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to house political prisoners and a hated symbol of the
ancien régime
. The mob
stormed the Bastille and captured it, as well as the arms that it contained. The
Revolution had begun and the king was taken from the palace at Versailles to the
palace in central Paris called the Tuileries, where he was kept under guard. Bastille
Day (July 14
th
) continues to be celebrated by the French as the birthday of French
national liberties.
Two days after the fall of the Bastille, the Observatory was caught up in the
events. Suspicious of anything that they did not understand, the revolutionary mob
invaded the Observatory to search it. Cassini was obliged to show the hundreds of
invaders through the buildings. They did not find the gunpowder, weapons and food
that they were looking for, and instead they stripped the roof of lead to make mus-
ket shot. This was the start of increasing Revolutionary involvement in the affairs
of the Observatory.
The position of the scientists (or
savants
, to use the then current French word)
in the Revolution was ambiguous.
On the one hand, the rise of science during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies brought new thinking and criticism of the backwardness of monarchy and the
Church. Diderot and D'Alembert began their project to create an encyclopaedia of
human knowledge (
L'Encyclopédie
) in 1728, and had completed 30 volumes by the
1770's. The topic was censored by the State in order to protect the status quo but
contained enough criticism to set the scene for the French Revolution. Thus, many
savants championed the liberal cause during the Revolution and even held office
and others helped to further the aims of the Revolution in its agenda for reform
based on rational and scientific thinking.
On the other hand, savants were often of wealthy, even aristocratic, ancestry and
were subject to the same suspicions that were attached to others in a similar class.
Some of them had, or were accused of having, counter-revolutionary views, resulting
in purging from their institutions, imprisonment and even execution by guillotine.
Ideas
The
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
(“Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts”) (1751-1832)
The
Encyclopédie
originated as a translation of Ephraim Chambers's
Cyclopaedia
, first
published in London in 1728, and the first encyclopaedia in the modern sense of a compre-
hensive, logically arranged collection of cross-referenced and indexed factual articles.
Disputes over the rights and the position of one of the
Encyclopédie
's first editors led to
the
Encyclopédie
becoming a completely new project. Eventually it comprised 28 volumes
and 71,818 articles. The editor in chief was Denis Diderot (1713-1784) a writer and
philosopher who wrote the articles on economics, philosophy, politics, and religion, among
others. He was assisted by Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) a mathematician,
physicist and philosopher, who wrote the mathematical and scientific articles. Among its
96 authors were Baron d'Holbach (chemistry, mineralogy, politics, religion), Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (music, political theory) and Voltaire (history, literature, philosophy). The
Encyclopédie
was intended to destroy superstition and elevate the role of rational knowl-
edge. It was a complete summary of the thought in what has become known as the Age of
the Enlightenment and controversial because of its religious tolerance, uplifting Protestant
thought and challenging Catholic dogma. It played an important role as the intellectual
underpinning of the French Revolution.
