When Louis XIV had an anal fistula, his doctors paced the mirrored halls of the vast palace he had built at Versailles pondering how to treat it. Eventually the Sun King agreed to an operation – a risky choice in the 17th century when modern surgery was barely in its infancy. The royal surgeon Charles-François Félix invented a curved silver scalpel to get at the fistula – you can see it in this glittering science history blockbuster – and practised on local paupers, killing several. The rehearsals worked: he fixed the royal fistula and Louis XIV lived on until 1715, his 72-year reign a world record.
In Versailles: Science and Splendour a silver scalpel slices through the cliche that the French palace was a world of pure fantasy frolics. The royal surgeon’s experiments were brutal but they also illustrate how Versailles in the 1780s was spearheading science.
You thought Marie-Antoinette was just interested in shepherdess cosplay? Here you see a breed of hyacinth named in her honour, an intricate watch made for her that was only finished years after she went to the guillotine, and her copy of a French atlas. Portraits of two of Louis XV’s daughters, Madame Adelaide and Madame Sophie, show them at their desks surrounded by books. A telescope has an inscription on it saying it was made by “Madame Sophie de France”. And don’t miss Louis XV’s rhinoceros, a colossal miracle of 18th-century taxidermy.
French royals wanted to take a progressive lead and would have been shocked by the US’s anti-vaxxer nominee for health secretary. When Louis XV died of smallpox, his son, Louis XVI, decided the entire royal family should get inoculated: bulletins were posted up to reassure subjects of the royals’ progress. The strategy worked and inoculation took off in France. A print portrays a fashionable woman wearing a ribbon to support inoculation.
Versailles itself was a technological achievement. Its gardens with their canals and fountains needed state of the art inventions such as the Marly Machine, built to pump water from the Seine and still working in the age of Napoleon. Hydraulic engineering had been used to create fancy water features since Renaissance times. What was new was the glamorisation of machinery itself: drawings and paintings celebrated the Marly Machine as a wonder of science – though it never worked that well.
The same belief that technology is beautiful shines from Jean-Antoine Nollet’s lovely lacquered scientific instruments to be used in jaw-dropping public lectures. Nollet’s air pump is so much more elegant than its English counterparts – but just as deadly when you put a bird inside its glass tank and removed the air.
The refined elite of 18th-century France did not shy from biological truth. Louis XV commissioned the midwife Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to improve male surgeons as well as female midwives. So she invented La Machine, a working model of a torso from which you could pull the baby. Made from stuffed fabric, it looks like an artwork by Louise Bourgeois but is praised in the catalogue for its “remarkable” accuracy. Madame du Coudray also made versions of her obstetric Machine with sponges “that could be soaked in clear or dyed liquids to stage the release of amniotic fluid and blood”.
The release of blood. With Madame du Coudray’s Machine we sense the birthpangs of the wider revolution that would consume Versailles. You can see the rational facade crumble in a section dedicated to Louis XVI’s efforts to defend the strategic harbour Cherbourg against the British navy. Louis-Alexandre de Cessart designed floating wooden cones that could be filled with stones and sunk to create a harbour wall. His model is in the exhibition. It looks like a folly and was. And while the Montgolfier brothers’ demonstration of their hot air balloon at Versailles was a milestone towards human flight, it wasn’t going to stop peasant bellies grumbling.
It would be tempting to see the science this exhibition so enjoyably brings to life as mere spectacle. One of the final exhibits, the Clock of the Creation of the World, is supposed to tell the time, date and year as well as the movements of the planets, and much else, but is overwhelmed by unbelievable opulence with a golden sun and silver waterfalls. Then you exit into a permanent gallery of British science in the same period. British air pumps and telescopes don’t have as much gold but they got the job done. Isaac Newton’s telescope, that helped him re-map the universe, looks like a cardboard toy.
Yet this exhibition’s real, exquisite point is that nationalism has no place in science. It explores the brilliance of French scientists including Buffon and Lavoisier but also shows how France enthusiastically adopted Newton as its hero. The gifted mathematician Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton’s Principia. You can see her manuscript, under her portrait in which she works at her desk, dividers in hand.
If the optimism of the French rationalists this exhibition remembers ended in slaughter, with Lavoisier one of the guillotine’s victims, science strode on. There’s a gorgeous moon map here created by the Italian born, French-based astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini. The space probe that took images of Saturn is named after him. The age of reason still isn’t completely finished.
