Newton, page 16
Although the equatorial expedition lasted ten years, Maupertuis and his colleagues in Lapland completed their work quickly and, in 1737, triumphantly returned to Paris clothed in furs. The results were ambiguous, but Maupertuis insisted that, though contested, these measurements vindicated his own faith in Newtonian gravitation. The earth’s flattened shape was, he declared, now established beyond all reasonable doubt. Fanning public sympathy with colourful newspaper tales of his team’s arduous battles against fog, mosquitoes and freezing cold, Maupertuis even published anonymous satires lambasting his opponents. The same poets who enthused that Newton had torn away the Cartesian bandages of error also hymned Maupertuis for his ‘astonishing audacity’ as he tackled ‘mountains of ice’ and ‘braved torrents hung suspended in space’. Only ‘the finest motives inflamed the hearts’ of the plucky explorers. Backed by Newtonian propagandists, Maupertuis became an exemplary French hero whose courageous venture entitled him (and France) to some of Newton’s glory.16
Two of Maupertuis’s earliest converts were Voltaire and his lover Émilie du Châtelet. She condemned Cartesianism as ‘a house collapsing into ruins, propped up on every side . . . I think it would be prudent to leave.’ As they set about persuading the nation to desert with them, Voltaire’s reverence for Newton came to verge on obsession. He scattered praise throughout his books and letters, while dinner-party guests were obliged to admire his bust of ‘the greatest genius that ever existed: if all the geniuses of the world were assembled, he should lead the band’.17 Promptly taking advantage of the surge in interest stimulated by Maupertuis’s Lapland success, in 1738 Voltaire published his Elements of Newton’s Philosophy. Although simplified and distorted, this illustrated account of optics and gravity became one of the major sources of French familiarity with Newton’s innovations.
Although Voltaire was happy to receive the credit, this man of literature did recognize that he was far less knowledgeable about mathematics and natural philosophy than his erudite lover. In the frontispiece of his book, du Châtelet appears as the goddess of truth reflecting an attenuated beam of divine Newtonian light down on to Voltaire, who is wearing a classical robe and a poet’s laurel wreath (Figure 1.6). As a preface for his Newtonian primer, Voltaire composed a long poem that hymns Newton, but opens by addressing du Châtelet as his ‘great and powerful genius, France’s Minerva’.18
Du Châtelet studied intensively and made original contributions to a range of topics. In particular, her translation of Newton’s Principia, with its substantial scholarly commentaries, was admired for its clarity and its superiority to the English version. Despite her domestic duties, du Châtelet did manage to complete the manuscript, but after she died in childbirth, it was another ten years before a full version was published. Voltaire frequently extolled her achievements; they would both be gratified to know that hers remains the only complete French translation.19
Faced with the problem of overcoming resistance to female scholarship, du Châtelet invited the country’s leading intellectuals to participate in discussions at her estate at Cirey. The behaviour of one of du Châtelet’s guests infuriated her. She had learned Italian expressly to engage in philosophical repartee with Algarotti, and he was probably delighted to visit Cirey rather than accept his other invitation – to join Maupertuis’s Lapland expedition. Nevertheless, in his Newtonianism for the Ladies, Algarotti made it clear that du Châtelet was the model for his fictional Marchioness, and so cruelly parodied her penchant for fine clothes and jewels. His frontispiece shows Algarotti as a slender elegant man (‘a swan’, sneered Voltaire) accompanying an unflattering portrait of a rather substantial du Châtelet, while his dialogue parodies her as a flirtatious intellectual lightweight. For instance, he put into her mouth such Newtonian absurdities as ‘after eight Days Absence, Love becomes sixty-four times less than it was the first Day, and according to this Progression it must soon be entirely obliterated . . .’20
