When Say and his delegation finally set foot in London, it was August 2, 1790.
Across British society, attitudes toward revolutionary France were still notably friendly; most people felt genuine excitement. Even the famously staid and conservative nobility maintained a gentlemanly neutrality, refusing to use insulting words about the convulsions across the Channel. The French Revolution had elevated an elected assembly while stripping the long-time British adversary, the Bourbon monarchy, of rule. Especially stirring to Britons was the National Constituent Assembly’s self-denying declaration of May 1790: “The French nation renounces all wars intended for conquest and will never use force against the liberty of any people.”
In British eyes, that pledge weakened their historic foe and cleared the way for the Empire’s bid for European pre-eminence and overseas expansion. The collapse of France’s absolutist regime also seemed to showcase the superiority of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Some radical MPs exulted, “What an age this is!”
A rhapsodic poet captured the mood in his new ode, “France”:
When France, aflame with wrath, lifts her matchless arm,
Her vow reverberates through sky, earth, and sea;
She stamps and swears: never to rest till freedom is won…
So, the moment Say’s purchasing mission arrived, Britain’s industrialists rolled out the welcome. Not only in London and nearby towns; factory owners from Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool also sent agents to the French delegation’s hotel, each hoping his goods would be included on the rumored “one-million-pound shopping list.”
That “one-million-pound list” was, of course, theater—seeded by Say’s ally “Pitt–Ouvrard” (Ouvrard’s second brother) on the London exchange. The effect was excellent. In truth, the French buyers controlled only ￡35,000 (700,000 livres), of which ￡30,000 were Bank of England acceptances. But the detail hardly mattered. What mattered was that a vast market of five million consumers was cracking open to British industry.
At first, a government inspectorate tried to prohibit certain “contraband” items on the French list from being exported. After pressure from interested merchants, a Commons trade arbitration committee batted the plan down after a brisk twenty-minute debate, ruling it illegal and affirming that the French delegation could purchase any British products and ship them home freely.
Within days, the twenty-odd mechanical and metallurgical engineers, architects, accountants, and outside counsel split into three teams under Say, Périer (the elder), and Fourier, fanning out to Britain’s industrial hubs to inspect factories earmarked on their itinerary.
Say and his employer had crossed swords fiercely over what to buy. Say agreed steam power was the future and should be a priority, but he opposed bolting immature engines onto ships and rails—even when André promised he didn’t care about R&D burn. To Say, that would dull competitiveness, breed indolent employees, and steer the company toward collapse. The lawyer saw it differently: steamships and locomotives would transform politics, economics, and war; the time to climb the tech tree was now. After heated argument, the economist carried the day. André accepted a revised plan: deploy Watt engines first in spinning and weaving, and build a modern dye-works in the Marne.
In Say’s analysis of inputs, manufacture, and markets, the Marne was ideal for cotton textiles: it sat beside France’s key cotton-growing district on the Lorraine plateau. Barging along rivers and canals at trifling cost, cotton from Lorraine—together with coal and iron from Alsace–Lorraine—could reach Chalons-en-Champagne on the Marne within thirty hours. The same river bound Chalons to Paris by about 190 kilometers of inland waterway: one day and a night to deliver finished goods to Europe’s second-largest consumer market.
Accordingly, Périer (the elder) headed to Birmingham to evaluate the Watt works; Say’s destination was Manchester. There he aimed to license Samuel Crompton’s “mule,” said to drive some four hundred spindles—fifty times a Jenny’s throughput, while producing finer, stronger yarn; and Edmund Cartwright’s water-powered loom, which quadrupled output over the flying shuttle.
Fourier remained in London to survey the capital’s intellectual currents and cutting-edge science. Because of André’s intervention, the “Fourier Cholera Map” appeared decades early under a different authorship; reproduced in Paris and then London, it helped ignite a British revolution in public-health thinking.
Late-eighteenth-century Britons worked with a briskness that put dilatory French routines to shame. Once both academies in Paris and London vouched for the cholera map’s accuracy, London’s City Hall announced a new Clean Water Plan. The Lord Mayor pledged to shutter all foul urban wells by year’s end and, within three years, deliver abundant, affordable clean water to most Londoners. The Royal Society elected Fourier an honorary member, and the city hired him as a technical adviser.
By mid-September, everything seemed charmed. Tempted by orders, the Watt firm accepted virtually all of Périer’s terms; old Watt even agreed to send his son to France as a resident engineer for five to six months. The American artist-engineer Fulton, then designing at the Watt works, accepted Périer’s invitation to move to friendlier France.
Fourier, meanwhile, was the toast of learned London. The cholera map and his Royal Society honor made him a rising star, and exchanges multiplied. Even André’s devilish “four-color problem” became a salon talking point.
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Say also progressed smoothly: the patents for the water loom and mule were secured. Edmund Cartwright promised to go to Chalons-en-Champagne and, with young Watt, convert the water loom to steam. Though Samuel Crompton was too engrossed at home to travel, he authorized the Joint Steam Engine Company to adapt mule power to steam.
But when Say reached Cornwall to recruit Richard Trevithick, he was politely rebuffed. Unlike the peripatetic American Fulton, Trevithick had wealth behind him—his family owned a tin mine—and needed no French patronage. In Gloucestershire, Say then sought out Edward Jenner in Berkeley, only to learn he had gone north to study at St Andrews. Time was short; Say could not chase him to Scotland. He left André’s signed letter with Jenner’s wife, Catherine, asking for a reply before the delegation sailed.
