Introduction
This paper is an attempt to place the French initiatives at disseminating science in a political context. Rather than starting from popular magazines it will consider popularizing enterprises initiated by a number of scientists with governmental support, which among other enterprises, resulted in some rather influential book series and journals. In nineteenth-century France, popular science flourished and became a genre in itself. In the 1860s, dozens of magazines, books, serial conferences, etc., developed to suit all tastes, all classes, all categories ranging from children, ladies, farmers, and gentlemen, to manufacturers. The mass-consumption of science was the result of the rapid growth of the cheap press, of the publishing business, and of the increased level of literacy in the French population, as in many other European countries. This booming activity was only indirectly induced by the State policy, as the authoritarian regime of the Second Empire (1851–1870) prompted many dissident journalists to move to science popularization in order to avoid political censorship (Béguet Reference Béguet1990). Thus a network of popular science writers emerged who paralleled the network of academic researchers, and occasionally interacted with them through controversies. They spread popular narratives of science, which were not necessarily popularized versions of academic science (Bensaude Vincent Reference Bensaude-Vincent1989, Reference Bensaude-Vincent1991).
The republican regime encouraged an official practice of science popularization. Following a noticeable decline of popular science literature at the turn of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of World War One, the French State prompted a number of initiatives aimed at promoting popular culture and at better integrating science within culture. Many cultural associations and libraries developed to promote popular education. They were part of a broader program of revitalization of culture and education, epitomized by the transformation of the old Ministry of Public Instruction into a Ministry of National Education in 1932. The new ministry held by Anatole de Monzie was intended to popularize the educational system, to reduce social inequalities, and at the same time to reinforce the social fabric. In 1936, following a strong social movement against various attempts at destabilizing the Third republic, a coalition of left-wing parties (the French communist party, the socialist party, and the party of the radicals) came into power. This regime named Popular Front (Front populaire) was characterized by a policy of state interventions in the domains of culture and science. Together with the institution of paid leaves of absence, the Popular Front encouraged cultural leisure with the foundation of the Maisons de la culture, of mobile libraries (bus bibliothèques), and stadiums for the practice of sport. For the first time, a Ministry of Culture was created as well as a Secretary of State for scientific research. The Popular front also worked to create a national center for scientific research, which was officially established in 1939, after the collapse of the Popular Front. So intense was the cultural policy of this short-lived regime that the historian Pascal Ory compared it to a “laboratory of cultural democracy” (Ory Reference Ory1994).
This cultural offensive was made possible by the support of committed French intellectuals who shared a republican faith in the power of culture and science to bring about social justice and welfare. The scientific community, in particular, which had been deeply weakened by the losses of World War One, was extremely concerned with the image of science in society and moved into the public arena in order to promote scientific culture. A number of famous physicists – such as Paul Langevin (1872–1946), Jean Perrin (1870–1942, Physics Nobel Prize in 1928), Louis de Broglie (1892–1987, Physics Nobel Prize in 1929), as well as the anthropologist Paul Rivet (1876–1958), and the historian Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), founder of the Annales – devoted part of their careers to the dissemination of science. For them, it was the scientists’ duty to share their knowledge with other people.
This paper describes three ambitious initiatives conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. They exemplify different styles of popularization, targeting different audiences. The first one was a multimedia enterprise aimed at bridging what would later be named “the two cultures” – natural sciences and humanities – rather than at popularizing scientific results in the society at large. The second one, an encyclopaedia named Encyclopédie française edited by the French historian Lucien Febvre, was meant to shape a cultural view of science for the general public. The most successful enterprise was the Palais de la découverte designed by the physicist Jean Perrin and explicitly aimed at the young public. In a final section, I will try to assess the results of these enterprises from various perspectives and emphasize a number of paradoxes.
1. Promoting a Synthetic View of Science
Throughout the nineteenth century the unity of science has been a major concern among the founders of science popularization in France. In particular, Auguste Comte taught his famous Cours de philosophie positive in order to fight against the fragmentation and specialization of science in academic research (Comte [1830–42] Reference Comte1975; Bensaude-Vincent Reference Bensaude-Vincent1987a, Reference Bensaude-Vincent, Baird, Bourel and Brian1997). For many science writers, such as Camille Flammarion, popular science was aimed at restoring the unity of science that had been damaged and threatened by the highly specialized academic culture (de la Cotardière and Fuentes Reference De la Cotardière and Fuentes1994; Bensaude-Vincent Reference Bensaude-Vincent1989).
