The Annales de chimie owed its existence to the revolution in the first place.

The original idea for the Annales came from Lavoisier’s protégé Pierre-Auguste Adet, who was then in his mid-20s. In 1787 he proposed a chemical journal modeled on German chemist Lorenz Crell’s Chemische Annalen, the first commercial periodical devoted exclusively to chemistry and founded only a few years before; indeed, the Annales was initially conceived as little more than a French translation of Crell’s monthly, perhaps supplemented with abstracts of chemical papers published elsewhere in Europe.

At that time French government censorship was so onerous Lavoisier did not think he could get it approved without the backing of the Académie royale des sciences and the keeper of the royal seals. The feedback he got from his back-channel negotiation was discouraging. The keeper of the royal seals was not prepared to approve anything more than a simple translation of Crell (no potentially inflammatory original content) nor more frequent than quarterly (no question of it being a species of troublesome periodical press) despite Lavoisier’s objection that this would make the publication perpetually out-of-date.

The opening events of the revolution, however, soon produced a more congenial publishing environment.

De Tocqueville wrote appositely of the French revolution, “the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.” In the so-called pre-revolution, the problem was financial. Tax receipts could not cover the cost of France’s sprawling empire, a deficit compounded by the country’s support of the American war of independence (to no obvious benefit to France, save poking Great Britain in the eye). France was on the brink of insolvency.

Though Louis XVI is often cast as the prototypical absolute monarch, absolutism was only so absolute; the magnitude of the changes needed to repair France’s finances would require some degree of buy-in. Louis began with the 3% or so of the population who had wealth or power—the clergy and nobility, that is, the first two of the three estates of the realm. He did so by convening a long-abandoned institution, the Assembly of Notables, in February 1787.

The idea was to push reforms through using a handpicked group of noblemen, clergy, and high officials and so avoid involving the mass of the French citizenry (the third estate) and even most members of the higher estates. Louis floated a universal land tax to this group to address the financial crisis. Perhaps to sweeten the deal, he promised to institute representative assemblies in all of France’s provinces and elected representation down to the village level.

The plan backfired. So assembled, the notables recognized a rare opportunity to assert power. As the ones who would bear the brunt of the tax burden, they were suspicious of the seemingly sudden deterioration of France’s finances and protested at being kept more or less in the dark. They demanded an accounting. The standoff devolved into public finger-pointing, with the notables, ironically, casting themselves as the defenders of the people’s traditional rights in the face of Louis’s proposal for a more representative democracy. After a few months, Louis dissolved the assembly without result.

The monarchy next turned to the parlements, or judiciary. Louis’s new finance minister—the previous one having lost his job during the Assembly of Notables—crafted an agreement with the parlements to push through the democratic reforms and extend taxes imposed to pay for the American war of independence. In return he offered to convene the Estates-General five years down the road in 1792.

This was a high stakes gamble: the Estates-General, a meeting of all three estates, had not been held since 1614. Who knew what the result might be? But by pushing it off into the future, he hoped to buy time to stabilize the financial situation.

As it turned out, Louis himself torpedoed the deal. Declaring his reforms “legal because I wish it,” he moved to abolish the parlement. His actions whipped up widespread outrage and a flood of pamphlets agitating for limits on his power.

The outrage soon grew into open revolt. Facing a breakdown in royal authority, the king and his ministers concluded they had no choice but to convene the Estates-General, and as soon as possible.

The announcement in July 1788 was followed by an onslaught of pamphlets and fly-by-night political periodicals clamoring for freedom of the press. The besieged monarchy caved, and the system of state censorship was abolished.

With the obstacle of censorship swept away, in the spring of 1789 Lavoisier, Adet, and the rest of the editorial staff put together the first volume of the Annales de chimie. After an exhaustive review, the Académie des sciences approved it. The first volume appeared the following year.

First billing on the new journal’s title page went to Guyton de Morveau, 6½ years Lavoisier’s senior, though his position was mostly honorific in the early years. It was Lavoisier’s show. Adet, now 26, was the secretary of Annales and most junior. They were joined by Gaspard Monge, Claude Louis Berthollet, Antoine-François de Fourcroy, Philippe Frédéric Baron de Dietrich, and Jean-Henri Hassenfratz.

