Paris and the Birth of Public Knowledge

By John Eigenauer

Today, we take for granted that knowledge belongs to everyone; it hasn't always been that way. In fact, there was a prolonged battle over the ownership of knowledge that began around 1620 in Paris. This is the compelling story of how knowledge passed from the control of the Church, royalty, and nobility into the hands of common people. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Eigenauer
• Release date: Jul 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201771607

John Eigenauer

JOHN EIGENAUER is a professor of philosophy; he holds a doctorate in interdisciplinary Studies from Syracuse University, where he was the recipient of the prestigious Syracuse University Fellowship. Dr. Eigenauer has taught philosophy, English, mathematics, computer science, physics, and Spanish. He has delivered workshops nationally and internationally on the pedagogy of critical thinking and published articles on critical thinking and rationality as well as works of intellectual history and the Enligtenment. He has spoken internationally on the complexities of rationality. Dr. Eigenauer works closely with the National Institute of Staff and Organizational Development, which is the United States’ leading provider of professional development for community college faculty, staff, and administrators. Through NISOD, he offers workshops and seminars in the pedagogy of critical thinking. 

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Paris and the Birth of Public Knowledge

By

John D. Eigenauer

Preface

Because knowledge today is ubiquitous and public in most modern societies, we tend to think of it as being freely available and rightfully belonging to everyone. We don’t think of it as something that individuals, governments or institutions hold privately and keep as a closely guarded secret. Those who speak routinely of secret knowledge or things that " they don’t want you to know about are described as conspiracy theorists. Because modern societies treat knowledge as a public commodity, it is easy to forget that knowledge was at one time private, and a battle had to be fought to make it public. Consequently, narratives of public knowledge have left out an extremely important element: struggle. Knowledge is a lot like freedom: its extension to large numbers of people involved a veritable battle with governmental and religious leaders who deemed themselves its rightful possessors and protectors. What Jacob Mchangama wrote of post-Gutenberg Europe, that the Church and secular authorities sought to retain their positions as the gatekeepers of knowledge, information, and communication [1] was equally true in the centuries that followed. That is why Andreas Daum wrote that, The history of public knowledge might ... find a central place in the many fundamental narratives of the modern world." [2]

Like most battles, this one was a particular event: historically situated with nameable actors. Nothing marks the transition of knowledge from private to public as necessary. We could, in fact, still be living in a world in which knowledge of science, political theory, alternative worldviews, various cultures, and philosophical systems are carefully guarded secrets kept from the undeserving. The historical circumstances that gave birth to public knowledge involved the relationship among the people of Paris, the French monarchy, and the French Church. Over the course of 130 years from 1620 until 1750, the French government and the French Catholic Church made huge efforts to keep knowledge private—efforts whose efficacy diminished over time. Although bookended by important historical figures such as Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XV, the most important figures in this drama were the Sun King (Louis XIV) and his minister of state, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Their efforts to possess and cloister knowledge were monumental, but ultimately counterproductive. Indeed, it is hard to imagine knowledge truly becoming a public commodity in the sense used in this book without their efforts to keep it private.

