La preuve par la Chine ? Jesuit networks, academic politics, and the shape of the Earth in 1730s Paris

This article argues that the Maupertuis-Cassini controversy over the shape of the Earth in the 1730s was intricately connected to Eurasian intellectual networks and academic politics. It focuses on the alliance of two Parisian pro-Cassini savants, Dortous de Mairan and Nicolas Fréret, and on their private correspondence with French Jesuits Antoine Gaubil and Dominique Parrenin in Beijing. Through these Eurasian connections, this article examines how Qing cartographic information was mobilized and transformed into credible evidence for polemical purposes in the Parisian public sphere and its aftermath. By uncovering the academic politics behind the episode, it shows that Mairan and Fréret's deployment of Chinese evidence, and Maupertuis's retaliatory response, emerged largely from a complex interplay of personal ambitions, institutional allegiances and factional rivalries within the French learned world. The article thus foregrounds the overlooked Eurasian entanglements of a classic intra-European dispute and offers a case study of how evidence acquired credibility across Eurasia and was contested in eighteenth-century Paris.