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