Dedication of bust of Linnaeus in the Jardin, August 23, 1790
Twenty-three
Germinal, Floreal, Thermidor, Messidor
On the evening of August 23, 1790, a little over a year into what was now unquestionably a revolution, a torchlit procession marched through the gates of the Jardin du Roi.
They were revolutionaries (or at least they billed themselves as such), but not revolutionaries of the stripe that had overrun the Bastille prison, killed its warden, and paraded his head impaled on a pike. These styled themselves as revolutionaries of the intellect, and they carried not a head but a bust, crafted of stucco but painted to resemble bronze. A bust of Linnaeus.
The forty-year dispute of Linnaeus and Buffon had not ended with their deaths. Systematists and complexists continued to clash, winning different degrees of influence in various countries. In Italy, Linnean systematics had been banned outright until 1773, when Clement XIII relaxed a papal proscription enacted fifteen years earlier. The British were mixed on the subject. The Germans, still registering the objections of Haller and Siegesbeck, had given it a tepid reception. In France, where Buffon and his circle had held sway for decades, Linnean thought had been driven to the fringes. But in the topsy-turvy year of 1790, the fringes marched steadily toward the center.
Since the fall of the Bastille—only a mile away, directly across the Seine—the staff and students of the Jardin had kept a low profile, anxiously awaiting the seemingly inevitable moment when the revolution addressed the matter of their existence. It was unobtrusive as far as institutions went, a gated patch of green on the edge of the city, but it was still the Garden of the King, containing the Cabinet of the King. The royal association could not be denied.
As Buffon lay dying in 1788, his official successor d’Angvillier had decided to pass the appointment on to his brother, the Marquis de la Billaderie. The marquis was a military man, a grand marshal in the king’s army, with no experience in natural history and no inclination to acquire any. He did not move into Buffon’s house on the premises, routinely ignored requests from the staff, and even before the revolution hadn’t bothered with one of the most important aspects of Buffon’s old job, which was advocating for the Jardin’s financial allocations at court. With far weightier matters to deal with, neither Louis XVI (at the time still clinging to the throne, as a constitutional monarch) nor the new National Assembly had taken notice of the Jardin’s rapidly dwindling operational funds—or, for that matter, of the Jardin at all. The Jardinistes tightened their belts and quietly coped, hoping to wait out the tide of unrest.
But others saw unrest as opportunity. One of them was Auguste Broussonet, permanent secretary of the Royal Agricultural Society and a private, but ardent, Linnean. In a published speech calculated to inject natural history into the roiling national discourse, he launched an attack on Buffon and his complexist legacy. Conceding that Buffon was “gifted with a lively and penetrating mind, with a vast and fertile imagination,” he nevertheless concluded that the late intendant “seemed to bear his eyes upon this rich confusion of things only to paint them in this very confusion, and to throw variety upon the great spectacle.” Linnaeus, on the other hand (Broussonet concluded) was “filled with a genius no less vast, no less ardent, but which he submitted to observation,” who “saw in this mixture of beings only an apparent disorder that it was necessary to dispel, to render more useful natural knowledge.”
This was a tactical strike. Broussonet was one of the leaders of a clandestine group calling themselves the Société de Linné de Paris. Formed in December of 1787 (while Buffon was still alive), the SLP met in secret—to escape official attention, and to mask obvious acts of betrayal—in hopes of taking advantage of Buffon’s expected passing. When no advantage materialized, the secret meetings tapered away; after only one year, the society was effectively defunct. But the growing air of change had led to a revitalization, and now the group was at least sixteen members strong.
Broussonet, a provincial originally from the Mediterranean city of Montpellier, occupied a peripheral position in Parisian savantry, an elite that had long held Buffon at its very center. But he was motivated by more than a desire for petty vengeance. As a physician turned agriculturalist, Broussonet was steeped in the practical concerns of natural history, not its abstractions. For those who did not have the luxury of engaging in pure research, whose chief concerns were identifying and utilizing individual species, there was simply no substitute for the sexual system, artificial as it was. To dismiss Linnaeus as distortive and flawed was to place the life’s work of savants like himself in a similar light. Broussonet was sincere in wanting to banish “the old errors and its prejudices” (as another SLP member put it), “to better see the Nature that Buffon had painted in broad strokes…to return to France the importance that it must have in the science of natural history.”
