Bureaucratic Models
Colbert took advice from scholars and professionals when he founded the Academy, but he also heeded goals and prototypes more familiar from those spheres — the economy, the navy, and the royal buildings — for which he was responsible as Louis's minister. For him the Academy was more than a shelter for learning. It was also an instrument of reform and propaganda, susceptible to his usual bureaucratic practices.[9]
Even if Colbert had read Bacon's New Atlantis or was familiar with Descartes's proposal for greater public support of the sciences, what interested him was not Baconianism or Cartesianism per se but rather his own "generous plan for a universal reform" with respect to "those matters pertaining to the maintenance and tranquility of the State."[10] Colbert's every official act was intended to promote the glory of the king and increase
the wealth of his realm.[11] The tradition of royal patronage, the crown's increased control over publishing, Colbert's respect for learning, and his multiple responsibilities as royal minister empowered him to influence French intellectual and cultural life. Here as in other spheres, his economic goals and expertise colored Colbert's official acts.
Colbert's economic policies have been labeled mercantilist by later writers. As an economic philosophy, mercantilism aimed to increase the wealth of one's own country; because resources were limited, this was necessarily at the expense of foreign lands. Thus mercantilism was based on and inflamed proto-nationalistic feelings. As practiced by Colbert, it included the establishment of companies for overseas trade, regulation and improvement of manufacturing, and importation of foreign workers, "taking care that the government got its money's worth for any aid granted."[12] French policies consolidated the powers of the state at the expense of local initiative.[13] Unlike savants who valued Baconian or Cartesian precepts and solved scientific problems, Colbert was motivated principally by patriotic and propagandistic goals in an economic context. The Academy owed a debt, therefore, not only to a scholarly tradition but also to Colbert's official program.
Colbert linked the economy of France to a broader plan to reform justice and develop the arts and sciences. He sought to overcome "ignorance" in "the sciences," where he believed the "abuses" were more significant even "than those of justice and finance."[14] Seeking a tool for reform, Colbert was enthusiastic about the academy as a type of institution. This is clear from his letters patent of 1676, which proclaimed the purposes of his academies in the following terms:
Because the splendor and happiness of a State consist not only in maintaining the glory of arms abroad, but also in displaying at home an abundance of wealth and in causing the arts and sciences to flourish, we have been persuaded for many years to establish several academies for both letters and sciences.[15]
During the 1660s and 1670s, Colbert founded or took under his protection many academies. When he contemplated one for the sciences, an adviser suggested that he "ask other persons from the various academies to give a model of their own" and to assist in planning.[16] The idea was part of a pattern for reforming and organizing cultural life in the kingdom to benefit the king.
Before establishing the Academy of Sciences, Colbert had experimented with traditional patronage in the form of pensions et gratifications sent to scholars all over Europe. Such grants seemed at first to be "the best way of
putting men of letters and artists in the service of the grandeur of the king."[17] Chapelain advised Colbert to reward Italians as well as the Dutch, so that having increased "the glory of the King in these northern countries" he might achieve "the same result for the southern provinces, that is, Florence and Pisa."[18] The gifts were repaid in the coin of scholars, for Hevelius dedicated his first book on comets to Colbert and both his Cométographie and Machine Céleste to Louis XIV, as expressions of gratitude.[19]
Colbert's advisers, however, soon argued that more formal, public, and systematic support for the arts and sciences would enhance the reputation of everyone involved. Anticipating that an academy of sciences would increase French "renown in the world," one gloated: "what glory to the King and what honor for Mgr. Colbert." Colbert would "enhance it above all the others and give it advantages that will make clear the hand by which it is sustained." He wanted the French Academy to surpass its rivals. It was to be "the most learned and most celebrated in the world," and the king would be applauded for its accomplishments. As the Observatory was built, it too found a place in a list of projects that would increase "grandeur and magnificence" in the kingdom. An account of the Academy's activities was solicited for inclusion in the official history of the reign, and the first histories of the Academy announced that the institution hoped to honor its king. Savants were sensitive to these competitive motives: an Avignonese wishing to flatter Huygens wrote tactlessly that by acquiring the Dutch mathematician for France, the king had outdone his conquest of Holland. The patriotism which "infused … and colored" mercantilism was at work in the establishment of the Academy. Even academicians and their associates were aware of their role in the competition among states for intellectual primacy.[20]
Manipulating an Academy for propagandistic ends was less cumbersome than corresponding with a dozen or more individual recipients of awards, as Chapelain did, to ensure that they repaid largesse with homage. After the Academy began to flourish, Colbert diminished the program of pensions for independent scholars, finally neglecting traditional patronage in favor of the more controlled venture. By the mid-1670s, when the crown stopped pensioning foreign scientists, patronage had adopted new habits.
