Science for everyone or science by everyone? Myths and counter-myths of 19th-century science

The second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial moment for the construction, in France, of the image of science as a difficult-to-access field, reserved to an increasingly professionalized learned elite. The myth of a radical separation in the production of knowledge between expert practitioners on the one hand and a curious but passive public on the other was progressively imposed. The French committed to vulgarization actively participated in the affirmation of this separation, by upholding the idea of a science for everyone rather than a science by everyone. This myth, nevertheless, faced multiple resistances, competing myths emerged, in particular that of a democratic science, open and accessible to anyone, and, in practice, multiple scholarly counter-cultures have developed, away from the dominant representations of science.