AMPÈRE, ANDRÉ-MARIE - Enciclopedia Cattolica, Vol. I, p. 682

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

AMPÈRE, ANDRÉ-MARIE. — French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, b. at Poleymieux near Lyon on 22 Jan. 1775, d. at Marseilles on 11 June 1836. He is the greatest physicist France produced in the 19th century. His discovery of the laws of electricity and magnetism ranks alongside those of Newton and Volta. He was also a great mathematician and a keen philosopher. Educated by his father, he read D’Alembert and Diderot’s *Encyclopédie* with enthusiasm and from it learned to love science and the search for truth. He learned from his father to disregard titles and diplomas. Dissatisfied, eager to know every new idea, he wrote to a friend: “… I find only truths; teach me the truth.” His life was most unhappy; his father, a Girondin, was guillotined at Lyon on 21 Nov. 1793, leaving his son a will that reveals the loftiness and nobility of his soul. His mother, deeply religious, instilled in him a pure and sincere faith. In Ampère’s work, science and religion cannot be separated; both occupied his mind simultaneously, as is evident from his correspondence and the memoirs of his contemporaries.

C. A. Valson published in 1910 an unpublished memoir by him, *Sur les preuves historiques de la divinité du Christianisme*. His philosophical ideas, and in particular a dichotomous classification of all human knowledge, are contained in the two volumes: *Essai sur la philosophie des sciences*, Paris 1834, 1838, and 1843, published by his son Jean Jacques.

Bibl.: His writings on electricity are contained in *Mémoires sur l’Électrodynamique*, Paris 1858–87, published by the Société Française de Physique. His mathematical works, scattered in rare collections, also deserve to be republished. The Société des Amis d’A.-M. A. has published the *Correspondance du grand A.*, 2 vols., Paris 1936, and a supplementary volume, 1943. The second volume contains a complete bibliography of his works and unpublished manuscripts. B. Saint Hilaire, *Philosophie des deux A.*, Paris 1866, 2nd ed., 1870. M. M. Chevreux, *Journal et correspondance de A.-M. A.*, Paris 1872; by the same author, the two exceedingly rare volumes: *A.-M. A. et Jean-Jacques A., correspondance et souvenirs (de 1805 à 1864)*, Paris 1875. Among the biographies worthy of note are those by E. Littré and Ch.-A. Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to vol. II of the *Essai sur la philosophie des sciences* cited above; C. A. Valson, *La vie et les travaux d’A. M. A.*, 3rd ed., Lyon 1910; L. de Launay, *Le grand A., d’après des documents inédits*, Paris 1925; R. Sartori, *A.*, Brescia 1946. Cf. A. Eymieu, *La part des croyants dans les progrès de la science*, I, 3rd ed., Paris 1920, pp. 157–66.