Darwin Correspondence Project

Contents:

1. 1.
   Introduction
   

   Dr White:
   My name is Paul White and I’m here with Pietro Corsi today. This is part
   of a series of interviews that the Darwin Project is doing on Darwin and
   religion, and Pietro is an expert, particularly on early nineteenth
   century and late eighteenth century evolution and the controversies
   surrounding evolutionary theories.

2. 2. The
   situation in France
   

   Dr White:
   I think I want to start by asking you a bit more about that period, and
   we [historians] have – from your work and others’ – now quite a
   ? bigger picture I think of what kinds of debates were going
   on around transformist theories before Darwin. In the British context,
   we have a sense too of what the religious significance[s] of some of
   those debates were, particularly in geology, but I don’t think that we
   have such a picture for France. I think the view that we have is of a
   very politicised arena, if one thinks of
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2786.html”>[Jean Baptiste de]
   Lamarck and
   >[Georges] Cuvier and
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1839.html”>[Etienne] Geoffroy
   Saint-Hilaire, but I’m not sure what the religious dimensions of
   those debates were about, and maybe we can start with that.

   Prof
   Corsi: Yes, well you see, the French scene deserves close attention.
   I think that people have been working – and doing excellent work – for
   England, as you said. Myself [included], but a lot of others as well: we
   build on each other’s work, which is natural. Germany’s now being opened
   up a bit thanks to works by Bob Richards or Sander Gliboff; that is, we
   now understand the extent to which forms of evolution – let’s keep it
   very broad – were debated in Germany.

   The French scene
   is particularly interesting because – let me start with a provocation -
   I think everything needs to be done. We have concentrated our attention
   on very, very few main actors – the ones you mentioned: Cuvier, Lamarck,
   Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire – and we have not paid? I don’t want
   to say, ?any attention? because as you know
   in history, there is always someone who has written an article, so will
   always find a contradiction in what you are saying, but let’s say that
   extremely rare are the examples of systematic investigation on ways of
   communicating science [in France before or during Darwin's career], for
   instance, and what does it mean to publish in science [in France in that
   period]. Let me try to be as simple as possible.

   The assumption is
   that French science is basically concentrated on the Academy of Sciences
   (through the various names it took: the Institut, you know, it
   was? the Academy of Sciences was abolished in 1793,
   reconstituted in 1795 with the name of the Institut, then at the
   [Bourbon] Restoration after Napoleon fell, it was given again, back, the
   name of Acad?mie des sciences, but let’s say, ?the
   Institution of Science?) and people have also assumed
   that the science which is interesting to look at was mainly done in the
   Jardin des Plantes: in the natural history museum in Paris.
   Now, of course, no-one can deny the centrality of Cuvier and later on,
   well, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and also the centrality of Lamarck, in
   zoology in particular. It is often forgotten that Lamarck was extremely
   respected as an invertebrate zoologist.

   Well, the work
   I’ve been doing in the last four or five years has concentrated on
   periodicals, which is obvious, and dictionaries. I worked on about six
   dictionaries published between 1802 and 1844. In each of these
   dictionaries there is a huge coverage of what people felt important for
   the understanding of the succession of life throughout history or at the
   surface of the world. References to religion are extremely limited if
   not non-existent. However, one extremely prolific writer, whose name is
   Julien-Joseph Virey, very well known in France, in England as well, and
   in the United States – he was one of the earliest racialist theorists of
   the nineteenth century – he was strongly providentially oriented. That
   is, he believed that spontaneous generations and the ascent of life
   through increasing degrees of complexity was dominated by the spirit of
   God: God acted in nature through these natural processes. But he is the
   only one so explicit. So the reference is to a broad natural theology
   outlook. It is interesting because, for instance, Virey, before reading
   Paley in
   1802, he already uses the eye as a key argument in natural theology, so
   drawing on a tradition which is difficult to monitor. Some names come to
   mind, but it’s really difficult to monitor.

