Blanckaert (1993) Buffon and The Natural History of Man. Writing History of The Foundathional Myth of Anthropology

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES ___
Vol. 6 No. 1
© 1993 SAGE (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi) 13
Buffon and the natural history of

man: writing history and the
foundational myth of
anthropology
CLAUDE BLANCKAERT
I THE CIRCLE OF EVALUATIONS
From the end of the 18th century, the naturalists and then the historians who
copied them unanimously hailed Buffon as the founder of anthropology.
Todays historians may not of course accept this joint verdict, but if they do, they
face a twin paradox which appears to deny any basis to the title founder. The
first element of paradox is located in the source, the Histoire naturelle de
lHomme of 1749, for nothing here, in Buffons own text, indicates awareness of
any radical innovation or of an explicit project concerning the founding of a new
science.
In this work, the nine articles on anthropology follow a clearly articulated
sequence, and while the text treats its subject exhaustively, it has no real critical
relationship to either old or contemporary sources. In accordance with his stated
method (Buffon,1954 [De la maniere detudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle]:
10) Buffon studies successively and in order mans attributes, first and
foremost his metaphysical attributes, then his anatomical and physical character-
istics according to age, sense functions and geographical variations. Within the
limited scope of a monograph the Natural History of Man presents the great
picture of logically pursued speculations that Buffon proposed in his theoretical
statements as the ideal way of representing facts and things in nature (Buffon,
1954 [Histoire naturelle des mineraux. Du fer]: 28). What it therefore presents,
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basically, are ways of testing a methodological canon whose unique quality and
novel status are indisputable. This, then, is the first conundrum. Buffon did
found anthropology. But culturally speaking, he may not have quite realized
what was at stake in his book, at least during the years of its composition.
The second paradox arises out of a rational examination of the theoretical
conditions for this foundational act. Surprisingly, few authors use a body of
reasoned arguments to justify this. What does it mean to found a science? As a
general rule, reminders that Buffon came first seem to be self-justifying, through
lack of information about what prompted him or any consensus about what his
motives might have been. We simply have to accept as self-evident what history
repeatedly tells us, namely that ... the name with which these studies must
open, for the natural history of man begins with him, is Buffon (Herve,
1918:195). To talk in the same breath about the birth of anthropology and the
Natural Htstory of Man is less to explain the fundamental properties of the work
itself or the conditions of possibility of such an event as to wheel in the age-old
commonplace to the effect that French anthropology in the 19th century is
characterized by the direct link to Buffon (Kremer-Marietti, 1984: 319). In fact,
the historian must register this consensus as largely unexamined, generations of
anthropologists having preached the same message, laying aside their ideological
divergences in order to agree on this point. Thus Paul Topinard compared
Buffon to a star whose radiance illuminates all branches of science, and whose
warmth causes their flowers to blossom and their fruit to ripen (Topinard,
1885: 32-3), while Cuvier acknowledged that he had shown the way forward
(Cuvier, 1845: 153) and Paul Broca saw him as having enabled anthropology to
take its first steps (Broca,1876: 5). On the occasion of the jubilee celebrations for
the centenary of the Societe dAnthropologie de Paris, created in 1859, a medal
was struck bearing Buffons likeness; he was described as having commenced, in
1749, a Treatise on Man that already contained the germ of a complete outline for
anthropology.2To declare outright that he founded a science is to mark out his
historical position as the founder of a school and to recall both the theoretical
bonds formed within a research community and a genealogy of knowledge: If
we leave out Aristotle, who has a somewhat remote claim to the title, Buffon was
finally the founder of anthropology. Since Aristotle, in fact, no name meriting

the epithet anthropologist has occurred to us; after Buffon they became
numerous (Topinard, 1885: 32-3); After Buffon came Camper (Jehan,
1857: 294); ... various authors, amongst whom I shall principally cite de Pauw
and Camper, followed his example, with differing degrees of success (Cuvier,
1845 : 153) ; the natural history of man, anthropology, is a recent invention, for it
was Buffon and Blumenbach who in a way instituted it. Unfortunately, it was
not from that excellent school that... (Hollard, 1853: v).
At the institutional level, it was again a matter of legitimizing socially a
tradition which systematically confused academic and research interests, as was

15
the casewhen A. de Quatrefages de Br6au, professor of the Natural History of

Man atthe Paris Museum of Natural History, recalled the origins of the chair
awarded him in 1855: For the first time, the science of Buffon, Blumenbach and
Prichard would find official interpreters (Quatrefages,1867: 28).
In any case the explanations appear useless. For once an author is declared
immortal,3 or if the inaugural move puts him in a perspective of scientifically
validated rationality, neither his motives nor the origin of his ideas can be
debated. The founding can then be identified as what Bachelard called an
epistemological act, a modern version of the stroke of genius or moment of
transcendental illumination (Bachelard, 1965: 254): ... anthropology was born
from a great idea that occurred to Buffon (Jehan, 1857: 294). Or, similarly, in
P. Flourens words: It was enough for Buffon to produce a few luminous
remarks for the natural history of man to be created (Morel,1857: 9). Such is the
power of genius (P. Flourens).
We must remember here that an epistemological act constitutes an absolute
barrier to historiographic explanation rather than a substitute for it. It therefore
has to be examined in its turn. With hindsight, the great idea attributed to
Buffon deserved to be looked at in its context. What should have been examined,
thereby reducing the number of redundant references, were detailed instances
where the novelty of the Natural History of Man was positively identifiable
through a number of displacements of interest, themselves responsible for
founding new, specifically anthropological object relations.
First of all, there is a philosophical discussion about the naturalization of man:
Buffon studied our species in the same way as he studied the other animals,
substituting for a metaphysics of the soul a science where man is seen according
to his situation in the world, cut off from the Creator and beholden for his
attributes to nature alone. Secondly, there is a methodological argument concern-
ing the accurate use of documents: while creating a synthesis of contemporary
ideas about the relationship between man and the animals, Buffon moved the
critical focus towards the history of man by eliminating the mythological
backdrop of half-human half-animal creatures, such as men with tails, who
clutter fanciful bestiaries from Pliny to B. de Maillet, Maupertuis and Linnaeus.
And thirdly, we have a programmatic argument concerning the constitution of a
completely new field of research: as a naturalist, Buffon went beyond the
individual to study men collectively, as a species. He authorized diversity in the
new science of anthropology by concentrating on the description of nations seen
in their own right, according to their physical differences and moral specificity.
Taking note of these arguments neither explains them nor makes their origin
intelligible, however. Buffon had already put them forward in various articles,
and more often than not, in trying to make them more explicit, one ends up
paraphrasing them. The question of the conditions of possibility of Buffons
great idea, from which anthropology was born, is therefore not raised.

16
There is a good reason why this strange historiographic situation has persisted
so long. Those authors who investigated the origin of the science of man were
already convinced that Buffon was its founder. Most understood this foun-
dational act to be more absolute than relative, an event unannounced by anything
tangible, already there, inherent in such a radically novel concept. Most took for
granted the trajectory his science followed, seeing the formation of a discipline
and its subsequent destiny as immanent in the fact of its foundation. Georges
Gusdorf, taking up a view already expressed by Paul Topinard in the 1880s,
judged that Buffons works, with their broad scope and their complementary
perspectives were
...the starting point for a new era, mapping out the mental space of the
discipline that thenceforth constituted the natural history of man.
Accepted by the European scientific community as a whole, they
constituted a set of assumptions that were referred to without having to be
explicitly cited. More specialized researchers opened up new areas in order
to investigate this or that aspect of their field, their work finding its place
within the discipline without any difficulty at all. (Gusdorf, 1972: 380)
Reversing the relationship of temporal causality, historical writing did not

escape this tautological circle: Buffon had to be the founder because he had
founded anthropological science. Insofar as developments in anthropology had
proceeded in directions already indicated by seminal ideas in the reference text
(here, the Natural History of Man), this was a logical necessity. To the extent that
any piece of critical modelling brings major presuppositions into the text it is
applied to, Buffons argument acquired a kind of open-ended theoretical
availability that made it possible to discover in it, at various points in time, new
ways of justifying the foundational myth. Hence the conclusion, in an article by
Jean Piveteau, written in 1954 and republished in 1988: He truly created the
natural history of man, opening up vast horizons for the science and setting out
vast plans that it has not subsequently been able to fulfil and execute (Piveteau,
1988: 206).
The remains, and it remains foundational. The critical models have
text
changed, all are articulated around burning topics on which Buffon takes up
but
unambiguously modern positions (Laissus, 1988: 81 ). Recognized as the equal
of Charles Darwin, if one takes into consideration the influence exerted by his
ideas on man and animals over nearly a whole century (Poliakov, 1971 : 162),
Buffon has been mythified and magnified. The credit he has enjoyed throughout
this long story makes it impossible to set him up, using an artifice of
epistemological criticism, against other founding fathers such as Montaigne,
Lafitau or Rousseau - whose fate in the major writings of structural anthro-
pology we know all too well.
No, the cultural problem lies elsewhere. To exit from the circle of tautological
evaluations without organizing the history of anthropology according to some

