Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 Balloon mania: news in the air Mi Gyung Kim Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-8108, USA The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, enabled the French King to project his glory, the nobility to exhibit their valor, the literary public to transmit the ideal of the Enlightenment and the plebian public to rejoice in a scientific spectacle. The ensuing balloon mania helped create an integrated public that, because of its size and composition, can only be described as ‘democratic’ just a few years before the French Revolution. The monumental impact of the balloon was well represented in a flood of poetry, pamphlets, books, journal reports, academic papers and consumer items. Sifting through these artifacts and considering the crowd that witnessed the ascent of the balloon will bring us to the historical moment when things, spectacles, and events (rather than words) shaped public and popular opinion. “Scientific Discoveries in general, even those from which men expect the most advantage, like those of the compass and the steam-engine, were greeted at first with contempt, or at best with indifference. Political events and the fortunes of armies monopolized almost entirely the attention of the people. But to this rule there are two exceptions – the discoveries of America and of aerostatics, the advents of Columbus and of Montgolfier” [1]. With these words, Dominique-François-Jean Arago drew attention to the rare historical moment when the promise of a new empire took science to the forefront of public attention. The ‘majestic’ balloon ascent had created a public exposure for science that was unique, unprecedented and powerful. By taking human existence closer to the realm of God, the ascent induced the public to make a leap of faith in their perception of human capabilities. Aeronauts were greeted with the question: ‘Are you men or gods?’ [2]. The sheer number of spectators, often estimated at a half (or even two-thirds) of the entire population of Paris (200 000–600 000 people), fundamentally altered the composition of what was considered to be the ‘public’ for science. “This swarm of people was in itself an incomparable sight, so varied was it, so vast and so changing. Two hundred thousand men, lifting their hands in wonder, admiring, glad, astonished; some in tears for fear the intrepid physicists should come to harm, some on their knees overcome with emotion, but all following the aeronauts in spirit, while these latter, unmoved, saluted, dipping their flags above our Corresponding author: Mi Gyung Kim ([email protected]). heads; what with the novelty, the dignity of the experiment; the unclouded sun, welcoming as it were the travelers to his own element; the attitude of the two men themselves sailing into the blue, while below their fellow-citizens prayed and feared for their safety; and lastly the balloon itself, superb in the sunlight, whirling aloft like a planet, or the chariot of some weather-god – it was a moment which can never be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world” [3]. When the Montgolfier brothers flew their first hot-air balloon in 1783, scientific news had been circulating in the Republic of Letters for over a century through the printed medium and personal contacts (hence the term the Republic of Science). The primary audience for scientific news was the literary ‘public’ who attended lectures, read books and journals, and participated in the conversational culture of salons, coffeehouses and Masonic lodges. The enlightened sociability that cultivated the taste for science operated within a social boundary that was policed by literacy, personal contact and rules of polite conduct [4]. However, with the growth of provincial academies and published journals during the second half of the 18th century, the network of savants who exchanged news expanded considerably. L.W.B. Brockliss argues that the imagined, singular republic of shared ideals gave way to many mini-republics that catered to the needs of local dignitaries, scholars, artists and scientists [5]. The expanding commerce of words, goods and services that maintained these mini-republics fostered localized public spheres in which new scientific experiments were enacted for the benefit of the public. The power elites took a paternalistic and patriotic interest in this growing transmission of useful knowledge to the lower ranks of society. If science as a discursive system circulated within the Republic of Letters, science as a material culture necessarily established a ‘contact zone’ between the aristocratic culture and the artisanal. Provincial Affiches (newspapers) attest to a vibrant ‘bazar economy’ that encompassed the elite reading public, merchants and tradesmen alike [6]. If medicine and science made the social boundary between the Republic of Letters and the illiterate ‘people’ somewhat porous, the balloon ascension obliterated it. As ‘news in the air’ that was witnessed by nearly the entire population of Paris, the balloon became an object of universal veneration that broke down the boundary between the literary ‘public’ and the illiterate ‘people’ (or, as Jürgen Habermas put it, between the bourgeois www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.04.010 150 Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 public sphere and the plebeian public sphere) [7]. If making balloons mobilized the set of material, social and literary technologies that constituted the Republic of Letters, flying balloons blew the carefully maintained social boundary of this Republic to pieces. In other words, the balloon ascension offered a scientific spectacle that oriented the plebeian public toward the literary public. It is thus not surprising that princes and nobles sought to control the representation of this potent display. As a sublime spectacle beheld by the entire population, the balloon ascension seemed to offer an extraordinary opportunity to promote royal splendor and power. As a result, it created a composite public – made up of the sovereign, the nobility, the literary public and the plebeian public – that brought a set of competing political agendas to the scene of this remarkable scientific achievement. A glorious invention The invention of the hot-air balloon followed a scenario that was familiar in the ancien regime that involved provincial inventors desiring priority and profit, the Paris Academy acting as the scientific tribunal and the sovereign wishing to bask in the inventor’s glory [8]. Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, the younger sons of a paper manufacturer from Vidalon, utilized their precarious educations (Joseph’s more so than Etienne’s) and robust imaginations to construct an ‘ascending machine’. As soon as their trial balloons showed success in December 1782, Etienne begged Nicolas Desmaret, his one connection to the Academy, to announce it to the Academy or in some journal ‘so that no one poaches on our preserve in the meantime.’ Etienne’s earlier experience in the capital while he was studying architecture had taught him the value of priority in securing royal patronage and public prestige. However, Desmaret, the lofty academician, was not convinced by this urgent plea from a provincial papermaker without adequate proof. He deemed that ‘a good drawing and a detailed description are essential’ before he could announce Etienne’s machine to the Academy. Unable to secure their priority via the Academy, the Montgolfier brothers staged a public demonstration, despite the adverse weather, at Annonay on 4 June 1783 to obtain a formal approbation from the Vivarais Estates then in session. It was this maneuver involving local notables that secured priority beyond anybody’s poaching for the Montgolfiers. Although a promising alternative that won over the academicians (Jacques Alexandre César Charles’ hydrogen balloon) emerged soon after, the royal favor was to be bestowed primarily on the Montgolfier brothers, because the inventor’s genius and glory would reflect favorably on the crown. The reaction of the Academy was much more cautious. When the minutes of the Vivarais Estates reached Lefèvre d’Ormesson – the controller general of finance – he wrote promptly to the permanent secretary of the Academy, the Marquis de Condorcet. Following their usual protocols, the Academy assigned the case of the balloon to a committee, reserving judgment until all the facts were in. In their first report, the commissaires (commissioners) expressed caution because the best mechaniciens (physicists) had already concluded such an ascending www.sciencedirect.com device was ‘impossible, at least as impracticable.’ The academy soon went into summer recess, although the committee continued to follow the Montgolfier’s progress. As a royal institution, the Academy could not ignore the sovereign’s wish to honor the inventor who could project royal glory to the public. However, as the highest scientific tribunal in the Republic of Letters, the Academy sought to observe proper procedures, to curtail vulgar enthusiasm and curiosity, and to present an ‘authentic’ account that would ‘merit all the confidence of the public.’ Despite the popular frenzy over the balloon ascension, the Academy oriented the research toward the ‘direction’ of the aerostatic machine that would make it most useful. In contrast, public enthusiasm brewed quickly, outpacing even the royal reception. After a brief report in the Feuille hebdomadaire on 10 July 1783, the Journal de Paris (the only daily newspaper in France) carried a more detailed piece on Montgolfier brothers’ ‘quite singular’ experiment on 27 July 1783. Although the report assumed a factual tone, giving the physical dimensions of the balloon [35 feet (1 footZ0.3048 meters) in diameter and 500 livres (1 livreZ489.5 grams) in weight, with excess force of 578 livres for the lift] and the details of the flight [the balloon reached the height of 500–1000 toises (1 toisesZ1.949 meters) and remained afloat for 10 minutes], the wheels of Parisian entertainment machinery began to turn immediately. When Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (a well-to-do amateur naturalist patronized by Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon) opened a public subscription to raise funds for the construction of a balloon at the Café du Caveau