French History, Vol. 28, No.

3 (2014)

Review Article

SCIENCE, ROMANTICISM, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL

CHANGE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY FRANCE
The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-
Century France. By Robert Fox. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2012. viii + 394 pp. 31.00. ISBN 978 1 4214 0522 3.
Text Image and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France:
Utopia and its Afterlives. By Daniel Sipe. London: Ashgate Publishing. 2013.
viii + 218 pp. 60.00. ISBN 978 1 4094 4776 4.
The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. By
John Tresch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xvii + 449 pp. 31.50.
ISBN 978 0 2268 1220 5.
The intertwining of science and romanticism in post-revolutionary France is a sur-
prisingly rich and important element of the cultural history of the century, with con-
nections that can be discerned in the political, cultural, intellectual, literary, and
technological realms of French life. As illustrated in widely divergent ways by the
three books under review here, cultural responses to the changes that industrialisation
wrought reverberated through virtually every aspect of French life in the aftermath
of the French Revolution and throughout the rest of the century. The three books dis-
cussed below tell stories that culminate in pivotal historical momentsfor Fox, the
technological catastrophe of World War I, for Sipe, twentieth-century totalitarianism,
and for Tresch, the crushed promise of social romanticism in June 1848. Their method-
ological approaches and the quality of their contributions vary; nevertheless, all three
address key themes in the cultural history of nineteenth-century France and they over-
lap in interestingways.
Robert Foxs magisterial account of the institutional and political development of the
sciences in France, what he eloquently calls the public face of science, begins with
the first Restoration of the Bourbons and ends on the eve of the Great War. Organised
both chronologically and thematically, The Savant and the State is accessible both
as a singular narrative and as a reference volume. The six major chapters of the book
are divided into sub-chapters focused on particular issues such as regional academies,
specific scientific debates, and the influence of science on warfare. Fox challenges the
longstanding characterisation of the century as one of decline in the French sciences
through demonstrating that the state of national pride, which is to say, French sense of
inferiority by comparison to rising Germany, has overly influenced the historiography
of science. By the conclusion of the book this argument comes as no particular sur-
prise, because in a myriad of ways, The Savant and the State is a history of the French

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 NAOM I J.A N DR E WS 407

state and French cultural conceptions in the nineteenth century, rather than a more
narrow book as the title and subject might indicate. As suggested by Foxs conclusion,
one of the central themes of the book is the recognition on the part of political leaders
of the critical connection between scientific education and the military and economic
recuperation of the nation. This insight situates the development of science squarely
amidst the major projects of the nineteenth-century French state: contesting rising
German hegemony on the Continent, and catching up economically to the other great
powers in the wake of decades of warfare and industrial stagnation.
The Savant and the State sheds light on other major themes in the historiography
of the century as well, especially the culture war between anticlerical republican-
ism and the Catholic Church. The struggle over the role of the Catholic Church in
French public and intellectual life is seen at close hand during the second half of the
century, emblematised by the conflict between Pasteur in his blinkered conformity
and Pouchet, the disadvantaged crusader for the true experimental method over the
issue of heterogenesis (spontaneous generation). Their debate became a widely fol-
lowed national controversy, crystallising much of the dissension of the 1860s over reli-
gious faith and its role in French life, and anticipating the establishment anticlericalism
of the Third Republic. Contemporaneous discussions of polygenesis and monogenesis,
likewise, were coloured by the cultural conflict unfolding within government and aca-
demia. Foxs account of the fate of the Catholic universities under the Third Republic,
likewise, is an illuminating avenue through which to understand the secularisation of
the French state and its intellectual ramifications.
From an institutional perspective, in Foxs narrative of the decline and stagnation
of regional academies and university faculties over the course of the first half of the
century and Second Empire, we find a rather Tocquevillian account of the inexorable
centralisation and professionalisation of education by the French state. As Fox engag-
ingly describes the decline of public lectures, amateur scientists, and showmen to the
advantage of the Paris faculties and professionalisation, we see a vivid, lived example of
the effect of the centralising state on intellectual life. Likewise his detailed accounts of
the drudgery of administering state examinations provides a glimpse into the quotid-
ian consequences of the increasingly managerial state in the late nineteenth century.
There is much to be gleaned from this detailed narrative about the cultural and genera-
tional struggles of the century, both within the scientific establishment and beyond.
The Savant and the State is a work of erudition and synthesis, one that demonstrates
deep familiarity with the debates, the archives, and the contexts under discussion, if
at times through somewhat dated reference to secondary scholarship. This elegantly
produced volume, which includes a detailed bibliographical essay, is an indispensable
guide to the role of science in the public sphere, and the reciprocal influence of politics
on scientific institutions and debates during the nineteenth century.
Daniel Sipes book, Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-
century France: Utopia and its Afterlives takes a very different approach to the ques-
tion of social reconstruction in post-revolutionary France. In this work of literary
analysis, Sipe investigates the romantic era transition of what he characterises some-
what imprecisely as utopia from the purely speculative, literary realm into the vibrant
and often wildly speculative arena of social romanticism. Sipe is interested in both
the effects of that shift into the real world occasioned by post-revolutionary French
political life and also with charting the echoes of those dreams of social reform as the
century progressed. Concluding the book with reference to the totalitarian dystopias
of the twentieth century, Sipe seeks to understand the demise of the social innovation
408 SOCIO-POLITICAL CHANGE

