Men of Mathematics (38 page)

The good Benedictines prevailed upon the young genius to choose the priesthood as his profession, and he entered the abbey of Saint-Benoît to become a novitiate. But before Fourier could take his vows
1789
arrived. He had always wanted to be a soldier and had chosen the priesthood only because commissions were not given to sons of tailors. The Revolution set him free. His old friends at Auxerre were broadminded enough to see that Fourier would never make a monk. They took him back and made him professor of mathematics. This was the first step—a long one—toward his ambition. Fourier proved his versatility by teaching his colleagues' classes when they were ill, usually better than they did themselves, in everything from physics to the classics.

In December,
1789,
Fourier (then twenty one) went to Paris to present his researches on the solution of numerical equations before the Academy. This work advanced beyond Lagrange, and is still of value, but as it is overshadowed by Fourier's methods in mathematical physics, we shall not discuss it further; it may be found in elementary texts on the theory of equations. The subject became one of his lifelong interests.

On returning to Auxerre Fourier joined the people's party and used his natural eloquence, which had enabled him as a small boy to compose stirring sermons, to stir up the people to put an end to mere sermonizers (among others).

From the first Fourier was an enthusiast for the Revolution—till it got out of hand. During the Terror, ignoring the danger to himself, he protested against the needless brutality. If he were living today Fourier would probably belong to the intelligentsia, blissfully unaware that such are among the first to be swept into the gutter when the real revolution begins. He was all for the masses and the renaissance of science and culture which the intellectuals imagined they foresaw. Instead of the generous encouragement of the sciences which he had predicted, Fourier presently saw men of science riding in the tumbrils or fleeing the country, and science itself fighting for its life in a rapidly rising tide of barbarism.

It is to Napoleon's everlasting credit that he was one of the first to see with cold-blooded clarity that ignorance of itself can do nothing but destroy. His own remedy in the end may not have been much better, but he did recognize that such a thing as civilization might be possible. To check the mere blood-letting Napoleon ordered or encouraged
the creation of schools. But there were no teachers. All the brains that might have been pressed into immediate service had long since fallen into the buckets. It became imperative to train a new teaching corps of fifteen hundred, and for this purpose the École Normale was created in 1794. As a reward for his recruiting in Auxerre Fourier was called to the chair of mathematics.

With this appointment a new era in the teaching of French mathematics began. Remembering the deadly lectures of defunct professors, memorized and delivered verbatim the same year after dreary year, the Convention called in
creators
of mathematics to do the
teaching,
and forbade them to lecture from any notes at all. The lectures were to be delivered standing (not sitting half asleep behind a desk), and were to be a free interchange of questions and explanations between the professor and his class. It was up to the lecturer to prevent a session from degenerating into a profitless debate.

The success of this scheme even surpassed expectations and led to one of the most brilliant periods in the history of French mathematics and science. Both at the short-lived Normale and the enduring Polytechnique Fourier demonstrated his genius for teaching. At the Polytechnique he enlivened his lectures on mathematics by out-of-the-way historical allusions (many of which he was the first to trace to their sources), and he skilfully tempered abstractions with interesting applications.

Fourier was still turning out engineers and mathematicians at the Polytechnique when Napoleon in 1798 decided to take him along as one of the Legion of Culture to civilize Egypt—“to offer a succouring hand to unhappy peoples, to free them from the brutalizing yoke under which they have groaned for centuries, and finally to endow them without delay with all the benefits of European civilization.”

Incredible as it may seem, the quotation is not from Signor Mussolini in 1935 justifying an invasion of Ethiopia, but from Arago in 1833 setting forth the lofty and humane aims of Napoleon's assault on Egypt. It will be interesting to see how the unregenerate inhabitants of Egypt received “all the benefits of European civilization” which Messrs. Monge, Berthollet, and Fourier strove to ram down their throats, and what those three musketeers of European culture themselves got out of their unselfish missionary work.

