Stephane Van Damme
CNRS-Centre Alexandre Koyré
57 rue Cuvier
75005 Paris
“ World of Learning, Sociability and City
in early Eighteenth Century France ”
In this last paper, I wish to present the
research project I am currently working on, which is about the connection
between the world of learning and scholars and the emergence of urban
identities in Europe in the first half of the 18th century. To speak
in broader terms, what I would like to grasp is how the circulation of
knowledge shaped the making of the great cultural metropolises in the period
between the 17th and the 18th century, mainly in a few
sites : Paris, Lyon, London, Edinburgh, Rome and Naples. This being a
work-in-progress, I chose to focus on the case of Lyons: the city ranked as a
major economic metropolis, but did not qualify as a European political capital.
This paper examines several aspects of this
question: first, I would like to present the guidelines of my review of the
historiography through this case study, and my intellectual framework.
Secondly, why the story of the places in which exchange and scholarly
sociability developed needs a reappraisal. And third, what were the effects of
the circulation of knowledge on the constitution of the "symbolic
capital" of the 18th century city.
1) Mesuring the “ capital ” effect
Actually, several recent works in history of
science or urban studies paid more attention on the role played by the centers in
the diffusion of knowledge[107]
and information in Europe[108].
They criticised the functionnalist metaphor of capital “ which served only
as surrogate for the rational instrumentalism of the capital market and the
bureaucratization of the lifeworld[109] ”
and which still presents in the recent conference in Paris in 1998 about
cultural capitals leading by the historian Christophe Charle.
Capitals in the history of capitalism
For Charle, capital'superior global command
over cultural ressources reorganize time and space. In the wake of Pierre
Bourdieu, the process of accumulation is the basis of the cultural dynamics of
capital circulation. In this grand narrative, from the eighteenth century to
the twentieth century, capitalist economic dynamics continues to dominate
localities and to didact the innovations' agenda. The inventory of equipments
(libraries, laboratories, etc.) of intellectual and educational institutions
and other forms of sociability which serve as structures to welcome foreigners
also provide a prosopography of scholars by signalling clearly the new
distribution of knowledge and of scientists that emerges during the
Enlightenment. But this alone cannot suffice, because it supposes that the
criteria of a “ capital ” are stable from the 17th to the 20th
centuries. To break with this teleological approach which encloses the
construction of European capitals in a frozen and finalist perspective, it is
useful to extend the methodology by a study of the invention of an intellectual
functionality of the modern city. The
conversion of knowledge into “ symbolic capital ” in the Bourdieu's
tradition does not result in a simple accumulation of datas and of equipments.
If, the global networks of wealth and power accumulate and exchange information
instantaneously as a central source of institutionnal power, the economies of
knowledge in Paris, Rome or London are different and do not contribute in the
same way to the creation of these “ places. ” We must therefore
reinterpret the notion of symbolic capital in this context by giving it a
dymanic and conflictual dimension.
The ethnographical turn and the question of learning capitals
In seeking to displace the reliance of social
history of science on grand narratives of macro-social development, such as the
analysis of ‘colonial machine', some historians of science embracing the label
“ post-modern ”, have posited a grand theory of local knowledge which
priviledges the ethnographic conversation, the local interaction, and the tacit
knowledges built by indigenous people (we can mention several works on history
on cartography). But, they contributed also to dissolve the question of
Capitals as a center of knowledge by privileging short circles of diffusion
against the long-distance networks.
From capital to capitalization
Understanding the social construction of
knowledge in the city should not simply shift our attention from macropolitics
to a micropolitics dicernible by ethnographic inquiry, nor are deducible from
purely macro-structural logics or mechanisms as in the Charle's interpretation.
According to Bruno Latour, “ we could of course talk of ‘capital' that is
something (money, knowledge, credit, power) that has no other function but to
be instantly reinvested into another cycle of accumulation. This would not be a
bad word, especially since it comes from caput, the head, the master,
the centre, the capital of a country, and this is indeed a characterisation of
Lisbon, Versailles, of all the places able to join the beginning and the end of
such a cycle. Howewer, using this expression would be begging the
question : what is capitalised is necessarily turned into capital, it does
not tell us what it is- besides, the word'capitalism' has had too confusing a
career… ”.[110]
For example, during the eighteenth century, London and Paris had become the
commercial entrepôt for the world's commodities in which the means of exchange
and payment were made. Mapping, classifying and making visible a new terrain
was central to Britain's foreign and domestic policy. The work of leading men
of science played an important role[111].