The eventual transfer of the right of knowledge ownership entailed the coincidence of several historical phenomena. The first is the history of Paris itself. Knowledge is an urban phenomenon; it needed an urban setting to be released to the public. While I do not study the other great European centers of knowledge production such as London, Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Florence, Madrid, and Seville, Paris had a unique urban history that facilitated knowledge becoming a public commodity. Indeed, Paris possessed certain physical and socio-cultural advantages in the race to being the first city in which a modern conception of public knowledge emerged. The second is the nature of Parisian salon culture. While this point is hotly debated, and even vehemently rejected by some scholars, it seems very likely to me that the language and habits of informed debate that arose in the Parisian salons spread to society at large in such a way that sociability played a role in making knowledge public. The third is the rise of Jansenism and the enormous and prolonged debate over the papal bull Unigenitus. This debate not only fractured Parisian society and held public interest for nearly a century but played a key role in advancing the idea that people of all classes could and should think for themselves, which drove the demand for knowledge. The fourth is the rise of science. Much scholarship has demonstrated the importance of the Early Modern infatuation with public displays of science; this was certainly the case in Paris. And while public displays of science occurred throughout Europe, they played an early and exceptionally important role in Paris in converting knowledge into a public resource. The fifth is the growth of the study of religion as a cultural, human phenomenon. During the reigns of Lous XIV and Louis XV, considerable efforts were made to help people understand religion in a new way. Ranging from travel narratives describing the religious practices of foreign peoples to biblical scholarship to fictional accounts of paradises of abundance unencumbered by the strictures of Western European religions, these writings shifted religion out of the spheres of doctrinal orthodoxy and social conformity to the realms of objective study that treated religion as a cultural and psychological phenomenon. Finally, a fascinating intellectual undercurrent to these phenomena is the rise and dissemination of illicit literature, known as clandestine literature. Clandestine literature is a constant theme in Paris throughout this book’s time period (1620-1760). In a way, it serves as the great metaphor for what the people wanted to see, and what the knowledge hierarchy wanted to keep private. The explosion of clandestine literature in Paris post-1735 coincides with the greatest shift in attitudes among the hierarchy towards the public, accepting that everyone had a legitimate right to read, learn, think independently, and know.

Today, it is impossible to study the spread of knowledge without the language of networks. Therefore, I try to describe the emergence of knowledge as a public commodity in terms of our modern understanding of knowledge networks. I believe this is an extremely fruitful model for future research and narratives. Important research from network scientists, historians, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists is emphasizing the role of networks—their topology, nature, and characteristics—in the spread of knowledge. Historians in particular are beginning to recognize the explanatory power of the science of networks to their field. This is true to a lesser extent of cognitive science, whose tools I use occasionally to interpret some human activities in the story of knowledge becoming public.

For millennia, knowledge in Western Europe belonged almost exclusively to religious and governmental authorities. They guarded printed and manuscript materials carefully, treating them as if they held magical powers to be used only by those of superior standing and wisdom. Of course, knowledge remaining in private hands may have been largely due to illiteracy and the lack of printing before Gutenberg; however, no government made any attempt to educate even a small percentage of society even after the invention of printing. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, this had changed dramatically. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, knowledge went from being a private commodity to a public one. This book is the story of how this happened in Paris beginning in the 1620s and culminating in the 1750s. In fact, I maintain that the Enlightenment in France depended very much on knowledge becoming public. 

Introduction

There is something about Paris. Walking west from Notre Dame, you pass the magnificent and storied Hotel de Dieu, along the Seine next to the Conciergerie, a fourteenth century prison where Marie Antoinette was held, through the subtly beautiful Place Dauphine, and to the stunning Pont Neuf: the New Bridge. There is a statue there of Henri IV, who built Pont Neuf to modernize and improve Paris, which, in the early 1600s, lay in a desolate state from a civil war. Aside from its beauty, Pont Neuf was an architectural wonder: it was the first stone bridge, it had the first sidewalks anywhere, it was decorated with the first balconies on a bridge, and it was the first bridge without permanent structures on it. This design led to unintended consequences: people gathered, gossiped, and strolled there; actors performed and newsmongers gathered there; ideas of every kind spread there. Pont Neuf opened passage from one side of the Seine to another; it also opened up a world of sociality where classes mixed, ideas were born, and traditions were questioned. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Henri’s heirs followed his architectural innovation with numerous modernizations: expansive plazas, beautiful statues, broad streets, the world’s first lighted streets, and a public transport system. Sociality boomed, interpersonal connections grew, and information was shared like never before. Standing on Pont Neuf, looking out over the Seine, one cannot help but think, This is where the modern world was born.

