Skip to main content

The Spaces of Science and Sciences of Space: Geography and Astronomy in the Paris Academy of Sciences

  • Chapter
The Uses of Space in Early Modern History
  • 472 Accesses

Abstract

The emergence of a modern social and political consciousness was enabled in part by a post-Renaissance re-imagining of space as a fundamental physical parameter that could be measured empirically by new techniques of survey and calculation, in ways that linked a knowable earth to the wider universe. The ability to imagine and make sense of an external spatial environment ranging far beyond the individual’s immediate sensory surroundings challenged traditional Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian views about the nature of the earth and its relationship to a larger cosmos. To be modern was to be conscious of relative spatial location, to be able to interpret this knowledge in terms of the diverse factors (environmental, economic, social, and political) that influenced spatial divisions and variations, and to be aware of how these spatial differences shaped individual and collective sensibilities.1 The early-modern re-conceptualization of space as a category of experience and knowledge has been examined in several national and institutional contexts and, as the other essays in this volume amply demonstrate, part of a wider “spatial turn” that has influenced most areas of the humanities and social sciences.2

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. See Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and more generally

    Google Scholar 

  2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);

    Google Scholar 

  3. Derek Gregory, Explorations in Critical Human Geography: The Hettner Lecture, University of Heidelberg 1997 (Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 1998), 45–70; and

    Google Scholar 

  4. David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska, eds., Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). For a recent related work, see

    Google Scholar 

  5. Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);

    Google Scholar 

  8. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990);

    Google Scholar 

  9. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 229–291. See also David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 201–247;

    Google Scholar 

  11. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) 66–90;

    Google Scholar 

  12. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 348–416 and, more generally,

    Google Scholar 

  13. Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  14. Andrew Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006); and

    Google Scholar 

  15. Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

    Google Scholar 

  16. See, for example, Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  17. David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also

    Google Scholar 

  19. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

    Google Scholar 

  20. See also Paul Elliott, Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England (London: I B Tauris, 2010);

    Google Scholar 

  21. Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography 1650–1850 (London: Palgrave, 2000);

    Google Scholar 

  22. Robert J. Mayhew, “Geography Books and the Character of Georgian Politics,” in Georgian Geographies: Essays in Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 192–211;

    Google Scholar 

  23. Robert J. Mayhew, “Mapping Science’s Imagined Community: Geography as a Republic of Letters, 1600–1800,” British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2005): 73–92;

    Google Scholar 

  24. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);

    Google Scholar 

  25. Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geographies of the Book (London: Ashgate, 2010).

    Google Scholar 

  26. See, for general context, James E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  27. For more on French geography in the eighteenth century, see Numa Broc, La géographie des philosophes: géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Ophrys, 1974) and

    Google Scholar 

  28. Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For related studies on debates about geography’s scientific credentials in other national contexts before, during and after the Scientific Revolution, see

    Google Scholar 

  29. Charles W. J. Withers, “Geography, science and the Scientific Revolution,” in Geography and Revolution, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 75–105 and

    Google Scholar 

  30. Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  31. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966);

    Google Scholar 

  32. Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). See also

    Google Scholar 

  33. Charles W. J. Withers, “Encyclopaedism, Modernism and the Classification of Geographical Knowledge,” Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 21 (1996): 275–298 and

    Google Scholar 

  34. Richard Yeo, “Classifying the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–262.

    Google Scholar 

  35. See also Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Press, 1980).

    Google Scholar 

  36. Éric Brian and Catherine Demeulenaere-Douyère, eds., Histoire et mémoire de l’Académie des Sciences: guide de recherches (Paris: Éditions Tec&Doc, 1996);

    Google Scholar 

  37. Maurice Crosland, Science Under Control: The French Academy of Sciences, 1795–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);

    Google Scholar 

  38. Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980);

    Google Scholar 

  39. Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  40. Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1830 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971);

    Google Scholar 

  41. Dorinda Outram, “The Ordeal of Vocation: The Paris Academy of Sciences and the Terror, 1793–5,” History of Science 21 (1983): 257–273; and

    Google Scholar 

  42. David J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  43. David S. Lux, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France: The Académie de Physique in Caen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989);

    Google Scholar 

  44. David S. Lux, “Colbert’s Plan for the Grande Académie: Royal Policy toward Science, 1663–67,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 12 (1990): 177–118; Roche 1978;

    Google Scholar 

  45. Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009);

    Google Scholar 

  46. Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947).

