The Museum as cradle of chemistry

In 1647, a Scottish alchemist doctor, William Davisson, gave the first free public chemistry course ever taught in France. In turn, his successors made the site one of the liveliest chemical centres of the 18th century. Among the great figures of the time was Guillaume-François Rouelle. In his laboratory were trained the greatest talents of the pre-revolutionary period: Bayen, Bucquet, Darcet, Macquer and Lavoisier.

And the audience was just as brilliant! Encyclopedists (Diderot), economists (Turgot), magistrates (Malesherbes) and philosophers (Rousseau) all flocked to it. It was so successful that the walls had to be extended. So much so that Buffon, steward of the Garden, entrusted the architect Verniquet with the task of building a new amphitheatre.

In the meantime, chemistry was charting its own course in the 1730s, abandoning the search for the "philosopher's stone" and turning to matter and its components in a scientific approach based on experimentation and logic. From 1772 onwards, a chemical revolution took hold, the 'father' of which was Lavoisier, and his famous "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed". A genius chemist, he was also a lawyer and a fermier général - a kind of tax collector, which led to his being guillotined in 1794. Modern chemistry therefore took off without him... The French Revolution was in full swing. By decree of the Convention, the Jardin du Roy became the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle in 1793 and two chairs of chemistry were created. Antoine-François Fourcroy, a chemist and member of the Convention, taught Lavoisier's new "theory", of which he was an ardent advocate. While Vauquelin discovered chromium, Chevreul isolated, characterized and named cholesterol. The textile industry, led by the printed cotton cloth factories (the "indiennes"), turned to chemistry to improve the technique of printing fabrics and their colouring.

As the country entered the industrial era under the Second Empire, a school of chemistry opened at the Museum in 1864 under the impetus of Professor Fremy. This was a first in France, which did not yet have any engineering courses! Another original feature was that the courses were free of charge and experimentation was given pride of place. In 1872, Fremy inaugurated the buildings at 63 rue de Buffon, where the current chemistry laboratory is located.

From 1864 to 1892, when the school was closed, more than 1,400 students were trained there. The most famous of these were Moissan, the first Frenchman to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1906), Arnaud, Chevreul's successor and a pioneer in plant chemistry, Étard, Bertrand, Verneuil, Becquerel and Curie.