The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 6: Science gets organized

The Royal Academy of Sciences

The Royal Academy of Sciences was founded in Paris in 1666, only a few years after the Royal Society, which it was trying to improve on. (Oster’s document 9.3 shows one relationship between the two groups.) However, it was a fundamentally different sort of institution.

Although scientists never admit to getting enough money, the Academy was state-funded, relatively lavishly, rather than dues-supported. While the Royal Society was relatively easy to win admittance to for an educated male, the Academy was extremely selective.

The Royal Society did not pay its Fellows; the Royal Academy paid its highest ranking Academicians. This difference contributed to a higher degree of professionalism among French scientists and of amateurism among English, a difference that would long persist.

The opening meeting of the new Academy took place 22 December in the King’s library, and was commemorated by a medal with the king’s head on one side and the goddess Minerva, patroness of wisdom, on the other. The Academy’s subsequent career was to be balanced between the services of these two masters.

It launched an ambitious and expensive program of expanding natural knowledge, financing expeditions to the Canary Islands, and to the Island of Hven, to pinpoint the exact location of Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg. Although the Academy included no Jesuits, it made an agreement with Jesuit missionaries in the far East to send back scientific information, some of which was published by the Academy.

The Academy had an ambitious publishing program of elaborate folio volumes such as the impressive Memoirs of the Natural History of Animals (1671) and Memoirs of the Natural History of Plants (1676). The dissection and analysis of animals and plants was an area in which the Academy established a position of international leadership.

The Academy was also expected to serve the utilitarian needs of the French state, working on navigation problems, the creation of an accurate map of France, and the water supply of the King’s new palace at Versailles.

As an extension of the power and glory of a King who valued harmony, the Academy should not be a place of conflict, and "dogmatists," whether Cartesian or Aristotelian, were excluded. Foreign scholars and even Protestants were not excluded, however, and the star of the Academy in its early days was the Dutch Protestant astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Another foreigner, the Italian Gian Domenico Cassini, was the head of the Paris Observatory.

The Academy’s publications in its early days were identified with the Academy itself rather than with individual scientists. If an Academician published something under his own name not previously approved by the Academy, he was expected not to refer to himself as an Academician in the work. However, as the Academy developed, it gave more recognition to individual contributions and emphasized corporate identity less.

The Academy had to cut back operations in the 1670s due to the demands made on Louis XIV’s treasury by his wars. The Academy also lost Protestant talent due to Louis XIV’s increasingly repressive religious policies, which caused Huygens to return to the Netherlands in 1681, a serious blow.

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