Page - 345 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

345Coping with Enlightenments December, bringing an end to the Society of Jesus in all Catholic countries. On September 10, 1773, the suppression of the order in the entire Habsburg monar- chy was officially announced and all its estates taken over by the state.3 If Hell was unable to read the signs of the times before the summer of 1773, he seems to have made the first steps of adjustment quickly: half a year later, we already find him drafting plans for an Austrian academy of sciences, to be established in Vienna.4 This was already the fourth time such plans were enter- tained. The project drafted by Leibniz in the beginning and von Petrasch in the middle of the century were mentioned in Chapter 2. Apparently, in 1764 Hell himself wanted to revive the idea of an academy of sciences, again without success.5 According to the report of a Danish visitor of Hell’s, this attempt failed because Hell rejected an (unnamed) minister’s insistence that members of the academy should be appointed by the government.6 The government de- cision to review the possibility of establishing an academy of sciences in Vi- enna in January 1774 may have been actually triggered by the suppression of the Society of Jesus: scientific life in Austria would have to be reorganized any- way. Hell’s invitation to participate in the project can be understood as a token of the measured disposition toward ex-Jesuits as individuals, urged by Kaunitz and pursued with some consistency as mentioned above. After all, the court astronomer was a significant asset: as of 1773, he was at the height of his fame in the Republic of Letters, elected a member of prestigious scientific bodies in Copenhagen, Trondheim, Stockholm, Göttingen, and Bologna, as well as a cor- responding member of the main scientific academy in the Catholic world, the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Besides, Hell was not only an astrono- mer of international reputation but also an encyclopedist in the sense that his research interests encompassed historical research, language studies, geophys- ics, meteorology, magnetism, electricity, and so forth. As such, by strictly aca- demic standards he hardly had any local competitor in the same league for the task. Hell’s “rival” in forging plans for an academy in the spring of 1774 was a recently appointed young professor of universal and literary history at the University of Vienna, Ignaz Mathes von Hess (1746–76), who opted for an institution consisting of two branches, a “physical-mathematical” and a 3 For a detailed chronological account, see Gerhard Winner, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Nie­ derösterreich und Wien (Vienna: Herold, 1967), esp. 33–48. 4 The literature includes Feil, Versuche, 45–69; Haberzettl, Stellung der Exjesuiten, 182–85; Steinmayr, “Geschichte der Universitätssternwarte,” 267–70. 5 See Joseph Feil, Zur Gründung einer Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Maria Theresia ( Vienna: Gerold, 1860). 6 Hviid, Andreas Christian Hviids Europa, 370 (entry on November 21, 1778).