Early eighteenth-century Newtonianism: the Huguenot contribution

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 533–548 www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Early eighteenth-century Newtonianism: the Huguenot contribution Jean-Franc¸ois Baillon 44 rue de Sauternes, 33800 Bordeaux, France

Abstract John Theophilus Desaguliers’s allegorical poem The Newtonian system of the world, the best model of government (1728) crystallizes the contribution of several important French Protestant exiles to the construction of early Newtonianism. In the context of diverging interpretations of Newton’s scientific achievement in terms of natural religion, writers such as Des Maizeaux, Coste, Le Clerc and others actively disseminated a version of Newtonianism which was close to Newton’s own intention. Through public experiments, translations, correspondence, reviews and books, they managed to convey a vision of Newtonian science which coincided with their propaganda of English liberties in Church and State. Therefore their effort on behalf of Newtonianism can be interpreted as part of a wider strategy of assimilation into English society at a time when most exiled Huguenots had given up hope of ever recreating a French Reformed Church at home. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Isaac Newton; John Theophilus Desaguliers; Pierre Coste; Pierre Des Maizeaux; Abraham de Moivre; Huguenots; Physico-theology; Translation; Vulgarization; Enlightenment

1. Introduction This article attempts to provide a context for John Theophilus Desaguliers’s philosophical poem, The Newtonian system of the world, the best model of government (1728), through a reconstruction of the network of Huguenot translators and disseminators of Newtonianism. Desaguliers’s poem, which is often considered as typical of the kind of literary praise that welcomed the accession of King George II in 1727—the year of

E-mail address: [email protected] (J.-F. Baillon). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.06.006

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Newton’s death—(Langford, 1998, p. 11), relies on an extended parallelism of the history of scientific doctrines since Ptolemy on the one hand, and the history of political re´gimes on the other. In combination with the—by then commonplace— contrast of the Cartesian ‘philosophical romance’ and the Newtonian allegedly scrupulous attention to phenomena, Desaguliers’s far-reaching analogy claimed that the English political system, based on the notion of a limited monarchy, was to tyranny what the Newtonian scientific system was to Ptolemy’s and Descartes’s—the latter being actually corruptions of the ancient doctrine of Pythagoras, which in turn was in harmony with the perfect political government of its times (Desaguliers, 1728, p. 20). Thus just as Newton restored primitive scientific truth, the present English political system restored the primitive political order, both being based on a balance of law and liberty (ibid., p. iv–v). ‘What . . . did Desaguliers’ peculiar poem on the Newtonian system of the world represent at the end of the reign of George I more than an attempt to curry favor with a new regime?’ (Stewart, 1992, p. 154). In an attempt to take seriously what was admittedly a rhetorical question asked by one of the leading specialists of eighteenth-century Newtonianism, I will suggest that not only did a significant number of Huguenots like Desaguliers contribute to the success of Newtonian science both at home and abroad, but they actually participated in the making of Newtonianism itself, or—to be quite specific—in the elaboration of a distinct variety of Newtonianism which happened to be authorized by Newton himself. One of the characteristic features of that variety was the centrality of its physico-theological dimension. From another perspective, the contribution of several Huguenots to that task can also be considered as subservient to a wider purpose, namely the further integration of the Huguenot community into British society at a time when Britain was increasingly posited as a Protestant haven and possibly a ‘deuxie`me patrie’ by the exiled French Protestants in London and elsewhere.

2. The Huguenot diaspora and its contribution to the European Enlightenment Although there were French Huguenots in England well before the eighteenth century, a sharp increase in numbers took place at the turn of the 1680s, in the context of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. According to one estimate, from 1660 to 1706, between 50,000 and 70,000 French Protestants took refuge in London (Chabrol, 1999, p. 94). Another account gives the number of 40,000 to 50,000 Huguenots for the decade of the 1680s (Prestwich, 1985). To this must be added the important fact of the settlement of French immigrants in the Netherlands and their links with Dutch printers and booksellers, a situation which favoured the growing use of French as the main language of the Continental Enlightenment—a phenomenon only increased by the publication of several major French-language Dutch periodicals (Hochstrasser, 1995, p. 19). Thus the situation was ripe for a dissemination of English ideas to Europe through the channel of French-speaking commentators, journalists, scholars, and so on: ‘The Huguenots

