Before Voltaire: Newtonianism and the origins of the Enlightenment in France, 1687--1734

This dissertation examines the French reception of Newtonian physics. It follows two parallel historical developments simultaneously. First, it examines French reactions to the new physics offered in Newton's 1687 Principia Mathematica and how the scientific engagement with this text changed scientific assumptions and practices in France between 1690--1734. It also looks at the role of institutional and cultural factors in shaping these scientific changes. My argument is that much of what we today call "classical Newtonian mechanics" was not developed by Newton but by a group of French mathematicians working in the Paris Academy of Sciences. These scientists laid the foundations for the later development of Newtonianism by synthesizing Newton's work with other scientific ideas even if they did not consider their work distinctively Newtonian at all.;The lack of any notable French esteem for or interest in Newton during the period when the French nevertheless developed the science that we today call "Newtonian mechanics" sets up the other dimension of this dissertation. After 1734, the innovators of the Enlightenment launched the movement by defending Newton against their French opponents, the so-called "Cartesians." Thus, viewed culturally, a key origin of the Enlightenment rests in how an earlier French culture which attributed very little significance to Newton was transformed between 1690 and 1734 into one where a perceived choice existed between Newtonianism and Cartesianism. My dissertation examines this transformation as well by showing how a new public scientific culture was born in the 1690s coincident with the early work in Newtonian mechanics. I argue that this public culture laid the foundation for the opening of the Enlightenment after 1734 and that the precise role of Newtonianism in the Enlightenment must be understood as a response to the earlier place of Newtonian science in the public scientific culture of the preceding four decades. Pulling these two strands together, the dissertation concludes by studying Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques of 1734, the work that opened the French Enlightenment by forging out of the preexisting culture of French public science a new Enlightenment intellectual identity via the strategic, public use of Newtonian science.