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Duelling; not a good idea if you happen to be a genius.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, emotions were stirring among the ‘thinking classes’ in France and Russia. You were indeed a brave intellectual if you publicised your true feelings during these turbulent times. Two prodigies born during the Napoleonic era (1799-1815), one in France and one in Russia, took the risk though, and came to the attention of the authorities for all the wrong reasons. Both Galois and Pushkin were young men who had already produced copious amounts of work; paradigm shifting material that fundamentally influenced the course of mathematics and literature.
The wasted gallantry of Galois
In 1814, France incredibly saw the return of the Bourbon monarchy, this time in the person of King Louis XVIII[1]. His reign would be briefly interrupted by Napoleon’s ‘One Hundred Days[2]’ return to power from March to June in 1815. Once Napoleon was finally given his marching orders, the deal was that the Bourbons would only be allowed return if they established a constitutional monarchy similar to what already existed in England – one house with hereditary peers and one house with elected representatives. As you might remember, the aristocracy had not fared too well in the French Revolution and the Terror; for them, the first election count after the Bourbon restoration was payback time. A landslide victory for the royalists gave them an opportunity to wreak vengeance on their persecutors; any non-aristocrats who were active during the revolution and the Terror.
Despite the fact that King Louis XVIII was personally inclined to moderation, a series of unfortunate events throughout the 1820’s saw the return of more and more laws in favour of the rich. One such event was the assassination of King Louis’ nephew, the Duc de Berry, in 1820, which resulted in a swing to the right by outraged royalists. De Berry’s father was Louis’ brother Charles, who was the leader of France’s ultra-royalist faction at the time of the murder. He would succeed Louis as King Charles X in 1824.
At the outset of Charles’ reign it was beginning to look like the Ancien Regime all over again. Power was returning to the clergy and the aristocracy. Understandably, hostility was re-ignited among the general population and Charles responded to this by appointing increasingly right-wing ministers. He was playing that old game of being a despot; on July 26th 1830 he dissolved parliament, inflicted a gagging order on the press, and announced a more restricted electorate of 25,000 aristocrats.
Straight from the pages of a Victor Hugo novel, barricades appeared on the streets of Paris. The revolutionary tricolour was brandished instead of the Bourbon flag. After three days of street-fighting between July 27th and July 29th, known as the ‘Three Glorious Days’, Charles X - king of pomp - fled Paris and was replaced by a distant Bourbon cousin, the duc d'Orléans, who became Louis-Philippe I. He incredibly eschewed the Bourbon flag for the revolutionary tricolour – a move the people apparently liked[3], for the time being at least. Proclaimed 'king of the French ... by the will of the people', he became known as the Citizen King, but his job would not be easy. The number of left wing disaffected groups had been increasing, especially among the urban poor. Add to this the more moderate republicans, Bonapartists and royalists split down the middle, and you had one grouping more than a political ménage à trois. Bourbon royalists, now called Legitimists, believed that the son of the assassinated Duc de Berry and Charles X's grandson should inherit the throne as Henry V, with Louis Philippe minding it until the future Henry V came of age. The other royalist faction, called the Orleanists, wanted Duc d’Orléans to be king; and he indeed became Louis-Philippe I.
But Louis Philippe was living in an undemocratic Laputa and on fourteen million francs a year; he had all the trappings but little to offer in way of political action. And so the unrest continued with attempts made on his life and republican uprisings in Lyons and Paris.
Evariste Galois’ lifespan, 1811 to 1832, coincided with this topsy-turvy period in French history – Napoleon’s swansong to a right royal mess. Although he died before his twenty-first birthday, leaving behind only about one hundred pages of mathematical work, Galois is regarded as the founder of modern algebra. While still a schoolboy he set himself the task of cracking an important problem that had baffled mathematicians for almost three hundred years – the discovery of a formula for solving fifth degree equations. (He later showed that solutions of the kind he and others were looking for don’t exist.) He also had his first paper published in Annals de Mathématiques in 1829 – the only schoolboy author in that issue, at any rate!
But let’s put Galois’ achievements into perspective. Three problems dating from about 500BC – the Three Classical Problems of Ancient Greece – had been exercising and frustrating mathematicians for 2,000 years. These were:
Construct a square with the same area as a given circle (known as ‘squaring the circle’ a phrase still used to describe an intractable problem).
Construct a cube with a volume that is twice that of a given cube.
Divide an arbitrary angle into three equal parts.
Galois provided elegant, general, and powerful methods that can be used to analyse these problems – and many others – to prove that the constructions sought by mathematicians for over 2,000 years do not exist.
It was while studying at the Ecole Préparatoire[4] that Galois made friends with fellow student Auguste Chevalier, who was a follower of Saint-Simonianism. Saint-Simon (1760-1826) believed that the necessary conditions for progress could only be achieved through the elimination of poverty and ignorance. He believed that this could only happen if Christianity became a secular religion, with spiritual power being granted to scientists rather than priests. Most notably, it was in the best known Saint-Simonian newspaper, Le Globe, that the word ‘socialism’ appeared for the first time in 1832. Saint-Simonians were concerned with social justice across the board. Indeed, their manifesto would not seem out of place in a modern socialist party.
