circles. Although the pose of the mathematician denotes strength and mastery, it is also slightly coquettish. The man of science presents himself as a denizen of high society; he is courting the same audience that frequented theaters and salons, performing a role much as his aristocratic friends performed their own theatricals. Maupertuis's reputation as mathematician was matched by a reputation as a conversationalist and man-about-town, even a libertine, at home in the salons and boudoirs of aristocratic women. The portrait, then, graphically demonstrates the way these audiences, the learned and the fashionable, overlapped and interacted. This overlap is emblematic of the practice of science in a setting where validation and rewards, as well as challenges and attacks, came from different sources simultaneously.
By sitting for his portrait, Maupertuis consolidated his public image. Painted in the aftermath of a painful and sometimes embarrassing controversy, the calmness and command of the portrait belie the contention surrounding the expedition by representing Maupertuis's controverted claim (the flattened globe) as a fait accompli. The controversy was not far from the minds of viewers, however. Jean-Francois Nollet described the portrait sardonically as the latest sally of a Don Quixote "defending his Dulcinea." Some years later, the journalist Charles Colle used the portrait as evidence that Maupertuis was "devoured by jealousy and thirst for reputation," since his collaborators were nowhere to be seen. Nothing was more unstable than reputation in this sociable world of privilege; Maupertuis's authority was controversial, however secure he appeared in his portrait.
The portrait crystallizes a moment in the convoluted story of how Maupertuis rose to prominence in a society where such arcane practices as precise astronomical measurements could translate into a variety of rewards, including status and honor. This book follows the movements and choices he made in his bid for fame and reputation, through the careful crafting of his mathematical and literary work, as well as through his sociability and conversation. His quest for knowledge was also a quest for a persona that would incorporate the posture of the portrait with an intellectual commitment to the rational investigation of nature. If we had only the portrait as evidence of this career, it would be a story of adventure and resounding acclaim. With the addition of his published works on diverse subjects and in many genres, the record of his activities in scientific institutions, and personal letters that document his social and intellectual networks, the story becomes more nuanced, more contested, and less directed toward a triumphant climax. The portrait can be read as one strategy among many--of mixed success as the reactions of his contemporaries attest--for the representation of the enlightened man of science. Maupertuis's biography, then, illuminates the place of science in the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, as well as the role of science in the making of his own identity.
Sociability
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the loose confederation of writers and readers who thought of themselves as enlightened identified enlightenment with what they called "sociability." As the element of human nature responsible for the social bond, this term carried connotations of citizenship as well as conviviality. Maupertuis participated in many of the forms of sociability, public and private, that have elicited scholarly interest in the wake of Jurgen Habermas's work on the public sphere. Cafes, public lectures, salon gatherings, public gardens, scientific and literary academies, and even royal courts provided the settings for the sociable exchange that characterized production of knowledge in the Enlightenment. As Roger Chartier has shown, this more or less public sociability depended on private reading and writing. These interlocking practices informed the strategies deployed by Maupertuis in building his persona and in solidifying his reputation as a member of a new elite that drew its status from scientific credentials, a status whose value was still being negotiated over the course of Maupertuis's life.
Enlightened prescriptions for the pursuit of natural knowledge placed it definitively in society, linking knowledge to social utility, but also to sociable behavior. The true philosopher, Denis Diderot told readers of the Encyclopedie, "knows how to divide his time between solitude and social intercourse." Unlike his less enlightened brethren, such a man recognizes the drawbacks of isolated reflection and rigid systematic thinking. "Man is not a monster who should live only in the depths of the sea or the farthest reaches of the forest.... Reason demands that he know and study the qualities of sociability and endeavor to acquire them." If philosophy was a sociable pursuit in self-consciously enlightened circles in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, it also required an awareness of the human mind's limitations and a willingness to give up constricting and all-encompassing theoretical "systems." Diderot's philosopher articulated his claims in dialogue with nature, much as the man of letters engaged in witty conversation with companions or wrote books for enlightened readers of both sexes.
