Descartes' Bones (17 page)

The chamber was wavering now; apparently Mercier's points had resonated with some. Chénier took the floor again and addressed his colleagues in anger. “With regard to the project that I have presented in the name of the commission,” he began, “I believe that the legislative body would cover itself in disgrace—” The rest of his sentence was drowned out by “violent murmurs,” as the secretary noted in his minutes. “I cannot otherwise express my thoughts,” Chénier continued after a moment. “I believe that the legislative body would compromise its glory and the national glory if, in ceding to the inclination that some persons seem carried away by, it denied today the solemn promise made to the memory of Descartes by the national convention.”

The debate grew; Voltaire was brought into it, and members began to compare the revolutionary credentials of Voltaire, Descartes, and Rousseau. A member rose to clarify the differences between the contributions of Voltaire and Descartes. “Voltaire enlightened all classes of the people,” he declared. “He employed, to be understood by each, the language suitable to them. The works of profound philosophy don't carry to all the world. As for Descartes, I have read part of his works, and I avow that never have I known so great a genius. I have read also Newton, but I have more veneration for Descartes, because he was first, and maybe also because he is French. I ask that the project of Chénier be instantly adopted.”

There was too much disagreement, however. Someone suggested postponing the matter. Chénier said he would agree to a postponement, but he insisted that if the pantheonization of Descartes was attacked a second time, “I ask that nothing be decided until we have heard, at this platform, from all those who want to defend the Enlightenment and philosophy.”

T
HE POSTPONEMENT PROVED FATAL
to Chénier's cause. Years passed, and Descartes' bones stayed in the garden of Lenoir's museum. The museum itself continued successful, but much else changed. France's wars against the monarchies of Europe brought about the end of its revolution—not through losses to foreign powers but through the rise of one of the revolutionary government's own military commanders. From victories in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte returned in 1799 to conquer his own country, upending the weak government of the Directory and installing himself in power. The most notable change he enacted as “first consul” was to grant the Catholic Church some of its former status. Then, in 1804, having consolidated power, he changed his title. He was now emperor. The democratic republic—and, seemingly, the whole raft of dreams and ideals based on the reorientation of society around reason, science, and the individual—was finished.

If Napoleon represented a grand problem for France, and for Europe, he was a particular problem for Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir now found himself in an awkward position. His was a “revolutionary museum,” born out of the chaos of the Revolution, dedicated to the values of the Revolution. He tried to resell it to the new regime, pitching it no longer as offering a vision of history building to a climax with the Revolution but rather as celebrating the French past. He focused his efforts on Napoleon's wife, Josephine, and managed to get her to pay a visit to the museum along with members of her entourage. She came in the evening, and Lenoir had the building and gardens tricked out with flaming torches, the better to show off the sepulchral charms. Napoleon himself visited once as well and remarked that the exotic gloom—stony figures recumbent beneath a blue ceiling stippled with painted stars—reminded him of Syria.

To some extent Lenoir's effort worked: the museum endured through Napoleon's reign. But after Elba and Waterloo, with Napoleon's passing and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, Lenoir's luck ran out. Completing one of the most notable of the many pendulum swings between secularism and religion that have characterized the modern centuries, the Catholic Church came back into power alongside the monarchy, with renewed force. As one aspect of its return, individual churches around the country demanded to have their property back. Lenoir tried to appease churchmen and keep his collection together by proposing to add a religious focus to the museum. His idea was to group the tombs together in a chapel that he would design and to offer masses there. But it didn't play. In 1816, Louis XVIII issued a decree that religious property in the Museum of French Monuments be returned to its originating institutions; the same year, the museum's grounds were given to the national art institute. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts continues to occupy the site today.

Lenoir oversaw the dismantling of the collection he had personally amassed. Many objects went back to the churches from which they had been taken. Others went to the Louvre, where they remain to this day. The statues of French kings were returned to the Basilica of St.-Denis—and with them, too, went Lenoir. In recognition of his work in preserving so much of the nation's and the church's patrimony, he was given the position of conservator of monuments at the basilica. He spent the rest of his life there and continued to catalog art and artifacts until his death in 1839. His son Albert picked up where he left off, becoming a founder of the new field of architectural history and spending twenty-seven years compiling his massive three-volume
Statistique monumentale de Paris.