All but Hassenfratz were members of the Académie des sciences; all were either chemists or had an allied interest in chemistry; and all were close associates of Lavoisier. Apart from the Baron de Dietrich, who for some reason was pushed further down the pack, they appear by age in descending order.

The first substantive change to the journal’s title page is the disappearance, after a single year, of the privilege of the Académie des sciences with volume 5 in 1790.

On August 26, 1789, the National Assembly (the successor of the Estates-General) approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, its first substantive change to French law. Article 11 of the declaration proclaimed, “Free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man: every citizen can therefore speak, write, and publish freely.” The days of seeking approval from the Académie des sciences were over. The Académie’s days themselves were numbered; it and other state-supported societies were abolished on August 8, 1793.

Article 1 of the declaration eliminated the special status and privileges of the nobility, but it was not until the decree of June 19, 1790, that hereditary nobility was explicitly abolished and citizens were barred from using noble titles. And so, in volume 6 of the Annales, de Morveau abruptly becomes Morveau, de Fourcroy becomes Fourcroy, and le Baron de Dietrich becomes simply Dietrich.

It was not so straightforward for Guyton de Morveau to shed his noble title. His family name was Guyton. His father had bought him a noble title with his appointment as avocat général du roi in Dijon, where he served as public prosecutor for 20 years while practicing chemistry on the side. He took the name de Morveau from a family property. He was a reformer by nature—he is intimately associated with the reform of chemical nomenclature, to cite but a single example—and with the revolution he became deeply involved in politics. He served in the government of the Côte d’Or before being elected to the National Assembly in 1792, where he voted in favor of executing Louis XVI on January 21, 1793.

Given his deep commitment to the revolution, his desire to ditch the noble title is understandable. By volume 9, in April 1791, he reverts to his family name, Guyton. The problem was that Guyton was the most senior and well-known editor of the Annales. The other editors must have been afraid of losing his name recognition, so he appears—in first position, as always—as “Guyton (ci-devant de Morveau),” or “Guyton (previously de Morveau).” He is referred to in this way until volume 15 in October 1792, after which he goes by plain Guyton.

Another bit of social leveling also begins in volume 15, when the editors stop being prefaced with the abbreviation “MM.” for messieurs; from then on until the suspension of publication after volume 18 it reads simply, “Par Guyton, Lavoisier,” et cetera.

Lavoisier was also a member of the nobility. His father too had bought him a noble title, an appointment as Secrétaire du roi the year after the chemist’s marriage. Unlike Guyton’s position, it was the worst kind of sinecure—status requiring neither work nor merit and surely what the revolutionaries had in mind when they abolished the nobility.

But Lavoisier had never styled himself “de Lavoisier,” and probably didn’t give his membership in the second estate much thought. He even tried to board the revolutionary bandwagon, thinking he could ride liberal politics to economic progress and free enterprise. Back when Louis XVI convened the Estates-General, Lavoisier declared himself a candidate for the third estate and renounced his privileges. “From now on there will be no financial distinction separating us; we shall all be brothers and friends,” he declared.

But the local populace was not so quick to forget Lavoisier’s noble status and, more importantly, his occupation of tax farmer. At age 24, Lavoisier had invested a considerable amount of his inheritance on a stake in the Ferme générale, or the General Farm, the private consortium that collected taxes on salt, tobacco, customs duties, and products entering Paris under contract from the king. Three years later he married Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the 13-year-old daughter of another member of the farm, which cemented his prospects for great wealth.

In an apparently heated meeting, Lavoisier’s candidacy for the third estate was disallowed.

Such hostility was not always the case. Guyton moved seamlessly into revolutionary politics and the third estate, as did most of the editorial staff of the Annales. Even Lavoisier’s friend Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who had been ennobled by Louis himself, managed to get elected as a representative of the third estate, albeit after a rocky meeting that began with the incensed crowd threatening to throw him out of the window. (Du Pont won over the hostile crowd after comically grasping a portly gentleman to use as a cushion should they follow through on the threat.)