Other members had different motivations. Another leader was André Thouin, who’d been a lifetime beneficiary of Buffon’s largesse. Buffon had hired Thouin’s father as an ordinary gardener, then promoted him to the post of head gardener; when the father died, Buffon gave the job to André, despite the fact that he was just seventeen at the time. Over the years Buffon considered Thouin one of his most trusted associates, often leaving him in charge of the Jardin when decamping for Montbard. But even before Buffon’s passing, Thouin had decided to throw in his lot with the Linneans, knowing his future options would be limited. There would be a changing of the guard, and the informal authority of a second-generation gardener with no formal education seemed shaky ground on which to stand.
Having tested the winds with Broussonet’s speech, in August of 1790 the Société de Linné de Paris decided to go public, albeit in a low-key manner: They would install a bust of Linnaeus in a forested area just outside the village of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a half-hour’s carriage ride from Paris. The ceremony backfired. The locals, seeing a group of well-dressed men carrying a large wooden crate as well as several smaller tin boxes (intended to gather botanical specimens along the way), grew suspicious and formed a crowd, driving them away. Bolder, or at least less ambiguous, action seemed called for, so the SLP changed tactics. Instead of scurrying around on the outskirts of Paris, they petitioned the National Assembly for the right to place the bust inside the Jardin itself.
In carefully worded language, Broussonet and company repackaged Linnaeus as a scientific revolutionary, a true man of the people, asking only to humbly erect a “plain stone monument” to a man they referred to not as Sir Carl von Linné but Charles Linné, democratizing the name by stripping away the “Sir,” and emphasizing its Frenchness by eliminating the German prefix von. Placing such a tribute in the middle of the so-called Jardin du Roi would clearly strike a blow against the ancien régime. The growing SLP had sixty-three signatures to affix to the petition. They sent it to the National Assembly and waited.
They did not have to wait long. Despite the fact that the National Assembly had no clear jurisdiction over the Jardin du Roi, they approved the petition. On the evening of August 23, 1790, a torchlit procession marched through the Jardin gates and gathered just below the promontory of the Gloriette, at the base of a large cedar tree. They quickly erected the pedestal, which was painted to resemble marble, and placed upon it the bust of Charles Linné.
Speeches were delivered. The society’s members, as well as newcomers beginning to style themselves Linneans, wrote their names on bits of paper and placed them in a vase at the base of the monument. The names were set afire, illuminating the column’s poetical inscription: In this beautiful garden, Linnaeus transports my eyes to paradise. But what a strange destiny.
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Watching this spectacle with undisguised disdain was a nineteen-year-old named Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, usually referred to by the surname Geoffroy. “I myself witnessed the extravagant tumult of zealots gathering at a designated time in the gardens embellished by Buffon to insult the memory of this great man,” he later recalled. “The bust of the foreigner, religiously placed under the shade of the great cedar of Lebanon, was…the glorification of the memory of Linnaeus. However, it was less a question of honoring such a great reputation than of annihilating the development of the school of Buffon.”
Geoffroy was a recent graduate of a local Catholic school, where he’d developed an interest in mineralogy and been pointed to the Jardin by one of the teaching priests. He considered himself merely a beginner in “the school of Buffon,” and like the other Jardinistes could only look on in silence as the SLP began to treat the Jardin as their own, taking over the auditorium to conduct their meetings and initiate new members. As their numbers grew into the hundreds, the organization changed its name: No longer the Société de Linné de Paris, they became the Société d’Histoire Naturelle. This was not to distance themselves from Carl Linné but to eliminate any distance whatsoever. As far as they were concerned, Linnaeus was natural history. An amateur naturalist named Grandmaison (yet another of the Société’s co-founders) took the opportunity to denounce “Buffon, whose writings seduced by the magic of style and which fixated on him the attention of his fellow citizens and all of Europe.”
It cannot be denied that he has delayed the progress of true knowledge in Natural History, by the contempt he manifested and inspired, of systems and methods without which this science can only offer confusion, can only be an inextricable labyrinth.