But another Cirey visitor, the fashionable artist Maurice Quentin de Latour, presented a very different view of a Newtonian woman. At the 1753 Louvre exhibition, which was – as usual – packed by crowds from all the social classes, he displayed eighteen new portraits of Enlightenment men and women. Several journalists singled out for comment his vibrant pastel showing Elizabeth Ferrand, a fashionable Parisian hostess, studying a book on Newton (Figure 5.2).21 Unlike the male-dominated club culture of England, in France women’s salons were recognized as social centres where serious discussions took place. Despite being a semi-invalid, Ferrand exerted considerable behind-the-scenes influence in Enlightenment France, and regularly engaged in debates about current political and scientific affairs with her eminent friends. Although some colleagues sniped in the press that she was mean and humourless, everyone paid tribute to her mathematical prowess. One man who publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Ferrand was the famous philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. The heart-felt sincerity of his overt tribute in his Treatise on the Sensations pays her a far truer compliment than does Voltaire’s overblown poetic praise of du Châtelet.22
Latour often depicted his female subjects engaged in intellectual pursuits (although when he painted Madame de Pompadour surrounded by books and globes, hostile critics accused him of detracting from her femininity). His picture of Ferrand, briefly interrupted from her Newtonian studies, reflects the barriers du Châtelet encountered when she tried to escape from her prescribed role as a spectator, and become an active participant in scientific life. Using the luminous pastel colours for which he was renowned, Latour shows Ferrand temporarily distracted from her peaceful perusal of Newton’s philosophy. Gazing out from a state of absorption, whether lost in reading, grief or contemplation, was a favourite theme for eighteenth-century artists, and moralizing poets preached the innocent delights of combining usefulness with pleasure. Latour’s scene suggests that Newtonian texts had entered the canon of morally improving books for women, so that Ferrand apparently embodies the Enlightenment ideal of a feeling heart guided by reason.23
This portrait is, however, shot with ambiguities. Ferrand’s clothes – her lace-lappeted cap and pink negligée trimmed with blue – indicate that the artistic viewer has been invited into a private domestic space. Her quizzical gaze and the coquettish angling of her fingers, which recall François Boucher’s intimate portrait of his wife seductively lounging in her boudoir, belie Ferrand’s studious pose, and suggest that she is theatrically engaging with the spectator. The book’s careful lettering deceptively suggests fidelity to an actual original, but this large volume with its marginal annotations more closely resembles the Bible than any available edition of Newton’s philosophy. Newton was already starting to assume the role of an idealized figure who bore scriptural authority in the secular realm of philosophy.24
By this time, access to Newton’s ideas had become far easier. For those who could read neither English nor Latin, Newton himself had intervened to ensure that a fine new translation of the Opticks was produced, and du Châtelet’s French Principia did eventually appear. At the Sorbonne, Diderot’s friend Pierre Sigorgne (who was at one stage imprisoned for passing on subversive political poetry) was lecturing on Newton’s natural philosophy to his students, and in 1747 he published his own influential textbook on Newton. In addition, French translations of explanatory guides like Pemberton’s became available. The first volumes of the pro-Newtonian Encyclopédie were starting to appear, and the small simplified books by Voltaire and Algarotti did, despite their inadequacies, advertise Newton to non-academic French readers. In Paris, fashionable audiences were flocking to the entertaining demonstration lectures given by Jean-Antoine Nollet. Inspired by a visit to Desaguliers, Nollet included many Newtonian experiments, which reached a wide readership through his enormously successful six-volume illustrated lecture course.
