Chemistry:
A French or German Science?

Kolbe's long-simmering hatreds burst into the public domain at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. The decline of his influence in theoretical chemistry, along with his general isolation in the collegial

community, must have increased Kolbe's ill temper, and after January 1870 he had his own journal to express his unexpurgated opinions. The war, along with the uproar over Wurtz' opening of his recently published history of chemistry, that "chemistry is a French science," provided the occasion for his outbursts.^[7] In a polemical article "On the State of Chemistry in France" published simultaneously with the French declaration of war (and obviously modeled on Liebig's similarly titled essays on Prussian and Austrian chemistry), Kolbe lambasted the French for their dissolute ways and their feeble scientific establishment. There is no French university, he declared, that can compare with any German university for chemical education.^[8]

As the war proceeded, Kolbe was even further radicalized. He was delighted by the Prussian victories at Sedan and Metz, but impatiently abided the long siege of Paris; he did not understand why Moltke held off on the bombardment for so long.^[9] To Varrentrapp he wrote,

The French are truly a nation of half children, half madmen. I have had deep hatred and contempt for the French, but I had never considered them so uncivilized, barbarous and base as we now see them to be. I believe France is now in a rapid decline, and will never recover. . . . The whole nation puts no value at all on honor, only on gloire.^[10]

The sharpest contrast in this respect could be drawn between the French and the Germans, Kolbe thought, as he wrote to Frankland,

The Germans, who seek their gloire in the arts of peace, and go to war only as a last resort, would never sacrifice their sons to the whim of anyone, even if a narrow-minded, fanatical, bellicose German emperor should one day accede to the throne. In our country the only kind of war that will be popular and possible is one that defends the fatherland.

Frankland ought therefore to have no fear of future German aggression. Furthermore, Kolbe bristled at Frankland's sentiments in favor of a republic, for the example of the United States illustrates that a republic is no more than "a playground for swindlers and adventurers, on which the insolent mediocrity bring their influence to bear, a language in whose dictionary the word 'gentleman' does not appear. . . . My dear friend, for heaven's sake no republic." We, like you (Kolbe concluded), would rather have a king than an emperor, and not one from Prussia; "aber die Nothwendigkeit hat eiserne Arme," and he and his compatriots were delighted with their new situation.^[11]

When the French Academy of Sciences neglected to remove from the wrapper of their Comptes rendus mention of the Alsatian cities of Strasbourg and Mulhouse, and Metz in Lorraine, after their transfer to Germany, Kolbe was enraged.^[12] He wrote Liebig,

My contempt for the whole contemporary French chemical world is beginning more and more to turn into pity. Even the Parisian Academy appears to have no idea how ridiculous it appears to the scholarly world by this miserable bickering, for which Herr Pasteur constituted the ferment. Forgive my expectoration. The behavior of this lost and lying nation sometimes makes me a little passionate.^[13]

But Liebig's was a sympathetic ear. The French, Liebig complained, were displaying "insane arrogance," demonstrating that they were a "dissolute race"; the "megalomania of this unfortunate nation is certainly capable of anything."^[14] "How terrible it must be for this vain and arrogant nation to have achieved not a single advantage in battle."^[15] Bismarck's adroit behind-the-scenes manipulations maneuvering both countries toward crisis had been essentially invisible to the German public, and the war propaganda was skillful. Even Kekulé was induced to denounce the "nation of scoundrels" they were fighting.^[16]

Emotions began to cool, at least on the German side, after peace was concluded, but Kolbe kept up the heat, continuing his Francophobic polemics for more than two years. Having been elected, along with Liebig, Wöhler, and Bunsen, a charter honorary member of the German Chemical Society, Kolbe resigned in 1871 out of anger that the Society had not defended his critique of Wurtz' dictum when that critique had met public foreign opposition. Meanwhile Kekulé, together with Volhard and Erlenmeyer, successfully persuaded the Society to become less provincial. Among other reforms suggested by this group, after 1872 the Society only named foreigners as Honorary Members. But to Kolbe the Society had already been far too internationally oriented.^[17]

