Looking for an Order of Things: Textbooks and Chemical Classifications in Nineteenth Century France
The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue of the creativity of textbook writing by exploring the links between nineteenth-century French textbooks and the quest for a classification of elements. The first section presents the elegant combination of didactic and chemical constraints invented by eighteenth-century chemists: the order of learning - from the known to the unknown - and the order of things - from the simple to the complex - were one and the same. In section two we argue that the alleged coincidence did not help the authors of elementary textbooks required for the new schools set up by the French revolution. Hence the variety of classifications adopted in the early nine…
Louis Jacques Thenard's Chemistry Courses at the Collège de France, 1804–1835
This article is concerned with the public courses and lecture demonstrations given by Louis Jacques Thenard at the College de France during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The expectations and needs of Thenard's auditors will be studied in order to understand the role played by chemistry courses at the College in the context of the growing and changing Parisian teaching market during the first third of the nineteenth century. The preparation and performance of lecture demonstrations was the main driving force of several major changes in the premises and the personnel associated with the chair of chemistry. Our analysis of the parallel process of expansion and functional differe…