But not everyone approved of this spread of Newton’s natural philosophy. Even at the heart of France’s scientific community, powerful anti-Newtonian factions operated well into the second half of the century. When Halley’s comet reappeared in 1759, Newtonian astronomers – notably Joseph-Jérôme Lalande – had to work hard to convince their sceptical colleagues that their English methods yielded the most accurate predictions. Although Newton’s allies had long viewed his cometary analyses as particularly telling arguments against Cartesian vortices, opponents continued to insist that French cometographers had been successfully perfecting their own techniques over the previous sixty years without recourse to Newton. Many of their objections were based on flaws in Newton’s own calculations, yet just as Maupertuis managed to convert his ambiguous results into definitive proof of polar flattening, so Lalande presented the return of the comet as a clinching success story for Newtonian celestial mechanics.25
The sustained Jesuit resistance to Newton had a very significant effect throughout Catholic Europe because the order controlled many of the best educational institutions. Jesuits clung to Cartesianism, partly because it drew a sharp distinction between the soul and the body. By choosing to give Newton’s philosophy a materialist interpretation, they could strengthen their own position by denouncing his adherents as atheists. Jesuit book reviewers sneered at enthusiasts who had deserted Descartes to leap on the Newtonian bandwagon: ‘At last Mr Voltaire speaks, and immediately Newton becomes famous or is on the way to becoming so; all Paris reverberates with Newton, all Paris stutters Newton, all Paris studies and learns Newton.’26
Selective translation provided one powerful strategy for subverting Newton’s influence. Substantial portions are missing from the French version of Algarotti’s Newton for the Ladies, and the Jesuit editor provided a preface criticizing Newton and praising Descartes. But head-on confrontation was the most obvious tactic. Because they wrote in Latin, Jesuits who wanted to attack Newton could reach an international audience. Several of them wrote anti-Newtonian poems, sometimes with extensive footnotes explaining that Newton’s philosophy led to atheism. One of the most widely read was the Cardinal de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius of 1747, which was promptly translated from Latin into French. Dedicated to promoting ‘Religion and Virtue’, this long poem (483 pages in the English version) is resolutely Cartesian:
Nor does great NEWTON’s famous system stand,
On one compact foundation, simply plann’d . . .
Reflect how vainly is that Art employ’d,
Which founds a stately fabrick on a Void:
Confess the fair result of sober thought,
WHO BUILDS ON VACUUM, MERELY BUILDS ON NOUGHT.27
As late as the 1770s, investigators all over France participated in a protracted debate about gravity. Extraordinary as it now seems, a scientific journal published details about research carried out in the Savoy mountains claiming to show that Newton was wrong – objects get heavier rather than lighter the further away they are from the centre of the earth. It was several years before it became clear that the original experiments had never taken place and that the article’s authors were fictional characters. That this fraud should be so successfully perpetrated illustrates for how long powerful anti-Newtonian lobbies survived in France.28
Because Newton and Descartes were both important symbolic icons, they could be attacked or praised by protagonists defending a wide range of positions. To say one belonged to a Newtonian or a Cartesian sect was socially significant, but by no means implied total intellectual commitment. There was no more uniformity amongst the neo-Cartesian camp than among the Newtonians they opposed, and many writers sought to combine their approaches. One common solution was simply to ignore the philosophical problems raised by attraction, and instead regard Newton’s cosmology as a useful model for making accurate quantitative predictions about the world. By the time of the Revolution, an ostensibly united scientific facade concealed huge rifts between factions holding very different opinions about aims and methodology. Nevertheless, Newton’s supporters had won the ideological battle, and – as in England many years earlier – it became impossible to shake Newtonian orthodoxy. Thus the Academy of Sciences automatically rejected the optical theories proposed by the physician Jean-Paul Marat because they contradicted Newton’s. Marat did, however, enjoy a successful political career before his untimely end in a bath.