    Google Scholar 

  47. Pascal Brioist, “The Royal Society and the Académie Des Sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 63–77. See also

    Google Scholar 

  48. David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook, “Closed Circles and Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science 36 (1988): 179–211.

    Google Scholar 

  49. James E. McClellan, “The Mémoires of the Académie Royale Des Sciences, 1699–1790: A Statistical Overview,” in Les publications de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (1666–1793) Tome II: Étude Statistique, ed. Robert Halleux, James E. McClellan, Daniela Berariu, and Geneviève Xhayet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 7–36 and

    Google Scholar 

  50. Alice Stroup, Royal Funding of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences during the 1690s (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 77, Part 4, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  51. Mario Biagioli, “Etiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in Seventeenth-Century Science,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 193–238, quotation on p. 218. See also

    Google Scholar 

  52. Guy Meynell, “The Académie des Sciences at the rue Vivienne, 1666–1699.” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 44 (1994): 22–27.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Robin Briggs, “The Académie Royale Des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility,” Past and Present 131 (1991): 38–88;

    Google Scholar 

  54. Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère and Éric Brian, eds., Règlement, usages et science dans la France de l’absolutisme à l’occasion du troisième centenaire du règlement instituant l’Académie Royale des Sciences (26 janvier 1699) (Paris: Éditions Tec & Doc, 2002); and

    Google Scholar 

  55. Marie-Jeanna Tits-Dieuaide, “Les savants, le société et l’État: à propos du ‘renouvellement’ de l’Académie royale des sciences (1699),” Journal des Savants 1 (1998): 79–114;

    Google Scholar 

  56. Alice Stroup, “Science, politique, et conscience aux débuts de l’Académie royale des sciences,” Revue de synthèse 114 (1993): 423–453.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Charles B. Paul, Science and Immortality: The Éloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1699–1791) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

    Google Scholar 

  58. James E. McClellan, “The Académie Royale des Sciences, 1699–1793: A Statistical Portrait,” Isis 72 (1981): 541–567.

    Google Scholar 

  59. James E. McClellan, “The mémoires of the Académie Royale des Sciences,” 7. See also Robert Halleux, James E. McClellan, Daniela Berariu, and Geneviève Xhayet, eds., Les publications de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (1666–1793) Tome I: Description bibliographique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  60. On the Academy’s publications committee, an early example of academic “peer review,” see James E. McClellan, Specialist Control: The Publications Committee of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris) 1700–1793 (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 93, Part 3, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  61. See, for more on this, Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, and Michael S. Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  62. See, for example, Albert Cohen, Music at the French Royal Academy of Sciences: A Study in the Evolution of Musical Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981);

    Google Scholar 

  63. Frederic L. Holmes, “Chemistry in the Académie Royale des Sciences.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 34 (2003): 41–68;

    Google Scholar 

  64. Claire Salomon-Bayet, L’institution de la science et l’expérience du vivant: méthode et expérience à l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1666–1793 (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); and

    Google Scholar 

  65. Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). On those forms of early science that were initially acknowledged by the Academy and subsequently marginalized, see

    Google Scholar 

  66. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124;

    Google Scholar 

  67. Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6 (1998): 149–172;

    Google Scholar 

  68. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). On the Academy’s alchemical research, see

    Google Scholar 

  69. Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 41–65.

    Google Scholar 

  70. Monique Pelletier, Les cartes de Cassini: la science au service de l’État et des regions (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2002) and

    Google Scholar 

  71. Josef Konvitz, Cartography in France 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). The Cassini dynasty began with Giovanni Domenico Cassini, often identified as Cassini I, who was recruited in 1669 from the Panzano observatory in Bologna. The family’s control of the Paris Observatory continued under Giovanni’s son Jacques (Cassini II), grandson César-François Cassini de Thury (Cassini III), and great grandson Jean-Dominique (Cassini IV). Cassini II’s report on the first survey of the Paris meridian appeared as an appendix to the 1718 HARS under the title De la grandeur et de la figure de la terre: suites des mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1720).

    Google Scholar 

  72. Richard Sorrenson, “Towards a History of the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London 50 (1996): 29–46.

    Google Scholar 

  73. Robert J. Mayhew, “Geography as the Eye of Enlightenment Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010): 611–627.

    Google Scholar 

  74. Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1997);

    Google Scholar 

  75. Marc Fumaroli, La querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); and

    Google Scholar 

  76. Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also

    Google Scholar 

  77. Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 389–392.

