ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to provide a detailed case study of an episode in eighteenth-century French astronomical cartography, namely the mapping of Languedoc, with a particular focus on the efforts of the Montpellier Société royale des sciences. Analysing the Languedoc project as a case study and putting it into perspective will allow us to identify a number of distinctive tensions that were operative in the first half of the eighteenth century, and to explore more deeply the themes of this book within a particular but quite significant historical context. The whole story takes place in the context of a rising centralised demand for information from the absolutist state, which met the usual resistance from local structures intent on keeping control over local affairs (a good example of this is the local mistrust of their operations often remarked upon and complained about by the geodetic expeditions). The status of the people involved was strained by a tension between the ideal-type exemplar of the provincial academic astronomer as an individual anchored in the Republic of Letters, and disinterestedly pursuing knowledge in the leisure time that his other activities left him (with a hint of the wish to emulate Parisian colleagues who, from the start, had a distinctive ethos), and that of the geographer as an entrepreneur who, much like a printer, operated at the crossroads between the businessman running a workshop and the culture broker, catering for the interests of a mixed audience of practitioners (the military, for instance) and avid members of the Republic of Letters. The issue of the proper cartographic methods to be followed was strained between the representation of geographical work as a painful and tedious exegesis of the work of previous geographers, as well as an assessment of the accuracy of old and new travel narratives (geography looking here like an ongoing and endless process of critical commentary), and that of a cartography founded on abstract objectivised measurements, largely independent of local context (since mediated by astronomical and geometrical instruments) and ideally providing positions of places with respect to one another that could be regarded as final. Maps could correspondingly be thought of either as combining geography and curious facts and stories attached to places, or as enhancing the separation of the geographical and the historical by focusing on the spatial layout of places of interest (for instance actualised by rendering visible a grid of parallels or meridians). Two ideal-type epistemologies can be compared: on the one hand an epistemology founded on the circulation of first-person accounts written by eye witnesses; on the other, an epistemology built upon comparable instruments (or claimed to be such) and the circulation of the tables of trigonometrically processed figures that were the outputs of the former. With respect to instruments themselves we will identify a tension between, on the one hand, a tight relationship of the natural philosopher to his tools (which was marked by eponymy, for the instrument and its user were not distinguished, and by a moral economy of prestige and ostentation, patronage and gift-giving), and, on the other hand, the instrument treated as a reified commodity exchanged for money, allegedly usable and readable by any observer. We will also show how the issue of the comparability of instruments impacted on this latter tension in the way that the role and trustworthiness of the instruments were construed.