   When you plunge
   into these dictionaries and these periodicals, you realise how much
   concentration on Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has been distorting
   our appreciation at a very basic level: what were people talking about?
   Now, that question needs to be put, without prejudices. You may say,
   well, some of these people were living outside the Institution. If I
   have five minutes, I can say that. Let me take only one case:
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-550.html”>[Jean Baptiste
   Georges Marie] Bory de Saint-Vincent.

   Bory de
   Saint-Vincent was the editor of the Dictionnaire classique
   d’histoire naturelle (the Classical dictionary of
   natural history) that travelled with
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1.html”>Darwin on the
   Beagle. Bory de Saint-Vincent, in the 1820s, was a key
   protagonist of a furious battle against Cuvier, and he was one of the
   earliest promoters of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the public press. Not
   only that, but he also produced, or had people writing for him, articles
   showing the close link between German embryology and Saint-Hilaire and
   monitoring the relationships, even the personal relationships, between
   big names in German science who had visited Paris and had become
   friendly with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

   Now, in a
   wonderful book written by Toby Appel on the Geoffroy
   Saint-Hilaire-Cuvier debate of 1830, she mentions Bory de Saint-Vincent,
   saying that he was – and she is right – that he was a rather picturesque
   figure, almost? someone active at the fringe of proper
   science, who had even gone to prison for debts, for three years. So,
   here we have someone who writes in dictionaries and journals, very
   prolific, very inventive, but cannot be taken seriously because he was
   really someone spending money with actresses and being a kind
   of? extravagant person.

   Now, if you look
   at the three years in prison, and you study what happens in France after
   1825? In France after 1825? Well, the movement
   starts in the early 1820s: ’23, ’24. Napoleon dies in March 1821. In
   France there is almost no [immediate] reaction. The reaction starts
   around ’23, ’24. The more the French government moves to the right wing,
   the more people try to start saying that Napoleon was a great hero. Now,
   in popular theatrical representations in Paris, the hero becomes more
   and more the soldier of the Napoleonic army who comes back to France
   after being stranded in Russia for years and finds France corrupted. The
   officer of the Napoleonic army becomes a kind of person who people have
   to trust to put the country in order again. Now, Bory de Saint-Vincent
   had been an officer of the Napoleonic army [and was] known for that; had
   been condemned to death in 1815 for being a strong supporter of
   Napoleon; had been forced to flee France for years, hiding in Belgium,
   Holland and Germany. In 1826 he is put in prison for debts. In doing
   that, he fulfils the paradigm of the theatrical figure of the Napoleonic
   officer. He is poor, forced to go to prison for debts, but he has a
   moral strength. So, historians have looked at Bory’s imprisonment for
   three years as a sign of his being outside mainstream. I am prepared to
   argue that by going to prison, like someone went to the gulags in
   Russia, he was not going out of credibility, he was increasing his
   credibility. So that should tell you how complex the situation was.

   In any case, Bory
   is interesting precisely for what I said at the beginning: his attempt
   to update evolutionary theories and make them more credible. For Bory,
   Lamarck is not credible because he does not have a proper theory of
   spontaneous generation and he also does not have a credible theory to
   explain how new successive increased organic complexities are achieved.
   So Bory launches a new research program using microscopes, on
   spontaneous generation, which attracts, for five years, enormous
   European attention – and [receives attention] in England as well. He
   also embraces embryological development models [which] Lamarck
   didn’t have, and he was right: Lamarck did not have a theory like
   that. So, for Bory de Saint-Vincent, sponteneous generations are similar
   to chemical combinations, and once you have a spontaneously generated
   molecule, and you have several spontaneously generated molecules
   sticking together to form cryptograms, for instance, you can only have
   that growth in the same way in which once you have a crystal, that
   crystal can only grow in one way. So, Bory de Saint-Vincent believed
   that he had achieved a totally materialistic explanation of the origin
   of life and of the ascent in complexity without reference to any final
   causes, and of course little? let alone of any creation. Bory
   was, contrary to Virey who was a Providentialist, Bory was extremely
   scathing against religious interpretation of creation, and against the
   Bible. He always made jokes?

