Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847): Kinship, natural history, and the invention of ceramic science

Thesis

In this thesis, I examine the life of Alexandre Brongniart, whose career in natural history paralleled a forty-seven-year directorship of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. Critically, I show that Brongniart created a coherent science for “the arts of the Earth,” for which he established the term “la céramique.” Brongniart placed the study of the ceramic arts firmly within the context of natural history as well as that of expansive, geological time. As a case study, Brongniart’s lifetime highlights the transitions in the study of natural history that took place between the Enlightenment and the mid-nineteenth century. Brongniart was born into a family centred in artisanal and noble networks, where Enlightenment views were often admired and upheld. Shared kinships, guild ties, and social networks strengthened families and expanded financial interests, while marriages frequently established or enlarged alliances. Surrounded by prominent savants, artists, and artisans, Brongniart inherited significant advantage, but he also actively shaped his own education and career. Brongniart’s early education took place amid the chemical revolution – learning chemistry from Lavoisier himself. By his early career, Brongniart had begun the kinds of analysis and categorization that were instrumental in establishing scientific disciplines such as biology, palaeontology, geology, and mineralogy out of the study of natural history. By the end of the eighteenth century, all-encompassing, cosmological “systems” fell into disfavour, as a focus on facts, experimentation, analysis, measurement, and observation became indispensable to the practice of science. Both Brongniart, and his famous associate and friend, Georges Cuvier, sought to record observations with restricted emphasis on theory, and both considered that precise nomenclature was a key component of the practice of natural history and science. My discussion traces Brongniart’s successful and unsuccessful contributions to expanding scientific disciplines and to scientific language, including words such as Jurassic, Jovienne, Saturnienne, and, perhaps most importantly, "la céramique".

Authors: Carr-Trebelhorn, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-n6q2dxrdw
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: art history; Earth history; stratigraphy; palaeontology; Jardin des plantes; artisanal networks; porcelain; Sèvres; Paris; craft; industry; history of science; ceramics; history of time; deep time; natural science; mineralogy; chemistry; geology; Muséum d'Histoire naturelle; biography; mining; scientific networks
• Subjects: Family Networks; Biography; Ceramic Science; Scientific Networks; History of Geology; Ceramic History