Not long after Pont Neuf was finished, a Parisian woman named Catherine de Vivonne remodeled her home and created the talk of Parisian high society: the Blue Room. The beautiful space was designed to bring people together and facilitate conversation. She invited guests from various walks of life to discuss intellectual topics, insisting that all participants treat each other with a refined respect that came to be called "politesse. This mutually respectful mode of conversation leveled social distinctions of rank and created a space where ideas mattered most. Her regular meetings that we now call salons" inspired imitators in Paris who also insisted that traditional hierarchies of wealth, social status, and gender be set aside. The polite, sophisticated conversation practiced in the salons spread to Parisian society as a behavioral norm that defined cultural belonging. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the salons lost some of their power as the state centralized knowledge creation and sharing. However, in the eighteenth century their influence surged as the salonnières invited an even broader swath of society to discuss a wider and more controversial range of topics. In eighteenth century Parisian salons, highly important members of the French government mingled with poets, priests, and publishers, all of whom carried the salons’ topics to a broader public.

As private salons in Paris were emerging, two men in Paris, Marin Mersenne and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, were building correspondence networks with European scholars and private scientific academies with local Parisian scholars. The two friends, driven by their curiosity about the natural world and human cultures, formed dozens of connections with Europe’s greatest scholars, including Descartes and Galileo, to create a clearinghouse of knowledge. They wrote seeking cutting edge scientific and philosophical ideas, supported scholars with books, and gathered natural and cultural objects for study. Mersenne leveraged these international letter writing networks into a local academy in Paris where scientific ideas were discussed that marked the direction for scientific exploration in the seventeenth century. Other academies sprung up as well, including Montmor’s Academy, the cabinet of the Dupuy brothers, and Théophraste Renaudot’s weekly public lectures. The success of these academies resulted in changes to the conceptualization of knowledge and how it was treated. First, the Parisian public began to be informed about newly discovered knowledge. Some of this happened no doubt because novel ideas always hold a certain intrigue, but also because people involved in the scientific academies actively shared new findings with the Parisian public. In this way, knowledge, for the first time, began tentatively to be treated as a public commodity. Second, the French crown, seeing the value of modern scientific thinking, began trying to bring science under government control. Two figures were essential in this drive: Cardinal Richelieu and Jean-Baptist Colbert.

In 1635, Richelieu formed the Académie Française which was modeled on Mersenne’s Academy. Over the following forty years, the crown formed five more academies, casting its net more broadly over more fields of knowledge. When Louis XIV assumed the crown in 1661, he appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as Minister of Finance, a position that allowed Colbert nearly unlimited resources to acquire and control knowledge. Colbert restricted printing in Paris, closed reading rooms, and generally did everything in his power to monitor the world of knowledge and learning. Naturally, this led to enhanced censorship and propaganda, but it also inspired efforts to combat the control. Scholars outside Paris, such as Pierre Bayle, fought to undermine Colbert’s vision. Exiled from France because he was a Protestant, Bayle began a war of words against French Catholic religious intolerance. Addressing the public directly, he insisted that people had the right and the ability to think for themselves and choose their beliefs as they wished. In Paris, starting in 1672, the journalist Donneau de Visé published the Mercure Galant, which further yet unintentionally undermined Colbert’s plan. De Visé essentially popularized and legitimized public opinion by involving his readers in matters of literary judgment and taste. Publishing novels in his newspaper, he encouraged readers to form their own independent opinions on literature and to share those opinions with other readers. By inviting readers to participate in the literary process as critics, de Visé helped create greater public demand for knowledge. Eventually, Colbert’s vision of a state monopoly on knowledge would become unsustainable as the Parisian public exercised its right to know, demanding more access to information and knowledge.