   The final point I
   would like to make – and I’m sorry I’ve been too long – of the
   complexity of France: I have personally assumed, and I have even
   written, that? After the fall of Napoleon and the Restoration
   (we are talking of the period between 1815 and 1830) there was an
   increasing movement towards the right. In 1825 the government [of
   France] tried to pass a legislation against blasphemy. Anyone could be
   condemned to death, even, if a judge thought that what he or she said
   was blasphemous. It was the major attack against the freedom of
   expression in France. Even the reactionary writer
   [Francois-Auguste-Rene, vicomte de] Chateaubriand wrote against it. I
   assumed that the same kind of iron fist was applying to science. I was
   totally wrong. The more you read this hugely diffused literature (I
   mean, for these dictionaries you can also know how many copies were
   sold: they were huge print runs; publishers became extremely rich by
   publishing these dictionaries)? now, in these dictionaries,
   Bory de Saint-Vincent could even say things like, ?The
   Chinese are a well-organised society. They don’t believe in the
   immortality of the soul, which is a dream, and their society shows
   very well that we don’t need that hypothesis.? Now,
   that is written in a period in which there is blasphemy legislation, so
   clearly a lot of scientific popular writings were not scrutinised, and
   the freedom of expression and the imaginative proposals that [were]
   pulling together different traditions, [were] enormously free.

3. 3.
   Clerical engagement with early evolutionary theories
   

   Dr White: Another area which your work has explored is the kind
   of engagement with evolutionary theory that was done by clerical
   thinkers, by theologians; your work on
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3836.html”>Baden Powell, in
   particular. This kind of surprising [way] in which transformism was
   taken up within the church in order to effect some kind of religious
   reformation or theological reformation is something that we find
   continues and is a very big part of the reception of Darwin. I’m just
   wondering again, going back to France, if we see any comparable
   engagement in the theological world with transformist theories.

   Prof Corsi: This is a very good question, because it was a matter
   of friendly contention with a couple of French historians – friends of
   mine – at a conference recently. I said that you do not have, in France,
   the same intensity and density of debate concerning, for instance,
   biblical geology or the natural theological appliations of geological or
   life sciences. And, in particular, one senior historian of France told
   me, well, Pietro, it’s not true: the question is that the issue has
   never been addressed [by historians]. So, there is someone? -
   it’s a caution I’m bringing forward against what I’m going to say, [there]
   is someone [who] strongly believes that there are so little studies that it’s
   difficult to say – however, I’m still pretty confident that you do not
   have, in France, the same intense engagement in natural sciences from
   the clergy that you have in England. After all, Charles Darwin was quite
   happy at the prospect of becoming an Anglican minister, because Anglican
   ministers, what they did, most of them, was precisely natural history.
   The amount of reading British clergyman were doing in the French natural
   sciences I just described before is absolutely outstanding. After all, a
   lot of French Lamarckian [literature] was owned by English clergymen. You do not have
   that in France. Moreover, in France, even during the hardest years,
   1825?1830, when the minister of education – let’s talk about
   that – was a bishop, [Denis-Luc] Frayssinous.

   Frayssinous was
   very worried to curb atheism, but even more worried [of] subversion and
   people not being friendly to the government. (So they closed down the
   faculty of medicine for a few months in 1824, if I’m not wrong.) But you
   do not have the same engagement in debating, within theological circles,
   these issues concerning natural history, let alone evolution or
   Lamarckism. So I think England is quite – in my view – quite original
   precisely because of the constitution, I mean the professional
   structure, of the Anglican clergymen. I found people endorsing moderate
   forms of Lamarckism even within the extreme right wing high Tory church,
   for instance on the subject of Noah’s ark. It is surprising the extent
   to which these people knew about Continental science.