Despite the occupation and victorious rhetoric, there was still no official word on the Jardin’s fate. De la Billaderie resigned as intendant on July 1, 1791. His replacement, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was even less qualified to lead the institution. Saint-Pierre was an author whose novel Paul et Virginie was a bestseller at the time, but his sole connection to natural history had been his friendship with the late philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had notably lavished praise on both Buffon and Linnaeus. In 1770, while visiting Buffon at Montbard, Rousseau had ostentatiously knelt to kiss the threshold; he was, as he explained, about to enter holy ground. But the following year he’d also written fawningly to Linnaeus, imploring him to “receive with health, Monsieur, the homage of one of the most ignorant but most zealous of your disciples…. Monsieur, continue to offer and interpret for men the book of nature…. I read you, I study you, I meditate on you, and I honor you and your companions with all of my heart.”
Proving as much a fence-straddler as his late friend Rousseau, Saint-Pierre kept a low profile and did nothing. The Jardin entered a limbo. Young Geoffroy resumed his studies in mineralogy until the days following August 10, 1792, when the storming of the Tuileries Palace led to the imprisonment of the king, the establishment of a new government called the National Convention, and a descent from revolution into reactionary chaos.
One of the National Convention’s first acts was to round up and begin executing “non-juring” priests: those who refused to take a vow of obedience to France over the church. Geoffroy, discovering that most of the faculty of his former school had been arrested, implored the Jardinistes to help in their release. When their influence was successful in freeing only a few, the young man vowed to rescue the rest himself. On the morning of September 2, he dressed as a prison commissioner and walked right into the open-air holding pens of Saint Firmin prison, where he urged the priests to follow him to freedom.
To his astonishment, they refused to go. Likely unaware of the immediate danger they were in, they thanked Geoffroy but chose to remain in solidarity with the other captives. He retreated with only one priest in tow, pondering what to do next. He knew the executions were just beginning—in fact, that day marked the beginning of the September Massacres, a four-day killing spree that would claim the lives of half the prison population of Paris.
Waiting until nightfall, he procured a ladder and scaled one of Saint Firmin’s parapet walls, then crouched at the top. He stayed there for eight hours, listening to the carnage below and knowing full well his ladder might be spotted at any minute. At last he recognized the priests by moonlight and gestured that they climb toward him. He pulled twelve of them over the wall and down to safety in a nearby lumberyard. Just before scrambling down the ladder himself, Geoffroy felt a bullet rip through his coat. He’d been so occupied with the rescue he hadn’t noticed the sun rising, fully exposing him to the guards.
One month later Jacques and Suzanne Necker fled Paris, in their haste leaving behind the preserved heart of Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. They were captured at the Swiss border, and detained for several days while the local commune debated the question: Were they heroes of the revolution, or enemies? Jacques had, after all, set much in motion with his defiant release of the royal budget in 1781, had worked with the National Convention to broker a peaceful transition of power from the monarchy, and had done his best to keep the French economy from collapsing, at one point personally donating most of his fortune into the national treasury. They were allowed to cross over on September 11, but only as the revolution moved to confiscate their remaining assets.
Suzanne never recovered from the shock of their fall and flight. She became a recluse, giving in to fits of hypochondria and a morbid obsession that compelled her to perpetually write and rewrite her will and funeral arrangements. She died in exile in 1794, at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind instructions for her body to be embalmed, propped up in her bed, and exhibited to visitors for a period of four months. Jacques lived until 1802, trying in vain to recover at least some of the fortune he’d sacrificed for France.
King Louis XVI, stripped of his titles and put to trial as Citoyen Louis Capet, was led to the guillotine on January 21, 1793. He attempted to address the crowd, shouting out “I die innocent!” before a drumroll, ordered by an impatient revolutionary general, drowned out his final words. Revolutionaries sang “La Marseillaise” and dipped handkerchiefs in his blood, then moved on to dismantling his legacy. By February they were petitioning the National Convention to “suppress” (i.e., demolish) the Jardin, branding it “an annex of the king’s palace.” A subcommittee was ordered to decide the issue, but at the same time the Convention rolled out the Revolutionary Tribunal, a new, more radical court aimed at meting out justice. The tribunal opened on March 10, beginning what would come to be known as the Reign of Terror.
The Jardin’s future looked dismal, as did the survival odds of several Jardinistes. Aware that his aristocratic title put his life in danger, Count Lacépède immediately fled Paris to lie low in his native Leuville, resigning his post as sub-keeper and assistant demonstrator of the cabinet of natural history. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the novelist turned intendant, approached Geoffroy with a startling proposition: Would he agree to be appointed as Lacépède’s successor?
