Pierre-Auguste Adet

Pierre-Auguste Adet combined medicine and chemistry with colonial administration and diplomacy. An advocate of the new chemistry associated with Lavoisier, he helped establish the Annales de chimie in 1789 and worked with Jean-Henri Hassenfratz on a system of chemical symbols. Their notation attempted to convey composition and physical state as well as a substance’s identity, but it did not become standard. Adet also translated and challenged arguments by Joseph Priestley and later published an elementary chemistry textbook. ¹

The Revolution drew him into administration: he accompanied the first commission sent to Saint-Domingue in 1791, worked on colonial affairs, and served in the navy ministry. After a diplomatic assignment at Geneva, he represented France in the United States during the dispute over the Jay Treaty and the American election of 1796. ²

Adet made that mission unusually public. In the autumn of 1796 he sent protests to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and arranged their publication in the Philadelphia Aurora. They denounced American policy toward Britain and announced that he was suspending his ministerial functions. His correspondence, discussed in Alden Fletcher’s study, explicitly connected publication with the selection of presidential electors. The intervention supported the French preference for Jefferson, but it did not prevent John Adams’s victory; its effect on particular voters cannot be measured with certainty. ³

Back in France, Adet joined the Tribunat. In a 1802 report on colonies restored by the Treaty of Amiens, he defended maintaining slavery and importing enslaved Africans, using economic and racist arguments. He subsequently became prefect of the Nièvre, a member of the Corps législatif, and, in 1813, a senior councillor at the Cour des comptes. He retained the latter office through the Restoration until his death in 1834. ²