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were par excellence cultural intermediaries, designers, directors, and switchboard operators in the new intellectual communications system which emerged and proliferated throughout Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century’ (Gibbs, 1986, p. 184). Since the end of Charles II’s reign, the Netherlands had been a place that had provided information about English cultural life for the Continent (Trevor-Roper, 1992, p. 251). Recent studies have traced the network in which exiled French Protestants settled in Holland played such a part, such as the French bookseller Prosper Marchand, who took refuge there in 1709 (Berkvens-Stevelinck, 1999). Thus as early as the late seventeenth century, exiled French Protestants occupied strategic places both in England and in the Netherlands: ‘De`s la fin du 17e sie`cle, les huguenots ont pris une part de´cisive au de´veloppement du journalisme francophone qui, au sie`cle des Lumie`res, devait acque´rir une pre´ponde´rance europe´enne’ (Geissler, 1999, p. 137). This coincided with the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, as well as with the first decades of the rise of Newtonianism both in physics, with the publication of the Principia in 1687, and in optics, with the publication of the 1704 Opticks. We shall be mainly concerned here with what A. Rupert Hall has termed the ‘second’ and ‘third’ phases of Newtonianism in France, namely the years 1699– 1713 and 1713–1732 respectively, although there will be no attempt to distinguish between them (Hall, 1975, pp. 234–235). Indeed it has sometimes been suggested that within this wide process of the dissemination of English ideas into Europe, the Huguenots played a noticeable part in the dissemination of Newtonianism (Gibbs, 1986, p. 184). Yet historians such as Gibbs wrote about the Huguenots as ‘popularizers’ of Newtonian science, and more recently A. Asfour, in a thorough study of William Hogarth’s manipulation of Newtonian references, summed up Michael Baxandall’s notion of the vulgarization of Newtonianism as ‘the dissemination and filtering of its principles in accessible form to a general audience’ (Asfour, 1999, p. 699). Insofar as such a definition assumes that Newtonianism was a pre-existent construct passively transferred to the level of understanding of given audiences, its presentation of the work of the early Huguenot Newtonians is not neutral. In particular, it begs the question of the disseminators’ own responsibility in the elaboration of the cultural artefact called ‘Newtonianism’—although the plural is probably more appropriate, as Robert Schofield established some time ago (Schofield, 1978). It will be argued here that the Huguenot translators and disseminators of Newton’s science were actually active in the creation of one particular version of Newtonianism, in the context of a competition for the dominant religious and political interpretation of Newton’s science. The Huguenot secondary authors of Newtonianism were doing two things simultaneously: they were transmitting Newtonian material, making it available for yet further transmission, and they were contributing to spread one particular way of looking at such material, often by means of a physico-theological commentary. In very rare instances did they omit to connect natural philosophy with metaphysical or religious speculations which today would be considered as quite extraneous.

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The actual magnitude of the Huguenot contribution to the rise of an authorized version of Newtonianism can only be measured if one attempts to put together the various channels through which such a version was conveyed. These would include: printed or aborted translations of Newtonian texts such as the Opticks; vulgarization either directly effected by Huguenots or in translations by them; and accounts of any of the previous categories of publications in French-language periodicals published in the Netherlands. While most French-language periodicals published there were actually in the hands of Huguenots, they were one of the main sources through which Continental writers had access to English thought in an everexpanding Republic of Letters whose lingua franca was French (Barrell, 1989, p. 1; De Beer, 1967, p. 189; Almagor, 1989, p. 13). While the hypothesis of a coherent and deliberate network ultimately controlled by Newton himself for part of the period under consideration must be discarded, there is some evidence of local, limited collaboration with him. We shall now take a look at a few major examples, before attempting to see them in a more general perspective.

3. Case studies 3.1. John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744) An Oxford graduate, Desaguliers succeeded John Keill in the chair of experimental philosophy at Hart Hall before moving to London in 1712.1 In the winter of 1713–1714, at Newton’s invitation, he performed experiments on heat before members of the Royal Society of London. From 1716 to 1742, he published no less than fifty-two articles in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, at first mainly on optics and mechanics, then increasingly on electricity. According to Professor Hall, he ‘occupies a leading position (along with Keill, Pemberton, and Maclaurin) among those who gave Newtonian science its ascendancy in eighteenth-century England’ (Hall, 1971, p. 45). He published several accounts of his lectures: Physicomechanical lectures (1717), Mechanical and experimental philosophy (1724), Experimental course of astronomy (1725), and A course of experimental philosophy (1734). The 1717 Physico-mechanical lectures were almost immediately translated into French by Desaguliers himself as Lec¸ons physico-mechaniques (London, 1717). Newton had observations made by Desaguliers in July 1719 inserted into the third edition of the Principia (Hall & Tilling, 1977, p. xxxviii). The closeness of the personal relationship between Newton and Desaguliers, perhaps reflected in the fact that Newton was the godfather of Desaguliers’s third child, may explain the similarities of certain aspects of The Newtonian system of the world with familiar elements of Newton’s private thoughts (Rowbottom, 1967, p. 204). When we come to consider that text, we may suspect a rather close intimacy with some of Newton’s 1 The following account, which is of course extremely selective, is a synthesis of various biographical accounts, the two major ones being Margaret Rowbottom’s article (Rowbottom, 1967) and the notice on Desaguliers in the Dictionary of scientific biography (Hall, 1971).