and freedom of the early nineteenth century in the aftermath of 1848, and the changing
character of utopianism during that period. One major problem with this approach,
however, is that in doing so, Sipe uses the terms utopia, utopian, utopianism, and other
variants in a rather nonspecific, reified manner. This has the effect of erasing the his-
torical specificity of the cultural artefacts he analyses, and, quite inaccurately attrib-
utes a coherent politics to the artists, writers, and social reformers whose work is under
discussion.
This book is broken into five chapters, each of which focuses on one or two specific
literary texts, chronologically moving from Chateaubriands 1801 Atala through the mid-
century socialist works of Cabet and Grandville, with chapters on Courbet and Baudelaire
in 1848 and after, and concluding with late-nineteenth century evocations of the automa-
ton found in works by Barbara and Villiers de lIsle-Adam. As already suggested, the centre
of gravity in this book, as in many other works of scholarship on the romantic socialism of
the early century, is the revolution of February 1848, what Sipe calls a utopian debacle,
with its quixotic idealism and failed emancipatory ambitions. Sipes argument focuses on
utopianism; while the precise meaning of this term is left open, its capaciousness allows
him to talk about both social and literary forms of social speculation, and to discuss the
afterlives of utopia, which he characterises as a reaction to the convoluted state of uto-
pian affaires. In essence, he argues, between theory (literary utopia) and practice (social
reform systems) there is a third realm that marries the two forms in complicated, often
self-critiquing, ways. It is in unpacking this diverse, uncertain realm of art and literature,
the author contends, that we can see the origins of the dystopias, both literary and lived, of
the modern era. The core of the individual chapters are then careful readings of the texts
under consideration, readings that tease out internal contradictions within the depictions
of alternative worlds with care and attention to detail.
Sipes reading is limited, however, by its insufficient attention to the specificities and
nuances of the historical context(s) in which these texts were produced. The early nine-
teenth-century social reform movement can only anachronistically be characterised by
the term utopianism. Indeed, thinkers such as Fourier, Saint Simon and his followers,
and Cabet, were only described in this manner by Marx and Engels in 1848, as a way of
distinguishing their so-called scientific socialism from the array of social theories in
their intellectual milieu; moreover, Fourier himself vehemently rejected the descriptor.
Historians of romantic socialism have been arguing for its inaccuracy for several gen-
erations, however common the moniker utopian socialism remains. The reduction of
early socialism to a singular ideology dedicated to what Sipe asserts was a wide belief
in the period after the French Revolution that society was at last free to perfect itself
is to both over-simplify and to misunderstand post-revolutionary French social thought.
As a number of historians have discussed, this reviewer included, French socialism was
in many ways a reaction to the destruction the Revolution had brought to France, not
revelry in the passing of the old world. The deeply Christian idiom of socialists such
as the Saint Simonians, Philippe Buchez, and Pierre Leroux, for example, is just one
manifestation of the social re-generation they sought.
Another problem with the notion of utopianism is that these varied movements for
social reform were just thathighly varied. While Sipes discussion includes many ref-
erences to passions and desires as core to the social imaginary of utopians [sic], histori-
cally speaking it was a relatively isolated element of the movement, limited primarily to
Fourier (whitewashed by his followers) and Enfantin, the Pope of the Saint Simonians.
This oversimplification of early socialism reflects, in this reviewers view, the insuffi-
ciently contextualised approach that frames this study. Other instances of this problem
 NAOM I J.A N DR E WS 409

