Revolution How oxygen changed the world

It is often said that Antoine Laurent Lavoisier did for chemistry what Isaac Newton did for physics and Charles Darwin for biology. He transformed it from a collection of disparate facts into a science with unified principles. 

And Lavoisier His was the fate of the Enlightenment s brave new world slaughtered during Robespierre s Reign of Terror. The liberal optimism of philosophers and thinkers like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Condorcet foundered before the fickle passions and arbitrary brutality of the French Revolutionaries. Reason was overthrown, and, in the decades that followed, chemistry became the supremely Romantic science. 

Lavoisier (1743-94), like Condorcet, was misfortunate that the leading thinkers in France were likely, sooner or later, to become embroiled in politics. Whereas in England science was still the 

Lavoisier was a tax collector before he became a famous scientist, and that was largely what sealed his fate. But his chemical expertise also secured him the prominent position of director on Louis XVFs Gunpowder Administration, and as treasurer and effective secretary of the Academy of Sciences he vigorously opposed its dissolution by the anti-elitist Jacobin administration in 1793. Lavoisier was a sitting target for the Revolutionary witch-hunters, who were determined to purge the nation of anyone whose loyalty to the Republic they found reason to doubt. That is why, in 1794, Lavoisier was forced to bow his head to the blade that had just removed his father-in-law s. 

Yet that is only part of the tale. Oxygen provides not only the central organizing principle for modem chemistry but a bridge between the new and the old, between the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle s 

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