Galois had missed participating in the ‘Three Glorious Days’ because the students at the Ecole Préparatoire were locked in. Despite the victory of the Bonapartists and republicans in the ‘Three Glorious Days’, a republic was still some way off. When hostilities ended on July 30th and the Duc d’Orléans entered Paris, the director of the Ecole Préparatoire offered the services of his students to the provisional government despite the fact that he had prevented them from joining the rebels on the barricades by locking them in! This hypocrisy and cowardice angered Galois who had grazed his hands and knees trying to escape over the outer wall to join the fight.
By the summer of 1830 Galois was very open about his political leanings and increasingly disillusioned by his failure to be recognised and understood by the leading French mathematicians of the day. Believing that the July revolutionaries had been betrayed, he supported another violent uprising. He seemed ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, “If I were only sure that a body would be enough to incite the people to revolt, I would offer mine.” In October he returned to college for his second year. He began actively associating with young republicans and in November joined a more aggressive wing of republicanism, the Société des Amis du Peuple. For the Societe des Amis du Peuple, Louis Philippe was one king too many. This republican organisation had had enough of royalty and its members were prepared to end it through violent means if necessary. In their opinion, the people who had died during the ‘Three Glorious Days’ in 1830 had wasted their lives because the Bourbon dynasty had not been overthrown.
After putting up posters demanding new elections the Société des Amis du Peuple was supressed and forced to become a secret organisation; its propaganda became more intense and it established an armed wing. Galois did not hide his subversive ideas in college much to the irritation of its director who would eventually expel him. The first thing he did was to join the National Guard as an artilleryman, but soon after it was disbanded by Louis-Philippe.
No longer having his college grant, Galois now had to teach maths for a living. Unlike your regular maths tutor, Galois wanted his classes to be public. Mainly attended by non-mathematical friends and supporters, these classes were not a success. Even the mathematically able would have been baffled by Galois’ advanced and unconventional methods. Attendance dwindled and Galois was forced instead to give private maths grinds to reluctant students; a galling situation for a mathematical genius. It was around this time that he also began attending lectures at the Paris Academy of Sciences and became better known among the mathematics community. Rigatelli (Rigatelli, 1996)[5] describes his behaviour at these august gatherings, “His contributions to discussion were no doubt very acute and relevant, but at the same time aggressively critical, and certainly did not comply with the rules of academic etiquette.” Even Sophie Germain, a woman who had endured the worst kind of misogyny before being recognised as a gifted mathematician, was not impressed by Galois’ behaviour towards her friend Guglielmo Libro, who obviously got the sharp end of Galois’ tongue after a lecture. In a letter of commiseration to Libro she wrote, “…he has kept up his capacity for being rude, a taste of which he gave you, after your best lecture at the Academy.”
Before long, Galois’ passionate embrace of republicanism brought him to the attention of the authorities. At a banquet celebrating the not guilty verdict of a group of anti-monarchists, known as the ‘trial of the nineteen’ Galois, brandishing a glass of wine (which had probably gone to his head) and a dagger, shouted, “To Louis-Philippe!” Threat or salute? Who knows? Anyway, at the time it was deemed too extreme by some of the guests. Infeld (1948) describes him semi-fictitiously as standing ‘like a statue that had come to life only long enough to pronounce the death sentence twice on the French King.’[6] Many hurriedly left the event; even the portly and liberal minded Alexander Dumas escaped through a window. Almost on que, the police arrived at Galois’ apartment the next day and arrested him on a charge of ‘incitement to an attempt on the life and person of the King of the French’ and he was imprisoned. What he had actually said, it transpired at the trial was, “To Louis-Philippe, if he betrays us!” After much evidence, the jury decided after only half an hour that Galois was not guilty.
Galois’ next arrest would take place on July 14th as he and other republicans were making their way to Place de la Bastille to take part in a patriotic demonstration. This time he spent three months in prison while awaiting trial. Charged with possession of illegal arms and wearing a uniform to which he was not entitled, Galois would remain in prison until April 1832. An extraordinary event occurred while he was there. It was a year since the July uprising and the prison authorities were expecting trouble from the political prisoners on July 28th and 29th. As they were going to bed in their dormitories on the night of the 29th a prisoner in a bed near to Galois was injured by a bullet fired from a house opposite the prison. One theory is that the bullet was meant for Galois because the police considered him to be too incendiary and wanted him silenced.
In the spring of 1832 the normality of Parisian life was upset by a cholera epidemic. In order to reduce the spread of the disease in prisons it was decided to remove the younger inmates to a clinic, and it was here that Galois fell in love with the doctor’s daughter, Stéphanie. It would seem, initially at any rate, that Galois’ friendly advances were not spurned. But when friendly advances turned into declarations of love, perhaps this was all too much for Stéphanie who wanted to end the relationship. The only evidence that exists about the affair lies in two letters exchanged between them that Galois tore up but tried to piece together again. The content of these letters pretty much support the explanation of the breakup.