Geoffroy was staggeringly unqualified, and he knew it. He was an unaccomplished twenty-one-year-old student, with zero experience in research or teaching, but he understood the subtext of the offer. Saint-Pierre and the Jardinistes knew he’d risked his life during the September Massacres to save the priests that had been his teachers. They hoped that if need be, he’d rescue them as well.
He accepted the post, and the unspoken charge of protecting his new colleagues, with the understanding that his duties would not include continuing the Histoire Naturelle (that matter would hinge on Lacépède’s survival). And not a moment too soon: Within days of his appointment the Reign of Terror was in full swing, with the Convention’s innocuously named Committee of Public Safety effectively seizing power and summarily killing off its enemies, real or imagined. Within a year, an estimated seventeen thousand citizens would be marched to the executioner, with some ten thousand more dying in prison before they could meet a similar fate. While Geoffroy could do his best to keep the Jardinistes from joining their ranks, he was powerless to rescue the Jardin itself from a suppression that now seemed to border on the inevitable.
That rescue came from the unlikeliest of sources: fifty-two-year-old Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, the Jardin’s humble herbarium keeper, who also happened to be a knight.
Born in the Picardy region of northeastern France, the herbarium keeper was the youngest of eleven children in a family that, while poor, passed down to him the last vestige of an aristocratic past. He’d inherited the minor title of Chevalier de Lamarck (a chevalier was roughly equivalent to knighthood), which gave him sufficient social cachet to join the French army’s officer corps. He did so, under the name of Lamarck, and gained a reputation for able leadership and courage under fire, but then came a humiliating and painful incident. In 1763, during a deployment to Monaco, a fellow officer impulsively lifted the diminutive Lamarck by the head. This bit of horseplay severely injured his neck, requiring surgery and a long recuperation, after which Lamarck decided not to return to the ranks. At the age of thirty-two he drifted to Paris, worked briefly as a bank clerk, and was thinking of becoming a professional musician when he discovered the Jardin. An introduction to Buffon soon followed.
There was nothing in his background that fitted him for a career in natural history, but Buffon, who had himself assumed control of the Jardin without formal qualifications, took a liking to the battle-weary veteran. He hired him as a tutor for Buffonet, and in 1777 was instrumental in arranging for state-sponsored publication of Lamarck’s first book, Flore Française—a book decidedly complexist in tone, in which the author took Linnaeus to task for “giving orders to nature, forcing her to deploy her productions like a general his army, by brigades, by regiments, by battalions, by companies, etc.” The book sold well, and in 1779 Lamarck was accepted into the Académie des Sciences.
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck
But over time, he and Buffon drifted apart. His term as Buffonet’s tutor had been humiliating—even years later, he shuddered at the memory of the brat splashing him with ink, ruining his clothes. More important, he and Buffon could not agree on a crucial point. While Buffon’s notions of exogenesis depicted life as fluid and changing, Lamarck continued to believe in the fixity of species: The mechanisms of life struck him as far too intricate to be anything other than a singular act of Creation. Relations between the two men remained cordial, but the intendant’s patronage ended with awarding him the post of keeper of the Jardin’s herbarium. It was a low-paying job, but Lamarck kept it as a lifeline to continue his own work.
His book Flore Française had marked him as an anti-Linnean, which he unabashedly was. But that was an unfortunate reputation to have when the new intendant was allowing free rein to Linneans. Convinced he would soon be out of a job, Lamarck had rapidly drafted a pamphlet to distribute to the National Assembly, in which he argued for his livelihood and for the utility of the Jardin du Roi. Cannily, Lamarck entitled the pamphlet Memoir on the Cabinet of Natural History, and Particularly on the Jardin des Plantes.
Not Jardin du Roi, but Jardin des Plantes. The King’s Garden, he implied, was no more: It was merely a Garden of Plants. He signed himself not Chevalier de Lamarck but simply Citizen Lamarck.
The Cabinet had always been open to the public, he noted. No admission had ever been charged to stroll through the Jardin, and even the most advanced courses of instruction had always been free. Citizen Lamarck humbly suggested that the informal role of depository be formalized—that the Cabinet of Natural History, enlarged by the people’s generosity, become the people’s Musée de Histoire Naturelle, or Museum of Natural History, wreathed in the people’s greenery of the Garden of Plants. It would no longer be led by a sole intendant or other political appointee, but managed under the more egalitarian leadership of six “professor-administrators.”
