Book review: No Need for Geniuses celebrates enlightenment in terror

An age of scientific discovery flourished during the French Revolution but this rich legacy has been wrongly obscured by the guillotine. Steve Jones's No Need for Geniuses shines a light on the enduring legacies of these intellectuals.

The Assassination of Marat (1880) by Jean-Joseph Weerts depicts the murder of scientist, journalist and French Revolution leader Jean-Paul Marat, by Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday. Marat became a martyr to the Republican Jacobins. The Gallery Collection / Corbis.Show less

The legendary story that provides the title of Steve Jones's delightful new book No Need for Geniuses: Revolutionary Science in the Age of the Guillotine is illuminating enough to warrant repeating.

Antoine Lavoisier, described by Jones as “founder of modern chemistry and modern physiology, munitions expert, agricultural researcher and tax-collector,” had been arrested and brought before the court of the French Revolution authorities. When members of the audience shouted out their protests, saying the court could not conceive of executing Lavoisier because he was a towering genius, the judge in question intoned, “La Republique n’a pas besoin de savants.” (“The Republic has no need for geniuses.”)

Lavoisier was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794, and according to Jones, was "the epitome of that era's marriage of technology and politics". He was a pioneer scientific philosopher (the man made the first table of the elements), a leader among philosophes, but he was also a rapacious tax-farmer with what one of his enemies referred to as an "inexhaustible thirst for gold". He was a groundbreaking scientific genius but he was also exactly the kind of money-grubbing grafter the Revolution's organisers considered a societal parasite, one of their prime targets when the Revolution erupted in July 1789.

Jones points out that in the years preceding and following the French Revolution, the scientific philosophes laid the foundations for much of the modern western scientific discipline known today, from chemistry to biology to astronomy to physics. They were all enthusiastic participants in what Jones describes as "the language of intellectual life", but most of them were also equally enthusiastically passionate about the politics of their time.

“Historians sometimes see the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolt against a corrupt and ineffective aristocracy,” Jones writes, “but in truth scientists were more involved than bankers.” Many of these scientists were also political firebrands; when the Revolution came, they didn’t have the option of declaring neutrality and retreating to their laboratories.

And their fates were dealt accordingly; one academician-in-four from the Royal Academy of Sciences met a violent death or imprisonment during the Revolution.

This double narrative lies at the heart of Jones’s book. He wants his account to help right the imbalance plaguing typical histories of the Revolution, which stress the political but scarcely mention the fact that the Revolution exploded right in the midst of one of the most remarkable scientific renaissances in modern history.

Pre-Revolution French society was a ferment of innovative ideas (encouraged by King Louis XVI, who is typically painted, as Jones points out, as "an effete fool", but who was deeply interested in physics and mathematics) – so many, in fact, that Jones warns his readers that his book won't even cover the whole spectrum. Groundbreaking work on the human eye perception of colour, the control of animal disease, the invention of the stethoscope, the study of poisons, crystals, harmonics and half-a-dozen other subjects all had to be left out of No Need for Geniuses so that Jones could concentrate on a smaller cast.

That cast includes such figures as Louis Cotte, the astronomer who founded much of modern meteorology; Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a pharmacist and pioneer in the field of nutrition (and the man who introduced the potato to France); Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a pioneer in the concept of evolution; Jean-Baptiste Meusnier de la Place, a surveyor and engineer who was killed at the siege of Mayence; Jean-Baptiste Biot, a mathematician and chemist who discovered the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites; George Cuvier, the great founder of paleontology; Jean-Sylvan Bailly, the astronomer who, according to Jones, “sparked off the Revolution” and was later guillotined; Thomas-François Dalibard, the botanist and lightning specialist; Claude Louis Berthollet, the chemist who invented bleach; Jean Baptiste Gaspard Bochart de Saron, an astronomer and expert on the orbit of comets, who was guillotined; Nicolas de Condorcet, the mathematician who was murdered (or, less likely, committed suicide) during the Reign of Terror; and Pierre André Latreille, a zoologist who, according to Jones, was imprisoned during the Revolution “but found a rare beetle in his cell, an event that led to his release”.

These and dozens of other men (and a few women) were deeply engaged in pioneering work on evolution, meteorology, germ theory, epidemiology, metabolism and many other fields of study, in all cases very intentionally throwing off the intellectual restrictions holding over from France’s medieval religious past.

They were avid experimenters (indeed, it was during this period that the unlucky guinea pig was first used as a test animal), and the gaudy, often awkward nature of those experiments – on everything from lightning rods to respiration – are relayed by Jones with unflagging vigour and a good deal of winking humour.

He is also extremely adept at teasing out modern-day relevances for the preoccupations of those long-dead philosophes. His long digression on the Tour de France (the prototype of which originated during the Revolutionary era) includes fascinating discussions of the science of extreme exertion and blood-doping, for example, and his section on the introduction of the potato to France includes a pointed glance at the state of modern mass agriculture.

In discussing the perceptive but ultimately off-target biological theories of Lamarck, Jones mentions “the disastrous attempt in the Soviet Union to rebuild agriculture on Lamarckian foundations. The episode led to the starvation of millions”.

The modern public combination of ignorance, indifference and hostility towards scientific endeavours runs through Jones’s account of the Revolutionary era, when protests went up, for instance, against the installation of Benjamin Franklin’s newly-invented lightning rods, on the contention that they would attract the very thing they were designed to dispel.

And the perceived arrogance of some of these scientific philosophes did them no favours; indeed, it drove Robespierre, in his youth an outspoken advocate of science, to authorize Revolutionary proclamations like: "All academies and literary societies established or endowed by the nation are eliminated … What do the diverse hypotheses by which certain philosophes explain the phenomena of nature matter to legistators?"

Likewise history tends to remember Jean-Paul Marat not for his earlier scientific experiments in light and electricity (and the communication of sexual disease) but, as Jones puts it, for “his central and sanguinary role in the revolt and his own death”. This uneasy alteration between scientific investigation and violent outcomes runs throughout the book, constantly reminding readers that science can never predict its own ultimate outcomes or misuses.

Particularly in his chapter titled Ashes to Ashes, Jones traces the sometimes-Byzantine connections between pioneering French discoveries and horrific 20th century applications of those earlier breakthroughs in the nature of inert gases and toxic chemicals. "Lavoisier's inert gas binds the worlds of life and death into an inextricable embrace," Jones observes. "Its powerful and aggressive split personality is shared, alas, with those who tinker with it."

Jones takes as the obvious but effective symbol of this overlooked philosophe renaissance the Eiffel Tower, which opened to the public in 1889 to celebrate the centennial of the fall of the Bastille. Jones calls the Tower "an audacious symbol of modernity" and tells his readers that the structure was the site of the world's first radio transmission, in 1898.

Inscribed on a beam of the Tower just below the first balcony, Jones points out, appear the names of 72 scientists from the period of his study – chemists, biologists, mathematicians and engineers who lived between the Revolution and the time of the Tower’s construction. Those men and women “built a new world,” a world in which science was based not only on church tradition but on active, inventive experimentation – even in the face of public taunts, poverty and state-sponsored Terror.

The standard narrative of the French Revolution – the political upheavals and social restructuring – are here placed in a new and refreshing balance with the teeming intellectual backdrop against which the Revolution took place. And as Jones points out, those amazing scientific breakthroughs have had a legacy at least as durable as the shouts of mobs, the violence of tribunals and the conquests of dictators.

Steve Donoghue is managing editor of Open Letters Monthly and a regular contributor to The Review.