The Protectors and their Spokesmen
Responsibility for the Academy's successes and failures must be shared between the researchers and the protectors. The ministers and their spokesmen influenced research through appointments, financing, and interference,
both subtle and open. The king also affected the Academy, albeit in ways that are now often obscure.
As spokesmen, La Chapelle and Bignon kept the ministers informed about the Academy, submitted the estats requesting payment of pensions, and defended academicians' requests for additional financial support for research. They also conveyed the wishes of the protector to the Academy. Doing the job well divided their loyalties. Henri Bessé de La Chapelle (?-1694) was assistant (commis ) to Louvois, serving as controller general of royal buildings, inspector of fine arts, and overseer of the Academies of Sciences and Inscriptions. A member of both academies, he was a geometer in the former. Little is known of his life. Because Louvois's relations with the Academy were uneasy — he reduced its budget and size and mistrusted its members who were partisans of Colbert — the responsibilities of his spokesman were difficult. In January 1686, for example, La Chapelle criticized botanists and chemists on Louvois's behalf, unintentionally provoking a decline in the Academy's study of plants.[38]
Fortunately for the abbé Jean Paul Bignon (1662–1743), his uncle Pontchartrain was sympathetic to improving the Academy. A staunch advocate of the Academy, Bignon sought to regularize its procedures and increase its funding; he tried to ensure that it was treated fairly by comparison with the other academies. He recommended savants for membership, bolstering botanical research by selecting Tournefort and Homberg in 1691. Armed with reports on its personnel, projects, and expectations, he argued the Academy's case to Pontchartrain, citing precedent. The weak condition of the royal treasury forced Bignon to justify every request for funds and to appoint academicians without pensions. He pleaded for payment of what was owed academicians but was more successful in obtaining permission for them to publish. He proposed a merit system which Pontchartrain vetoed in favor of the seniority system.[39]
Bignon came from "a distinguished family of magistrates and royal librarians that stood at the very center of the robin society" in Paris. Like Du Hamel a member of the Congregation of the Oratory, Bignon's sinecures made him a wealthy man. In the eighteenth century, he directed the book trade, edited the Journal des sçavans , and became royal librarian. Thus, Bignon controlled much of French intellectual life from 1691 until his death.[40]
The three ministerial protectors of the Academy — Colbert, Louvois, and Pontchartrain — influenced research both deliberately and accidentally. Their appointments, financial support, persuasion, and encouragement to publish all affected institutional health. They arranged for special benefits
or assistance to the Academy through bureaucratic and diplomatic channels and could arbitrate disputes among academicians.[41] Each valued botanical studies differently.
Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) appointed fifteen of the Academy's students of plants and supported the natural history of plants generously until the early 1680s. He was interested in natural philosophy. Thus he invited academicians to his estate for learned conversations and visited the Academy well before the king did. But he was not above exploiting its members for familial advantage, for he had Du Hamel write the book that won Colbert's son admission to the Académie française.[42]
François Michel Le Tellier, marquis de Louvois (1639–1691) did not share Colbert's enthusiasm for the sciences or the Academy, and his awkward management demoralized the institution. Nevertheless, he favored the biological sciences, especially their medical applications and comparative anatomy. He appointed no new botanists or chemists, however, and canceled publications on anatomy and botany. His personal interest in certain subjects injured academic research by threatening its independence.[43]
Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain (1643–1727) his family valued learning both for its own sake and for its benefits to the state. As protector of the Academy, he was serious about rejuvenating it as inexpensively as possible. He appointed six botanists and chemists and ordered them to investigate the natural history of plants. He also subsidized publication of Tournefort's treatises.[44]
Behind the scenes was the king. Advocate of personal rule, good at figures, interested in details, eager to catch out his ministers in an oversight, and fond of telling them what they already knew, Louis XIV (1638–1715) spent much of his day closeted with royal officials. The king's dislike of unfamiliar faces and his personal attention to the affairs of state gave certain ministers, including the three protectors of the Academy, great power.
Some of the Academy's projects must have pleased this monarch who loved gardens, rare plants, and exotic animals, who was vainglorious and hungry for tax revenue, and who sought to expand his kingdom. Academicians studied rare plants and dissected animals from the royal menagerie. They mapped both the tax district around Paris and the entire kingdom, and they studied military technology. Their elegantly illustrated books smoothed diplomacy when Louis presented them as marks of royal favor. When the king visited the Academy in 1681, academicians demonstrated some experiments and apparatus and gave him a list of manuscripts ready
for publication. But none of the botanical texts on the list was published. Indeed, academicians never got all the support they wanted, for the king's favor, ministerial interest, and the health of the royal treasury fluctuated.
For Louis the Academy was a potential source of honor and invention. Thus, he told Cassini that he wanted the Academy to make France as illustrious in the realm of letters as it was in warfare, and when Cassini explained how astronomy could reform geography and navigation, the monarch was attentive. Louis was curious to witness the spectacular or the curious, including the comet of 1664, a large burning mirror in 1669, and the dissection of an elephant in 1683. But Colbert persuaded him only with difficulty to visit the Academy in 1681 and the Observatory in 1682, and when rain interrupted the second visit the king never returned. There was little need for him to visit the Academy's headquarters, however, for the Academy came to court whenever Louis granted Cassini an audience, when Dodart attended Louis as his physician, or when Du Verney and other academicians tutored members of the royal family. Louis ruled his kingdom personally, taking an interest in details and serving as his own prime minister and superintendent of finances, but his impersonal sponsorship of the Academy suggests that it was relatively unimportant to him. Although Louis approved of the Academy, had certain expectations of it, and was fascinated by some of its more arcane activities, he delegated the responsibility for running it almost entirely to the ministerial protectors.[45]
Like the kingdom of which it was part, the Academy had its place in a hierarchy of power and privilege. At the apex stood the king, with ministerial protectors mediating between him and the academicians. But the distinction between academicians and protectors went beyond relationships of power and responsibility and, as will be seen in the next chapter, permeated perceptions and expectations of the Academy.