Bully for Brontosaurus (38 page)

The fateful move had been made in 1768, when Lavoisier joined the infamous Ferme Générale, or Tax Farm. If you regard the IRS as a less than benevolent institution, just consider taxation under the
ancien régime
and count your blessings. Taxation was regressive with a vengeance, as the nobility and clergy were entirely exempt, and poor people supplied the bulk of the royal treasury through tariffs on the movement of goods across provincial boundaries, fees for entering the city of Paris, and taxes on such goods as tobacco and salt. (The hated
gabelle
, or “salt tax,” was applied at iniquitously differing rates from region to region, and was levied not on actual consumption but on presumed usage—thus, in effect, forcing each family to buy a certain quantity of taxed salt each year.)

Moreover, the government did not collect taxes directly. They set the rates and then leased (for six-year periods) the privilege of collecting taxes to a private finance company, the Ferme Générale. The Tax Farm operated for profit like any other private business. If they managed to collect more than the government levy, they kept the balance; if they failed to reach the quota, they took the loss. The system was not only oppressive in principle; it was also corrupt. Several shares in the Tax Farm were paid for no work as favors or bribes; many courtiers, even the king himself, were direct beneficiaries. Nonetheless, Lavoisier chose this enterprise for the primary investment of his family fortune, and he became, as members of the firm were called, a
fermier-général
, or “farmer-general.”

(Incidentally, since I first read the sad story of Lavoisier some twenty-five years ago, I have been amused by the term farmer-general, for it conjures up a pleasantly rustic image of a country yokel, dressed in his Osh Kosh b’Gosh overalls, and chewing on a stalk of hay while trying to collect the
gabelle
. But I have just learned from the
Oxford English Dictionary
that my image is not only wrong, but entirely backward. A farm, defined as a piece of agricultural land, is a derivative term. In usage dating to Chaucer, a farm, from the medieval Latin
firma
, “fixed payment,” is “a fixed yearly sum accepted from a person as a composition for taxes or other moneys which he is empowered to collect.” By extension, to farm is to lease anything for a fixed rent. Since most leases applied to land, agricultural plots become “farms,” with a first use in this sense traced only to the sixteenth century; the leasers of such land then became “farmers.” Thus, our modern phrase “farming out” records the original use, and has no agricultural connotation. And Lavoisier was a farmer-general in the true sense, with no mitigating image of bucolic innocence.)

I do not understand why Lavoisier chose the Ferme Générale for his investment, and then worked so assiduously in his role as tax farmer. He was surely among the most scrupulous and fair-minded of the farmers, and might be justifiably called a reformer. (He opposed the overwatering of tobacco, a monopoly product of the Ferme, and he did, at least in later years, advocate taxation upon all, including the radical idea that nobles might pay as well.) But he took his profits, and he provoked no extensive campaign for reform as the money rolled in. The standard biographies, all too hagiographical, tend to argue that he regarded the Ferme as an investment that would combine greatest safety and return with minimal expenditure of effort—all done to secure a maximum of time for his beloved scientific work. But I do not see how this explanation can hold. Lavoisier, with his characteristic energy, plunged into the work of the Ferme, traveling all over the country, for example, to inspect the tobacco industry. I rather suspect that Lavoisier, like many modern businessmen, simply jumped at a good and legal investment without asking too many ethical questions.

But the golden calf of one season becomes the shattered idol of another. The farmers-general were roundly hated, in part for genuine corruption and iniquity, in part because tax collectors are always scapegoated, especially when the national treasury is bankrupt and the people are starving. Lavoisier’s position was particularly precarious. As a scheme to prevent the loss of taxes from widespread smuggling of goods into Paris, Lavoisier advocated the building of a wall around the city. Much to Lavoisier’s distress, the project, financed largely (and involuntarily) through taxes levied upon the people of Paris, became something of a boondoggle, as millions were spent on fancy ornamental gates. Parisians blamed the wall for keeping in fetid air and spreading disease. The militant republican Jean-Paul Marat began a campaign of vilification against Lavoisier that only ended when Charlotte Corday stabbed him to death in his bath. Marat had written several works in science and had hoped for election to the Royal Academy, then run by Lavoisier. But Lavoisier had exposed the emptiness of Marat’s work. Marat fumed, bided his time, and waited for the season when patriotism would become a good refuge for scoundrels. In January 1791, he launched his attack in
l’Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People)
:

The breaching of the wall by the citizens of Paris on July 12, 1789, was the prelude to the fall of the Bastille two days later.

