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This study reevaluates the role of the 1728 meridian line in Paris’ Saint-Sulpice church, as both a technical instrument and a discursive project. Designed by the English clockmaker Henry Sully, purportedly to synchronise Parisian public clocks via precise solar noon, the project aimed at repurposing the horizontal church meridiana, used in the 16th and 17th centuries for astronomical observation, into a civic timekeeping tool. Unfinished at Sully’s death, the instrument is primarily documented through a bold and programmatic 1728 text, which advocated for astronomy’s role in everyday horology. Through archival analysis and material evidence, this article contextualises Sully’s social identity (an outsider seeking legitimacy beyond guild structures) and argues that, rather than a realistic and functional device, the Saint-Sulpice line embodied a « technology »: a performative discourse promoting a new conception of the clockmaker-astronomer as civic synchronizer. By highlighting Sully’s editorial strategies and the meridian’s hybrid design, it complicates John Heilbron’s model of meridian lines transitioning belatedly to timekeeping uses. Instead, it reveals the coexistence and negotiation of astronomical precision, mechanical time, and social authority in Enlightenment Paris, demonstrating how gnomonics contributed to emerging ideals of urban temporal uniformity.

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Synchronising Paris in the Eighteenth Century? Henry Sully’s Meridian Line at Saint-Sulpice: Astronomy, Clockmaking, and Timekeeping

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Louis Georges

摘要

This study reevaluates the role of the 1728 meridian line in Paris’ Saint-Sulpice church, as both a technical instrument and a discursive project. Designed by the English clockmaker Henry Sully, purportedly to synchronise Parisian public clocks via precise solar noon, the project aimed at repurposing the horizontal church meridiana, used in the 16th and 17th centuries for astronomical observation, into a civic timekeeping tool. Unfinished at Sully’s death, the instrument is primarily documented through a bold and programmatic 1728 text, which advocated for astronomy’s role in everyday horology. Through archival analysis and material evidence, this article contextualises Sully’s social identity (an outsider seeking legitimacy beyond guild structures) and argues that, rather than a realistic and functional device, the Saint-Sulpice line embodied a « technology »: a performative discourse promoting a new conception of the clockmaker-astronomer as civic synchronizer. By highlighting Sully’s editorial strategies and the meridian’s hybrid design, it complicates John Heilbron’s model of meridian lines transitioning belatedly to timekeeping uses. Instead, it reveals the coexistence and negotiation of astronomical precision, mechanical time, and social authority in Enlightenment Paris, demonstrating how gnomonics contributed to emerging ideals of urban temporal uniformity.