The Press and Academic Judgment

I was doing research at the French National Library in 2008 when I stumbled on a prospectus for a new journal that caught my eye. It was dated 1802 and signed by the professors of the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris. The occasion of launching a new periodical prompted them to reflect on the origins of scientific progress, which they traced back to the moment when savants began to investigate nature as a collaborative activity. "This fortunate development is mainly due to two institutions first imagined in the seventeenth century." The first of these were academies of science, "those bodies to which members come each day to submit to the examination of their colleagues new facts and relations they believe themselves to have discovered." The second was the invention of scholarly journals [journaux savans] that diffused discoveries to wider audiences and which proliferated during the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, however, academies — being "attached like all others to their original habits" — had not made much use of journals. Though they often published memoirs, they did so "slowly and in large volumes," accessible only to "a small number of rich amateurs." The two institutions had thus remained apart, and the Muséum would at last bring them together.

These professors' idea that academies and journals had evolved in parallel but separately puzzled me. Raised on late modern narratives of the origins of modern science, I believed that the swift adoption of journals by academies and societies is what made the emergence of open, collective scientific progress possible. It was tempting to chalk up the Muséum's reading of scientific history to French parochialism. The genuine origins of the scientific journal were surely to be found in England, where the Philosophical Transactions was founded under the aegis of the Royal Society of London. But historical reflections across the Channel seemed rather to corroborate the professors' account. An 1813 prospectus for a new London journal noted that the moment the Royal Society took control of the Transactions in the mid-eighteenth century it transformed it into an expensive, infrequently published collection of memoirs resembling those of the French Academy. After that, "Britain no longer possessed a periodical philosophical journal" at all. It turned out that all those stories about continuous and exponential growth of science, pegged to the spread of journals such as the Philosophical Transactions, might be based on a series of media-historical misunderstandings.

What happens if we take seriously the idea that the professors of the Muséum really were doing something quite new, and even potentially controversial, by publishing a journal? These earlier accounts may have seen history differently because they were alive to distinctions of genre and format that many accounts of the origins of modern science, burdened with the knowledge of what scientific journals are supposed to be, have blurred together. If their forerunners — the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society of London — had largely eschewed journals, then we need to investigate why they did so, and what formats, genres, and record-keeping tools they used instead. Moreover, we should explore the relationship between the Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society to those mythical publications, the Journal des savants and the Philosophical Transactions. How did the conceptions of judgment embodied in these and subsequent learned publications of the eighteenth century compare to those favored by academies and societies? As we explore these questions, we should be careful to avoid separating out a dozen or so "scientific periodicals" from the broader landscape of Enlightenment journals. Why? Simply because no one in the eighteenth century recognized any special category constituted by "scientific periodicals."

When the professors at the Muséum announced their new journal in 1802, they acknowledged that journals dedicated to science had their problems. Because of "the ease of skimming a brochure of a few pages in comparison with the labor required to study a folio," the proliferation of journals might encourage the pretensions of "demi-savants" to participate in natural philosophy. We should therefore ask why institutions such as the Muséum d'histoire naturelle decided that it was worth the effort to consider publishing a journal of their own. Conversely, we can also ask why savants decided to contribute original content to the new journals, and even to agree to edit them. This means paying especially close attention to the changing meaning and status of authorship, at a time when the enlightened reading public was coming to be figured as a literary market to which writers might appeal to establish their reputations, rather than by associating with aristocratic patrons. It is easy to imagine that writing for periodicals meant to early nineteenth-century savants what it does now: publicizing a claim among peers, establishing priority, and indicating that one's claims had passed some threshold of credibility. While it meant some of these things some of the time, the considerations involved could be a great deal more diverse, and could even be fraught with risks.