Spurned by Stéphanie and ignored by the mathematical community, Galois seemed to have only one reason to live – his militant republicanism. In May a new development occurred that transfixed the energy of the republicans. The widow of the Duc de Berry, who had been assassinated in 1820, returned to Paris. At the time of the assassination nobody knew that she was pregnant. Her twelve-year-old son was living in exile in Prague. Maddeningly, his tutor was Cauchy, the influential but selfish mathematician who chose to ignore the work of the young Galois. This young Bourbon would be a threat to Louis-Philippe; the republicans decided it was the perfect time to create a perfect storm. Of course Galois threw himself into the preparation, but a pretext to spark hostilities was needed. A martyr was needed, whose death would be revenged by the people. Galois, who believed his life was no longer worth living, volunteered to be that martyr – this is one of several theories surrounding his death. Infeld (1948) goes with the ‘degrading love affair’ theory involving one Mlle. Eve Sorel.
But back to political martyrdom then - the plan was for Galois to arrange a duel with a friend, L.D., but only L.D.’s pistol would be loaded. Then the Société des Amis du Peuple would spread a rumour that Galois was killed by a police ambush. It was hoped then that the people would be roused by Galois’ emotional and cleverly stage-managed funeral. The duel was arranged for May 30th and letters were written by Galois to make it seem like he had been challenged to the duel. Fatally injured, he died the following day in hospital. When his brother came to his deathbed he stuck to the story he had agreed to with the Société des Amis du Peuple – that he was ambushed by the police.
Now the republicans had their martyr. About 3,000 mourners gathered in the cemetery at Montparnasse, primed for attack as soon as the coffin was lowered. But even in death Galois was upstaged. As his funeral oration was being delivered word spread that General Lamarque (who had been appointed Marshall of France by Napoleon) had died. This corpse had much more added value than young Galois’. It was decided to postpone any unrest until Lamarque’s funeral. Galois’ funeral ended in a damp squib rather than a spark of revolution.
Astoundingly, the night before he knew he was going to his certain death, Galois wrote out a summary of his mathematical findings six and a half pages in length. In a lecture delivered in Gresham College, Oxford in 2011[7], Dr Peter Neumann reminded his audience that ‘those six and a half pages contain more mathematics than any other six and a half pages you can imagine.’ It would become the foundation of modern algebra.
What pushed Pushkin over the edge?
Throughout the 1820’s trouble was brewing in Russia also. The Decembrists[8], who were mainly members of the Russian upper classes, led an unsuccessful uprising in December 1825 following the death of Tsar Alexander I. Some of these rebels had form, having participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars. But what was the background to this uprising? Tsar Alexander l was quite the good guy, the non-aggressor in Europe at that time. He wanted to be friends with everybody – England, France, Prussia and Austria. In the earlier part of his reign he alternated between hot and cold relationships with Napoleon. When the friendship was blossoming, Napoleon dreamt of sharing the world with Alexander, even though the more reasonable Alexander was dreaming more of some kind of European federation.
When the relationship wasn’t going so well, like for example, when Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France in 1804 and didn’t hide the fact that he wanted to conquer the world, Alexander was forced to declare war on him. The showdown happened at Austerlitz, where the Russians and Austrians were defeated in 1805. Now the reasonable Alexander was angry.
Fast forward to 1812 then, when Napoleon and his Grand Army invaded Russia and entered Moscow as the victors, confident that Alexander would step down. But the pomp of the conquerors was deflated by an almost empty and ruined Moscow – not the kind of place you can taunt the locals with your victory celebrations. Not only did Alexander not capitulate in the face of defeat, but he got a second wind, and his troops drove the Grand Army from Russian soil. This was to be the beginning of the end for Napoleon.
Alexander’s unquenchable spirit was contagious; Prussia and Austria joined in the fight to oust Napoleon from Europe. Victorious at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, Alexander wanted to do a Napoleon on it; march into Paris. He realised this ambition in March 1814. Napoleon abdicated and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII. Alexander was happy in the knowledge that he had saved the French people from Napoleon. Of course, as we may remember, this was not really the end for Napoleon. Returning from exile in Elba, he regained his throne, but would finally be defeated at Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
All of these heady successes turned Alexander a tad spiritual. He was now reading the Bible daily and praying a lot, strongly influenced by Quaker and Moravian beliefs. This newfound spirituality didn’t stop him taking Poland though. He began ignoring the business of running his country and instead immersed himself in the Russian Bible Society. He formed the Holy Alliance, a very advanced and modern concept of a happy, clappy Christian federation based on ecumenical, rather than political, foundations. Unfortunately, it became more of a gun club than a Bible club, and the happy, clappy dream of benign monarchs and contented subjects reverted to old style despotism.
A disappointed and disillusioned Alexander shied away more and more from the affairs of state; he just wanted to abdicate. During a tour of inspection in Crimea, he caught either pneumonia or malaria; nobody is quite sure, and died.
