How an Anglo-American methodology took root in France.

Abstract

French organic chemistry had a strong nationalistic bent in the immediate aftermath to World War II. It continued to bask in the glow of the pre-World War I Nobel prize awarded jointly in 1912 to Victor Grignard and Paul Sabatier. In addition, the influence of the two mandarins then in power, Charles Prévost at the Sorbonne and Albert Kirrmann, a Dean in Strasbourg who would be called upon as vice-director at the École normale supérieure in Paris, saw to it that the only theory of organic reactions, admissible in the classroom and in the laboratory, was Prévost's. As Mary Jo Nye has shown, a wall was erected against penetration of the ideas of the British school of Ingold and Hughes. Mechanistic chemistry, as was being vigorously studied by the contemporary Anglo-American physical organic chemists, was 'persona non grata' in France. Publication by Bianca Tchoubar, in 1960, of "Les mécanismes réactionnels en chimie organique" opened a breach. The irony was for Dr. Tchoubar, a militant member of the Communist Party and a lady of fierce opinions, to have become a propagandist for the Anglo-American school of mechanistic studies. Truth for her overruled political propaganda. Her little book was revolutionary in the French context of the times. Together with the GECO (Groupe d'étude de chimie organique) summer conferences pioneered by Guy Ourisson after his return from Harvard, it ushered in the new ideas. This historical essay, based on an in-depth study of Tchoubar's book, will include a portrait of this remarkable woman scientist. It will delve at some length into the renewal of French science initiated by De Gaulle's government after his return to power in 1958. The tension in the French scientific establishment of the sixties reflected two opposed versions of nationalism, the one conservative, Malthusian, inner-directed, the other forward-looking, eager for the recovery of national status, seeing a strong French science as a means for asserting national identity and independence from the two world power blocs.