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The Bureau des Longitudes: An Institutional Study

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Navigational Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, 1730–1850

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac, a fine illustrator of French society, set out the popular image of the Bureau des longitudes: an institution created to control and govern everything, from the physical to the emotional.2 With extraordinary lucidity Balzac described one of the principal ambitions of nineteenth-century science, which, to use the words of Ernest Renan, was to ‘organize humanity scientifically’.3 Writers, philosophers and educators, as well as men of science, were confident that science would be the tool to explain and understand the world.

Et voilà donc la chose la plus capricieuse du monde, voilà donc le sentiment le plus éminemment mobile, qui n’a de prix que par ses inspirations chatouilleuses, qui ne tire son charme que de la soudaineté des désirs, qui ne plaît que par la vérité de ses expansions, voilà l’amour, enfin, soumis à une règle monastique et à la géométrie du bureau des longitudes!

Honoré de Balzac, 18291

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Notes

  1. Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du mariage ou meditations de philosophie écletique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, new edition (Paris: Charpentier Libraire éditeur, 1840), p. 176.

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  2. Other references to the Bureau des longitudes in Balzac include: ‘Les difficultés surexcitent le génie des employés, qui souvent sont des gens de lettres, et qui se mettent alors à la recherche de l’Inconnu avec l’ardeur des mathématiciens du Bureau des Longitudes: ils fouillent tout le royaume’; Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres complètes de M. de Balzac, La comédie humaine; 2. Etudes de mœurs. 2e livre, Scènes de la vie de province. Les célibataires: Pierrette (Paris: Acamédia, 1842–48) http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1012816> [accessed 27 April 2015].

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  3. The Bureau was appointed by the government for expert and technical tasks: performing experiments and tests, fabricating expensive machines, publishing books useful to the progress of the arts; see Dominique de Place, ‘Le Bureau de consultation pour les arts, Paris, 1791–1796’, History and Technology, 5 (1988), 139–78 (quote on p. 139).

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  4. The Bureau des longitudes still exists and consists of 13 titular members (three ‘au titre de l’Académie des sciences’), 32 correspondents (four of whom are foreign scientists) and some members in ‘extraordinary service’ (representing the Centre national d’études spatiales, the Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière, Météo France, the Observatoire de Paris and the Service hydrographique de la Marine). It has retained its role of publishing an astronomical ephemeris and has responsibility for the computations carried out, since 1998, by the Institut de mécanique céleste et du calcul des éphémérides; see Nicole Capitaine, ‘Le Bureau des Longitudes: Activités et missions issues de son histoire’, paper given at the Conférence de l’Académie de Marine, 23 November 2011.

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  5. The location was inaugurated on 3 October 1875, but the Bureau informally met there from December 1874; see Guy Boistel, L’observatoire de la Marine et du Bureau des longitudes au parc Montsouris, 1875–1914 (Paris: IMCCE/E-dite, 2010).

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  1. Martina Schiavon
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Museums Greenwich, UK

    Richard Dunn (Senior Curator for the History of Science) (Senior Curator for the History of Science)

  2. University of Kent, UK

    Rebekah Higgitt (Lecturer in History) (Lecturer in History)

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© 2015 Martina Schiavon

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Schiavon, M. (2015). The Bureau des Longitudes: An Institutional Study. In: Dunn, R., Higgitt, R. (eds) Navigational Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, 1730–1850. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520647_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520647_5

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56744-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52064-7

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