Lavoisier began to worry very early in the cycle. Less than seven months after the fall of the Bastille, he wrote to his old friend Benjamin Franklin:

But these limits were breached, just as Lavoisier’s wall had fallen, and he could read the handwriting on the remnants. The Ferme Générale was suppressed in 1791, and Lavoisier played no further role in the complex sorting out of the farmers’ accounts. He tried to keep his nose clean with socially useful work on weights and measures and public education. But time was running out for the farmers-general. The treasury was bankrupt, and many thought (quite incorrectly) that the iniquitously hoarded wealth of the farmers-general could replenish the nation. The farmers were too good a scapegoat to resist; they were arrested
en masse
in November 1793, commanded to put their accounts in order, and to reimburse the nation for any ill-gotten gains.

The presumed offenses of the farmers-general were not capital under revolutionary law, and they hoped initially to win their personal freedom, even though their wealth and possessions might be confiscated. But they had the misfortune to be in the wrong place (jail) at the worst time (as the Terror intensified). Eventually, capital charges of counterrevolutionary activities were drummed up, and in a mock trial lasting only part of a day, the farmers-general were condemned to the guillotine.

Lavoisier’s influential friends might have saved him, but none dared (or cared) to speak. The Terror was not so inexorable and efficient as tradition holds. Fourteen of the farmers-general managed to evade arrest, and one was saved by the intervention of Robespierre. Madame Lavoisier, who lived to a ripe old age, marrying and divorcing Count Rumford, and reestablishing one of the liveliest salons in Paris, never allowed any of these men over her doorstep again. One courageous (but uninfluential) group offered brave support in Lavoisier’s last hours. A deputation from the Lycée des Arts came to the prison to honor Lavoisier and crown him with a wreath. We read in the minutes of that organization: “Brought to Lavoisier in irons, the consolation of friendship…to crown the head about to go under the ax.”

It is a peculiar attribute of human courage that when no option remains but death, criteria of judgment shift to the manner of dying. Chronicles of the revolution are filled with stories about who died with dignity—and who went screaming to the knife. Antoine Lavoisier died well. He wrote a last letter to his cousin, in apparent calm, not without humor, and with an intellectual’s faith in the supreme importance of mind.

Lavoisier’s rehabilitation came almost as quickly as his death. In 1795, the Lycée des Arts held a first public memorial service, with Lagrange himself offering the eulogy and unveiling a bust of Lavoisier inscribed with the words: “Victim of tyranny, respected friend of the arts, he continues to live; through genius he still serves humanity.” Lavoisier’s spirit continued to inspire, but his head, once filled with great thoughts as numerous as the unwritten symphonies of Mozart, lay severed in a common grave.

Many people try to put a happy interpretation upon Lacépède’s observation about the asymmetry of painstaking creation and instantaneous destruction. The collapse of systems, they argue, may be a prerequisite to any future episode of creativity—and the antidote, therefore, to stagnation. Taking the longest view, for example, mass extinctions do break up stable ecosystems and provoke episodes of novelty further down the evolutionary road. We would not be here today if the death of dinosaurs had not cleared some space for the burgeoning of mammals.

I have no objection to this argument in its proper temporal perspective. If you choose a telescope and wish to peer into an evolutionary future millions of years away, then a current episode of destruction may be read as an ultimate spur. But if you care for the here and now, which is (after all) the only time we feel and have, then massive extinction is only a sadness and an opportunity lost forever. I have heard people argue that our current wave of extinctions should not inspire concern because the earth will eventually recover, as so oft before, and perhaps with pleasant novelty. But what can a conjecture about ten million years from now possibly mean to our lives—especially since we have the power to blow up our planet long before then, and rather little prospect, in any case, of surviving so long ourselves (since few vertebrate species live for 10 million years).