States mobilized citizens, missionnaries, military officers, doctors and loyal
indigenous people. To be useful these observations had to be taken according to
certain criteria, reduced to standardized techniques, classified and carefully
stored. This was the raw material necessary for calculated decisions and making
possible action at a distance. Information from around Britain and the world
was relayed back, classified, and stored in accessible filing cabinets housed
in government departemental offices. Items were put on display in cabinets in
institutions such as the British Museum, and entombed in the memoirs of various
scientific societies. Thence developped the imperial and metropolitan
storehouses[112]. For the
urban theorist Michael Peter Smith, “ this way of envisioning the process
of localization thus locates “ globalization ” in the realm of social
pratice and situates the global-local interplay in historically specific milieus. It extends the meaning of the global-local nexus to encompass not just
the social actions of “ global capitalists' interacting with ‘local
comunnities' but of the far more complex interplay of cultural, economic,
political, and religious networks that operate at local, translocal and transnational
scales but which intersect in particular places at particular times [113]”.
By studying the circulation of knowledge in
specific urban sites, it is possible to develop a differential, cultural
cartography and to mesure the unequal
distribution of knowledge and of sites of knowlege in the construction of urban
Europe in the 18th century. By working not merely on one capital but on the
dynamic among capitals, we can emphasize the role played by knowledge and
intellectual circuits in the production of these national differences, and
address the traditional problem of center and periphery. Beyond national
spaces, there are collectivities characterized by local regimes of knowledge,
notably by the ciculation of men, the multiplication of equipments and instruments,
the standardisation of practices and attitudes, all of which can be studied.
For example, London or Rome correspond to two different experiences in the
universalicization of knowlege in Europe, because one is oriented towards the
recognition of experimental knowledge and the valorisation of public spaces for
science, and the other in the orbit of cardinals and foreign princes, in which
universalisation proceeds through religious vectors such as religious orders
and Church censorship.
To begin, the research must necessarily develop
a precise cartography of urban cultures already studied, which will also
underline the distributuion of networks of exchange woven through these cities.
The geographical enlargement, thus, does not hold illustrative value, but it is
necessary for a comparative approach that can lead to a European typography of
localisms and of the various forms of
universalisation. This practical orientation, certainly, leads me to retain the
ordinary criteria of an intellectual capital : editorial center,
university, point of exchange in the Republic of Letters. But it also requires
me to consider the capacity of an urban milieu to exploit and diversity its
forms of knowledge.
Developing a notion of a capital as a function
requires us to measure the effects of the threshhold we establish between an
ordinary city and a site of importance. Our research thus must be oriented
towards a more precise examination of the “ tools of scale ” [outils
de la grandeur], understand as the instruments of the conversion of a city
into a universal ; this involves the recognition of an expertise, the
attraction and centralization of information, the multiplication of locations
for analyzing information, the establishment of frameworks for publicity, etc.)
This idea must also take seriously the “ tests of scale ” [épreuves
de la grandeur ] that the actors and institutions elaborate, from city to
city[114].
An entire written corpus, in print and manuscript, broadly diffused (such as
travel guides[115]) has left
us the traces of these procedures of comparison. In this framework, I am
particularly interested in scientific controversies, in the polemical gears
that turn around scientific knowledge, or even more, the controversies (including
lawsuits) in which knowledge is evaluated and which establish links
from the scientific world to the urban community.
Taking into account the politics of large
cities (urban corporations and communities, guilds, religious congregations,
universities, etc.) in this history will ultimately situate the interactions of
savants and political authorities, not simply in an instrumentalist
vision of technical knowledge, but by showing how educated elites think about
the city and of their own sites ; by the same token, it will underline the
necessary implication of power in the establishment of scientific research
projects. It is this interpenetration, this “ translation ” of
interests of one group and the other, which is the ojbect of this study. In
this way, we can hope to establish a description of a common world
between these different spheres. In the second part of this paper, I would like
to present a brief discussion of the formation of the urban academic scene, or
"lieu" académique in French, a notion that I define
both as a reference of the local political discourse and as a concrete entity,
the space of the meeting place. By paying more attention to the inscriptions of
knowledge, to the pratices of circulation of information, we can reassess the
social construction of a center of calculation.
