The opposition raised against lightning conductors in France was entirely personal, its origin being due to the wounded vanity of a very estimable but likewise a very weak man, the already mentioned Abbé Nollet. Born in 1700, the Abbé had very early in life gained renown for his scientific researches, and after a while devoted much of his time to electrical experiments, in conjunction with two other celebrated men, Dufay and De Réaumur. When the report of Franklin’s discoveries arrived in Europe, the Abbé Nollet was generally looked upon as the greatest of living ‘electricians,’ and the general homage paid to him having roused his self-esteem to an inordinate degree, he got fiercely irritated that another man, a previously quite unknown person, in a distant land, should have dared to snatch from him his scientific laurels. Accordingly, he used all his influence among the public, in the scientific world, and at the French court, where he held a high position as tutor of the King’s children, not only to depreciate Franklin’s lightning conductors, but to set them down as something like an imposture. In various treatises and articles published in learned papers, Abbé Nollet sought to prove that the person called Benjamin Franklin--in whose very existence he formerly refused to believe, but which he now grudgingly acknowledged--was an individual unacquainted even with the first principles of the science of electricity, and that his proposal for protecting houses against lightning was so absurd as not to be worth engaging the attention of any thinking man. More than this, he argued that the proposed lightning conductors were not only inefficacious, but positively dangerous. By thus joining in the vulgar cry of lightning being, so to speak, sucked from the clouds by Franklin’s conductors, the learned Abbé had the satisfaction of retarding their introduction in his own, as well as other European countries, for a number of years.
In France itself the thus awakened resistance to the setting-up of lightning conductors was strikingly shown by an incident which occurred at the town of St. Omer, not far from Calais. A manufacturer settled here, who had been in America, and there learnt to appreciate the usefulness of Franklin’s lightning conductors, had one made for his own house, and quietly fixed it to wall and roof. But the populace no sooner heard of it when there arose a public disturbance, and the iron rod was torn down by force. So far from repressing the rioters, the municipality of St. Omer, acting under priestly influence, forbade the manufacturer to erect another lightning conductor, on the ground that it was ‘against law and religion.’ Thereupon the bold manufacturer, a man of English descent, to try his right, appealed to the tribunals, and the judges at last, after protracted pleadings, not being able to discover any statutes against the fastening of metal rods to buildings, declared that the thing might be done, but with precautions. The lawyer who pleaded the case of the lightning conductors before the French tribunals at this momentous period was a very young man, quite unknown to fame at the time, but destined for a superabundance of it. His name was Robespierre.