    Google Scholar 

  78. Numa Broc, “Une affaire de plagiat cartographique sous Louis XIV: le procès Delisle-Nolin,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et de leurs Applications 23 (1970): 141–153;

    Google Scholar 

  79. Nelson-Martin Dawson, L’Atelier Delisle: l’Amérique du Nord sur la table à dessin (Québec: Sillery, 2000), 30–37; and

    Google Scholar 

  80. Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 106–110.

    Google Scholar 

  81. Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 73–74.

    Google Scholar 

  82. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994);

    Google Scholar 

  83. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and

    Google Scholar 

  84. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  85. Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère and David J. Sturdy, eds., L’Enquête du Régent, 1716–1718: sciences, techniques et politique dans la France pré-industrielle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  86. Monique Pelletier, “Buache et le Dépôt des Cartes, Plans et Journaux de la Marine,” in Mappae Antiquae: Liber Amicorum Günter Schilder, eds., Paula van Gestel-van het Schip and Peter van der Krogt (Houten: HES & DG Publishers, 2007), 563–78;

    Google Scholar 

  87. Christine Marie Petto, When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); and

    Google Scholar 

  88. Marco Petrella, “Guillaume Delisle’s Carte du Duché de Bourgogne: The Role of Central and Peripheral Authorities in the Construction of a Provincial Territory in France in the Early 18th Century,” Journal of Map and Geography Libraries 5 (2009): 17–39.

    Google Scholar 

  89. See Christine Marie Petto, “Playing the Feminine Card: Women of the Early Modern Map Trade,” Cartographica 44 (2009): 67–81. For the general political context in which scientific patronage was negotiated, see

    Google Scholar 

  90. William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and for more women and gender in French science in this period, see

    Google Scholar 

  91. Vesna Crnjanksi Petrovich, “Women and the Paris Academy of Sciences,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1999): 383–390 and

    Google Scholar 

  92. Mary Terrall, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences,” Configurations 3 (1995): 207–232.

    Google Scholar 

  93. For a fascinating commentary on Maurepas’s complex relationship with the French crown, see Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communications Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 31–36.

    Google Scholar 

  94. AN O1 69 fol. 184–185. See also John H. Appleby, “Mapping Russia: Farquharson, Delisle and the Royal Society,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 52 (2001): 191–204 and

    Google Scholar 

  95. Marie-Anne Chabin, “Moscovie ou Russie? Regard de Joseph-Nicolas Delisle et des savants français sur les États de Pierre le Grand,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 28 (1996): 43–56.

    Google Scholar 

  96. René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, “Réflexions sur l’utilité dont l’Académie des sciences pourroit être au Royaume, si le Royaume luy donnoit les Secours dont elle a besoin” (late 1726), in AAS, Dossier Réaumur, Folder I, of II. See also Éric Brian, La mesure de l’état: administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 83–87 and

    Google Scholar 

  97. E. Maindron, L’Académie des sciences (Paris: Alcan, 1888), 95–100.

    Google Scholar 

  98. Isabelle Backouche, La trace du fleuve: la Seine et Paris (1750–1850) (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2000), 99–102;

    Google Scholar 

  99. Numa Broc, “Un géographe dans son siècle: Philippe Buache (1700–1773),” Dix-huitième Siècle 3 (1971): 223–235, p. 230; and

    Google Scholar 

  100. Lucie Lagarde, “Philippe Buache, 1700–1773,” Geographers: Bio-Bibliographical Studies 9 (1985): 21–27, esp. p. 21.

    Google Scholar 

  101. John L. Greenberg, “Degrees of Longitude and the Earth’s Shape: The Diffusion of a Scientific Idea in Paris in the 1730s,” Annals of Science 41 (1984): 151–158, esp. pp. 152–153.

    Google Scholar 

  102. J. B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  103. See John L. Greenberg, The Problem of the Earth’s Shape from Newton to Clairaut: The Rise of Mathematical Science in Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Fall of “Normal” Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and

    Google Scholar 

  104. Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences of the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  105. Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  106. César-François Cassini de Thury, “De la méridienne de Paris, prolongée vers le Nord, & des Observations qui ont été faites pour décrire les frontières du Royaume,” HARS 42 (1740): M276–292 (delivered on November 12). His full report, an appendix to the 1740 HARS volume, was titled La méridienne de l’Observatoire Royal de Paris, vérifiée dans toute l’étendue du Royaume par de nouvelles observations (Guérin, Paris). See Irène Passeron, “La form de la terre, est-elle une preuve de la vérité du système newtonien?” In Terre à découvrir, terres à parcourir: exploration et connaissance du monde au XIIe.–XIX siècles, ed. Danielle Lecoq and Antoine Chambard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 129–45.