   I’m just focusing
   on France; people have been writing on
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1966.html”>[Joseph Henry]
   Green, the private doctor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been
   to Germany and knew German anatomy but also knew
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2641.html”>[Immanuel]
   Kant’s philosophy. I still believe up to the mid-1830s not many
   English people knew German. (The evidence of that is that I found
   several people quoting German literature from the French translations.
   So? more studying needs to be done, but I think that [the
   evidence so far] is [representative of] the reality.) So, briefly, you
   do not have in France, the same systematic and massive list of
   publications. concerning the theological bearings or the religious
   bearings of developments in natural science.

4. 4.
   Darwin’s knowledge of early evolutionary theories
   

   Dr White:
   I want to ask you about Darwin’s own understanding of the prehistory of
   evolution, which we find laid out in that historical preface to the
   third edition [of Darwin's On the origin of species], and
   I’ve heard you remark that this is an extraordinarily simplified picture
   of precursors that he lays out. His view of the French scene, for
   example, is extremely simplified. I’m just wondering how you might
   explain that: is Darwin, in fact, not reading very much of the kind of
   literature that you mentioned, that’s quite prolific, or is he trying to
   construct a picture that will promote? his own originality, I
   suppose?

   Prof
   Corsi: I think both.

   As you know, some
   historians have stressed Darwin’s nasty side (I cannot believe in that
   because I adore Darwin) and stressed the fact that Darwin insisted on
   his originality.
   >Richard Owen started first, in a nasty review in 1860. I don’t
   believe that, I’m sorry. I think it’s too simple; [if] we apply
   contemporary academic climbing to a completely different mindset. But
   people always try to say how original they are. That’s natural,
   especially if you work forty years on a project! But I don’t think that
   is the case [here]. I think generational factors are much more
   important. Let me give you one instance.

   For people like
   John Fleming,
   the Scottish minister and naturalist, friend of
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3051.html”>Charles Lyell,
   the debate I was sketching before – Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier, Bory
   de Saint-Vincent, Virey – to John Fleming, in the 1820s, these were
   burning issues. If you read Fleming’s writings on Lamarck from 1820 to
   1830, you will notice a change of tone. At the beginning, he is almost
   sympathetic. By the end of the 1820s, he is worried and he is more and
   more critical of potentially dangerous atheism implicit in Lamarck. By
   1830 in England, a lot of people are really worried that Lamarckian
   evolution will join with political radicalism and create a new,
   atheistic view of nature. They are extremely surprised, by 1835, to
   notice that none of that is coming from France. However, they almost
   overreacted. William Whewell, in the review of the second volume of the
   Principles of geology by Lyell, published in 1832,
   William Whewell reviewed the second volume and said, ?We
   were rather worried by how many friends Lamarck is making throughout
   Europe,? and therefore Lyell reviews Lamarck in the
   opening eleven chapters, by the way, of Principles of
   geology, thus providing the most accurate and substantial summary
   of Lamarck’s theory available in England, and indeed perhaps in Europe.

   But Darwin in
   ’32, well, of course he knew a lot about insects, about coleoptera. He
   knew a lot through conversation with
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2235.html”>[John Stevens]
   Henslow of what biogeography was, and of course he went on a
   trip in the summer to study geology: a field trip with
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4276.html”>[Adam] Sedgwick.
   But when he started reading these French authors, for Darwin they were
   not any more a burning issue. By 1834, the issue was almost academic
   within a lot of people, and William Whewell, in 1837, wrongly thought it
   was time to say, That’s it. And in the History of [the] inductive
   sciences, William Whewell said investigation on the origin
   and transformation of life is not a legitimate field in science, but of
   course, he failed in that.