This concern motivated the initiatives of Henri Berr (1863–1954), an Alsatian Jew established in Paris (Biard, Bourel, and Brian Reference Biard, Bourel and Brian1997). Berr was not a member of the academic establishment. He taught literature in a lycée but he corresponded with scientists all around the world. He was also a close friend of Paul Doumer, a French politician who became president of the republic in 1931 (and was assassinated in 1932). More than a popularizer, Berr was a kind of cultural entrepreneur and the center of an international network of intellectuals. He dedicated his entire life to the promotion of a synthetic view of knowledge mobilizing history as a tool for synthesis. As early as 1900, he founded a journal, Revue de synthèse historique. In the 1920s, he launched a book series entitled L'évolution de l'humanité which would provide a unified view of mankind from its origins on earth to the present time, in 100 volumes. The project was initially conceived as a response to the German Weltgeschichte; it was meant to combine the advantages of an encyclopaedia with those of a linear historical narrative. The first section covered prehistory and Antiquity; the second section the origins of Christianity and the Middle Ages; section 3, the modern world; and section 4, the present time. The purpose was to shape a science-based humanism, close to the views of George Sarton the founder of Isis and one of Berr's close friends (Sarton Reference Sarton1924, 17). Berr and Sarton shared the conviction that science could encourage a true internationalism and that the unity of science could be achieved by fundamental concepts such as chance, matter, invention, law, sensibility, or civilization (Gemelli Reference Gemelli, Biard, Bourel and Brian1997, 282). Thanks to a network of collaborators including the best historians and scientists of his time, Berr achieved the publication of 65 volumes before his death in 1954.
In 1925, thanks to national and private funds, Berr also created an International Center, the Centre international de synthèse (Gemelli Reference Gemelli1987).Footnote 1 The Board of Trustees included members of the State, bankers, and famous scientists such as Albert Einstein and Ernest Rutherford. The Centre de synthèse was hosted by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations until it moved to the Hôtel de Nevers, near the Bibliothèque nationale. It was neither a learned society nor an institute of higher education. It was designed as “an instrument of reflection and regulation, as a field of systematic and rational exploration of the logic of science in view of their mutual integration” (Conseil d'administration du 25 mai 1928, quoted in Biard, Bourel, and Brian Reference Biard, Bourel and Brian1997, 15). The Center fostered interdisciplinary exchanges between social scientists and natural scientists especially on the occasion of its annual conferences. Les Semaines de synthèse covered such topics as relativity (1932); science and laws (1933); the notion of progress in face of contemporary science (1934); statistics (1935); heavens in history and in science (1936); invention (1937); sensibility in mankind and in nature (1938); and what is matter? historical and present notions (1939). The Center managed to attract a number of leading scientists such as Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie, and Louis Lapicque. In addition famous social scientists, such as Lucien Febvre and the sociologist Marcel Mauss collaborated with the Centre international de synthèse. The Centre de synthèse was equally attractive for historians of science such as Hélène Metzger and Alexandre Koyré who were in charge of the publication of a historical vocabulary of science. In its efforts to integrate new trends of scientific research within humanities, the Centre de synthèse developed a high-level, philosophy-oriented, scientific culture. To the same style of high-culture dissemination of science belongs a book series named Actualités scientifiques et industrielles based on papers delivered by international scientists at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers and published by Hermann. More than 100 booklets (60 to 100 pages) came out in the 1930s. Together with the Semaines internationales de synthèse, these booklets played a crucial role in spreading and discussing quantum physics (in a series edited by Louis de Broglie). The booklets also introduced the ideas of the Vienna Circle in France (Schöttler Reference Schöttler2006).Footnote 2
We thus find in our first example a number of initiatives, which converged to encourage cultural and philosophical views of science, and undoubtedly initiated a tradition of dialogue between the natural sciences and the social sciences. For instance when Albert Einstein visited Paris in April 1922, a session was held at the Société française de philosophie, where Einstein could discuss relativity theory with Henri Bergson, Léon Brunschvicg, and Emile Meyerson, among others.