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theories about the history of science. Thus one can read in a footnote to line 8 of Desaguliers’s philosophical poem: ‘The System of the Universe, as taught by Pythagoras, Philolaus, and other of the Ancients, is the same, which was since reviv’d by Copernicus, allow’d by all the unprejudic’d of the Moderns, and at last demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton’ (Boutin, 1999, p. 221). This is a rather faithful rendering of Newton’s own belief in a prisca philosophia as demonstrated by McGuire and Rattansi in a seminal article on the so-called ‘classical scholia’ initially intended as part of the Principia (McGuire & Rattansi, 1966; Casini, 1984). Besides, one can note a striking analogy between the historical role played by the process of corruption in Newton’s history of religion and Desaguliers’s use of the category of ‘bribery’ for similar explanatory purposes. Beside the mere publication of his lectures, Desaguliers’s personal influence on Continental natural philosophers or statesmen was more direct since in a few occasions he performed experiments on the Newtonian theory of colours before visitors such as ’sGravesande, who became a decisive spokesman of Newtonian theories in the Netherlands in the first half of the eighteenth century (Guerlac, 1981, pp. 128–129; Costabel, 1964, pp. 117–134). A letter from ’sGravesande to Newton in June 1718 reflects his efforts on behalf of Newton’s theories (Hall, 1982, p. 26). These efforts materialized in 1720 with the publication of a Dutch textbook soon translated into English by Desaguliers as The mathematical elements of natural philosophy (1721), ‘one of the important eighteenth-century textbooks that made Newton’s mathematics accessible’ (Dobbs & Jacob, 1995, p. 83). This was indeed ‘the first general text of Newtonian science to be published on the Continent and one of the earliest to be published in England’ (Schofield, 1997, p. 24).2 In 1715, the year of ’sGravesande’s visit, Desaguliers also performed experiments on colours before members of the French Acade´mie Royale des Sciences, thus paving the way to a wider recognition of the validity of Newton’s theories by French scientists such as Pierre Varignon (Coste, 1720, p. xii). Much the same task was performed by Desaguliers before diplomatic audiences from Spain, Sicily, Venice and Russia (Stewart, 1992, p. 121). 3.2. Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754) After studying at the French Protestant academies of Sedan and Saumur, De Moivre had to leave France in 1685 and settled in London soon afterwards. His first paper for the Royal Society was a paper about fluxions published in 1695. His first published mathematical treatise, The doctrine of chances (London, 1718), was dedicated to Newton. According to A. Rupert Hall, he ‘was acting as Newton’s spokesman’ during the priority quarrel with Leibniz (Hall & Tilling, 1977, p. xxxi). He improved Coste’s translation of the Opticks (see below) for the Paris edition of 2

Another exiled French Protestant, Elie de Joncourt, translated the same book into French as Ele´mens de physique de´montre´s mathe´matiquement et confirme´s par des expe´riences ou introduction a` la physique newtonienne (Costabel, 1964, p. 123 n. 7), and was probably the translator of Pemberton’s Elements of Newton’s philosophy, published as Ele´mens de la philosophie newtonienne in 1755.

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1722 (ibid., p. xxxvi). Before that, he was credited by Fontenelle with assisting Samuel Clarke in the 1706 Latin translation (Guerlac, 1964, p. 250). According to Matthew Maty, the Huguenot editor of the Journal Britannique (Maty, 1750–1755), his Miscellanea analytica (London, 1730) was reviewed by ’sGravesande for the thirteenth issue of the Journal Litte´raire (Maty, 1755, p. 50). According to A. R. Hall, De Moivre ‘was closely associated with Newton during the last twenty years or so of Newton’s life, though we know all too little of what passed between them’ (Hall, 1980, p. 195). Other historians stress that he belonged to a narrow circle of Newton’s closest relations (Gwynn, 1985, p. 90; Gibbs, 1986, p. 194; Guicciardini, 1999, pp. 5, 104, 194). He was personally chosen by Newton to counteract George Cheyne’s exposition of the doctrine of fluxions in the latter’s Fluxionum methodus inversa (1703) (Guicciardini, 1999, p. 189). In summary, De Moivre played an important part in the defense of Newton’s preeminence against Leibniz, but he was also crucial in the presentation of reliable editions of Newton’s Opticks in languages likely to be understood by foreign scientists, namely Latin and French—to which must be added private communication with Newton on mathematical matters over about two decades. 3.3. Pierre Coste (1668–1747) Generally speaking, the importance of Pierre Coste as a disseminator of English thought among Continental philosophers can hardly be overrated (Barrell, 1989, p. 106; Rumbold, 1991, p. 93). One of Coste’s main achievements as an ambassador of English thought abroad was undoubtedly his translation of the 1704 Opticks into French, which was the first such version to be printed, although a much earlier one by another hand has remained in manuscript form (Guerlac, 1981, p. 76). Coste was commissioned to translate Newton’s treatise through the intervention of the Princess of Wales and his work was revised by Desaguliers before going to print (Rumbold, 1991, p. 75). According to the editor of Locke’s Thoughts on education, ‘Coste had been on familiar terms with Sir Isaac Newton before his death in 1727’ (Axtell, 1968, p. 95). He was also on close terms with Locke, and translated many of the latter’s works, including the Essay concerning human understanding, a task in which he benefited from the cooperation of Jean Le Clerc (Locke, 1999, p. 239 n. 50). Locke even wished him to be the translator of his Two treatises of government, although ultimately another Huguenot, David Mazel, performed that job (Locke, 1999, pp. 242–245). According to the testimony of Charles De La Motte, Coste—again on the request of the Princess of Wales—also translated into French ‘quelques pie`ces de M. Newton que je n’ai jamais vuˆes’, although there may simply be a confusion with the translation of the Opticks (Locke, 1999, pp. 254– 255). Like Desaguliers, Coste did not consider himself as just an instrument for the circulation of other people’s thoughts (Rumbold, 1991, p. 77). He developed his own theories about knowledge and learning in a dissertation on the progress of science, his Discours sur la philosophie ou` l’on voit en abre´ge´ l’histoire de cette science (1691; a Latin translation was published in 1705). A close analysis of that

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text shows that he claimed the superiority of modern science over ancient learning (Leduc-Fayette, 1983). 3.4. Pierre Des Maizeaux (1666–1745) Des Maizeaux ‘was one of the foremost artisans of the Republic of Letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ (Barrell, 1989, pp. 215–218). Like Coste, his importance ‘lies in his roˆle as mediator between the English and French cultures through his voluminous correspondence, his personal contacts and his activities as a literary agent’ (Almagor, 1989, p. 10). He has also been portrayed as ‘the ‘‘chef’’ of the London journalistic scene’ (Janssens, 1999, p. 104). Probably unable to grasp the substance of Newton’s mathematical reasoning, he mainly conveyed to his French readers the notion ‘that Newton was the most profound mathematician in England but hardly discussed the contents and implications of his publications’ (Almagor, 1989, p. 66). In various French-language periodicals such as the Nouvelles Litte´raires or the Histoire Critique de la Re´publique des Lettres, he published articles which were accounts either of some of Newton’s works—such as the 1718 Optice—or of books published by eminent Newtonians: Joseph Raphson’s The history of fluxions (1715), Samuel Clarke’s A discourse concerning the being and attributes of God (1716), or Desaguliers’s Physico-mechanical lectures (1717) which he used as vehicles to spread a concise version of Newtonian physico-theology. In 1718, one year after Samuel Clarke, Des Maizeaux put together a new edition of the correspondence of Clarke and Leibniz, the Recueil de diverses pieces, for the publication of which he had been in contact with Newton (Des Maizeaux, 1718). Seeing the proof sheets ‘Newton immediately organized Des Maizeaux’s proposed book according to his own advantage, reordering the documents and correcting the editorial comments upon them’ (Hall, 1980, p. 243). Evidence of Newton’s participation was disclosed by Koyre´ and Cohen in the form of a draft letter to Des Maizeaux signalling a mistake in the ordering of some letters. The mistake was indeed corrected in the next edition of the Recueil, which went through several editions in the eighteenth century and can be considered as a vehicle of Newtonian propaganda on the Continent, thus justifying Leibniz’s own misgivings about Des Maizeaux’s partiality, expressed in a letter to the Princess of Wales of July 1716 (Koyre´ & Cohen, 1962, pp. 122–123; Robinet, 1957, p. 119). In summary, while Clarke’s 1717 edition of the correspondence targeted a domestic readership, Des Maizeaux’s unitentionally belated Recueil can be considered as Newton’s discreet mouthpiece intended for a Continental audience. 3.5. Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) Le Clerc’s importance as the instrument of Newtonian propaganda in the eighteenth century first lies in his efforts as editor of two French-language periodicals, the Bibliothe`que Choisie (1703–1713) and the Bibliothe`que Ancienne et Moderne (1714–1727). Yet even before that time, both as editor of the Bibliothe`que Universelle et Historique (1686–1693) and as lecturer in natural philosophy, Le Clerc demonstrated an interest in English thinking. Thus it has been established that

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‘more than a fifth’ of the space of the Bibliothe`que Universelle was dedicated to reviews of English books (De Beer, 1967, p. 185). Moreover, when he was lecturing to students in natural philosophy in Amsterdam in the last decade of the seventeenth century, Le Clerc expounded Newtonian attraction which he openly professed to find more convincing than Cartesian vortices (Barnes, 1938, p. 144). Le Clerc’s Opera philosophica, published in separate volumes from 1692 to 1696 before the single-volume edition of 1698, were the printed trace of that teaching and acknowledged Newton and Locke as intellectual models. This may explain why, in 1722, Nicolas Hartsoeker used the stratagem of a letter to Le Clerc to issue a refutation of the Newtonian system: his ‘lettre a` Monsieur Le Clerc sur quelques endroits de la philosophie newtonienne’ (Hartsoeker, 1722) is explicitly based on an article by Le Clerc in the Bibliothe`que Ancienne et Moderne, perceived by Hartsoeker as a representative vehicle of Newtonian thought. In an earlier book, the Conjectures physiques (1706), he had already targeted ‘a dozen scholars in Europe who, having set up a kind of network of mutual praise, praise [Newton] excessively, while a huge number of others, who are but the echoes of the former, praise him with just as much excess, not because they understand him, but merely to have it thought in the world that they are as much initiated in those mysteries’.3 Perhaps Hartsoeker included Le Clerc in that number. 3.6. Michel de la Roche (?–1742) Like Le Clerc, La Roche’s importance in the dissemination of Newton’s thought mainly lies in his role as editor of various literary journals, both in French and in English. Although it would be interesting to consider his activities as editor of the Memoirs of Literature (1710–1714 and 1717), the New Memoirs of Literature (1725–1727) and the Literary Journal (1730–1731), we must focus on the contribution of his two French-language periodicals, the Bibliothe`que Angloise or Histoire Litte´raire de la Grande-Bretagne (De La Roche, 1717–1719) and the Memoires Litteraires de la Grande-Bretagne (De La Roche, 1720–1724), through which English authors in general, and Newton and his commentators in particular, became the dominant philosophical and scientific reference in Enlightenment thought on the Continent. La Roche, an active disseminator of English thought, studied mathematics with De Moivre (Thomas, 1985, p. 15). According to his biographer, Margaret D. Thomas, La Roche’s journals ‘made a noteworthy contribution to the early encouragement of the intense interest in English culture which was to culminate in France in the wellknown phenomenon of ‘‘Anglomanie’’‘ (ibid., p. 103). The dissemination of Newton’s theories in the Bibliothe`que Angloise was achieved 3