2) From the long networks to the short network
From the end of Louis XIV's reign to the
creation of the Academy of Lyons under letters of patent in 1724, provincial
urban identity asserted itself through the designation of new spokesmen for
Lyons' intellectuals. The social elites spearheaded the combination of the
"long networks" of the Republic of Letters (correspondences, great
academies, scholarly journals) with the "short networks" of Lyons'
cultural space, and thereby they mobilized and activated circuits of
correspondence at the provincial level, promoting exchanges along untrodden
paths, and extending both indirect and discreet encouragement to the founding
of academies, and to expressions of curiosity for the local past. Thus with
this rerouting of information from the long networks of the Republic of Letters
to local circuits, they authorized the conversion of various fields of
knowledge (archeology, numismatics, philology, experimental physics, theology)
into symbolic capital.
These
exchanges of correspondence first exhibited a remarkable change in the scale
and nature of the relations between scholars. In the first half of the XVIIth
century, Lyons had been able to achieve integration in the long networks of the
Republic of Letters through the joint action of the physicians and of the
Jesuits of the collège de la Trinité, the latter being well represented
in scholarly correspondences like those of the Royal Society of London , of
Leibnitz, or in Italy. In the early XVIIIth century, however, the
correspondence was now anchored in the concerns of scholars whose horizons were
essentially limited to Lyons and its surroundings. With the academic
"creation" of 1700, the practices of communication in-writing no
longer revolved exclusively around an intellectual project, they no longer
aimed only at the circulation of knowledge or at the integration and
recognition of people who represented Lyons on the international scene. The
practice of letter-writing now concerned circles of intimate friends and came
within the scope of society living and friendly intercourse. The first academic
circles established progressively in the city between 1700 and 1724 owed their
strength to this densification of epistolary relations, backed by social
intercourse. Admittedly, only a small proportion of the whole population of
learned men who filled the meetings of the first academic circles in this
period kept a correspondence, but the practice appeared to be spreading .
Traces of such keen ties between various learned men living in Lyons exist, as
in the case of Laurent Dugas, the marquis de St Fonds, Cholier, Anthème
Tricaud, Brossette, François Gacon. The collective identity that appeared
through these letters was no longer merely based on an exchange of information,
but it was attached to a specific place.
A
central figure in this process of polarization was Claude Brossette, a lawyer
who appeared from the start as the spokesman for the first groups formed after
1700, thanks to his far-reaching connections, both in geographic and in social
terms. Claude Brossette, seigneur de Varennes d'Appetour, was born in
Theizé , a parish in the Lyonnais, on November 7, 1671. He attended the collège de la Trinité
in Lyons, and was a novice with the Jesuits before he became a lawyer. As a
matter of fact, his letters reached beyond his connections in Lyons, and he
exchanged letters with members of the Dijon academy, especially with president
Bouhier and abbot Olivet. News sent from Toulouse acquainted him with the
erudite work of Jesuit Father Vanière. As far as Paris was concerned, besides a
close relationship with Boileau, there were also letters sent to François de
Lamoignon or to Bernard de La Monnoye from the Académie française, or to
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, with whom he exchanged more than a hundred letters.
Brossette built up steady relations with the main provincial capitals of the
world of learning, and also maintained substantial exchanges with Paris.
Relatively limited before 1729, his network nevertheless clearly diversified from
then on and until 1740. With Voltaire, Louis Racine, abbot Lenglet-Dufresnoy,
Déon, Father Brumoy, it became national in scope, which shows that Brossette
also took advantage of his position as secretary of the academy of Lyons to
expand his connections. Besides, he continued to be influential in Lyons, and
remained close to the Jesuits. His older brother Pierre Brossette, who taught
theology and resided at the collège de la Trinité, was a personal friend
of M. de Saint-Fonds. And his younger brother Nicolas was a Jesuit as well.
A third development should finally be
mentioned, a trend already perceptible in Brossette's action: the strengthening
of the Paris-Lyons axis indicated that Lyons' influence tended to withdraw into
the boundaries of the kingdom and gave rise to a new, problematic relation
between Lyons and the French capital. Of course Lyons' cultural lexicon had
long been shaped by the comparison with Paris. But in the early 18th
century, in the context of the tensions between the municipality and the
representatives of the king or the cours souveraines, this comparison
assumed a more confrontational dimension. And besides the discourse of the
first academic circles, and the claims to independence voiced by their renowned
leader Brossette, other networks of intellectual and literary exchanges with
Paris were much more likely to qualify statements on Lyons' originality , and
even to criticize the academy. Thus the exchanges and network of nouvelles à
la main established by Father Leonard, Dom Delamare, and abbot Anselme
Tricaud, or the régiment de la calotte that the poet Gacon maintained
with various learned men in Lyons, both exemplify a continuing dialogue with
Paris, which even seemed to intensify in the first three decades of the 18th
century. Such competing strategies hampered the recognition of academies for a
while, and yet they also took over the efforts of the first circles to
centralize and capitalize various fields of knowledge.
3) The making of the academic scene (1700-1724)
Far from being taken for granted, the
durability of the first circles and the letters of patent signifying
recognition by the king in 1724 long remained highly uncertain. Legitimating
both the academy and the political greatness of Lyons was not self-evident at
first, but rather a matter of constant work and repeated efforts to build and
mobilize alliances. Indeed these first circles demonstrated a robustness and a
plasticity that enabled them to last apart from any legal recognition. And they
did not only owe them to the speeches and representations publicized by Lyons'
historians writing about the city as an "assembly of scholars" and
mobilizing the rhetoric of the constituent bodies. In more important ways, the
first circles also relied on alliances, on the action of these networks, their
composition, and the material and intellectual practices that they established.
Material sources make it possible to follow the course of these practices
through a ten-year period, and to locate the stages of this stabilization. Three
indicators may be useful here: the invention of a practice of record-keeping;
the formalization of the meeting; and the construction of an intellectual and
civic space.
The
keeping of a minute-book for the meetings of the academy from 1724 onward, and
the designation of a permanent secretary in charge of updating this journal and
writing the minutes of meetings represented in many respects an important
landmark in the organization of these intellectual encounters. As far as the
presentation of this journal is concerned, it first showed a lack of
codification, being written in a nervous hand and taking the form of separate
notebooks, but as early as 1715 a more formal material aspect suggested a more
systematic use of the register by the academicians. The minutes started with a
brief mention of the place of the meeting, followed by a list of the persons
who attended, and then the secretary recorded and summed up the speeches
delivered, as well as the ensuing discussions. Through this precise inventory
of the places, the actors and the contents of the meetings, a recording of
practices was evolved, which tended to maintain continuity between the
meetings. Thus, in spite of fluctuations in the respective importance of the
various components of the meetings, the journal kept in the hand of Claude
Brossette served as the memory of the academy. The effects of this
record-keeping on the consolidation of a community of scholars and on the
actors' perception of changes in their intellectual practices may have been underestimated
in the historiography. Nevertheless this process only brought about a partial
reordering and restructuring of the group's activities. Indeed after a series
of sheets devoted to 1715, the journal goes back to the meetings of 1714, and
then turns again to the rest of the year 1715. This going backward in the
chronological arrangement of the accounts of the meetings occurred repeatedly
in 1714-1715. Reading through these minutes, one gathers that meetings were
recorded in an haphazard manner and on an irregular basis. Likewise, entries
followed by blank spaces indicating the absence of the secretary are sometimes
inverted. A marginal note informs us on possible reading errors: "This
meeting was mistakenly placed here instead of under Monday, April first, which
was left blank, because the secretary was in the country."
Real
standards for keeping the journal were established only in 1716. With the
appearance of an archive of the academy, which the first circles lacked, a
first stage in a process of formalization of the assembly was reached. Thus
this journal is significant mostly in retrospect: through the accumulation and
stabilization of these documents, their constitution into a series set apart
from other documents, this circle was brought into a clear focus and was
invested with the status of original founder.