*  *  *

The French fleet of five hundred ships arrived at Malta on June 9,
1798, and three days later captured the place. As a first step toward civilizing the East, Monge started fifteen elementary schools and a higher school somewhat on the lines of the Polytechnique. A week later the fleet was on its way again, with Monge aboard Napoleon's flagship,
l'Orient.
Every morning Napoleon outlined a program for discussion after dinner in the evening. Needless to say, Monge was the star of these soirées. Among the topics solemnly debated were the age of the earth, the possibility of the world coming to an end by fire or water, and “Are the planets inhabited?” The last suggests that even at this comparatively early stage of his career Napoleon's ambitions outran Alexander's.

The fleet reached Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Monge was one of the first to leap ashore, and it was only by exercising his authority as Commander in Chief that Napoleon restrained the
Marseillaising
geometer from participating in the assault on the city. It would never do to have the Legion of Culture annihilated in the first skirmish before the work of civilization could begin; so Napoleon sent Monge and the rest of them up the Nile by boat to Cairo.

While Monge and company lolled like Cleopatra and her court under their sunshade, Napoleon marched resolutely along the bank, civilizing the uncultured (and poorly armed) inhabitants with shot and flame. Presently the intrepid General heard a devil of a cannonade from the direction of the river. Guessing the worst he abandoned the battle in which he was engaged at the moment and galloped to the rescue. The blessed boat was hard aground on a sand bar. There was Monge serving the cannon like a veteran. Napoleon arrived just in the nick of time to chase the attackers up the bank and give Monge his well-merited decoration for conspicuous bravery. So Monge after all had his way and got his sniff of powder. Napoleon was so overjoyed at having saved his friend that he did not regret the decisive victory Monge's rescue had cost him.

Following the victory of July 20, 1798, at the Battle of the Pyramids, the triumphant army whooped into Cairo. Everything went off like fireworks, precisely as that great idealist Napoleon had dreamed, but for one trifling fizzle. The obtuse Egyptians cared not a single curse for the cultural banquet which Messrs. Monge, Fourier, and Berthollet spread before them at the Egyptian Institute (founded, August 27, 1798, in parody of the
Institut de France),
but sat like mummies through the great chemist's scientific legerdemain, the enthusiastic
Monge's concerts, and the historical disquisitions of the scholarly Fourier on the glories of their own mummified civilization. The sweating savants shed their sangfroid, damning their prospective enlightenees as tasteless cattle incapable of relishing the rich hash of French erudition offered for their spiritual nourishment, but to no avail. Once more the wily, “unsophisticated” native made a complete ass of his determined uplifters by holding his peace and waiting for the plague of locusts to be blown away in the scavenging winds. To keep his self-respect till the breezes blew, the uncivilized Egyptian criticized the superior civilization of his conquerors in the one language they could understand. Three hundred of Napoleon's bravest had their hairy throats cut at one swipe in a street brawl. Monge himself saved his own windpipe and those of his beleaguered companions only by an exhibition of heroism for which any Boy Scout today in the English-speaking world might well receive a medal.

This ingratitude on the part of the unregenerate Egyptians cut Napoleon to the quick. His suspicion that it was his moral duty to desert his companions in arms was strengthened by disturbing news from Paris. During his absence things on the Continent had been going from purgatory to damnation; and now he must hurry back to preserve the honor of France and his own skin. Monge shared the General's confidence; the less beloved Fourier did not. Fourier, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that he was considerable enough in his commander's masterful eyes to be left in Cairo to educate Egypt or have his throat cut, when Napoleon, accompanied by the complaisant Monge, took secret passage for France without so much as an adieu to the troops who had suffered hell for him in the desert. Not being a Commander in Chief, Fourier was not entitled to take to his heels in the face of danger. He stayed, perforce. Only in 1801, when the French after Trafalgar finally acknowledged that the British, not they, were to regenerate the Egyptians, did the devoted—but disillusioned—Fourier return to France.