‘Comme le Systeme de Mr. Newton fait grand bruit dans le Monde, puis qu’il y a une douzaine de Sc¸avans en Europe qui ayant e´tabli une espece de commerce de louanges reciproques, le louent avec excez, & qu’un grand nombre de gens qui ne sont que les e´chos des autres, le louent avec tout autant d’exce`s, non parce qu’ils l’entendent, mais seulement pour faire croire dans le monde qu’ils sont aussi initiez dans ces mysteres; je crois qu’il ne sera pas hors de propos d’y faire quelques remarques, pour faire voir l’impossibilite´ ce cet ingenieux Systeme’ (Hartsoeker, 1706–1708, t. I , p. 29).

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mainly through reviews of books by key Newtonian authors such as Whiston’s New theory of the earth (1716) or John Keill’s Introductio ad veram astronomiam (1718), although brief references to limited aspects of Newton’s works were not infrequent. In several instalments of his Memoires Litte´raires de la Grande Bretagne, he used an account of John Clarke’s 1719 Boyle Lectures (published as An enquiry into the cause & origin of evil) as a vehicle with which to expound Newton’s discoveries.4 Apart from his active propaganda as editor of French-language journals, La Roche’s other important contribution was the translation into French of the English portion of the correspondence of Clarke and Leibniz in Clarke’s 1717 edition (Robinet, 1957, p. 8 n. 1; Thomas, 1985, p. 103). 4. Interpretation: Newtonianism and assimilation 4.1. The Huguenots and Newtonian physico-theology The first obvious conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing description is the strategic importance of the contribution of Huguenot journalists and scientists in the dissemination of Newtonian thought in Europe. While some, such as Desaguliers or De Moivre, were closer to the source—Newton himself—and took part in the production of first-hand Newtonian documents, others, such as Des Maizeaux or La Roche, translated, summed up or commented upon those documents, making them available for wider audiences in a version which contained an authorized physico-theological exploitation of science. As a consequence one chief characteristic of that twofold work of dissemination was its preservation of the link between science and its religious interpretation—a link, needless to say, on which Newton himself insisted in well known sections of the Principia (the General Scholium) and the Opticks (the Queries). This confirms Roy Porter’s remark about Desaguliers, whom he describes as one of Newton’s ‘prote´ge´s’: ‘Through having such followers, Newton became Newtonianism’ (Porter, 2000, p. 134). This echoes the analysis offered by other historians of eighteenth-century Enlightenment: ‘Bentley and Desaguliers may be taken as typical of the first generation of Newton’s followers, the Newtonians . . . Long before his death in 1727, he had confidants as well as acknowledged and trusted followers’ (Dobbs & Jacob, 1995, p. 65). Even the most cursory glance at the production of Huguenot vulgarizers is enough to produce revelatory passages. For instance, here is how Desaguliers introduced the English translation of Bernard Nieuwentidjt’s The religious philosopher: ‘He that reads Nieuwentijt, will easily see that a Philosopher cannot be an Atheist; and if it were true, that a Smattering in Physics will give a proud Man a Tincture of Atheism, a deep Search into Nature will certainly bring him back to a Religious Sense of God’s Wisdom and Providence’ (Desaguliers, 1717, p. viii). Much the same vision of the use of science emerged from the opening lines of his letter ‘to His Royal Highness Frederick, Prince of Wales’ which introduced his 4

Cf. Memoires Litte´raires, 3 (1720), 105–141; 4 (1720), 60–111; 5 (1721), 18–62; 7 (1721), 234–281; 8 (1722), 285–322; 9 (1722), 68–114.

