French works of the small academy of sciences. French academy

In 1635, the Duke of Richelieu proposed the foundation of the French Academy, with the help of which the cardinal intended to compile a unified dictionary of the French language and to monitor its correctness and purity. The motto on the seal of the academy, donated by the cardinal, was engraved "For the sake of immortality." The meaning of these words indicated the immortality of connoisseurs of the French language.

The beginning of the formation of the academy

A small circle of writers gathered in the house of the writer Valentin Konrar, where they talked mainly about art. When the petition submitted to Parliament by Cardinal Richelieu to establish the French Academy was approved, the members of the circle elected its director, chancellor, and secretary. In early January 1635, Louis XIII was granted a patent that confirmed the opening of the Academy. Cardinal Richelieu was considered the patron saint of the French Academy, after whose death his new successors were announced - the councilor Seguer, Louis XV, hereditary kings, the emperor and government leaders.

Initially, the mission of the members of the academy was to standardize and refine the French language in order to make it understandable and of high quality for the entire people of France. It became necessary to create a Dictionary of the Academy, the first edition of which was published in 1694.

Another task was the distribution of donations, the provision of material assistance to scientists and literary societies, disadvantaged, large families and widows. The Academy approved the Great Literary Prize, the annual presentation of which testified to the attention of the Academy to the spread of the common French language.

The origin of the armchairs

In the French Academy during its formation, there was only one chair that belonged to its director, the rest of the members, regardless of position, had only chairs. When the completely infirm Cardinal d'Estre asked for a more comfortable chair, his request was forwarded to Louis XV. The king ordered 40 seats to be brought into the conference room, thus establishing forever equality among academics.

Among the famous writers, there were many talented candidates for membership in the academy. The writer Arsene All coined the expression "forty-first" chair, thus rewarding those who had never been a member of the French Academy, but fully deserved this title. Among them were the famous Balzac, Decar, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Zola, Lesage and many others.

Election as a member of the French Academy

During the existence of the Academy, more than 700 outstanding people were approved by its members - poets, writers, philosophers, scientists, doctors, representatives of theatrical art, art critics, government and military leaders, representatives of the church. All of them had great services to France and its state language. The choice to become a member of the French Academy was considered the highest honor - a kind of dedication. The first woman to be elected as a member of the academy was Marguerite Yursenar, after whom four more women earned this honor.

The French Academy was able to hold on to its institutions for nearly three and a half centuries, working regularly, except during periods of revolution and directory.

How to get there

Address: 23 Quai de Conti, Paris 75006
Telephone: +33 1 44 41 43 00
Site: academie-francaise.fr
Underground: Métro Saint Germain des Près, Mabillon, Pont Neuf, Louvre - Rivoli
Updated: 18.05.2016

Not to be confused with the Académie Française. Louis XIV's visit to the Academy in 1671 French Academy of Sciences (fr. & ... Wikipedia

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Not to be confused with the French Academy of Sciences ... Wikipedia

The Pont des Arts leads to the French Academy from the Louvre. The French Academy (French Académie Française, it should not be confused with the Parisian (French) Academy of Sciences), a scientific institution in France, the purpose of which is to study the French language and ... ... Wikipedia

Louis XIV's visit to the Academy in 1671 The Académie des sciences is a scientific organization founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean Baptiste Colbert to inspire and protect French scientists. She ... ... Wikipedia

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This is an article about the Russian Academy, which studied the Russian language at the end of the 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries. For the Academy of Sciences of the same time, see St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. For the modern Russian Academy of Sciences, see Russian Academy of Sciences. Academy ... Wikipedia

Books

, E. Bezu. Mathematics course. The arithmetic of Etienne Bezout E. Bezout, member of the French Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, examiner of the students of the Artillery and Marine Corps, was translated ...

The Saint-Germain quarter is best approached from the river, from the side Louvre, over a graceful footbridge called the Pont des Arts.