The name was a clear capitulation to the Linneans, who had changed their organization’s name to the Société de Histoire Naturelle. Lamarck anticipated that they would dominate the council of professor-administrators, but he hoped there would be room for himself.
The pamphlet disappeared into the National Assembly. Three years passed. The National Assembly itself disappeared, to be replaced by the National Convention. In June of 1793, the government had weightier matters to contend with—in addition to the Reign of Terror, it was fighting simultaneous wars against Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, and Spain—but nevertheless a decision on the Jardin finally emerged. Somehow, yet another Convention committee (Public Instruction and Finances) had happened across a copy of Lamarck’s pamphlet, decided it made a splendid template for reorganization, and endorsed it with the sole modification of increasing the number of proposed professor-administrators from six to twelve. The Convention passed the plan without objection.
Lamarck’s pamphlet had shielded the institution from the worst of the turmoil of the revolution, and given it a new name. Since his proposal had treated the Jardin as a subset of the Cabinet and not the other way around, the term cabinet was upgraded to museum and given precedence. The Jardin du Roi was now officially the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, avec les Jardin des Plantes.
This inversion underscored the institution’s utility. As throngs of revolutionaries stormed the homes of the elite to confiscate their jewelry and other valuables, they were also carrying off the contents of that formerly fashionable status symbol, the private cabinet of curiosities. Some looters, upon realizing most specimens held little inherent value, chucked them into a trash-heap or the Seine, but others discarded them at the Jardin. The paths leading to the Cabinet/Museum were regularly littered with abandoned collections of stuffed birds, pinned butterflies, fragments of fossils, and miscellaneous objects floating in jars.
The task of dividing up the organization into twelve departments was left to the denizens of the Jardin themselves. The plant kingdom was split between two chairs—one in Horticulture, awarded to André Thouin, and one in Botany, given to René Desfontaines, a physician and botanical hobbyist whose only real credential was being a co-founder of the SLP. The chair of anatomy was split into Human and Vertebrate departments as well (although humans were obviously vertebrates), and the animal kingdom was split into Higher and Lower departments.
For Higher Zoology, the obvious candidate was Lacépède, but he had fled Paris. The task of recruiting a new candidate was taken up by Louis Daubenton, the Montbard native Buffon had imported to write Histoire Naturelle’s supplemental inventories of the Cabinet and supervise its anatomically precise illustrations. At seventy-seven years of age, Daubenton had no hopes of filling the role himself, but he desperately wished it on to someone with Buffonian sensibilities, to counterbalance the ruling majority of Linnean systematists. He paid a visit to Geoffroy, who once again found himself implored to take an office for which he was utterly unqualified. “I will undertake the responsibility for your inexperience,” Daubenton reassured him. “I have a father’s authority over you. Take this professorship, and let us one day say that you have made zoology a French science.” Geoffroy accepted the chair.
That left Lamarck himself, a man the Linneans actively disliked but who had clearly saved the day. He was awarded the professorship of Lower Animals, specifically “of insects, of worms, and microscopic animals”—the vaguest of all possible categories, covering the species that Linnaeus had first lumped into Vermes, then Vermes and Insecta.
He accepted. He was a botanist, not a zoologist, and it was meant to be a humiliating posting, but it was better than his previous role as keeper of the herbarium. Young Geoffroy, realizing that Lamarck now faced a learning curve even greater than his own, formed a lifelong respect for the older man. As he recalled, “The law of 1793 had prescribed that all parts of the natural sciences should be equally taught.”
The insects, shells, and an infinity of organisms—a portion of creation still almost unknown—remained to be treated…. This task, so great, and which would tend to lead him into numberless researches; this friendless, unthankful task he accepted.
While the assignment was intended to exile Lamarck to an obscure corner of the animal kingdom, in truth it placed him at its center. Arthropods and mollusks (“insects, shells”) happen to encompass approximately nine-tenths of all animal species alive on Earth. This compelled abundance, as well as his forced transfer from the kingdom Plantae to the kingdom Animalia, would have momentous consequences.