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Course of experimental philosophy: ‘To contemplate the Works of God, to discover Causes from their Effects, and make Art and Nature subservient to the Necessities of Life, by a Skill in joining proper Causes to obtain the most useful Effects, is the Business of a Science, the Grounds and Principles of which, I have the Honour to lay at Your Royal Highness’s Feet’ (Desaguliers, 1734, p. i). Much the same picture emerged from Coste’s preface to his own translation of Newton’s Opticks: ‘The Reader will allow me to add one more word on the Queries which are like a conclusion to this Work. There he will find what the Author thinks about the most important matters of Physics. They are the fruit of a Philosophy which one only has to study and understand to admire, & which through the scrutiny of the main Phenomena of Nature, leads us necessarily to God, the Author & Preserver of all things’.5 La Roche’s account of Keill’s Introductio ad veram astronomia in the Bibliothe`que Angloise contained a translation of the latter’s apology of astronomy and was followed by a brief history of the progress of that science, culminating in Newton’s discovery of the law of universal gravitation. ‘There is nothing’, he wrote, ‘which gives us a more exact notion of the Vastness of the Universe, of its beauty & of the Wisdom of its Author, than the Laws which we have just discussed’.6 The trace of that ‘new science-inspired Protestantism [which] spread throughout Continental Europe’ (Dobbs & Jacob, 1995, p. 83) is perceptible in a mid-century version by another London-based Huguenot, Matthew Maty, in a review of James Foster’s Discourses on all the principal branches of natural religion and social virtue (London, 1749), when Maty comments upon gravity as evidence of the existence of God: ‘as it acts upon the diverse and the smallest parts of matter, as it does not hover over the surfaces but penetrates into the inward parts of bodies, and lastly as it extends its influence over the whole nature, it appears to be the most obvious indication of the presence of the Sovereign Being, the instrument of His operations, the common locus of the parts of the Universe’.7 4.2. The Huguenots as English patriots The Newtonian propaganda developed by several key figures of the Huguenot Refuge in England and the Netherlands in the early eighteenth century—with a peak in the period 1715–1720—coincided with an increasing movement towards 5 ‘Qu’on me permette d’ajouˆter encore un mot sur les Questions qui servent de conclusion a` cet Ouvrage. On y trouvera ce que l’Auteur pense sur les matieres les plus importantes de la Physique. Ce sont des fruits d’une Philosophie qui n’a besoin que d’eˆtre e´tudie´e & entendue¨ pour eˆtre admire´e, & qui par l’examen des principaux Phenomenes de la Nature, nous conduit ne´cessairement a` Dieu, l’Auteur & le Conservateur de toutes choses’ (Coste, 1720, pp. XII–XIII, my translation). 6 ‘Il n’y a rien qui nous donne une plus juste ide´e de la vaste Etendue de l’Univers, de sa beaute´, & de la Sagesse de son Auteur, que les Loix, dont nous venons de parler’ (Bibliothe`que Angloise, IV(2nd part) [1718], 344–345, my translation). 7 ‘[C]omme elle agit sur les diverses & les plus petites parties de la matie`re, qu’elle ne voltige point sur les surfaces, mais qu’elle pe´ne`tre dans l’inte´rieur des corps, & qu’enfin elle e´tend son influence sur la nature entie`re, elle paroıˆt eˆtre l’indice le plus marque´ de la pre´sence du Souverain Etre, l’instrument de ses ope´rations, le lieu commun des parties de l’Univers’ (Journal Britannique, January (1750), 22, my translation).

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assimilation and with an end to the exiled French Protestants contemplating a return to France en masse. The climate following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Glorious Revolution seems to have favoured the adoption of England as a new mother country by an ever-increasing number of exiles. From that perspective, the defense of a Protestant physico-theology must be related to the wider advocacy of an English model, whether in the field of science, theology or politics. Thus from a historical point of view the contribution of various Huguenots to the construction of eighteenth-century Newtonian physico-theology should be regarded as instrumental to the emergence of the English paradigm in the thought of the early Enlightenment. The passage of the Naturalization Act by a Whig majority in 1709 encouraged many French exiles to view assimilation to the host country as a better solution than a hypothetical return to France, although La Roche, for one, was naturalized earlier—by a 1701 Parliamentary Bill which naturalized a number of his fellow exiles (Thomas, 1985, p. 107). Indeed historians of the French Refuge have noticed the waning of their French patriotism: ‘By the middle of the first half of the eighteenth century, most Huguenot refugees had been settled in their new countries for quite some time . . . Eventually, assimilation to another cultural identity was completed . . . Some of them did not feel any longer like Frenchmen’ (Haour, 1995, pp. 134–135). Ever since 1688, French refugees had swarmed to London in search of asylum and pensions (Texte, 1895, p. 18). Some of them, either individually or as a group, contributed to the emergence of the post-1688 settlement. The English radicals exiled in the Netherlands ‘conspired with e´migre´s from France’ (Porter, 2000, p. 26) and many London Huguenots had a part in the establishment of the Bank of England, ‘a main pillar of the Revolution settlement’ (Gibbs, 1986, p. 182). The central role of a key Huguenot historian, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, in the elaboration of what later came to be derided as ‘Whig history’ has been aptly documented by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who even nicknamed him England’s ‘first Whig historian’ (Trevor-Roper, 1992). Another important figure was Abel Boyer, author of a French–English dictionary and editor of The political state of Great Britain, which went through sixty volumes from 1711 to 1740 and which constantly celebrated the English constitution and English liberties, supposedly restored and preserved by the Glorious Revolution (Gibbs, 1986, p. 181).8 Des Maizeaux too was a constant admirer of the English political and legal system: ‘In Des Maizeaux’s eyes this was one of the most important aspects of the English system: its laws and Parliament’ (Almagor, 1989, p. 134). Indeed one of the most vocal upholders of the Hanoverian re´gime, seen as sealing English liberties and a Protestant succession, was none other than Desaguliers, ‘outspoken in his loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty’ (Gibbs, 1986, p. 200; Porter, 2000, p. 137; Kramnick, 1968, p. 139). In the prefatory letter ‘To the Right Honourable The Earl of Ilay’ introducing The Newtonian system of the world, 8