As knowledge ownership became more contested, its content became more dangerous. Colbert’s vision of state knowledge control grew out of one of the age’s most common prejudices: that people outside the upper echelons of society could not be trusted. Common people were normally looked upon as a sort of wild beast; it was thought that "le peuple would completely destabilize society if they had access to dangerous ideas. So, for example, the people should not be allowed to read the Bible because they might interpret certain passages incorrectly; or they might learn of Spinoza’s materialism, deny the soul’s immortality, and give themselves over to plunder and debauchery. And so, when the Catholic scholar Richard Simon undertook a new translation of the Old Testament that would correct its numerous scribal errors, a Parisian bishop had all the copies of Simon’s work seized and burned. Other scholarly efforts in the new field of biblical criticism, such as Pierre Daniel Huet’s, met with a similar reaction. However, it turns out that the most dangerous ideas—those associated with atheism"—were hidden in plain sight. In an attempt to head off the pernicious ideas that only a few irreligious writers created, Catholic theologians often discussed these atheistic ideas openly in an attempt to refute them. This may have inspired more curiosity than orthodox Catholic writers wished. In fact, public curiosity in Paris about heterodox ideas was such that someone wrote one of the most irreligious works of the age apparently in response to the long-standing rumor that it existed, which it did not. Evidently, when it came to heterodox ideas in Paris, demand created supply. But subversive ideas were by no means limited to orthodox refutations or non-existent books. In fact, these ideas circulated among respected members of the Académie Française. And when unorthodox thinkers were not creating enough trouble for the Catholic Church, the Church proved capable of creating trouble for itself.

In one of the great ironies of the Enlightenment, a religious movement nearly unique to French Catholicism encouraged all Parisians to pursue independent thinking, personal judgement, and critical thinking in religious and political matters. Locked in an unending battle with more traditional modes of Roman Catholicism, Jansenism advocated for personal and intellectual freedom at the expense of obedience to Rome. The movement created the world’s first truly underground newspaper in order to dispute Rome’s right to intervene in matters of the French Catholic Church, unintentionally branching off into the necessity and right of people to think for themselves. Despite the crown’s best efforts to quash it, the newspaper escaped government censure for a hundred years through a brilliant network publishing strategy. Louis attempted to quash the movement by appealing to the Pope, an effort that resulted in a controversy that lasted nearly a century and touched all levels of society. Known as the Unigenitus controversy from the name of the papal bull that condemned Jansenism’s tenets, it spawned thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles and divided Parisians and the French church. It caused enormous trouble for Louis XIV, his heir Louis XV, and numerous members of the Church hierarchy who sought to enforce the bull. The result was a fight for freedom of thought, belief, and expression that led one historian to remark that the eighteenth century could just as easily be named the Age of Unigenitus in France as it could be called the Age of Enlightenment.

Chapter six retreats to the beginnings of scientific curiosity about 1620 in Mersenne’s academy. Mersenne’s book, Incredible Questions, set the tone for an age of remarkable curiosity in which people wondered about Nature and sought answers outside religion’s domain. When one of Mersenne’s friends, Théophraste Renaudot, began offering public talks and demonstrations on scientific topics, Parisian audiences went wild for the scientific displays. Over the next one hundred years, a veritable industry of demonstrations in physics, chemistry, and anatomy blossomed in Paris attended by everyone from illiterate servants to Europe’s most famous philosophers. The movement gave birth to the world’s first scientific journal and took scientific knowledge to the public. As a result, the Parisian public began to understand that science could be used to make sense of the world in new, concrete, and non-mysterious ways. The advent of the microscope brought even more wonders into view, which scientists described in great detail to a fascinated Parisian public. Eventually, science entered public policy via medicine through—sigh—debates about vaccines.

