This article argues that French royal institutions such as the Jardin du roi and the Académie royal des sciences helped transform chemistry into an ‘experimental science’ during the French Enlightenment. By establishing a loose coordination between public teaching and systematic research, French elite chemists cultivated a symbiotic relationship between chemical theory (the affinity table) and model experiments (displacement reactions) to transform chemistry into a ‘science’—a genre of systematic knowledge that could be codified and communicated to the literary public and contribute to the maintenance of the state. This development under the most advanced absolutist regime calls for a different understanding of the relationship between science and the Enlightenment.