Des Maizeaux wrote Boyer’s obituary in the columns of the Bibliothe`que Raisonne´e des Ouvrages des Savans de l’Europe.

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Desaguliers thus linked up Newtonian cosmology and Hanoverian politics: ‘The limited Monarchy, whereby our Liberties, Rights, and Privileges are so well secured to us, as to make us happier than all the Nations round about us, seems to be a lively Image of our System’ (Desaguliers, 1728, p. v). According to Dobbs and Jacob, in his philosophical poem, Desaguliers ‘summed up his understanding of the new postrevolutionary relationship between English government and Newtonian science’ (Dobbs & Jacob, 1995, p. 85). Volume 1 of A course of experimental philosophy was dedicated to ‘His Royal Highness Frederick, Prince of Wales’ (Desaguliers, 1734, pp. i–iv). In the last issue of the Bibliothe`que Angloise, one could read an abstract of Antoine Vezian’s ‘Ode to George II’ preceded by a commentary which emphasized the Refugees’ loyalty to the English nation: ‘while the French people, in the Refuge, have not forgotten the propensity of their Nation to praise Kings, at least they have learnt to praise them only for what is great and what is true’.9 The author of that review, Armand Boisbeleau de la Chapelle, who succeeded La Roche as editor of the journal in 1719, described England as the only European nation where liberties were protected in the advertisement to the first volume of his own publication, the Bibliothe`que Raisonne´e des Ouvrages des Savans de l’Europe, published in September 1728 (Boisbeleau de la Chapelle, 1728–1746, 1, viii). One of the most obvious links between Refugee identity and the general praise bestowed on English institutions was the crucial need to preserve the interests of the French community in exile. ‘Des Maizeaux’s Huguenot heritage had a direct influence on his general political position: the English monarchy and nation always were to be praised for creating a shelter for the French Protestant refugees’ (Almagor, 1989, p. 134). This preoccupation took on a fresh urgency in the very first years of the eighteenth century, during the crisis precipitated by the arrival of the Ce´venol prophets. Thus Des Maizeaux, for one, took up a position against the French Prophets with the obvious intention of preserving the reputation of the Huguenot community (ibid., pp. 39–41, 64). This attitude was consistent with that of the French religious authorities in London, who expressed their solidarity with the post-1688 settlement at the expense of the French Prophets (Cottret, 1985, pp. 310–311). Although it would be a distortion to assert that all French exiles shared quite the same interpretation either of Newtonian physics or of the post-1688 settlement, many of them saw England as the most tolerant nation in Europe, and they sometimes linked the emergence of English liberties to the rise of free scientific inquiry. This was Desaguliers’s explicit argument in The Newtonian system of the world, but a similar discourse can also be found in other contexts. Thus Des Maizeaux dedicated the second edition (1743) of the English translation of Bayle’s Dictionnaire to Sir Robert Walpole and insisted that knowledge could prosper only in a favourable 9 ‘[S]i les Franc¸ois n’ont pas oublie´, dans le Refuge, le penchant qui porte leur Nation a` louer les Rois, ils y ont au moins appris a` ne les louer que par le grand & le vrai’ (15(2nd part) [1728], art. VIII, 483, my translation).

