Discovery and enlightenment at sea: Maritime exploration and observation in the 18th-century French scientific community

This dissertation studies the relations between science and seafaring in France from 1660-1790. Beginning with Jean Baptiste Colbert and the Paris Academy of Sciences, I trace the origins of the dual interest among the most prestigious scientists and naval ministers in France in improving navigation, cartography, hydrography and maritime supremacy with the fruits of scientific research, and in using ocean travel, colonial expansion and the naval establishment to further the goals of astronomy, botany and scientific methodology. These dual aims were captured in a research program I here call maritime science, and they gave rise to a new quest for a global science, exemplified by the work of the astronomer Jean Domenique Cassini and in the network of observers he organized through the early Paris Academy of Sciences.;I then examine how these dual interests were played out in a series of scientific sea voyages undertaken from France, often under the auspices of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In the first wave of voyages, from 1670-1700, the travelers Charles Plumier, Jean Picard, Jean Richer, and Jean-Mathieu de Chazelles forged a coherent research methodology in astronomy, botany, cartography and hydrography based on the limits and possibilities offered by maritime travel, primarily in the Mediterranean and the Levant. In a second set of voyages from 1700-1735, a new generation of explorers including Louis Feuillee, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Louis Ferdinand Marsigli, Amedee-Francois Frezier, Antoine de Laval, Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Reginald Outhier, Pierre Bouguer, and Joseph de Jussieu, all took advantage of royal patronage available under new ministerial initiatives, and extended the horizon of scientific maritime exploration to the Atlantic and the Americas.;Between 1730-1760, Jean-Andre Peyssonnel and Jean de Lozier-Bouvet traveled and sought knowledge of maritime science outside the traditional institutional framework of the Paris Academy of Sciences, but nonetheless profoundly influenced the direction of scientific research in France. In the last phase of maritime discovery, 1760-1790, I trace the shift of French scientific exploration westward into the Pacific with the voyages of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Jean de Laperouse. Here the aspirations for a global science among the first generation of French maritime scientists came to fruition.