To tell the truth, France is the country where an evaluation of the influence 
exercised by Lamarck on the French and European scientific scene took the 
longest to emerge, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere. This is not to say 
that there has been a lack of studies of the scientific and institutional 
context of the career of Lamarck. Several monographs and articles focussing on 
Buffon, the origins of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle or the careers 
of some of his colleagues, especially Cuvier, have indeed been published, and in 
the last three decades innovative studies on Lamarck himself have also appeared. 
Yet, the critical analysis of the myth of the isolation of Lamarck, a 
preliminary condition for posing the question of the nature, the identity and 
the composition of his audience, his friends and alliances or his disciples and 
admirers, has been treated in studies published only during the last fifteen 
years. In my work The Age of Lamarck (the first Italian edition of which 
appeared in 1983) I attempted to widen the horizon of historical research on 
Lamarck, by appealing to the (often favourable) testimony of contemporary 
figures such as Cyprien-Prosper Brard, Pierre Denys de Montfort, Julien-Joseph 
Virey, Jean-Baptiste-Georges-Marie Bory de Saint Vincent, Louis Constant 
Prévost, Jean-Claude Delamétherie, Charles-Nicholas-Sigisbert Sonnini de 
Manoncourt, Jean-Baptiste-Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy, and other authors who 
engaged in a sustained dialogue with Lamarck's work.
 

Goulven Laurent, the doyen of studies on Lamarck and Lamarckism in France, has 
shown the extent of the influence exercised by Lamarck’s studies on living and 
fossil invertebrates on geologists and palaeontologists active in the first half 
of the nineteenth century. More recently, Patrick Matagne’s doctoral 
dissertation, based on admirable research on natural history societies 
throughout France, has revealed important and significant traces of the 
penetration of the ideas of Lamarck in provincial scientific milieus from the 
end of the 1830s (8).  If we consider that French students clearly made up the 
great majority of those who attended Lamarck's lectures, it is clear that 
sustained research on the register will provide crucial evidence concerning the 
diffusion 

(8) P. Corsi, Oltre il mito. Lamarck e le scienze naturali del suo tempo, 
Bologna, Il Mulino 1983; revised edition in English, The  Age of Lamarck. 
Evolutionary Theories in France 1790-1830, Berkeley, University of California 
Press, 1988. G. Laurent, "Paléontologie et évolution en France de Lamarck à 
Darwin", thèse de Doctorat d'État, Université de Paris I, 2 vol. 1984; P. 
Matagne, "Les mécanismes de diffusion de l'écologie en France de la Révolution 
française à la première guerre mondiale", thèse de Doctorat d'État, Université 
Paris VII, 2 vol., 1994.