From here you will have a beautiful, already classic view of Cité island, with barges moored to the Conti embankment on the Left Bank and silhouettes towers Saint-Jacques and the building of the City Hall on the Right Bank.

The graceful dome and pediment, which you will see at the end of the bridge, belongs to the building of the Metropolitan College of the Four Nations, which now houses the world-renowned Institut de France.

Of the five academies of arts and sciences that are part of the Institute, the oldest and most famous is the Académie Française (Académie Française) - the most worthy collection of the best writers and scholars, whose honorable duty is to award literary prizes and to keep the purity of the French language.

The latest advance in language preservation is the French word for "baladeur" for a player instead of the English "walkman," but overall efforts by pundits to combat Anglo-Saxon terms in science, management and computing are hopelessly ineffective.

The title of academician is the highest degree of recognition of merit, therefore those who have been awarded this title are called "immortals" (immortelle), although there is some irony in this. The fact is that by the time people turn out to be worthy of the title of academician, many of them are already at a rather old age, therefore, in fact, they do not have the prospect of enjoying their title for a long time.

The list of "immortals" is small: at the time of this writing, there were about forty, including one cardinal and only two women. Visitors are allowed to take a walk in the courtyard.

If you politely ask the clerk at the entrance, you will be given a pass to visit the magnificent Mazarin Libraries(Monday-Friday from 10.00 to 18.00; admission is free) Looking into the hall, you will see how people studying the history of religion sit in silence, surrounded by Corinthian columns, marble busts and shell candlesticks, enjoying the reading of tomes of the XVI-XVII centuries - their the library contains about 200 thousand volumes.

Organizational structure of the Institute of France

(Institut de France) is the main official scientific institution in France, the organizational structure of which consists of an association of five national academies:

French academy(Academie francaise), established under Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to improve the French language and literature, consists of 40 members ("immortels");

French Academy of Inscriptions and Literature(Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres), founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in February 1663, initially to compose inscriptions on monuments and medals in honor of Louis XIV, later brought together humanitarians in the field of history, archeology and linguistics; the official status of the academy since 1701 has 55 French and 40 foreign members;

French Academy of Sciences(Academie des sciences), founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert for mathematics, natural sciences and medicine;

French Academy of Fine Arts(Academie des Beaux-Arts), created in 1803 as a result of the merger of the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture (founded in 1648, dissolved in 1793), the French Academy of Music (founded in 1669), the French Academy of Architecture (founded in 1671 ); the official status of the academy since 1816; currently added sections for cinematography and photography; 57 seats, of which 48 are occupied as of January 1, 2010.

French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences(Academie des sciences morales et politiques), founded in 1795, dissolved in 1803, restored in 1832; currently has sections: philosophy; moral sciences and sociology; legislation, public law and jurisprudence; political economy, statistics and finance; history and geography; general.

Neighborhood of the Institute of France

House number 11 on the Conti embankment, next to the Institut de France, is the building of the Mint (Hotel de Monet). At the end of the 18th century, it was converted into a mint, and now it houses Mint Museum(Monday-Friday, 11.00-17.30, Saturday and Sunday, 12.00-17.30; 8 euros).

The strict collection of the museum, containing coins of all kinds and tools for their manufacture, can only impress those who are nostalgic for the good old franc, or admirers of Balzac, who want to see with their own eyes the money that flowed like water between the fingers of a young Rastignac, from golden louis to simple sous.

To the west of the Institut de France is the École National des Beaux-Arts (Ecole-de-Boe-Ar). On sunny days, her apprentices, aspiring artists, occupy the embankments, making numerous sketches in their notebooks.

Sometimes the school hosts open exhibitions of student work. Farther west, at 5 bis on rue Verneuil, Serge Gainsbourg lived (until his death in 1991), a legendary man who opposed himself to traditional art.

Nowadays, his daughter Charlotte, a famous film actress, lives in this house. Over the years, the garden wall of this house has been covered with several layers of graffiti, quoting the words of the most famous poems of Gensbourg, such as "The Lord smokes Havana cigars"; there were also silhouettes applied with spray paint.

