The enterprise involved manufacturing sulfuric, nitric, hydrochloric and other acids, alum, white lead and soda, among other substances.

Chaptal reported regularly on his studies in chemistry applied to industry and agriculture for the Société Royale des Sciences de Montpellier.

He communicated with the Controller General's department in Paris in 1782 regarding his projects for bottle-making, dyeing and the manufacture of artificial soda.

[6] Reflecting later in his life on the Revolution in France, Chaptal wrote: "In the widespread confusion and flood of all passions, the wise man will consider carefully the role he must play; it will appear to him equally dangerous in the midst of such agitation to remain either inactive or to participate.

But, in 1793, he led opposition in Montpellier against the perceived extremism of the Committee of Public Safety of the National Convention in Paris.

Fortunately for Chaptal, his value to the nation as an industrial chemist was deemed sufficient to excuse his politics, in part because the revolutionary armies required gunpowder.

In the Spring of 1794, by order of Lazare Carnot, the Minister of War, Chaptal was charged with the management of the major gunpowder factory at Grenelle in Paris.

Chaptal recounts in his memoirs how, with the help of his fellow scientists—Berthollet, Fourcroy, Guyton and others—he introduced new and more rapid methods for refining potassium nitrate (at Saint-Germain-des-Prés) and produced increased amounts of gunpowder at Grenelle.

[8] After Thermidor (July 1794), Chaptal spent about four years mainly in Montpellier teaching at the medical school and rebuilding his chemicals industry.

In 1798 he decided to move to Paris, leaving his business enterprises in Montpellier to his long-time partner, Étienne Bérard.

He then began to build up a second large chemicals industry near Paris at Ternes, an enterprise managed after 1808 by his son, Jean-Baptiste Chaptal (1782–1833).

By 1795, at the newly established École Polytechnique in Paris, Chaptal shared the teaching of courses in pure and applied chemistry with Claude-Louis Berthollet.

[9] Napoleon's first Minister of Interior (1799) was Berthollet's friend, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a scientist and mathematician and a poor administrator.

Chaptal created a Bureau of Statistics for his ministry to gather basic data from each of the departments on population and the condition of agriculture, commerce and industry.

Chaptal's believed that government should "protect and encourage industry, open new markets for its products and defend it against undue foreign competition.

Closely related to this initiative, Chaptal resumed François de Neufchâteau's plan for periodic expositions in Paris of the products of industry.

Napoleon brought in Chaptal as his key consultant for a special Conseil d'Administration du commerce et des manufactures (6 June 1810).

The other members were the Ministers of Interior and Foreign Affairs, plus the Director General of Customs, Jean-Baptiste Collin de Sussy, Napoleon's "douanier par excellence."

Chaptal's vision of a new industrial order in France that would bring scientists, business leaders and government officials together had to give way.

With Joseph Degérando, Benjamin Delessert and Scipion Perier, Chaptal organized a society to improve primary school instruction (1815).

[19] In 1819, Chaptal reflected on his career:If I might be permitted to speak for myself, I would say that I have lived in workshops (ateliers) and in the midst of artists for forty years; that I have created important businesses; that the general administration of commerce, agriculture and industry was conferred on me during my ministry; that the sessions of the Académie des Sciences, and those of the Société d'Encouragement which I presided over since its founding, allowed me to see and judge every day the progress and state .

In this decade, Chaptal wrote his 1823 study of the application of scientific principles to the cultivation of land, the Chemistry applied to agriculture.