Despite the large role that the popularization of science played in making knowledge public, nothing captivated the Parisian public’s attention like religion. European interactions with the New World, China, and Islam drove public curiosity, and writers came to treat foreign religions as worthy objects of study rather than as opponents whose doctrines required refutation and condemnation. A number of books by French missionaries sympathetic to non-Europeans helped create this new perspective on religion. The work that most influenced the Parisian public was Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, published in multiple volumes over fourteen years; it became one of the most popular scholarly works of eighteenth-century France. Lavishly illustrated with examples of religious ceremonies from various world cultures, the work taught the public to view religion as essentially human and to see what different religions had in common. However, some skeptical voices used this new field of comparative religion to show French Catholicism in a less than flattering light. Fictitious accounts of travelers to idyllic lands provided opportunities to compare Catholicism with religions that lacked dogmas or hierarchy. In these fictitious lands, inhabitants lived in peace, their conception of God coming only from the natural lights of reason. This utopian literature created a view of other peoples and religions wholly at odds with the French Catholic ideology of the necessity religious unity. As the eighteenth century wore on, these writings helped Parisians see religious intolerance as unacceptably unenlightened. After Voltaire made famous the torture and unjust death of an innocent Protestant man in Toulouse at the hands of an angry Catholic mob, Parisians widely accepted that enforcing belief was an antiquated and inhumane practice.

Getting to this point took a lot of effort. Traditional ideas gave way only slowly over generations. But by the 1730s, Louis XIV’s memory had passed, philosophical thought had gained ground, and the Parisian public was seeking more controversial literature. Governmental power was waning, and some leaders were even beginning to move in circles where unconventional thought was dominating. Books and manuscripts began to appear whose content directly attacked traditional ideas about immortality, morality, faith, and the value of religion. While heterodox writings were still technically prohibited, even the government recognized that the demand could not be stemmed, settling on a strategy that allowed illicit material to be published, although without express permission. Even so, writers still had to invent novel strategies, such as pretending to speak through the voices of ancient Greek philosophers. The public consumed this daring philosophical literature, but it positively gorged on novels. While the majority of novels were sentimental and harmless, others were profoundly heretical. An entire genre of philosophical pornography emerged in the 1740s that merged the worlds of mind and body to simultaneously explore prohibited thoughts and actions. Characters who questioned religious authority explored what a material world void of religious morality might mean. They taught the public that the most avant garde philosophical thought, if correct, destroyed many of the limits on physical pleasure that the Church had imposed for centuries. Eventually, the novels broke into the most taboo territory: politics. A number of Parisian novels dragged the monarchy into their spotlight, revealing the king’s personal decadence and his indifference towards the kingdom. At this point, knowledge of all kinds—gossip, philosophy, anti-religious thought, political protest—could not be contained as the Parisian public turned all of it into song. By 1750, the government was finding it practically impossible to manage the spread of knowledge in Paris.

Not coincidentally, at just this time, some Parisian publishers were planning the greatest amalgamation of knowledge ever undertaken: the Encyclopédie. Originally conceived of as a translation of a relatively small English work, it eventually took on gargantuan proportions. The publishers had the luck—or the insight—to choose as the main editors two of the most brilliant minds of the eighteenth century: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. Together, they conceived of an encyclopedia that not only housed all the knowledge available to them but would subtly forward non-traditional ideas that were often anti-religious or anti-monarchical. Conservative voices such as the Jesuits sounded the alarm, insisting that the Encyclopédie sought to undermine the foundations of French society. Despite this, Diderot and D’Alembert pushed forward, publishing one volume after the next, each one with articles that promoted critical thinking and skepticism. Articles sometimes referenced other articles in ways that further undermined traditional knowledge structures, such as an article on worship that linked to idolatry, and thence to superstition. The Encyclopédie’s skeptical tone eventually led to multiple suspensions of its license to publish. But it was too late. This was no longer an age in which knowledge could be harnessed by political powers or religious objections. The government was forced to allow the Encyclopédie to continue being printed in Paris with a false place of publication to give the appearance of being banned and smuggled in, allowing the government to save face and the publishers to make money. For a number of years, the Encyclopédie was thought to have brought about a revolution in thinking; in fact, it was a battle fought after the war had been won. It was not so much a war machine, as some have called it, as the manifestation of the state of knowledge, the pièce de résistance of public knowledge.