near the Palais Royal, it filled quickly even without public announcements. Faujas engaged Charles, a public lecturer of physics, to construct a hydrogen balloon with the help of two well-known instrument makers, the Robert brothers. Charles designed a much smaller balloon (12 feet in diameter and 25 livres in weight) made of an impermeable fabric (taffeta coated with rubber) to prevent the escape of the hydrogen gas. A test-flight in the small garden attached to his house at the Place des Victoires attracted intense curiosity from the Parisians. To avoid the people crushing against the guards and causing a street scene, he had the half-inflated balloon transported during the night to Champ de Mars. The stage was set for the first Parisian demonstration of the aerostatic machine. On 27 August 1783, the publicized date for the first Parisian ascension, a lighted wick gave the signal for the experiment to begin at precisely 5 p.m., and two shots of a canon announced the event to the public. Soon, the globe was elevated and in a few minutes it disappeared from view. Two more cannon shots marked this last moment. As the cloud that eclipsed the globe dissipated, the crowd gained a sight of the Globe once more, its small volume indicating the considerable height it had reached. Repeated applause gave new proof of public interest. Although the description of the ascension in its physics section was largely factual, the Journal de Paris also published a long poem by Gudin de la Brenellerie, a Marseilles academician, characterizing the balloon as a patriotic invention that would build an ‘empire of airs’. If poets dreamed of an empire that would bring glory to Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 the French nation, much of the population, who were ignorant of the new invention, were terrified of it when it appeared out of nowhere. The landowner who first broached the news of a ‘truly curious show’ in a letter to the Feuille hebdomadaire could hardly conceal his sentiment that he reproached the Montgolfier brothers’ ‘expensive’ apparition for terrifying his peasants. When Charles’ balloon came down in Gonesse, the frightened villagers tore it to shreds with their muskets and pitchforks (Figure 1). In the wake of these incidents, the government had to issue a proclamation to safeguard future balloons. In order to allay the ‘astonishment & even the terror the apparition in the air or the fall of this aerostatic machine could produce’ among those who did not have knowledge of these experiments, the Journal de Paris also took the extraordinary measure of sending several thousand exemplars of the account of the experiments to the local administrators of the villages where the journal was normally not circulated, accompanied by a letter from the Baron d’Ogny ordering their distribution. These official proclamations and extra exemplars would have resulted in public readings to convey the message to the illiterate, thus drawing more of the plebeian public into the vicinity of the literary public and fuelling the balloon mania [9]. The speedy realization of Charles’ balloon design indicates that the material, social and literary technologies that were required for its construction were readily available in the Republic of Letters and the commercial sphere [10]. Except for the large quantity of hydrogen, which was produced by a long and dangerous procedure, the rest of the materials necessary to construct a balloon were easily obtainable. Making balloons also required savants with some knowledge of mechanics, hydrodynamics and the behavior of gases, as well as administrative approval and means of public communication. Above all, they required a substantial amount of capital, Figure 1. Panic at Gonesse. The startling landing of Jacques Alexandre César Charles’ balloon scared the villagers of Gonesse, and they proceeded to attack the stricken construct. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the USAF Mcdermott Library, Special Collections Branch. www.sciencedirect.com 151 which was often raised by public subscription (an established means of publishing expensive books such as the Encyclopédie and the Histoire naturelle) [11]. According to the Journal de Paris: ‘princes, ministers, academies, men of letters, [and] artists’ rushed in their subscriptions, proving their ardor and zeal for ‘useful and brilliant experiments’. Daily and weekly newspapers provided an easy means of circulating the news among the reading public and beyond. The circulation of print literature could mobilize even the illiterate ‘people’, as mémoires judiciaries (popular legal briefs) had done in scandalous court cases [12]. The aerial theater In Paris, the literary and the plebeian public quickly converged on the scene of the scientific spectacle. The audience for science was no longer limited to the ‘public’ created by the circulation of words, but included the ‘people’, whose ‘vulgar’ curiosity often interfered with the proceedings of the balloon ‘experiments’ and threatened to cripple them. The proximity of the plebeian to the literary public also made the balloon ascension a promising event for re-constructing and re-valorizing the authority of