Material Enlightenments

Material Enlightenments B Y M I G YUN G K IM *

B RUNO B ELHOSTE . Paris savant: Parcours et rencontres au temps des Lumie`res. Paris: Armand Colin, 2011. 311 pp., illus., index. ISBN: 978-2-200-25563-3. 25.40€ (paper). E MMA C. S PARY . Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. x þ 366 pp., illus., index. ISBN: 978-0-226-76886-1. $45.00 (hardcover). S EAN T AKATS . The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. x þ 203 pp., illus., index. ISBN: 9781-4214-0283-3. $60.00 (hardcover). Parisian Enlightenment sciences once held a privileged position in the history of science due to the illustrious roster of royal academicians such as d’Alembert, Buffon, Laplace, Lavoisier, Condorcet, and Lagrange, who laid the foundation for the sophisticated Napoleonic sciences.1 Efforts to explain their technical supremacy produced path-breaking histories of royal institutions, which posed a vexing question about the role of science in shaping Enlightenment ideology and the modern state.2 Since the World Wars, Enlightenment production and legitimation of instrumental rationality had become a serious moral dilemma to undermine the era’s emancipatory legacy.3 When

*Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8108; [email protected]. 1. Robert Fox, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics,’’ HSPS 4 (1974): 89–136. 2. Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666– 1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973) [translation of Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung, 1944]; Introduction, and Dorinda Outram, ‘‘The Enlightenment Our Contemporary,’’ both in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 44, Number 4, pps. 424–433. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http:// www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2014.44.4.424. 424 |

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Charles C. Gillispie, in Science and Polity at the End of the Old Regime, characterized the relationship in question as a transaction of mere instrumentalities (technical expertise for patronage), Keith Michael Baker objected that science provided the rationale for central administrations across the revolutionary divide—to him, the pursuit of ‘‘natural’’ weights and measures indicated a contemporary need for a system of authority that could counter despotic bureaucracy.4 Despite their divergent interpretations on the power of science, Gillispie and Baker shared an understanding of science as objective and gave mathematics and physical sciences a place of honor as the bearers of timeless and universal reason. Pre-Lavoisian chemistry struggled for inclusion in their definition of modern science. Many other kinds of knowledge, practitioners, and institutions would have seemed beyond the ‘‘edge of objectivity.’’ The books reviewed here shift their focus toward the production and public circulation of material knowledges, clustered around chemistry and medicine, and should raise familiar questions anew: What is modern science? Who count as scientists? What is the relationship between modern science and modern polity?5 While Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have dealt with similar questions in their visionary work on the birth of experimental philosophy in Restoration England, the case of marginal sciences during the Enlightenment could disperse the very identity of modern science, a project set in motion by Michel Foucault’s systematic studies on ‘‘dubious sciences’’ that included natural history.6 Emma C. Spary uses the term science ‘‘to refer to all formal learned enterprises . . . not merely the natural sciences’’ (9). Bruno Belhoste’s Paris savant offers a wonderful complement to Gillispie’s Science and Polity by presenting a balanced physiognomy of scientific Paris. Although he emphasizes the dominance of royal institutions in this ‘‘capital of Enlightenment’’ (32), Belhoste includes a broader range of scientific and -

Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3–31, 32–40, resp. 4. Keith Michael Baker, ‘‘Science and Politics at the End of the Old Regime,’’ in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–66. For a brief response, see Charles C. Gillispie, ‘‘L’Envoi,’’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 96, no. 5 (2006): 405–11. 5. In tune with the shift in historiographical focus toward material technology, bodily discipline, construction of human nature, and geographical distribution in Clark et al., Sciences in Enlightened Europe (ref. 3). 6. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Mi Gyung Kim, ‘‘Archeology, Genealogy, and Geography of Experimental Philosophy,’’ Social Studies of Science 44, no. 1 (2014): 150–62.