The argument of the “long view” may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children’s children’s children—hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale. Similarly, others could do the unfinished work of Lavoisier, if not so elegantly; and political revolution did spur science into some interesting channels. But how can this mitigate the tragedy of Lavoisier? He was one of the most brilliant men ever to grace our history, and he died at the height of his powers and health. He had work to do, and he was not guilty.

My title, “The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier,” is a double entendre. The modern meaning of
passion
, “overmastering zeal or enthusiasm,” is a latecomer. The word entered our language from the Latin verb for suffering, particularly for suffering physical pain. The Saint Matthew and Saint John Passions of J. S. Bach are musical dramas about the suffering of Jesus on the cross. This essay, therefore, focuses upon the final and literal passion of Lavoisier. (Anyone who has ever been disappointed in love—that is, nearly all of us—will understand the intimate connection between the two meanings of passion.)

But I also wanted to emphasize Lavoisier’s passion in the modern meaning. For this supremely organized man—farmer-general; commissioner of gunpowder; wall builder; reformer of prisons, hospitals, and schools; legislative representative for the nobility of Blois; father of the metric system; servant on a hundred government committees—really had but one passion amidst this burden of activities for a thousand lifetimes. Lavoisier loved science more than anything else. He awoke at six in the morning and worked on science until eight, then again at night from seven until ten. He devoted one full day a week to scientific experiments and called it his
jour de bonheur
(day of happiness). The letters and reports of his last year are painful to read, for Lavoisier never abandoned his passion—his conviction that reason and science must guide any just and effective social order. But those who received his pleas, and held power over him, had heard the different drummer of despotism.

Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will. Bernard Lacépède was probably thinking of Lavoisier when he wrote a closing flourish following his passage on the great asymmetry of slow creation and sudden destruction:

The Republic needs scientists.

LEMUEL GULLIVER
, marooned by pirates on a small Pacific island, lamented his apparently inevitable fate: “I considered how impossible it was to preserve my life, in so desolate a place; and how miserable my end must be.” But then the floating island of Laputa appeared and he rode up on a chain to safety.

The Laputans, Gulliver soon discovered, were an odd lot, with an ethereal turn of mind well suited to their abode. Their thoughts, he noted, “are so taken up with intense speculation” that they can neither speak nor hear the words of others unless explicitly roused. Thus, each Laputan of status employs a “flapper” who gently strikes the ear or mouth of his master with an inflated bladder full of small pebbles whenever his lordship must either attend or answer.

The Laputans are not catholic in their distractions; only music and mathematics incite their unworldly concentration. Gulliver finds that their mathematical obsession extends to all spheres of life; he obtains for his first meal “a shoulder of mutton, cut into an equilateral triangle; a piece of beef into rhomboides; and a pudding into a cycloid.”

But mathematics has its negative side, at least psychologically. The Laputans are not lost in a blissful reverie about the perfection of circles or the infinitude of pi. They are scared. Their calculations have taught them that “the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet…and that the next, which they have calculated for one and thirty years hence, will probably destroy [them].” The Laputans live in fear: “When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun’s health; how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet.”

Jonathan Swift, as usual, was not writing abstract humor in reciting the Laputans’ fear of comets. He was satirizing the influential theory of a political and religious enemy, William Whiston, handpicked successor to Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1696, Whiston had published the first edition of a work destined for scientific immortality of the worst sort—as a primer of how not to proceed. Whiston called his treatise
A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of all Things, Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as laid down in the Holy Scriptures, are shewn to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy
.

