Some observations on theObservations the decline of the French Jesuit scientific mission in China

In the late seventeenth century, French Jesuit missionaries in China transplanted a distinctively French and distinctively academic brand of scientific work from Paris to Beijing. This auspicious inauguration has obscured the later trajectory of the mission’s scientific ambitions within Old Regime arenas of scientific activity. In this paper, I argue that significant differences distinguish the French Jesuit scientific mission in its late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century incarnations. By examining the various Parisian editions of French Jesuit scientific work carried out on the China mission, theObservations (1688, 1692, 1729), I trace the declining fortunes of the French Jesuit scientific mission to the dissolution of its alliance with the Académie des sciences and to its difficulties in sustaining a corporate identity and collective vision as investigators of natural phenomena.