Émilie du Châtelet

Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Châtelet-Lomont—or simply Émilie Du Châtelet—was born in Paris
on 17 December 1706 to baron Louis Nicholas le Tonnelier de Breteuil and Gabrielle Anne de Froullay, Baronne de
Breteuil. She married Marquis Florent-Claude de Châtelet-Lomont in 1725. Together they had three children, a
daughter and two sons (the second died the year after his birth). In 1733, she met Voltaire who became her lover and
life-long intellectual companion. They retired to Du Châtelet's husband's estate—Cirey—which was remodeled to
include a laboratory with several instruments for their on-going scientific experiments. In 1748, she became
pregnant at the age of 42 with the child of her then lover, Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. She bore her fourth child,
a daughter, on 4 September 1749 and died on 10 September 1749.

In her intellectual work, Du Châtelet focused on natural philosophy, particularly that of Newton, Leibniz and
Christian Wolff. She knew, corresponded with, or was tutored by Pierre Louis de Maupertuis, Alexis-Claude
Clairaut, Samuel Koenig, and several members of the Bernoulli family, and her advanced abilities in physics and
mathematics made her especially able to write capably about Newton's physics. She thus contributed to the shift in
France away from an acceptance of Cartesian physics and toward the embrace of Newtonian physics. Nonetheless,
she was more than just an expositor of others' works, and she was not interested in physics alone. Indeed, still
squarely in the tradition of natural philosophy, Du Châtelet sought a metaphysical basis for the Newtonian physics
she embraced upon rejecting Cartesianism.

Voltaire implicitly acknowledged her significant contribution—especially on more technical material—to his
1738 Eléments de la philosophie de Newton. For many years, it was believed that there was one surviving chapter
from an otherwise lost work written by Du Châtelet—her “Essai sur l'optique” (ca. 1736). This chapter is housed
among Voltaire's papers in Russia's National Library in St. Petersberg. Judging from that chapter on color formation
this earlier essay seems to have been a more developed version of the chapter on optics in Voltaire's book, thus
indicating her significant contribution to Voltaire's work. As a fascinating side note on how dynamic Du Châtelet
studies are, in recent years fully three complete copies of her Essai have been found, one in Bernoulli's papers in
Basel (Nagel 2012) and two that have been acquired recently by the Musée des lettres et manuscrits in Paris. In 1737
Du Châtelet entered a competition to explain the nature of fire, conducting her experiments in secret while Voltaire
also conducted experiments for his entry to the competition. Both Du Châtelet's and Voltaire's entries aimed to
disprove the theory that fire is a material substance, and both were published along with the three winners (including
the essay essay by Leonhard Euler, which took the top prize). Du Châtelet returned to this project a number of times
thereafter, making significant revisions to the original text as her ideas on the nature of fire matured and changed.

In 1738, she published “Lettre sur les ‘Eléments de la philosophie de Newton’” in the Journal des savants in which
she argued against those who accepted a Cartesian account of attraction. In 1740 she published her Institutions de
physique (The Foundations of Physics) ostensibly a textbook in physics for her son, but in reality a highly original
work in natural philosophy (a second edition was published in 1742 under the slightly altered title Institutions
physique). It was in this text—hermagnum opus—that she supplied the metaphysical basis for the Newtonian
physics she had long accepted. This metaphysics was Leibnizian and Wolffian in flavor. Her inclusion of a defense
offorce vive (she thus sided with Leibniz on this question) led to her subsequent dispute on the issue with Jean-
Jacques Dortous de Mairan. Sometime in the early 1740s she began work on her two-volume translation of and
commentary on Newton's Principia. She died shortly after she completed this work, which remained unpublished
until 1759. It is still the leading French translation of Newton's book.

While Du Châtelet's primary interest was in natural philosophy, she also had interests in ethics (translating of
portions of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees), theology and the Bible (writing a book titled Examens de la Bible), and
the source of human happiness (writing a semi-autobiographical book, Discours sur le bonheur). Her non-scientific
work occasionally touched on the subject of women's social roles and their education.
This entry focuses on Du Châtelet's natural philosophy, which occupied the bulk of her intellectual efforts. More
specifically, it focuses on that aspect of her thought as found in her own clearly articulated version of natural
philosophy—her masterwork of 1740, The Foundations of Physics.