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Cuvier’s History of the Natural Sciences

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Georges Cuvier

Foreword

Pietro Corsi

Texto completo

  • 1 Anonymous [Stendhal], “Sketches of Parisian Society”, The New Monthly Magazine, no. 16, dated May (...)
  • 2 Gunnell (Doris), Sutton Sharpe et ses amis français. Avec des lettres inédites, Paris: Librairie A (...)

1The second half of the 1820s was not an easy time for Cuvier. Already in 1826 the socialite and great French novelist Stendhal recorded in his Parisian chronicles, written for a British audience, that Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was becoming a formidable rival of his more famous colleague, the Sécretaire perpétuel of the Académie des sciences.1 At the same time, Cuvier’s role as influential member and at times President of the Council of State (the organ effectively running the country) did not render him popular with the liberal political opposition. For instance, the Anti-Sacrilege Act legislation (loi sur le sacrilège) passed in early January 1825 in the House (dominated by the ultra-royalists) was considered as excessive even by staunch Catholic royalists such as René de Chateaubriand. Protestant politicians such as Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) took a stand against it. Cuvier did not, and probably could not afford to. As a top-ranking civil servant and political appointee, Cuvier had no choice but to represent the reasons of the Government and of the Court: he thus spoke repeatedly to defend legislation fiercely opposed by liberals and moderate royalists. From within his own inner circle, frequent guests at his soirées and even aspiring members of his family spread rumours on the unacceptable political behaviour of the great anatomist and naturalist. Sutton Sharpe (1797-1843), a London lawyer courting Cuvier’s stepdaughter Sophie Duvaucel (1789-1867), talked publicly of the negative reactions Cuvier’s speeches on behalf of the Government were eliciting2.

  • 3 Desmoulins (Antoine), Histoire naturelle des races humaines, Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1826, pp. vi (...)
  • 4 Appel (Toby), The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin, Oxford: Oxf (...)

2The political critique also spilled into the realm of scientific debates. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire spent much of the second half of the 1820s engaged in systematic attacks and innuendos against Cuvier, whom he repeatedly accused of preventing the progress of knowledge to serve his political agenda and masters. Needless to say, Cuvier was not slow in answering in tone. Geoffroy reiterated the view that Cuvier had given up on science, and that his natural history of fishes was in fact the work of Cuvier’s pupil Achille Valenciennes (1794-1865). These were expensive volumes, richly illustrated, good for the coffee table, radical naturalist and politician François-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878) hinted. The unfortunate and irascible Antoine Desmoulins (1794-1828), a brilliant collaborator of François Magendie, (1763-1855) publicly denounced Cuvier’s absenteeism as a teacher: everybody knew, he claimed, that assistants took care of the vast majority of his teaching. Desmoulins even appealed to Parliament to overrule Cuvier’s decision to ban him from consulting collections at the Muséum: these were properties of the Nation, he protested, not of baron Cuvier.3 The mounting political tension that finally erupted into the July 1830 Revolution took its toll on Cuvier’s reputation. Still, as many officials of the Restoration regime, Cuvier survived the Revolution, in spite of attacks against his person and the deplorable (in the eyes of critics) state of institutions he was associated with, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in particular.4

3At the scientific level, his counterattack against Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the famous debate on the Unity of Composition of the early months of 1830 showed naturalists and the cultivated public who was still the master of detail and of rhetoric. In his Règne animal, Cuvier had established the existence of four main plans of organisation for all animals, his famous “embranchements”. During the 1810s, Geoffroy worked to prove that all vertebrates were composed of the same osteological segments and organs, variously disposed and modified to suit the endless varieties of conditions organisms lived in. He also embarked upon embryological research to prove that at the foetal level the unity of type of the vertebrates was even more visible: the foetuses of birds, for instance, showed traces of teeth, before beaks took their place in development. Cuvier applauded this confirmation of his own views. Yet, during the 1820s, and with increasing boldness, Geoffroy suggested that the vertebrae, the basic units of vertebrate osteology, were in fact present also in invertebrates. Crabs, for instance, had vertebrae turned into an articulated shell: the animals lived within their skeleton.

