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In this paper, my aim is to reexamine Fontenelle’s position as to chemistry. Before he became the Secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris, Fontenelle knew chemistry quite badly and he ridiculed it in his personal works; but as the Secretary of the institution he has to justify its existence a science. The way in which he accounts for the memoirs of chemistry shows that Fontenelle follows the evolution of this science from 1699, proving that he is aware of its novelties. Of course, Fontenelle keeps rejecting what he identifies as “ancient chemistry”, separating the chemistry of the first decades of the 18th century from its history. Such a rhetorical operation should not be misleading: it does not imply that Fontenelle has an ill-conception of the chemistry he sees at the Académie Royale des Sciences. On the contrary, he welcomes all that might lead chemistry on the road to science. Certainly, this leads him to insist upon the mechanical explanations used by some chemists. But this is not Fontenelle’s last word on chemistry. From 1718 he proposes an important reflection on affinities, which, according to him, give to chemistry its “fundamental law”. The search for affinities, as distinguished both from Newtonian attraction and ancient occult sympathies, makes of chemistry a science on its own, even if it cannot be reduced to mechanical explanations.

In the early eighteenth century a quarrel came out between two French chemists concerning artificial making of iron. It was in fact a conflict between a mechanist interpretation of chemical process and a more traditional approach, which was suspected of having taken his thesis from alchemy. But nevertheless, this approach will lead to affinity table which was accepted by all the chemists until the early nineteenth century.