Alexander I’s brother, Constantine was next in line for the throne. But he had automatically put himself out of the running by marrying a non-royal Polish woman in 1820. This resulted in Nicholas being heir presumptive and it was all made official by Alexander in 1822, but was never made public to Russian subjects who expected Constantine to be the next tsar. When Constantine reconfirmed his disinterest in the royal vacancy, Nicholas published Alexander’s manifesto and become emperor of Russia in December 1825.
This resulted in what becomes known as the Decembrist Rebellion. Liberal conspirators persuaded some of the troops in St. Petersburg not to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to call for his brother Constantine to become tsar. The rebellion, however, was poorly organized and easily suppressed. Two hundred and eighty-nine Decembrists were tried and five were executed.
In 1817 Pushkin obtained a job in the foreign office at St. Petersburg. It was at this time that he also joined the Green Lamp association, a literary and history club that was really a front for a secret society called the Union of Welfare. Pushkin’s political verses, encapsulating the ideas of the Decembrist movement, were widely circulated. This resulted in his banishment from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. His writings during this time confirmed his reputation as the leading Russian poet of the day as well as a leading liberal thinker. In May 1823 he started work on the verse novel, Yevgeny Onegin, which gives a fabulous, but objective, picture of Russian life.
Pushkin’s exile had its highs and lows. As he was transferred from place to place he alternately wrote hard and played hard. His behaviour finally led to his being moved to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia and it was here that he came face to face with peasant life. He studied Russian history and folklore and incorporated these into his writings. Indeed, it was here that he wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin and the historical tragedy Boris Godunov.
Pushkin played no part in the Decembrist uprising but he did support it. Realising it was better to have an author much loved by the people on your side, Nicholas I allowed Pushkin to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826. After listening to Pushkin’s complaints about censorship Nicholas appointed himself as Pushkin’s censor and also made placating noises about liberating the serfs. But the tsar’s censorship proved to be even more exacting than that of the official censors, and Pushkin was put under secret observation by the police. None of these actions, however, prevented him from turning out works of genius, which would start a new movement in the life of literary Russia.
After marrying Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova in 1831 Pushkin settled in St. Petersburg. He was commissioned to write a history of Peter the Great and received the bizarre rank of ‘gentleman of the emperor’s bedchamber’. While Natalya enjoyed the social whirl of court life (and the attentions of Nicholas l) Pushkin was less enthusiastic and begged, without success, to be allowed to retire to the country to concentrate on his writing. His fellow courtiers were not impressed and regarded him with suspicion.
But what was the background to Pushkin’s untimely death? Pushkin and his wife met George d’Anthès, the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, in 1834. d’Anthès possessed the enviable attributes of being both French and handsome and had joined the Tsar’s army to advance his career. He also found enough time though, to take a protracted romantic interest in Pushkin’s wife, Natalya in 1835. It is doubtful though that she returned his love.[1] Poor old Pushkin suffered greatly by the incessant rumours in St. Petersbourg society and his mortification was compounded when he received a letter informing him that he had been elected to ‘The Most Serene Order of Cuckolds’ even though there was no proof that Natalya had been unfaithful. Indeed, (Binyon 2003) believes that any modern day forensic psychologist would class d’Anthés as a stalker. To compound Pushkin’s embarrassment, the same letter was also sent to selected friends and associates. When Natalya eventually told Pushkin about d’Anthés’ relentless pursuit of her, Pushkin challenged d’Anthès to a duel, which, after lengthy negotiations, eventually took place on January 27th 1837. Pushkin aged only thirty-seven and with so much more to offer the world of literature, was killed.
Even before his death, Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet. Admittedly, his reputation was on the decline for his last few years, but would be rightly and belatedly restored after a statue of him was unveiled in Moscow in 1880. The emotional response from Russian authors was telling. Turgenev described him as Russia’s ‘first artist-poet.’ Lamenting his premature demise, Dostoevsky said that, ‘Pushkin died in the full development of his powers, and undoubtedly carried to his grave a certain great mystery.’
D is for duelling; an insane practice that caused the senseless death of two young men who still had a life’s work ahead of them. D is for the dashed hopes of these young geniuses. D is for depressing, when you consider that nobody can ever quantify what the world of mathematics and literature lost.
[1] Remember that Louis XVl lost his head in 1793 after the French Revolution.
[2] These Hundred Days (one hundred and one to be exact) were sandwiched between Napoleon's return from exile on Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815.
[3] Remember after the storming of the Bastille, the royal government was replaced with a Patriot one and a far more soberly dressed Louis was hailed as a supporter of the revolution.
[4] Teacher Training College – would become known as Ecole Normale Superior
[5] Rigatelli, L. T. Evariste Galois. 1996. Birkhäuser. Basel Boston Berlin
[6] Infeld, L. Whom the Gods Love. 1948. Whittesey House
[7] The Memoirs and Legacy of Évariste Galois
[8] It was actually a sub group of the Decembrists called the The Northern Society.
[9] Binyon, T. J. Pushkin: A Biography. HarperCollins. 2003.
