Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONof gas-lighting and chemicals, and agriculture stimulated their labours.And the enthusiasm of the solid British bourgeois Radical and aristocraticWhig not merely for applied research but for daring advancesin knowledge from which established science itself recoiled is sufficientproof that the scientific progress of our period cannot be separatedfrom the stimulus of the Industrial Revolution.Similarly the scientific implications of the French Revolution areobvious in the frank or concealed hostility to science with whichpolitical conservatives or moderates met what they regarded as thenatural consequences of eighteenth century materialist and rationalistsubversion. Napoleon's defeat brought a wave of obscurantism. 'Mathematicswere the chains of human thought,' cried the slippery Lamartine,'I breathe, and they are broken.' The struggle between a combativepro-scientific and anti-clerical left which has, in its rare moments ofvictory, built most of the institutions which allow French scientists tofunction, and an anti-scientific right, which has done its best to starvethem, 8 has continued ever since. This does not imply that scientists inFrance or elsewhere were at this period particularly revolutionary.Some were, like the golden boy Evariste Galois, who dashed to thebarricades in 1830, was persecuted as a rebel, and killed in a duelprovoked by political bullies at the age of twenty-one in 1832. Generationsof mathematicians have fed on the profound ideas he wrote downfeverishly in what he knew to be his last night on earth. Some werefrank reactionaries, like the Legitimist Gauchy, though for obviousreasons the tradition of the Ecole Polytechnique, which he adorned,was militantly anti-royalist. Probably most scientists would havereckoned themselves to be left of centre in the post-Napoleonic periodand some, especially in new nations or hitherto unpolitical communities,were forced into positions of political leadership; notably historians,linguists and others with obvious connections with national movements.Palacky became the chief spokesman of the Czechs in 1848, the sevenprofessors of Gottingen who signed a letter of protest in 1837 foundthemselves national figures,* and the Frankfurt Parliament in theGerman 1848 Revolution was notoriously an assembly of professorsas well as other civil servants. On the other hand, compared with theartists and philosophers, the scientists—and especially the naturalones—showed only a very low degree of political consciousness, unlesstheir subject actually required it. Outside the Catholic countries, forinstance, they showed a capacity for combining science with a tranquilreligious orthodoxy which surprises the student of the post-Darwinianera.* They included the brothers Grimm.292