The transformation of the Jardin was taking place against a backdrop of even more radical changes to French savantry. In August of 1793, the Académie des Sciences and the Académie Française were abolished, along with all other royal academies. The plaster bust of Linnaeus disappeared from the Jardin—by some accounts it was mistaken for a bust of an ancient French king and smashed to bits. But the posthumous reinvention of Linnaeus as Charles Linné, revolutionary hero, continued unabated that autumn, when the National Convention turned toward revolutionizing time itself.
One morning, French citizens awoke to learn that the date was not the 25th of October 1793, but the Fourth of Brumaire, Year Two. The newly proclaimed calendrier républicain français retroactively declared the day after the Convention’s own founding (September 22, 1792) as the first day of Year One; subsequent years would begin on the autumn equinox in Paris. Time was now reckoned in decimals. Weeks were ten days long, and the hours of each day redivided into units of ten, each consisting of one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds apiece. Months were now three weeks long—an arrangement that required four or five extra days to sync up with the astronomical year, which were swept into a loose period called “complementary days.” It was, like so much of the revolution, produced by committee. One committee member, the actor and poet Fabré d’Englantine, had been given the task of finding new names for the months, stripping them of any imperialist or religious connotations. After paying a visit to André Thouin at the Jardin, he’d emerged with notes cribbed from Linnaeus’s 1756 Calendarium Florae, an eighteen-page pamphlet describing the year in botanical terms.
D’Englantine unleashed his poetic sensibilities on the assignment, dubbing the February-ish month Ventose, or “time of the winds.” The October-ish month became Brumaire, or “time of the mists.” But four of the names were cribbed directly from Calendarium Florae: Germinal, Floreal, Thermidor, Messidor. In France, Charles Linné was now immortalized as the man who’d named much of the calendar.
With everything to learn about zoology, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire decided to build a zoo. Since the Convention had banned private ownership of exotic animals, revolutionaries were rounding up traveling circuses and delivering them to the Jardin along with their keepers, making them Geoffroy’s problem; thus far he’d found himself the caretaker of a tiger, a panther, a leopard, a white bear, two eagles, and several mandrills. He was supposed to dismiss the keepers and have the animals killed, stuffed, and put on display, but he had other ideas. Scrambling to find the funds, he began constructing enclaves in the lower part of the Jardin and hiring the former circus men as zookeepers. The zoo opened on December 11, 1794, and quickly became one of the Jardin’s most popular features. As peaceful crowds began to stream through the gates in search of idle entertainment, Lamarck and Geoffroy cautiously resumed the institution’s oldest tradition: free lectures on natural history, open to any and all.
Yet these were still lethal times. Georges-Louie-Marie Buffon, known as Buffonet before becoming the second Count de Buffon, had been an early supporter of the revolution, serving as a colonel in the revolutionary army’s fifty-eighth infantry. But it was difficult to shake off the fact that he had inherited his father’s title, and he was stigmatized further by being associated with the royal family, a connection that came strongly against his will.
Seven years earlier, one of the ailing Buffon’s last parental tasks had been breaking disturbing news to his son: The Duke of Orleans, cousin to the king, had taken Buffonet’s wife as his mistress. He counseled his son to move clear of the affair without confronting the duke. Buffonet had heeded his words, resigning his commission in the royal army and separating from his wife with as little fuss as possible. But the revolution was extirpating as much of the ruling class as possible, and eventually being the estranged husband of the mistress of the king’s cousin was enough to cost him his life. Robespierre accused the twenty-nine-year-old of taking part in a conspiracy “to destroy the unity and indivisibility of the republic,” and the Committee of Public Safety handed down a verdict of death. The execution was carried out on 22 Messidor, Year Two—July 10, 1794.
In his final hours, the once frivolous Buffonet appears to have summoned a dignity reminiscent of his father’s stoic end. Eyewitnesses report that he walked calmly to the guillotine, and from the scaffold addressed the crowd with a declaration of pride. “Citizens, my name is Buffon!” he shouted, before the blade fell.
His body did not join those of his father and mother in the Montbard family crypt. That small structure, attached to a chapel on the edge of the Parc Buffon, had recently been desecrated by revolutionaries seeking lead for their bullets. They pulled down the coffins from their niches, emptying them and stripping them for their metal linings. Buffon’s body, so recently interred it was barely skeletonized, was left strewn on the chapel floor, intermingled with the bones of his wife.
In July of 1795, a young man named Georges Cuvier arrived at the Jardin gates, bearing a letter of invitation. “Come and fill the place of a Linnaeus here,” the twenty-three-year-old Geoffroy had written to the twenty-five-year-old Cuvier. “Come and be another legislator of natural history.”