17
exclusive finality of truth (Bachelard), the historian must in his turn historicize
his relationship to the idea of foundation and try to understand it in terms of
changing protocols of reading. He has therefore to look at it through the eyes of
those scientists from both the more distant and the more recent past for whom
the Natural History of Man was, as of right, one of the authorized classics of the
discipline. The text alone does not make clear why it is topical. Its modernity
derives from a whole range of interpretations by competent readers, i.e.
professional readers able to piece together a lexicon, experimental codes and
representations. Through familiarity with the text, authors imposed certain
didactic constraints, a typology of Buffons articles, an implicit classification,
even a clear hierarchy of those of his views deemed consistent or interesting.
Before pinpointing in our turn significant features of the French annals of
anthropology, we should note that the writing of history, at least in this instance,
exists only in a reflexive posture. Internal analysis of the book as object is not
enough. Thus going back to Buffon in no way entails forgetting comments and
choices made essentially during the 18th and 19th centuries; instead, it means
implicating them as documentary evidence in the historical process of the
production of meaning. A whole science depended on it; that much is
undeniable.
II BUFFON IN HISTORY, OR HOW TO BECOME

A FOUNDER
Buffon wanted to create a Complete History of Man considered as individual

and species. He succeeded insofar as it was possible in his time.... In a word, in
spite of its imperfections and the equally inevitable lacunae, the fact that Buffons
work earned for him the title of founder of Anthropology was justly deserved.
Why did he create this science? Because he had a plan of study. Why did he
decide on this plan of study? Because he understood, like Linnaeus, that man and
the various human groups spread across the surface of the globe fell within the
scope of their studies (Quatrefages, 1887: V-VII).
Saying nothing about the theoretical presuppositions behind such a position
or why they were necessary, Cuviers century justified retrospectively what was
clearly a hagiographic promotion. And justify is the significant word here, the
word we must remember. For positivist scientists, such a celebration of Buffon
brought with it a good many potential problems. First, his great work, the
Histoire naturelle g6n6rale, had lost its evocative power since the 1800s. One way
of discrediting an author and of refuting his philosophical claims was to
underline the eloquence of his style. After Buffons death in 1788, supporters of
Linnaeus and Cuvier joined forces to ridicule his cosmological novels or to
invalidate his knowledge. So the naturalists have finally lost their chief; this
time Count Buffon is really dead and buried.6 In his posthumous eulogy

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for Daubenton, Cuvier judged that Buffons eloquence seemed to be employed

against his own reason before leading other peoples reason astray. His
pompous style had been adopted in ladies dressing rooms and scribblers
studies (Cuvier, 1800: 442, 452). After 1767, having alienated Daubenton,
hitherto responsible for the anatomical and descriptive part of the natural history
they were collaborating on, he had loosed his imagination against nature. Unlike
his successors, the anatomists Petrus Camper, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or
Georges Cuvier, Buffon had opposed baring natures skeleton, a process which
nevertheless brought zoology and comparative anatomy into being (Serres,
1854:13). At the time, it was stated that he had been an obstacle to the scientific
expression of modern natural history. In the 1830s there was another change of
direction in scientific opinion thanks to the initiators of the so-called philosophi-
cal school, Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,
1838). Their disciples, such as Armand de Quatrefages de Br6au, defended
Buffon, but by taking up this critical position they proved how the reputation of
the naturalist of the Kings Garden had been overturned (cf. Appel, 1987:15, 26,
49, 186-7).
His Treatise on Man, a fragment of the complete work, was not treated with
the same suspicion. It would remain the basic reference text for observers of man
in the 19th century. But its irrefutable and enduring scientific relevance had to be
rethought and rewritten in analytical conformity with the technical requirements
of a concept of science unknown to Buffon.
Accounts of his modernity at that time thus stressed instead archaic features of
the first chapters of the Natural History of Man: In it, science is far behind the
knowledge of our era, and theoretical views that were discredited long ago play
far too important a part (Quatrefages, 1867: 12). The work had been judged: it
was thenceforth deemed to be made up of disparate articles themselves
comprising a mass of digressions; dealing with its subject from several different
points of view, it offered no apparent unity; above all, in its approach to
knowledge, it bore the conceptual and ideological stamp of the Enlightenment.
Bringing Buffon up to date meant forgetting his eloquent disquisitions on man
and the mechanistic Cartesian view of animal behaviour that Condillac,
Com6lius de Pauw and Cuvier had openly condemned (Condillac, 1981 [1755];
de Pauw, 1770: Vol. II, 62-3 7) , as well as the philosophical passages arguing
against sexual continence (Buffon, 1971 [De 1enfance: 57, et Addition a 1article
de la pubert6: 69-70]), assumptions about virginity (Buffon, 1971 [De la
puberte]: 85 ff.) or the use of swaddling clothes for infants (Buffon, 1971 [De
1enfance]: 57, 69-70). These articles, which soon appeared dated and were
rapidly forgotten, had been considered just as important by the first generation
of Buffons anthropological disciples, such as Julien-Joseph Virey or Lacep6de
(Virey: an. IX; Lacepede, 1821). Their Natural History of Man, replete with
references to Rousseau and Buffon, maintained the synthetic ideal of the 1749
edition, as well as its social standpoint and its philosophical argumentation -

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which they frequently reproduced verbatim, as did Daubenton or Valmont de

Bomare (Daubenton, 1782: XIX-LXXXXII; Valmont de Bomare, an. VIII-1800:
Vol. VII, 8-152). They were still demanding, for anthropology, fields of research
and subjects for investigation that hygienist medicine would monopolize during
the Empire and Restoration periods, and together with their doctrinal master they
considered that the general picture of the human species had to follow natures
direction (Lacepede). However important their testimony may have been for the
history of the human sciences, it was nevertheless not indicative of the deeper
movement of ideas that would produce the institutionalization of French
anthropology, henceforth under the control of the now dominant anatomists.

In order to work out its relationship to Buffons text in such a way that
emergent science got the best of the deal, the positivist 19th century had to cancel
any such ideological debts. Three ways of resolving the problem were worked
out, and they allowed Buffon to be recognized in spite of his philosophy and in
spite of the General Natural History, which was disqualified, according to the
experts, by its over-adventurous arguments.
First of all, the spirit of synthesis of the Natural History of Man would be
valued, rather than its out-of-date analyses. Buffons first great merit was that he
had studied man in all his guises: Buffon was ... the first author to deal ex
professo with the natural history of man (G. Cuvier, 1843: 173). Cuviers judge-
ment would last well beyond the end of the century and is repeated even now.
Applied to the Treatise on Man, the idea of synthesis allowed the Natural
History of Man to be modernized in spite of its old-fashioned ideas. From the
moment Buffon was recognized as having established or pointed to all the
fundamental components of academic anthropology, he was granted the privi-
lege of having anticipated the questions, provided clues to the answers, and
developed the rigorous reasoning that all combined to promote him to the rank
of precursor of the science eventually validated by his more or less distant
disciples. Topinards remarks illustrate perfectly this process of retro-
celebration : Buffon
... founded what would soon be designated anthropology, whose main
branches he sketched out: man in general, considered at all ages as an
animal from the morphological and biological point of view; the descrip-
tion of the races, their origins and their intermixing; finally, the compari-
son of man with the apes and other animals from the physical and
physiological point of view, and then the study of his characteristics, his
place amongst other beings and his origin. These amount to the three
branches of anthropology made distinct by Broca: general, special and
zoological. (Topinard, 1885: 48; Dougherty, 1980: 325)
Secondly, the way anthropology was to emerge as a discipline would hence-
forth follow on from other choices. Having been accorded such distinction by
his successors, Buffon would be quoted in support of the true scientists

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attachment to fact-based realism. His moderation in technical matters, his

criticism of sources, his wide reading and his prudent theorizing would all be
applauded. It is not really so paradoxical, perhaps, to claim that ill-concealed
anti-Buffon attitudes in fact showed the Natural History of Man in a good light:
What is so remarkable is that this genius, at once so profound and so bold, who
did not always wait to have the facts before pronouncing his verdict, was so
moderate in this work that he avoided any kind of system, as it were, and that
nowhere was what he wrote more true (Edwards, 1841: 110-11).
The third consequence was that from that point onwards a selective reading of
the Buffonian anthropological corpus became inevitable. The opening discourse
on the nature of man, which restated the substantial duality of Homo duplex
and which was to maintain its paradigmatic appeal for all spiritualist, anth-
ropocentric and finalist interpretations, would be discreetly disposed of. To
found anthropology, judged Paul Broca, a healthier philosophy was needed: it
was only in the last century that scientists ... dared finally tackle anthropological
studies. While Linnaeus was assigning a place to man in his zoological

classification, Buffon was writing his Natural History of Man, and the first great
milestone in our science turned out to be one of the masterpieces of our literature
(Broca, 1874: 415).
In the 19th century, it became clear that the importance of Buffons
contribution to the foundation of a science of man was directly proportional to
the importance accorded thenceforth to racial considerations in establishing the
natural history of human societies and to studying their geographical distri-
bution and classifying them according to their place on the evolutionary scale of
civilization: The Newest part of this Natural History of Man is the chapter on
the Varieties amongst the human species. Here, Buffon combines admirable
erudition with an even more admirable sagacity (Flourens, 1850: 157). Scientific
commentators all agreed that in this chapter the whole of Buffon could be
found; ... it is impossible not to admire the marvellous sagacity of a man who,
having such imperfect materials at his disposition, was able to make many correct
deductions and draw so many correct conclusions from them (Quatrefages,
1867: 13). The comparative study of human groups, started by Buffon in 1749,
was what summed up the importance of his work:
In one fell swoop, Buffon virtually created the natural history of man, and
he brought it into the world in the form of a masterpiece: his article, as he
called it, with characteristic simplicity, a chapter too easily forgotten,
which nevertheless constituted one of his major claims to fame, the
Varieties amongst the Human Species, the first treatise on ethnology.
Anthropology and especially ethnology had not existed before Buffon.
Anatomically, individual man had been studied in great depth; physio-
logically, rather less so. Meanwhile, the predilections and methods of those
who studied man from the intellectual angle were matched only by their

21
lack of experience and even greater lack of success. Humankind had not
been studied at all, and the constitution of the groups that make it up had
not even been considered. It was only after Buffon that the science of
Varieties, or human races, his real intellectual offspring, was born and was
able to grow. (Herve, 1918: 195)
From this moment onwards, by indicating the progress made after him and
thanks to him, the limitations of Buffons undertaking could be pointed out
without invalidating his enterprise as a whole. He examined the different races
... he tried to determine their characters. Treating this subject for the first time,
his work was naturally imperfect (Cuvier, 1845: 153; Broca, 1874: 415).
The objectivized split between the science of the individual (medicine) and the
science of the human species (anthropology), a foundational split for positivists
of both yesterday and of today, provided guarantees for an area of competence
whose epistemological frontiers were closed. In a single gesture, it reflected the
new direction taken by anthropological research and the corresponding changes
in the sociology of its institutions in all the senses of that term. Witness the
comments made much later, in 1959, by H. V. Vallois, secretary general of the
Paris Anthropological Society: Once Buffon, in his Natural History of Man...
had shown the interest of a study of man which studied him not as an individual,
as a doctor of medicine does, but as a zoological group, as only a naturalist can
do, the great establishment then called the Jardin du Roi never lost interest in
such research (Vallois, 1960: 296).
Reduced to just its final chapter, Buffons scientific anthropology gained in
autonomy while simultaneously losing the support provided by a system of
internal rules and a wider intellectual context which probably justified its general
orientation. Far from looking at the Natural History of Man in isolation, as has
been done since the last century, Buffon emphasized the logic of his system,
which provided the basis of the objectivizations that followed. At the end of the
article On the Nature of Man, for example, he made perfectly explicit the link he
saw to be necessary between the general examination of the phenomena of
reproduction and the formation of the foetus, a central topic in the first chapters
of the History of the Animals of 1749 and the article On Childhood. By
reducing anthropology more and more to its factual and ethnographic content,
posterity was deliberately to neglect the systematic effect of this construction.
This is why not only the positivist critics of the past but those who have
reproduced their views more recently rule out any investigation of the theoretical
conditions in which a new disciplinary field can appear. By putting the spotlight,
late in the day, on a fragment arbitrarily detached from the Natural History of
Man, they ended up creating an evolutionary method that became the hallmark
of anthropology in the first half of the 19th century. Flourens was thus able to
speak of Buffons treatise on the varieties amongst the human species as the first
important step of its kind (Flourens, 1838: 362).

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preferential treatment is not reflected in the work of just one isolated author. The
article Man in Diderots and dAlemberts Encyclopaedia reveals the same
divergence from the future norm: We have followed man from the moment of
his formation or the beginning of his life, until the moment of his death. This is
what constitutes the natural history of many In 1773, Alexandre Sav6riens
negative attitude was even more marked:
To this particular history of man the Naturalists of our time add the general
history of Mankind. This history contains the varieties amongst the human
species.... And their relations degenerate into a travellers tale that in no
way resembles a natural history: customs, ways of life, the laws of different
peoples not being at all the object of this science. (Saverien, 1773:
LXXIII-LXXIV)
Saverien, one of the first popularizers of what was then called Antropology [sic],
would in 1778 once more take up the general scheme of the Natural History of
Man. Like Daubenton he spends a good deal of time on the description of the
ages of man and the sexual behaviour of the species, and devotes but a few lines to
the geographical varieties of humanity. Knowledge of savage and civilized
peoples belongs to a general history of peoples rather than the natural science of
man: All I need say is that M. de Buffon is the first of the Naturalists to describe
the varieties of human species and that this description is by no means the least
interesting part of this fine and indeed great work (Saverien, 1778: 230).
At the other extreme from this first appropriation of Buffons text,
valorization from the naturalist standpoint of the chapter on the varieties
amongst the human species would proceed, from the beginning of the 19th
century, from another conception of science and from other ideological issues,
particularly ones connected to the anthropological debate that was now focusing
on the problem of the origin of the races (Blanckaert, 1981). It would also be
connected with the rehabilitation, in the framework of a certain geographical or

ethnographic conception of the Buffon corpus, of travel literature, under the
heading of customs and local manifestations of human intelligence. From one
period and from one school to another, certain of Buffons anthropological
articles were thus overvalued. Other articles were annexed to them; for example,
The Pongo and the Jocko, where the author, following Edward Tyson, was
attempting a summary of the resemblances and differences between man and ape
(Wokler, 1976). Others disappeared as it were through not being mentioned;
such as the ages of man, the analysis of sense experience, the depiction of
emotions on the human face, the reflections on death. Also forgotten were the
long statistical tables in the section on probabilities concerning life spans which
bore witness, over some 200 pages, to Buffons familiarity with mathematics, and
which he continued to study in his Essay on Social Arithmetic. Selective reading
throughout the 19th century transformed the ideological scope of his discourse
as well as its contents in terms of knowledge. Buffon was enrolled by

24
anthropologists, spiritualists and materialists alike. He numbered man amongst

the animals (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,1859: 171, note 1), but he was seen as one of
the precursors of the doctrine of the human reign (Quatrefages,1867: 11 ). In the
Darwinian era he was made into a transformationist (Hovelacque, 1882;
Topinard, 1883), then a prehistorian (Bloch, 1901; cf. Harvey, 1992).
What is more, the importance accorded to the concept of the natural history of
man and the extent to which it is understood varies according to the viewpoints
of professionals. Because of their situation, professionals reproduce their
prejudices and interests in their reading protocols. Any discourse of knowledge
of a positivist kind is normative in principle and will always tend to prescribe an
authorized meaning. To understand better Buffons anthropology and its
specific destiny as the science of the human species, the historically constituted
effects of meaning must be analysed and then integrated into the commentary.
Only on these terms is it possible to escape, albeit only partially, from the
philological illusion (see Benrekassa, 1979) and the network of unilateral
identifications and value judgements that mortgage all historiographic under-
takings. It is this dialectical tension between the two terms involved in any act of
scientific appropriation, a source-text, and, lined up opposite, the accumulated
evidence for its status as an obligatory reference-text, that the historian must be
clear about if he is to understand the extent of the Buffonian revolution in
anthropology. In exactly the same way, the accessible part of the basic corpus
must be taken into account along with the type of critical reading superimposed
upon it by the various schools which, historically, in the very act of recognition
by which they appropriated it, discovered in it their own identity. Moreover, if
the doctrinal unity of Buffons work makes cutting it up into sections appear
contrived, we have to conclude, together with Jacques Roger, that ... in fact,
man is everywhere present in the Natural History, explicitly or implicitly ...
(Roger, 1979: 253). Putting it another way, we might say that a philosophical
matrix governs the work as a whole.
We should therefore take up the invitation to investigate the standard an-
thropological corpus and the areas in which it enjoys exclusive rights, but also go
further, and open up its discursive space to wider interpretations (see Duchet,
1971b: 230-1). By virtue of their very subjects and the multiple effects of comp-
lementarity, symmetry or redundancy that in the end determine certain late texts,
one must necessarily take into account philosophical works such as the discourse
On the Nature of Animals, The Epochs of Nature, or certain supplements to
the Natural History. There are no longer any limits to what we may select.
III FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN TO THE

SCIENCE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES
The Buffon legend gains much from the extraordinary way in which the Seigneur
de Montbard rose in society, just as it does from the list of his scientific titles:

25
chief administrator of the Jardm du Roi, which he brought to the pinnacle of its
glory (Laissus, 1986: 316), permanent treasurer of the Royal Academy of
Sciences, member of the French Academy and the academies of Berlin, London,
St Petersburg, Bologna, Florence, Edinburgh and Philadelphia - by the end of his
life Buffon was known and recognized as an illustrious naturalist. He
nevertheless remained a philosopher and shared with the thinkers of his time
what Michele Duchet has called a kind of militant impatience. As for his
reflections on the nature of man, which were frequently critical of the order and
the values of the ancien rgime, they were imbued with reformist zeal (Duchet,
1971 b: 20). A list of recent editions of Buffons works or books about him reveals
even more clearly, to the modern reader, how this appointment with philosophi-
cal history came about. In 1954, Jean Piveteau published extracts from the
Natural History of Man in Buffons Philosophical Works, which constitute
Volume XLI of the Corpus general des philosophes franqais. Not very long
ago, the late Jacques Roger used the words A Philosopher in the Kings Garden
as the subtitle to his remarkable biography of Buffon. For although Buffon
touched circumspectly on polemical political topics, preferring, as he himself

said, to keep a low profile rather than swing from a gibbet, and though he took
very literally the duty of restraint that came with his official position, Buffon
shared the critical positions of the philosophes, such as their naturalism and their
anticlericalism. Thus he concluded his Epochs of Nature with a picture of an ideal
society which had arrived at the best form of government possible, capable of
perfecting human nature in peace and comfort. He quoted in eulogistic terms the
Lettre sur les aveugles, which had earned Diderot a stay in prison at Vincennes
(Buffon, 1971 [Du sens de la vue]: 181, note a; Roger, 1963) and inspired many
of Rousseaus reflections in his Discours sur lorigine de lingalit parmi les
hommes by giving him in advance grounds for believing that quite possibly vice
was only produced in society (Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans
1espece humaine]:
297; Starobinski, 1971: 380-92). As Michele Duchet has shown in her erudite
critical edition of the treatise On Man, Buffon provided the Encyclopaedia with
many an article while also anticipating the Lockeian Adam (Fellows and
Milliken, 1972:125), a fiction where original man awakes to the world by means
of his senses, providing the model for the allegory of the statue developed later by
Condillac and Charles Bonnet (Buffon, 1971 [Des sens en general] : 214-19;
Marcos, 1986).
There are many such items dispersed throughout the Natural History of Man.
Based on a sensualist epistemology and an ideology of human nature and the
progress of societies that is both normative and polemical, they bear witness to
Buffons social preoccupations. In this way, Buffons anthropology is not
fundamentally different in its structure and its ideological aspects from those of
the other philosophers (Duchet, 1971b : 20). Michele Duchet thus demolishes
the concept of foundation, going as far as to recognize, in the works of Buffon,
Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire and Helvetius, several possible Enlightenment