The Rise and Fall of Oldenburg's Vision

When Denis de Sallo, an obsessive compiler of extracts from books, founded the Journal des sçavans in Paris in January 1665, his aim was less to provide a venue for the generation of new knowledge than to provide a solution to there being too much of it. He promised to give his readers a digest of "all that is new in the Republic of Letters," and he filled each number with book reviews, extracts, translations, and bibliographical lists. There was also space for some other kinds of content: obituaries of scholars, reports of new discoveries and inventions, and decisions of ecclesiastical courts. The format gradually caught on in continental Europe, and it played a crucial role in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. In 1710, an observer defined journals as "those sequential works which provide information from time to time about the various books which have appeared and what is contained in them ..." This was not only an intellectual service but a commercial one, for readers were also consumers. Scholarly journals fit into a long history of technologies for ordering and managing the landscape of scholarly news that seemed always already to be spinning out of control.

Just weeks after acquiring a copy of the first issue of the Journal des sçavans, Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London, presented to the Society his own take on the new format, which he had titled the Philosophical Transactions. It contained fewer reviews but more news of experiments, found objects, and other happenings in natural philosophy. As the secretary of the Society, Oldenburg felt perpetually overworked, constantly writing letters on behalf of the Society, taking "much pains in satisfying forran demands about philosophicall matters" and distributing "farr and near store of directions and enquiries for the society's purpose." A printed bulletin like the Transactions was a means of accomplishing this more efficiently.

Although they were controlled by individuals, both these publications had some connection with learned societies. In different ways, they were a part of the strategies through which the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society in London eked out spaces of stability and trust in the face of the treacherous world of European printing and publishing. But they did so in remarkably different ways, and these differences were bound up with the degrees of assent they were able to command as central registers and arbiters of knowledge.

The main documentary technology of the early Royal Society was not the Transactions but its register books. When observations, experiments, and discovery claims were presented to the Society, they were recorded in these volumes by hand, along with their dates. The register was a reliable means of recording and establishing a discovery claim because it existed in a single copy, it remained in the charge of a trusted individual, and it could be used to record successful demonstrations and experiments at meetings virtually in real time in front of other trustworthy witnesses. These manuscript lists were particularly appropriate to the epistemological orientation of the Society's leading members, who valued above all else the accumulation of particulars and curiosities. The Society's first historian and publicist, Thomas Sprat, explained that "their purpose was, to heap up a mixt Mass of Experiments, without digesting them into any perfect model." Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have called them strange facts, esteemed precisely because they resisted incorporation into hasty theoretical systems.

In comparison, the circulation of printed texts left much to be desired. Books were subject to unauthorized and faulty replication, responsibility for their form and content was distributed between a number of different parties (including some motivated by profit), and dates of printing stood in no predictable relation to the date of the discoveries and observations recorded. The situation with periodicals was even more uncertain. The most proximate precedent in Britain were the newsbooks that appeared in the 1640s when press controls lapsed during the English Civil Wars. These publications came and went on a regular basis, their periodicity was based on calculated obsolescence, and many were associated with political dissension and disorder.

But as long as the Society wished to publicize its work more broadly, the print shop was hard to avoid. The possibility of being mentioned or printed in Oldenburg's newsletter gave potential adherents to the experimental philosophy added incentive to engage in correspondence with him. And the miscellaneous nature of its content shared with the register a resistance to system-building. In its Charter, the state had given the Society the power to license books for publication, and it used this to allow Oldenburg to publish the Philosophical Transactions. Still, the Society's association with a periodical publication remained a fraught proposition. Issues of the Transactions were subject to unauthorized reprinting, translation, and appropriation across Europe. Oldenburg was often on the defensive about his publication. He was careful to strike a balance between playing up its utility and minimizing the significance of its contents, and he was careful to take primary responsibility for its contents. After Oldenburg passed away in 1677, the publication went through decades of turmoil, and it even perished for certain periods.

Across the Channel, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris experienced similar tensions, but it had a different hierarchical organization, more intimate ties to the monarchy, and a stronger set of privileges attaching to publications and inventions. While the philosophical gentlemen in London maintained a strategically ambiguous link to the Philosophical Transactions well into the eighteenth century, the Parisian Academy generally kept its ties to learned journals out of view entirely.