the sovereign, which had been severely undermined by the emergence of public opinion as the supreme political tribunal. Although royal spectacles had been mostly confined to Versailles since the reign of Louis XIV, occasional royal processions through Paris still invited numerous crowds, as was evident in the large number of spectators killed during the marriage celebration of Louis XVI to Marie-Antoinette [13]. In a political milieu that had fundamentally desacralized the divine right of the king [14], the balloon seemed to offer a new instrument of inscribing the sovereign’s power and glory into the minds and souls of the populace. As an object of universal veneration, the balloon embodied a set of values – truth, virtue, honor and glory – that princes and nobles could not afford to part with. The power elites thus mobilized traditional political symbols and rituals to insert their rank and authority into the moment of consecration that the balloon ascension engendered among the people. In other words, the balloon seemed to offer an aerial theater that could display the sovereign’s uncontested glory to their admiring subjects. The task of constructing a royal balloon naturally fell to the inventor of the original balloon, whose genius and industry could only add to royal glory. To facilitate this, Etienne Montgolfier was brought to Paris where he set up a workshop at Réveillon’s royal paper factory to prepare for a demonstration at Versailles. The cost was born by the Ministry of Finance. Etienne’s easy entrée into the royal establishment had his family walking on clouds, albeit with caution. They expected glory, fame and profit from this venture. In contrast to Charles’ simple stripe design, the Montgolfière (as the hot-air balloon came to be called) Etienne constructed for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was a glorious object bearing the royal insignia and beautifully decorated in blue and gold fleur-de-lis, the long-established symbols of the French monarchy since the Middle Ages [15]. It was meant as an aerial theater that would represent the absolutist king’s glory and power 152 Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 as it floated above the people. On 19 September 1783, the stage was set at the Château de Versailles. Etienne Montgolfier, washed and shaved to wipe off the exhaustion caused by working day and night to make a new balloon because of an accident that ruined the first one [16], was brought to the king’s levée (rising ceremony) to present an account of the experiment in person. Afterwards, the king inspected the launch site with his entire entourage and made known his affection for the inventor. At 1 p.m., surrounded by ‘a prodigious concours of spectators’, the balloon was elevated, carrying a barometer, a duck, a rooster and a sheep. The king had prohibited human passenger from the Versailles demonstration as a gesture of his benevolence. It reached about 200 toises and was afloat for about 27 seconds before it descended in the forest of Vaucresson, about half a league (1 leagueZ4.82802 kilometers) from the château. Pilâtre de Rozier arrived first at the scene and found the barometer intact and the animals alive. Meanwhile, Etienne was led to the royal apartments and found the king observing the balloon with his field glasses. The controller general invited Etienne to dine with the members of the Academy, causing him to decline numerous other dinner invitations. Court ladies sought his company throughout that evening, which ended with an audience with the queen. Dazed by this Figure 2. The first hot-air balloon flight in which the craft was released from its moorings, which took place on 21 November 1783. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the USAF Mcdermott Library, Special Collections Branch. www.sciencedirect.com courtly reception, Etienne was ‘willing to admit that, in spite of a philosophy that appreciates things at their true value, I have not been insensible to the pleasures of this day, and I have forgotten the work, the trouble, and the worry it cost me.’ The new argonauts An ‘empire of airs’ required aerial vessels directed by aeronauts. The utility of the balloon lay in its potential to carry passengers and goods. From the beginning, Etienne sought to persuade the Academy of the validity of his invention on this basis, arguing that it could be used to carry bombs over fortifications in wartime sieges or as a means of cheap transportation. No sooner had Charles’ balloon demonstrated the possibility of ascension did people begin to imagine an ‘aerial voyage’ directed by ‘aerial navigators’. An ‘amateur of fine arts’ wrote a letter to the Journal de Paris proposing a vessel shaped like Pegasus that would combine grace, facility of movement and safety of the voyager: “His body would serve as recipient of gas; his head, the hair before it, would serve as the office of bows; his wings would moderate the elevation & determine the speed; his tail would be the helm; & the four feet, in the posture of a galloping horse, charged in their extremities with a weighing body, proportioned to the rest of the machine, would serve as the ballast & assure the Aerial Cavalier