Dealing
with this stage in the history of the academy of Lyons, Roger Chartier and
Daniel Roche greatly emphasized an increasing conformity with the academic
models. Indeed several indicators conjoin to verify this assertion. First, the
composition of the assemblies, as presented in the documents, clearly displays
an evolution: early in 1714, only the Jesuits appeared as distinct from the
rest of the people in attendance, while the date of August 4, 1714 marks the
beginning of a long-lasting division into three categories, the director, the
Jesuits, and the others. The emphasis on the presence of the Jesuits confirms
the peculiar standing of the keeper of the journal within the group. The ranking
of academicians by seniority occurred later. Such a list was first established
on January 9, 1725, after the reception of the letters of patent. This
consideration for long-lasting ties with the group rewarded enduring practices
and underlined the role of time and collective memory. Thus the structure of
the academy reads as a stratification laying out the temporal dimension of the
scholarly community. In this list, the Jesuits occupied the third rank, with F.
de Colonia, then the sixteenth, with F. Lombart, and finally the twenty-third
(out of 24 in the list) with F. Folart. The mention of the Jesuits' affiliation
with a religious order was not a unique favor. Institutional affiliations were
systematically mentioned on the reception of new members, which also enhanced
the special consideration given to institutional bodies and communities. Among
the professions represented, three major components of Lyons' urban society
stand out. Besides the Jesuits, two other urban bodies met in the assembly, one
the one hand the Présidial, with three members in 1700, and on the other
hand the Sénéchaussée. In 1709-1710, officers of the Cour des
Monnaies, of the Sénéchaussée, of the Présidial and consular
offices carried more weight within the organization, since they represented 35%
of the total. To some extent the presence of the Jesuits faded, as the secular
clergy became more prominent. But it remained an important factor of stability.
Various
practices testify to significant changes in the very organization of the meetings.
An order of the speeches, an agenda was thus set up. For the first time on
Monday, May 15 1715, the assembly agreed to "an order according to which
the academiciens must proceed with their discourses", and then in January
1718 the order of the speeches was decided by drawing lots. Likewise, the rule
of unanimity for elections was replaced by a practice of "ballots" (billets),
also in January 1718. Both modifications were decided on the same meeting.
Finally, a status hierarchy was evolved within the academy. Only the president
and the permanent secretary were originally marked out as distinct positions.
However, a decision of April 4, 1714 specified that the president would be
thereafter elected for three months. And then , following in the footsteps of
the parisian academies, intermediary statuses were created. Thus M. Mahudel,
who lived in Paris but attended the meetings from time to time, was designated
in May 1715 as an "associate of this Academy, to which he reports on the
proceedings of the Academy of medals and inscriptions". A status of
vice-president appeared in January 1718, and then honorary academicians were
appointed, a status created for three new members: president Valbonnay, the
marquis d'Halincourt, and the Jesuit Father de Vitry. And on the following
week, the son of Dugas was allowed to attend the assemblies, "without
ranking as an academician". This note pointed to a status stratification
within the academy, and also to its opening onto the outside society, as well
as to its recognition of provincial and parisian connections.
However,
this conformity with the parisian academic structures did not suffice to put
the coterie on a solid footing and to endowe it with the kind of time-honored
experience that would save it from possible extinction.
Thus,
a study of the frequency of the meetings between 1714 and 1724 brings to the
fore important discrepancies from one year to the next, as well as a
progressive decline in the number of the meetings. This shows that the 1724
royal recognition did not follow an intensification of the meetings, but on the
contrary, that it was part of a strategy to inscribe them in the law in order
to put an end to a structural instability. Likewise, changes in the places of
the meetings repeatedly disrupted the composition of the groups. The story of
the creation of an academy in 1700 is a case in point: it first took place in
the library of the physician Camille Falconnet, "in the midst of five or
six thousand volumes". Falconnet being inconveniently called back to
Paris, where he became a consulting physician for the king and a member of the
Academy of the Inscriptions, he had to give up the idea of being host to these
conferences of learned men. So M. de Trudaine, the newly-appointed intendant of
Lyons' government, took over as early as 1704. Then in 1710, the assembly moved
to be housed by M. de la Vallette and by president Dugas until 1717, when
archbishop François-Paul de Neufville provided asylum in his palace. As it
appears at first glance, these meetings continued to assume the spontaneous and
private character that they had in the 17th century. However, the
place of the meeting with M. de Trudaine was no longer entirely neutral ground.
Trudaine had only just arrived in Lyons and he intended to found an academy.