can be found in the discussion of Chateaubriands Atala. Saint Simonian ideas are read
into the text, despite the fact that its publication predated by several years the first
published work by Saint Simonwhich only hinted at the form his social theory would
eventually take, at that. Secondary scholarship on the romantic socialist movement is
inconsistently referenced, nowhere more noticeably than in Sipes discussion of Cabets
Voyage en Icarie, which misleadingly describes Cabets oddly timed departure from
France as roughly coincide[ing] with the emergence of a utopian society of the sort
Cabet had described. In point of fact, Cabet was still in France in late June 1848, after
the bloody June Days, events which conventionally mark the end of the idealism of the
February Revolution.
Romantic socialists were dreamers, fantasists, idealists, and in one sense of the term,
utopians. However unlike literary utopias, the world they wanted to reform was influ-
enced by specific historical circumstancesindustrialisation, urbanisation, class con-
flict, the emergence of organised labour, political turmoil, colonial expansion, among
othersthat shaped their lives and delimited the possibilities for realising their goals.
That context is key to understanding the content of the world they imagined, and thus
cannot be disengaged from any analysis of their utopias. Perhaps most importantly,
they are worthy of understanding in their own right, not as part of a teleological discus-
sion that ultimately leads to twentieth-century totalitarianism.
In John Treschs marvelous and inventive book, The Romantic Machine: Utopian
Science and Technology after Napoleon, however, that context is richly and evocatively
explored. The Romantic Machine is situated at the intersection of the two narrative
strands pursued in the previous two books. His central concern is to demonstrate how the
romantic generation sought to use science and technology as a means of building a more
just, free, and harmonious society. Convincingly undermining conventional depictions of
romanticism as a retrograde tendency working against the progress of science and indus-
try, Tresch describes a scientific community that was deeply informed by the collective
goals of romanticism, which was the source of emotional intensity that proved decisive
for building Frances technical infrastructure. In agreement with Foxs rejection of the
narrative of post-Napoleonic scientific decline, Tresch conjures an intellectual and cul-
tural milieu in which the classical mechanistic and deterministic sciences emblematised
by Laplace and Cuvier was successfullyand resonantlychallenged by members of the
romantic generation such as Arago and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
The Romantic Machine is structured around a series of case studies of scientists and social
reformers between the two Napoleons, including Ampre, Arago, Humboldt, Saint-Hilaire,
Saint Simon and his followers, Leroux, and Comte. Arguing persuasively for the commonalities
among these scientific explorers of the natural and social landscapes, driven by the aforemen-
tioned collective goals of romanticism, Tresch locates their thinking in relation to both German
and French philosophers, including Kant, Schiller, Maine de Biran, and Ballanche. Among the
great strengths of Treschs approach is that he links the philosophical and literary spirit of the
romantics to the technological and scientific innovations of the era, creating a cultural portrait
of the early nineteenth century thatin good romantic fashionunifies the technological and
ideological realms. Throughout the book Tresch resists the neat binaries that conventionally
structure historiography of science and this era, particularly, including that between the arts
and sciences, the material and the spiritual, and the rational and the emotional.
The romantic machine is the linchpin of this union, the interface between the human
world and the material world. Contrary to classical definitions of the machine as an
object moved by external force, the mechanical romantics saw the machine as akin to
an organism, something moved by internal force. This understanding of the machine,
410 SOCIO-POLITICAL CHANGE

Tresch argues, drew on Kantian philosophy via Schillers interpretation of it, and was
elaborated most fully by Humboldt in his investigative methods. Humboldts methodo-
logical incorporation of Schillers aesthetics was aligned with republican (and socialist)
ideals of interdependence, shared labour, mediation, and community. This philosophi-
cal bent is reflected in Humboldts understanding of freedom and objectivity as pro-
duced through the interaction of the individual with the observed context or with
the community, rather than as defined by an absolute disconnection from either other
human beings or situated positions. As Tresch observes, just as freedom, for Schiller,
could only emerge in reciprocal exchange with other beings, so the objectivity of the
Humboldtian tool demanded cooperation with a highly skilled and patient human.
Treschs genealogy of the influence of this idea of interdependence on scientific
thinking, carefully laid out in the first part of the book in chapters on Humboldt,
Ampre, and Arago, serves as the foundation for the argument of the rest of the book. In
part two the mechanical workings of popular spectacle, opera, printing, and city plan-
ning are explored in their philosophical and mechanical dimensions. In the last sec-
tion of the book, which focuses on the social romantic thinkers of the 1830s and 40s,
Tresch reads their innovative plans for the reform of humanity through the machines
they offered as means of mediating social change. In these chapters, the influence of
natural science debates on socialism and positivism are deftly drawn. Pierre Lerouxs
notion of humanity, for example, in Treschs hands is persuasively shown to be a rein-
terpretation of Saint-Hilaires ideas of animal unity. Another noteworthy feature of the
latter third of the book is Treschs handling of Comtean positivism, which he describes
as recognition of human dependence on its milieu, rather than the objective, anti-
metaphysical doctrine that it is conventionally portrayed as. Among other strengths of
Treschs account of the social reformers of the early century is his consistent incorpora-
tion of the scientific and technological aspects of their thinkinglargely through the
influence of the Ecole Polytechniquewith their seemingly more idiosyncratic ideas
of social regeneration. Thus the Saint Simonian engineers retreat to Menilmontant is
both a testament to the community of all men as labourers and [to] the centrality
of industry. Comtes religion of humanity, often seen as a deviation from his positiv-
ist doctrine, is an outgrowth of the specific organisation of the human species, and
positivism in its final form was a users manual for remodelling the human habitat.
As noted above, Treschs account terminates in the disillusionment of 1848, during
which the liberatory possibility of machines also prompted darker imaginings of their use
for repression; Foucaults pendulum is featured here as the exemplar of Napoleonic order
restored after 1851. This short term recognition of the double-edged sword that technol-
ogy inherently carries, however, gives way in his conclusion to a more optimistic call to
take seriously the mechanical romantics recognition of the interdependence of man and
machine as a means of addressing contemporary, particularly environmental, challenges.
Read together, these three accounts make clear the many ways in which post-revolu-
tionary French life was in an ongoing process of accommodation and reinvention. The
impact of industrialisation and the acceleration of the role of technology in human life,
for better and for worse, is a key theme in French life during this period, whether in
terms of the institutions of learning and investigation, the arc of utopian and dystopian
thinking, or the romantic mechanics use of technology to reshape human society on a
more humane and interdependent footing.

Santa Clara University N AOM I J. AN DREW S

doi:10.1093/fh/cru073
Advance Access publication 29 July 2014