26
anthropologies (ibid.: 479). Even when marked out by a relationship of

conformity such as this - In the very first place, of course, the Natural History of
Man (ibid.: 13) - Buffon does not benefit from any retrospective privileges.
Though he points the way (Duchet, 1971a: 7-36), it is, however, only a
question of an internal transformation of the sensualist system, not of a new
philosophy (Duchet,1971b: 21). But is it not the case that to consider Buffon as
one of the Encyclopaedists invalidates or minimizes the theoretical differences
that characterize his human science? Did the anthropological system responsible
for his scientific renown constitute a simple variant on the classic theme of
human nature or one of many possible ways of problematizing it?
We can be sure of nothing here. The modern verdict flies in the face of history
while the subsequent development of the human sciences provides unarguable
evidence that Buffons internal transformation of the sensualist system
proposed a new kind of knowledge and a research programme to carry it
forward, whereas within two generations no further echoes of the anthropo-
logies of Diderot, La Mettrie or Helvetius were heard (cf. Moutaux, 1988: 31-
4~). The antithetical division of science and philosophy is therefore of very little
explanatory value, even if one grants that the posthumous distinction accorded to
the Intendant of the Kings Garden owed much to his prudent style, his
superficial spiritualism, his academic fame and his international audience.
In fact, Buffon wrote about the human condition in the margins of his
century and as a naturalist. He renewed the criteria and the objective methods
required for deciding upon the place of our species in nature because he was a
naturalist, not a philosopher. If he entered the philosophical debate, it was not to
found the science he wanted to build, but to have it accepted (Roger,1979: 257).
It is very obvious that he combined the scientific and the philosophical genres,
but according to J. Roger, it was fundamentally a matter of making a number of
covert moves intended to provide science, cloaked in the fashionable thought of
his century, with a solid base in its own right (Roger, 1989a: chs 11, 12). It is
precisely the real, effective, operational difference represented by Buffonian
anthropology that we have to construct, just as posterity did, by putting to good
historiographic use not only the consensus amongst authors but their dis-
agreements too. Buffons sensualism neither proves nor disproves his allegiance
to the philosophical movement. What is more, Jean Piveteau showed how the
Cartesian Buffon of the Discours and the Vues generales on nature
contradicted the sensualist Buffon directly associated with the true creation of
the natural history of man, Buffon the observer, the naturalist (Piveteau,
1988:188). This is the one still claimed by natural scientists, who find nothing
philosophical there, in the restrictive, or, for them, crippling sense of the word.
Once they have reread the first, forgotten chapters of the Natural History of
Man, which deal in particular with ontogeny and sexual anthropology, historians
too agree about this (Brahimi, 1980).
In 1749, having considered the inner man and established the spirituality of the

27
soul, Buffon proposed to write a history of the human body and to go through
the ages of man, from birth to death. Four chapters were devoted to this topic,
traditionally part of medical anthropography rather than natural history. In the
19th century it was recognized as a very fine work of physiology and
psychology, and an eloquent picture of the physical and moral development of
man to which nothing could be compared (Jehan,1857: col. 364&dquo;). For the first
time, man was treated just like other living creatures, from the material angle,
while Buffons psychological research on the senses brought him an extraordi-
nary reputation (Cuvier, 1843: 174). For Buffon, everything these descriptions
entailed rightfully belonged to the natural history of man. Today, the principle
responsible for their coherence within the unity of a single text has been
forgotten. This is why Otis Fellows and Stephen Milliken judged Buffons efforts
in anthropology, along with his observations and commentaries, as among the
least formalized, the least rigorous, the least systematic, of all his writings. His
general approach usually seems freewheeling, loosely impressionistic (Fellows
and Milliken, 1972: 136; see also 137). However, far from being devoid of order,
the work responds precisely to the methodological proposal outlined in the
opening discourse of the Natural History, which used the following terms to
make clear the object of inquiry and the type of knowledge sought:
The history of an animal must not be the history of the individual, but that
of the whole species of such animals; it must include their begetting, the
period of gestation and of birth, the number of young produced, the
nurture provided by mothers and fathers, the kind of education received,
their instincts, their habitat, their food, the ways in which they obtain it,
their customs, their cunning ... (Buffon,1954 [De la maniere detudier et
de traiter lhistoire naturelle]:16)
Though conforming to this epistemological guideline, the first chapters of the

Natural History of Man dealt, as the author saw it, only with the history of the
individual. In his judgement only the chapter on the Varieties amongst the
Human Species had any bearing on the history of the species studied according
to varieties of colour, form and natural temperament lnaturel] (Buffon, 1971
[Varietes dans 1espece humaine]: 223). The first articles in the Treatise on Man,
like the chapters on the senses, did not, however, have a purely ideographic value.
The description of the different stages of human development presupposed a
comparative, ethnographic examination of behaviour and customs, linked to
changes in the individuals circumstances. Climatic geography and travel
literature were constantly cited to account for physical and physiological
variations in the human body or dietary regimes that corresponded to
environment and nationality. As soon as he was treated as an animal, man
appeared in all his empirical singularity. In the history of an animal species, each
specimen was the equivalent of its generic type. The rigorous demands of
instinct, the circumscribed limits of its natural homeland [patrie naturelle] and

28
specialized alimentary habits combined to repress individuation. All this can be

talked about in general terms. But no such thing applied to man, whose
cosmopolitan species was subject to the influence of a great diversity of
sometimes almost contradictory physical milieux, and whose intelligence,
whether used for good or for ill, did not obey the mechanisms of a putative single
inner material feeling [sentiment matriel intrieur]. This is what Buffon
remarked upon in the article On Puberty: what contrasts among the customs
of different nations! what contrary ways of thinking! (Buffon, 1971 [De la
puberte]: 90). It was no longer enough to declare outright, with a flourish of
style, that men were intellectually equal; it was necessary to show that their
actions and their works showed variety and diversity because they possessed
free and independent souls. Buffon did not contradict Descartes; instead, he took
him literally : ... for it is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing being
to apply it well (Descartes, 1963 [1637]: 25). Furthermore, superstitions,
prejudices, contrary opinions about what could be seen to represent la belle

nature demonstrated that one could not claim to be examining the nature of
man without the aid of ethnographic documentation.
There are in Buffon a good number of normative statements about the conduct
of the wise man or rules of behaviour that obey natural law (Hoffmann, 1977:
part 4, ch. 4). But the tyranny exercised by men and oppressive civil laws took
little account of prescriptive remarks touching on sexuality and marriage in
particular. In order to study man with the kind of philosophical impartiality
that leaves the meanings of words intact (Buffon, 1971 [De la puberte]: 76),
one has, according to the programmatic phrase used by Charles de Brosses, to
renounce all possibilities: ... it is not a matter of imagining what he [man]
might have been able to do or ought to have done, but to examine what he did
(de Brosses, 1988 [1760]: 143t2).
As a witness and actor in contemporary debates that were as much about
paediatrics and sexuality as the origin of our ideas, true or false, Buffon
summoned up examples from Negroes to Siamese tribesmen, if need be, to bear
witness to the absurdity of our customs (Roger,1989a: 226). By means of a more
controlled but still polemical use of travellers tales, the savage of the
philosophers, whether Iroquois or Tahitian, was less frequently called upon, as
he had previously been from La Hontan to Rousseau, to provide lessons on good
behaviour for corrupt Europeans. Buffon ceased expatiating on the human race
in the manner of Rousseau, who put aside all facts, the better to seek right and
reason. Rousseau conjectured, while Buffon stated. The former rejected all
scientific books (Rousseau, 1964 [1755]: 1253), while the latter sought in them
historical truths, restricting himself, as he puts it in the first paragraph of the
chapter on the Varieties amongst the Human Species, to what is most general
and moreover proven to be true. Hence the approval of those who continued his
work: ... never was the art of examining evidence, of critical inquiry, which is
surrounded by so much difficulty in ethnology, taken so far (Herv6, 1918:196).

29
It was by a whole series of epistemological decisions of this kind that Buffon,

according to his successors, laid the foundations of the natural history of man
and of ethnography, or the description of peoples (Broca,1874: 415). Obliged to
treat the natural reality of the ages of man dialectically, by integrating it in the
ever-changing symbolic universe of rites and popular customs, Buffon did not
generalize much about physical questions, even if he did often interpret what
were claimed to be natures wishes to his own advantage. It was in the name of a
complete comparative history of the species that he condemned the kind of

madness that made girls virginity into a living entity (Buffon, 1971 [De la
puberte] : 85). It was in natures name, again, and against the principle of
ecclesiastical celibacy, that he published the long confession of a sex maniac and
denounced overlong retention of seminal fluid as responsible for states of
dementia and epilepsy (Buffon, 1971 [Addition a 1article de la puberte]:100-7).
A philosophers discourse, doubtless, anticipating Diderots naturist, libertarian
and irreligious pamphlet, the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, which
portrayed a devout priest being led to break his vows of chastity in the arms of a
young native girl, a text where a Tahitian, an epicurean and a master of rhetoric,
also declares that the strange precepts of the priests religion were contrary to the
general law of living beings (Diderot, 1964: 455 ff.; quotation, 480). However,
Buffon also provided himself with other reasons for writing than the critical
analysis of contemporary mores. It was a question of creating an inventory of the
human condition: Puberty, the accompanying circumstances, circumcision,
castration, virginity, impotence - these are too essential to the history of man to
allow us to suppress related facts (Buffon, 1971 [De la puberte]: 76). And
further on, apropos of virginity, he concludes his reflections by justifying his
compilation of source-materials: ... just as in a story one reports not only the
sequence of events and the factual circumstances, but also the origin of the most
influential opinions and errors, I believed that in the history of man I could not
avoid speaking of his favourite idol, the one to whom he makes most sacrificial
offerings (Buffon, 1971: 85). Buffons analyses remain brief: where aetiology is
concerned, he blames superstitions and mens jealousy, passions and self-
interest, along with the rest of his century. But the result of his empirical and
textual inquiry counts less than the impetus he gave to a technical and
documentary genre, ethnography, henceforth subordinated to a history of man.
At the beginning of the 19th century the anthropology of the sexes, to take just
this example, would constitute an essential chapter in Julien-Joseph Vireys
Natural History of Mankind. It would remain an important disciplinary
component in the institution of French ethnography for many years, as is shown
by the instructions concerning the specific ethnic characteristics of the
reproductive system in the various human races and their differences or particular
variations published in 1871 under the auspices of the Paris Ethnographic
Society. Almost certainly written by Clemence Royer, this questionnaire for
travellers dealt with the anatomical and physiological characteristics of the sexual

30
organs of different peoples, particularities of puberty in different milieux, the

ceremonies, habits and superstitions relating to menstrual crises, vices against
nature linked to hot climates, hygiene, social status and certain customs, beliefs,
prejudices and superstitions, and practices of circumcision and infibulation in
relation to their physical and moral causes - and so on (Calmette, Duhousset,
Hervey-Saint-Denys, de Labarthe, de Rosny and Royer, 1871). All in all, a very
Buffonian questionnaire.
Another aspect of Buffons thought justifies retrospectively his patient
empirical inquiry into the variations in man. The author of the Natural History of
Man does not speak of human nature, if we are to understand by that expression
a set of essential, inalienable qualities guaranteeing a certain kind of being, an
essence shared by all men, something that might incline the species to certain
obligatory forms of behaviour. Though a philosopher concerned with progress,

he proposed no conjectural hypothesis about the necessary development of
societies. Buffons man was most certainly endowed, by virtue of a divine gift,
with thought, and through his capacity to communicate ideas, with the idea of
the perfectibility of the species. All individuals, whether savage or civilized,
possessed the same rational potential and ability to evolve. They were equal in
the eyes of nature. But they could not make most of their constitutive differences
into anything meaningful, as he put it, without organizing their power of action
over nature collectively and in the context of a society based upon law. Turning
the speciess aptitudes into actual behaviour was thus conditional and depended
upon social factors. Interwoven with biographical elements, this entrepreneurs
view of reason taking possession of brutish nature (he describes it as hideous and
dying) allows Buffon the financier, landowner and master blacksmith, to offer a
dynamic picture of human nature overcoming obstacles and taking calculated
risks. Without going into all the details of the argument - something that would
require far more copious documentation than is possible here (Blanckaert, 1992)
-
the upshot is that the value of man, as reflected in Buffons productivist

terminology, is not an absolute given: it has to be maintained and can be
retroceded if, like the savage, man fails to realize his potential: man himself, in
the pure state of nature, unenlightened, and stripped of all the support of society,
produces nothing, builds nothing (Buffon, 1829-31 [Le Castor]: Vol. 15, 317).
According to Buffon, the perfectibility of the species implied, in order to become
concrete, an ongoing, active process whereby it was produced and reproduced
ceaselessly; all of which presupposed human labour, meaning the work involved
in cultivating the earth or overcoming the natural forces which gave material
reality to an otherwise abstract essence. By using technology to alter natural
processes, mans worth acquired value in relation to his project, which was the
appropriation or mastery of the terrestrial globe, the cultivation of the earth, the
domestication of savage species and control of the energy that physical forces can
provide. Cultivated nature, draped in magnificent and pompous attire, was
turned into a mirror which reflected its own greatness and superiority.

31
Rephrasing Descartes, Buffons man would thus proclaim: I do, therefore I am.
This conception of mans place in nature proved to be decisive as regards the
direction subsequently taken by Buffons naturalist anthropology. It has three
main features, which we will now summarize.
First of all, by placing man straight away in the practical situation of
appropriating the physical world and having to cope with the uncertainties of
civilization, Buffon neutralized the traps involved in philosophical attribution.
What happened to the species was no longer guaranteed by natural law, nor were
its direction and choices ordered in purely rational ways or determined by clear
and distinct ideas. Thought, freedom and perfectibility had no meaning unless
tested against reality. Virtualities had to be lived. The minds of men, in their
concrete reality, differed in every way or not at all (Buffon, 1954 [LAsne]:
356): There are so many automata amongst the human species! And education
and reciprocal communication so augment the quantity and the vivacity of
feelings! What a difference, in this respect, between the savage and the man in a
policed society, and between a peasant woman and a woman of the world!
(Buffon, 1954 [Les animaux carnassiers]: 367).
Secondly, civilization produced its own truth and value. In a policed society,
men had as it were tamed themselves, and represented the concept of a specific,
perfectible human nature. This was the consequence of the epistemology peculiar
to Buffon. He refused definitions based upon intrinsic properties and in all his
work, according to Cassirer, he prepared the way for a vision of nature which
instead of deducing destiny from being, deduced being from destiny and
explained being by destiny (Cassirer, 1966: 107). Hence a significant change of
perspective. In answer to the question What is man?, Buffons activist
philosophy replied to all intents and purposes that he is a differentiated animal
living in political societies and capable of thought and words who, by means of
concerted plans of action and the natural means available to him, or created by
him, tries to abolish in himself the signs of his animality. The 19th century would
take this definition further, but without contradicting it.
Thirdly, the civilized white man, model of all that was true and beautiful
(Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans 1espece humaine]: 319), represented both a
prototype and an unchallengeable, perfect example of what variations amongst
the species had produced. The savage became the degenerate antithesis to all
this. Buffons European-centred anthropology was largely presented as the
solution to an enigma: given the unity of the human species and, in ideal terms,
the equality of nations, how could one account empirically for all the different
time-scales in mans development, the resulting divisions, and the debased
genius (C. de Pauw), of savage peoples? What were the mechanisms, both
material and social, that caused man to degenerate in relation to his truth and his
beauty? Why did men - the plural being the operative word - vary in their
natural character?
The positivist epistemological tradition holds that a new science is inaugurated

32
by a critical break from established ideologies, in a move against the dominant

philosophy. Now naturalist science, the science of the human species, depended
in part on the philosophy of man the entrepreneur and agent in the world he had
himself humanized. Customs and the national genius of different peoples were
part of nature, and thus, a fortiori, of natural history. From that point on, and for
all the disciples of the eloquent historian of nature, the illustrious M. Buffon
(Valmont de Bomare), the picture of the general products of that intelligence, in
each of the races of the human species, was the necessary complement of their
history.... The use that each human race has made of its portion of the qualities
nature shared out should therefore be the subject of their historians research; he
should strive to present a faithful image of it (Lacep~de, an. IX-1801: 7-8).
Without giving leverage to reductionist materialism in the style of La Mettrie or
Cabanis, Buffon brought together and consolidated empirical studies of the
physical and moral characteristics of a variety of human groups by the
bringing to earth of the &dquo;whole&dquo; of man, as Sergio Moravia put it (1980: 250-
214): It was the totality of his being, physical, social and intellectual, that Buffon
wanted to deal with in his Natural History of Man (Roger, 1989a: 210).
Thereafter, the word philosophy would operate on two different levels.
The first level involved a specific rationalization of mans mode of spatio-
temporal integration in the world - something which does indeed appear to
smack of an ideology of human nature. After the revolutionary period, Buffons
disciple Julien-Joseph Virey would make this unspoken naturalist agenda
explicit: ... nothing is outside nature, nothing can get outside it.... Our
sciences, arts and industry all come within its purview. Man himself, this
creature that reigns above all creatures ... remains subject to natures laws, like
the lowliest animal. How could he not realize that it is in his interest to know
himself, together with all that surrounds him, gives him life and causes him to
die? (Virey, 1817: 542).
The second level brought into play a corpus of methodological principles
designed to make this philosophy fruitful in ways that transcended parochial
preoccupations, set in the context of a progressive problematic of knowledge.
This is more or less the meaning Buffon ascribes to the word philosophy: It
seems to me that a philosophy without defects would be one where the only
causes invoked were general effects, but in which one would at the same time
seek to increase their number while striving to generalize particular effects
(Buffon, 1954 [Histoire generale des animaux]: 249).
The Natural History of Man displaced the philosophical issue, moving from
solid nominalist a priori requirements to a position open to empirical solutions
(Buffon, 1971 [De la nature de 1homme]: 43~). Man in the state of nature or
man as natural was not as important as man in nature, man understood in terms
of his concrete relationship to the world. As a naturalist and an entrepreneur,

Buffon supplied proof that terrestrial circumstances defined for the socialized
individual a framework of necessary, changing actions that was in no way

33
uniform. The physical and mechanical aspects of his animal nature had created
conditions for him which he could not avoid confronting (Buffon, 1954
[Nomenclature des singes]: 390). But environmental constraints weighed even
more heavily on man the cosmopolitan animal, since the natural world was so
diverse and, occasionally, so hostile to him. Certain climates discouraged human

activity, others were favourable to it. For Buffon, man was partially a product of
the earth he lived on, forming with it a concrete, necessary totality: Thus the
earth makes the plants, the earth and the plants make the animals, while the earth,
the plants and the animals make man (Buffon, 1954 [Les animaux sauvages]:
362). The type of existence of communities that might be situated very close to
each other could be completely different, according to whether beneficial or
more arduous conditions of physical geography obtained. Buffon could in this
way contrast the description of the Ainou people, close neighbours of the
civilized Japanese, bringing all available causal factors into play.
The province of Ye~o, which is in the northern part of Japan, though
situated in what should be a temperate climate, is nevertheless very cold,
sterile and mountainous. Consequently, the inhabitants of this region are
different from the Japanese and the Chinese; their behaviour is gross and
brutal, and they have neither social mores nor arts ... they live like savages,
and nourish themselves with whale fat and fish oil; they are very lazy and
they wear dirty clothes. Their children run around almost naked ... in
general, they are more like the northern Tartars, or the Samoides, than like
the Japanese. (Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans 1espece humaine]: 236-7;
emphasis added)
This example shows quite clearly the new cognitive scheme Buffon set up in
order to get inside the philosophers seemingly impregnable rationalist bastion.
A pluralist and differential anthropology would be defined in this way, but the
initial stance probably had a philosophical origin: if man justified himself first
and foremost by his works, human creativity, like the new liberty that flowed
from it, implied a mastery, however relative, of natural forces - which amounted
to saying an awareness of necessities. But what would liberty in the abstract be
like, if man had no opportunities for physically making use of it? Knowing mans
real situation in the world forced a recognition, within a single thesis, of his
specific potential, his actual practices and the location of his settlements. The
whole pattern formed a system (Sloan, 1973). To understand man, even in a
dualist, Cartesian framework, it would thereafter be necessary to take note of the
demands of physiology and to think hard about the disruptive, inhibiting or
dynamic part played by customs, predominant behaviour patterns, modes of
subsistence, and education, all of which had to be closely correlated to overall
climatic conditions. One example will be enough to make manifest Buffons
pragmatic convictions. It bore upon one of the central issues of Enlightenment
anthropology6: did the faculty of judgement react adversely to the influence of

34
climatic variations? In 1748, in Lhomme-machine, and without going into

details, La Mettrie implicated the weight of hereditary influences, food and the
chaos of diverse elements that float in the immensity of the air. He drew from
this the conclusion that... such is the power of Climate that a Man who changes
from one to another feels the change in spite of himself. He is like an ambulatory
plant that has transplanted itself; if the climate is no longer the same, it is normal
that the plant should degenerate or improve (La Mettrie, 1987: 72-3). In De
lhomme, a posthumous work published in 1773, Helv6tius formally replied that
this could not be the case without contradicting the very essence of understand-
ing, defined as the capacity to see the resemblances and the differences between
objects, and to recognize their suitability or unsuitability:
Some ... attribute intellectual differences to the physical differences
between latitudes. But to prove this, keeping to the given definition of the
human mind, we would have to name a country where men noticed neither
the differences nor the resemblances between objects, nor their suitability
or unsuitability for us. Such a climate has yet to be discovered. (Helvetius,
1989 [1773]: Vol. 1, 223, note a; cf. also 207-8, note b)
The canonical image of the mind as endowed with the faculty to compare,
could not therefore be invalidated by degrees of heat or cold or by the way the
location was configured. Buffon deliberately swept away all generalizations.
Without getting directly involved in a polemic with the rabble of philosophizers
against whom Rousseau was soon to stress the advantages of on the spot
observation (Rousseau, 1964 [1755]: 212), he accumulated empirical evidence of
proof in favour of the hypothesis of climatic and telluric determination:
The air and the earth have a great deal of influence upon the shapes of men,
animals and plants: within one canton one only has to examine the men
who live higher up the hillsides or on the hilltops, and to compare them
with those who live in the middle of the neighbouring valleys, to discover
that the former are agile, alert, well proportioned and quick-witted, and
that the women are generally pretty, whereas on the flat, low-lying land,
where the earth is heavier, the air thicker and the water less pure, the
peasants are slower and less well proportioned as well as being slow-witted,
while the women are nearly all ugly. (Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans 1espece
humaine]: 320, emphasis added)
Without any further show of feeling, Buffons philosophical anthropology
faced up to real lifes often sordid material conditions. Poverty was imprinted
upon faces and penetrated bodies. Inequality, actual and contingent, could cancel
out the potential formal equality of mankind. Climate forged the soul and
harmony between bodies. Nothing had therefore been decided in advance when
judgements were made in observation-based sciences. To be answerable to its
own criteria, theory had thus to give way to the practice of the inventory. If the

35
individual or the groups with which he entered into relations were not equivalent
to the species as a whole, the naturalist had to provide himself with numerous
facts before having ideas, and not jump ahead of empirical inquiry. Any
innovatory research depended upon an appreciation of these factors. The first
stages of reflection could not involve attempting to imagine outcomes or endings.
This is why the Natural History of Man is built on the basis of a break from the
philosophy of universal man, and maps out the way forward for an unheard-of
discipline that can be called anthropology or the science of the human species.
This displacement of interest and of emphasis explains the importance retro-
spectively accorded to Buffonian anthropology by 19th-century naturalists.
Buffon came up against the physical and social geography of conditions and
climates, the whims of custom, alimentary traditions and variations in the body
social which made it more or less integrated. Beneath all these variables, once
ordered, he sought to discover laws, that is to say, objectivized regularities,
recurrent properties and correlating levels (Buffon, 1954 [De la maniere
detudier et de traiter 1histoire naturelle]: 25&dquo;). Prior to any demonstration, the
inventory of the human phenomenon, the ordered repertoire of travel literature,
takes on its full meaning here. Anthropology is for Buffon the science that
allows two concepts to be entertained at once: the unity of the human species and
its diversity (Duchet, 1971a: 17). Man in himself, universal and abstract, was put
into a subservient position with respect to concrete variables. Circumnavigation
of the globe had accumulated all kinds of information about distant peoples.
These documents had to be put into some kind of order.... This is what Buffon
did, taking as his basis the idea Hippocrates had two thousand years earlier called
the influence of air, water and place (Topinard,1885: 45). It was very obviously
the case that speculation was not lacking in all this, but it had technical alibis with
no equivalents in the work of Rousseau, Diderot or Helvetius, as Michele
Duchet acknowledges.
Buffon did not enunciate in explicit nomothetic form his conception of the
place of men in nature, but the overall organization of his anthropological
discourse constitutes an invitation to found such laws by testing them against
facts. From Lacep6de to Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the Buffon school, using
examples he provided, would speak of the laws of nature and would grant him
the status of a legislator of natural history. Both an empiricist and an inductivist,
Buffon recorded effects of similarity which by virtue of repetition made up the
essence of physical truth (Buffon, 1954 [De la maniere detudier et de traiter
1histoire naturelle]: 24). He renounced intuitive definition of essences and did
not concern himself, as the metaphysicians did, with conjecture over primary
causes of recorded phenomena. Buffon understood the word law according to
its new, Newtonian meaning, defined by Montesquieu in 1748 as dealing with
the necessary relationships derived from the nature of things such that each
instance of diversity is uniformity, each change constancy (Montesquieu, 1964:
book 1, part 1, 530). In the chapter entitled Varieties amongst the Human

36
Species Buffon distinguished at least three laws, three grand principles or general
effects immanent in the human phenomenon.
Rapidly summarized, the first law consisted of a law accounting for regular
degeneration according to isothermic lines and articulated around the concept of
climate.8 This law was particularly responsible for controlling skin colour
modifications, from white to black, and height variations in individuals and
ethnic groups. It also formed the basis of the theory of climates. It probably owed
much to Buffons reading of Charrons Treatise on Wisdom, which likewise
derived the differences in men from the diverse moods of the world, but for the
Age of Enlightenment as a whole it was an unquestionable truth based upon
experience, over and above the views of Hippocrates, Bodin or Montesquieu.9
The second law accounted for uniformity of physical types subject to uniform
life-styles, a simple adaptation of the first Newtonian rules concerning
philosophical reasoning, while the third was concerned with correlating the
aesthetics of human shapes and the state of society. This flowed directly from
Buffons a priori views on civilization, which he declared to be the natural norm.
This third law more or less subsumed the previous ones, but was in competition
with them on their own aetiological ground. Society in itself constituted a milieu,
whose climate was not without influence on mens physical appearance and on
the development of their abilities. Customs could change men as surely as
atmospheric conditions, the direction a river flowed or the altitude of
settlements.
A policed society living in relative ease, accustomed to an ordered, calm
and docile life, and which, because its interests are looked after by a good
government, is neither exposed to poverty nor lacking the basic necessities,
will for that reason alone be composed of stronger, better looking and
better built men than a wild and independent nation where each individual,
unaided by society, is obliged to provide his own sustenance, suffer in turn
hunger or excess of food that is often bad, be exhausted by work or
boredom, experience the rigours of the climate without being able to
protect himself from them and, in a word, act more often like an animal
than a man. Assuming these two different peoples living in the same climate,
we would have every reason to believe that the men belonging to the wild
nation would be darker, uglier, smaller and more wrinkled than those of the
policed nation. (Buffon, 1971 [Vari6t6s dans 1espece humaine]: 270,
emphasis added)
In a great many passages Buffon points out complex, inextricably interlinked
situations. Not only did laws have cumulative effects at particular times and
places, but the many and varied forms of social retribution added their own
variable and contradictory material reality to the results of natural determinism.
Man and world came together to form a system that developed outwards
(civilization) or turned inwards against itself (savagery). Retroactive effects were

37
thus multiplied. Climate and soil influenced community life - coming from arid
desert lands the free and independent Moors would of necessity be nomads and
thus an errant people (Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans 1esp6ce humaine]: 276) -
but society in its turn modified the physical milieu. Through its own inbuilt
dynamics it could in the selfsame way civilize a wilderness and control
carnivorous animals. In a word, it could redeem untended nature which, for
Buffon, was growing inexorably cooler (Buffon, 1962 [7e 6pique]: 213 ff.;
Hanks, 1966:173-~).
Because it confronted unexpected complexities, the natural history of man
does not resemble philosophies of man contemporary with it. Buffon was the
first to have attempted, in terms of the two great axes of time and space, to
rediscover relationships attributable to the nature of things and capable of
accounting for variety (Salomon-Bayet, 1978: 312-13). Anthropology hence-
forth meant man working and speaking, bound to the circumstances in which he
lived, the subject of his history. Just as the reciprocal interaction of man and
milieu bore witness to the vicissitudes of civil history, so time played its part,
adding to disorder, without it being possible to draw conclusions of a predictive
kind. Buffon sought deterministic rules beneath the appearance of phenomena.
But the deterministic factors were at the same time rigorous - they allowed causal
analysis - and partial. Exhaustive and critical information and observations
garnered from travel narratives supported the theoretical reform of knowledge
and the indefinite and concrete documentation of a science of the species quite
capable of refuting itself or being perfected: ... modern travellers have
provided more exact data, the kind required to perfect Buffons immortal Essay
(Bory de Saint-Vincent, 1825: 279). From the end of the 1770s onwards, in the
supplement to the article entitled Varieties amongst the Human Species, Buffon
made justificatory claims for the new regime of truth:
In the entire sequence of my work on natural history there is perhaps not a
single article more likely to require additions and even corrections.... I
wrote that article on variety in human species thirty years ago and several
voyages have occurred in that space of time, some of which were
undertaken and chronicled by educated men: using the new knowledge
brought back to us I shall try to reorganize things according to the most
exact truth, either by doing away with certain facts that I affirmed on the
basis of too slender evidence, giving too much credence to the first
travellers, or by confirming those impugned or mistakenly denied by
critics. (Buffon, 1971 [Addition a 1article des varietes dans 1esp~ce
humaine]: 321-2)
The new discipline, nourished by travel literature, developments in compara-
tive anatomy and the progress made in physiology, was soon to become the site
of struggles for supremacy between specialists. Buffon created a research
paradigm that provided a means of expression to a normal science, in Thomas

38
Kuhns sense, meaning the kind of enigma-solving activity characteristic of

progressive research (Kuhn, 1972: esp. chs 2 and 3). The paradigm provided the
hard kernel of unquestioned evidence that remained articulated around the
theory of the degeneration of savage peoples. For Buffon, as we have seen,
civilization placed itself between the socialized subject and the physical
framework of his existence in such a way as to shape a totally new and
authentically human environment. When this social milieu was lacking, or when
living conditions proved too rigorous, too hard, man degenerated individually
and collectively. Because he lost the prerogatives peculiar to his species he also
failed to relate in a truly social way to his own animality. When the social bond
was stretched too far the individual found himself back in the condition of an
atomized animal, outside nature. The Australians, who have no houses ... and
live higgledy-piggledy in groups of twenty or thirty men, women and children,
were perhaps the most wretched people in the world, and of all men those who
came closest to brutes (Buffon, 1971 [Varietes dans 1espece humaine]: 247-8).
For an observer of society who noted nuances suggesting a general

mechanism, the proof provided by the degradation of the Tartars or the
inhabitants of New Holland took on even greater weight: ... in our own
regions country people are uglier than town-dwellers, and I have often noticed
that where poverty is less acute than in other neighbouring communities, the
men are also better constituted and the villages less ugly (Buffon, 1971 [Vari6t6s
dans 1espece humaine]: 319-20).
For more than a century this body of structured assertions provided a virtually
unchallenged model for understanding human society. Popularized as received
wisdom by the monogenist school, whose official leader Buffon became
retrospectively (Topinard, 1885: 33), the degenerationist paradigm pointed the
scientific community towards a corpus of principles 2 explained by a basic
conceptual scheme that provided a methodological direction in which empiri-
cism and comparativism were governed by the same Newtonian rules and where
live issues, curious anomalies even, simply awaited technical validation. Finally,
it furnished internal criteria for judging the legitimacy of solutions that had been
thought satisfactory.2 The enduring success of Buffons axiomatics, firmly
attached as they were to his ethnocentric certainties, and yet open to research in
the field (Roger, 1989b), is ample proof of the ideological solidarity amongst the
researchers who associated themselves with a programme judged interesting, in
the words of H. V. Vallois. Most anthropologists, from J. F. Blumenbach, C. de
Pauw and J. G. Zimmerman to J. Hunter and P. Camper, unreservedly
acknowledged white Christian civilized man as the human prototype. This
proposition, dispersed among many other unsuspected matters of belief, is at the
heart of the paradigm. It was not something that could be challenged. Because of
this, the programme rapidly gained in autonomy, and 19th-century authors,
unconcerned by the philosophical or sociological roots of the new scientific
discipline, identified Buffons logic, put to the test in the Varieties amongst the

39
Human Species, as the official announcement of its birth. Much has been
written about the human races since Buffon. I immediately discount the work of
Camper, Blumenbach and M. Cuvier, for in the first place these fine works came
after Buffon and then, if one takes the broad view, the deeper view, the overall
view, Buffons work remains without equal (Flourens, 1850: 158).
In the ongoing context of this vast movement whose initial instigator he
became, Buffon was considered to be a theorist of the idea of race. Rare indeed
were the authors, such as Topinard, who admitted that it was a manifest error,
that he had never indicated an exact number of races and that the divisions
between them were too imprecise, and too subordinate to variations in milieux
for him to commit himself on this point (Topinard,1885: 64). The founder had
perforce to be a classifier too. Blumenbach thought Buffon had divided
humanity into six great varieties, Flourens made it four and Honor6 Jacquinot
came back to six.... The monogenists, who argued for gradual transitions
between varieties of humans rather than racial divisions, preferred to follow
literally the teachings of the Intendant of the Kings Garden, agreeing with
Buffon that all men are the same man tinted by the colour of the climate
(Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1856: 4322);... their division into four fundamental
groups, essentially characterized by colour, emerges from an attentive reading of
his book rather than being formally expressed in it (Quatrefages, 1867, 1423).
Topinard and Quatrefages were perfectly correct. Nevertheless, Buffons
science would not have been judged complete without a more immediate
topical relationship to what since the 1830s was called ethnology, that is, the
science of race. Unanimously, Blumenbach had been recognized as its founding
father. In the years from 1870 to 1880, in a nationalistic context exacerbated by
the Franco-Prussian war, two strategies for historiographic writing were
adopted, both of which allowed Buffon to be valorized to the detriment of his
distinguished emulator.
First of all, the two thinkers were associated in the expression of a common
scientific ideal: Buffons and Blumenbachs works and those of the naturalists
who followed them, whether closely or more distantly, had placed the
comparative study of human groups on a sound footing (Quatrefages,1867: 15).
Then an attempt was made to diminish the Gottingen anatomists fame and with
it the strength of his heuristic analyses. According to Topinard, Blumenbach was
... after Buffon, the greatest figure in the history of anthropology. Some
have put him in the first rank, but we do not share their opinion....
Buffon had a breadth of vision that Blumenbach never possessed. The latter
was a kind of Daubenton; he was inspired by Buffon and complemented
him. These two kinds of minds had to follow one another in order to
ensure the full development of the emergent science. After them, we can
say that anthropology had been founded. (Topinard,1885: 57)

With the promotion of the idea of permanence of the races (Blanckaert, 1988)

40
the degenerationist paradigm was directly challenged by the polygenists.24
However, the factual criticisms that were brought to bear on Buffons theoretical
edifice concentrated, significantly, on the matter of foundational evidence. For
example, around 1860, Broca attacked James Cowles Prichard, the most eminent
representative of English monogenist naturalism. Prichard was, however,
recognized in France as the successor of Buffon and Blumenbach. He was
essentially of the Buffon school (Quatrefages, 1867: 17). Broca sought to
accumulate empirical proof against Prichards so-called law concerning the
degrading of skin colours as one moves further away from the Equator, from one
zone to another (Broca, 1877: 357) - a straightforward adaptation of the theory
of climates, popular since the 18th century. In actual fact, however, Broca was to
a greater or lesser extent bringing the arguments of his theoretical adversaries up
to date because, by invoking Buffon as an armed adversary, he helped found him
again as a contemporary authority. The law in question was of course Buffons.
IV CONCLUSION: DO FOUNDERS HAVE TO BE

FOUNDED?
As we come to the end of this study it appears that Buffons elevation to the
anthropologists pantheon much to the didactic tradition of commemor-
owes
ation or academic eulogy. Even if one refuses to accept this evaluation, one has to
note that his foundational text, the Natural History of Man, is still called into
service, two centuries later, in the framework of a professional activity, that of the
natural sciences. Successive rereadings of the work by generations of anthropolo-
gists have confirmed its modernity but also ended up obliterating everything
which, for the intellectual historian, makes it one of the most reliable pieces of
memoir-writing of the 18th century. The image proposed by G. Herv6 at the end
of the last century, the image of the creator of scientific ethnology, or the study of
race, is still reproduced, and the celebration of the bicentenary of Buffons death,
in 1988, added little to it. Hence an unexpected consequence: whereas he is still
valued by naturalists as an observer of different human types (Taquet, 1988: 8),
a judgement that is doubly suspect, since the Histoire naturelle does not involve
any problematic of types and since he was neither an observer nor an anatomist
of types,25 Buffon has been de-legitimized by anti-racist critics, and described as a
spokesman for youthful bourgeois pride, one of the most influential
champions of the Enlightenment [who] built the foundations of the following
centurys scientific racism (Poliakov, 1971 : 165-6). The eulogy has discovered
its contradictory double in a rhetorical genre Aristotle called epidictics. Praise
and blame are, however, two aspects of the same value judgement, one that has
little place in historiography. To avoid subscribing to it, we may put forward
three regulatory requirements that will stand as provisional conclusions.
First of all, without giving in to the mythology of an always more topical, even

