Does the Enlightenment’s Great Female Intellect Need Rescuing?
Historians championing previously marginalized intellectual and literary figures are often caught on the horns of an odd dilemma. On the one hand, the subject—the woman scientist, the Black composer, the Indigenous military strategist—must have met with some degree of social acceptance in their day or the work would never have had enough support and attention to have flourished and survived. Since historians wish to draw on the wiser judges of the era to establish the importance of their subjects, we are told about whom they wowed and how they wowed them. On the other hand, the point must be made that such subjects have had far less attention than they deserve. So they must be shown to have been keenly appreciated by the better spirits of their time as well as wrongly consigned to oblivion.
This reflects a historical truth—the marginalized often are esteemed, at least by some, before being neglected by all—but it creates a strange biographer’s two-step. We regret that Louise Farrenc, the French Romantic composer, has fallen into obscurity, while reporting how much her contemporary Hector Berlioz admired her in order to establish the injustice of her obscurity. Isaac Rosenberg might be “the greatest English war poet nobody’s ever heard of”—as one of his champions insists, comparing him favorably with Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, and ascribing his oblivion to his being working class and Jewish—but his work’s excellence is established by the fact that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were impressed by it. Vindicated and victimized: this two-step is very much on view in “The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy” (Oxford), Andrew Janiak’s engrossing life of the French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher.
Janiak, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, makes the largely persuasive case that du Châtelet was not just a significant figure in eighteenth-century physics but one of the most important women in European history. So we hear of the universal fame she enjoyed after publishing her “Foundations of Physics,” which was first printed in 1740, revised for a second edition in 1742, and translated into so many other languages that she gained a European audience. Janiak reports that the work “was then cited, debated, and praised by major figures in science, mathematics, and philosophy,” and “read from Prussia to Russia, from Italy to France, from Switzerland to England.” But we also hear much of her subsequent neglect, and pages are spent inveighing against the way she has been referred to as “Voltaire’s mistress.” (She and the philosophe had a passionate and public love affair that started in the seventeen-thirties, working and sleeping side by side in her castle at Cirey with the acceptance of her complaisant husband.) “She was not merely betrayed by later misogynist portrayals in recent times,” Janiak writes. “Even as she rose to the highest levels of intellectual fame in eighteenth-century Europe, she was first betrayed by the Enlightenment itself.”
Yet, in trying to save her from being an appurtenance of Voltaire’s, her biographer disembodies her a little. We lose sight of her as a French marquise of the eighteenth century, with lovers to juggle, a watchful husband in an arranged marriage to mollify and manipulate, family properties to manage, children to bear, raise, and marry off, footmen and parlormaids to hire and fire, card games at which to gamble extravagantly, literary-society feuds to arbitrate, and, not least, health crises around every corner. Instead, Janiak makes her sound more like an assistant professor at an American university, with theses to present, colleagues to placate, abstract arguments to win and lose, and tenure to pursue. In truth, we diminish her by lifting her out of her own time and circle; making her even more of a mind needn’t make her less of a woman. In Janiak’s account, Voltaire’s central role in her life, as her friend and teacher and ideal mate and intellectual wrestling opponent, is cordoned off, for fear of making her once again Voltaire’s mistress. The term is indeed deplorable and demeaning, but her being Voltaire’s lover was a decisive aspect of who she was and how she lived and why she wrote so well, just as Harriet Taylor’s mind was liberated, not limited, by her love for John Stuart Mill. (As his was by his love for her.) Du Châtelet wrote as movingly as anyone ever has about love found and lost, and that, too, is as much a part of her legacy as her now rediscovered “pluralistic” vision of physics. Indeed, one draws on the other. In trying to protect du Châtelet from a tradition of condescension, we subject her to another form of condescension, denying her the sensual wholeness that matched her intellectual heft.
Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, as she was born in 1706, came from the top of French society; she was introduced to the world in what is now the Place des Vosges in a building that still survives on that matchless square of matched red brick homes, which was among the earliest modular urban developments in European history. She had an unusually happy childhood, with a family bent toward the sciences. Bernard de Fontenelle, the great Academician and the author of one of the first books of popular science, the “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,” was a regular at her father’s table, and was said to delight in conversing with Émilie. (Already old when he knew her, Fontenelle lived in good health into his late nineties, and was famous for having said, at ninety-two, on meeting a beautiful woman, “Ah, to be eighty again.” He credited his long life to a diet of strawberries.)
Wildly precocious, Émilie mastered Latin, Greek, and English. In such a milieu, she was encouraged to read and study, but was soon married off to an even grander aristocrat, the Marquis du Châtelet, a well-meaning, somewhat bumbling Army officer, who was interested only in his military exploits and soon forbidden by his wife to discuss them at the table. He was completely outmatched by her and wise enough to know it. But she pined for more study and chafed at the strictures placed upon women: “I feel the full weight of prejudice that excludes us universally from the sciences, and it is one of the contradictions of this world, which has always astonished me, that there are great countries where the law permits us to decide our destiny, but none where we are brought up to think.”
Madame du Châtelet solved the problem in a way that only a very smart (and very rich) woman could: since she couldn’t get to the colleges, she would make her home one. She drew a procession of philosophes to her country house in Cirey, while her husband fussed and watched, unable to comprehend the arguments but eager to see his beautiful wife happy. Like any French woman of her class, she immediately began to collect a series of lovers: first the very grand Duc de Richelieu, who remained a lifelong friend, and then Jean François de Saint-Lambert.
Among the intellectual luminaries of the time, Voltaire was the big “get,” and she got him. In 1730, just back from a prudent self-imposed exile in England, he had succeeded Fontenelle in the French role of maître-penseur. He was a passionate Anglophile—French Anglophilia, with its Savile Row suits and Scotch in preference to champagne, being at least as passionate a pursuit as English Francophilia—and had become enamored of Newton’s physics and Locke’s laws.
A preoccupation of du Châtelet and Voltaire’s, in the château and then in later households in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was a highly abstract one that nonetheless had a tribal charge: the clash between Newton’s “English” theory of gravitation and the cosmic theories of the dominant French thinker, René Descartes. It was the scientific crisis of the era. Descartes, though better remembered as a philosopher of mind than as a physicist, posited a lucid, mechanical model of motion and matter: invisible vortices—cogwheels somehow situated in space—pushed at each other across eternity and were responsible for the movement of the spheres and the stars. Against this was Newton’s vision—ridiculously occult, to the logical French mind—of action at a distance, with the sun moving the Earth by a mysterious pull that spread across space, the Earth then moving the moon, and the moon then moving the tides. Why Voltaire took up the very abstruse Newton, and how thoroughly he understood his theories mathematically, as opposed to ideologically, is much debated, but the reality that Voltaire’s enemies in the French academy were all Cartesians was as good a reason for his Anglophilic allegiance as any. In the event, Voltaire was a passionate, evangelical, monomaniacal Newtonian, and he spent his time making war on Newton’s behalf, and persuading du Châtelet to join him, a mutual venture that, in time, led her to produce a French translation, long the standard one, of Newton’s “Principia.”
That she loved Voltaire no one can doubt, and she wrote a beautiful little book about happiness, sometime in the seventeen-forties, that remains the most vivid record of her mind. A perfect instance of French wit, with its mixture of sharp candor about human motives and sincere sentiments about the human heart, she briskly lists the necessities for happiness as good sense, good health, good taste, and a capacity for self-deception, since “we owe the majority of our pleasures to illusions.” She went on, “Far from seeking to make illusion disappear by the torchlight of reason, let us try to thicken the veneer it places upon the majority of objects.” Yet, however thick the veneer, she writes plaintively and honestly about the great love of her life. “I was happy for ten years through the love of someone who had subjugated my soul; and these ten years were spent in intimacy with him, without one moment of loathing, or of weariness,” she recalls, adding:
