Opening illustration of Histoire Naturelle, volume 1 (1749)
Thirteen
Covering Myself in Dust and Ashes
In September of 1749, the first three volumes of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, Avec la Description du Cabinet du Roi arrived at booksellers throughout France. Even before reading a word, customers could not help being impressed. The volumes were hefty (417,600 words long, spread across 1,600 cumulative pages), handsomely bound and printed, and bearing the pedigree of the king’s own Imprimerie Royale. Yet despite their length and detail, they examined only a single animal. After an opening salvo on systemists in general and Linnaeus in particular, Buffon spent most of the first volume and all of the second putting forth his theories of the Earth’s formation and development. It was not until the third volume that he took up the subject of what Linnaeus had labeled class Quadrupedia, order Anthropomorphia, species Homo.
Where Linnaeus had declared four variations, Buffon provided a spectrum. Drawing from what he considered credible sources “established on undoubted testimony,” he led the reader on a tour of ethnic groups across the globe, starting in the north and meandering across temperate zones. Surveying more than two hundred distinct cultures, he compiled travelers’ reports on dominant physical characteristics—passing through the arctic, he cites Linnaeus’s description of the Lapps as having a “snub & stubby nose, iris yellow-brown and tending towards black.” Through his choice of sources and citations Buffon reveals his prejudices, but they are primarily aesthetic in nature. The people of Kashmir are “celebrated for their beauty,” he reports, but so are the denizens of the Dara province of Morocco. As regards the women of Java, “their complexions beautiful…their hands delicate, their air soft, their eyes brilliant, their smile agreeable.”
These are not his words: He is quoting the explorer François Leguat, who visited Java in 1708. He quotes the privateer William Dampier in describing the natives of the coast of New Holland (present-day Australia) as “of all mankind, perhaps the most miserable…. They have no beard; their visage is long, nor does it contain one pleasing feature.” Buffon would later disavow many of these travelers’ accounts, noting their tendency to exaggerate in one direction or another. But his overall eye is clinical, assessing even his fellow Europeans in terms of regional variations.
Black or brown hair begins to be unfrequent in Britain, in Flanders, in Holland, and in the northern provinces of Germany; and in Denmark, Sweden, or Poland, it is seldom to be met with. Linnaeus informs us that the Goths are tall, their hair smooth and white as silver, and the iris of their eye is bluish. The Finlanders are muscular and fleshy, the hair long, and of a yellowish white, and the iris of the eye is of a deep yellow.
Far from falling into a handful of categories, humanity offered a panoply of features and colors. Why was this? Buffon suspected adaptation was at least a large part of it. People in hotter climates tended to have darker skin than those in more temperate zones, but this did not seem to apply consistently across the globe. “If blackness was the effect of heat, the natives of the Antilles, Mexico, Santa Fe, Guiana, the country of the Amazons, and Peru, would necessarily be so,” he wrote, “since those countries of America are situated in the same latitude with Senegal, Guinea, and Angola.” One possible factor was that the Americas had been settled more recently than other continents, by humans migrating across the Arctic Ocean.
I am inclined to believe, therefore, that the first men who set foot on America landed on some spot northwest of California; that the excessive cold of this climate obliged them to remove to the more southern parts of their new abode; that at first they settled in Mexico and Peru, from whence they afterwards diffused themselves over all the different parts of North and South America…. Many ages might elapse before a pale race would become altogether dark, but there is a probability that in time a pale people, transported from the north to the equator, would experience that change, especially if they were to change their manners, and to feed solely on the productions of the warm climate.
Adaptation manifested slowly, and perhaps was unfolding still. Humanity was a work in progress. As Buffon acknowledged, none of this accounted for individual variations in the human organism: height, hair color, facial features. These “ought to be considered as accidental, since we find in the same country, and in the same town, men whose hair is entirely different from one another.” But “accidental” was a concept he would come to explore further. In keeping with the fact that it was ostensibly a catalogue, the volume closed out with “Description of the part of the Cabinet which relates to the Natural History of Man,” inventoried thusly:
-
Bones
-
Bones cut to expose interior parts
-
Deformed bones
-
Bones deformed by defect of conformation
-
Hunchback & Stunted skeletons
-
Bone spurs and tooth decay
Despite its dry, clinical ending, the first printing of Histoire Naturelle sold out in six weeks. It was the beginning of a publishing phenomenon that would make Buffon the most popular French author of his lifetime, outselling Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. The first three volumes, and volumes to follow, would become a ubiquitous presence on European bookshelves, remaining in print in various editions and translations for more than 150 years. Demand was such that at one point Buffon was overseeing six editions that differed not in content but in page size, the better to fit on a variety of bookshelves. Buffon was already a respected public figure prior to publication, but Histoire Naturelle turned him into the embodiment of a new category of fame: the celebrity savant. It was a role he would play for the rest of his life.
Buffon’s indictment of systemist thinking, reaching a general audience for the first time, struck critics as particularly effective. “This attack is directed straight at the celebrated Linnaeus, an author, it is known, of a new system which destroys all previous ideas,” commented the Journal of Trévoux, which considered this section of Histoire Naturelle so persuasive it formally retracted its earlier praise of Linnaeus. “He [Buffon] shows the defects, even the ridiculousness of such a method.”
Those who read this section of the discourse will see that energy and freedom still remain among the writers of natural history. We add that despite our esteem for the learned Swedish botanist, we are not very sorry to see his system disturbed…. By virtue of the discourse of M. De Buffon we are supported, so to speak, in our manner of thinking, and we acquire strong arms to defend us against the partisans of novelty.
Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon’s assertion “that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter.” The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls.
“Everyone knows that spirit, which is immortal, and matter, which contains the seeds of its own dissolution, are two incommensurable orders of beings,” opined the article. “Thus there can be no gradation so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other.” (The Journal, a Jesuit publication, thereafter curtailed its praise of Buffon.) More religious objections arose in the pages of Ecclesiastical News, which attacked Buffon’s postulation that the planets had been formed of molten matter ejected from the sun, “which heat necessarily underwent a gradual decay: it was in this state of fluidity that they took their circular forms.”
The offending words here were “gradual decay.” Buffon was stating that the Earth was created not as the singular act described in Genesis but as a process—a process that, he impiously concluded, continued for millennia thereafter. It was a blatant attempt to break the lens of fixity, to impart a non-biblical timescale to creation. This was enough for the Ecclesiastical News to condemn Histoire Naturelle as “a book whose venom we believe ourself obliged to expose,” but Buffon went further still:
So the sun will die out probably for the same reason, but in some future age, and proportionately as far from the times that the earth and the other planets become extinct.
The death of planets, and of the sun itself? “Can one without blame leave uncriticized a work as pernicious as this?” the News thundered. “How, then, will Monsieur Buffon begin to lead these unbelievers back to the salutory yoke of faith? Beyond the injury which this book does to God, it dishonors the name of the king, to whom it is dedicated.” The anonymous reviewer quoted the book of Job (therefore I reprehend myself, and do penance in dust and ashes), urging Buffon to renounce his heresy in a similar fashion.
Buffon intended to do nothing of the sort. “I think of acting differently, and shall not reply by a single word,” he confided to a friend. “Everyone has his delicate shade of self-esteem. Mine goes so far as to think that certain people cannot even offend me.” But the controversy amplified, to the point that the Sorbonne—the Jardin’s ancient nemesis—decided to weigh in. Its theology faculty notified Buffon that Histoire Naturelle was officially under censure, “because it contained principles and maxims which are not in accordance with those of Religion.”
Silence was no longer an option. In March of 1751, Buffon replied with an explicit show of capitulation. “I disapprove of my behavior and I repent, by covering myself with dust and ashes,” he wrote, intentionally echoing the Ecclesiastical News’ invocation of Job. “I abandon whatever in my book concerns the formation of the earth.” To further appease, he declared his theories about the Earth merely “pure philosophical speculation,” assuring the theology faculty he believed wholeheartedly in the biblical account of Creation, “both as to the order of time and the circumstances of the facts.”
He included the Sorbonne letter and his response, verbatim, in the next volume of Histoire Naturelle. He did not, however, change or remove in subsequent printings a single word of what had already been published. The work rolled on.
To Buffon’s surprise, the gesture worked. “I have extricated myself to my very great satisfaction,” he wrote to a friend. “Of one hundred and twenty assembled doctors, I had one hundred and fifteen, and their decision contains words of praise for me, which I didn’t expect.” It was an act of what he confessed as “pérsiflage,” a flattering but patently insincere flutter of words. The incident inspired one of Buffon’s more famous quips: “It is better to be humble than be hung.”
It also posed the challenge of how to steer clear of religious sensibilities in the future. Buffon realized his mistake: He had employed no rhetorical safeguards. Commonly used by other authors whose work touched upon theologically sensitive matters, these were prominent passages carefully crafted to deflect religious censure, inserted in the text to buffer subsequent pages from controversy. Even a work as innocuous as De Uitlandsche Kapellen, Caspar Stoll’s four-volume study of butterflies, took pains to reassure the reader that it had been written “without losing sight of the all-powerful hand of the Creator.” Linnaeus, in Systema Naturae, had also used rhetorical safeguards, going out of his way “to attribute this progenitorial unity to an Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, namely God.”
It had bordered on naïve for Buffon to toss out a theory of planetary creation in the absence of similar caveats, or at least language framing it as an idle thought exercise. Mindful of the delicate roles he played, both as a member of King Louis XV’s court and as director of the already-controversial Jardin, Buffon took the lesson to heart. Future volumes of Histoire Naturelle would emerge from the presses generously laced with strategically placed rhetorical safeguards, some of which would puzzle later generations of readers, unaware of their original context.
In a move that further served to reestablish his respectability, Buffon got around to marrying. On September 22, 1752, he wed Marie-Françoise de Saint-Belin-Malain, a woman he had been courting for the past two years. She came from a noble family that had descended into poverty; the two had met when she was a charity student at Montbard’s convent school, an institution run by Buffon’s sister, who had become a nun. Marie-Françoise, described as “charming, gentle, pretty rather than beautiful,” had no dowry or useful connections. She would make no splash in social circles, much less in the royal court, preferring like her husband to remain in Montbard as much as possible. Their union would prove harmonious, and was, by all accounts, rooted in genuine affection. While eyebrows raised at the unlikely pairing, Buffon was undisturbed. “I will worry even less about criticisms of my marriage than those of my book,” Buffon quipped, before getting back to work.