Introduction

François-René de Chateaubriand, the great French romantic, spoke for an entire generation when in his autobiography he described the French Revolution as a ‘river of blood which separates for ever the old world in which you were born from the new world on whose frontiers you will die’. This sense of the French Revolution as a dark and threatening chasm in time, so different from the joyful novus ordo saeculorum of the triumphant New World revolution of 1776, was undoubtedly one of the major reasons for the outpouring of autobiography which is characteristic of that era. This was so not only because autobiography seemed the ideal vehicle, in many cases, to vindicate the actions of the troubled revolutionary era, but also because autobiography became a way of asserting the continuities of existence and identity across the rupture between the pre- and post-revolutionary worlds. Because of this, it is difficult, and misleading, to see the autobiographies of this time as ‘private’ documents: rather, they are involved with the reshaping of the meaning of the revolutionary era, precisely because they are the medium through which many in France worked through the specific nature of their investment in, and exploration of, the ‘new world’ of postrevolutionary time.

Possibly nowhere did autobiography fill this need more urgently than in the case of the scientific élite.