   But what I’m
   trying to repeat again and get at is that by the time in which Darwin
   sets to read these people – Lamarck, Bory de Saint-Vincent, Geoffroy
   Saint-Hilaire and others – they have become almost sources. They are not
   any more [part of a] burning debate, [a] hot debate, on which people feel things are at
   stake. So I think generational factors are like that. Darwin was
   not misleading readers: he is simply not aware; he has not
   lived through that. The historical sketch by Darwin, in my view is very
   disappointing, but I’m not accusing Darwin of [being responsible] for
   that. I simply say that he’s tried to think, who are the people who said
   something [about evolution before he did]. For instance, he mentions
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3917.html”>[Constantine Samuel]
   Rafinesque, this very strange character. We now know much more
   about him. By the way, Rafinesque was a close friend of Bory de
   Saint-Vincent and probably got his idea from Bory, when he published in
   1822 that varieties become species through a constant process of
   modification: new varieties, new species, and so on and so forth. But
   Darwin did not know that. For Darwin, Rafinesque was just one name who
   said something. And naturally so, because by 1860 these people were
   curiosities, whereas if you are in the 1820s or the early 1830s these
   people make up a worrying scenario of people in different parts of the
   world claiming that nature has capabilities of spontaneous
   self-organisation, which is the basic of Lucretian atomism and certainly
   not a religious view of nature. So my answer will be that Darwin read
   what he needed, not because what he needed was a matter of burning
   concern around him but because it was a concern to him personally.

5. 5. What
   was Darwin’s impact on the French transformist tradition?
   

   Dr White: Given that there was so much work and debate about
   transformism in the late eighteenth century and right through the first
   part of the nineteenth century, when Darwin does publish what difference
   does it really make then to the debate in France? We don’t have to talk
   about it as a straightforward [matter of the] reception of Darwin’s
   ideas, but is the fact that Darwinism is now out there? does
   that really change the way the French talk about transformism and the
   way in which they engage with their own tradition of transformist
   thought?

   Prof Corsi: I think that in France, Darwin was looked at as a
   very clever botanist. In particular, he was given a seat at the Academy
   of Sciences in botany, not in zoology. People felt challenged. The
   earliest reaction to Darwin was typically French: ?We
   already said it.? That poses a problem for historians
   because historians assume that Lamarck was dead not only physically in
   1829 but even morally: no-one took him seriously. I think that is
   totally not true. But nevertheless, people who say that Lamarck cut no
   ice in France itself, well, they have to explain why the immediate
   reaction to [Darwin]? People, even in letters, said,
   ?Oh, well, Lamarck already said that.? Of
   course, Lamarck has not said what Darwin said, even though some
   people say, well, within Darwin there are Lamarckian elements. I don’t
   think they are Lamarckian. I think the idea that during your lifetime
   you can acquire some character or you can move some of your organs in
   some direction, however fractionally, and that that can be passed on to
   your children, that does not amount to Lamarckianism: everyone believed
   that throughout Europe; very few people doubted that. The question is to
   what an extent, and there Darwin was not Lamarckian in that, because he
   did not believe that you can have, for instance, major organic
   transformations simply because of use or lack of use. So for Darwin,
   Lamarckian factors (in our language, not in his language) were amongst
   the many factors producing variation, of which – as we know very well -
   he knew very little (and he was in good company). So, variations are
   produced in which way? Well, amongst other things, they are also
   produced through use and lack of use.

   The French were
   aware of Lamarck and in fact, in the 1850s Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s son
   - just to mention one –
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1840.html”>Isidore,
   reviewed the entire debate in a very successful publication. He really
   spelled out the story and said, which are the main views on the
   transformation of species today? And he gave a fair account: of Lamark;
   of his father (of course, he tended to give prominence to his
   father)? and he declared, in 1858, that the question of
   whether we can explain speciation in natural terms is widely open and
   whoever comes with a good idea, we will listen to him. That was the
   political message. At the
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4454.html”>Geological
   Society in Paris, which has been very little studied (the Geological
   Society in France had similar status to the
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1841.html”>Geological
   Society in England; however, whereas on the Geolocial Society in
   England we have marvellous studies from [Martin] Rudwick, [James (Jim)]
   Secord, Simon Knell, marvellous studies; for France we have almost
   nothing)? in the debate of the Geological Society of France
   in the 1850s, an agreement was found that the question has to be
   analysed more thoroughly: that clearly there must be something
   explaining why a little shell dies out and another shell appears, only
   slightly different but certainly different, and the idea that God
   creates each of them, in succession, is a bit ridiculous. So, for
   instance, a German author, who will be the first translator of Darwin,
   [Heinrich Georg]
   Bronn, is widely read in France, and debated in France,
   precisely because he has a theory equating domestication to speciation
   and claiming that in the past something analagous happened.