Hofmann, who very much wished to soothe the raw feelings between the two countries, picked up the cue at this point, proposing Auguste Cahours as the first Frenchman to receive such an honorary membership after the war ended. This was the last straw for Kolbe, who protested loudly, both publicly and privately (but without effect, partly because he had now resigned). In his journal he asserted that there were "dozens" of more deserving Germans. "What a disgrace," he wrote Varrentrapp, "again with Cahours; what is the purpose of this international coquetting with France? Hofmann unfortunately lost the fatherland in England."^[18]

Kolbe's tone became even harsher in his final years, when he became truly irrationally preoccupied with his various crusades. Ironically, the French were far less oriented toward structure theory than the Germans; Kolbe noticed this fact with alarm, for to him it indicated a

surprising source of French strength that was dangerous for the future health of the German chemical community. "I know full well," he wrote Volhard,

. . . that if Prussia continues to ruin chemistry . . . the time will soon return when, as in the second decade of this century, German chemists will go to Paris to educate themselves in chemistry. As at that time, when everyone in Germany was crazy about the Naturphilosophie of Hegel and Schelling, this swindle made no headway in France, and for that very reason France was far superior to us in science, so today, with the single exception of Wurtz, French chemists keep away from the naturphilosophische swindle of the modern structural and bonding chemistry, and therefore they will gain a head start on us once more.^[19]

The irony was, as Kolbe well knew and loved to point out, that this same unscientific structural chemistry was a direct product of French chemistry—namely, an outgrowth of the type theories of Dumas, Laurent, Gerhardt, and Wurtz. Kolbe thought this was where Kekulé had gone wrong; he had followed not only the bankrupt theories of the French but also their larcenous behavior. The more highly Kekulö's textbook was valued, the more Kolbe railed against the "tendentious forgeries" committed by its author.^[20]

Despite Kolbe's quirkiness, he saw a number of points quite clearly. Kekulö was indeed an internationalist at heart, and he had been decisively influenced by the French chemists Dumas, Laurent, Gerhardt, and Wurtz. He and other (predominantly German and German-influenced) chemists—such as Erlenmeyer, Crum Brown, Frankland, Ladenburg, Butlerov, Baeyer, Fischer, Victor Meyer, Graebe, and Wislicenus—had developed structural chemistry from that essentially French background. Kolbe was also correct in viewing Kekulö and Wurtz as flawed historians, for the latter did have hidden agendas in mind and neglected the very real contributions of those they disagreed with—especially Kolbe, Frankland, and Couper. Finally, Kolbe was right to see Wurtz as one of the few prominent representatives of structural chemistry in France.

Indeed, Wurtz' isolation in France was sort of a mirror image of Kolbe's in Germany, placing the contretemps over his chauvinist historical comment in even sharper relief. Read with attention to the thematic orientation of the entire work and placed in context with Wurtz' other interpretive, historical, and polemical writings of the 1860s, the apparently gratuitous chauvinism of his opening motto is subject to a different, or at least additional, interpretation. Wurtz had accepted essential parts of the Gerhardtian reform in 1853; by 1858 he was a full and enthusiastic convert. But continued opposition among

his colleagues led him, rather isolated in France, to initiate a concerted campaign for the new chemistry, including structural ideas. He started a new journal (Répertoire de chimie pure ) and a new society (Société Chimique de Paris); became a leader, along with Kekulé, of the Karlsruhe Congress organizers; wrote a heavily subtexted éloge for Gerhardt and Laurent; presented invited historical lectures to the Société Chimique, the Collège de France, and the Chemical Society of London; wrote a textbook; and finally, published a full, formal history prefacing a multivolume dictionary. All were designed to propagate the new chemistry in a country still dominated by older ideas. None were notably successful.^[21]

I want to suggest, in short, that Wurtz' "chemistry is a French science" has a thematic load that was heavier than mere chauvinism. It was not so much Lavoisier and the first chemical revolution that Wurtz wanted to promote, but rather Lavoisier's countrymen Laurent and Gerhardt (not to mention Wurtz himself, aided by foreign Francophiles such as Williamson and Kekulé)—these being the authors of the still incompletely consummated second revolution. The work was directed inward rather than outward, its intended audience Wurtz' fellow Frenchmen. What better way to persuade them to join the new movement than to appeal to their patriotism by arguing for the continued dominance of French chemistry in the international arena? If I am right, we have here an example of nationalism put to rhetorical purposes, but for a cognitive goal—and not for mere chauvinist puffery. But it was difficult for foreigners to get past that first fearsome line.

