The American Mission of Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet: Revolutionary Chemistry and Diplomacy in the Early Republic

Abstract

Pierre-A uguste Adet: Revolutionary Chemistry and Diplomacy in the Early Republic THE LAST TWO DECADES of the eighteenth century were a period of revolutionary change when new ideas crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean, overturning orthodoxies in politics and in science. As Joseph Priestley, an English radical and chemist residing in America, remarked, it was an "age of revolutions, philosophical as well as civil."' One person at the center of this maelstrom of ideas was Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet, a diplomat and chemist who was sent by the French Republic to the United States in 1795 as minister plenipotentiary. As a revolutionary diplomat, Adet attempted to restore the Franco-American alliance with the help of American Republicans, by leaking the contents of the Jay Treaty, by recruiting foreign revolutionaries for the French army, and by intriguing in the presidential election of 1796. As a revolutionary chemist, Adet communicated American advances in chemistry to his compatriots in France, supported the researches of French scientists in the United States, and defended the Chemical Revolution of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier from the