Duelling; not a good idea if you happen to be a genius.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, emotions were stirring among the ‘thinking classes’ in France and Russia. You were indeed a brave intellectual if you publicised your true feelings during these turbulent times. Two prodigies born during the Napoleonic era (1799-1815), one in France and one in Russia, took the risk though, and came to the attention of the authorities for all the wrong reasons. Both Galois and Pushkin were young men who had already produced copious amounts of work; paradigm shifting material that fundamentally influenced the course of mathematics and literature.
The wasted gallantry of Galois
In 1814, France incredibly saw the return of the Bourbon monarchy, this time in the person of King Louis XVIII[1]. His reign would be briefly interrupted by Napoleon’s ‘One Hundred Days[2]’ return to power from March to June in 1815. Once Napoleon was finally given his marching orders, the deal was that the Bourbons would only be allowed return if they established a constitutional monarchy similar to what already existed in England – one house with hereditary peers and one house with elected representatives. As you might remember, the aristocracy had not fared too well in the French Revolution and the Terror; for them, the first election count after the Bourbon restoration was payback time. A landslide victory for the royalists gave them an opportunity to wreak vengeance on their persecutors; any non-aristocrats who were active during the revolution and the Terror.
Despite the fact that King Louis XVIII was personally inclined to moderation, a series of unfortunate events throughout the 1820’s saw the return of more and more laws in favour of the rich. One such event was the assassination of King Louis’ nephew, the Duc de Berry, in 1820, which resulted in a swing to the right by outraged royalists. De Berry’s father was Louis’ brother Charles, who was the leader of France’s ultra-royalist faction at the time of the murder. He would succeed Louis as King Charles X in 1824.
At the outset of Charles’ reign it was beginning to look like the Ancien Regime all over again. Power was returning to the clergy and the aristocracy. Understandably, hostility was re-ignited among the general population and Charles responded to this by appointing increasingly right-wing ministers. He was playing that old game of being a despot; on July 26th 1830 he dissolved parliament, inflicted a gagging order on the press, and announced a more restricted electorate of 25,000 aristocrats.
Straight from the pages of a Victor Hugo novel, barricades appeared on the streets of Paris. The revolutionary tricolour was brandished instead of the Bourbon flag. After three days of street-fighting between July 27th and July 29th, known as the ‘Three Glorious Days’, Charles X - king of pomp - fled Paris and was replaced by a distant Bourbon cousin, the duc d'Orléans, who became Louis-Philippe I. He incredibly eschewed the Bourbon flag for the revolutionary tricolour – a move the people apparently liked[3], for the time being at least. Proclaimed 'king of the French ... by the will of the people', he became known as the Citizen King, but his job would not be easy. The number of left wing disaffected groups had been increasing, especially among the urban poor. Add to this the more moderate republicans, Bonapartists and royalists split down the middle, and you had one grouping more than a political ménage à trois. Bourbon royalists, now called Legitimists, believed that the son of the assassinated Duc de Berry and Charles X's grandson should inherit the throne as Henry V, with Louis Philippe minding it until the future Henry V came of age. The other royalist faction, called the Orleanists, wanted Duc d’Orléans to be king; and he indeed became Louis-Philippe I.
But Louis Philippe was living in an undemocratic Laputa and on fourteen million francs a year; he had all the trappings but little to offer in way of political action. And so the unrest continued with attempts made on his life and republican uprisings in Lyons and Paris.
Evariste Galois’ lifespan, 1811 to 1832, coincided with this topsy-turvy period in French history – Napoleon’s swansong to a right royal mess. Although he died before his twenty-first birthday, leaving behind only about one hundred pages of mathematical work, Galois is regarded as the founder of modern algebra. While still a schoolboy he set himself the task of cracking an important problem that had baffled mathematicians for almost three hundred years – the discovery of a formula for solving fifth degree equations. (He later showed that solutions of the kind he and others were looking for don’t exist.) He also had his first paper published in Annals de Mathématiques in 1829 – the only schoolboy author in that issue, at any rate!
But let’s put Galois’ achievements into perspective. Three problems dating from about 500BC – the Three Classical Problems of Ancient Greece – had been exercising and frustrating mathematicians for 2,000 years. These were:
Construct a square with the same area as a given circle (known as ‘squaring the circle’ a phrase still used to describe an intractable problem).
Construct a cube with a volume that is twice that of a given cube.
Divide an arbitrary angle into three equal parts.
Galois provided elegant, general, and powerful methods that can be used to analyse these problems – and many others – to prove that the constructions sought by mathematicians for over 2,000 years do not exist.
It was while studying at the Ecole Préparatoire[4] that Galois made friends with fellow student Auguste Chevalier, who was a follower of Saint-Simonianism. Saint-Simon (1760-1826) believed that the necessary conditions for progress could only be achieved through the elimination of poverty and ignorance. He believed that this could only happen if Christianity became a secular religion, with spiritual power being granted to scientists rather than priests. Most notably, it was in the best known Saint-Simonian newspaper, Le Globe, that the word ‘socialism’ appeared for the first time in 1832. Saint-Simonians were concerned with social justice across the board. Indeed, their manifesto would not seem out of place in a modern socialist party.
