Elements pour la genealogie d'un lieu commun français, vulgariser c'est traduire

There is a French saying to the effect that scientific popularization is a kind of translation. This is sometimes associated with the claim that popularization downgrades science. From a literary point of view it has even been said that popularization can be characterized by the mere production of metaphors in sharp contrast to science that ought to be a literal language. We claim that the statements about translation and downgrading appear around the first third of the nineteenth century and are connected with some dominant features of French philosophical thought about science and with the institutional organization of science in France. Our aim is to show the distinct threads that led to these ideas and how they got entangled. We first present examples to show that "popularization is a translation" really is a French commonplace. Journalists, professors and scientists used and still use it. Even quite recent French scholarship makes this assumption in its analyses of popularization. In fact, these approaches rely on the very metaphors about science that allowed the emergence of the translation thesis in the first place. So we proceed to a genealogy of the thesis in Part II. In the eighteenth century enlightened minds--especially physiocrats--thought that a general education was needed to promote the common good. An optimistic philosopher like Condorcet thought that the public acknowledgment of the truths of the sciences would be similar to an election, a process itself similar to a trial. Then the "voters" would agree to be led peacefully to a better world. If part of this program was new, it also kept close to some principles of the honourable Republic of Letters. However the academies, the most official bodies of this virtual republic, were not trustworthy allies. They claimed to promote progress but were accused by major 'philosophes ' like Turgot and d'Alembert, and soon by much more radical outsiders, to be first and foremost conservative corporations. In its will to accelerate a general enlightenment, the French Revolution remained faithful to academic ideas about science and language. Here, Condillac's writings offered a celebrated example of the way "analysis", a key concept of the time, could link an epistemology, a theory of the sciences, a theory of language and a political theory. So, the revolutionary assemblies decided that the people should talk one and the same analytical language. Even the moderate 'Idéologues' favored this idea and still hesitated between algebra and French as the most perfect language. Later on science became specialized and took place in official institutions, apart both from the lay people and from the "distinguished" members of the Republic of Letters. The unity and the political leadership of the sciences seemed doomed despite of the imaginative reforms suggested by the proto-socialist and positivist Saint-Simon. Then it became clear that only a translation of the sciences could prevent the betrayal of the ideal of the Enlightenment. This opened a path for the job of professional popularizer. In the meantime, more aristocratically minded people began to claim that the metaphors of popularization downgrades science.