Jean Sylvain Bailly Biography

Dromo's Den

BAILY, Jean Sylvan, [or Jean Sylvain Bailly] celebrated because of his attachment to science; still more through his eloquence as the Historian of Astronomy; most of all on account of his connection with the unfolding of the first or great French revolution, and his melancholy fate. Baily was born in Paris in the year 1736; in 1790 he presided as Mayor of Paris at the Champ de Mars, over that vast assemblage when the united French people hailed the supposed commencement of the Reign of Liberty and Universal Brotherhood; in 1793 one of countless illustrious victims he perished on the scaffold. In his attachment to the cause of rational liberty Baily was constant through all calamity: it was not desire of fame, nor the thirst to overthrow, that led him towards the front ranks of the Revolution; so, through abiding faith in humanity, he died without the shame of relinquishing his early principles and hopes, merely because the effort to realize them had brought evil to himself. Baily's History of Astronomy is still very fascinating: as a strictly philosophical work it does not answer the highest ends, he was led astray by the then novel and false doctrine of the value of some ancient and forgotten knowledge. As a technical History it is supplanted by the laborious, but yet very insufficient history of Delambre. [J.P.N.]

Francis L. Hawks, ed. Pictorial Cyclopaedia of Biography (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1856) 68.