ABSTRACT
The preceding pages should have made it clear that Cuvier’s career could not have taken the form it did without his successful manipulation of patronage. This book has emphasised Cuvier’s tactics as both patron and client, rather than stressing his institutional involvements. This was done deliberately, and reflects a judgement on the part of the author on the need to reorientate studies of French science in this period away from a dominant concern with institutions, and issues such as the ‘professionalisation’ of science, and towards a closer examination of the nature of the exchanges between individuals which constituted a substantial part of the exercise of power in this period. 1 This is not of course to argue that patronage exists in a vacuum. Institutional resources are obviously one of the most important prizes a patron has to offer to his clients. Rather, it is to argue that until we understand both the nature of the institutions of science, and the interchanges of power which went on around them in the shape of patronage, we will not understand the nature of science in this period. Emphasis on institutions in the literature has also encouraged the assumption that scientific institutions and scientific patronage were somehow coterminous. But in a world where the major patrons in science also controlled patronage in a considerable number of other fields (Cuvier in the Conseil d’Etat and the University of France, Lacepède in the Sénat and the Légion d’honneur, Chaptal in the Ministry of the Interior, to take only a few examples), this assumption is clearly a dangerous one, and can cause misleading conclusions to be drawn about the importance and operation of patronage. This is particularly so because we are in the interesting position of possessing many 190studies of institutions in this period, many biographies of individuals, many discussions of ‘issues’, such as professional-isation of science; but we do not possess a single comprehensive, precisely argued, historically detailed account of the exercise of patronage. This book, which has set out to be as much issue orientated as biographically orientated, represents a first step towards this goal.