Kekulé practiced the same technique. His 1859 history of chemical theory, prefacing his textbook, had a number of significant omissions. As was the case with Wurtz, these were partly due to selfish priority interests, and chauvinism may have also played a role; but there was also a rational didactic or rhetorical intent promoted by the distortions. He had a new theory to push, and he needed to tell the history behind it in such a way as to make the theory appear rational, even inevitable. The work of Kolbe and Frankland in particular failed to fit into the neat story Kekulé wanted to tell. This historical-didactic technique was, of course, very old and well attested.^[22] It had been practiced with particular skill by Lavoisier himself. Although such a procedure may be devious and covert (or perhaps self-deluding), chauvinism was only at best a secondary motive.

The historical work of Hermann Kopp, a close friend to Kolbe, Hofmann, and Liebig, forms a sharp contrast to Kekulé's and Wurtz' partisan histories. Despite having been commissioned to write a history of chemistry in Germany , moreover just at the time of the Franco-

Prussian War and in the immediate aftermath of Wurtz' apparent chauvinism, Kopp's Entwickelung der Chemie in der neueren Zeit was aggressively and explicitly international in orientation. The case of Kopp is sufficient to show that chauvinist currents were by no means all-pervading, even during the most jingoistic of times.^[23]

The optimistic interpretation to which such considerations lead—that chauvinism in science is perhaps less damaging than has hitherto been thought—can be further supported by looking again at some of the protagonists in our story. Liebig, for instance, exhibited prominent elements of Francophilia as well as Francophobia, and not only because his first rigorous scientific education took place in Paris. His biographers have emphasized his international outlook, which was often in evidence.^[24] As the war with France progressed, Liebig expressed compassion and concern for his French colleagues, some of whom were good friends. In September 1870, Liebig told Wöhler that he had just written his brother-in-law, the army physician Karl Thiersch, then with the Prussians in Versailles,

. . . that he might seek out Regnault and offer him his help. I wonder how our friends in Paris, Dumas, Peligot, Boussingault, etc. are doing? If only it were possible to do something for them, but they will not be allowed out of Paris. The lovely city, what suffering she faces!^[25]

Through Thiersch, Liebig succeeded in getting a letter to Deville in Paris from his wife, a refugee in Geneva. He sent 500 francs to C. L. Barreswil's wife in Boulogne, under the presumption that she needed it; he considered the same charity for Madame Deville.^[26]

In the first meeting of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences after cessation of hostilities, Liebig delivered a speech assessing the causes of Prussian victory and French defeat. He suggested that German superiority was an indirect but very real consequence of wise governmental policies that, inter alia, gave sufficient support to academic research, which led in the long term to efficacious scientific rather than mere rote applications; but he made a particular point of praising the glories of French science. Liebig, like Kekulé, had begun his career as a Francophile, showing nothing but contempt for his previous German teachers; he always revered his French mentors Arago, Dulong, The-nard, and above all Gay-Lussac. He subsequently formed an exceedingly close relationship with J. T. Pelouze and others, spoke and wrote French fluently, and until his death kept in close contact with the leading figures of the Parisian establishment. In 1845 he wrote Wöhler, "Indeed, Frenchmen have something exceptionally appealing and amiable that is generally missing from the Germans."^[27] As we have seen,

he successfully reconciled with Dumas. Even Gerhardt, whom he had accused publicly of being an assassin and a highwayman, eventually managed to elicit kind and generous comments from his former teacher and became fully reconciled before his death in 1856.

