15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France
Hélène Metzger earned the brevet supérieur at a time when girls did not go to lycée to prepare for the baccalauréat and rarely attended university. She studied mineralogy with Frédéric Wallerant in his laboratory at the Sorbonne and in May 1912 received a diplôme d’études supérieures in physics under him for her memoir “Étude cristallographique du chlorate de lithium.”
15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France
Hélène Metzger earned the brevet supérieur at a time when girls did not go to lycée to prepare for the baccalauréat and rarely attended university. She studied mineralogy with Frédéric Wallerant in his laboratory at the Sorbonne and in May 1912 received a diplôme d’études supérieures in physics under him for her memoir “Étude cristallographique du chlorate de lithium.”
Hélène Metzger was a French chemist, philosopher of science and historian of science. She was the leading historian of the chemistry of her generation.
Background
Hélène Metzger was born Hélène Emilie Bruhl on August 26, 1889, in Chatou, Ile-de-France, France the family of Paul Moïse Bruhl, the grandson of Isaac Bruhl, a famous rabbi of Worms and Eugénie Emilie Adler. When Hélène was only two years old, her mother died while giving birth to Louise, her second daughter. Paul Bruhl then married Marguerite Casevitz, giving Hélène three half-brothers, among them Adrien, who was to become a celebrated scholar. Hélène grew up as an unhappy, very introverted, single-minded and independent child - characteristics that were to influence her scientific career.
Paul Bruhl was a wealthy jeweler, who did not think his daughters should have professions of their own.
Education
Hélène Metzger earned the brevet supérieur at a time when girls did not go to lycée to prepare for the baccalauréat and rarely attended university. She studied mineralogy with Frédéric Wallerant in his laboratory at the Sorbonne and in May 1912 received a diplôme d’études supérieures in physics under him for her memoir “Étude cristallographique du chlorate de lithium.”
During the war, within no specific intellectual or institutional context, Metzger wrote her first book, La génèse de la science des cristaux (The Emergence of the Science of Crystals). After some difficulties, she succeeded (in 1918) in having it accepted as a doctoral thesis (a Doctorat d'université, however, rather than the far more prestigious Doctorat d'État). Thereafter she began attending courses of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and eventually decided to turn her attention to the history of chemistry.
During the interwar years Hélène Metzger’s works - which included many articles in Isis, Archeion, and Scientia and her contributions to the Vocabulaire historique (prepared by the Centre International de Synthèse), which appeared in Revue de synthèse and Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications - had a considerable impact on the history of science and on epistemology. Her personal influence among historians of science was still more decisive. She participated in the first four international congresses of the history of science and was a charter member of the Comité International d’Histoire des Sciences (converted into the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences in 1929). She served as its administrator and treasurer from 5 June 1931 until her arrest. She organized the Academy’s library in the Rue Colbert in Paris, and her philosophical concerns are clearly reflected in its holdings.
Convinced that scientific revolutions are the visible effect of a previous underlying current, Metzger took chemistry as an example and conceived a vast plan that was to lead her research from the beginning of the seventeenth century to Lavoisier. The general title was Les doctrines chimiques en France, du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. The first part appeared in 1923, and in 1924 it won for its author the Prix Binoux of the Académie des Sciences. Nicolas Lemery was the central character, but importance was accorded to authors little known until then.
Drawn to philosophical reflection and preoccupied by epistemological problems, Hélène Metzger submitted an essay to a contest held by the Académic des Sciences Morales et Politiques that won the Prix Bordin in philosophy in 1925 and was published in 1926 under the title Les concepts scientifiques. This study deals with both psychology and logic and takes examples from the history of science to show how concepts arise and become transformed and how they can be classified.