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political climate (Almagor, 1989, p. 15). According to La Roche, the study of natural philosophy could only lead to the abandonment of superstition and to the concomitant enfeeblement of intolerance (Thomas, 1985, p. 134). In the review of the third edition of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1722), Armand de la Chapelle wondered why Sprat did not mention ‘la douceur du Gouvernement Anglois si favorable a` toute sorte d’e´tudes’ (Bibliothe`que Angloise, 11(1st part) [1724], art. I, 50). Among the achievements of the English people in the field of public liberties, many French Protestants developed an admiration for the Church of England— sometimes to the point of joining it, like Desaguliers or La Roche. On various occasions the latter explicitly linked this decision to his experience of persecution in France (Thomas, 1985, pp. 122–123). One of his most lyrical flights of praise of the Church of England was to be found in the first volume of his Memoires Litte´raires de la Grande-Bretagne: ‘Far from being biased toward that Church, I could not possibly speak about it too advantageously; and I must make ardent wishes for its preservation, all the more since it was good enough to welcome me with open arms, when I took refuge in her pale’.10 In the reviews of English books he sent to various periodicals, Des Maizeaux lavishly praised the Church of England (for instance in a review of Burnet’s Exposition on the 39 Articles (Almagor, 1989, p. 26)) and, by contrast, missed no opportunity to debunk the Roman Catholic Church (ibid., p. 138). In his Lettre d’un gentilhomme de la Cour de Saint-Germain a` un de ses amis en Angleterre (1710), he defended the Whigs against the Jacobites and the Jesuits, whom he charged with an attempt to control the Church of England (Almagor, 1989, p. 5). Le Clerc’s biographer interpreted his new edition of Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianæ in 1709 as an indirect apology for the Church of England (Barnes, 1938, pp. 145–146) and she mentioned two poems in French written by Le Clerc in praise of the Glorious Revolution, which he published as an appendix to his translation of sermons by Gilbert Burnet (ibid., p. 147). According to Barbeyrac, around the years 1707–1708 the English government thought of offering Le Clerc the post of Queen’s Librarian, altough it eventually came to nothing (ibid, p. 167). French Protestant loyalties to Newtonianism and English liberties did not disappear at once with the generation of Huguenots whose biographies started before 1685. Second- and third-generation Huguenots or descendents of Huguenots kept up the flame, such as Matthew Maty in the columns of the Journal Britannique, Stephen Charles Triboudet Demainbray—a demonstrator of experimental philosophy who followed ’sGravesande’s lectures at Leiden (Rowbottom, 1967, p. 204) before he became a Royal Astronomer at Kew—and even Jean-Paul Marat, who translated Newton’s Opticks again in 1787. Yet as the eighteenth century was reaching its close, Refugee identity lost some of its edge and—as a careful 10 ‘Loin d’eˆtre partial en faveur de cette Eglise, je n’en saurois parler trop avantageusement; & je dois faire des vœux ardents pour sa conservation, d’autant plus qu’elle a eu la bonte´ de me recevoir a` bras ouverts, lors que je me suis re´fugie´ dans son Sein’ (1 [1720], xv–xvi, my translation).

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comparison of Newton’s, Coste’s and Marat’s texts shows—Marat’s very biased translation diminished the role of a personal, biblical God in nature by erasing some of Newton’s most explicit commentaries, thus confirming Dobbs and Jacob’s judgment that ‘[t]he natural religion or physico-theology so beloved by British Newtonians was far too godly for Buffon and the leaders of the French Enlightenment’ (Dobbs & Jacob, 1995, p. 109). The Huguenot transformation of Newton into Newtonianism in the first decades of the eighteenth century should then appear as a transitional phase during which something of Newton’s initial intentions was preserved, until different national and cultural contexts made it increasingly less necessary to maintain a close solidarity between the authority of modern science and a given ideological exploitation.

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McGuire, J. E., & Rattansi, P. M. (1966). Newton and the ‘pipes of Pan’. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 21, 108–143. Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. Prestwich, M. (1985). Les Huguenots anglais. In Les Huguenots: Exposition nationale (pp. 190–193). Paris: Archives Nationales, La Documentation Franc¸aise. Robinet, A. (Ed.). (1957). Correspondance Leibniz–Clarke. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rowbottom, M. (1967). John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744). Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, XXI(2), 196–218. Rumbold, M. E. (1991). Traducteur huguenot: Pierre Coste. New York: P. Lang. Schofield, R. E. (1978). An evolutionary taxonomy of eighteenth-century Newtonianisms. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 7, 175–192. Schofield, R. E. (1997). The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A study of his life and work from 1733 to 1773. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Stewart, L. (1992). The rise of public science: Rhetoric, technology and natural philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Texte, J. (1895). Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme litte´raire: Etude sur les relations litte´raires de la France et de l’Angleterre au XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris: Hachette. Thomas, M. D. (1985). Michel de La Roche: A Huguenot critic of Calvin. In Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol 238 (pp. 97–195). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Trevor-Roper, H. (1992). From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg.

Further reading Cohen, I. B. (1964). Isaac Newton, Hans Sloane and the Acade´mie des Sciences. In I. B. Cohen, & R. Taton (Eds.), Me´langes Alexandre Koyre´, I: L’aventure de la science (pp. 60–116). Paris: Hermann. Desaguliers, J. T. (1724). A letter from the Reverend Mr. Desaguliers to John Chamberlayne, Esq; relating to the following treatise (2 February 1717/1718). In B. Nieuwentijt (Ed.), The religious philosopher: Or, the right use of contemplating the works of the creator (3rd ed.) (pp. vii–viii). London: J. Senex, E. Taylor, W. and J. Innys and J. Osborne. Hacking, I. (1974). Moivre, Abraham de. In Dictionary of scientific biography, Vol. IX (C. C. Gillispie, Ed.) (pp. 452–455). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Jacob, M. C. (1981). The radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: Allen & Unwin. Locke, J. (1991). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (First published 1690) Newton, I. (1722). Traite´ d’optique sur les reflexions, refractions, inflexions, et les couleurs, de la lumie´re. Paris: Montalant. Wade, N. J. (2000). Jean The´ophile Desaguliers (1683–1744) and eighteenth-century vision research. British Journal of Psychology, 91, 275–285.