Anglomania
Just as Voltaire exaggerated the contrast between Newtonian London and Cartesian Paris, caricaturists on both sides of the Channel delighted in portraying national stereotypes. In a British engraving of 1768, a clumsy, overweight Englishman is unsuccessfully trying to learn how to dance under the disdainful eyes of his slim, foppish teacher, who despite being unmistakably French, is wearing a hair ribbon labelled Newton. This foreigner might, the artist implies, be forcing his employer into an inferior role, but even he must pay tribute to England’s intellectual hero. A decade earlier, a Frenchman had coined the term Anglomania to describe the French fad for all things English – including Newton – that continued up to the Revolution. Initial resistance evolved into deliberate imitation, and English ways of life profoundly affected the geographical, intellectual and political landscapes of France during the second half of the century. ‘Albion’, enthused one poet, was the home of Newton. ‘Oh how the universe should envy that island!’29
In England, the widespread dissemination of portraits, busts and statues made a vital contribution to Newton’s conversion into an English hero. However, in France visual imagery played a different role. Pictures of Newton himself enjoyed only a limited circulation. His admirers – men like Buffon and d’Alembert – did seek inspiration by hanging Newton’s portrait on their study walls, and several engravings and medals were reproduced in books or could be bought separately. But many of these had been derived from other copies, and came to bear little resemblance to the original, often looking characteristically French. Particularly when Newton appeared as one in a series of great men, he tended to lose his personal identity. Moreover, there were virtually no French statues or busts of him. After the Revolution Newton had become a French icon, but the state encouraged paintings and sculptures that would celebrate national achievement and democratic ideals. The nave of Westminster Abbey contained private memorials to famous individuals, but the Panthéon, Paris’s secular cathedral, housed representations of abstract quantities like Reason and Architecture.30
Because Newton was symbolically important, images claiming to show his actual appearance were less significant than pictures and monuments intended to convey the spirit, as it were, of Newton and his philosophy. One such building that survives is the Temple des Philosophes at Ermenonville, now about an hour’s drive from Paris. Its history illustrates some of the ways in which Newton became absorbed into French life and politics. This classical Temple with six Tuscan columns nestles among trees on a slope overlooking a lake, and the current neglect of this prefabricated ruin heightens its melancholic atmosphere. Newton’s column is placed next to Descartes’s, while the other four geniuses are Voltaire, Penn, Montesquieu and Rousseau.
Like many wealthy French landowners, during the 1760s and 1770s the Marquis de Girardin redesigned his estate at Ermenonville in the English allegorical style made so famous by Stowe. The tight mathematical arrangements of formal French gardens gave way to rolling parklands that were carefully crafted to appear natural. Dotted with classical statues and Masonic grottoes, this sculpted scenery articulated in material form the sentimental vision of nature that artists and writers were adopting from English pictures and poetry. The meticulously planned groves and monuments laid out by Girardin and other landed gentry reflected how English customs were affecting not only how French people interacted with their environment, but also how they thought about death and commemoration.31
Girardin frequently indulged in ‘a calm and tranquil morning à l’anglaise’ perusing Newton and Milton, and spent tranquil evenings with English visitors, exchanging poetic snippets from the Newtonian poet Thomson and his French imitators. Among the rustic monuments scattered around his grounds, Girardin erected an obelisk to four pastoral poets, including James Thomson. Like the pyramid on Newton’s tomb, the obelisk’s shape symbolized eternal fame, while the tribute to Thomson (inscribed in English) summoned up Newton’s astronomy and optics:
Like the circling sun; his
Warm genius
Coloured and vivified every
Season of the year.
Ermenonville became a pilgrimage site after Jean-Jacques Rousseau was buried there in 1778. Although the obelisk with its Newtonian inscription was demolished by Revolutionary troops as a symbol of foreign oppression, swarms of Sunday visitors still enjoyed wandering round the Temple des Philosophes while an orchestra played under a nearby beech tree. But this elegant building, with its splendid views over the lake, had originally been designed as a tribute to genius and a comment on the finite duration of time. Based on the temple at Tivoli, a favourite spot for young men on their Grand Tour, the rotunda is supported by six pillars dedicated, Girardin explained, to ‘those privileged Geniuses who appear briefly to honour their country & illuminate their peers’. Now overgrown with nettles, two adjacent columns are inscribed to Descartes and Newton, here commemorated for his work on light, not gravity. In this prefabricated ruin, the seventh column is intentionally broken, while three others lie nearby on the ground, awaiting the arrival of another comparable genius.32