When the Museum of French Monuments closed, the question of what to do with the tombs of so many French notables excited some popular interest, and various officials weighed in. One idea concerned the vast cemetery of Père-Lachaise. It had been organized under Napoleon but was so far from the city center it got little business. The idea involved transferring the famous remains from Lenoir's former establishment to the cemetery and making the occasion a public event in which the ancient, historic remains would give the new cemetery on the far eastern fringes of the city some attention and cachet. In March 1817, the city's conservator of monuments wrote to the minister of the interior and the prefect of the Seine proposing that the tombs of Descartes, Abelard and Heloise, the poet Nicolas Boileau, and the scholars Bernard de Montfaucon and Jean Mabillon be included, saying that “all these illustrious personages merit the same homage and the same religious treatment.” The officials agreed, tombs were transported en masse, and the plan worked. The presence of the tombs of the great Molière, the poet La Fontaine, and especially the doomed lovers Abelard and Heloise—whose tragic love affair took place in the context of a twelfth-century version of the clash between faith and knowledge—excited morbid interest and encouraged cultured Parisians to buy plots. Today Père-Lachaise—whose more recent residents include Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison—is one of Paris's most popular tourist sites.

But Descartes wasn't part of the mass migration to Père-Lachaise. Once again, it seems, a group of “friends of philosophy” took a particular interest in his bones and exercised their influence. The cemetery was too remote. If the church of the patron saint of Paris had once housed the remains of the father of modern philosophy, another site, equally symbolic, had to be found. They settled on the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, on the left bank of the river. It was the oldest church in Paris, founded in the sixth century, and the intertwining of its history with that of the city extended right to its partial destruction during the Revolution. On February 26, 1819, yet another formal religious ceremony—the third—was held over the remains. In the presence of the commissioner of police, the mayor of the Tenth Arrondissement, and delegates from the prefect of the Seine, the remains of Descartes, together with those of Mabillon and Montfaucon, were taken from the garden of the former museum. They were “extracted” from their tombs
“avec une religieuse attention”
and placed in fresh oak coffins. A party consisting of numerous members of the French Academy of Sciences processed with the coffins the short distance along the left bank from the former convent to the church. Here they were buried, and three black marble plaques erected, in a chapel on the right side of the nave.

The plaques can still be seen in the church today; Descartes' gives a fusty lineup of Latin platitudes extolling his immortal accomplishments. But exactly what lies beneath the plaque bearing his name is a matter of contention. When the porphyry box was opened, the members of the academy who peered into its ancient recesses were confused and dismayed at what they found—as well as at what they did not find. Something was wrong. Things were not as they had been led to believe.

Eventually the learned gentlemen set about doing what, as good, modern scientists, they were trained to do: analyze information, sound old theories, and construct new hypotheses. The bones of Descartes were about to leave history and enter science. Or, to reference another modern construct—a literary one—that was just being invented, they were about to become the subject of a detective story.

The Misplaced Head

F THE SAGA OF
D
ESCARTES' BONES CAN SERVE AS
a metaphor for modernity then it is doubly symbolic that during their peregrinations the head somehow got separated from the body and was to become, as it wound its way through the centuries, a source of mystery for various thinkers, artists, and scientists. For what does Descartes stand for today if not the cerebral over the material—the head over the body? Who bequeathed to us the mind-body problem?

In the seventeenth century it was considered normal for thinkers to cover a fairly astonishing range of subjects in depth—all of reality, more or less. A Descartes or Hobbes or Leibniz might devote one major work to light and optics, another to geology, another to God, another to free will, another to the movement of the tides, another to that of the planets. As the 1700s went by such grandeur became less and less possible. A botanical treatise written in 1542 listed five hundred known plant varieties. By the end of the 1600s the catalog included ten thousand; in 1824 the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle indexed fifty thousand plants. Specialization was by this time the only way to advance knowledge. Descartes and other natural explorers of his day believed that nature was a puzzle that just the right sequence of discoveries would unravel, leading to astounding changes that they could not even imagine. Of course, they were right about the astounding changes, but they were naïve in their appreciation of the puzzle's complexity.