Diderot was only one among many of his contemporaries who defined reason, wit (esprit), and good sense so as to put them to work in the service of a socially engaged philosophy that would challenge dogmatism and superstition. This definition was of course polemical, with enlightened or true philosophy standing opposed to the outmoded, rigid (and often-caricatured) "spirit of system" associated with Descartes and his followers. Diderot's portrayal of the philosopher exemplified the self-conscious impulse to articulate a new kind of identity, claiming a spot for "philosophy" in the society of men and women worthy of "this enlightened century." The trend, epitomized in the encyclopedia project of Diderot and d'Alembert, to ground knowledge in sensory experience and to derive both social utility and pleasure from it, made science sociable. The Encyclopedie itself, one of the most elaborate and controversial publishing ventures of its time, made manifest the connection of print to sociability. These convivial and reasoned forms of interaction permeated not only conversation and letter writing, but books and journals as well. Traces of dialogue and exchange abound in printed works, in footnotes, prefaces, dialogues, and critical reviews; this literary angle was essential to the connection between science and sociability. Reading might seem a solitary and unsociable activity, but discussion and debate about books dominated many social gatherings and epistolary exchanges. To be sociable meant, among other things, to converse and correspond about books, their authors, their attackers, their supporters, and any attendant scandal. Writers interested in making a reputation in this world attuned themselves to these discussions, and fostered them. Maupertuis meticulously positioned himself and his books in this complex web of audiences, not just in order to be admired but to provoke discussion and even controversy. Louis-Bertrand Castel, a Jesuit mathematician and journalist, recalled hearing this advice from Maupertuis: "He who causes himself to be often spoken of is always discussed, and that is everything. It was [some] years ago that the illustrious president M[aupertuis] said to me, 'Publish small works often, and you will dominate all of literature.'"
Much historical attention has been paid to the political consequences of a wide range of forms of sociability, for articulating challenges to the regime and for contributing to a newly significant public opinion. Enlightened salonnieres consciously promoted a code of sociability for their guests to distinguish their conversations and letters from the courtly civility of the previous century, a form of civility they branded as superficial. Salons were only one of many types of gathering where literature, philosophy, and politics were discussed and debated. The exchange between "institutions of sociability" (including male-dominated cafes and clubs as well as female-dominated salons) points to the multiplicity of venues where men and women pursued and promoted science, along with other forms of edification and amusement. Maupertuis's trajectory through the world of salons, cafes, and academies shows that science also belonged in the realm of conversation and wit. Discourse about natural knowledge--all the topics that might be grouped under the rubric of "the sciences"--took place in and among many kinds of social groups, including mixed-gender salons and public lectures, but also informal all-male gatherings in private homes or public cafes, aristocratic house parties, clubs, and a variety of organized institutions. The boundaries between these settings were never entirely rigid, though different rules of comportment and performance obtained in different settings. In fact, Maupertuis's career demonstrates the permeability of these boundaries, as he adapted his rhetoric and behavior to the appropriate context and exploited his ability to pass from one setting to another.
The Academy of Sciences was the most exclusive venue for scientific investigation, but it was integrated into the Republic of Letters, and many of its members wrote for that unstructured, cosmopolitan, and often contentious wider community of readers. Maupertuis himself was one of a small number of members of the science academy who was also elected to the elite literary academy, the Academie francaise, which in turn was closely linked to the salons of powerful aristocratic hostesses. One anecdote about the early part of his career is telling in this regard. Although he later broke with Fontenelle, in the 1730s the patronage of the star of salon society served Maupertuis well. As the story goes, Maupertuis "wished to be admitted chez Mme Lambert, who assembled men of letters at her home. Fontenelle, in introducing him, said, 'I have the honor of presenting M. de Maupertuis, who is a great mathematician and who nevertheless is not afool [sot]."