Galois had missed participating in the ‘Three Glorious Days’ because the students at the Ecole Préparatoire were locked in. Despite the victory of the Bonapartists and republicans in the ‘Three Glorious Days’, a republic was still some way off. When hostilities ended on July 30th and the Duc d’Orléans entered Paris, the director of the Ecole Préparatoire offered the services of his students to the provisional government despite the fact that he had prevented them from joining the rebels on the barricades by locking them in! This hypocrisy and cowardice angered Galois who had grazed his hands and knees trying to escape over the outer wall to join the fight.
By the summer of 1830 Galois was very open about his political leanings and increasingly disillusioned by his failure to be recognised and understood by the leading French mathematicians of the day. Believing that the July revolutionaries had been betrayed, he supported another violent uprising. He seemed ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, “If I were only sure that a body would be enough to incite the people to revolt, I would offer mine.” In October he returned to college for his second year. He began actively associating with young republicans and in November joined a more aggressive wing of republicanism, the Société des Amis du Peuple. For the Societe des Amis du Peuple, Louis Philippe was one king too many. This republican organisation had had enough of royalty and its members were prepared to end it through violent means if necessary. In their opinion, the people who had died during the ‘Three Glorious Days’ in 1830 had wasted their lives because the Bourbon dynasty had not been overthrown.
After putting up posters demanding new elections the Société des Amis du Peuple was supressed and forced to become a secret organisation; its propaganda became more intense and it established an armed wing. Galois did not hide his subversive ideas in college much to the irritation of its director who would eventually expel him. The first thing he did was to join the National Guard as an artilleryman, but soon after it was disbanded by Louis-Philippe.
No longer having his college grant, Galois now had to teach maths for a living. Unlike your regular maths tutor, Galois wanted his classes to be public. Mainly attended by non-mathematical friends and supporters, these classes were not a success. Even the mathematically able would have been baffled by Galois’ advanced and unconventional methods. Attendance dwindled and Galois was forced instead to give private maths grinds to reluctant students; a galling situation for a mathematical genius. It was around this time that he also began attending lectures at the Paris Academy of Sciences and became better known among the mathematics community. Rigatelli (Rigatelli, 1996)[5] describes his behaviour at these august gatherings, “His contributions to discussion were no doubt very acute and relevant, but at the same time aggressively critical, and certainly did not comply with the rules of academic etiquette.” Even Sophie Germain, a woman who had endured the worst kind of misogyny before being recognised as a gifted mathematician, was not impressed by Galois’ behaviour towards her friend Guglielmo Libro, who obviously got the sharp end of Galois’ tongue after a lecture. In a letter of commiseration to Libro she wrote, “…he has kept up his capacity for being rude, a taste of which he gave you, after your best lecture at the Academy.”
Before long, Galois’ passionate embrace of republicanism brought him to the attention of the authorities. At a banquet celebrating the not guilty verdict of a group of anti-monarchists, known as the ‘trial of the nineteen’ Galois, brandishing a glass of wine (which had probably gone to his head) and a dagger, shouted, “To Louis-Philippe!” Threat or salute? Who knows? Anyway, at the time it was deemed too extreme by some of the guests. Infeld (1948) describes him semi-fictitiously as standing ‘like a statue that had come to life only long enough to pronounce the death sentence twice on the French King.’[6] Many hurriedly left the event; even the portly and liberal minded Alexander Dumas escaped through a window. Almost on que, the police arrived at Galois’ apartment the next day and arrested him on a charge of ‘incitement to an attempt on the life and person of the King of the French’ and he was imprisoned. What he had actually said, it transpired at the trial was, “To Louis-Philippe, if he betrays us!” After much evidence, the jury decided after only half an hour that Galois was not guilty.
Galois’ next arrest would take place on July 14th as he and other republicans were making their way to Place de la Bastille to take part in a patriotic demonstration. This time he spent three months in prison while awaiting trial. Charged with possession of illegal arms and wearing a uniform to which he was not entitled, Galois would remain in prison until April 1832. An extraordinary event occurred while he was there. It was a year since the July uprising and the prison authorities were expecting trouble from the political prisoners on July 28th and 29th. As they were going to bed in their dormitories on the night of the 29th a prisoner in a bed near to Galois was injured by a bullet fired from a house opposite the prison. One theory is that the bullet was meant for Galois because the police considered him to be too incendiary and wanted him silenced.
In the spring of 1832 the normality of Parisian life was upset by a cholera epidemic. In order to reduce the spread of the disease in prisons it was decided to remove the younger inmates to a clinic, and it was here that Galois fell in love with the doctor’s daughter, Stéphanie. It would seem, initially at any rate, that Galois’ friendly advances were not spurned. But when friendly advances turned into declarations of love, perhaps this was all too much for Stéphanie who wanted to end the relationship. The only evidence that exists about the affair lies in two letters exchanged between them that Galois tore up but tried to piece together again. The content of these letters pretty much support the explanation of the breakup.
