Lavoisier in the year one : the birth of a new science in an age of revolution / Madison Smartt Bell.

Antoine Lavoisier--who lived at the zenith of the Enlightenment and died at the hands of the French Revolution--was himself a revolutionary. Closely followed by the burgeoning international scientific community, he competed with the best minds of his time to be the first to explain how chemical processes really work. Aided by a large fortune and his accomplished wife, he employed the most ingenious and expensive technology of his time in a series of innovative experiments that forever buried medieval alchemy and established a chemical language still in use today. Yet his personal triumph was short-lived, and the glory his achievement brought France could not protect him from the ravages of the Terror.--From publisher description.