Bordeaux: Journey’s End

Abstract

In the first year of the twentieth century, when Liard was formally reminded by Duhem that Bordeaux was meant to be for him a road to Paris, other roads too must have taken on for him a dispiriting outlook. For one, his access to physics students narrowed ominously. He gave, mostly before empty chairs, his special courses in advanced physics (on elasticity in 1901–02 and on stability in small displacements in 1902–03).¹ Such was a waste of talent the shocking measure of which was amply revealed when the next year he gave the first of his courses open to all the educated public of Bordeaux, which immediately sensed the genius he was. The course was on the aim and structure of physical theory which, once in print, immediately proved itself a classic. The impression made by the course can be sensed from the rector’s reference to it in the Rapport 1903–04: ‘The Faculties of Science and Letters offered this year seventeen public courses which drew people of all conditions … I will mention only one, because it represented a happy innovation. In about twenty lectures … Duhem appealed not only to physicists but to philosophers as well. His course brought together students of both Faculties, professors of secondary and higher education, and interested outsiders. Let me add that these lectures, published in the Revue de philosophie, will soon appear as a book.’² Not for the last time Duhem treated his University and the educated public of Bordeaux to a series of lectures ready to be printed which, in view of the perfection of his oral delivery, must have been a first class treat.