Spurned by Stéphanie and ignored by the mathematical community, Galois seemed to have only one reason to live – his militant republicanism. In May a new development occurred that transfixed the energy of the republicans. The widow of the Duc de Berry, who had been assassinated in 1820, returned to Paris. At the time of the assassination nobody knew that she was pregnant. Her twelve-year-old son was living in exile in Prague. Maddeningly, his tutor was Cauchy, the influential but selfish mathematician who chose to ignore the work of the young Galois. This young Bourbon would be a threat to Louis-Philippe; the republicans decided it was the perfect time to create a perfect storm. Of course Galois threw himself into the preparation, but a pretext to spark hostilities was needed. A martyr was needed, whose death would be revenged by the people. Galois, who believed his life was no longer worth living, volunteered to be that martyr – this is one of several theories surrounding his death. Infeld (1948) goes with the ‘degrading love affair’ theory involving one Mlle. Eve Sorel.
But back to political martyrdom then - the plan was for Galois to arrange a duel with a friend, L.D., but only L.D.’s pistol would be loaded. Then the Société des Amis du Peuple would spread a rumour that Galois was killed by a police ambush. It was hoped then that the people would be roused by Galois’ emotional and cleverly stage-managed funeral. The duel was arranged for May 30th and letters were written by Galois to make it seem like he had been challenged to the duel. Fatally injured, he died the following day in hospital. When his brother came to his deathbed he stuck to the story he had agreed to with the Société des Amis du Peuple – that he was ambushed by the police.
Now the republicans had their martyr. About 3,000 mourners gathered in the cemetery at Montparnasse, primed for attack as soon as the coffin was lowered. But even in death Galois was upstaged. As his funeral oration was being delivered word spread that General Lamarque (who had been appointed Marshall of France by Napoleon) had died. This corpse had much more added value than young Galois’. It was decided to postpone any unrest until Lamarque’s funeral. Galois’ funeral ended in a damp squib rather than a spark of revolution.
Astoundingly, the night before he knew he was going to his certain death, Galois wrote out a summary of his mathematical findings six and a half pages in length. In a lecture delivered in Gresham College, Oxford in 2011[7], Dr Peter Neumann reminded his audience that ‘those six and a half pages contain more mathematics than any other six and a half pages you can imagine.’ It would become the foundation of modern algebra.
What pushed Pushkin over the edge?
Throughout the 1820’s trouble was brewing in Russia also. The Decembrists[8], who were mainly members of the Russian upper classes, led an unsuccessful uprising in December 1825 following the death of Tsar Alexander I. Some of these rebels had form, having participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars. But what was the background to this uprising? Tsar Alexander l was quite the good guy, the non-aggressor in Europe at that time. He wanted to be friends with everybody – England, France, Prussia and Austria. In the earlier part of his reign he alternated between hot and cold relationships with Napoleon. When the friendship was blossoming, Napoleon dreamt of sharing the world with Alexander, even though the more reasonable Alexander was dreaming more of some kind of European federation.
When the relationship wasn’t going so well, like for example, when Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France in 1804 and didn’t hide the fact that he wanted to conquer the world, Alexander was forced to declare war on him. The showdown happened at Austerlitz, where the Russians and Austrians were defeated in 1805. Now the reasonable Alexander was angry.
Fast forward to 1812 then, when Napoleon and his Grand Army invaded Russia and entered Moscow as the victors, confident that Alexander would step down. But the pomp of the conquerors was deflated by an almost empty and ruined Moscow – not the kind of place you can taunt the locals with your victory celebrations. Not only did Alexander not capitulate in the face of defeat, but he got a second wind, and his troops drove the Grand Army from Russian soil. This was to be the beginning of the end for Napoleon.
Alexander’s unquenchable spirit was contagious; Prussia and Austria joined in the fight to oust Napoleon from Europe. Victorious at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, Alexander wanted to do a Napoleon on it; march into Paris. He realised this ambition in March 1814. Napoleon abdicated and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII. Alexander was happy in the knowledge that he had saved the French people from Napoleon. Of course, as we may remember, this was not really the end for Napoleon. Returning from exile in Elba, he regained his throne, but would finally be defeated at Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
All of these heady successes turned Alexander a tad spiritual. He was now reading the Bible daily and praying a lot, strongly influenced by Quaker and Moravian beliefs. This newfound spirituality didn’t stop him taking Poland though. He began ignoring the business of running his country and instead immersed himself in the Russian Bible Society. He formed the Holy Alliance, a very advanced and modern concept of a happy, clappy Christian federation based on ecumenical, rather than political, foundations. Unfortunately, it became more of a gun club than a Bible club, and the happy, clappy dream of benign monarchs and contented subjects reverted to old style despotism.
A disappointed and disillusioned Alexander shied away more and more from the affairs of state; he just wanted to abdicate. During a tour of inspection in Crimea, he caught either pneumonia or malaria; nobody is quite sure, and died.