  • 5 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Étienne), “Buffon”, Encyclopédie nouvelle, vol. 2, 1837, pp. 105-111.

4They did not belong to an ontologically distinct “embranchement”, but highlighted instead the communal features shared by structural types Cuvier had declared irremediably distinct. According to Geoffroy, it was now possible to speculate by analogy that all animals were built on a single plan, a hypothesis Buffon had already suggested, but immediately refuted.5 It was now the role of Geoffroy’s “philosophical anatomy” to prove this major discovery. Geoffroy’s pupils less modestly announced in the press that as England had had Newton, and Germany Kepler, France could now boast Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

  • 6 Reynaud (J.), “Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire”, in Sarrut (Germain) & Bourg (Edme-Théodore) (sous la dir.) (...)

5During the 1830 debate, and up to Cuvier’s death in May 1832, Geoffroy’s style, which Cuvier scorned as appropriate to a cook (“le style d’un cuisinier”), was no match against the power of a mind and of a voice that had mesmerized audiences for thirty years. Cuvier systematically challenged his colleague to pay attention to the hard facts of observation, before indulging in poetic flights and hasty generalizations. As it is often the case, those who admired Cuvier kept doing so, whereas those who sided with Geoffroy extolled his superior philosophical depth, from Wolfgang Goethe, Antoine Étienne Renaud Augustin Serres (1786-1868) and Jean-Baptiste-Geneviève-Marcelin Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778-1846), to several radicalized young naturalists.6

6Shortly before this last public battle, tragedy had struck Cuvier’s family. In the late summer of 1827, Clémentine (born in 1805), the young daughter the anatomist adored, died a few days before her marriage. Cuvier was devastated; for two months he did not attend the Committee of Public Education he was in charge of, and closed his salon for almost a year, thus losing a major venue of influence and information at a very delicate moment for his career and for the ruling Ultra-Royalist governments. His fighting back, however, did not start with the head on collision clash with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. It started with the first lecture at the Collège de France on the history of life sciences, on December 15, 1829. The cultivated public and the press were ecstatic, even those who had been critical of him. On January 3d, 1830, issue no. 1 of Le national carried an announcement that complements the press notices already quoted by the curators of the present edition of Cuvier’s last work:

  • 7 [Anonymous], “Cours de M. Cuvier au Collège de France. Histoire des sciences naturelles”, Le Natio (...)

Depuis dix ans, M. Cuvier n’avait fait aucune leçon publique. Les amis de la science voyaient avec peine ce savant, distrait par des fonctions et de devoirs d’autre genre, abandonner chaque année son enseignement à des suppléans. La célébrité du professeur et le sujet des leçons de cette année font de ce cours un objet d’intérêt général. On s’empresse pour voir et entendre le grand naturaliste, qui a attaché son nom à un science toute entière, qui a fait l’histoire d’un monde, détruit d’après quelques débris restés comme échantillons, dont les idées géologiques et anatomiques ont tant de fois occupé l’Europe savante.7

  • 8 Anonymous [Stendhal], “Sketches of Parisian Society”, The New Monthly Magazine, no. 22, dated May (...)

7Formal lecture courses had become a major political and social event in the spring of 1828, one year before Cuvier entered the social fray. According to Stendhal, who wrote a perceptive account of the atmosphere surrounding the events, publishers paid stenographers to take down each lecture, which was then printed in haste.8 This was made possible by the inauguration in January 1828 of a new government, placed under the strong political leadership of royalist moderate the Viscount de Martignac (1788-1832). Censorship was watered down, and people condemned to silence were given their voices back. Scholars and politicians until then banned from appearing in public became the heroes in the eyes of the growing opposition to extreme right-wing policies. A favourite of the cultivated public was the young philosopher and powerful orator Victor Cousin (1792-1867), then engaged in tracing the development of the Western intellect towards the eclectic philosophy he was proposing as mediation between the French and the German traditions, between sensualism and metaphysics. Equally successful was Abel-François Villemain (1790-1870), who had lost his political appointments because considered too liberal; he gave lectures on the history of French literature, immediately published in instalments and then in volumes (Cours de la littérature française, 5 vols, 1828-1829). The future Prime Minister and leading Protestant intellectual François Guizot (1787-1874), he too a victim of the ultra-royalists, had been restored by Martignac to his Sorbonne chair and to his seat in the Council of State. His lecture course the same years was equally printed in haste, becoming a classic of French historiography, the Histoire de la civilisation en Europe.