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technical activities (e.g., other academies, diverse m´etiers, mus´ees, spectacles, and marvels) to familiarize the reader with the full roster of royal institutions, literary productions (e.g., Encyclop´edie), and material culture. Succinct descriptions of numerous institutions, embellished by interesting anecdotes and biographical details, provide occasions for more serious reflections on the nature of academic authority and its function in the complex urban setting. Most valuable in this virtual promenade, especially for beginning researchers and teachers, is his attention to the geography of scientific institutions and activities: maps of royal institutions, academic residences, and cabinets of natural history are supplemented by their precise locations (in the Louvre, the Palais royale, the Jardin du roi, the Arsenal, etc.) to visualize the distribution of scientific activity throughout the capital. The symbolic distinction of royal savants in the Republic of Letters and their mastery of literary strategies to win scientific arguments, as exemplified by Buffon and Maupertuis, pose an unavoidable question for Belhoste: ‘‘Was there a worldly science [science mondaine]’’ (117)?7 Despite Fontenelle’s narrow definition of the reasoning ‘‘public’’ for science, which excluded literary socialites along with the vulgar ‘‘people,’’ historians of French science have always included in the category the fashionable society [le monde] along with the rational/critical public envisaged by Ju¨rgen Habermas.8 Since Antoine Lilti’s comprehensive study of Parisian salons has driven a wedge between the two, 7. On the character of French savants, see Vincenzo Ferrone, ‘‘The Man of Science,’’ in Enlightenment Portraits, ed. Michel Vovelle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 190– 225. On their literary strategies, see Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John Bennett Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Joanna Stalnaker, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of Encyclopedia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 8. Fontenelle served as permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences between 1699 and 1739. In this capacity, he cultivated a public image of science through the Histoire de l’Acad´emie and the e´loges. On his ideal public, see Steven F. Rendall, ‘‘Fontenelle and His Public,’’ Modern Language Notes 86, no. 4 (1971): 496–508. On science for the fashionable society, see Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). On Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, see Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Anthony LaVopa, ‘‘Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,’’ Journal of Modern History 64, no. 1 (1992): 79–116; Margaret C. Jacob, ‘‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 1 (1994): 95–113; Thomas Broman, ‘‘The Habermasian Public Sphere and ‘Science in the Enlightenment’,’’ History of Science 36 (1998): 123–49.

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seriously undermining the conventional caricature of the French Enlightenment dominated by a few radical salons and philosophes, the relationship between academic scientists and their public has become a pressing historiographical concern.9 While acknowledging court patronage and the importance of Masonic sociability (in the Loge des Neuf Soeurs), Belhoste follows Lilti (and Fontenelle) in demarcating serious science from worldly science. The latter required an element of spectacle or surprise that would entertain the audience. Cabinets of natural history and spectacular experiments served to incorporate science into the symbolic economy of mondanit´e that cultivated a larger audience through newspapers (e.g., Journal de Paris), mus´ees, and public spectacles such as the balloon experiment. In other words, science became worldly in Enlightenment Paris, but the process would make it less ‘‘severe’’—presumably lacking experimental standards and mathematical language. Spary’s erudite approach to ‘‘knowledge and reason from the standpoint of commerce’’ in Eating the Enlightenment revolves around the public consumption of coffee, liquors, and la cuisine moderne ‘‘to shine a new light’’ on the relationship between polite science, artisanal skill, and academic sciences (146– 47). In contrast to Belhoste, she places food and the allied sciences in a more porous ‘‘public domain’’ anchored at the caf´es, or the ‘‘archetypical public space’’ of rational political debate in Habermas.10 Nevertheless, she carefully avoids using the term ‘‘public sphere’’ to distance her approach from his and to configure Bruno Latour’s ‘‘fabric of science-society tangles’’ (6).11 In her 9. Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons (Paris: Fayard, 2005). Contrast it with Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 10. Steve Pincus, ‘‘‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,’’ Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (1995): 807–34, on 808. 11. Efforts to utilize Habermas’s model in French historiography have produced a series of modifications: Benjamin Nathans, ‘‘Habermas’s ‘Public Sphere’ in the Era of the French Revolution,’’ French Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (1990): 620–44; Daniel Gordon, ‘‘Philosophy, Sociology and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion,’’ David A. Bell, ‘‘The ‘Public Sphere,’ the State, and the World of Law in Eighteenth-Century France,’’ and Sarah Maza, ‘‘Women, Bourgeosie and the Public Sphere,’’ French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 882-911, 912-34, 935-50, respectively; Dena Goodman, ‘‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,’’ History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992): 1–20; Dale K. Van Kley, ‘‘In Search of Eighteenth-Century Parisian Public Opinion,’’ French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995): 215–26; Colin Jones, ‘‘The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,’’ American Historical Review 101, no. 1 (1996): 13–40.

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analysis, caf´es emerge as a liminal space between the fashionable society that governed European (or global) taste and their urban emulators, an egalitarian yet undemocratic space of worldly sociability [sociabilit´e mondaine] that harbored the ‘‘citizens without sovereignty’’ in Daniel Gordon’s characterization.12 As heterogeneous yet respectable (in comparison to taverns) sites of learning, caf´es mixed social ranks and exotic ingredients to brew a culture of emulation and fashionable knowledge through polite conversation. As a performative space of indiscriminate public entertainment that enacted poetry, satire, ‘‘philosophical novelty, religious heterodoxy, political dissent, and personal disagreement’’ (120), caf´es offered an ideal site for mediating philosophical disputes as well as digesting chemical ideas and spirits to illustrate the ‘‘epistemological peculiarity of comestibles’’ (91). Spary argues that caf´es became ‘‘new sites for crafting a public, worldly knowledge’’ that rejected erudition for innovation and criticism to produce enlightened minds (146). In other words, caf´es as a quotidian institution of urban learning fused the serious public and the fashionable society in the figure of polite urban man of letters through their commercial, literary, and material transactions. Coffee, in its transformation from ‘‘an imported Oriental luxury to . . . a leading colonial product’’ (57) through ‘‘a process of selective appropriations, rejections, and accommodations,’’ allows Spary to establish an institutional link forged by various kinds of ‘‘learned experts—philologists, collectors, travelers, physicians, botanists, gardeners, even merchants’’ between the French empire and the domestic public space (92). In addition to its Oriental prestige and mystique, domesticating coffee between 1669 and 1730 depended on its reputed medical value, French foreign policy and imperial/colonial practices, botanical expertise that identified and acclimatized various specimens in the colonies, and its institutionalization in the caf´es. Once an exotic luxury that carried social distinction to spur debates on ‘‘global commerce and superfluous consumption’’ (96), coffee became an everyday drink in the metropolis with successful colonial cultivation and guild incorporation to multiply domestic ‘‘contact zones’’ that shaped a public domain at once polite, literary, and commercial.13 Physical displacements and cultural adaptations of coffee 12. Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 13. The ‘‘contact zone’’ refers to ‘‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’’; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.

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created diverse assemblages of peoples, institutions, and knowledge that translated the colonial Empire for domestic Enlightenment and stabilized its cultural identity as a quintessentially French substance.14 As a material mediator of French ‘‘colonial and metropolitan identity’’ (72), coffee also fashioned careers of the philosophes such as Voltaire who built his literary persona on its presumed potency in stimulating creativity. Caf´es served more than coffee. The concoction and consumption of novelty liquors on-site engendered a complex system of knowledge that wove together the world of commerce, fashion, and science. Distilling liquors depended on the global commerce of exotic flavors and the local marketing of distinct products advertised through the Avantcoureur. It also required a mastery of chemical art that encroached upon the apothecaries’ domain, reaching to alimentary and medical recipes (e.g., chocolate, quince jelly, and cherry wine), according to Antoine Baum´e’s El´emens de pharmacie. A shadowy collaborator of Pierre-Joseph Macquer, the master academician who ran royal manufactures and whose textbooks became a standard reading for the educated elite, Baum´e ran a lucrative pharmacy that placed him at the intersection of academic chemistry, commercial pharmacy, and urban trade. Spary argues that distillers, albeit excluded from the Academy of Sciences, occupied a similar position to apothecaries with their innovations in medicinal, alimentary, and cosmetic domains. By conflating their laboratory activity, which demanded skill, expertise, experience, and sophisticated chemical apparatus, she takes distillers seriously as producers of scientific knowledge. Commercial and academic interests intersected indiscriminately in stabilizing the ontology, epistemology, and material technology of distillation products such as spirits, even if the ambitious apothecary Jacques-Franc¸ois Demachy in his bid for an academic career sought to discredit the distillers’ claims of expertise, ingenuity, and invention. The cuisine led the French civilizing mission to spread their art of living ‘‘from the Antarctic to the Arctic,’’ as Sean Takats reports, through an unprecedented ‘‘empire’’ over material fashions (1). In dealing with the cookbooks that publicized la cuisine moderne from the 1730s, Spary and Takats pick up opposite ends of the stick to construct complementary historical objects. Spary places Franc¸ois Marin’s Les Dons de Comus squarely in the literary public sphere, for example, by focusing on the preface written by two erudite Jesuits to address polite society. The public domain offered a transactional space 14. For an excellent account of such displacements and assemblages, see Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

