The historical literature on Jean-Baptiste Dumas has scrutinized his contributions to chemistry and chemical education and, to a far lesser degree, his political career after the Revolution of 1848. His cultivation of science-based, especially chemical, industry has received scant attention, yet for four decades he was president of the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, founded in Paris in 1801 to improve industry through the application of science.

This talk casts the applied science of Dumas at the Société d’Encouragement within the context of an emerging bourgeois culture of paternalism and consumption. Dumas literally changed the society’s history and erected its present headquarters to transform it into a bourgeois institution with funding from industry. Through the society, he created a series of paternalistic foundations to aid ill, injured, impoverished, and elderly workers in various industries again with business backing. These prefigured the worker legislation introduced under the Third Republic.

Dumas changed the course of the Société d’Encouragement, which originally fostered industries and innovations that served the goals of national industrial policy as defined by the Interior Ministry. His reinvented society favored bourgeois consumption and taste with consumer goods whose manufacture rested on an alliance of science and practice.

I follow the definition of “French bourgeoisie” framed by Whitney Walton who defines the bourgeoisie in terms of consumer tastes and practices. She shows that their values and habits upheld a social order (that included the artisan class) that the bourgeoisie aspired to dominate. Walton also discusses taste and consumption in terms of production methods (mechanized versus hand manufacture).

I argue that the industries given pride of place by the society reflected the tastes and consumption patterns of the bourgeoisie. Stearic acid industries, based on the chemistry of Chevreul, made candles, soaps, and perfumes. Silver and gold electroplating, started by Christofle and expanded through the society's efforts, also catered to bourgeois tastes.