(Academy President), this is one of the five Academies.

history

The heroic depiction of the activities of the Academy since 1698

The Academy of Sciences traces its origins to Colbert's plan to create a general academy. He selected a small group of scholars who met on December 22, 1666 at the King's library, and then held there twice a week working meetings. The first 30 years of the Academy's existence were relatively informal, as no statutes had yet been laid down for the institution. Unlike its British counterpart, the Academy was founded as an authority. The academy is expected to remain apolitical, and avoid discussing religious and social issues (Conner, 2005, p. 385).

On 20 January 1699, Louis XIV gave the Society his first rules. Academy got its name Royal Academy of Sciences and was installed at the Louvre in Paris. Following this reform, the Academy began publishing a volume each year with information on all the work done by its members and obituaries for members who had died. This reform also codified the method by which members of the Academy could receive pensions for their work. On August 8, 1793, the National Convention abolished all academies. Since August 22, 1795, National Institute of Arts and Sciences was put in place, uniting the old academies of sciences, literature and art, among them the French Academy and des Sciences Academie. Almost all of the old members of the previously abolished Académie were formally re-elected and reclaimed their ancient sites. Among the exceptions was Dominique, Comte de Cassini, who refused to take his place. Membership in the Academy was not limited to scientists: in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte was elected a member of the Academy and three years later as president in connection with his Egyptian expedition, which had a scientific component. In 1816, renamed again as "Royal Academy of Sciences" became autonomous, with the formation of a unit; the head of state became his patron. In the Second Republic, the name returned to the Academy of Sciences. During this period, the Academy was funded and accountable to the Ministry of Public Education. The academy came to oversee French patent laws during the eighteenth century, acting as a link of artisans' knowledge to the public domain. As a result, academics have dominated technological developments in France (Conner, 2005, p. 385). The proceedings of the Academy were published under the title Comptes Rendus de l "Academy of Sciences (1835-1965). Rendus Comptes now the series is a magazine with seven titles. The publication can be found on the website of the National Library of France.

In 1818, the French Academy of Sciences announced a competition to explain the properties of light. Engineer Fresnel entered this competition by presenting a new wave theory of light. Poisson, one of the judges, studied Fresnel's theory in detail. As a proponent of the particle theory of light, he looked for a way to refute it. Poisson believed he had found a flaw when he showed that Fresnel's theory predicted that on the axes a bright spot would exist in the shadow of a circular obstacle, where there should be complete darkness according to particle theory of light. Poisson's spot is not easy to observe in everyday situations, so it was only natural for Poisson to interpret it as absurd, and that he should refute Fresnel's theory. Nevertheless, the head of the committee, Dominique François-Jean Arago, and who, incidentally, later became Prime Minister of France, decided to conduct an experiment in more detail. It is molding a 2mm metal disc with a glass plate with wax. To everyone's surprise, he managed to observe the predicted spot, which convinced most scientists of the wave nature of light.

For three centuries, women were not admitted as members of the Academy. This meant that many women scientists were excluded, including two-time Nobel laureate Marie Curie, Nobel laureate Irene Joliot-Curie, mathematician Sophie Germain, and many other worthy women scientists. The first woman to admit to being a Corresponding Member was Curie's student, Marguerite Perey, in 1962; the first female full member was Yvonne Chock-Bru in 1979.

Today Academy

Today the Academy is one of the five academies that make up the structure. Its members are elected for life. Currently there are 150 full members, 300 correspondent members and 120 foreign associates. They are divided into two scientific groups: mathematical and physical sciences and their applications and chemical, biological, geological and medical sciences and their applications.