Chapter One: The City

Near the end of the sixteenth century, Paris was like every other medieval city in Europe: just like London, Rome, Vienna, and Seville, Paris had a large defensive wall around it; they all had large rivers running through them that served as further defensive boundaries, as thoroughfares to transport goods, and as sources of food and water. Their streets were nearly all made of dirt, which caused residents immense trouble when it rained. Churches, shrines, monasteries, and religious monuments dominated the urban landscape: St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, The Cathedral of Seville, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and Notre Dame in Paris. While cities and countries traded goods, economies were largely local, food mostly coming from the surrounding countryside. Most people who lived in these cities might never venture out of them, except perhaps to villages not far from the city walls. The vast majority of people lived exceedingly simple, isolated, and uninformed lives. They knew their family members, their neighbors, shopkeepers, and local parish priests, but few others. They were aware of people of stature such as the aristocracy and occasionally learned something of them via gossip, although interaction with people above their social class was well-nigh impossible, limited mostly to occasions of servitude. Physical walls separated cities, but social and psychological walls formed formidable barriers between classes of people as well.

Paris’ physical layout and social structure may have been like that of other European capitals, but its physical condition was far worse. Wracked by civil war throughout France in the early 1590s, with Paris coming under siege at the end of the war, the city deteriorated badly while trying to hold out against an attacker Parisians considered to be a heretic. Its water supplies became contaminated, buildings and bridges collapsed, ashes, manure, and garbage lay piled up and decaying in the streets, the plague struck nearly every summer, and food was in short supply. Given this bleak picture, the changes that happened in Paris in the next few decades were nothing short of remarkable. These horrific conditions greeted Henri IV (the supposed heretic) when he finally subjugated Paris and began to enact a plan of remarkable social vision. He appointed a chief overseer to assure the orderly reconstruction of Paris and to enforce civil codes to forestall further deterioration. He saw it as his duty and his pleasure to increase the standard of living for all Parisians, extend public services, beautify Paris, create new industries, provide work, and, above all, do everything with an eye toward public utility in what was probably the first truly modern and inclusive use of the term public.[3] But more than merely ameliorate the frightful circumstances in which he found Paris, Henri planned to make Paris a miracle of the world. Within 100 years, Paris became the first modern city, the world’s first cultural epicenter, the world’s first tourist destination, the world’s first exporter of fashion, and the model for every European king’s dreams for his own city. By 1617, King Philip III of Spain was consciously imitating French urban design and architecture and rulers from England to Russia followed suit. Historians began documenting Paris’ ascendance, nobles from all over Europe visited the most beautiful city on earth, Parisian artisans created luxury goods that the whole world wanted, French became the world’s lingua franca, new literary genres emerged from Paris, and Paris’ population doubled without the birthrate rising. Nothing like these extraordinary changes had ever been seen.

This transformation from a muddy medieval city to the miracle of the world began with Henri IV’s first urban project: a bridge across the Seine River. Since many European cities and towns were built on rivers, Europe had thousands of bridges; none, however, compared to what Henri envisioned and his architects built. This bridge with the rather unassuming name of Pont Neuf (New Bridge) was destined to change the world. To begin with, the physical structure itself was entirely novel: it was wider than any bridge ever built. More importantly, it contained two features never seen before: sidewalks and balconies. The sidewalks were such a new innovation that they didn’t even have a proper name: they were raised structures where carriages, carts, and cows couldn’t go—dedicated places where people could walk without having to worry about being run over. And since they were to be walking, balconies were provided to allow pedestrians to step out and enjoy the view of the River Seine. While this may seem like a simple idea, it had never been tried; to this point, bridges had been entirely functional, designed to allow carts laden with goods to cross a river and lined with houses that blocked views of the river. The reactions to this novelty were sensational. Almost immediately, it seemed that the entire city turned out