a constant posture.” In October, Etienne was preparing for the first manned flight amid intense public curiosity. Besieged with requests for subscription that would secure a place in his garden, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon posted a public announcement in the Journal de Paris stating that the approaching experiments would be interesting only to savants and would not afford amusement for the merely curious. Nonetheless, when the experiments began on 15 October 1783, the spectators grew with each trial. The attached flights conducted by Rozier easily convinced one of his companions, Gerond de Villette, that ‘this machine, though somewhat expensive one, might be very useful in war to enable one to discover the position of the enemy, his maneuvers, and his marches; and to announce these by signals to one’s own army’ [17]. The first free flight, in which the balloon was completely released from its mooring, took place on 21 November 1783 (Figure 2) at the Château de la Muette, the residence of the two-year old dauphin. To make sure that it was appropriate for the location, the balloon had been designed with care. The upper part was embroidered in gold with fleurs-de-lis and the twelve signs of the zodiac. The middle part alternated between the monogram of the king and figures of the sun. The lower part was garnished with masks, garlands and spread eagles (Figure 3). Charles and Robert’s ascension in the hydrogen balloon took place on 1 December 1783 at the Tuilleries. Although their balloon was of relatively simple design (a stripe of red and yellow, with the upper hemisphere covered by a cord netting), their ‘car of triumph’ was ‘so extravagantly shaped and so elaborately bedizened with painted cloth and decoration that it resembled some mythical Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 Figure 3. The hot-air balloon designed for the 21 November 1783 flight by Etienne Montgolfier complete with livery to honor the King of France. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the USAF Mcdermott Library, Special Collections Branch. chariot of the gods as conceived by a master of the baroque. symbolizing the conquest of the air and the heroic stature of the aeronauts’ [18] (Figure 4). When the balloon descended at Nesles, the aeronauts were greeted by the Duc de Chartres, the Duc de Fitz-James, and an Englishman, Farrer, who had followed the balloon on horseback. The first aeronauts – or the new ‘aerial Argonauts’ – received public acclaim that exceeded that of the Montgolfier brothers’, garnering poetry and praise, and setting off spontaneous parades and festivals. Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, an academician no less, called for a subscription to forge a gold medal for Rozier. Others wanted to erect ‘a historical monument’ to mark the site where the machine landed. The manner in which the aeronauts were celebrated in the provinces provides us with a vivid picture of their role in creating a popular mythology of science. After a longawaited flight in Lyon, where Joseph Montgolfier had constructed a large balloon commissioned by the royal intendant Jacques de Flesselles, the jubilant crowd of 4000–5000 accosted Joseph and some other aeronauts in a carriage (which they flagged down and then tried to eject those female passengers who were in it) that was taking them back to the town under the escort of a brigade of mounted police. After Prince Charles invited them to dinner, Flesselles took them to the opera where they www.sciencedirect.com 153 Figure 4. French balloonist Jacques Alexandre César Charles receiving a wreath from Apollo, while cherubs and an angel surround his balloon. This image was taken from a steel engraving by E.A. Tilly, after Nageon. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-02190. stopped the performance and crowned the aeronauts with garlands. Supper followed at the residence of the military commandant, and the ball that followed was opened with a minuet by Madame de Flesselles. The noblemen who had fought with their swords and pistols to become aeronauts – compromising the balloon and nearly killing themselves – spent the day as folk heroes next to the inventor. In Dijon, a city proud of its scientific prowess, the academicians took the initiative in establishing a subscription to support the building of an aerostatic machine that could be directed at will, taking care that this endeavour did not take on the appearance of a vulgar enthusiasm or curiosity in the eyes of the ruling crust of the city – solemn magistrates, lawyers and royal administrators. However, public enthusiasm quickly eclipsed the Academy’s reserved rhetoric. Poets of the literary city poured out odes celebrating the future ‘empire of airs’, and comparing the aeronauts to classical heroes. When the aeronauts (Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Abbé Bertrand) landed at Auxonne they were greeted by local officials who invited them to dinner. The officers of the artillery corps offered a fête in their honor. When they opted to return to Dijon despite the late hour, the Dijonnais who had followed the balloon accompanied them, carrying trumpets and timbales. At