8At the end of the 1820s, lectures having history as their themes had become very popular. It was indeed difficult to secure a place, and seats near the speaker were sold at very high price. History provided a reassuring sense of continuity of some sorts: by inserting the discussion of dramatic changes within a long-term narrative framework, history contributed to healing the trauma of the Revolution —in itself the object of intense historical scrutiny. It was probably Cuvier’s ambition to show he was capable to compete with the liberal stars of 1828, and to claim his entitlement to the history, and therefore to the intellectual ownership of the field of research that had made him famous. The history of natural sciences deserved a leading place alongside the history of literature, of philosophy, and of the Nation: it deserved an equal status in élite culture. He was taking a public stand where the public was, in the lecture hall.

  • 9 Sprengel (Kurt Polycarp Joachim), Essai d’une histoire pragmatique de la médecine [new ed., tr. by (...)

9The history of scientific disciplines was not absent from the French and the European intellectual scene, as Theodore W. Pietsch has reminded us in his Introduction to the present edition. Yet, French cultivated readers of the time knew that very few Frenchman could rival the productions of German scholars. The great botanist Kurt Sprengler (1766-1833, admired by Charles Darwin for his studies on the relationship between insects and flowers), for instance, had written a ponderous Versuch einer pragmatischen Geschichte der Arzneikunde (1800-1803), duly translated into French in a multivolume “history of medicine”.9 The work, still today an interesting reading, situated medical theories and especially practices within their historical contexts, providing charts detailing major dynastic, religious or intellectual contexts. The zoologist Johann Baptiste von Spix (1781-1826) had produced a very erudite history of zoology, showing, like Sprengel had done, a Teutonic mastery of a vast literature covering the entire Old Continent, and of narratives of voyages of exploration worldwide. Histories of medicine, of botany, of zoology, and of chemistry poured out of the German-speaking countries.

  • 10 Royer-Collard (Hippolyte), “De l’état actuel de la physiologie”, Revue française, no. 3, 1828, pp. (...)

10In France, young liberal naturalists and philosophers promoted German scientific culture as an implicit critique of the status quo in France: French institutions, proud of their monopolistic power, failed to match the output of scores of German Universities, journals, publishers. Important German natural sciences textbooks and monographs were translated into French and sold throughout the world, in England in particular. To Hippolyte Royer Collard (1802-1850), nephew of Pierre-Paul Royer Collard, the famous political figurehead of the “Doctrinaires”, even Geoffroy should have been more generous in acknowledging the priority and superiority of German “philosophical” natural sciences.10

  • 11 Cuvier (Georges), “Nature”, Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, vol. 34, 1825, pp. 261-268.

11The pro-German attitude of the younger generation of naturalists and sympathizers of German philosophy of nature added interest towards Cuvier’s lectures. After all, in a widely read article he had contributed in 1825 to the Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles he nominally edited, he had denounced the dangerous pantheism of Naturphilosophie, of German organic recapitulation theories, and of the inroads these doctrines were making in France, at the hand of Geoffroy, Serres, and their acolytes in the press.11 Thus, even pro-German sympathizers were eager to hear what Cuvier had to say talking from the Chair of the Collège he had deserted for so long.

12Friends and foes of Cuvier agreed that the naturalist had successfully reminded his audience of what foundations his fame rested upon. Even the pro-German Le Globe took favourable notice of the lectures and printed extended summaries. Commentators of the past and of the present have expanded upon Cuvier’s widely acknowledged oratory excellence. It is easy for us to imagine Cuvier applying to the preparation of the lectures the working methods Philippe Taquet has vividly described, having his assistants preparing books and sources for him neatly arranged on tables. Though the critical examination of the volumes of the Histoire des sciences naturelles has never been attempted, it is possible to surmise that a vast historical literature, especially from Germany, percolated into his data gathering machinery and filled his notes and oral deliveries. His exceptional memory and equally exceptional literary proficiency allowed him to turn out lecture after lecture, until the last one, probably devoted to German natural sciences and Naturphilosophie, the one he delivered just days before his death, on May 8, 1832.