Alexander I’s brother, Constantine was next in line for the throne. But he had automatically put himself out of the running by marrying a non-royal Polish woman in 1820. This resulted in Nicholas being heir presumptive and it was all made official by Alexander in 1822, but was never made public to Russian subjects who expected Constantine to be the next tsar. When Constantine reconfirmed his disinterest in the royal vacancy, Nicholas published Alexander’s manifesto and become emperor of Russia in December 1825.
This resulted in what becomes known as the Decembrist Rebellion. Liberal conspirators persuaded some of the troops in St. Petersburg not to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to call for his brother Constantine to become tsar. The rebellion, however, was poorly organized and easily suppressed. Two hundred and eighty-nine Decembrists were tried and five were executed.
In 1817 Pushkin obtained a job in the foreign office at St. Petersburg. It was at this time that he also joined the Green Lamp association, a literary and history club that was really a front for a secret society called the Union of Welfare. Pushkin’s political verses, encapsulating the ideas of the Decembrist movement, were widely circulated. This resulted in his banishment from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. His writings during this time confirmed his reputation as the leading Russian poet of the day as well as a leading liberal thinker. In May 1823 he started work on the verse novel, Yevgeny Onegin, which gives a fabulous, but objective, picture of Russian life.
Pushkin’s exile had its highs and lows. As he was transferred from place to place he alternately wrote hard and played hard. His behaviour finally led to his being moved to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia and it was here that he came face to face with peasant life. He studied Russian history and folklore and incorporated these into his writings. Indeed, it was here that he wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin and the historical tragedy Boris Godunov.
Pushkin played no part in the Decembrist uprising but he did support it. Realising it was better to have an author much loved by the people on your side, Nicholas I allowed Pushkin to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826. After listening to Pushkin’s complaints about censorship Nicholas appointed himself as Pushkin’s censor and also made placating noises about liberating the serfs. But the tsar’s censorship proved to be even more exacting than that of the official censors, and Pushkin was put under secret observation by the police. None of these actions, however, prevented him from turning out works of genius, which would start a new movement in the life of literary Russia.
After marrying Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova in 1831 Pushkin settled in St. Petersburg. He was commissioned to write a history of Peter the Great and received the bizarre rank of ‘gentleman of the emperor’s bedchamber’. While Natalya enjoyed the social whirl of court life (and the attentions of Nicholas l) Pushkin was less enthusiastic and begged, without success, to be allowed to retire to the country to concentrate on his writing. His fellow courtiers were not impressed and regarded him with suspicion.
But what was the background to Pushkin’s untimely death? Pushkin and his wife met George d’Anthès, the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, in 1834. d’Anthès possessed the enviable attributes of being both French and handsome and had joined the Tsar’s army to advance his career. He also found enough time though, to take a protracted romantic interest in Pushkin’s wife, Natalya in 1835. It is doubtful though that she returned his love.[1] Poor old Pushkin suffered greatly by the incessant rumours in St. Petersbourg society and his mortification was compounded when he received a letter informing him that he had been elected to ‘The Most Serene Order of Cuckolds’ even though there was no proof that Natalya had been unfaithful. Indeed, (Binyon 2003) believes that any modern day forensic psychologist would class d’Anthés as a stalker. To compound Pushkin’s embarrassment, the same letter was also sent to selected friends and associates. When Natalya eventually told Pushkin about d’Anthés’ relentless pursuit of her, Pushkin challenged d’Anthès to a duel, which, after lengthy negotiations, eventually took place on January 27th 1837. Pushkin aged only thirty-seven and with so much more to offer the world of literature, was killed.
Even before his death, Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet. Admittedly, his reputation was on the decline for his last few years, but would be rightly and belatedly restored after a statue of him was unveiled in Moscow in 1880. The emotional response from Russian authors was telling. Turgenev described him as Russia’s ‘first artist-poet.’ Lamenting his premature demise, Dostoevsky said that, ‘Pushkin died in the full development of his powers, and undoubtedly carried to his grave a certain great mystery.’
D is for duelling; an insane practice that caused the senseless death of two young men who still had a life’s work ahead of them. D is for the dashed hopes of these young geniuses. D is for depressing, when you consider that nobody can ever quantify what the world of mathematics and literature lost.
[1] Remember that Louis XVl lost his head in 1793 after the French Revolution.
[2] These Hundred Days (one hundred and one to be exact) were sandwiched between Napoleon's return from exile on Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815.
[3] Remember after the storming of the Bastille, the royal government was replaced with a Patriot one and a far more soberly dressed Louis was hailed as a supporter of the revolution.
[4] Teacher Training College – would become known as Ecole Normale Superior
[5] Rigatelli, L. T. Evariste Galois. 1996. Birkhäuser. Basel Boston Berlin
[6] Infeld, L. Whom the Gods Love. 1948. Whittesey House
[7] The Memoirs and Legacy of Évariste Galois
[8] It was actually a sub group of the Decembrists called the The Northern Society.
[9] Binyon, T. J. Pushkin: A Biography. HarperCollins. 2003.
