THE PUPILS OF LAMARCK
A Research Project
THE PUPILS OF LAMARCK : A Research Project
It have argued elsewhere (on this website, Celebrating Lamarck) that the myths
surrounding Lamarck, running through a long historiographical tradition, have
deeply influenced research on his life and work. Those myths of Cuvierian
origin, representing Lamarck as a lonely individual, isolated from the
scientific world and the educated public of his time, have severely limited
research on the spread and transformation of Lamarck's ideas in France and
Europe since the first decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, the
myth of the isolation of Lamarck has become such a commonplace that many telling
historical clues that could have allowed less anachronistic (and much more
interesting) historical and social reconstructions have been systematically
ignored.
In his biography of Lamarck, published in 1909, Marcel Landrieu raised the issue
of an evaluation of Lamarck's role as Professor at the Muséum national
d'histoire naturelle. He emphasised the important documentary record constituted
by the register containing the signatures of those who attended the lectures
given by Lamarck every Spring from 1795 to 1820. After the death of the
naturalist, the register was deposited in the Archives of the Muséum, where
Landrieu recovered it when looking for manuscripts relating to Lamarck;it is
today conserved at the Archives nationales in Paris. In 1909, Landrieu's
interest in the register was the logical outcome of the assumption of Lamarck's
isolation: even if Lamarck's theoretical work had been condemned to silence by
Cuvier and his allies, it would be interesting, he argued, to establish if, how
and with what success he had taken advantage of his chance to exercise an
influence on those who attended his lectures, i.e. on the "youth" of his day. In
this vein, Landrieu regretted that Lamarck had refused the chair of zoology
created in March 1808 at the Faculty of sciences on the occasion of the
foundation of the Imperial University :
A more direct involvement with the youth of his day would perhaps have allowed
the founder of transformism to sow the ideas he
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