Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot

Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot (born Oct. 27, 1827, Paris, France—died March 18, 1907, Paris) was a French organic and physical chemist, science historian, and government official. His creative thought and work significantly influenced the development of chemistry in the latter part of the 19th century.

Berthelot achieved great renown in his lifetime. He entered the French Academy of Medicine in 1863, became president of the Chemical Society of Paris in 1866, and was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1873 and became its permanent secretary in 1889. He also entered the French Academy in 1901. When he died in 1907, he was honoured throughout the nation, with most French towns naming a street or a square after him.

Education and early career

Berthelot was born into a middle-class Parisian family and attended secondary school at the Collège Henri IV, ending with the baccalauréat ès lettres in 1847 and the baccalauréat ès sciences in 1848. He became close friends with a fellow student living in the same pension, Ernest Renan, who later became famous as a historian and philologist. Their lifelong correspondence shows the strong influence of this friendship on Berthelot’s philosophical and historical inclinations.

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Faces of Science

As a pupil at Collège Henri IV, Berthelot attended a variety of lectures at the Collège de France and was attracted to chemistry. He earned a degree in physical sciences from the Collège de France in 1849, and he returned in 1851 as an assistant to chemist Antoine-Jérôme Balard. Bertholot’s doctoral dissertation (1854) was entitled “The Combinations of Glycerin with Acids and the Synthesis of Immediate Principles of Animal Fats.” Following Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s study of the chemical composition of fats as consisting of organic acids combined with glycerin, Berthelot conjectured that they could be formed of one, two, or three parts of fatty acids. This conjecture led him to synthesize many new fats, while coining the terms monoglyceride, diglyceride, and triglyceride.

This was the start of Berthelot’s scientific career and his long-standing controversy with French atomists. Charles-Adolphe Wurtz, in particular, interpreted Berthelot’s results in terms of type theory, which implied a distinction between atoms and molecules. In contrast, Berthelot defended an older dualistic theory that represented organic compounds as oxides and salts. Berthelot completed his education with pharmaceutical studies and obtained a second doctoral degree in pharmacy in 1858. When a professorship of organic chemistry was created at the École de Pharmacie in 1859, Berthelot was named to it. He also taught a course at the Collège de France, where Balard obtained the creation of a chair in organic chemistry for him in 1865.

The champion of synthesis and opponent of atomism

In 1855 Berthelot submitted a memoir to the French Academy of Sciences detailing the synthesis of ethyl alcohol from ethylene by treatment with sulfuric acid. This production of a natural substance in the laboratory convinced Berthelot that chemistry would destroy the metaphysical belief in a vital force, and it provided the basis for his ambitious program of “total synthesis.” This grandiose project aimed to methodically synthesize all organic compounds, starting from inorganic elements and proceeding step by step from hydrocarbons to alcohols to esters and organic acids and so forth ad infinitum. Some of his more notable achievements included the synthesis of formic acid in 1856, methane in 1858, and acetylene in 1862. His synthesis of benzene in 1851 by heating acetylene in a glass tube opened the way to the production of aromatic compounds.

Whereas Berthelot was extremely influential in France, his opposition to atomic ideas led to his increasing isolation from the mainstream of the international community of organic chemists. In 1860 he declined German chemist August Kekule’s offer that Berthelot join the Karlsruhe Conference, which was organized to reach an agreement on formulas and atomic weights, because he wanted to return to equivalent weights. He endlessly fought against the theories of chemical atoms and molecular constitutions, which he considered to be “theories of language,” and championed instead his own system of equivalents, which he considered to be “theories of facts” firmly grounded on empirical evidence.

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Shifting interests

Like his contemporaries Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius and German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, Berthelot diversified his field of interest and investigation in chemistry. Trying to understand the thermal phenomena accompanying the formation of organic compounds, he gradually turned to the emergent field of thermochemistry. With Léon Péan de Saint-Gilles, Berthelot noticed that, in the reaction of alcohol with acids to form esters, the rate of reaction depended on the quantities of reagents and products involved, though a state of equilibrium was reached that was independent of the quantities. In the 1860s, Berthelot devoted himself to the foundation of a new discipline relating heat and chemical reactions, which he named chemical mechanics. In an essay published in 1879, he formulated three basic principles for the new discipline: (1) the equivalence between internal work and heat changes in a chemical reaction; (2) the heat evolved depends only on the initial and final states; and (3) chemical changes tend toward the production of the bodies that produce the most heat. The latter, known as the law of maximum work, engaged Berthelot in a fierce controversy with French physicist Pierre Duhem.

In the 1880s, Berthelot turned his attention to agricultural chemistry by founding an experimental research station. To confirm his early (and false) hypothesis that the direct fixation of nitrogen by some vegetables was facilitated by atmospheric electricity, he became involved in the study on the nitrification of soils by microorganisms. He then collaborated with Russian microbiologist Sergey Nikolayevich Winogradsky, who identified an anaerobic bacterium (Clostridium pasterianum) responsible for the fixation of nitrogen in soil.

Berthelot was a prolific writer, with some 1,600 published papers and books. In addition to publishing a collection of Greek alchemical manuscripts (1887), he wrote an introduction to the study of ancient and medieval alchemy that came out the same year as his work on the French chemical pioneer Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1889). Finally, Berthelot, who was a committed freethinker and a Freemason, publicized his philosophical views on science, metaphysics, ethics, and education in a number of widely circulated essays that became classics of the republican movement in France.

Political activities

Since the 18th century, scientists, particularly chemists, had played a role on the French political stage (a role that intensified during the French Revolution), and, through the 19th century, chemists held leading positions in successive French governments. This tradition culminated with Berthelot, who became a politician under the Third Republic. During the Franco-German War (1870–71), he was head of the Scientific Commitee for the Defense of Paris. This experience led Berthelot to a detailed study on the strength of explosives, which culminated in a two-volume publication in 1883. From 1881 Berthelot was a permanent member of the Senate, where he belonged to the Republican Union party. He was a minister of public instruction and fine arts (1886–87) and a few years later the minister of foreign affairs at the Foreign Office (1895–96). In 1889 he succeeded Louis Pasteur as secretary of the Academy of Sciences.

His wife, Sophie Niaudet-Berthelot, whom he had married in 1861, died within hours of his death. The two had a joint funeral and were interred together in the Panthéon. She was thus the first—and, for about a century, the only—woman to be buried there.