Lavoisier, it seems, simply did not apprehend how toxic his association with the Ferme générale was. He persisted in trying to involve himself in the great political changes underway. Turned down by the third estate, he instead presented himself as a candidate for the second estate. But even his fellow noblemen disallowed his candidacy on account of his onerous profession.

More ominous changes were in store for the editors of Annales. In the same 1792 volume in which Guyton abandons “de Morveau” and the editors drop the title messieurs, Dietrich vanishes.

Philippe Frédéric Dietrich was from Strasbourg, son of industrialist Jean de Dietrich, who by the mid-1780s had six iron plants and was the richest individual landholder in Alsace.

Like Guyton’s, Dietrich’s background was not an obstacle to serving in the early revolutionary government. His earlier administrative experience in several government positions landed him the position Commissaire du roi to Strasbourg in 1789. After winning the confidence of the citizenry, he was elected Strasbourg’s first constitutional mayor in 1790. When France declared war on Austria in April 1792, Dietrich asked Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a local army officer, to compose a patriotic marching song for the Army of the Rhine. The anthem became popular among the troops, and when a battalion from Marseille sang it in Paris that July, it became known as “La Marseillaise.” It is still France’s national anthem.

Despite his popularity, Dietrich made political enemies, particularly among the radical Jacobins. The attacks against him intensified after the “second revolution” of August 10, 1792, when—under pressure from the war with Austria—the constitutional monarchy collapsed, Louis XVI’s functions were suspended, and a convention to determine his fate was announced. Dietrich, caught off guard by these swift developments in far-off Paris, was ordered to appear before the National Assembly. While he lingered in Strasbourg preparing his defense, he learned of an order to transport him to Paris to answer charges. Fearing the worst, he fled to Switzerland on September 2. The following month he disappears from the masthead of the Annales.

With assurances of safe conduct, Dietrich returned to France in November, was tried and acquitted in March 1793, but not released. His flight had marked him as an emigré—a nobleman who had taken refuge from the revolution outside France. Under continued pressure from his political enemies in Strasbourg, he was transferred to Abbaye prison in Paris in September 1793, tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned to death, and guillotined on the Place de la Révolution on December 29, 1793. He was the first of the editors to fall victim to the Terror.

Like a tech bro who thinks spouting “don’t be evil” will abrogate responsibility for his actions, Lavoisier had gone through life doing the right thing (for him) without any thought of the consequences. His own obliviousness precipitated his downfall.

It began with his choice of profession. Though he dutifully received a law degree to follow in his father’s footsteps, Lavoisier found he had a greater interest in science. Around the time he was elected to the Académie des sciences, he sought out his position with the Ferme générale to provide him the means to pursue science on the side.

Lavoisier applied himself to his job with the farm, crisscrossing France to improve operations and ferret out fraud among its provincial employees. He invested a surprising amount of time perfecting the wetting and grinding of tobacco, efforts that would be key to one of the indictments against tax farmers during the revolution.

Lavoisier consistently demonstrated a tin ear with regard to his actions and how they would be perceived by others. At one point he calculated the value of the merchandise Paris needed to sustain itself and compared that figure with the taxes collected by the farm. From this calculation he concluded that about one-fifth of merchandise was entering the city untaxed.

The reason was clear. The city had grown beyond the existing tollgates. There were some properties with one door outside the tollgates and another inside. Smuggling was child’s play.

In 1779 Lavoisier proposed a new wall to encompass all of Paris. He determined that the cost of building, maintaining, and staffing the wall would pay for itself in increased tax collection. His plan was filed away, but the wall and its dozens of customs houses eventually were erected at great expense, well over a billion dollars in today’s terms by the time it was completed in 1791.

Though the finance minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne was the one who approved it, and the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux designed its many buildings, the populace knew who to blame: Lavoisier. He was roundly condemned and lampooned. There was even a little epigram:

Perhaps sensing the precariousness of his situation, Lavoisier turned his attention to being useful.

