The Passion of Pierre Duhem

"Silence is the greatest persecution." -- Pascal

Despite the fact that he was one of France's greatest scientists at the turn of the 20th century, if not its greatest, Pierre Duhem's masterwork Le Systeme du Monde was suppressed by the French government and his own publisher because it refuted, through contemporary documentation (10 volumes of 500 pages each, drawn from 120 notebooks of 200 pages each filled with excerpts from Medieval manuscripts that he had to beg to borrow from other French libraries), the notion that there was no scientific progress in the Middle Ages. As Jaki, his biographer, puts it, "He had no microfilm, no Xerox machines, no dictaphones, not even ball point pens at his disposal. Above all, he had no research assistants of any sort. Worse, he often had to hold firm his trembling right hand with his left." (Jaki, 178) This was not Duhem's only project, he continued with a full slate of journal publications as well as a three-volume historical study of the scientific work of Leonardo! To complicate things, Duhem did all this work out in the sticks of France, so to speak. His original doctoral dissertation presented his co-discovery of a new scientific law (still in use today). Unfortunately for him, the scientist who formulated the old law was the politically powerful former French Minister of Education, who used his political influence to fail Duhem's dissertation, and deny him a seat in any Parisian university for the rest of his life. After years spent writing an entirely new dissertation, Duhem was passed by a board of pure mathematicians who didn't give a fig for the minister's power, but spent the rest of his life in provincial universities.

Although he was a Roman Catholic, and thus not entirely disposed to regard the Middle Ages as a wasteland, he shared the general belief that one had "to jump well over a thousand years from Archimedes or Ptolemy to Galileo" (Jaki, 178) to do the history of science. In doing a series of articles on the history of the science of statics, he jumped from Archimedes to Stevin and Cardanus. I'll let Jaki continue:

But in reading Cardanus, Duhem found a cryptic reference to a certain Jordanus, a name noticed during the previous ten or so years by several historians of science, who, unlike Duhem, had not cared to track down that elusive figure whom Cardanus seemed to credit with an important scientific insight. The task, involving a search for half-a-millennium-old medieval manuscripts and the deciphering of their quasi-cryptic scripts, would have been shunned by all theoretical physicists and by most historians of science, who at that time were still few and far between. Duhem's heroic effort paid a most unexpected dividend. He found that in speaking of the laws of balance Jordanus, who turned out to have flourished around 1320, enunciated the law of virtual velocities which is the cornerstone of general dynamics. (Jaki, 178)

Duhem's mental acuity and writing ability were such that his first-draft manuscripts were outstandingly publishable according to any rigorously refereed scientific publication standards. He was reading the proofs for the 5th volume of Le Systeme du Monde when he died on Sept. 14, 1916. His publisher, A. Hermann et Cie, was one of France's most noted scientific publishing houses. They took great pride in obtaining the best quality paper for the set, even during wartime conditions.

At first, his death was feared to have cut off the series, but a group of manuscripts found in his papers was soon determined to be the drafts for the final 5 volumes. His daughter and sole survivor, Helene, then 25, turned the manuscripts over to the French Academy of Sciences. Her father had several good friends there, including the perpetual secretary Darboux. (who died shortly thereafter, however). The Academy set up a committee to determine the publication status of the manuscripts and their findings were thoroughly positive. The manuscript of the sixth volume was handed over to Hermann in 1917 for publication.

It was not published until 1954.

What Happened?

The direct cause of the failure to publish the manuscript was a change in management at Hermann et Cie. Adolphe Hermann had retired and his grandson by-marriage M. Freymann took over. Freymann stonewalled Helene for 30+ years with feeble excuses about hard economic times while volume after volume of esoteric scholarship issued forth from his presses. According to the original publishing contract, Duhem was obliged to present the equivalent of 500 large octavo pages of manuscript every year, and forgo all royalties on the first 400 copies of each volume, receiving %40 royalties thereafter (the print run for Le Systeme du Monde was only 700 copies per volume). The only obligation Hermann et Cie had was to publish the volumes at a rate of 1 per year.

Helene Duhem later learned that the company was being supported by radical and anti-clerical intellectual elements of the French government and academic community. Her informant was no less than the head of the Institute of Science and Technology at the Sorbonne, Abel Ray, a political radical himself. Despite this, Ray was one of the rare individuals who put recognition of scholarship above ideological differences. Since no one suspected him of being pro-Catholic (which in the French context=pro Christian), he was able to accumulate the backdoor political information necessary for Helene to continue her fight.

Quite a different spectacle was cut by George Sarton, editor of the leading journal of the history of science at the time, ISIS. At first, he lauded the publication of Le Systeme as a landmark of scientific historiography, but after Duhem's death the worm turned. Sarton tried to pass himself off as the first historian to investigate Leonardo's scientific work, ignoring Duhem's exhaustive prior study. He also banned any further review of Le Systeme in the pages of ISIS, and contrived as much as possible to have it covered up, except for a hypocritical subscription call for independent publication, which he really opposed. His underlying motive for this came from his devotion to the anti-clerical philosophies of Freemasonry. Sarton knew from the thrust of vol. 3-5 that the old lie of the Middle Ages being anti-scientific was Duhem's target. With Sarton as an example, the rest of the secular establishment followed suit. (Perrin, a Nobel-laureate physicist, even directly helped in the suppression.)

To make a long story short, Freymann dug in his heels over the years and became more stubborn in his opposition to publication. Helene suffered agonies of torment during WWII, fearing that the manuscripts might be lost or destroyed (she didn't have copies). A group of scientists headed by de Broglie finally threatened Freymann with court action on March 31, 1954. This would have suited Freymann just fine, enabling him to continue delaying publication, but he died 3 days later. The new director of Hermann et Cie, Pierre Beres, immediately published the sixth volume, and the whole set almost as quickly.

Historians and philosophers of science, such as A. Koyre, praised Duhem's scholarship even as they tried to sweep his conclusions under the rug. However, thanks to the tireless efforts of his daughter the attempt to destroy Duhem failed.

But the silence continues ...

Work Cited

Jaki, Stanley L. "Science and Censorship: Helene Duhem and the Publication of the Systeme du monde." The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988.