Medals, awards and prizes

Each year, the Academy of Sciences distributes about 80 prizes. They include:

Grande Medaille, awarded annually, in rotation, in the respective disciplines of each branch of the Academy, to a French or foreign scientist who has contributed to the development of science in a decisive way.
Lalande Prize, awarded from 1802 to 1970, for excellence in astronomy
Waltz Prize, awarded from 1877 to 1970, in honor of achievements in astronomy
Richard Lounsbury Prize, jointly with the National Academy of Sciences
Herbrand Prize, in Mathematics and Physics
Prize for Paul Pascal, in chemistry
Bachelia Prize for his great contribution to mathematical modeling in the field of finance
Michelle Pn T Bubble Prize for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, awarded since 1977
The Lecomte Prize, awarded annually since 1886, recognizes important discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history and medicine

Academy People

presidents

Kaznacheev

Permanent Secretaries

Mathematical Sciences

Physical sciences

Connor (2005), missing The work is cited twice in the text, but the link is not listed here. Incomplete links.
Crosland, Maurice P. (1992), Science under control: French Academy of Sciences, 1795-1914, Cambridge University Press, ISBN
Stéphane Schmitt, “Animal Research and the Advancement of Comparative Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris and Around in the Eighteenth Century,” Science in Context 29 (1), 2016, pp. 11-54.
Stroup, Alice (1987), Royal funding of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences in 1690, DIANE publishing house,

There is a popular legend that the French Academy of Sciences at the end of the 18th century refused to recognize the existence of meteorites and imposed a ban on their study, as a result of which many meteorite collections ended up in the trash heap. This legend is especially revered by alternative scientists, who offer it as evidence of the inertia of "official science". However, in reality, everything was not so simple.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, the concept of matter in interplanetary space was not the subject of broad scientific discussion. Meteors and stones falling from the sky were considered atmospheric phenomena. At the same time, there were no hesitations in explaining their nature: either something is burning in the upper layers of the atmosphere, or unusual electrical phenomena appear in the same layers - there was too little factual data to consider meteors an insoluble mystery. The situation was worse with the falling stones. A stone is a completely concrete, tangible object with size, shape, color, temperature. And stones fell from the sky! More precisely, chronicles, legends, pictures of old masters told about their falls from the sky.

Some of the fallen stones have survived for centuries not only in memory. The first recorded fall of a meteorite that has survived to this day occurred in May 861. The heavenly stone fell in the Japanese province of Nogata and has been kept in the temple for more than 11 centuries. Its meteoric nature was reliably established in 1979. In Europe, the oldest fallen meteorite appeared much later. It struck a wheat field near the Alsatian city of Enzisheim in November 1492 and, due to turbulent European history, survived much worse than its Japanese counterpart. For five centuries, it was so often chipped off piece by piece that the original weight of 135 kg was reduced to a 56-kilogram fragment, but this fragment survived and over the centuries reminded of the history of its appearance.

There were other falls after Enzisheim. For the time being, they happened rarely, more precisely, they were rarely recorded due to the low population density and ineffective dissemination of news, which did not contribute to the systematization and analysis of information about the stones. In addition, the baggage of physical and chemical knowledge in those years was not large, and therefore stones falling from the sky also did not seem to be something inexplicable. Well they fall and fall. Maybe some earthly processes make them fly up into the sky, maybe they condense there, above, from some kind of vapor.

In the 18th century, a turning point came. The development of the natural sciences more and more obsessively indicated that it was very difficult to weave a many-kilogram stone, or even an iron lump from the vapors. The link to volcanoes was also becoming less convincing. But reports of falling stones continued to come in!

For the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences, the need to understand the problem matured after the fall of a meteorite in Luce (France) in September 1768. The academy created a special commission, which included the mineralogist Fougereau, the pharmacist Cadet, and the chemist Lavoisier. Although Lavoisier was the youngest in this trio both in age and in position, in the future he became famous more than his colleagues, and therefore the conclusions of the commission are mainly associated with his name. You can read in detail about the results of the commission's work. I would like to emphasize the following: speaking about the fact that “stones cannot fall from the sky”, the commission rejected the terrestrial (volcanic emissions) or atmospheric (condensation at high altitudes) origin of meteorites. And she was absolutely right in this respect! The commission could not reject their cosmic origin, since it was not seriously considered at that time.

