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IMPACT OF BOOZE AND GUNS. “Alcohol was not the only plant substance altering bodies in France in the years after the Revolution. The circulation of medicinal plants and drugs remained robust. With the abolition of apothecary guilds during the Revolution, the regulation of trade now fell to the profession of pharmacy, newly institutionalised by a group closely allied to Lavoisier, most notably the chemist Antoine François Fourcroy (1755-1809), who had established, along with Lavoisier, the new chemical nomenclature.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

RETURN OF VITALISM. “For Chaptal, fermentation was not, as Lavoisier had suggested, a straightforward chemical reaction, but a living process. He identified four components of the grape that played a role: water, tartaric acid, sugar, and what he started out calling a “sweet principle” (principe doux), and later switched to calling the “vegeto-animal principle.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

STEPS BACKWARD. “Wine makers and distillers found little of use in Lavoisier’s work, and instead turned to another chemist of his generation, who was only partially converted to Lavoisier’s cause, the unapologetic vitalist Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756-1832). Chaptal had replaced Lavoisier at the Gunpowder Administration after the latter’s beheading, and then served as Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior. He had also, in these years, published scientific accounts of both wine making and distilling that transformed both industries.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

LOST HIS HEAD BUT HIS IDEAS REMAINED. “Although Lavoisier did not survive the Revolution that followed, his new nomenclature did, cementing a shift that deprived active principles of their fundamental ontological status. But a focus on the constituent elements remained insufficient to explain what was, for many, the most interesting part of fermented beverages.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

FLY IN THE OINTMENT. “Pasteur's career went from success to success. In his next project, in the 1850s, he studied the production of alcohol, succeeding where Lavoisier had failed, and showing that fermentation was not an inert chemical process, but a “vital act,” which required the presence of a living “ferment” or germ to begin the process.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PASTEUR DISTRACTED BY GUNPOWDER. “He pressed on, however, ordering a new fermentation apparatus with the hope that greater precision would clear up his problems. It arrived in June of 1789, but by that time his duties overseeing Paris’s gunpowder supply in the middle of rising civic unrest made it hard to get work done.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE FINAL DEMARKATION. “These two things, the ability of plants to rotate light and the ability of plants to effect bodies, were bundled together under the concept of action or activity, which replaced vitalism and vitality as the demarcating line between living and non-living substances.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

MONEY MACHINE. “Such artificial constructions would come to be known as “synthetic,” a term that Catherine Jackson has traced to Hofmann’s reference to his “synthetical experiments” in a paper of 1845. Hofmann’s name has become indelibly associated with the new enterprise of making artificial molecules, and he presided over a team of chemists producing one new compound after another, some of them immensely lucrative.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn