I had the opportunity to tour the French Academy of Sciences with Christian Amatore, who is himself a member of the Academy, and his wife Marie-France. Christian took me through several of its meeting rooms, the library, and most impressively the great meeting space beneath the oval interior dome. The surroundings seem appropriate for an institution whose history reaches back to Louis XIV.
The Académie des sciences was founded in 1666 through the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful minister. Colbert gathered mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, anatomists, botanists, zoologists and chemists to promote scientific investigation and advise the government. The first meeting took place on December 22, 1666, in the king’s library. In 1699 Louis XIV formally reorganized it as the Académie royale des sciences and gave it quarters in the Louvre.
The Academy soon became one of Europe’s great centers of science. Its members investigated everything from astronomy and mathematics to chemistry and natural history. Its scientists participated in famous expeditions to measure the shape of the Earth, and in 1790 the National Assembly entrusted the Academy with helping establish a unified system of weights and measures—work that contributed to the metric system.
The French Revolution interrupted this history. In 1793 the revolutionary Convention abolished all the academies. Two years later the Institut de France was created, and the scientific academy eventually emerged within the new institutional structure.
The magnificent building the Academy occupies today has a separate history. Cardinal Mazarin provided in his will for the creation of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, intended to educate young men from four territories recently incorporated into France. Construction began in the 1660s under Louis Le Vau, one of the great architects of seventeenth-century France, who also worked on the Louvre and Versailles. The college opened in 1688.
Its most recognizable feature is the dome facing the Seine and the Louvre. What appears from outside to be a circular dome is oval inside—a remarkable architectural effect. The room beneath it was originally the college chapel and was intended to contain Mazarin’s tomb. After Napoleon moved the Institut de France into the former college in 1805, architect Antoine Vaudoyer transformed the chapel into the great assembly hall beneath the cupola.
The library is another link to Mazarin. His great collection was transferred to the Collège des Quatre-Nations in the seventeenth century and survives as the Bibliothèque Mazarine, today containing some 600,000 documents, including thousands of manuscripts and incunabula.
Today the Palais de l’Institut houses France’s five academies. Beneath the dome, academicians continue a tradition extending across revolutions, empires, republics and more than three and a half centuries.
Walking through those rooms with Christian Amatore made that history unusually tangible. The Academy is not simply a monument to France’s scientific past. Nearly 360 years after Colbert assembled that first group of scientists, it remains a place where scientists meet, argue, exchange ideas and try to understand the world.
The official histories are available from the Académie des sciences and the Institut de France's history of the Palais.