Lavoisier had been running the Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration alongside his work with the Ferme générale since 1775. At the height of his career, in 1788, he held three additional positions—he was on the board of the Caisse d’escompte (the discount bank), a member of the Académie des sciences, and a commissioner of agriculture. Early in 1791, rabblerouser Jean-Paul Marat called out Lavoisier for his many appointments in his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, while reminding readers of Lavoisier’s role in building the wall.

When the National Assembly on April 7 of that year also appointed him a commissioner of the public treasury, Lavoisier realized too late how greedy his many government appointments made him appear, and on April 9 published an open letter in the more mainstream Le Moniteur renouncing the way of life to which he had become accustomed, resigning all of his paid appointments, save the gunpowder administration, and promising to serve the National Assembly without pay.

His main service—and the one on which he pinned his hopes to make himself indispensable to the revolution—was the commission to rationalize weights and measures, established by the assembly in 1790. The outcome of the commission’s work, its members hoped, would be a scientifically based, rational, international standard—the metric system.

The system’s foundation was the meter, a unit of measurement defined by the commission as equal to one ten-millionth of the quadrant of the meridian of the earth (the distance from the equator to one of the planet’s poles). Lavoisier threw himself into administering the precise surveys his colleagues were making, from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea at Barcelona, to determine the length of the meter. When they were done, he oversaw the fabrication of the platinum meter standards, the determination of the kilogram, and their dependent units.

But all Lavoisier’s good works would not spare him from the Terror.

On September 10, 1793, two senior police officers arrived at Lavoisier’s house on the Boulevard de la Madeleine to search his papers for documents relating to the Ferme générale. With them came mathematician Charles-Gilbert Romme and Lavoisier’s erstwhile colleague Fourcroy, who together represented the Committee on Public Education, which oversaw the weights and measures project. They took away instruments in Lavoisier’s possession that were being used for the project. Both were bad signs.

Though the police did not find any farm documents, their appearance was a reminder that his role as a tax farmer had not been forgotten. Lavoisier had resigned from the Ferme générale shortly before it was abolished in 1791 and naively hoped the gesture would insulate him from accountability.

The Ferme générale remained a thorn in the side of the revolutionaries. Its assets were meant to move to the treasury, but little had happened even 18 months after it was dissolved. The tax farmers in charge of the transfer attributed the delay to the onerous process of disposing of the farm’s assets, such as warehouses of tobacco. In the meantime, former employees were suing the farm over their pension plan (which Lavoisier had set up) and other issues. At least 25,000 claims had been filed, and each successful suit sapped the treasury’s take. Win or lose, the suits dragged on at a snail’s pace.

The advent of the Reign of Terror, however, pushed things into high gear. On the very day radical workers known as the sans-culottes invaded the National Convention and solidified Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre’s supreme power, the committee liquidating the farm’s assets was abolished and all the papers related to the farm were ordered sealed. Five days later the police showed up at Lavoisier’s house.

Soon frustration with the farm reached the breaking point. At the Convention, François Louis Bourdon exclaimed, “This is the hundredth time we have discussed the accounts of the Farmers General. I demand that those public leeches be arrested, and that if their accounts are not presented in a month, then the Convention must turn them over to the sword of the law.” His proposal passed with a show of hands, warrants were drawn up, and 19 former farmers were arrested that same day.

Lavoisier was not among them. When the police showed up at his house, he was engaged in his civic duty with the National Guard. When alerted that the police were looking for him, Lavoisier wandered the streets before taking refuge with a former usher from the Académie des sciences. Then he holed up for a few days at the Louvre in the former premises of the Académie.

From hiding he wrote to the Committee on Public Education protesting that he had resigned from the farm three years earlier, had never had a say in its general operations, was not responsible for the delay in rendering the farms accounts, and did not believe he should be arrested with the other farmers. He asked the National Convention to leave him out of the accounting and allow him to resume his work with weights and measures. He sent a similar appeal to the Committee of General Security. He received no response. Panicked, he consulted his wife and father-in-law, who was also on the lam. They decided to turn themselves in, which they did on November 28.