Liebig concluded his speech by saying

A warm sympathy for all that is noble and great and an unselfish hospitality are among the finest traits of the French character; these features will be rekindled and reactivated on the neutral ground of science, on which the best minds of the two nations must meet in their endeavors toward the high goal common to both; thus will the ineradicable feeling of brotherhood gradually contribute in the field of science to soothe the bitterness that the deeply wounded French national pride feels toward Germany, as a result of the war which they forced upon us.^[28]

Partisan emotion was clearly showing through here, but we must grant that Liebig's heart was in the right place and at a difficult time for German as well as French hearts. Liebig's good side often eventually won out over his outbursts of chauvinism, selfishness, and temper.

It may be noted parenthetically that Liebig's relations with English chemists were also very close. Despite disparaging comments on English dilettantism and their lack of attention to pure science, as well as a public attack on the idol of English experimentalism, Francis Bacon, Liebig's high regard for English chemists and his continuous collegial contact with them has prompted one prominent English Liebig scholar to refer to Liebig quite justly as "very much an honorary Englishman."^[29]

In conclusion, there is no evidence that Liebig was prey to the sort of pathological national prejudice that might have chronically interfered with his appreciation of foreigners' work and thus with his pursuit of science. None of this is to deny a certain hot-headed and instinctual chauvinism at the heart of Liebig's character, but the judgment of one historian that "Liebig was the undisputed champion of this growing and squalid German nationalism in scientific affairs"^[30] is quite unjust.

Many would want to award such championship honors to Hermann Kolbe, and in truth it would be hard to find a better candidate. And yet, close examination of Kolbe's career reveals an interesting irony. No one had more contempt for the French or their theories in the late 1840s and early 1850s than Kolbe. However, the striking new reactions and brilliant arguments by Gerhardt, Williamson, Wurtz, and Frank-land during the early 1850s that convinced most of Kolbe's German colleagues to accept the French-English theories were by no means lost on Kolbe either. By 1857, he had developed a theory of his own

that was strikingly similar to the Williamson-Gerhardt newer type theory, namely, that all common organic compounds could be regarded as substitution products of carbonic acid. He retained this theory almost without modification for the rest of his life.

Colleagues, friends, and rivals all pointed out, from the late 1850s until Kolbe's death, both publicly and privately, that Kolbe had become a de facto convert to Gerhardt's system. Kolbe denied it with all the energy at his command. Despite some substantive distinctions between what Kolbe called his own "real types" and the purely "formal types" of Gerhardt's theory, however, the similarities were striking, both to Kolbe's contemporaries and to modern observers. In 1868, two years before the war broke out, Kolbe even converted to modern atomic weight formulas, the last highly visible difference between him and the structuralists-and a step that most French chemists did not take for another quarter century.

To put the matter a bit simplistically, Kolbe's pathological chauvinism had failed to prevent him from understanding and being persuaded by the hated French ideas; it had only operated to prevent him from believing he had adopted them. Using his faux types during his most productive years in the 1860s, Kolbe practiced substantively and very successfully the same sort of theoretical chemistry being pursued simultaneously by the structuralists. In short, to the extent that he was an exceptionally good scientist—and there is little doubt that he was—he was also an internationalist in spite of himself. It would be wrong to suggest that Kolbe's bigotry did not damage the quality of his science, for I believe it is clear that it did, especially after 1870. But what is striking is that a man of such violent and ineradicable prejudices against the very direction that we have come to know as modern chemistry was able essentially to become a modern chemist in spite of himself.

I would not want to push my argument too far, for there are well known instances in the history of science when national feelings have seriously damaged the free interplay of scientific ideas. But the present case demonstrates that the Germans accepted the French-English chemical reforms of the 1850s astonishingly rapidly. In fact, it is a striking irony that these essentially French reforms were pursued much more aggressively and enthusiastically in Germany than in France; by the 1860s, structure theory had become a quintessentially German field, while Wurtz felt his to be a voice in the French wilderness. Thus, the prevalence of nationalist fervor provides much less predictive guidance in explaining the growth, development, and differential national reception of some scientific theories than one might have expected.