   However, when
   Darwin came out with a fully-fledged and powerful theory, the reaction
   was a bit? closing up. France was? they knew they
   lost out to him, and 1870 was a confirmation. There is a big debate:
   did, really, French science decline? And of course, as every thesis as
   broad as that – ?French science declined? -
   people are now finding a lot of counter-examples. The question is very
   complex. Let me simply say, I just published a book on that
   correspondence, with the preface in English, explaining precisely this
   point. We have visitors who left testimonies – contemporaries – [who]
   openly said that what Paris had been until 1830, now London was. In
   particular, one of my authors spends two years, 1854 and 1855, in Paris,
   working at the Natural History Museum and working in the huge
   paleontological collections in Paris, and becomes a very good friend of
   a paleontologist who is openly Lamarckian, and believes in evolution,
   straightforward. This chap moves to London in 1857 and writes back in
   shock. He says, no French collection can now equal the British Museum.
   Not only that, but he goes through France and goes to the famous fossil
   locations, for crocodiles – the famous Teleosaurus or fossil
   crocodiles – the north of France; the centre of France and Paris for
   invertebrates; and he constantly says, British gold is buying
   everything.

   So there is even
   the idea that British collections and private collectors have put French
   science out of the market. Funding for research decreased in Paris
   across the board, that’s clear. So, the French are very edgy about
   Darwin; also for the fact that the enormous European success of Darwin
   signifies to some a kind of serious attempt to [topple] the superiority
   of French science, exemplifies it. So there is also an institutional
   psychological reaction. I don’t want to enter into the reaction in
   scientific terms because of course the French developed their own form
   of evolutionary theories. They also experiment in Lamarckian terms well
   before [Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko. In France, there were a lot of
   experiments, especially on animal breeding for agricultural purposes and
   plant cultivation – acclimatisation, it was called:
   acclimatisation – that were based on Lamarckian principles. So
   Darwin’s natural selection was totally alien to the French scientific
   scene and to the French psychological scene? with an
   exception, of course: the [French] translator of Darwin,
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4113.html”>Cl?mence [Auguste]
   Royer.

   I’m waiting for
   Darwin scholars (I’m not a Darwin scholar even though of course I’ve
   read Darwin) to explain why Darwin appeared to have been so late in
   understanding that [his French] translator was so rabid that it was
   almost embarassing. Now, the translator of Darwin into French, if I have
   a minute to say, was called Cl?mence Royer; was a lady. She has all our
   sympathies. She was a proto-feminist; the first lady to be honoured with
   an honorary degree in medicine in France. She lived with a married man,
   which was absolutely scandalous. She had been giving lectures on Lamarck
   in Lausanne in the 1850s. I mean, she is really our darling. Yet, she
   writes in the preface to the Origin of Species that the
   worst of all sins is Christian charity: the weak have to be eliminated.
   Now that’s hard stuff, but she was really not speaking a French
   language. That is, that was not mainstream. Certainly, people who used
   Darwin in that way in France, well, there were [some], but later on, in
   the 1880s where you have a kind of social Darwinism with radical
   undertones. But I never understood, according to the letters you have
   published, why Darwin took so long – because he read French quite well -
   why he did not read that preface and say, ?What is this
   girl saying? That’s not me,? or something.