But he actually only reconstituted the defunct academy of 1700, incidently
reshaping the composition of its members and providing it with a meeting-place
in his residence. Besides, the mansion of the intendant was also known to the
scholars of Lyons as a meeting point in the circulation of literary and
political news, especially for banned books. Thus Dom Delamare wrote to F.
Léonard de Sainte-Catherine on May 29, 1707:
"I
had heard of the book authored by Mr le Maréchal de Vauban, in this city this
piece only appeared at the house of Mr l'Intendant, through a military officer
who passed by and lent it to him for a few hours only. This Intendant promised
me on Annunciation day to move heaven and earth to get a copy of it, which he
will let me copy at my leisure".
Undeniably,
the arrival of Trudaine turned the headquarters of the academy into a stage.
This occurred as the intendants' action took on new forms in the généralité.
Trudaine was the son of a Trésorier de France working at the Finance
Bureau in Amiens. He became ordinaire en la Chambre des Comptes de Paris,
was then appointed intendant of Burgundy in 1710, and conseiller d'Etat
on August 20, 1711, maître de requêtes in 1715, and finally conseiller
d'Etat ordinaire in 1720. Méliand, who succeeded him, was admitted in the
academy in 1714:
"M.
Méliand, intendant of Lyons, honored the assembly with his presence. (…) Monsieur
l'Intendant dealt with much clarity and precision with various common
practices regarding the governing rules of the parlement de Paris".
All the intendants of the Généralité who
followed requested admittance into the academy of Lyons, as well as the prévôts
des marchands. And a little later, as it enjoyed the protection of the
archbishop, the academy soon obtained the letters of patent. Although we do not
know much about the spatial arrangements of the first meetings, the
meeting-registers disclose more details on the moving of the academy in the
palace of the archbishop on April 7, 1717:
"Monseigneur
the archbishop kindly consented to provide the academy with an asylum, his
greatness assigned the location of the sessions in his own apartment in the
archbishop's palace. The academy assembled around a long desk and approved . Monseigneur
sat in an armchair at the upper end of the table, the academicians on chairs
around it, and the secretary at the lower end of the table, facing Mgr.
Mr de Serre, the director, sitting on the right-hand side of Monseigneur
and gave a speech to thank Monseigneur for honoring the academy with a session
in his palace".
The staging of patronage is the most noteworthy
feature of this description. There is nothing unusual about the layout of the
furniture, which could also be found at the residence of the abbé de La Roque,
for example, but the scenography highlights the exalted position of the
archbishop and the submission of the academicians. There was no continuity in
the gatherings at the archbishop's palace, however. Between 1720 and 1722, the
sessions took place at Dugas' again. Eventually, on December 12, 1724, the
secretary wrote down: "first public and general assembly". Thus the
dynamics of the meeting-places proceeded apace with the development of
patronage and the formalization of practices. And its significance was enhanced
by the institution of a "cultural ceremonial".
Finally, in addition to this use of patronage
to strengthen the internal structure of the gatherings, public recognition also
mattered to the academies. And on Lyons' cultural scene, this public
recognition was tied up with the definition of a hierarchy in the various
assemblies which started calling themselves "academies" in the city.
Thus on August 6, 1714, the music academie, heretofore named concert,
asked the Academy to give it regulations, a name, and a motto. The journey
between the intellectual and domestic space of Falconnet's library and the
archbishop's palace reads like the story of a capture, traces a process of
harnessing the cultural representations of Lyons' intellectual scene to
political and civic institutions.
4) A local economy of academic knowledge?
Let us turn now to the last question I wish to
discuss here: to what extent did these groups with loose connections set up a
local economy of knowledge? This notion should not be understood as a mere
transfer of the parisian academic culture, but also as a translation of general
knowledge from the standpoint of local practices. Two examples illustrate these
traductions lyonnaises.
First,
let us consider the attempt to mobilize this academic circle to edit a commentary
and a translation of Cicero's De Natura Deorum, a project adopted on
January 12, 1717. The project was proposed by the archbishop "for the
purpose of avoiding the sort of disarray that the assemblies have fallen into
lately ".