2. Encyclopaedia and national identity
In 1932, the Minister of Education, Anatole de Monzie, announced that the French State would launch a national encyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie française.Footnote 3 It would provide an opportunity for “un examen de conscience intellectuel” in the aftermath of the war. Thus after the outbreak of patriotism and national hatred nurtured by World War One, in the 1930s encyclopaedias appeared as tools to reshape the national identities of “modern states” on an intellectual, pacific, basis. In fact, many similar projects were created in various countries with similar organizations: State initiative, public and private funding, big editorial boards and extensive use of advertisement (Gemelli Reference Gemelli1987; Schöttler Reference Schöttler, Nemeth and Roudet2005). Encouraged by the success of nineteenth-century encyclopedias, the twentieth-century encyclopedias were planned as big enterprises: they required a strong publishing house, financial investments, industrial management with a clear division of labor and regular teams of editors, contributors, and traders. In France, the publishing house Pierre Larousse, which had built its reputation on the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, was the obvious candidate for launching the Encyclopédie française. The initial endowment in 1935 amounted to FF 1 million (approximately € 400.000) to which should be added FF 300.000 when the Société de gestion de l'Encyclopédie française was created in 1936 (ibid.).
The Encyclopédie française would challenge all previous and contemporary rival encyclopaedias thanks to its innovative format. It was delivered in three different formats from hard cover to paperback (ibid.). It could be purchased through three different channels of distribution: either subscribing to the Comité de l'Encyclopédie française; or buying the volumes in a bookshop held by Larousse; or negotiating with door-to-door salesmen. The cost of the fifteen planned volumes was relatively high: depending on the format of binding it was sold from FF 2700, to 2300, and 1850 (the latter being equivalent to slightly more than 1,000 euros). However sales on credit would allow modest customers to acquire the Encyclopédie for the amount of FF 40 (approximately 21 euros) per month. This commercial strategy was motivated by the ambition to target many social strata of the public, ranging from high professions such as magistrates, lawyers, and medical doctors, to civil servants, engineers, industrial managers, as well teachers and librarians. Moreover the promoters of the Encyclopédie française claimed that it would last forever, thanks to a system of mobile files which allowed renewing the pages on the topics that would need updating.
The editorial task of the Encyclopédie française was entrusted to a historian, professor at the Collège de France, Lucien Febvre. He had been the collaborator of Berr at the Centre de synthèse and co-founder of the Annales with Marc Bloch. Febvre managed to attract a number of prestigious names of French intellectuals and scientists to the editorial board, who would in turn guarantee the quality of the enterprise. He chose the contributors from among the elite of writers, scientists, artists and men of action. Febvre rejected the alphabetic order which had prevailed in Diderot's Encyclopédie. He equally rejected a disciplinary organization such as that of the Encyclopédie méthodique. In his view, an encyclopaedia should not look like a department-store. It had to convey the unity of the universe as well as the unity of science.
As editor, Febvre was keen on providing strong philosophical direction to the series of volumes. The purpose, he claimed, was to teach rather than simply provide information.Footnote 4 As a historian, Febvre referred to the historical roots of the encyclopaedic movement during the Renaissance and elected “mankind” as its organizing principle. The sequence of volumes was planned and organized according to this principle. The first volume presented the “mental tools,” then the following volumes were meant to lead the reader from the physical environment of human life to its most accomplished cultural achievements in fine arts, religion, philosophy, and history.Footnote 5 Thus man would be at the core of the enterprise and humanism would signify the French national identity. Febvre intended to reach the general public but he insisted that this target did not imply any simplification. The unity of human knowledge had to be suggested without reducing the complex phenomena to simpler ones. His main concern was to raise the critical spirit of the readers, so Febvre asked his contributors to present scientific issues rather than the results of investigation. This approach, which was in tune with Bachelard's contemporary epistemology, broke away from the usual cumulative view of science. Unlike the conventional and popular encyclopaedias published by Larousse or Quillet, the Encyclopédie française did not attempt to inform the public or put recent advances in science within everyone's reach. Febvre thus developed an original concept of popularization aimed at providing a global and reflexive regard for knowledge instead of mirroring the achievements of scientific research (Poirot-Delpech Reference Poirot-Delpech1988; Muller Reference Muller2003). The most challenging aspect of Febvre's project was to emphasize the zones of uncertainty and obscurity in current knowledge. He claimed that his encyclopaedia was unique in that it dared to acknowledge the amount of our ignorance (Febvre Reference Febvre1936).