  • 12 Cercle de la librairie, Bibliographie de la France ou Journal général de l’Imprimerie et de la Lib (...)

13Professor Pietsch has already expanded upon the history of the work, and the role T. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy played in preserving a printed memory of the event. The self-appointed editor of the lectures boasted that he had obtained permission to go ahead and publish his notes by Cuvier himself, and this appears to be true, in spite of contemporary denials. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy started early in 1830 to sell instalments through subscription, a few lectures at the time, as it was then the practice with most publishing. According to the Bibliographie de la France, even the last lecture of May 8, 1832, was put on sale; a later bibliographical source claimed that sales of instalments continued into 1833. A first volume collecting the earliest instalments appeared in 1831.12 We ignore why Magdeleine de Saint-Agy, or his publisher, stopped the publication in volume format. It is possible that people who had already acquired the instalments did not bother to buy the much more expensive bound collection. Volume one reappeared in 1841, the only change with respect to the 1831 edition being the new title page, and four successive volumes followed up to 1845.

14From 1839 to 1841 Cuvier’s nemesis, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777-1850), delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the Histoire des sciences de l’organisation, to be published in 1845 (3 vols), almost entirely re-written by the Abbé François-Louis-Michel Maupied (1814-1898). In Section VII of volume three, expanding upon the last lectures of 1841, De Blainville did not mince words against his defunct colleague, whom he described as an eclectic man lost in details: the true leading naturalist of the first three decades of the century had been Lamarck, not Cuvier. It is thus possible to formulate the hypothesis that in 1841 De Blainville’s public lectures provided the marketing opening to printing again, and updating, Cuvier’s own version of the history of natural sciences, thus re-establishing his “true” role in the history of natural sciences.

15The final volume, the fifth, was subtitled “Complémentaire”, and in the title page Magdeleine de Saint-Agy was clearly indicated as the author who had completed the work. In volume one, 1831, he was only designed as the editor and compiler; in the reprint of 1841 and in volumes 2, 3 and 4, he was also credited with authorship, albeit alongside his work of editing and filling in information. Only volume 5, therefore, made it clear that the editor had become full author. Appropriately, the final volume contained frequent references to events of the 1830s and the early 1840s. The message to the potential readers was thus unequivocal: the new edition of Cuvier’s Histoire was worth buying, since the story had been brought forward to the early 1840s.

  • 13 Magdeleine de Saint-Agy (T.), “Buffon”, in Martin (Charles), Leçons analytiques de littérature et (...)

16We do not know how freely Magdeleine de Saint-Agy treated his own original notes and was faithful to the lectures as they were delivered, though instalments appeared when the memory of the oral delivery was still vivid: there was surely a limit to free interpolation. However, the difficult textual analysis to track down Cuvier’s, and Magdeleine de Saint-Agy’s sources has not been undertaken, as yet, nor the comparison between accounts in the press and the first volume of instalments. In the age of Gallica, Google Books, Internet Archive, and the Biodiversity Library, it is hoped that a crowd-sourcing scholarly enterprise may perhaps be attempted. More of Cuvier’s manuscripts might surface, some of the original instalments could be found in libraries, and more information on Magdeleine de Saint-Agy will hopefully emerge. There are still many questions attentive readers are likely to ask themselves when confronted with this impressive albeit elusive work.13

Notas

1 Anonymous [Stendhal], “Sketches of Parisian Society”, The New Monthly Magazine, no. 16, dated May 20 1826, p. 8. Stendhal nicknamed Cuvier “Mammoth”. Outram (Dorinda), Georges Cuvier. Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, VIII + 299 p. has been the first historian to call attention on Cuvier’s constant negotiations to maintain his political and scientific leadership. The forthcoming secondo volume of Philippe Taquet’s biography of Cuvier will add important dimensions to our understanding of Cuvier’s private life and public career (vol. 1., Georges Cuvier, naissance d’un génie, was published in 2006, Paris: Odile Jacob, 539 p.)