By the 1800s, there was much greater awareness of the complexity. The task of understanding the universe was in the process of being divided into different fields, and there was sometimes a geographic slant to the specialization. It so happened that the country in which Descartes had chosen to die was particularly rich in mineral deposits, making it a center of the newly emerging field of chemistry. Swedish chemists discovered a good portion of the sixty-eight elements known by the late nineteenth century, including oxygen, the elemental element, as it were (though since Carl Wilhelm Scheele's discovery of oxygen in 1773 was beaten out for publication by Joseph Priestley, credit is often given to both men).

The greatest of these chemists—and one of the most prominent figures in the history of science—was Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the man who in 1821 sat down to compose the idiosyncratic letter whose opening is quoted above. He started life in rural Sweden, threshing hempseed and sleeping in the potato storage, launched himself in a career in medicine, but discovered that he loved experimentation and analysis more than healing. He found work at the School of Surgery in Stockholm under a revered professor of medicine and pharmacology named Anders Sparrman, lived in the house of a mine owner, and roomed with a physician who operated a spa where people went for its healing mineral waters—surrounding himself, in other words, with chemicals and chemistry. The young Berzelius was perennially short of cash and made a deal whereby in lieu of paying for his meals he would create new mineral water mixtures—seltzers, bitters, alkalines, “liver water”—for the spa goers' pleasure.

Under Sparrman, Berzelius did some things—discovering the odd element—that today might merit a Nobel Prize, but when Sparrman retired Berzelius was passed over as his replacement. He was about to resign himself to a career as a country doctor but the young man who had been given Sparrman's position died suddenly and Berzelius was granted one of the few jobs in chemistry that then existed in the world. He was a bluff, florid man with a capacity for enormous energy, and he went at his work with herculean intensity. One of the hurdles the field had to clear was determining the atomic weights of each element, which was necessary in order to know how elements could be combined with one another to form new compounds. In a feat of intellectual and physical labor that has become legendary among chemists, Berzelius set about fixing the weights of all the elements then known. He typically worked from six-thirty in the morning to ten at night; at one point he was nearly blinded in an explosion. The rewards were sweet. After fixing the combinations of silver chloride and sulfuric acid and barium hydroxide, he noted that “it is impossible to describe the bliss. . . . But to this end two years of ceaseless work had been given.” He published his results in what quickly became the standard textbook of chemistry. Meanwhile, hampered and annoyed, as others had been, by the chaotic terminology and symbols that various scientists had devised for the elements and their combinations—some looked like hieroglyphs or a child's drawings—he invented what he thought was a clearer system, using letters from the beginning of the Latin terms for each element. He thus gave the periodic table—and the landscape of chemistry—the look that it has today.

Immediately following this burst of effort Berzelius suffered a nervous breakdown. Friends suggested travel as a way to recuperate, and he set out for the two capital cities of science. He was an international celebrity now and was received into the scientific inner circles in London and Paris. In London, this was the Royal Society; in Paris, it was the Academy of Sciences. These institutions reflected the different approach to science as it evolved in the two countries. The English were freelancers, and the Royal Society was something of a gentleman's club. But if the top-down approach of the French retarded the growth of industry in France, it had an important benefit for the development of Western history. As an offshoot of the government, the Academy of Sciences was able to function with an authority that the Royal Society did not. As Maurice Crosland, a historian of science at the University of Kent in Canterbury, notes, this authority in defining what science was started with the word itself. The Royal Society had an approach to knowledge that was holistic and at times playful, one that hearkened back to the seventeenth-century natural philosophers. In the early nineteenth century its members still tended to use the word
science
in the broad medieval sense, so that theology could still be regarded as “the queen of the sciences.” Crosland argues that it was the French Revolution that nudged the members of the Academy of Sciences to begin restricting the use of the word to a particular type of secular investigation of the natural world, so that while in English
science
came into its current usage only in the 1830s, the Académie des sciences showed in its name that the French had long before moved in this regard in the direction of modernity.