6. 6. The
   portrayal of Darwin among French scientists
   

   Dr White: I think I’ll just ask you one more question, which is
   about this debate in the French Academy in the 1870s. You said that
   Darwin is eventually recognised as a botanist, not as a zoologist, and
   it’s a long series of debates? about this. It’s something
   that you’ve worked on, and I’ve read some of the accounts of these
   debates and it’s striking the different arguments that are brought
   against Darwin. On the one hand, Darwin is [portrayed as] an amateur, so
   he’s not really doing proper science the way it’s done today, and this
   is a striking observation if we think about French science as actually
   in decline at this point and Darwin representing a threat. Another
   [means of portrayal is that]: Darwin is a wild speculator. And then
   there’s this curious defence by
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3892.html”>[Armand de]
   Quatrefages in which Darwin is brought out as a way of
   practising science which is free from politics: an emphasis on Darwin’s
   really [strong] devotion to truth, and his hard work and dedication.
   [Quatrefages argues that we] should look to Darwin as someone who can
   show us that science can be something higher than politics, which to me
   suggests that there is a kind of intense politicisation of Darwin and
   maybe this radicalism that you mentioned with Royer’s translation: a
   kind of anti-clerical Darwin that’s being put forward at this time; that
   this is another problem.

   Prof Corsi: I totally agree. De Quatrefages is a very interesting
   figure because you see, in France, the interest for geology, for
   instance, fades away. It’s difficult to say when, but certainly by the
   1860s the public interest in geology of the 1850s has gone and a lot of
   these geologists and paleontologists become human anthropologists and
   move into anthropology or prehistory. Now, de Quatrefages is someone who
   does almost precisely that, because he moves into anthropology (what we
   would call today anthropology) and he’s an extremely cultivated man. He
   writes rather interesting stuff on the French precursors of Darwin. He
   writes for La [sic] revue de deux mondes, a very important
   general culture magazine.

   And you are
   totally right: that is, there are several voices taking part in this
   debate. But the question of amateurs versus professional
   scientists? I think it’s very important to stress. The French
   institutional scientists that we take for granted had in fact to fight a
   very long battle to exercise a monopoly on science, because they
   themselves, at least until the 1830s, were very much threatened by
   amateurs: publishers, writers?

   When Cuvier
   launches his dictionary of natural sciences, he writes an appeal to the
   public and says, do not buy a rival dictionary – done by Virey and
   amateurs – because, he says, we the professors of the Natural History
   Museum are the only ones entitled to speak about nature because we have
   the collections. And then he says, also because we are in touch with all
   the merchants of specimens throughout Europe. Well, Cuvier’s dictionary
   fails: after volume 4, no-one buys it. Now, there may be complex
   economic reasons as well, but I submit to say that we have assumed that
   because French institutional science was politically so powerful, that
   means that these people represented science in the eyes of the French
   public. My claim is that they rarely did so, and it depended more on
   individuals rather than on a class.

   Clearly,
   Darwin? you rightly said that, thanks for pointing that out.
   Darwin? people felt threatened. I mean after all, French
   professors had fought very hard battles to get the privileges of an
   aristocratic position. French professors, even today, enjoy something
   which is unthinkable in England or in other European countries or the
   United States: the right to accumulate several jobs. Up to the second
   half of the nineteenth century, professors had the right to appoint
   their assistants (usually [they appointed] their relatives), and their
   successors. So to a paradoxical extent, institutional science in France
   had gained the privileges of the aristocracy: life appointments;
   accumulation of salaries; accumulation of jobs; family lineages being
   perpetrated. Now to them, the amateur who could attract attention was a
   real threat. [?]

   Of course, in
   England, remember, in 1830, the great debate on the decline of science
   in England. An extraordinary debate, that occurred precisely when
   British science was taking up enormously. And people talk about decline!
   They say, Which is our model?, the French scientists. In France,
   scientists have [been] made barons, counts. They are honoured by the
   state. In England, not. So, in 1832, at the British Association for the
   Advancement of Science,
   href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3871.html”>[Charles]
   Pritchard, [John]
   Dalton and I don’t remember who? [These] four
   scientists are knighted. So that’s an important thing. However, the
   image of the French scientists they had and we have is not really
   accurate because they were not state fonctionnaires; they were
   not state bureaucrats. To some extent they were, but they enjoyed
   privileges that would be unthinkable in England, not for the
   reasons that they were honoured, but for this monopoly on positions.