This original concept however did not lead to commercial success. In November 1938, three years after the beginning of the publication, only 3400 copies had been sold (Mollier Reference Jean-Yves2002). In 1939 the Société de gestion de l'Encyclopédie française created in 1936 was bankrupt and only 11 of the 21 volumes had been published. To be sure the economic depression which followed the 1929 crisis did not favor the commercial success of this expensive publishing enterprise. Still the commercial strategy adopted with various formats for advertisements and door-to-door sales consumed a lot of money. More fundamentally, the hybrid public/private character of the enterprise proved to be its major weakness. The state support was more formal than real since no public money was involved in the project. Nevertheless it weighed on the project and generated tensions. Disagreements between de Monzie and Febvre became visible in the preparation of volume 10, which was dedicated to the notion of State. Febvre who was a committed anti-facscist could not approve de Monzie's admiration for Mussolini and Salazar (Gemelli Reference Gemelli2002). In 1939 a new society of the Encyclopédie française was created with a capital of FF 2 million, which did not manage to rescue the enterprise. The project, interrupted in the early 1940s, was resumed in the aftermath. When Lucien Febvre died in 1956, the physicist Louis de Broglie, who was the editor of the volume dedicated to physics, became the editor of the project. The last volumes were published between 1954 and 1966 but the total number of subscribers between 1936 and 1966 remained under 10,000 (Mollier Reference Jean-Yves2002), and not all the volumes initially planned did come out. Thus unlike its eighteenth-century model – Diderot's Encyclopédie – the Encyclopédie française never became a best-seller and the published volumes did not fulfill Febvre's ambitious project of reorganizing knowledge with humanity at its center.
3. The Palais de la découverte and the campaign for science
In 1935 the French government invited a number of leading figures in the intellectual milieus including scientists, writers, artists, and philosophers, to submit designs for a pavilion dedicated to science at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition “Arts and Industry.” Jean Perrin's plan for a Palais de la découverte won the competition over two rivals. One was a Palais des records de la science et de l'industrie; the other one planned to display a Laboratory of trials and measurements in action.Footnote 6
In conducting the project and coining the term “Palais de la découverte,” Jean Perrin had two definite intentions, which he developed in a number of papers later collected in a volume, La science et l'espérance (Perrin Reference Perrin1948). His main purpose was to appeal to the public, to emphasize the beauty of science and scientific research and to convince visitors that pure science was socially useful. For Perrin, science is useful not because of its applications. Pure science is more useful than applied science, at least in the long term. Perrin assumed that curiosity-driven science would miraculously lead to technological advances in the near future and bring endless progress. He claimed that more public welfare would follow from scientific research as an unpredicted consequence of pure cognitive science.
The Palais has often been described as a “cathedral of science.” The comparison is inspired not only by the grandiose architecture of the building but also by the celebration of science. The huge Van der Graaf electric generator posted at the entrance was meant to inspire the power and grandeur of physics. Visitors were invited to marvel for instance at the numerous decimals of the Pi number displayed on the walls in a small circular room that looked like a chapel. However the Palais de la découverte did not invite worship of scientists as saints; instead it sought to display science as a playful and attractive activity through re-enacting historical and spectacular experiments of electricity and chemistry, in particular (Maury Reference Maury1994).
Another explicit purpose was to encourage science as a vocation among young visitors from the lower classes who were generally left out by the establishment. Perrin assumed that many potential geniuses were wasted by elitist societies. He also assumed that people were attracted by science and that science had the power to emancipate the people from oppression:
For the people [le peuple] feel deeply albeit they confuse faith with science. They hope, they expect from this liberating science a gradual emancipation, already at work, which will bring the outmost joys of art and thought within everyone's reach. (Perrin Reference Perrin1948, 151; author's translation)
The life of Michael Faraday was presented as an icon, embodying Perrin's messages. Faraday started his career as a modest workman and became famous for his work on electricity. In conducting exclusively pure research and discovering a basic law of the science of electricity he nevertheless pioneered all subsequent developments of electrical engineering and technology. With this view in mind, from the outset Perrin designed the Palais as a permanent museum.