2 Gunnell (Doris), Sutton Sharpe et ses amis français. Avec des lettres inédites, Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1925, vii + 261 p. (Revue de littérature comparée. Bibliothèque; 26). Orr (M.), “Keeping in the family: the extraordinary case of Cuvier’s daughters”, in Burek (Cynthia V.) & Higgs (Bettie) (eds), The Role of Women in the History of Geology, London: The Geological Society, 2007, pp. 277-287 (Geological Society special publication; 281). Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard [ed. and tr. by Stewart Jean & Knight B.C.J.G.], London: [s. n.], 1958, p. 180.

3 Desmoulins (Antoine), Histoire naturelle des races humaines, Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1826, pp. viii-xxxiv and Pétition adressée à la Chambre des Pairs contre le Bon Cuvier, en sa qualité de professeur administrateur du Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Rouen: C. Bloquet, 1827, 16 p., in-8°. Raspail (François-Vincent), “Côteries scientifiques”, Annales des sciences d’observation, vol. 3, 1830, pp. 151-159, p. 157; on Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s repeated attacks against Cuvier, see Corsi (Pietro), Lamarck et les sciences naturelles de son temps, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001, ch. VIII.

4 Appel (Toby), The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 305 p.

5 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Étienne), “Buffon”, Encyclopédie nouvelle, vol. 2, 1837, pp. 105-111.

6 Reynaud (J.), “Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire”, in Sarrut (Germain) & Bourg (Edme-Théodore) (sous la dir.), Biographie des hommes du jour: industriels, conseillers d’État, artistes, chambellans, députés, prêtres, militaires, écrivains, rois, diplomates, pairs, gens de justice, princes, espions fameux, savans. tome II, 2e partie, Paris: Krabbe, 1836, p. 404: “M. Cuvier’s glory is on the wane, M. Geoffroy’s is rising”.

7 [Anonymous], “Cours de M. Cuvier au Collège de France. Histoire des sciences naturelles”, Le National, no. 1, 3 janvier 1830, p. 1.

8 Anonymous [Stendhal], “Sketches of Parisian Society”, The New Monthly Magazine, no. 22, dated May 22 1828, pp. 580-583.

9 Sprengel (Kurt Polycarp Joachim), Essai d’une histoire pragmatique de la médecine [new ed., tr. by Geiger Charles-Frédéric], Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1809-1810, 2 vols (xxxii + 578; xx + 630 p.), ills, in-8°, Histoire de la médecine depuis son origine jusqu’au dix-neuvième siècle, Paris: Déterville, 1815-1820, 9 vols, in-8°. Spix (Johann Baptist von), Geschichte und Beurtheilung aller Systeme in der Zoologie: nach ihrer Entwiklungsfolge von Aristoteles bis auf die gegenwärtige Zeit, Nürnberg: Milbradt, 1811, xxvi + 710 p., in-8°.

10 Royer-Collard (Hippolyte), “De l’état actuel de la physiologie”, Revue française, no. 3, 1828, pp. 28-66, and “Considérations sur le développement du foetus humain”, Revue française, no. 5, 1828, pp. 77-119.

11 Cuvier (Georges), “Nature”, Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles, vol. 34, 1825, pp. 261-268.

12 Cercle de la librairie, Bibliographie de la France ou Journal général de l’Imprimerie et de la Librairie, Paris: Pillet, vol. 21, 1832, pp. 148, 308, 310. Louandre (Charles) & Bourguelot (Félix), Littérature française contemporaine, tome troisième, [Chrz-Fu]: 1827-1844, Paris: F. Daguin, 1848, p. 123: the lectures “avaient été déjà publiées par livraisons de 1830 à 1833”.

13 Magdeleine de Saint-Agy (T.), “Buffon”, in Martin (Charles), Leçons analytiques de littérature et de style... par une Société de littérateurs et de grammairiens, Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1838, vol. 2, pp. 169-192, is the only publication by him I am personally aware of, a part from the Histoire.

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