88

The period of seven and a half months during which the Académie royale des sciences was actually formed remains poorly known. The activities carried out within the emerging organization have been particularly neglected by historians. Relying on Huygens’s first Parisian workbook, this paper shows that a whole series of hitherto poorly dated academic writings are in fact related to the formative year of the institution. Using largely new documentation, the paper then presents for the first time in their true chronological order and in the context of the main organizational stages, the academic works of this period.