After its founding in 1666, the Academy had experimented with various forms of collective organization and publishing, but nothing quite seemed to stick. The major works with which it was first identified were multivolume projects on the natural history of animals and of plants in which individual authorship was subsumed by the whole. Yet academicians turned out to be reluctant to have their discovery claims obscured in this way, and many continued to publish elsewhere. Letters to the Journal des sçavans were a convenient means of staking individual claims, although the Academy insisted on screening these letters first, for the sake of protecting both its reputation and its collective property. The Academy tried out other arrangements as well. For a short period beginning in 1692 they attempted to run their own monthly publication made up of short memoirs by its own members. (They explainedthat academicians were sometimes distracted from their principal work by unrelated chance discoveries.) This too did not last.

In 1699 the Academy was reorganized and given a new hierarchical structure that in some ways mirrored the orders of French society itself. The publication format that emerged from this "Renouvellement" was called the Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique et physique (Histoire et mémoires, for short). It became the pattern not only of its own publication strategy but of many other learned academies and societies for the next century. Its lavish quarto volumes, with large margins and expensive illustrated plates, covered a year's worth of the Academy's work and consisted of two parts. The Histoire was an overview of the works of the Academy as a whole, consisting largely of a curated summary by the secretaries of notable work that had been presented at its meetings. The Mémoires, which made up the bulk of most volumes, were collections of polished versions of papers written by its own members. It was thus a compromise between collective report and individual authorship. No one confused these volumes with learned journals. They were issued far less frequently, and the histories and tracts they contained often commemorated experiments and papers that had been presented several years earlier. Many other academies made no pretense to regularity of publication at all, issuing volumes of memoirs whenever they had collected sufficient matter to put out a volume.

It is tempting to regard the Histoire et mémoires as a rather deficient product. The infrequent publishing schedule, the long delays between presentation and publication, and the fact that it tended only to publish their members' work have been cited as signs that such royal academies were unable to meet the pressing needs of science. In this reading, the Paris Academy published a journal, but despite the considerable resources of the state, it did a remarkably bad job of it.

But consider the Academy's publishing strategy in the context of its role within the absolutist French state, and it takes on a different appearance. Arguably the most important genre attaching to the Academy's collective identity was not the mémoire but rather the rapport. The 1699 Renouvellement provided the Academy a set of privileges that gave it the right and responsibility to oversee developments in science and technology for the King. The Academy acted as an examination board for new inventions, deciding whether inventors (or importers of inventions from abroad) ought to be granted commercial protections. Second, like the Royal Society, the Academy came to possess the powers of a censor with respect to natural philosophical writings. Decisions about the value of new inventions, as well as about the suitability of scientific and technical memoirs, came to involve the writing of reports by commissions consisting of two or three academicians. These would be read out at meetings and recorded in the minutes, and some would even find their way into print. The collective authority of the Academy was increasingly concentrated in these judgments. To exercise the powers of an academician was to be a rapporteur.

Although the initial raison d'être of the rapports may have been legal, they came to possess other kinds of significance. Antoine Lavoisier later observed that the Academy had gradually become "a voluntary tribunal to which individuals appeal directly for judgment." To present one's scientific manuscript or invention to the Academy was to present it for approval to the only public of science that was supposed to matter. Inventors who received a favorable report might advertise their product by printing an excerpt from the report, or at least the phrase "Approuvé par l'Académie Royale des Sciences." Authors sometimes printed a favorable academic report they had received as a preface to a book and pamphlet. (See for exampleFigure 1.1.) More generally, submitting one's research to the Academy was a crucial means of finding favor among the elites, and for a lucky few it might eventually lead to election to the Academy itself. (The 1699 statutes promised that preference in elections would be given to "those savants that have been most exact" in their correspondence with the Academy.) The submission of a manuscript to the Academy was effectively a gift to a potential patron.