Whiston has descended through history as the worst example of religious superstition viewed as an impediment to science. Whiston, we are told, was so wed to the few thousand years of Moses’ chronology that he had to postulate absurd catastrophes via cometary collisions in order to encompass the earth’s history in so short a time. This dismissal is no modern gloss but an old tradition in scientific rhetoric. Charles Lyell, conventional father of modernity in geological thought, poured contempt upon Whiston’s extraterrestrial and catastrophic theories because they foreclosed proper attention to gradual, earth-based causes. Lyell wrote in 1830:

But Whiston did not only suffer the abuse of posthumous reputation; he became an object of ridicule in his own time as well (as Swift’s satire indicates). His contemporary troubles did not stem from his cometary theory (which resembled several others of his day and did not strike fellow intellectuals as outré) but from his religious heterodoxies. Whiston’s public support of the Arian heresy (a denial of the Trinity, and the consubstantiality of Christ with God the Father) led to dismissal from his Cambridge professorship (as Newton, his erstwhile champion, and a quieter, more measured exponent of the same heresy, remained conspicuously silent). Resettled in London, Whiston was tried twice for heresy and, though not formally convicted, lost most of his previous prestige and lived the rest of his long life (he died in 1752 at the age of eighty-four) as an independent intellectual, viewed as a prophet by some and as a crank by most. In the eighth plate of Hogarth’s
The Rake’s Progress
, set in the mental hospital of Bedlam, an inmate covers the wall with a sketch of Whiston’s scheme for measuring longitude.

Despite continual rejection of Whiston, from his own time to ours, we must still grant him a major role in the history of science. The French historian Jacques Roger ended his article on Whiston (in the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
) with these words:

Moreover, we must not forget the early acclaim of his contemporaries. The greatest figure in all the history of science, Isaac Newton, personally chose Whiston as his successor. In my copy of Whiston’s
New Theory
(the second edition of 1708), a Mr. Nathaniel Hancock, who bought the book in 1723, has inscribed on its title page, in a beautiful, flowing hand, the following judgment of Whiston and his book by John Locke:

Comets were in the air in late seventeenth century Britain. In 1680, a great comet brightened the skies of Europe, followed two years later by a smaller object that sent Edmond Halley to the drawing boards of history and mathematics. Moreover, the seventeenth century had been a time of extraordinary change and tension in Britain—the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution to mention just a few of the tumultuous events of Whiston’s age. These happenings fostered a revival of millennial thought—a scrutiny of the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation, leading to a conclusion that the end of this world lay in sight, and that the blessed millennium, or thousand-year reign of Christ, would soon begin. Since comets had long been viewed as harbingers or signals of great transitions and disasters (literally, “evil stars”), Whiston chose a propitious time to implicate comets as the prime movers of our planet’s history.

Whiston’s
New Theory
tried, above all, to establish a consistency between the two great sources of truth, as defined by his countrymen: the infallibility of Scripture and the mathematical beauty of the cosmos, so recently revealed by Newton. Whiston began his account of our planet’s history by summarizing his method of inquiry in a single page, entitled
Postulata
. The first two statements illustrate his attempt to join Moses with Newton:

Comets became Whiston’s
deus ex machina
for rendering the cataclysmic events of Genesis with the forces of Newton’s universe.

Consider Whiston’s descriptions of the earth, from cradle to grave, with each of its five principal events tied to cometary causes:

1.
The Hexameron, or Moses’ six days of creation
. Whiston prefaced the body of his work with a ninety-four-page “Discourse Concerning the Nature, Stile, and Extent of the Mosaick History of the Creation.” Here, he attempts to preserve the literal sense of Scripture (first postulate above) in the light of Newton’s nearly infinite universe. How could all this vastness be made in six days, and how could our earth, one tiny speck in one corner of the cosmos, be the focus of such infinitude? Whiston devotes his preface to a single argument: Moses described the origin of the earth alone, not the entire universe; moreover, he tailored his words to describe not the abstract properties of nature’s laws, but the visual appearance of events as an untutored observer might have witnessed them on the congealing surface of our planet. With these provisos, everything happened exactly as Genesis proclaims.

