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242 The Mediterranean of Louis XV
Mediterranean of Louis XV may be bracketed by two technological
innovations that transformed the practice of cartography,
the first being the development by the Bolognese
astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) in the 1680s
of tables of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, which were
used to determine longitude relative to a fixed meridian; the
second being the application in the late eighteenth century of
marine chronometers to the same problem of fixing a traveller’s
location relative to an arbitrary point of reference. During the
period between these two developments, the extraordinary proliferation
of systematic astronomical observation within academic
bodies throughout Europe and the publication of
increasingly precise observations of celestial phenomena
resulted in an unprecedented potential for the verification of
astronomical and geographical data. The Académie des Sciences,
occupying a dominant position within the academic universe
of the Enlightenment, and the highly centralized
administration of French external commerce were, between
1669 and 1749, linked directly through the person of the Secretary
of State for Maritime Affairs. 18 The result was an unparalleled
system for the coordination of geographic
information that transformed representations of the world and
the practice of cartography, nowhere more dramatically than in
the Mediterranean Sea.
3. the mediterranean sea
and enlightenment science
French dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of ‘Mer Méditerranée’
give little sense of the radical transformation of representations
of that body of water in the course of the eighteenth
century or of the immense significance of the adjacent territories—particularly
those under Ottoman control—to French
commerce. In the article ‘Mer Méditerranée’ published in the
1768 edition of La Martinière’s Grand dictionnaire géographique,
the Mediterranean is understood primarily as a collection
of smaller seas, gulfs and bays, defined by a number of peninsulas
and large islands:
18
See M. Vergé-Franceschi, La Marine française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1996).