For Edward Jenner, St Andrews was not the idyll one imagines. The venerable Scottish university—third oldest in Britain after Oxford and Cambridge—sparkled with prestige, but not everyone welcomed heresy. Over twenty years earlier, as a sixteen-year-old apothecary’s apprentice, Jenner had dared to imagine that cowpox could prevent smallpox. London training under the great Hunter deepened his anatomical skill but brought scorn for the idea. Hunter, like Jenner’s earlier mentor, felt his pupil’s brow and, finding no fever, blasted the “insane” notion.
Jenner persisted. Back in Berkeley he grew into a respected physician, but he kept his theory quiet. In 1788, when smallpox raged through Gloucestershire, he sought a cow with fresh pox to inoculate his young son—none were to be found. He found poxed swine instead and, with Catherine’s encouragement, lanced a pustule, collected the fluid, nicked the boy’s arm, and applied the matter. The child suffered only mild discomfort and recovered quickly. To prove protection, Jenner later exposed him to true smallpox virus; the boy remained well. He wrote up the “miracle” and submitted it to London journals and colleges—only to be ignored. Locally the rumor spread; hostile doctors, fearing upheaval, hounded him with libels and roughs, until he burned his manuscript.
In autumn 1790 he came to St Andrews to deepen his studies, regained his nerve, and resubmitted the old paper to the medical journal. The editor published it in full. A firestorm followed: some applauded, others doubted, the devout denounced—“Inoculate cowpox and men grow horns and bellow; use swine-pox and they turn into hopeless pigs!” The university ordered issues destroyed. In despair, Jenner received a lifeline: a letter from Catherine—and an invitation from a French prosecutor named André Franck.
The Frenchman’s note was remarkable. It included three watercolor panels of a man’s arm after cowpox inoculation:
Day one: pale-yellow lymph drips into a small cross-cut;
Day two: local redness, a mild fever—peak 37.8 °C;
Day three: fever abates, the wound crusts, the body feels sound again.
André stated plainly that the arm was his. By chance he had obtained a copy of Jenner’s 1788 report and—ever cautious in a city where smallpox still smoldered—had inoculated himself. He invited Jenner to Paris and offered to fund research to make cowpox inoculation a medical reality.
André could have bypassed Jenner, ordering Larrey or Percy to seize the laurel. But he knew inoculation was more than medicine: it would collide with society, religion, politics, and law. Better to bring an English physician as a shield than to waste months fencing with reactionaries.
On October 5, the eve of the delegation’s return, Edward Jenner abandoned his St Andrews studies, bade his family farewell in Berkeley, and knocked on Say’s hotel door in London.
Meanwhile, months earlier, the fiery Whig MP Edmund Burke had begun the work that would define his career: Reflections on the Revolution in France. What began as private correspondence with a French diplomat grew, at friends’ urging, into a full-blown treatise. In it Edmund Burke, in impassioned, muscular prose, attacked the Revolution’s principles as hollow and perilous—a trampling of rights, liberty, constitutionalism, and Europe’s civilizational inheritance. He diagnosed the malady and issued one of history’s eeriest predictions: that the Revolution’s ruinous destructiveness would culminate in a new autocracy, the only force capable of saving society from chaos.
Within two weeks of its Paris debut, Burke and his ideas met a wall of denunciation. The Assembly even lodged a formal protest with Britain’s embassy. André alone sat with the book open on his lap, silent from first page to last.
…
In the Napoleonic era the Emperor constantly insisted that victories were won on foot. He ordered that infantry adhere strictly to the 1791 Regulations: corps to march at an average of 3–4 km/h; loaded with 10 kg, men to cover 30–40 km per day; “forced marches” above 50 km in a day; hour-long runs and rapid moves when required. Typically, units marched two to three hours, then rested twenty to thirty minutes; after a day’s march, they took two to four hours. Artillery with 12-pounders and the baggage moved slower, 4–5 km/h; cavalry could make 20 km/h. Terrain, of course, changed everything.
On October 8, when the Champagne Composite Regiment broke north for Paris, it followed those rules. Senarmont’s battery had already shifted from Metz to Versailles for training and did not join the column, but the regiment’s baggage still dragged the pace: 5–6 km/h on the road (about 4 km/h including halts), roughly 40 km per day—at least fifteen days to cover the ~600 km to the southern outskirts of Paris.
André regretted, briefly, not shipping the baggage by sea and river—up the Seine from the estuary—while marching the combat column light. Still, the decision had been collective: a live-fire test of endurance.
From the day they left Bordeaux, Lussac, at André’s order, recorded every statistic of the march—data for future maneuvers and war. Anyone peeking over André’s shoulder would have recognized the standardized units in Lussac’s tables: meters, kilometers, grams, kilograms, tons. Thanks in part to André’s untimely appearance, France’s Commission on Weights and Measures—led by Lagrange and Monge—released the meter half a year early and the gram two years early; only the liter lagged. Without waiting for the Assembly’s formal vote, André told Lussac to adopt metric and gram weights as the research standards and dispatched a courier to buy certified meter rods and mass standards from the Commission.
That afternoon, near Périgueux in Dordogne, the last baggage cart’s iron-rimmed wheels thundered off a bridge’s planks and back onto limestone paving. Lussac entered his final time, clicked shut his watch, and exhaled. His assignment was complete. Fifteen minutes later, he rode to André’s billet in town to report.