The academy adopted an appropriately scientific approach to science, organizing itself into divisions, subdivisions, and sub-subdivisions, and in so doing helped define to this day the way knowledge is structured in university departments and research institutes. Astronomy, geography, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany, mechanics, agriculture—each branch had a department, and each department was tied to a school where that field was taught. Each held conferences, awarded prizes, funded research. When it was felt necessary, the members of the academy met to discuss whether to create a new subdivision, such as when the growing collections of fossils all over Europe led to the creation of a division of paleontology and then a subcategory of paleobotany.

Dating back to the period before the Revolution, the academy also defined what science was not. When Franz Mesmer came to Paris, having been run out of Vienna after causing an uproar with his “animal magnetism”—a precursor to hypnosis—members of the academy met in 1784 to consider whether “mesmerism,” as it also became known, had any scientific basis. Mesmer's technique used magnets, long gazes, and pressure on the hands and arms to cause changes in patients; he argued that there was an unknown fluid, or “tide,” within the human body that could be shifted in this way to bring about healing. All of Europe was in a frenzy over whether animal magnetism was real or not. The Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences decided to weigh in. The committee of review they put together was something of an all-star team of eighteenth-century science, including Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose name was soon to become attached to the signature device of the Revolution, and, as visiting authority on electricity and other currents, Benjamin Franklin. In an early instance of the use of placebo and the single-blind trial, the scientists told some people they were being magnetized when in fact they were not, while others were magnetized without their knowing it. Those who had been told they were being magnetized, even when there was no actual magnet used, reported positive results; those who were magnetized without their knowing it showed no results. The scientists concluded that the evidence did not support the idea of the movement of tidal fluids within the body. Rather it demonstrated the effects of “the imagination.” The academy deemed that mesmerism was not science—and from that moment it was not. Mesmer left Paris the next year. Mesmerism went on to have a lively career in nineteenth-century America, but it eventually went the way of the wooly mammoth and ultimately history would demote Franz Mesmer's immortal status from imposing noun to ephemeral adjective.

Berzelius arrived in Paris in 1818 as a guest of the academy. He was awed by Paris and the great houses where he was entertained and was fascinated both by the egalitarian nature of the salons (“In conversation there is no distinction between those of high station and other good folk. Titles such as Prince, Count etc. are never used in speech”) and by how highly evolved his field had become in the city (“I believe that there are here more than 100 laboratories devoted to research, and there are several dealers specializing in chemical glassware whose stock is a source of astonishment to a poor Stockholmer who, when he needs a simple retort, cannot obtain it in less than three months”). Salons may have displayed a democratic sensibility but the academy itself, the inner sanctum of European science, impressed Berzelius with its grandeur. The members even wore a specially designed costume, green with frilly gold trim (they were French, after all), which amounted to a scientific uniform. Berzelius's trip was meant for recuperation, but he now felt rejuvenated enough to settle into a furious round of activity. With Claude-Louis Berthollet and Pierre-Louis Dulong, two of the great chemists of the day, he devised a way to further refine his calculation of the atomic weight of hydrogen. He met the discoverer of fatty acids and the discoverer of hydrogen peroxide, whom he admired (though the chemical had not yet evolved into a fashion statement), and he worked on a French translation of his book.

As it happened, Berzelius was in Paris when the third burial of Descartes' bones took place. One of those who had been invited to the burial ceremony was Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, the leading astronomer of the day and one of the two permanent secretaries of the academy, who functioned as codirectors. Delambre had a passion not only for science but for its history. His devotion to the ideals of precision and accuracy resulted in an achievement that has shaped the world to this day. Nearly thirty years before—in the midst of the Revolution—he had opened up a whole front of modernity by directing the project that led to the creation of the metric system. Throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages European localities had devised hundreds of different units of weight and measurement, which varied from village to village, and even those with the same name varied, so that a pound of bread or a pint of beer meant different quantities in different places. This nonsystem maintained local traditions but inhibited trade—on a very practical level it kept Europe medieval. The new, modern idea was to give everyone in the world one system, which would be based not on custom or legend or ancient myth but on nature—to be precise, on the scientific calculation of a natural standard.