Heroes… and heroines? Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier and the manifold reasons for invisibility

Published in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Œuvres de Lavoisier celebrated the French chemist as the “founder of modern chemistry”, a genius capable of “revolutionizing” an entire field of knowledge. No mention was made of Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758-1836), Lavoisier’s wife and collaborator, who was largely responsible for the construction of the myth surrounding her husband between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Though invisible in the Œuvres, her work with the chemist was represented in a much more ambivalent way in her lifetime. This paper will focus on some of these ambivalences, in order to highlight the issues at stake in the invention of Lavoisier as the “founder” of a “new” knowledge.