Duhem was born in Paris in 1861 to a father of Flemish origins employed in the textiles sector and mother from a middle-class background. He was educated privately during a childhood that was plagued by the events of the Franco-Prussian War, which compelled the family to evacuate to Bordeaux. After returning to Paris he lived through the months of the Commune in an atmosphere of abhorrence, as the Duhem family, that had grown up with a strict religious education, felt a loathing of the split between the State and the Church, the secularisation of the schools, the nationalisation of ecclesiastical property and the violation of consecrated land.

Despite the family tragedy of the death from diphtheria of a brother and sister, after 1872 Pierre Duhem continued his studies at the Collège Stanislas, an institute in the Catholic tradition, where he himself would later say that he acquired the theoretical and critical foundations from the physicist Jules Moutier, whose studies of thermodynamics were the first steps for important future developments. In 1882 he enrolled at the École normale supérieure, where he was always top of the class and where he graduated in mathematics and physics. His passion for theoretical physics, as well as leading him to refuse a job in chemical bacteriology that he was offered immediately after his degree, encouraged him to try for an academic career, but his doctoral dissertation on Le potentiel thermodynamique et ses applications à la mécanique chimique et à l’étude des phénomènes électriques was rejected by a panel made up of the physicist Gabriel Lippmann and the mathematicians Charles Hermite and Émile Picard. This decision seems to have been influenced by the political differences of the lay and anticlerical examiners towards a conservative Catholic candidate, unbending and inclined to argue, and the academic hatred caused by the rejection in the dissertations of the theory of Thomsen-Berthelot on the production of heat in chemical changes. Marcellin Berthelot, a friend of Lippmann, had apparently placed a veto on Duhem’s admission as a lecturer in Paris, forcing him to live forever outside his native city. Years later Duhem turned down the chair of the history of science at the Collège de France, declaring that he would return to Paris only as professor of theoretical physics, something that never happened.

Despite everything, Éditions Hermann decided to publish his dissertation anyway, and a second panel, made up of the physicist Edmond Bouty, the mathematician Gaston Darboux and Henri Poincaré awarded him his doctorate in 1888, thanks to a dissertation on magnetic induction. The preceding year Duhem had already been made maître de conférences in Lille, but despite his substantial production of papers on hydrodynamics, on elasticity and acoustics, on electricity and magnetism and on physical chemistry, as a result of the differences resulting from trivial reasons, he moved first to Rennes and then, in 1894, to Bordeaux.

Alongside his main subjects of research that were driven by his belief in a generalised thermodynamics as a foundation of physical theory, and were later brought together in his Traité d’énergétique ou de thermodynamique générale in 1911, Duhem pursued questions of methodology and historico-scientific works. His studies on philosophy and history of science, arising probably out of his desire to defend his principles of theoretical physics, became over time independent lines of enquiry. His epistemological publications, in the first place La théorie physique, son objet et sa structure of 1906, defining the limits of the scientific method, the relationship between phenomenon and theoretical physics and the role and prerogatives of the theoretical physicist, were based on arguments of a historical kind, which led to a massive campaign of documentary research that later materialised in volumes such as Les origines de la statique (1905-1906), Études sur Léonard de Vinci, ceux qu’il a lus, ceux qui l’ont lu (1906-1913), ΣΟΖΕΙΝ ΤΑ ΦΑΙΝΟΜΕΝΑ: essai sur la notion de théorie physique de Platon à Galilée (1908) and Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (1914-1954), planned in twelve volumes but left unfinished.

The fundamental thesis that underpinned the historical output of Duhem was the idea of an uninterrupted thread between late medieval science and modern scientific thinking, from Leonardo da Vinci, influenced by Giordano Nemorario and his school, to Galileo and his dynamics, the direct descendant of the theories of impetus of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme. Favaro summed up very clearly the position of his colleague: “scientific development is subject to the law of continuity; […] the great discoveries were almost always the fruit of a slow and complicated preparation, pursued down the centuries; […] the doctrines that the greatest thinkers came to affirm are the result of a multitude of efforts brought together from a mass of unknown workers. Thus neither Galileo, nor Descartes, nor Newton would have been able to formulate any doctrine at all that was not connected through innumerable links to the teachings of those who had come before them”.

Duhem’s approach and analyses did not go down well with his colleagues, especially in Italy. Favaro himself felt compelled to write a note in Galileo Galilei e i Doctores Parisienses (1918), to downgrade the Juvenilia of Galileo to a school notebook (and not a theoretical text resulting from long analysis), thus proving through documents how “the main argument made against” the eternal object of his studies was “completely devoid of value”. He also reaffirmed “the great rule that in critical studies on the history of science it is essential to avoid attributing to authors who are not modern the conclusions that appear to us to be immediately following from the assumptions that they propose, or assumptions necessary for the outcome at which they arrive”.

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms, Favaro acknowledged in Duhem great merits for “quality of intelligence”, “strength of knowledge”, “breadth of learning” and “rigorous method of scientific enquiry”. The mass of his contributions was such as to “make us believe that one man was not enough for so much and promote the idea that it was the work of a number of scholars with the same name”. And beyond the disagreements, because of his undoubted ability to use unexplored sources and because of the originality of his investigations, Antonio Favaro saw in Duhem “almost the only representative” of historico-scientific studies in France after the death of Paul Tannery, as well as a precious collaborator for his own research, as is also demonstrated by the biographical notes of almost unknown people, gathered together at his request and preserved among the autographs in his archive. Pierre Duhem died prematurely at Cabrespine in 1916.