Flight Technology Experiments and the Public in Pre - Revolutionary France.

The balloon mania that engulfed the public just a few years before the French Revolution, long viewed as the crucible of modernity, makes it a particularly suitable subject to explore the relationship between science, Enlightenment ideology, the French Revolution, and modernity. In this project, Dr. Kim seeks to place the first balloon ascensions in the midst of revolutionary historical processes to understand how they helped shape a new political landscape by mobilizing the existing resources and institutions. To this end, she will examine the material, social, and literary technologies ? production of luxury consumer items, expansion of the press and the postal system, different genres and modes of literature, administrative channels of communication, circulation of the news, etc.?that served to create a mass public. She intends to utilize new types of sources (e.g. imaginary voyages and underground pamphlets) and comparative perspectives (e.g. France vs. England, Germany; Montgolfiers vs. Blanchard) to dismantle the standard, euphoric narrative on ballooning.

The ideological, utilitarian, and cultural uses of science have shaped Western civilization; in particular, science has been deeply implicated in the construction of European modernity. It provided an alternative ideology of the state that eclipsed the traditional, religious justification of kingship, offered useful gadgets that shaped its military and urban environment, and generated a cultural milieu of rational entertainment that catered to the bourgeois taste and habits of consumption. This study will result in a more sophisticated, comparative understanding of the different cultures of invention. It will reveal institutional, social, cultural and political advantages and barriers that affected the development of science during the French Revolution. Proceeding in this way will serve to contribute to envisioning a global community/culture of technoscience.