In 1939 Hélène Metzger was placed in charge of the history of science library of the Centre International de Synthese. An ardent participant in all the meetings of its history of science section - as is attested by the issues of Archeion - and secretary of the Groupe Français d’Historiens des Sciences, she enlivened the discussions with her subtle and often ironic remarks, which were always pertinent and erudite, if somewhat disconcerting in their impulsiveness. Cordial to young scholars and to French and foreign colleagues, she was an inceptive influence for many studies, Aldo Mieli, Pierre Brunet, Federigo Enriques, Alexandre Koyré, George Sarton, Paul Mouy, and Robert Lenoble all derived inspiration for their work from their contact with Hélène Metzger.
Hélène Metzger was arrested on February 8, 1944, in her Lyon pension at 28 Rue Vaubecour. She was transferred to the transit camp at Drancy on February 20 and was on transport no. 69, which left Drancy for Auschwitz on March 7. Of the 1501 “Arbeitsjuden” who were on this transport, only 20 persons survived; Metzger was not among them. The British historian of science Charles Singer wrote that “fellow victims who have survived testify to her courage and cheerfulness during these months.”
Achievements
Hélène Metzger found recognition and much comfort from a number of great scholars, notably André Lalande in Paris (who arranged a literary prize for her in 1924), and George Sarton at Harvard, the founder, and editor of Isis, the major journal in the history of science, with whom she regularly exchanged letters. The publication of Metzger’s picture on the cover of Isis, in a way does her ultimate justice, be it almost sixty years after her death.
In 1933 Metzger played an important role in efforts to move the International Congress for the History of Science, scheduled to be held in Berlin in 1934, to another place; it was finally held in Coimbra. She won Prix Bordin in philosophy for Les concepts scientifiques.
Like many other French Jews, Metzger had great confidence in the French state and after the occupation did not go into hiding. She remained in Paris until late 1941 and then moved to Lyon, where, again, she did not hesitate to register as a Jew.
Views
A disciple of both Émile Meyerson and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Hélène Metzger was not satisfied with a strictly positivist position. She followed Meyerson in seeking out the philosophical bases of science, and Lévy-Bruhl in extending her investigations to the nonrational aspects of thought, which are as prevalent in the civilized as in the primitive mind. It was the activity of the entire human intellect that she wanted to uncover by following the scientists in their groping; she was as interested in “false” ideas as in those currently considered “true.” For her, religious, metaphysical, and scientific ideas formed a unified whole in a given historical period, and she believed that one group could not properly be studied by artificially separating it from others. If that viewpoint is widely accepted today, it is partly because she helped to establish it.
Metzger’s approach to the history of science was original in that it sought to avoid any anachronism; she tried to capture the thought of the scientists of the past in their own terms, retrace the genesis of their ideas. At the same time, in line with much of contemporary French thought, she wished to integrate the study of the history of science within the larger framework of a global theory of the human mind, which she assumed to be one and the same for all periods and cultures. It is owing to her anti-positivistic historical method, which today is shared by most historians of science, that Metzger’s work is still appreciated and used today. Methodological disagreements with colleagues led her in the 1930s to write a series of articles explicating her historiographical method (collected in La Méthode philosophique en histoire des sciences).
Quotations:
"I think that progress is essentially perishable, that it can in fact perish, and that only a vigilant attention and a sort of virtue can offer our civilized societies a warranty against an offensive return of the barbarity of primitive times. And as this new barbarity would dispose of all the industrial achievements generated by science, it would be especially dangerous."
Personality
Metzger was an independent thinker, who cherished her independence and vehemently resisted any attempt to influence her. In a recently discovered letter to Émile Meyerson, who, she felt, tried to patronize her, she poignantly tells him her mind, giving us an insight into how conflicting her relationships with the Paris mandarins must have been.
Connections
On May 10, 1913, Hélène Emilie Bruhl married Paul Metzger a brilliant young scholar. Paul Metzger was killed in September 1914, in one of the first battles of World War I, leaving Hélène childless and in what seems to have been perpetual grieving for the rest of her life. From then on, Metzger devoted herself to science, as well as to some social work.
