IRIS Photos

Lavoisier Collection Grows

Since the early 1960s CUL has been home to the largest collection outside Paris of material by and about Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), the French scientist known as the father of modern chemistry. He developed the basic nomenclature and theoretical structure of chemistry as we know it today.

After Lavoisier’s death at the guillotine at the height of the French Revolution, his widow spent years assembling and preserving material related to his life and work. When she died in 1836, the collection was passed down through her brother’s family. Beginning in the 1850s, her descendents began to disperse that material, and in 1956 what remained from Madame Lavoisier’s collection was sold at public auction in Paris. The bulk of the material in that sale, including hundreds of manuscripts and more than 600 volumes from Lavoisier’s personal library, became the nucleus of the collection Cornell later acquired in 1962.

Thanks to gifts from several generous donors, the Library has now acquired hundreds more books and manuscripts.The core of the private collection CUL recently acquired is the other “half” of Madame Lavoisier’s collection that had been dispersed earlier. It includes hundreds of pages of additional manuscripts and every printed item not already held by Cornell. Perhaps the most exciting addition is Madame Lavoisier’s personal copy of what is arguably the most famous chemistry treatise ever published: her husband’s 1789 Traité élémentaire de chimie. Illustrated by Madame Lavoisier herself and bound in her distinctive personal style, this unique volume has particular significance for students and scholars of the history of science.

Among the historic manuscripts are numerous letters to and from Lavoisier and his scientific colleagues, many of which have never been published. There is also correspondence to and from Madame Lavoisier, including a letter of 1788 in which she recounts an explosion in the couple’s laboratory that nearly killed them both.

Many other items in the new acquisition provide insight into the social and political unrest surrounding the French Revolution. The most dramatic example is a two-volume diary kept by Lavoisier’s colleague Auguste Denis Fougeroux de Bondaroy, in which he meticulously recorded daily observations of events in the streets of Paris in the days immediately preceding and immediately following the fall of the Bastille in July 1789.

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