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between the literary urban elite and the lowly cooks. In this world of ‘‘playful polite learning’’ (209), culinary literature tended to legitimate ‘‘the mental superiority of polite, literate city-dwellers’’ exemplified by Voltaire (205). The ‘‘sensual sage’’ who could maintain balance, variety, and moderation in his diet would exercise his ‘‘reason and judgement . . . in their full vigour’’ (205). This physiological production of esprit, the elusive quality that made careers of literary men, enticed them to pay close attention to the aliments. Elite employers of expert cooks did enter the kitchen, she argues implicitly contra Takats, while their cooks learned to converse on taste and refinement. This rapprochement between ‘‘culinary scholars’’ and ‘‘learned cooks’’ articulated, despite contestations over the latter’s scholarly pretensions and excessive claims of expertise, the ‘‘philosophical palate’’ (195–98). Instead of elite consumers, Takats in Expert Cook reads Marin’s book mostly for the lowly cooks’ strategies of social advancement. By delineating their occupational profile (via contemporary classification, market definition, physical traits, family situation, moral character, expertise, compensation, career trajectories, hiring practices, training and promotion, etc.), he claims that their strategies ‘‘disrupted social order, redefined aesthetic sensibility, and challenged medical science’’ (2). Unable to distinguish themselves as artists, yet unprotected by the guilds, and long ‘‘cast among the brutes operating at the absolute bottom of the Old Regime’s occupational ladder’’ (13) along with domestic servants, cooks worked at ‘‘a unique crossroads that included domestic service, urban trades, and professional medicine,’’ yet dreamed like the philosophes of ‘‘an ideal future where reason and science propelled human society to perfection’’ (4). Given the scarcity of documents pertaining to these anonymous cooks working in hidden kitchens, historians can trace their material expertise and revolutionary dreams only through their cookbooks. Takats treats them as ‘‘artifacts of cooks’ practices’’ to voice their professional claims of expertise in tasteful and scientific cuisine through an analysis of their rhetorical emphasis on cooking’s cultural and social significance (8). In the aftermath of the protracted debate between the ancients and the moderns, they constructed a historical narrative to characterize modern cuisine as a radical break from the past that constituted the core of French civilization.15 By delineating something like a philosophical history of cooking reaching back to the state of nature and by tracing the genealogy of French cuisine to the Romans, which 15. Joan E. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Sie`cle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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provided an occasion to demonstrate their erudition, cooks configured their innovative role in maintaining a healthy society and empire. The symbolic economy of pleasure that governed the fashionable society and integrated public caf´es and private kitchens at its margins allowed for the artificers of taste to participate in its production, maintenance, and transformation.16 Precisely because their social status was so low and their material kitchens so filthy as to exclude all others, Takats argues, the cooks exercised ‘‘absolute dominion’’ over the theory and practice of cooking and monopolized the publication of cookbooks (14). Their claims of abstract, generalized theory for open practice appropriated the authority of modern science, especially that of chemistry, to establish the relevance of modern cooking to medicine through their understanding of appetite and digestion. Critics thus objected, as Spary notes on the subject, that the cook would have to know ‘‘in depth the thoughts produced in the soul by the digestion’’ of various foods to prepare the youths for their proper station in life (202). Her effort to situate the production of natural knowledge ‘‘firmly . . . within the domains of the body and of everyday life’’ (19) also converges on digestion (rather than generation and sensibility emphasized in physiology texts) as ‘‘a prime locus at which matter and mind intersected’’ (50). She uses the contemporary debate between iatrochemical and iatromechanical physicians, positioned much higher than cooks, distillers, and apothecaries in the social hierarchy, to configure the philosophical, social, moral, religious, and political struggles that shaped the understanding of digestion (chap. 2). Since la cuisine moderne did not entail ‘‘a radically different set of new recipes,’’ according to Takats, the cooks’ ‘‘passionate campaign’’ depended on ‘‘theorizing the kitchen’’ through the cookbooks that transmitted their knowledge to the public sphere (95–96). Their theoretical endeavor to classify the lowly work—be it seasonal, alphabetic, or natural—deserves our serious attention in writing material histories of early modern science.17 Since historians of science had to work arduously against the theory-dominant historiography,

16. For the artisans’ subversive role despite the scripted representations of stage productions, see Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 17. On the rhetorical significance of ‘‘theory’’ in artisanal culture, see Simon Schaffer, ‘‘‘The Charter’d Thames’: Naval Architecture and Experimental Spaces in Georgian Britain,’’ in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), 325–48.

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their material turn from the 1980s has often ignored early modern practitioners’ rhetorical invocation of theory as well as theory’s productive function in practice. Despite our appreciation of science’s material control over its theoretical coherence and truth content, however, inventing a ‘‘science’’ in early modern Europe required advocates to defend their system as a coherent theoretical representation of nature. If chemistry presented ‘‘a particularly remarkable case’’ of scholarly intervention in urban space, as Belhoste suggests (71), it was because chemists had successfully carved out an institutional and cognitive space for their ‘‘science’’ through a theoretical representation (e.g., affinity table) that accomplished pedagogical efficacy and through a philosophical discourse that facilitated social legitimation.18 What eighteenth-century chemists and cooks meant by ‘‘theory’’ differed radically from both contemporary philosophers’ speculative representation of nature and twentieth-century philosophers’ notion of logical, mathematized theory. Taken together, these books offer a complex geography of Enlightenment Paris as a social space for the ‘‘transaction, appropriation and negotiation’’ of knowledge, food, and entertainments (Spary, 1–2). Not just royal academicians and famed philosophes but also ordinary, ‘‘mechanical’’ people such as cooks participated in the (process of) Enlightenment (Takats, 4). Belhoste thus includes an extensive repertoire of scientific and material activities in his intricate portrait of scientific Paris. Spary delineates how perishable goods forged, extended, and maintained the urban network of an enlightened clientele consisting of court nobility, urban elite, and the middling sort of consumers. Takats asserts the cooks’ role in interweaving private households and public knowledge domains. Paying attention to these embodied, material practices should allow historians to discern in Frank Trentmann’s vision ‘‘how users, things, tools, competence and desires are coordinated’’ to constitute an intricate network of symbolic communication and action (not just transaction) that shapes the identities and dreams of human actors. The ‘‘material turn’’ promises to configure the material politics of civil society, ‘‘reconnecting private and public,’’ so as to provide ‘‘a bridge between histories of politics and material culture.’’19 18. Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Mi Gyung Kim, ‘‘Labor and Mirage: Writing the History of Chemistry,’’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1995): 155–65. 19. Frank Trentmann, ‘‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,’’ Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283–307. On science in civil society, see Lynn K. Nyhart and Thomas H. Broman, eds., Science and Civil Society, Osiris 17 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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How the public domain of knowledge generated by luxury goods relates to real and imaginary politics remains somewhat ambiguous, however. None of the knowledge producers ranging from royal academicians to domestic cooks, whose sustenance depended on the stable infrastructure of luxury consumption, had it in their interest to fashion themselves as serious critics of the absolutist polity, much less revolutionaries. If Voltaire exemplified the polite man of letters groomed on a sophisticated diet, he became a compromised figure who symbolized the collusion between philosophy and the state to the Grub Street writers. Should we infer, then, that material knowledges and their artificers were simply irrelevant to the emancipatory dreams for a liberal polity?20 Or, was ‘‘the radical Enlightenment’’ a mere fiction of historical imagination, as Antoine Lilti would have it? If material knowledge functioned merely as an instrument of sociocultural transaction in the Old Regime, we have come full circle to the same impasse that faced Gillispie and Baker, except that the kinds of knowledge and knowledge-producing sites have expanded to include aristocratic salons, public space of consumption (caf´es and restaurants), and private kitchens. While it may be viewed as a considerable improvement over the unspecified spatialization afforded by Habermas’s notion of the public sphere to account for the mass subject of the French Revolution, this radical turn in French politics poses a thorny question: if the Revolution was the ‘‘most radical byproduct’’ of the Old Regime, how did the ‘‘infrapolitics’’ of scientific Paris with its intricate hierarchy and multifarious tactics of negotiating power shape national politics during the Enlightenment?21

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Erika L. Milam and Jacob Hamblin for their editorial and critical input on an earlier version.

20. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 21. On the spatialization of the public sphere, see Harold Mah, ‘‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,’’ Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 153– 82. The French Revolution as the ‘‘most radical byproduct’’ is from Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (ref. 12), 24. Infrapolitics, which encapsulates circumspect struggles in unobstrusive realms, refers to the cultural and structural aspects of domination that make more visible political action possible; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).