Crossing Intellectual Boundaries
The idealized sociability of reasoned and witty conversations coexisted with vigorous and often vitriolic contention in the letters and sciences of the eighteenth century. Maupertuis lived the life of the sociable enquiring philosopher described by Diderot, embroiled in intellectual controversy and intrigue, and exploiting the medium of print to further his goals and enhance his reputation. His career exemplifies the way in which the various scientific disciplines were interleaved with literature and philosophy in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Although he did not write for the Encyclopedie, he belonged to the diffuse community of "gens de lettres" from which it drew its authors and its readers. His many works, primarily academic papers and short books, range across an encyclopedic variety of topics, belying anachronistic notions of specialization or expertise. Reviews and abstracts of his books appeared in the pages of all the leading literary and scientific journals of the day. Citations and summaries are sprinkled throughout the volumes of the Encyclopedie in articles on mathematics, physics, life science, reproduction, navigation, astronomy, epistemology and language. All of this made him a visible figure, admired by some and reviled by others, in the world of enlightened science and letters.
Maupertuis set out in the 1720s to make his way as a mathematician; he learned Leibnizian analysis from Johann Bernoulli and applied it to problems addressed by Newton in the Principia. This was a way to stake a claim at the cutting edge of mathematical physics, where methods and concepts gave rise to rancorous debate. He went on to write about geodesy (the shape of the earth) and mechanics, both mathematical disciplines, but then ventured into life science, cosmology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Maupertuis has been remembered, in the history of science and in physics and biology, for certain of his ideas that gained significance later by virtue of some relation, genealogical or not, to more modern concepts like evolution or the principle of least action. Most often, in the historical literature, his works have been treated piecemeal, in isolation from their context in the social and political environment of old-regime France and Prussia. Even when they have been examined as the product of a single thinker, as in studies by Pierre Brunet and David Beeson, the theories and arguments have not been read in light of what it meant to do science and be a man of science in the eighteenth century. This was above all a literary world, where books and periodicals provided not only reading matter, but stimulated conversation and gossip as well. In this world, hierarchical structures and power relations coexisted with the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the Republic of Letters. These features of the social location of science informed the way Maupertuis formulated his ideas, his presentation of them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked. He maintained friendships and collegial relations with men of science and aristocratic women across Europe. He frequented the fashionable intellectual salons of Paris, as well as Louis XV's court, and the intimate circle of Frederick II of Prussia. His success in these venues aroused jealousy, pique, and ridicule, but also admiration and flattery.
Reputation was crucially important in this world of gossip, performance, and reading, and the sciences could foster reputation in a sphere that extended beyond the limited specialist elite of the academy. As a man of science and a man of letters, Maupertuis systematically crafted his public identity by building relations with a variety of constituencies and patrons, and by writing for several overlapping audiences. He first established his reputation in the cafes and salons of Paris, then in the Paris Academy of Sciences, and went on to dominate the Francophone scientific world of Prussia under Frederick the Great, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences. His books, in form as well as in content, projected an image of the author as adventurer, wit, and philosopher, equally comfortable in salon and academy, fluent in the language of mathematics and astronomical measurement but also the master of an elegant literary style. He wrote for an elite readership avid for books on provocative subjects, as well as for academicians versed in technical evidence and arguments. To call him a popularizer would be to miss the point of his concerted efforts to build a career and reputation among the social and intellectual elite, including technically adept men of science. Along the way, he aspired to asserting the aristocratic status of science, compatible with nobility as well as with the freewheeling and even freethinking world of the philosophes.
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Excerpted from The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment by Mary Terrall Copyright © 2002 by Mary Terrall. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Translations
1. Portrait of a Man of Science
2. From Saint-Malo to Paris
3. Mathematics and Mechanics in the Paris Academy of Sciences
4. The Expedition to Lapland
5. The Polemical Aftermath of the Lapland Expedition
6. Beyond Newton and on to Berlin
7. Toward a Science of Living Things
8. The Berlin Academy of Sciences
9. Teleology, Cosmology, and Least Action
10. Heredity and Materialism
11. The Final Years
Bibliography
Index
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