French Academy of Sciences (1666): Colbert's Royal Academy

The French Academy of Sciences, the Académie royale des sciences, held its first meeting in the Royal Library in Paris on 22 December 1666. It was founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of King Louis XIV, to bring leading mathematicians and natural philosophers together under royal patronage. With salaried members and state funding, it became a model for scientific academies across Europe and still exists today as part of the Institut de France.

Background: science and the state

In the first half of the 17th century, French science had flourished in private circles. The friar Marin Mersenne corresponded with scholars across Europe and held informal meetings in Paris until his death in 1648. Later, the wealthy official Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor hosted the “Montmor Academy” in his house, where experiments were discussed and sometimes fiercely argued over.

These groups struggled with money and quarrels. Some members appealed to the crown for support, pointing to the new Royal Society in London, which had received its royal charter in 1662. Colbert, who controlled royal finance and building from the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661, saw scientific prestige as part of the glory of the king and as a way to improve navigation, manufacturing and engineering.

He had already founded the Académie des inscriptions in 1663. In 1666 he turned to the sciences.

Founding and first members

The new body began meeting twice a week in rooms at the King’s Library on rue Vivienne. Mathematicians met on Wednesdays and those working on physics, chemistry, anatomy and botany on Saturdays, though members often joined both sessions. The secretary, the priest Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel, kept the records.

Colbert recruited some of the best minds available, including foreigners. The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, famous for the pendulum clock and the discovery of Saturn’s moon Titan, received a generous pension and lodgings in the library. Other early members included the astronomers Adrien Auzout and Jean Picard, the mathematicians Gilles Personne de Roberval, Pierre de Carcavi and Bernard Frénicle de Bessy, the physician and architect Claude Perrault, and the physicist Edme Mariotte.

Unlike the Royal Society, the Paris academy was small and closed, with roughly twenty members at first. Members were paid by the crown, and their work was expected to serve the king. There was no formal charter or statute; the academy existed by royal favour.

How the academy worked

The academy’s early work was deliberately collective. Colbert and the members hoped that by pooling their efforts they could produce large, authoritative works rather than scattered individual papers. Two major projects were launched almost at once. One was a natural history of plants, for which members examined, described and chemically analysed hundreds of species. The other was a natural history of animals, based on dissections of exotic creatures that had died in the royal menagerie at Versailles, among them a lion, a camel and an ostrich. Claude Perrault led the anatomical work, and the descriptions were published in lavish illustrated volumes from 1671.

Members were also expected to give practical advice. They examined new machines and inventions submitted to the crown, advised on water supply for the fountains of Versailles, and worked on problems of navigation and gunnery. Over time the academy became, in effect, the government’s scientific consultant, and inventors sought its approval as a mark of quality.

Results were not always published quickly. Because work was presented as the academy’s collective product, individual credit was sometimes obscured, and some members, including Huygens, published important findings under their own names elsewhere. Huygens, a Protestant, eventually left Paris for good in 1681, partly because of ill health and partly as religious tensions grew in France before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

Observatory and astronomy

A royal observatory was part of the plan from the beginning. Construction of the Paris Observatory began in 1667 to designs by Claude Perrault and was largely complete by 1672. In 1669 Colbert brought the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini from Bologna. Cassini discovered four moons of Saturn and the gap in its rings now called the Cassini Division, and his family directed the observatory for four generations.

The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer, working at the observatory, used the timing of eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io to show in 1676 that light travels at a finite speed. Jean Picard measured an arc of the meridian north of Paris in 1669–1670, producing an accurate value for the size of the Earth that Isaac Newton later used.

Expeditions and the shape of the Earth

The academy organised some of the earliest scientific expeditions. In 1672–1673 Jean Richer travelled to Cayenne in French Guiana, where he found that a pendulum clock ran slower than in Paris, a hint that gravity is weaker near the equator.

This fed a long debate over whether the Earth was flattened at the poles, as Newton predicted, or elongated, as the Cassini measurements in France seemed to suggest. In the 1730s the academy sent two expeditions to settle it. One, led by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, went to Lapland in 1736–1737. The other, including Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer and Louis Godin, worked in the Andes of present-day Ecuador from 1735 into the 1740s. Their results confirmed the flattened Earth.

Reorganisation, revolution and revival

On 20 January 1699 Louis XIV gave the academy its first formal regulations, renamed it the Académie royale des sciences and moved it to the Louvre. Membership was organised into classes and ranks. From 1699 it published annual volumes of its Histoire and Mémoires, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, secretary from 1697 to 1740, wrote elegant summaries and obituaries that spread its work to a wide audience.

In the 18th century the academy examined inventions for the government, judged prizes, and contributed to projects such as the description of trades. Its members included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and in 1791 it proposed the metre as a new unit based on the Earth’s meridian.

The French Revolution saw royal academies as privileged bodies. On 8 August 1793 the National Convention abolished them all. Lavoisier was guillotined in 1794 for his role as a tax farmer. In 1795 the academies were revived as classes of the new Institut de France, and the Académie des sciences regained its name in 1816.

Legacy

The Paris academy showed that governments could organise and fund science directly. Academies in Berlin (1700), St Petersburg (1724) and Stockholm (1739) followed similar lines. Its expeditions, measurements and publications made Paris a centre of European science throughout the 18th century, alongside works such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Timeline

• 1661: Louis XIV begins his personal rule; Colbert rises to power.
• 1666, 22 December: First meeting of the academy in the Royal Library.
• 1667: Construction of the Paris Observatory begins.
• 1669: Cassini arrives in Paris; Picard begins his meridian survey.
• 1672–1673: Richer’s expedition to Cayenne.
• 1676: Rømer demonstrates the finite speed of light.
• 1699, 20 January: First formal regulations; move to the Louvre.
• 1735–1744: Expeditions to Peru and Lapland measure the Earth’s shape.
• 1793, 8 August: Academy abolished by the National Convention.
• 1795: Revived within the Institut de France.

Why it matters

The French Academy of Sciences turned science into a profession supported by the state, with paid researchers, a dedicated observatory and official publications. That model of public investment in research, and its link to national prestige, remains central to how science is organised today.