least 25 horses 154 Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 and carriages enlarged the cortège further. They arrived at Dijon late at night, having missed a spontaneous festival that had broken out: men and women of all stations had come out to line the long path from the port Saint-Pierre to Cremolois that was a league and a half in length. Carriages and horses abounded. Most of the gathering had returned to the village with the approach of the night, but quite a number still remained. When the aeronauts finally arrived, preceded by the cavalcade and the sound of trumpets, fifs and drums, they were greeted by renewed acclamations from the numerous crowd that still remained and were crowned with a bouquet of flowers [19]. The cult of reason The popular coronations at the theater and in a ceremony simulating the medieval entrées of kings and dukes – a resurrection of political rituals from the Middle Ages – bespeak of the popularity and authority the aeronauts commanded among the people. They personified the hero of the classical drama on the aerial stage and thereby brought to life the image of the scientist (long cultivated by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, among others) as a virtuous hero, who would overcome all obstacles and hardships that lay in the pursuit of the truth with perseverance and courage [20]. Their moment of uncontested glory in the midst of the composite ‘public’ poses interesting questions concerning the role science played in shaping public opinion and ideology during the last years of the ancien régime. Did the balloons bring back the representative public sphere that had been in decline since Louis XIV’s localization of royal spectacles at Versailles, or did they mobilize the machineries of royal representation and Parisian entertainment to create an egalitarian, moralistic, truthful and futuristic public sphere in which all classes mingled together? The fluid movement of the balloons between the royal institutions, the literary public sphere, the commercial sphere and the plebeian public (including peasants) makes it impossible for us to apply Habermas’ notion of the representative, bourgeois and plebeian public spheres as successive historical stages in the formation of modern public. When successful, the balloon ascensions brought people from all social stations together through their immediate and universal capacity to inspire wonder. The exceptional status of the balloons Arago mentioned was in large part owing to their symbolic status that transcended social and political divisions among the composite public. If the construction of balloons mobilized local resources or royal patronage, they commanded universal authority as ‘news in the air’. Princes and nobles thus sought to harness the power and the authority balloons and their pilots commanded among the people. Through the balloons, science now offered an exceptional opportunity for true ennoblement that could be endorsed by the public, rather than a paper entitlement that was often ridiculed in practice [21]. However, in the instances when balloon flights ended in failure they occasioned minor riots. The makeshift physical barrier between the subscribers and the people outside was extremely fragile. The near-failure of the flight at the Château de la Muette invited mockery www.sciencedirect.com from the crowd. The escalating tension was curbed only by the efforts of the volunteers – ‘all those distinguished by rank or knowledge’ – who saved the balloon and the royal honor. When Abbés Miolan and Janninet failed to fly their balloon at the time arranged at Luxembourg, the crowd that had waited from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. broke down the barrier: “Sneers of derision made themselves heard on all sides. A universal murmur, rapidly developing into a clamour, arose amongst the multitude; then, wild with disappointment, the frenzied populace threw themselves upon the barricade, broke it, attacked the gallery of the balloon, the instruments, the apparatus, trampling them under foot, and smashing them in bits. They then rushed upon the balloon and fired it. There was then a general mêlée. Far from fleeing from the fire, everyone struggled to seize and carry off a bit of the balloon, to preserve as a relic. The two abbés escaped as they best could, under protection of a number of friends” [22]. These oscillating moments of consecration and sacrilege that the balloons engendered among the ‘people’ capture the instances when things, spectacles and events (rather than words) shaped public and popular opinion. Subversive words did not simply trickle down from the published literature. They attached themselves to the discussions of the things seen by the people and assumed ‘the form appropriate to the way the events had happened’ [23]. Popular culture was shaped by acts of appropriation, rather than by a trickle-down from the elite culture [24]. The factual description of balloon ascensions in the Journal de Paris largely suppressed this participatory dimension of a remarkable scientific spectacle. However, one has to wonder if it was precisely this factual, and seemingly politically neutral, description