The son of a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards, Georges Cuvier was born in 1769 in Montbéliard, a town near the Swiss border that was culturally French but territorially German, having been purchased from France by the duchy of Württemberg in 1536. An intelligent child with limited local educational opportunities, Cuvier spent his formative years entranced by Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, reading every volume he could get his hands on and committing his favorite passages to memory. He also found an influential role model in Buffon himself: a sophisticated savant ranging freely over a broad range of topics with a storyteller’s flair, elevating natural history while at the same time popularizing it. He would later pattern his ambitions along similar lines.
To lift himself out of his circumstances, he took advantage of Montbéliard’s technically foreign status, traveling to study in the duchy’s capital of Stuttgart despite not knowing how to speak German. He picked it up so rapidly that he was soon winning prizes for declamation, earning a reputation as a brilliant student in whom “the driest chronological facts, once arranged in his memory, were never forgotten.” But his funds ran out in 1788, and the nineteen-year-old was obliged to return to France and find what employment he could. By 1790 he was living in rural Normandy, working as tutor to a nobleman’s son. The only intellectual life he could pursue consisted of occasional visits to a nearby village, where an informal group of farmers, burghers, and other citizens met to discuss agriculture.
At one of these meetings, Cuvier began paying special attention to another attendee, a physician from a nearby field hospital who seemed to know quite a lot about specialized topics such as grain diseases and the decay of wheat. There was something about him—his cadences, the specifics of his erudition—that struck Cuvier as familiar. From the depths of his prodigious memory he summoned up entries he’d read in an encyclopedia, and recognized the man as their author. He was Henri-Alexandre Tessier, the director of Louis XVI’s royal farm at Rambouillet, famous for having introduced the Merino sheep to France. Excited to discover such an eminence in their midst, Cuvier cornered the man and began asking him questions, addressing him by name in the process.
Georges Cuvier
Tessier was horrified. He’d bolted from Paris to escape the revolution, and was living under an assumed name in a rural village specifically to elude being recognized. “I am known, then,” he blurted, “and consequently lost.”
“Lost!” Cuvier replied. “No; you are henceforth the object of our most anxious care.”
Relieved, the former royal agronomist grew increasingly impressed with the young man. “I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy,” he wrote to a friend back in Paris. Word of the remarkable young man soon reached Geoffroy. Lonely for a colleague his own age, he arranged for an assistant’s post in the department of animal anatomy and extended his invitation.
The two young naturalists hit it off immediately, forming a deep friendship that quickly took on the contours of a partnership. “Geoffroy and Cuvier knew no jealousy,” one account reads. “Geoffroy had a position; he shared it with his friend; he had books and collections; they were open to his rival; he had lodging in the Museum; they were shared by his new brother.” Their growing air of collaboration discomfited some Jardinistes, who gently reminded Geoffroy that he occupied their highest rank, while the new arrival was a low-ranking assistant. Far from being another Linnaeus, Cuvier was an inexperienced savant with dues to pay. Geoffroy did not give it much attention.
A peace of sorts began to settle over France after 13 Vendénmiaire, Year Four (October 5, 1795), when royalist forces marching into Paris were met with a rain of fire from artillery concealed in the winding city streets. The surprise barrage scattered the last vestiges of armed resistance to the revolution, and brought fame to the artillery commander, a young brigadier general named Napoleon Bonaparte. The monarchist cause was ended, but so too was the anti-monarchist bloodbath: Robespierre, chief architect of the Reign of Terror and the man who consigned Buffonet to the guillotine, had died under the same blade. As extremism gave way to the practical business of running France—a country now externally at war with several other nations—antipathies began to fade.
Count Lacépède emerged from hiding and returned to the Jardin, not minding that the reorganization had left him with no formal office. It gave him more time to resume working on the Histoire Naturelle. Lamarck attempted to open a new phase in his career, petitioning the Convention for funds to write a proposed Systeme de la Nature, which he described as a French-language “work analogous to the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus.” Resigned to the triumph of the Linnean system, he no longer wished to replace it but instead to bring it up to date. But he made the error of describing Linnaeus’s last published edition as “filled with gross mistakes, omissions of double and triple occurrence, and errors in synonymy.”