*  *  *

The return trip of Monge and Napoleon was less amusing for both of them than the voyage out. Instead of speculating about the end of the world Napoleon spent much anxious thought on his own probable end should the British sailors bag him. The reward for desertion in the field, he recalled, was a strictly private interview with a firing
squad. Would the British treat him as a deserter for having run away from his army? If he must die he would die theatrically.

“Monge,” he said one day, “if we are attacked by the British, our ship must be blown up the instant they board us. I charge you to carry it out.”

The very next day a sail topped the horizon and all hands stood to their posts to repel the expected attack. But it turned out to be a French ship after all.

“Where's Monge?” somebody asked when all the excitement was over.

They found him in the powder magazine with a lighted lamp in his hand. If only that had been a British ship—. They always blow in fifteen minutes or fifteen years too late.

Berthollet and Monge arrived home looking like a pair of tramps. Neither had had a change of clothes since he left, and it was only with difficulty that Monge got by his wife's porter.

The friendship with Napoleon continued unmarred. Probably Monge was the only man in France who dared to stand up to Napoleon and tell him the truth in the days of his greatest arrogance. When Napoleon crowned himself Emperor the young men of the Polytechnique revolted. They were Monge's pride.

“Well, Monge,” Napoleon remarked one day, “your pupils are nearly all in revolt against me; they have decidedly declared themselves my enemies.”

“Sire,” Monge replied, “we have had trouble enough to make republicans out of them; give them time to become imperialists. Moreover, permit me to say, you have turned rather abruptly!”

Little spats like this meant nothing between old lovers. In 1804 Napoleon showed his appreciation of Monge's merits by creating him Count of Péluse (Pelusium). For his part Monge accepted the honor gratefully and lived up to the title with all the usual trappings of nobility, forgetting that he had once voted for the abolition of all titles.

And so it went, in an ever more dazzling blaze of splendor till the year 1812, which was to have ushered in the day of glory, but which brought instead the retreat from Moscow. Too old (he was sixty six) to accompany Napoleon into Russia, Monge had stayed behind in France at his country estate, eagerly following the progress of the Grand Army through the official bulletins. When he read the fatal “Bulletin 29,” announcing the disaster to French arms, Monge suffered
a stroke of apoplexy. On recovering he said, “A little while ago I did not know something that I know now; I know how I shall die.”

Monge was to be spared for the final curtain; Fourier helped to lower it. On his return from Egypt Fourier was appointed (January 2, 1802) prefect of the Department of Isère, with headquarters at Grenoble. The district was then in political turmoil; Fourier's first task was to restore order. He was met by a curious opposition which he subdued in a ludicrous fashion. While in Egypt Fourier had taken a leading part in administering the archaeological research of the Institute. The good citizens of Grenoble were much upset by the religious implications of some of the Institute's discoveries, particularly the great age assigned to the older monuments, which conflicted (they imagined) with the chronology of the Bible. They were quite satisfied however and took Fourier to their bosoms when, as the result of some further archaeological researches nearer home, he dug up a saint in his own family, the blessed Pierre Fourier, his great-uncle, whose memory was hallowed because he had founded a religious order. His respectability established, Fourier accomplished a vast amount of useful work, draining marshlands, stamping out malaria, and otherwise lifting his district out of the Middle Ages.

*  *  *

It was while at Grenoble that Fourier composed the immortal
Theorie analytique de la chaleur
(The Mathematical Theory of Heat), a landmark in mathematical physics. His first memoir on the conduction of heat was submitted in 1807. This was so promising that the Academy encouraged Fourier to continue by setting a contribution to the mathematical theory of heat as its problem for the Grand Prize in 1812. Fourier won the prize, but not without some criticism which he resented deeply but which was well taken.

Laplace, Lagrange, and Legendre were the referees. While admitting the novelty and importance of Fourier's work they pointed out that the mathematical treatment was faulty, leaving much to be desired in the way of rigor. Lagrange himself had discovered special cases of Fourier's main theorem but had been deterred from proceeding to the general result by the difficulties which he now pointed out. These subtle difficulties were of such a nature that their removal at the time would probably have been impossible. More than a century was to elapse before they were satisfactorily met.