The Abbé de Saint-Pierre and the Emergence of the 'Quantifying ...

Abbé Saint-Pierre and the “Quantifying Spirit” 18
to work. Especially important was the role of the public as both an authoritative judge and target
audience for Saint-Pierre’s new political science. 40 Here again the abbé’s exposure to the
intersecting practices of scientific sociability and administrative monarchy after 1680 provided
the crucial context for his thought.
At the center of Saint-Pierre’s various reform projects, including the plan for a new class
of state-supported Analistes, was a new role for academies and other public institutions in the
production, circulation, and adjudication of political knowledge. His new Académie politique,
which Saint-Pierre conceived as something like an all-powerful information ministry, was crucial
to this vision. This institution would choose the official Analistes and administer their
information gathering and archiving. But this was only one part of a much larger set of
responsibilities which Saint-Pierre imagined for this new body. In another set of reform tracts
published in his Ouvrajes politiques, the abbé discusses how the existing academies of letters
and the sciences can be improved. His solution for each is to make them satellites of the central
Académie politique and to make the latter the supervising center of the entire academy system. 41
In the case of the Académie française, the parent institution would administer admission
to the body, choosing gens de lettres who were committed to what for Saint-Pierre were the three
principle objectives of a literary academy: the study of correct diction, grammar and
orthography; the scholarly exploration of monuments, medals, and inscriptions; and the
development of rhetorical tools which instill morals and inspire great deeds. In short, the
production of accurate dictionaries and grammars, antiquarian scholarship, and morally-driven
history. To foster this work Saint-Pierre imagined reorganizing the existing institution into three
bureaux devoted to each of these projects. Guiding each would be an imperative toward serving
the public interest through the production of utilitarian knowledge. 42