The request was not approved. In the posthumous flowering of reputation that science historians would later call the néolinnéisme, Linnaeus remained a darling of populist culture, his lack of high-flown language and easily grasped classification system championed as a model of the democratization of thought. A poem of the period by René-Richard Louis Castel encapsulated the pervading spirit:
Obtain, O Linné, this immortality!
You came, the order appeared. A lively light
Reflects suddenly the whole of nature
The deep dark bed of the various minerals
Agile child of the air and the inhabitants of the waters
The plants in the spring zephyr revived.
You knew all when you lived. You made all known to us.
Even though Lamarck had broken with Buffon by disbelieving in species change, his connections to the leader of the pre-revolutionary Jardin remained a stigma. “It is well known that Buffon, who did not understand the Linnaean system, nor chose to give himself any trouble to do so, had frequently censured Linnaeus,” reads a 1794 account of the Société Linnéenne insurgency, underscoring what would become an enduring mythos: that Buffon’s opposition to Linnean systematics arose not from an opposing complexist philosophy but from pigheaded ignorance. Linnaeus, on the other hand, “belongs to that small number of luminaries, who made a fresh epoch in the annals of literary greatness, raised their merit beyond the limits of their age, and rendered imperishable the splendor of their name.”
By the time he’d risen to the rank of general, Napoleon Bonaparte fancied himself not only a soldier but a savant. His initial military success was founded on his considerable skills in deploying artillery, skills in turn based on his strong command of mathematics. When he was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1796, it was not a courtesy title. When the Directory—the currently ruling junta—placed him at the head of a mysterious deployment in 1798, his preparations included an unusual move: He established a special Commission des Sciences et des Arts and invited 167 members of the savantry community to join, Geoffroy among them. Once they had assembled, the twenty-eight-year-old general made them a proposal. They could join him on his mission, on the condition that they depart in ignorance of his military briefing. They would board French warships for an expedition of unspecified duration, to a classified location.
The fact of the offer itself was a revelation. Until now, rumor had held that the troops and ships quietly massing in French ports were part of an invasion of England, which would not seem to require a special corps of zoologists, astronomers, chemists, and geographical engineers. To twenty-five-year-old Geoffroy, this plunge into the unknown was too intriguing to turn down: Assured that his position at the Jardin would be waiting upon his return, he signed on. So did all but 16 of the 166 other savants, many of them swayed by the political optics of refusing to come to France’s aid in its time of need. As far as Geoffroy was concerned, it was a shame that his friend Cuvier, the assistant animal anatomist, had not been deemed important enough to warrant an invitation.
On May 19, 1798, Geoffroy sailed with Bonaparte on his flagship l’Orient as part of a four-hundred-ship flotilla. Only when l’Orient was out of the sight of land did the general inform him of their destination. France was invading Egypt.
Why Egypt? The tactic had been Napoleon’s idea. He’d convinced the Directory that the region was ripe for the taking—at the time it was a much-neglected province of the fading Ottoman Empire, which would be hard-pressed to defend it. It would give France a strategic presence to disrupt British trade routes to both India and the East Indies, and the Directory was especially intrigued by the idea of linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with a canal (an idea that much later became the Suez Canal). It would also be a cultural coup, claiming the region generally regarded by Europeans as the cradle of civilization. Which was why Napoleon went to the trouble of recruiting his corps of 151 savants: They provided the rationale that the French were there not only to conquer but to discover and preserve as well. The French fleet swept through the Mediterranean, conquering Malta on the way and landing at Alexandria on the first day of July.
From a military standpoint, the invasion was not a success. Attacks by the British fleet under Admiral Nelson resulted in France ceding almost complete control of the Mediterranean Sea to the British. On land, French control of Alexandria and Cairo wavered after Napoleon failed to convince Egyptians that he was there to liberate them from the Ottomans. The Egyptians’ open rebellion led to the loss of more than thirty thousand troops—half casualties of battle, half victims of disease. In August of 1799, Napoleon abandoned the expedition and returned to France, ostensibly to gather reinforcements but in reality to take advantage of deteriorating political conditions. Within a month of landing, Napoleon had enlisted as a conspirator in a planned coup, staged his own coup within the coup, and emerged as First Consul of France with near-dictatorial powers. “The revolution is over,” he proclaimed, ending an era. “I am the revolution,” he added, beginning another.