Interestingly, the projects that were rejected equally expressed a faith in the virtues of science but for opposite reasons. They celebrated the industrial applications of science rather than pure science. Their proponents advocated a rational management of scientific research, of industrial production, and of society itself. They were fascinated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The chemist Henry Le Chatelier, who inspired the rival project of a Laboratory, actively promoted an idealized view of Taylorism as a scientific, hence a perfect, organization of labor. He presented his own grandiose program in La science et l'industrie (Le Chatelier Reference Le Chatelier1925a and Reference Le Chatelier1925b). He advocated a proportionate relation between the cost of research laboratories and the expected profits resulting from the introduction of the innovations introduced in the industrial processes. He claimed that good science grows out of industrial projects and illustrated his point with historical cases such as those of Lavoisier, Carnot, Sainte-Claire-Deville, and Pasteur. He also assumed that science is the study of natural laws, i.e. of the necessary relations between phenomena, whatever their nature. For Le Chatelier and a number of engineers, science was not characterized by the objects it investigated. Rather it was conceived of as a method for the collection of data acquired through careful measurements, and for the optimization of industrial process to maximize yields. Consequently the scientific method was promoted as a sure means to increase the efficiency of industrial production and of scientific research.
In stark contrast, Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin, who were close to the socialist and communist parties, advocated an idealized view of science as a cultural pursuit. In 1932, Langevin co-founded the Université ouvrière (workers university) with the philosopher Alain, and two writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse. They assumed that science and culture would help emancipate the working class, provided it was presented as an integral part of culture. Langevin used to contrast culture and vocation. He deplored that professional education and occupational activities contributed to isolating people whereas culture being common to all people brings them closer together. Thus in keeping with his campaign to promote “modern humanities” in the educational system, he popularized science as a cultural enterprise and praised its “human value.”
More pragmatic intentions hidden behind such noble visions also motivated the project and design of the Palais de la découverte. As Jacqueline Eidelman convincingly argued, the Palais was part of Perrin's campaign to raise public support for scientific research (Eidelman Reference Eidelman and Schroeder-Gudehus1992). While he planned the Palais, Perrin was working very hard to increase the budget of scientific research and create a state institution exclusively devoted to scientific research, with permanent research positions free of teaching duties.
In this campaign, Perrin benefited from his relations with politicians such as Edouard Herriot a member of the radical party and Léon Blum a member of the socialist party. Perrin and Langevin used their influence to promote the coalition of parties named the Front populaire which came into power in 1936 (Bensaude-Vincent Reference Bensaude-Vincent1987b). Perrin took advantage of his personal relations with politicians to reinforce his campaign for science, which eventually led to the foundation of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1939. The campaign for scientific research and the project of popular science worked very well together: The Palais de la découverte was meant to enroll young promising future scientists and legitimate the pursuit of disinterested knowledge. Thus popularization served the professional strategy of scientists in their attempt to promote scientific research as a national service. However this popularizing enterprise makes sense in the broader context of the cultural policy of the Front populaire, which introduced three-week paid holidays for all workers and developed parallel efforts to enroll citizens in cultural associative activities during their leisure-time (ibid.). Along with the Palais de la découverte, an anthropological museum was created in 1938 – the Musée de l'homme near the Trocadéro. An Arts and Crafts museum (Musée des arts et traditions populaires) was planned to celebrate popular culture, which would open only after World War II. This intense museum activity proceeded from the conviction that the leisure time provided by the modernization of industry would be spent in cultural activities.
4. Paradoxical results
The social and natural scientists involved in editorial and museographical projects were motivated by cultural ambitions. They wanted to promote a new humanism as well as a more democratic society. Ironically, despite their social ideals, they favored an elitist concept of popular science essentially meant to integrate science into high culture. While they strove to overcome increased specialization, they nevertheless increased the professionalization of scientific research and the isolation of science. The Centre international de synthèse eventually became a niche for professional historians and played a leading role in the emergence of the history of science as an autonomous discipline. The Encyclopédie française helped professionalize research in a number of fields such as folklore and nutrition where amateurs had prevailed thus far. The Centre national de la recherche, the crowning achievement of Perrin's longstanding campaign for scientific research, enabled a crowd of permanent researchers to be recruited in the 1950s and 1960s. They enjoyed great autonomy and considered themselves fully independent from public opinion. They no longer cared for disseminating knowledge and gradually came to regard popularization as a secondary activity that should be in the hands of professional mediators.