The commission's miscalculation was that it, along with erroneous interpretations of falling stones, rejected the very reality of the fall. However, it should be remembered that then there were no video recorders and the commission had to rely on the verbal testimony of not the most educated layers of the population, who, along with stories about falling stones, willingly told about other miracles. Lavoisier was a fierce fighter against all sorts of superstitions, and it is his zeal in some texts that explains why he slightly went too far in the analysis of falling stones.

But what does it mean in this case to "go too far"? The academy appointed a panel whose members analyzed the samples and testimony and concluded that there were no falls and that the samples were the result of a lightning strike in the pyrite-rich sandstone. This conclusion turned out to be erroneous - it happens. The academy did not draw any organizational conclusions on this matter; the research of the falling stones continued. Moreover, the commission's report itself did not appear immediately. Lavoisier read it in April 1769, and in print it first appeared in short form in 1772 - with a note from the secretary of the academy, Fouchy, that the matter deserves further study.

Unfortunately, it cannot be said that the conclusions of the French scientists turned out to be completely harmless. Given their authority, they did not need to make formal decisions. For example, cases were noted when people were silent about the falling stones for fear of being ridiculed. It is possible that some collections of fallen stones also suffered, but this phenomenon was not widespread. More precisely, these acts of “enlightened vandalism” were written about in 1819 by the “father of meteorics” Ernst Chladni, mentioning the museums of Dresden, Vienna, Copenhagen, Verona and Bern. However, he apparently relied not on documentary evidence of vandalism, but on the notion that these museums must have contained samples of meteorites that were virtually absent. Already in the XX century, John Burke in the wonderful book "Cosmic debris. Meteorites in history ”provided evidence that at least some of these“ disappeared ”specimens were either in private collections or remained in the mentioned museums.

In any case, the report of Fougereau, Cadet and Lavoisier did not slow down the development of meteorics. In general, the explosive evolution of this science is very instructive. After centuries of very sluggish progress, it firmly stood on its feet in literally ten years: in the last five years of the 18th century and in the first five years of the 19th century. Perhaps the development of mass communications played a role in this: if during the second half of the 18th century, four or six falls were recorded per decade, then in the first 10 years of the 19th century, there were already nineteen of them. By the end of the 18th century, there were more and more reports of the connection between falling stones and fireballs, data appeared on the height of the appearance of fireballs and the speed of their movement, which did not agree at all with the idea of their atmospheric origin.

The fact that it was Chladni who managed to put together all the available facts is probably not an accident. He was a lawyer by training and understood that if you have nothing but verbal testimony, you need to work with what you have, approaching the analysis of peasant stories not from the standpoint of their physical reliability, but from the standpoint of actual consistency with each other. Having collected historical and modern evidence, he was the first to say what, as it seems now, lay on the surface. The stones are falling. Stones cannot form in the atmosphere. Rocks often fall after fireballs appear. Fireballs are formed outside the dense layers of the atmosphere ... This means that stones fall to the Earth from space.

Chladni published a small book with these conclusions in 1794, and, as if to confirm them, in the following years there were several bright and well-documented falls. Their crown was the L'Egle meteorite, which fell in April 1803 in Normandy, a detailed and convincing description of which was made by the then young physicist Biot - and also on behalf of the Academy of Sciences (at that revolutionary time it was called differently). After that, almost no one doubted the reality of the falling stones ...

P.S. ... Until February 15, 2013. Now the situation has turned in the opposite direction. For two months now, "academicians" have been repeating that a cosmic stone flew over Chelyabinsk, but there are many people who do not believe these statements. No, no, yes, and someone will say with a sly squint: "But it was not a meteorite!" And then such tales begin, in comparison with which the idea of condensation of stones from the air seems to be the height of sanity.