Empire of Exactitude: Life, Literature and the Physical Sciences in Post-Enlightenment Paris

FAIN: FEL-262618-19

Travis Benjamin Wilds
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

Writing leading to the publication of an intellectual history of how the sciences triumphed over the humanities in the Paris academy (1780 to 1815).

My book investigates the changing conditions of scientific production during the Revolutionary and Empire periods in France (1780-1815), when the forging of exact mathematical physics raised quantification to unprecedented prestige while eclipsing a variety of natural philosophical and medical traditions. I show that the rhetoric of exactitude generated by a new breed of Parisian mathematical physicists corresponded to a push for cultural autonomy in scientific production, and ultimately to the emergence of a distinct scientific field. This bent toward specialization fragmented the relatively undifferentiated span of eighteenth-century “letters,” which had sustained the authority of medical and utility-oriented experimentalists, heirs of the Enlightenment tradition, and neo-natural theological philosophers. The book reveals how patronage dynamics helped proponents of exact science sideline these rivals and institute ideas about the value of “values” that remain with us today.