His:story o/European Ideas. Vol. 13. No. 4, pp. 423-492, 1991

Pcrgamon Press plc. Printed in Great Britam.

BOOK REVIEWS

Buffon, Jacques Roger (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 645, 160.00 FF, paper.

If one would attempt to characterise the intellectual climate of the eighteenth-century, one would describe it as an era of unrelenting efforts to find an answer to the momentous questions raised in the preceding centuries by the Newtonian revolution in the sciences, the Reformation and the discovery of the New World.

How did our planet come into being? Was our world the only one in the infinity of space? What was Nature? And even more importantly what was Man? These were the questions eighteenth-century theologians, philosophers and scientists sought to solve in accordance with their particular creed, philosophy and overall world-view.

As Jacques Roger, a professor at the Sorbonne and author of several books on Buffon and eighteenth-century thought argues, Nature was the central issue underlying the theories and speculations of the ‘quatre grands’, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, whose thoughts dominated the intellectual atmosphere of the Enlightenment in France. But while the ‘quatre grands’ consistently applied their theories on Nature to bolster their views on religious, ethical and social issues, Buffon sought a strictly scientific identification of the issue. Professor Roger offers an exhaustive and at the same time fascinating account of Buffon’s methodology which was inspired by the firm conviction that whether one deals with the structure of the solar system or that of the smallest animals or plants, the scientist’s main task should be to find out how those structures came into being. This is indeed what Buffon sought to achieve in his thirty-three volume Histoire naturelIe in which he explored the changes, variations and transformations that had occurred, and are still occurring, in the animal, vegetable and mineral world. In drawing attention to those neverceasingchanges, so Roger notes, Buffon contributed greatly to the demolition of a static world-view and to the preparation of the terrain for the evolutionary ideas that were to come to full fruition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The far-reaching implications of Buffon’s evolutionary ideas were bound to alarm the guardians of theological and philosophical orthodoxy entrenched at the Sorbonne and in some of the provincial academies. Their attacks put Buffon in a difficult situation. As a scientist he believed that truth should be based on ‘what can be verified by observation and experimentation’. But as an aristocrat by birth, a protege of Madame Pompadour and member of the royal Establishment (he was Keeper of the King’s Garden), he could not profess quite openly ideas that were likely to undermine the existing order. Roger gives a richly documented account of how Buffon sought to resolve the problem without compromising his scientific integrity while remaining a loyal supporter of the monarchic system. Buffon’s resilience in extricating himself from a difficult situation might have been one of the reasons why the uncompromising d’Alembert dismissed him as ‘a great phrase- maker’. This view was not shared either by Voltaire or Diderot even though they were occasionally involved in heated polemics with Buffon. Gibbon called him ‘a sublime genius’ even though he found that his ‘conversation and manners were mediocre’. In whatever light his contemporaries saw him, the picture which Roger draws of Buffon is a major contribution to the understanding of an interesting man as well as of the intellectual atmosphere in pre-revolutionary France.

University of Maryland Ann DemaTtreYf.

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