that enabled the balloon to move freely between different social strata, mobilizing the people to an unprecedented degree and setting the stage for a people’s revolution that was not sanctioned by the literary ‘public’. As Colin Jones put it, ‘a kind of subterranean, anti-authority journalism’ that fashioned the citizen-consumer could evolve ‘beneath a morass of prudent conformism and loyalist yea-saying’ by the journalists. At the very least, the participation in these scientific spectacles would have nurtured the cult of reason that came to dominate the revolutionary rhetoric. References 1 Marion, F. (1888) Wonderful Balloon Ascents; or, The Conquest of the Skies. A History of Balloons and Balloon Voyages, Cassel (London, United Kingdom), pp. 2–3 2 Darnton, R. (1968) Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Harvard University Press, p. 22 3 Mercier, L-S. (1783) Le premier décembre. Le Tableau de Paris 2, pp. 886–889. Translated in Popkin, J.D., ed. (1999) Panorama of Paris, The Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 196 4 Goldgar, A. (1995) Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750, Yale University Press 5 Brockliss, L.W.B. (2002) Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press 6 Jones, C. (1996) The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution. American Historical Review 101, 13–40 Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.4 December 2004 7 Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, MIT Press 8 The following account of the endeavors of the Montgolfier brothers is drawn from Gillispie, C.C. (1983) The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784, Princeton University Press 9 Baker, K.M. (1987) Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections. In Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Censer, J.R. and Popkin, J.D., eds), pp. 204–246, University of California Press 10 See Shapin, S. (1984) Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology. Social Studies of Science 14, pp. 481–520 and Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton University Press 11 See Darnton, R. (1979) The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of Encyclopédia, 1775–1800, Harvard University Press and van Horn Melton, J. (2001) The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge University Press 12 Maza, S. (1993) Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes célèbres of prerevolutionary France, The University of California Press 13 Farge, A. (1993) Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Harvard University Press, pp. 204–225 14 See Merrick, J. (1990) The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century, Louisiana State University Press and Graham, L.J. (2000) If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV, University Press of Virginia 155 15 Bryant, L.M. (1986) The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance, Libraire Droz S.A. (Geneva, Switzerland) 16 The first, larger balloon (70 feet in height and 40 feet in diameter) was made of paper and was destroyed in the test flight in the presence of academicians, leading to it being replaced by a smaller one (57 feet in height and 41 feet in diameter) made of taffeta coated with varnish. Both were decorated in blue and gold with royal symbols 17 Journal de Paris, 26 October (1783) 18 Rolt L.T.C. (1966) The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning, 1783-1903, Longmans (London, UK), p. 50 19 Journal de Bourgogne, 4 May (1784) 20 Terrall, M. (2002) The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment, The University of Chicago Press 21 Smith, J.M. (1996) The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy, 1600-1789, University of Michigan Press 22 Marion, F. (1888), pp. 128–129 23 Farge, A. (1995) Subversive Words: Public Opinion in EighteenthCentury France, Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 36 24 Chartier, R. (1984) Culture as Appropriation. In Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Kaplan, S.L., ed.), pp. 229–253, Mouton (The Hague, The Netherlands) Free journals for developing countries The WHO and six medical journal publishers have launched the Access to Research Initiative, which enables nearly 70 of the world’s poorest countries to gain free access to biomedical literature through the Internet. The science publishers, Blackwell, Elsevier, the Harcourt Worldwide STM group, Wolters Kluwer International Health and Science, Springer-Verlag and John Wiley, were approached by the WHO and the British Medical Journal in 2001. Initially, more than 1000 journals will be available for free or at significantly reduced prices to universities, medical schools, research and public institutions in developing countries. The second stage involves extending this initiative to institutions in other countries. Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general for the WHO, said that this initiative was ’perhaps the biggest step ever taken towards reducing the health information gap between rich and poor countries’. See http://www.healthinternetwork.net for more information. www.sciencedirect.com
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