Even
though the edition failed to be completed, this undertaking is remarkable in
several respects. With this project, the academy of Lyons joined a large-scale
academic and scholarly movement. A translation of the same text had indeed been
already initiated by abbot d'Olivet, a former Jesuit, and by president Bouhier,
of Dijon. This testifies to the promotion of provincial emulation, of a
competitive spirit even, which the correspondence between Brossette and M. de
Saint-Fonds discloses on several occurrences.
The
editing work undertaken by the young assembly also demonstrated its capacity
for structuring itself around a project (with the organization of various
committees). The abilities of everyone could thus be spotted, as well as his
intellectual position on the academic scene. The translation required work at
the juncture of several fields of knowledge (linguistic, antiquarian, and
religious), and thus mobilized the main centers of interest of the circle. And
finally, it was also significant for the way it turned the archbishop, formerly
a political Maecenas, into a true literary patron, since he was involved in
proofreading and corrections.
Beyond the particulars of this episode, what
was at stake was the display of a literary bent and the celebration of the
practice of the commentary. This was confirmed in 1720 by the choice of the
title to be used to refer to the assembly in the register, which appeared as
"Académie de littérature". At the same time, Brossette was
entrusted with the task of annotating the complete works of Molière; Louis
Racine joined the coterie soon afterwards. This undertaking paralleled the
literary strategy of Claude Brossette, whose credit rested in part on his
edition of commentaries of Boileau's Satyres, on his edition of the
poems of Mathurin Régnier, as well as on his Histoire Abrégée ou éloge
historique de la ville de Lyon, published in 1711. Following this example,
other academicians tried to illustrate themselves in the scholarly exercise of
the commentary. Thus M. de Saint-Fonds set about to write a commentary of
Racine's works, which was never published. Chauvelin, a maître de requêtes
in charge of the library, went so far as calling upon Brossette for his
notes on one of Molière's plays:
"Monsieur, an in-4° edition of the
Molière is proposed here. I know you have notes written down on this piece. If
you would like to transmit them to me, I will have them used in this edition,
since I am convinced that they will be received with pleasure by the public, as
they come from a person whose learning is already known to them in several
respects."
The second example to be examined here deals
with the way the new "academicians" committed the circulation of
knowledge to relatively stable and polarized procedures. Stereotypes marked an
inversion of the terms of the search for identity. Lyons' identity was no
longer shaped merely by antiquarian research, it no longer depended only on the
recognition of an object of study at an international level. It became the
mainspring of a polarization process and tended to absorb multifaceted forms of
outside knowledge . Thus local history was no longer called upon to unify or
mobilize from the outside a loose association of scholars with mixed
geographical origins, but it concurred with the efforts of Lyons' consulate to
found privileges on the past. The projective dimension of learning yielded to
an affirmative gesture, to the sense of belonging to an urban community. Of
course, the academicians continued to maintain relations with outside scholars,
but the flow of knowledge in circulation changed direction. The stakes of
learning were now subordinate to issues of identity and politics. What mattered
was to have expert authorities ratify Lyons' knowledge.
The following example sheds light on this
transformation: in the journal of the meetings held from 1714 onward, the entry
for the first meeting mentions a discussion on a marble table with an engraved
latin inscription. After the intervention of Valbonnais, F. Ménestrier and his Histoire
de Lyon were cited. And on the next meetings, Laisné proposed his
interpretation. Then Chorier and Spon were cited. M. Aubert also read a paper
on the same subject, proposing a "new conjecture about this formula",
and evoking Spon in his Antiquités de Lyon. Interventions from Dugas and
Laisné followed. And eventually the issue was put into the hands of two expert
authorities, M. de la Vallette et B. de Montfaucon, whose opinion only
concurred with the official interpretation of the assembly.
The journals reporting on the academicians'activities
opened with this anecdote, which seems to epitomize an evolution in the
circulation of scholarly materials. Correspondence was no longer used to
mobilize a field of studies, on the contrary it assumed a retroactive
dimension, it was used to bring outside knowledge back to the academic center,
in order to ratify Lyons' expertise and to strengthen the position of the
academic "short network". Thus taking the floor within the circle,
the orators brought to the fore an on-going dialogue with the works of F.
Ménestrier or Jacob Spon. However, although such works sketched a circle of
local authorities, they were not confronted with other, outside research.
Starting from the inventory and the commenary of these local archeological
inscriptions and attempting to reach a global knowledge of the Roman empire was
like trying to square the circle. Given this impossibility, discussions did not
go anywhere, and lost their way into a mere localism. Lacking new discoveries,
they were doomed to repetition. Nevertheless, this sterility also had its
positive side, since it helped integrate academic practices into an antiquarian
tradition which defended the city's privileges and political order. This
integration gave the scholarly gatherings a sense of purpose and an agenda. As
the academicians undertook to criss-cross time and space in this way, they
managed to get a firm grounding in an imprescriptible logic, by vesting the
circle with concerns that revolved around the permanence of city's identity.
The publication of the two volumes of the Histoire
littéraire de la ville de Lyon, by the Jesuit Dominique de Colonia marks
the end of this evolution, insofar as several stories intersected in this book:
the history and the founding of the Jesuit college, the history of the city,
and the history of the academic movement. This enabled the new community of
scholars, recently recognized by the letters of patent of 1724, to earn a
historical dimension, a time-honored distinction, which their predecessors had
missed. With this conjunction of three institutional histories, the academy
acquired a memory that could reach almost as far back as the founding of the
city. Thus the black box of academic and civic pride finally closed up. From
then on, the celebration of academic institutions and civic greatness appeared
hand in hand in the mythical foundation of collective identities.
Conclusion : City, Circulation and innovation, the
paths to capitalization
To conclude my paper, I wish to broaden the
scope of this analysis and the period covered here, in order to reach a better
understanding of how a city can rely on the circulation of knowledge to become
a metropolis. The formation of Lyons' cultural space has long been an object of
study, with the pioneering works of Louis Trénard in 1958 or Maurice Garden in
1970.However, the cultural history of Lyons has been profoundly revisited in
the last ten years. Taking into account the results that have been added up, I
propose to define the role and the status of knowledge in this process. The example
of Lyons let us observe three main stages.
First, it should be noted that the city
committed itself to a cycle of accumulation of knowledge and of
institutionalization, which went along with the setting up of routes and
storage areas. Lyons benefitted from its position at the crossroads of
different information networks: religious or denominational networks (those of
the Protestants or the Jesuit missions outside of Europe); the networks of
trade with the Levant and the West Indies (with the experience of entrepreneur
Flachat in the Ottoman empire); the network of medicine, connecting the centers
of medical training (Geneva, Montpellier, Strasbourg); the networks of local
scholars and antique dealers (Esprit Calvet in Avignon). The second remarkable element
is the increase in the number of public libraries in the city (Jesuits,
Augustins, Dominicans, Oratorians), as well as of private collections. With
respect to these private collections, the catalogues that have been preserved
denote a significant intellectual openness on the part of Lyons' elites.
Through its connections with various remote peripheries, Lyons became a real
center of exchanges, as well as a center for the treatment of information. The
figure of bibliographer Adamoli epitomizes these new possibilities.
The
structuration of this rise to the rank of "cultural capital" rested
on a second factor: namely, the capacity of Lyons' elites for generalizing
local questions. They displayed this capacity in the technical fields of the
silk industry, which exported many devices. The emergence of a certain form of
local expertise played a significant part in the popular academic competitions
of the second half of the 18th century. The city's success in these
competitions showed in the way the questions sent from Lyons drew many answers.
The research of Liliane Hilaire-Perez on technological transfers, as well as
the work of Marie Thébaut-Sorger on aerostatic experiments both emphasize the
rallying power of Lyons' institutions throughout the kingdom.
Finally,
the third peculiar feature of Lyons' cultural scene lies in the interconnection
of various networks of sociability, which favored both a capitalization of
knowledge and its translation into universal terms, for the use of other places
in Europe. As this structure depended on a single network, it was possible for
the "capital" function to work on a permanent basis. Lyons thus
became an attractive place for new cultural movements in Europe, movements that
throve on extra-national principles and on cosmopolitan values: the city became
a great center for the freemasonry, as well as a crossroads in the Protestant
diaspora. The significance of these various elements has recently been
reassessed in a European context, and they point to an interpenetration of the
fields of cultural experience in the city , the fields of commerce, masonic or
religious activities. They also show a shift in the definition of urban
identity on the eve of the Revolution. Urban identity no longer rested on a
withdrawal into a common space, but on the contrary on this ability to function
as a center in the circulatory system of innovation.