   Even today, a top
   scientist can be a member of at least four different universities and
   institutions: a full member. Today, you don’t have salaries anymore, you
   only have one salary (so that’s regrettable for our colleagues!), but
   certainly the principle of accumulating jobs puts the French science in
   another light. So there was a lot at stake if, suddenly, amateurs could
   claim that they were doing top science. French scientists had been
   saying, There is only one top science – it’s ours – and there cannot be
   other ones.

7. 7.
   Darwin’s appropriation in France
   

   Dr White: Do you want to say anything else about the ways in
   which Darwin might have been perceived as a kind of – or that he was
   being used by others besides his translator to promote a kind of -
   attack on the church; as a kind of anti-clerical instrument? Or is
   that?

   Prof Corsi: Oh yes. But you see, republicans? France
   becomes a lay country in 1870 after the [Paris] Commune and in 1871 -
   ’70-’71 – the defeat. Then the Third Republic is ushered in which is
   officially non-religious and in fact mostly anti-clerical. But they do
   not tend to use Darwin much. I mean, there are people who do that, as we
   have already seen. Cl?mence Royer certainly uses Darwin against every
   cleric. I mean, Cl?mence Royer hates rabbis, imams, clergymen: every
   form of religious person is hated by her.

   There are people
   who do that, but you would not say that it is in the name of Darwin.
   Often it is in the name, in fact, of Lamarck. Lamarckianism is
   progressive and republican because it gives you a chance. The
   educational system of France is based, in a kind of paradoxical way, on
   a pedagogical principle that stresses the incremental capability of
   every individual to acquire knowledge. Therefore: free education;
   therefore: the promotion of bright lower class kids who are sent to
   Paris to the ?cole Normale and they become President of the Republic,
   for instance, or great scientists.

   So what they saw
   as the Darwinian model was not cohesive enough for a great country as
   France [was]. We often forget that even in the 1870s and ’80s, France
   was still the most populous country in Europe. And certainly, before the
   unification of Germany, the largest country in Europe. So what we may
   call – I don’t want to be offensive – but what people call French
   arrogance had quite a substantial truth in it. That is, they had been
   the major player in world politics up to the 1850s and ’60s. 1870 was a
   shock to them, [an] enormous shock, because Napoleon had lost several
   battles but my god, how did he lose them! You know, it was really a
   mighty fight: it was all the world against him. But 1870 was little
   Prussia. Prussia was not the Prussia it became later on. It was a
   relatively small state with advanced technology, using new explosives,
   new rifles, new technologies. And the French were totally shattered. So,
   the least they wanted collectively, if one can say so in history,
   talking, the least they wanted was the idea that within society you had
   stiff competitions. Society has to be organically construed.

   Many evolutionary
   biologists in France of the second half of the century worked
   essentially on colonies of animals. That is, they worked on animals that
   co-operate. The co-operation for life was much more liked by the average
   French intellectual rather than the struggle for life.

   Dr White: Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you?

   Prof Corsi: Sorry, I’ve been too long.

   Dr White: No, no, it’s fine. Thank you very much, Pietro.

8. 8. Credits
   

   The views
   expressed in the interview may not be those of the Darwin Correspondence
   Project.

   Date of interview:

   17 July 2009.

   Location:

   St. Anne’s College, Oxford

   Interviewer:

   Dr Paul White, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of
   Cambridge.

   Interviewee:

   Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science, University of
   Oxford

   Recorded by:

   Dr Paul White (as above).

   Edited by:

   Sam P. Kuper, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of
   Cambridge.

   ? Darwin Correspondence Project (except birdsong
   recording
   href=”http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13662″
   >”Wren4.wav” by Acclivity, used under
   href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling/1.0/”>Creative
   Commons Sampling License v1.0)