History of the Academy, Academie des sciences

This is the Academie des sciences's own history page, published on the French institution's official website, describing its own founding and institutional development. As the academy's own account of itself it is the correct and authoritative source for what the institution states about its own history, membership traditions and self understanding, comparable to any learned society's own official history page. Its limit is exactly that self authorship, an institutional self account rather than an independent historian's study, so it is well suited to establishing basic founding facts and the institution's own framing of its history, while a claim requiring independent scholarly assessment of the academy's actual scientific influence over a given period needs a dedicated history of science source alongside it.