    Google Scholar 

  107. Buffon’s views were expressed in his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi: Tome Premier (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), 204–228. On Buffon, see Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Guettard’s mémoires were titled “Mémoire sur les granits de France, comparés à ceux d’Égypte,” HARS 53 (1751): M164–210 (delivered on June 9) and “Mémoire sur la comparaison du Canada avec la Suisse, par rapport à ses minéraux,” HARS 54 (1752): M189–220, 323–360, 452–438 (delivered on June 7). See also

    Google Scholar 

  108. George Kish, “Early Thematic Mapping: The Work of Philippe Buache,” Imago Mundi 38 (1976): 129–36 and

    Google Scholar 

  109. Isabelle Laboulais, “Inventorier et cartographier les ressources minérales en France des années 1740 aux années 1830,” in Naissances de la géographie moderne (1760–1860): lieux, pratiques et formation des savoirs de l’espace, ed. Jean-Marc Besse, Hélène Blais and Isabelle Surun (Lyons: ENS Éditions, 2010), 155–193.

    Google Scholar 

  110. See, on this topic, Numa Broc, Les montagnes vues par les géographes et les naturalistes de langue française au XVIIIe. siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1969), 47–70;

    Google Scholar 

  111. Bernard Débarbieux, “Mountains: Between Pure Reason and Embodied Experience: Philippe Buache and Alexander von Humboldt,” in High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science, eds Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (London: I B Tauris, 2009), 87–104;

    Google Scholar 

  112. Bernard Débarbieux and Gilles Rudez, Les faiseurs de montagnes: imaginaires politiques et territorialites, XVIIIe.–XXIe. siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2010);

    Google Scholar 

  113. Lucie Lagarde, “Philippe Buache: cartographe ou géographe?,” in Terre à découvrir, terres à parcourir: exploration et connaissance du monde au XIIe.–XIX siècles, ed. Danielle Lecoq and Antoine Chambard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 147–166; and

    Google Scholar 

  114. Isabelle Laboulais, “Le système de Buache, une “nouvelle façon de considérer notre globe” et de combler les blancs de la carte,” in Combler les blancs de la carte: modalité et enjeux de la construction des savoirs géographiques (XVIIIe.–XXe. siècle), ed. Isabelle Laboulais (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004), 93–115.

    Google Scholar 

  115. Buache’s geography lessons, prepared for Louis XV’s grandsons, the Duc de Bourgogne, the Duc de Berry (later Louis XVI), the Comte de Provence (later Louis XVIII) and the Comte d’Artois (later Charles X), survive in BNF CP, Ge.EE.92 under the title Explication et usage des cartes dressées pour l’Institution géographique et historique de Mgr. le duc de Bourgogne en 1756; and in the Bodleian Library MSS C21 (252) under the title Explication des Cartes et Découpures presentées pour l’Institution Historique et Géographique de Monseigneur le Duc de Berry (8 Mai 1765). The smaller globe is discussed in Philippe Buache, “Observations géographiques et physiques, où l’on donne une idée de l’existence de terres antarctiques, & de leur mer glaciale intérieure; avec quelques remarques sur un globe physique en relief, d’un pied de diamètre, qui sert de modèle pour celui de neuf pieds mémoire,” HARS 59 (1757): M190–203 and in BNF CP, Ge.FF.13732/I Explication du globe physique en relief présenté au Roi le 6 novembre 1757. See also Ludovic Drapeyron, Les deux Buache et l’education géographique de trois rois de France (Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, Charles X) avec documents inédits (Paris: Delagrave, 1888).

    Google Scholar 

  116. Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, Explication de la carte des nouvelles découvertes au nord de la Mer du Sud (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1752). See also Lucie Lagarde, “Le passage de nord-ouest et la Mer de l’Ouest dans la cartographie française du 18e. siècle: contribution à l’étude de l’oeuvre de Delisle et Buache,” Imago Mundi 41 (1989): 19–43; and

    Google Scholar 

  117. Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 239–286.

    Google Scholar 

  118. Francis Bacon, “Aphorism III,” in Novum Organum: Book 1—Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878 [1620]), 11.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Copyright information

© 2015 Paul Stock

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Heffernan, M. (2015). The Spaces of Science and Sciences of Space: Geography and Astronomy in the Paris Academy of Sciences. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_6

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50434-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49004-9

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics