Newton, page 17
Whether in private contemplation or public salon readings, ardent Anglophiles like Girardin particularly favoured two English poems that eulogized Newton and his ideas: Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Thomson’s The Seasons. Young inspired astronomical poetry that envisaged Newton’s soul ecstatically soaring through the heavens ‘on the wings of Genius, holding Urania’s dividers in his hand’.33 But it was Thomson in particular who became a cult hero, and whose references to Newton were often quoted in English as well as French. Thomson had completed his The Seasons by 1730, and thirty years later the first French translation stimulated French versions. Compared with Thomson’s lyrical Georgic hymns to nature’s beauty, much of this derivative French poetry seems rather leaden, using rhyming couplets to intone moral homilies about the virtues of hard work.
Newtonian poetry became politicized in the hands of Thomson’s French emulators. One of the best known was Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, such a favourite visitor at Cirey that he fathered du Châtelet’s child. In his French Seasons, Saint-Lambert urged his aristocratic readers to care for the peasants who tended their property; unlike Thomson, he focused on the industrial value of minerals rather than their beautiful spectral colours. Scientific creativity, he stressed, stems from social need, while happiness comes not from whiling away the long hours of winter darkness at balls and concerts, but in quiet solitude learning how to ‘enlighten oneself between Locke and Newton!’34 Another of Thomson’s imitators obliquely criticized royal oppression by praising Newton as a scientific liberator, a ‘daring eagle’ who had been brave enough to ‘look the blazing King of the Skies in the face’ and break ‘the chains of ancient ignorance’.35
On the other hand, not all French people were enthusiastic about this cultural invasion from across the Channel. It was not only natural philosophers who resented Newton for supplanting their own national hero. One (fictional) society hostess complained about a faddish young visitor who ‘has the Anglo-manie to a great degree. He unfortunately spent fourteen days in London, and speaks of it incessantly; is always boasting of the learning and genius of the English . . . He keeps English horses, reads the English newspapers, makes his morning visits with boots and spurs, drinks tea twice a day, and thinks himself as wise as Newton or Locke.’36 In the middle of the century, some writers still heralded Descartes as Europe’s intellectual saviour: ‘without that great Frenchman, whom we must regard as the Founder of sound Philosophy, Great Britain would still be groaning under the tyranny of the Aristotelians’.37
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the influential public administrator who had been one of Sigorgne’s early Newtonian pupils at the Sorbonne, resolved the conflict by giving these two national heroes equal status in the empire of science:
Some people have made it their business to sacrifice the reputation of Descartes to that of Newton. They have imitated those Romans who, when one emperor succeeded another, simply knocked off the head of the first and substituted it for that of the second. But in the Temple of Glory there is room for all great geniuses.
Turgot insisted that scientific advance depends on a continuous succession of great men who open up new avenues of research to be explored by lesser minds. He was articulating the faith in rational progress professed by the rationalizing French philosophers of the Enlightenment. For them, nature was a more important source of knowledge than God, and they enrolled Newton into a new intellectual elite intended to replace the older aristocratic and clerical hierarchies.38
Turgot’s vision of a tightly knit scientific community still survives. When art historians look back at the work of the sculptor Robert-Guillaume Dardel, they automatically bracket together two of his statues, one of Descartes and one of Newton. Although Dardel is not famous now, he moved in prestigious circles, and examining his sculptures provides insights into the bonds between scientific and political interests. Because these two pieces were produced eleven years apart, on either side of the Revolution, they carried very different political messages and should not be considered as a pair.
Dardel first exhibited a terracotta model of ‘Descartes piercing the dark clouds of ignorance’ in 1782. Now in London’s Wallace Collection, Dardel’s Descartes is himself realistically represented in seventeenth-century clothes, but he is sitting astride an amorphous shape resembling rounded rocks. These are the metaphorical clouds of ignorance symbolically being penetrated by the sun’s rays. On one interpretation, this Descartes is an emblem of scientific achievement, but to portray him in this way was also to make a patriotic declaration. In the same exhibition, Dardel showed a deliberately flattering sculpture of his patron, the Prince of Condé, pursuing his retreating enemies. As France’s wealthy aristocrats were becoming increasingly concerned about the nation’s decline, sculptors were producing expensive monuments that consoled them by nostalgically recalling the glories of the country’s vanished past. In England, Wedgwood was mass-marketing cheap models and medallions of Enlightenment intellectuals from all over Europe. But in France, only rich customers could afford the Sèvres replicas of these statues, which had been designed to create a pantheon of specifically French achievement. Dardel was subsequently commissioned to produce a full-scale version of his Descartes, which, paralleling his statues of famous military men, publicly proclaimed the greatness of France’s intellectual heritage.39
In 1793, Dardel decided to sculpt Newton. Unfortunately, his terracotta model probably no longer exists, but much can be deduced from the informative title: ‘Newton discovers and displays [female] Truth, who in one hand holds a prism to indicate the theory of colours, and in the other a magnetized circle to designate his system of attraction’. Whereas at the time of his Descartes pieces Dardel had been employed by an aristocrat, he now played a prominent role in post-Revolutionary artistic politics. Dardel was renowned for his use of allegory, and since the three other sculptures he exhibited that year were laden with republican symbolism, his Newton certainly carried concealed meanings. At this time, Dardel’s major patron was Jacques-Louis David, whose splendid double portrait of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his wife resonates with allusions to how scientific expertise could contribute to social improvement.40
In Dardel’s vanished sculpture, Truth’s prism symbolized not only Newton’s optics, but also the rays of Enlightenment. The ‘magnetized circle’ remains mysterious, but may well indicate that Dardel knew about recent French experiments extending Newton’s law of gravitational attraction to cover magnetism.41 Although natural philosophy was a male preserve, Truth and Reason were, as in Voltaire’s frontispiece, always personified as female (Figure 1.6); they were, moreover, Revolutionary icons in contemporary polemical art. Dardel’s Newton was rooted in these allegorical associations between scientific knowledge and Revolutionary progress. By exhibiting Newton, Dardel was making a political statement about French ideals of social reform through scientific research and technological innovation. Newton had become an iconic figurehead, a God of Reason who featured prominently in polemical tracts on equality, stability and progress.
Astronomical order and gravitational equality
The year before the French Revolution, Louis Fontanes published a long didactic poem on astronomy that launched him on his doubly successful career as a poet and a politician. Inspired by a recent trip to England, Fontanes took his cue from Young’s Night Thoughts to stress the insignificance of human achievement and the complexity of God’s design. Newton, he declared (in what to modern readers seem rather agonizing rhyming couplets), was ‘the most worthy of God’s interpreters’, who had lifted one corner of heaven’s veil to reveal ‘which laws govern the motion of all the planets’.42
Fontanes belonged to a new generation of French writers who had been taught Newtonian physics and were keen to celebrate modern ideas by incorporating them within lyrical yet factually informative poetry. Poetry was an important genre of Newtonian education, one which explained scientific concepts but also delivered political, religious and moral messages. Poets often produced versified versions of the Enlightenment slogan that reason would dispel the mistaken beliefs and superstitions of earlier, more ignorant ages. Furthermore, in the charged atmosphere of the post-Revolutionary decades, many of them stressed that Newton, ‘that great legislator of the worlds and Heavens’, had organized and stabilized the universe. Thanks to Newton, they proclaimed, ‘error was dethroned, and his dividers brought order and simplicity’.43
United by their praise for Newton, these poems conveyed contrasting opinions about science, knowledge and progress, and were designed for different audiences. Nevertheless, their common emphasis on Newton’s uniquely powerful role reinforced his fame among wide groups of readers who lacked any formal scientific education. Some of these literary tributes read like breathless sports commentaries about intellectual athletes pounding towards truth at the top of Mount Olympus. But whatever their poetic qualities, as well as publicizing Newton, they also helped to consolidate the concept of a scientific community transcending national boundaries, and to reinforce the increasing power of scientific institutions after the Revolution.44
In their prefaces and footnotes, these didactic poets frequently acknowledged their debt to Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, two eminent astronomers who had published influential textbooks supporting Newtonian over Cartesian cosmology. It was Lalande, so devoted that he made a point of visiting Westminster Abbey to bow at Newton’s tomb, who had successfully converted the 1759 comet into a vindication of Newtonian prediction. Renowned for his dedication to the public understanding of science, he swallowed dried spiders to discourage arachnophobia, and embarked on dangerous balloon flights. Less spectacularly, but perhaps more importantly, he encouraged astronomical poetry and did much to promote the spread of Newtonian ideas throughout the French educational system. Bailly, who established his own laboratory in the Louvre and was particularly well known for his detailed history of Newtonian astronomy, later became Paris’s first elected mayor, when he was satirized in political caricatures as an absent-minded star-gazer tumbling into a well. After he was guillotined in 1793, it was Lalande who read his funeral eulogy.
Lalande and Bailly inspired poetic interpretations of Newtonian astronomy in which the theme of scientific progress, so central to Revolutionary ideology, was particularly important. It was usually given a strong nationalistic twist. Newton appeared in an ancestry of great men stretching back in time to Aristotle, Kepler and – above all – Descartes, the vital predecessor without whom (they claimed) even Newton would not have been able to formulate his theories. The lineage of intellectual aristocrats also pointed forward to Newton’s successors, French Newtonians such as Maupertuis and Lalande.
Lalande sponsored a didactic history of astronomy designed for schoolboys. This long chronological tour ranging from the Chaldeans to the present included detailed tables of astronomical distances, as well as technical footnotes about celestial mechanics, and was delivered in resounding rhyming couplets. Newton appeared as the sole discoverer of nature’s hidden secrets, while Maupertuis and his colleagues comprised specifically French role models of bravery (‘French audacity conceived, dared and achieved a hundred prodigious feats undreamt of elsewhere . . .’).45
By the time of the Revolution, the members of the Paris Academy all regarded Newton with reverence, yet several different scientific outlooks sheltered beneath this Newtonian umbrella. Lalande championed what we might term the hard physics school of thought, whereas his critics disapproved of analytical techniques and deterministic cosmologies. In line with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental pastoralism, they sought to develop a more holistic philosophy. It was this approach that inspired Letters to Sophie, an enormously successful educational poem.
In strong contrast with Lalande’s adventurous hymns to progress, Letters to Sophie delivered moral lessons suitable for girls, teaching them that the goal of science was to learn about God by uncovering nature’s harmonious structure. Letters from an avuncular tutor urged Sophie and her friends to abandon their jewels and lace and turn instead to their globes. Expected to grapple neither with mathematics nor Arctic ice, these female readers were gently persuaded to admire the immortal Newton for revealing the beauty of God’s creation, and to marvel how ‘at the genius’s voice, the stars make a sweet harmony heard’.46
A third prevalent view at the Academy was that science’s major aim should be to improve social welfare through invention. This became a favourite theme for progressive poets. One of the most famous was André Chénier, who had worked at the London Embassy before the Revolution, and after his return belonged – like the sculptor Dardel – to David’s intellectual circle. Educated at one of the first schools to include Newtonian science in its regular curriculum, Chénier became a leading advocate of political scientific poetry. Criticizing stodgy versifiers, Chénier campaigned for a new poetic style that would capture modern scientific thought while avoiding pedantry. In Invention, his most renowned doctrinaire poem, Chénier fêted Newton as the crowning glory of a cumulative chain of achievement. Newton, he wrote, was made to ‘talk in the language of the Gods’ as Urania (goddess of astronomy) taught Calliope (muse of poetry) to string ‘her golden lyre to a nobler pitch’.
A political moderate, Chénier used his rhymed version of Bailly’s Newtonian astronomy to draw forceful analogies between cosmological and political order. He symbolized the universe’s suns as kings ruling over the planets that circled around them, weighed down by the yoke of intransigent laws ‘whose sacred, essential, inflexible power makes them all yearn towards an invisible centre’.47 After Louis XVI was executed, it became dangerous to express such monarchist sentiments. André Chénier was imprisoned and then guillotined, despite the efforts of his younger brother, Marie-Josèphe, who was a leading Jacobin politician, to prevent his death.
Already an established playwright, Marie-Josèphe Chénier wrote stirring hymns praising Revolutionary virtues. In a long poem celebrating the power of reason, he also paid tribute to Newton, albeit far more vaguely than had his elder brother. In French, Newton conveniently rhymes – well, almost – with the words for reason, Cicero, Cato and Plato. This enabled Marie-Josèphe Chénier to list Newton as one among many intellectual heroes who had been inspired by ‘exquisite reason’. His verses may not be great poetry, but they do illustrate how Newton had entered an international, timeless pantheon of great men.48
By the late eighteenth century, Newton had become the God of Reason, an emblematic hero symbolizing stability, equality and rational progress for people who had only a hazy notion of his achievements. For those who escaped André Chénier’s fate, the stability of Newton’s universe provided an obvious metaphorical contrast to the Reign of Terror. In lengthy allegorical epics, poets compared the periods of mistaken beliefs that had interrupted scientific progress before Newton with the wars, decadence and famines that afflicted the development of human civilization. Comets, which were the subject of intense debate and apprehension, provided particularly potent symbols of political chaos and divine retribution. As a scientific genius, Newton was becoming hailed as a secular prophet. ‘Nations! rest assured,’ wrote one poet; Newton has declared that comets ‘will one day reanimate the ageing Sun . . . and I believe in his genius.’49
Newtonian physics also provided a political metaphor for equality. In one anti-monarchic adaptation of Thomson’s The Seasons, Newton was praised for ordering the universe so that it ‘resembles those wise kingdoms, where one law is enough to control all men. Attraction: that is the law of the universe.’ Nature now provided an egalitarian political model, in which every individual was governed by the same law of attraction. Unlike the packed, swirling universe of Cartesian vortices, the Newtonian void was populated by separate bodies that – as another poet put it – ‘one & the Other attract each other by the same bonds, while at the same time, & following the same laws, they weigh towards a common centre’.50
While poets hymned Newton’s genius verbally, some architects were expressing the concepts of Newtonian order and celestial infinity in the visual language of buildings. A small but important group of innovators, now often called the Revolutionary architects, conceived their buildings as poems communicating abstract ideas through a universal language of shapes. Intended to embody Republican virtues, their geometrical plans broke with existing conventions, and were designed to evoke appropriate sensations in the spectator. Henceforth, they declared, appearance was to be strictly related to function. Although their more visionary schemes were, like those of eminent modern architects, never constructed, their ideas and ideals radically affected the appearance of Paris as well as towns throughout Europe.51
One of the most influential members of this group was Étienne-Louis Boullée, an architectural teacher for over fifty years, who sought to regenerate architecture through geometry, and to revive aesthetic and religious values. In his buildings, Boullée used pure mathematical forms to symbolize the transcendent order of the Newtonian universe and the harmony between people and their environment. Working with Bailly’s Astronomy on his bookshelf and a portrait of Newton on his study wall, in 1784–5 Boullée designed two versions of a cenotaph to Newton, both essentially gigantic spheres (Figure 5.3). These Platonic shapes immediately summoned up the immensity of the Newtonian universe, as well as the earth’s symmetrical shape before its Newtonian flattening. More obliquely, they referred to the recent French invention of air balloons, spherical emblems of a democratic science that would enable ordinary people to soar above the heads of their social superiors.
Addressing Newton as a divine being, Boullée explained his inspiration: ‘While by spreading your illumination and the sublimity of your genius, you have determined the shape of the earth, I have conceived the project of enclosing you within your discovery.’ Initially, he planned to illuminate the interior of his sepulchre with a solar light emanating from a central armillary sphere, a double reference to Newton’s Opticks and to his astronomical theories. Reluctantly rejecting that scheme as impracticable, Boullée drafted a second design in which sunlight would shine through small holes pierced in the vault, creating an interior illusion of the domed sky studded with twinkling stars. He intended visitors to enter through the small entrance at the base and then, paralleling a balloonist’s sublime flight, experience an ecstatic voyage into celestial infinity.52