This changing attitude invites us to reconsider the popular inclinations of the French scientists of the previous generation. In the 1930s, Langevin, Perrin, and other leading scientists felt that it was their duty to reach the public at large, to engage people who had been kept ignorant by the former elitist society. Langevin in particular claimed that scientists had a moral responsibility to popularize science in order to prevent political disasters:
It is the duty of scientists to keep in contact with other people even in matters of science, and not to adopt a too esoteric style that could create a gulf between its representatives and the bulk of human species. This task is all the more difficult given that the speed of changes in science makes it hard to keep up even for us. However if it happened that only a few initiates were introduced to the joy of understanding and to the potentials of action, our mankind would be in great danger. The savants’ government that Renan envisaged, would be, in effect, as dangerous as any other form of dictatorship by one man or by an oligarchy. Experience teaches us that a man in a position of excessive political or financial power loses its balance: scientists would be no exception and would become dangerous mad people. (Langevin [1946] Reference Langevin and Bensaude Vincent2007, 356; author's translation)
Despite, or because of, their convictions, the scientists dedicated to the popularization of science finally contributed to spreading the cliché of the increasing gap between scientists and the public.Footnote 7 Significantly, the article “vulgarisation” written by the Swiss writer René Sudre for the eighteenth volume of the Encyclopédie française claimed that the increasing gap was the natural consequence of the advancement of science (Sudre Reference Sudre1939). In surveying the changing relations between science and the public over time, Sudre distinguished three stages. The first stage was characterized by a very small distance between scientists and society. For instance in Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, published in the late seventeenth century, a skilled mathematician could entertain a marchioness in a salon by teaching her Descartes's cosmology. The distance between the scientist and the public is embedded in their style of argumentation. Later on, according to Sudre, the increased formalization and mathematization of science and the emergence of esoteric formulas in the nineteenth century increased the gulf between laypeople and scientists. No longer was it a question of style. The languages so much diverged that a translator was needed. Popularization was then developed to bridge the gap and conceived of as a process of translation of esoteric language into vernacular languages. A third stage was reached, Sudre continued, in the early twentieth century. Due to the relativity theory and quantum mechanics, such translations from scientific language into ordinary ones were no longer possible because the notions introduced by physicists have no equivalent in our common intuition of space and time. Scientists and ordinary people live in two different worlds. The gulf between them is ontological, there is no common reference allowing the process of translation.
This historical legitimization of the increasing gap echoed Gaston Bachelard's epistemology. In La formation de l'esprit scientifique (1938), Bachelard advocated a necessary divorce between science and opinion. The scientific spirit has to break with common sense views and non-expert knowledge. This radical break is not just a result of scientific advances, it is constitutive of science:
Science, in its completion as in its principle, is absolutely opposed to opinion. If it happens to legitimize opinion, on a particular point, it is for reasons different from those on which opinion is grounded. Thus de jure opinion is always wrong. Opinion is bad thought, it is thoughtless; it just expresses a need for knowledge. . . . Nothing can be built on opinion: it should be first destroyed. (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1938, 14; author's translation)
Bachelard's espistemology of rupture was largely inspired by non-Euclidian geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. The message he wanted to deliver was that we have entered a new scientific age.
However the common view of a radical gulf between science and the public rests on a very partial view of science. Selective attention to the “new physics” allowed science popularizers to consider that the two theories which effectively challenged the traditional foundations of physics could testify for all other sciences. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics became the metonymy of scientific thinking.
The reduction of science to physics, which was considered as a model for all sciences, contributed to generating the conviction that the increasing gap was a historical necessity. This conviction gradually undermined the ideal of the Centre de synthèse. Berr's efforts to create an interstitial space between natural sciences and humanities, to encourage a dialogue between philosophers, anthropologists, and physicists were doomed to failure. The proceedings of the annual Semaines de synthèse on such general topics as matter or invention suggest that there was no real dialogue between specialists (Bensaude-Vincent Reference Bensaude-Vincent, Baird, Bourel and Brian1997). Scientists resisted all attempts at reformulating their concepts in metaphysical or anthropological terms. The positivistic boundary between science and metaphysics thus acted as an obstacle to interdisciplinary dialogue.
In conclusion, the three projects here described testify to a remarkable mobilization of natural scientists and social scientists. They also make a case for spreading science within society. This phenomenon instantiates the historical role of intellectuals in France, who felt responsible for shaping society and national culture.
In the 1920s and the 1930s, the projects were conducted with State support. This cultural policy, which became especially ambitious during the Front populaire, reinforced the old alliance between the scientific community and the French republic. This alliance had been sealed in the late nineteenth century on the occasion of a controversy on the bankruptcy of science, which set into opposition the Catholic Church and left Republican scientists (Paul Reference Paul1968). A robust faith in science and its social function became part of the French socialist movement.Footnote 8 A striking feature of this movement is that it is less concerned with popularization stricto sensu than with promoting science within high culture.
