Lecturer in Lille

Abstract

On taking the train, sometime in late October 1887, in the still-to-be-completed Gare St. Lazare from Paris to Lille, Pierre Duhem knew all too well, in more than one sense, where he was going. He may have heard a thing or two from Joseph Boussinesq, who took a chair at the Sorbonne in 1886 after serving for fourteen years as professor of mathematics in Lille and who soon developed a keen appreciation of Duhem’s work in theoretical mechanics. At any rate, it was all too obvious that for the previous seven years the Third Republic had been busy turning Lille into a bastion of secularism. The campaign was launched by none other than Jules Ferry, often referred to in those times as the ‘apostle of laicization.’ Duhem could hardly help recalling that by volunteering cartoons to an anti-Ferry album he had already been in the ranks of Ferry’s active opponents. These were numerous in Lille, the great industrial capital of the North and also a stronghold of French Catholicism, where Ferry’s arrival, on April 24, 1880, at the main railroad station provoked huge demonstrations. ¹