Lavoisier manuscript collection

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was born in Paris in 1743. He was the son of Jean Antoine Lavoisier, a lawyer, and Émilie Punctis, who belonged to a wealthy Parisian family, and died when he was two. Then he attended the Collège Mazarin where he studied classics and mathematics. In 1763, he passed the Bachelor of Law degree. At this time he got interested in mineralogy and chemistry and attended Rouelle's classes. In 1766-1767, he went on some field trips with Jean Etienne Guettard, to study the stratigraphy of soils and make an inventory of the mineralogical resources of France.

In 1768, he was admitted to the Académie des Sciences, where he presented his research on the chemical analysis of water. The same year, he entered the Ferme Générale, a private company in charge of collecting indirect taxes for the king. Lavoisier became first an inspector of one of the Ferme Générale commissions, the Tobacco commission, where his supervisor was Jacques Paulze. On December 16, 1771, Lavoisier married his thirteen-year-old daughter, Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze, who was also the grandniece of the powerful Abbé Terray, the Controller General of Finance. In 1775, Lavoisier entered the Régie des Poudres et Salpêtres, a private company responsible for the production, control and refining of saltpeter and the manufacture of gunpowder in France. As a Fermier Général and a member of the Régie des Poudres et Salpêtres, Lavoisier became interested in economic theories, physiocratic ideas, agronomy, and public finance.

Simultaneously, from 1772, Lavoisier studied pneumatic chemistry, the chemistry of gases, borrowing experimental facts from English scientists, like Priestley. In 1773, he published the Opuscules physiques et chimiques, where he considered atmospheric air as a mixture, that established his reputation as a chemist. In the 1770's, he discovered that the components of air were mainly oxygen and nitrogen, and defined combustion and calcination as chemical reactions. Then, with Guyton de Morveau, Berthollet and Fourcroy he elaborated a new method of chemical nomenclature, giving chemistry a clear language, published in 1787 under the title of Méthode de nomenclature chimique. At least, in 1789, his Traité élémentaire de chimie explained the essential points of the new chemistry, like the composition of air and water and the law of the conservation of matter in chemical reactions, and depicted the experimental methods of a real scientific approach. The thirteen plates illustrating the work had been engraved by Marie-Anne Lavoisier

In 1789, Lavoisier failed to be elected at the Estates General, and steered clear of political affairs. He resigned from his office at the Ferme Générale shortly before its abolition in 1791, but was considered as an consultant in financial affairs and became the director of the Discount Bank, and a commissioner of the Public Treasury, and expressed many ideas about the reforms of French public finance and taxation. At the same time, he took part to the major reform of the unification of the weights and measures system. But, as a former Fermier Général and like his peers, among them his father-in-law, Jacques Paulze, he was arrested in 1794. They were accused of exactions and embezzlement and transferred to the Conciergerie. On the 19 floréal an II (May 8, 1794), they were all sentenced to death and executed.

After Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's death, his properties were consficated by the State. In 1795, after a campaign, Marie-Anne Lavoisier obtained the restoration of her property. In the same time, she published an edition of Lavoisier's works. In 1805, she married an American scientist, Benjamin Thomson, who had become Count Rumford in 1791.