The earth began as a comet, and the chaos described in Genesis 1 (“and the earth was without form and void”) represents the original swirling atmosphere. Whiston’s contemporaries did not know the true size of comets, and many assumed, as he did, that comets might be of planetary dimensions, and therefore suitable for transformation into a planet. Whiston wrote:

To transform this comet, with its highly elliptical pathway, into a planet, God needs to render its orbit more nearly circular. The chaotic atmosphere will then clear and precipitate to form the solid surface of a planet. Whiston’s attitude toward miracles (temporary suspension by God of his own natural laws) remained ambiguous. His second postulate stated a preference for natural explanations, but only when possible. He never did resolve whether the change in orbit that converted our cometary ancestor into the present earth had been a true miracle (accomplished by the immediate agency of God’s own hand) or a natural event (the result of gravitational influences exerted by another body moving through the heavens according to Newton’s laws). But since Newton’s laws are God’s laws, Whiston attached only limited importance to the distinction—for the transition from comet to planet occurred either by God’s direct action or by laws that God had established in full knowledge of the later, desired result.

In any case, once the comet’s orbit had been adjusted to its planetary pathway, the events of Genesis 1 would proceed naturally, as viewed by an observer on earth. The creation of light on the first day represents an initial clarification of a formerly opaque atmosphere (so that a brightness always present could finally be perceived). Similarly, the “creation” of the sun and moon records a further lightening of atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the products of this former atmosphere settled out by order of density into a series of concentric layers—solid at the center, water above, and a solid froth on top—to form the earth.

If all this activity still seems a bit much to compress into a mere six days, Whiston added an argument to increase our confidence. The original earth underwent no diurnal rotation on its axis but maintained a constant position as it revolved around the sun. The nearly equatorial Eden therefore experienced a year divided into halves: one of day; the second of night. Since we define a “day” as a single alternation of light and darkness, the days of Genesis 1 were all a year long—not a vast span for the work accomplished, but a big step in the right direction.

2.
The Fall, and expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden
. The pristine earth stood bolt upright with no seasons, tides, or winds to disturb its primeval bliss. But “as soon as Man had sinned…and as God Almighty had pronounced a curse on the ground, and its production, presently the earth began a new and strange motion, and revolved from west to east on its own axis.” This axis tilted to its present inclination of some 21 degrees, and the earth began its diurnal rotation, with days, nights, winds, and seasons. Whiston ascribed this change to a cometary collision:

3.
Noah’s flood
. All the great works of this late seventeenth century vogue for “theories of the earth” (notably Burnet’s
Sacred Theory of the Earth
and Woodward’s
Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth
) regarded an explanation of the Deluge as their central test and focus. Events of the Creation were too distant and shrouded in mystery, phenomena of the coming millennium too tentative. But the Flood was a relatively recent incident, begun (or so Whiston deduced) precisely “on the 17th day of the 2nd month from the autumnal equinox…in the 2349th year before the Christian era.” Any proper theory of the earth must, above all, render this cardinal and precisely specified event of a history remembered and recorded in the ancient chronicles.

The comet that unleashed the Flood did not strike the earth directly but passed close enough for two great effects that combined to produce the Deluge. First, the earth passed (for about two hours) directly through the “vaporous tail” of the comet, thus absorbing by gravity enough water to unleash forty days and nights of rain. Second, the tides generated by close passage of such an enormous body stretched the round earth into an oblate spheroid and eventually cracked the solid surface, allowing the underlying layer of water to rise and contribute to the great flood (Genesis, remember, speaks not only of rain from above, but also of upwelling from the “fountains of the deep”).

(In a rather uncomfortable bit of special pleading, even in his own terms, Whiston argued that the cometary impact at the Fall had not unleashed a similar flood because this previous comet had no atmosphere. If we then ask why this earlier impact, more direct after all than the near miss that made the Flood, did not tear the surface and raise the waters from the abyss, Whiston responds that such a fracturing requires not only the gravitational force of the comet itself but also the pressing weight of waters from its tail.)