We needn’t rehearse all the details of the arrest, detention, and trial of the tax farmers, but there are a few observations to be made.

The first is that there was a contingent of the farmers—Lavoisier among them, it seems—who didn’t think they had done anything wrong. The farm was full of lawyers, like Lavoisier, and the contracts they had signed with the king were legal. Indeed, though the charges against them were kept secret, through rumor and guessing they were able to divine the most concrete charges and composed and printed a 42-page repudiation before trial.

It was probably this conviction that led his legalistic father-in-law, Jacques Paulze, to turn himself in. And it was undoubtedly his wife’s desire for Lavoisier to stay close to her father that compelled Lavoisier to accompany him. The fact that both were in jeopardy may also have torpedoed Lavoisier’s best chance at freedom. After all, not all the farmers had even been arrested, and during the proceedings a number slipped away or were released.

In fact, arrangements were made for Lavoisier’s case to be separated from the others and for him to be transferred to another prison, during which he might also escape. An interview was arranged between Madame Lavoisier and the prosecutor Antoine Dupin, who could have released Lavoisier. Madame Lavoisier just needed to close the deal, perhaps by throwing herself on his mercy or by offering a bribe. Instead, she excoriated Dupin for the persecution of the farmers and declared that her husband would feel dishonored to have his case separated from the others. The deal fell through. Madame Lavoisier simply could not bear the thought of saving her husband while her father languished in prison.

The second point is that no matter what we might think of the injustice of one of history’s greatest chemists having his life ended on the scaffold, Lavoisier was a tax farmer. And he was good at it. He was not merely a hapless investor. He threw his prodigious energies into making himself and the other farmers rich. The author of that 42-page defense? Lavoisier. He was publicly known and reviled by the citizens of Paris, especially for his role in the construction of the farmers’ wall. True, his investment of money and energy in the farm were perfectly legal and meant from the beginning to free him to pursue research. And his return on that investment was epoch-making in scientific terms. But in the crucible of the revolution, his scientific accomplishments could not save him.

In the end, Lavoisier’s efforts to defend the farmers collectively and himself individually came to nothing. Their case was referred to the Revolutionary Tribunal. It was a kangaroo court. His court-appointed lawyer didn’t even show up the day of the proceedings. The tribunal didn’t adjudicate the supposed malfeasance of the farm but instead charged them with counterrevolutionary conspiracy in complicity with foreigners, the reasoning being that their (assumed) malfeasance robbed the nation of the money it needed to defend itself against its enemies. All the farmers in custody were sentenced to death, an outcome never really in question.

On May 8, 1794, the same day as their trial, 28 tax farmers were loaded onto wagons and driven to the Place de la Révolution to be guillotined. Paulze was third in line, Lavoisier was fourth. They died about a minute apart.

Of his fellow editors of the Annales, only Fourcroy seems to have raised a finger to save Lavoisier. Apparently, a day or two before Lavoisier was tried and executed, Fourcroy appeared unbidden before Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which oversaw the Reign of Terror, and passionately declared what a dreadful loss for science Lavoisier’s death would represent. The response was stone-faced silence. No sooner had Fourcroy left the room than Robespierre complained of his unmitigated gall. Another committee member, terrified by Robespierre’s response, ran after Fourcroy and warned him never to do anything like that again lest he lose his own head.

Years later, in the Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Lavoisier, Fourcroy bitterly reflected on the times “when we had to hide our tears in our hearts so as not to betray our sensitivity to tyranny; when, for the dominant horde, the slightest signs of compassion and pity were admissions of complicity with those it had pronounced guilty.”

As for Berthollet, Monge, Hassenfratz, and Guyton de Morveau, most were preoccupied with their own roles in the revolution, and they did nothing to save their former colleague.

In the absence of a functional editorial board, not to mention increasing difficulty sourcing paper to print it on, the publication of the Annales lapsed. The final number was published in September of 1793, the month the police showed up at Lavoisier’s door.