My history hero: Mary Archer chooses Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (1758–1836)
Scientist Mary Archer chooses Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier as a history hero
In profile
Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, later Countess Rumford, was a French chemist, linguist, translator and noblewoman who helped bring the pioneering work of her husband, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, to the attention of a wider international audience. She later married Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, but retained her first husband’s last name. She died at home in Paris, aged 78.
When did you first hear about Lavoisier?
While I studied chemistry at Oxford. Marie-Anne and Antoine Lavoisier played a major part in overthrowing the century-old phlogiston theory of heat, and helped usher in the ‘new chemistry’ revolution. Antoine, assisted by Marie-Anne, discovered the role that oxygen plays in both the oxidation of metals and combustion.
What kind of woman was she?
Marie-Anne was a highly accomplished figure who spoke several languages, and translated foreign works into French for her husband, whom she married when she was only 13. She was also a skilled ‘draughtsman’, trained by the artist Jacques-Louis David – who, incidentally, painted a wonderful portrait of the couple, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – and engraved the most beautiful illustrations for Antoine’s chemistry books. She was also a very determined woman.
What made her a hero?
First, the role she played in helping to popularise the ‘new chemistry’. She became interested in the subject when translating works from English and German into French, and became sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject to assist Antoine in his experiments, which she wrote up in lab notebooks. But it’s her courage that I most admire. Antoine, who worked as a tax collector, fell foul of the French revolutionary authorities and was guillotined in 1794, aged just 50.
She fought hard for his release during his imprisonment; after his execution she was bankrupted, and everything in their chemical laboratory – notebooks included – was confiscated. She fought tooth and nail to get those items back, and they are now in an archive at Cornell University. Some of his instrumentation was also recovered and is on display in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
What was Marie-Anne’s finest hour?
That fight for her husband in the most tempestuous times during the French Revolution, and retrieving her lab notebooks, her husband’s chemical apparatus and his memory and achievements for the scientific world. Incidentally, Marie-Anne’s father, who was also a tax collector, was guillotined on the same day as her husband. Just imagine that!
Can you see any parallels between her life and your own?
I admire her qualities that I would like to think I also have: persistence, courage and intellectual accomplishment.
What would you ask Marie-Anne if you could meet her?
I’d ask what her role was in the state-of-the-art chemistry laboratory that Antoine built – in the Arsenal in Paris, of all places.
Dame Mary Archer is a scientist who was formerly a chemistry lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and chair of the trustees of the Science Museum Group. She is currently chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Authors
York Membery is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine, the Daily Mail and Sunday Times among other publications. York, who lives in London, worked on the Mirror, Express and Times before turning freelance. He studied history at Cardiff University and the Institute of Historical Research, and has a History PhD from Maastricht University.