Having shifted patronage from individuals to institutions, Colbert drew on his bureaucratic experience for ideas about how to run the Academy. To stimulate the stagnant French economy, he offered monetary incentives to the directors of companies; he also imported skilled workers and subsidized manufacture of luxury products.[21] To stimulate French science,
therefore, he raided faltering private societies for their best members, to whom he paid pensions; he imported highly regarded savants from Holland, Bologna, and Denmark; and he subsidized research and publication.
Like the manufacturing and trading companies, the Academy was intended to be useful. Although this is sometimes said to have been a blemish imposed by Louvois,[22] Colbert and his advisers had designed the Academy with its utility to the kingdom in mind. They chose as academicians men whose aggregate skills would "make the royal academy as noble as it is useful." It was Colbert who ordered the Academy to examine the drinking water at Versailles and who encouraged La Hire to dissect the fish along the coasts of Brittany and Normandy "because this work will be very useful." Colbert wanted results, in the form of a map of the tax district around Paris, a method of determining longitude, or a natural history of plants. His expectations were nourished by mercantilist presuppositions and by the propaganda of early modern scientists, technologues, and amateurs, for whom utility was an article of faith.[23]
The Academy enjoyed privileges similar to those of the manufacturing and trading companies. The honor of a royal visit to the Academy was arranged in 1681, just as had been done for the Gobelins in 1667. Colbert exempted academicians from taxes in regions where they were making observations for the great map of the kingdom, and he used the power of his office and his extensive contacts to obtain what the Company needed. Like certain master craftsmen, many academicians were housed in royal buildings.[24]
As he did with economic ventures, Colbert supervised the Academy's activities. Cassini spoke to Francis Vernon of this control. In 1670, hoping that his ephemerides would soon be published, Cassini admitted that "It depends upon the orders and determinations of Monsr Colbert upon whom all the motions of the Royal Academie are to bee calculated; For the measure of their times are sett by him." Moreover, he attributed the generosity of pensions and paucity of members to the king's wish "not only to have a Titular butt an effectuall influence upon his royall Academie."[25] This Louis accomplished through the ministerial protector, who reviewed annual reports and proposals, appointed academicians, and regulated finances and publication. These methods Colbert and his successors adapted from the bureaucratic world that was their principal concern.
The Academy of Sciences was of course very different from trading or manufacturing companies. Membership in the Academy depended on connections and scientific talent, not wealth. The Academy was not intended to monopolize, but to reform. It had no religious, legal, or
political powers, although it controlled members' rights to publish. It was not intended to sell a commodity or to make a profit, and its publications circulated as gifts rather than through purchase.
Nevertheless, the Academy shared some traits with the manufacturing and trading companies. Like the overseas trading companies, it exploited the natural resources of the colonies and sponsored expeditions that retrieved materials from foreign lands in order to enrich knowledge in the mother country. Like manufacturing companies, the Academy produced luxury and practical goods: hypotheses, data, scholarly publications, and useful inventions. Both Academy and companies aggrandized France and the king at the expense of foreign rivals. Both protected participants' claims or rights, enjoyed royal financial support, were closely supervised by royal ministers, owed their existence to ministerial initiative, and were meant to benefit the kingdom. As with the economy so in the learned world, the crown championed those activities of the third estate which seemed advantageous to king and kingdom.[26]
The Academy was indebted to the economic policies of Colbert, whose companies influenced his academies. The French statist economic tradition supplied both the justification and the procedures for sponsoring the Academy of Sciences.