During the nineteenth century an intellectual elite formed in Germany which owed its status primarily to educational qualifications rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. With the ascendency of this elite, which Fritz Ringer has called the German ‘mandarins’, came their acceptance as the spiritual bearers of culture in German life. Politically they controlled the life of the Reichstag and hence were the spokesmen of the nation. As an intellectual elite they fed a diet of German idealistic philosophy to the educational class. The university professors, as the most influential members of this class, spoke for the mandarin elite as a whole; and most cultivated Germans looked to the academicians for their understanding of political and cultural issues. Hence, German academic opinion became a sort of ‘mandarin ideology’.

Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal was not only a chemical manufacturer and one of the first ‘industrial scientists’ but was also, according to his own testimony, one of the early supporters of Lavoisier's system of chemistry. It might be assumed that Chaptal's pioneering work in industrial chemistry was intimately linked with his acceptance of the oxygen system of chemistry; more specifically, that this theory served to direct and inform his applied research and contributed not a little to its success. Indeed, he himself in 1790 explicitly stated this to have been the case. A close study of his work prior to 1790 fails, however, to establish the importance of such a linkage. First, his selection of research topics proves to have owed little to the ‘new chemistry’ but much to the scientific and economic milieu of his province of Languedoc and of Montpellier, its administrative seat. Second, the significance of his acceptance of the ‘new chemistry’ appears rather problematic, not the least because of the rather hazy boundaries between the phlogistic and Lavoisian theories in the 1780s. Third, it is not clear from the evidence available how the new theory helped solve the various problems of industrial chemistry he faced, or could have done so, other than to offer alternative explanations for processes with which he was already familiar and indeed had often mastered. It will be suggested that it is precisely this less dramatic role which was filled by the new chemistry: that of ‘rectifying’ his ideas by providing alternative and more satisfactory rationalizations of his experiences and experiments in the laboratory and the factory, not that of enabling him to simplify and perfect old processes nor to invent new ones. To put the point more bluntly: Chaptal's early successes and reputation in industrial chemistry were not a by-product of his allegiance to the new chemistry; rather, his growing adherence to that system was a by-product of its ability to provide satisfactory post-hoc explanations of the chemical processes and products with which he was concerned.

There existed essentially two theories of light during the early nineteenth century: the particulate theory and the wave theory. This we realise today is a gross over-simplification, since there were many varieties of each theory. But to the supporters of one theory the other theory had faults so fundamental that no distinction between varieties of the same theory was sufficient to placate opposition to that theory. This meant that opponents of either the wave or the particulate theory seldom, in their attacks, distinguished between different varieties of either theory.