41
visionary Buffon, the historian has to take account of an undeniable reality:

through his followers, Buffon was perceived, transfigured and enthroned as the
legislator and founder of the natural history of man. Unless we wish to undo
history, it is therefore useless to re-examine this representation in order, for
example, to set it against other conceptions of scientificity which he could not
have credited. We should not question the basis of this representation, certainly,
but we must check it, put it into historiographic perspective and understand it in
terms of the interaction between a text and its readers, in order to analyse
Buffons place in the history of anthropology.
Secondly, we have to recognize the powerful influence on evaluations of
Buffons contribution to the discipline of the idea made popular in France by
Bachelard and Althusser of an opposition or epistemological break between
science and ideology. Because someone decided that he was too involved in the
philosophical movement it became necessary, in order to ensure the importance
of his scientific revolution, to take the opposite line, to the effect that his
philosophical thought was certainly less original than his science, and to all
intents and purposes useless (Piveteau,1988: 206). Conversely, to say that he was
more a philosopher than a naturalist (Lester, 1963: 1358) amounts to placing
him among the intuitive thinkers, or the kind of system-builders concerned
with propagating false knowledge or hastily contrived certainties unconfirmed
by observation. Using Buffon as an example, Michele Duchet has shown
convincingly how much the naturalists scruples, his prudent critical attitude
towards documents and his curiosity indirectly contributed to the science of
man (Duchet, 1971b: 232-3). Following up J. Rogers ideas, we have tried to
show that the conception of man developed by Buffon, far more important in its
implications than it is said to be, in no way created an obstacle to the expression
of a naturalist science. On the contrary, it justified theoretically the necessity of
seeing mans activity at the centre of nature as well as the scientific treatment,
from both the naturalist and the ethnographic points of view, of certain
traditional philosophical questions. Buffons often vaunted return to concrete
facts, only concerned with truths of experience, is as indissociable from his
sensualist epistemology as it is from his entrepreneurs way of posing problems.
The science-ideology opposition is not therefore particularly useful from the
historiographical point of view.
The third requirement is at once more trivial and more radical. The historian
does not have the power to found founders. In the first part of this article, by
throwing light on the multiplicity of appropriations made by the natural history
of man, we tried to show how each period - or each author - constructed a
preferential image of the founder of anthropology. The idea of a founder is not
neutral. Everyone individualizes his Buffon, and the atomized and selective
image that dominates at such and such a date cannot but seriously distort
understanding of the source-text.
In the second part of this article, and without casting doubt on the stereotype

42
of Buffon, the founder of anthropology, we went beyond the normal limits of

the traditional historiography of the area in order to understand how Buffon,
starting from a particular philosophy of man, was led to posit the requirement of
a discourse not of the individual but of the human species.
It nevertheless seems that the necessarily overdetermined notion of foundation
is of very little relevance and of little instrumental value in the history of the
human sciences. It compels the historian to personalize the birth of the discipline,
within an almost exclusively biographical register. The problematic question of
foundation takes more or less the form of the question: Under what theoretical
conditions can abstract reflection on the relationship between man and the world
depart from the particular logic of its author in such a way as to symbolize, for
generations of disciples, the base reference of all scientificity?
The question is badly formulated. On the one hand it individualizes the
creative act of an immortal scientific genius alone with his thoughts in the
solitude of his study. On the other hand, it reintroduces the all too notorious
epistemological break insofar as the epistemological act is considered in
absolutist terms as une saccade du g6nie scientifique (Bachelard), a sudden shift
or mutation of knowledge that as it were occurs without any historical
preparation, without being in any way called for by the social and intellectual
context. Finally, and above all, the idea of foundation cannot be dissociated from
a disciplinary point of view. It functions in the regressive mode, in other words
along the present-past axis of recurrent history. This disciplinary history can be
seen, to use Stefan Collinis metaphor, as guilty of tunnel vision (Collini,
1988: 391). In 1988 Paul-Marie Grinevald declared in connection with the birth
of the science of man that Buffon was the founder of this new science; together
with Linnaeus, he elevated natural history to the level of a self-sufficient
discipline that claimed man himself as one of its objects of inquiry (Grinevald,
1988:103).
The task of historians of the human sciences is not easy. Rarely, if ever, do we
have available at the origin of a discipline perfectly construed theories
attributable to the brain of a single man. The birth of a new area of study or the
way it gains its autonomy is a social and collective event rather than an individual
fact, an event that occurs in the dimension of longue dur6e and rarely stands out
like a bright light punctuating the line of time. In any case, the history of the
human sciences has as its objective to illuminate the real genesis of disciplines.
Only by taking infinite precautions can it make use of recurrence, however
carefully checked. Recurrence leads necessarily to retracing the internal history
of disciplines as they are now divided up, without taking account of the
intellectual basis or the cross-disciplinary alliances which alone permit the
emergence of specialisms. In the same way, the idea of foundation that we use all
too readily in order to pinpoint the birth of the different human sciences turns
out to be a simple historiographic artefact (Blanckaert, 1990). It has no more
heuristic value than the notion of the precursor, so abused, in times past, in the

43
history of science. We may add here that the numerous authors who use this
notion in connection with Buffon seem inevitably to contradict themselves. For
example, Georges Gusdorf himself demonstrated in numerous works that the
18th century did not invent anthropology (Gusdorf, 1969: Vol. 2, 178 ff.;
Gusdorf, 1972: 354). More recently, Francis Affergan has asserted that Linnaeus
and Buffon could rightly be considered as the founders of anthropological
method, despite having previously put forward the thesis that without any
doubt, modern anthropology finds its source in the 16th century (Affergan,
1987: 228, 225). One cannot have it both ways.... As soon as one acknowledges
that no science can exist without a method appropriate to the object of inquiry,
the antinomous nature of such a judgement becomes evident. On the other hand,
these contradictions make explicit the fact that the trend towards the seculariz-
ation of studies of man, towards the recognition of exotic peoples and the
naturalization of the total human phenomenon, a movement that covers the
entire classical age, found in Buffon an official interpreter without equivalent in
his century. The specialists agree that most of Buffons themes, the comparison
of man and animal, the theory of climates, degenerationism, monogenism, and so
on, were not original contributions. Yet he was responsible for a ... new
manner of bringing together in the same study considerations traditionally
divided between different fields of knowledge (Roger, 1989a: 223-4). On the
strength of this, Buffon is an essential landmark in the slow constitution of
anthropology. He achieved a synthesis of the acquisitions of his predecessors and
his contemporaries, but his exemplary value stems above all from the way he put
order into the study of documentary evidence, in a field whose boundaries he
redefined. He created, or rather crystallized, a technical and scientific genre, the
natural history of man, whose pre-existing elements were scattered throughout
the literature or inscribed in parallel research traditions. In conclusion, it seems
possible to relativize the badly founded notion of the founder without
minimizing Buffons contribution, his historical significance and his ideological
ambiguities (Sloan, 1973: 310-11 ).
A developing science depended on The Natural History of Man, a work that
was found to possess the functional capacity of extending the boundaries of
knowledge. Buffon enlarged all the questions he touched on, furthermore, he

created new questions (Flourens, 1850: 155). As soon as the varieties and
therefore the variations in man became the central issue to be elucidated, the
analysis of the biological and sociological mechanisms responsible for creating
racial differences became more diversified. A discipline was thus created, one that
would rapidly differentiate between its objects of inquiry and its techniques of
inquiry. It can be seen then that without any kind of break, the Buffonian
ideology of man retrospectively discovered a scholarly solution in what Thomas
Kuhn called a disciplinary matrix, a hard kernel of statements, principles,
deductive links and exemplary cases that allowed work on proofs to proceed
within a framework of cumulative knowledge. At the origin of this process of

44
crystallization there
neither the stroke of intuitive genius of a solitary
was
scientist nor a great idea divorced from

its social pre-text. Instead there is a
complex process whose contextual and biographical foundations, as well as
future academic and nationalistic issues, are revealed by epistemological analysis.
Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris

Translated by Anthony Cheal Pugh
NOTES
This paper was initially presented at the September 1990 Lancaster conference on The
Nature of the Human Sciences in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
The author would like to thank Anthony Pugh for his very fine translation of the paper
and for his helpful editorial suggestions. The editors would like to express their gratitude
to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (GO 890) for their assistance in
publishing this translation of M. Blanckaerts essay.
1 Some years later, in 1753, in the Discours sur la nature des animaux, Buffon would
speak of this important science, which has as its object man himself (Buffon,
1954: 317).
de la Société dAnthropologie de Paris, 11e série, 1 (1960): 270.
2 Bulletins et Mémoires
The medal is reproduced on p. 269.
3 From 1764, P. Camper hailed the natural history of man of the immortal Buffon
(Camper, an. XI-1803: 476). Similarly, de Quatrefages: Buffons work on the history
of man ... is one of our immortal naturalists most glorious achievements
(Quatrefages, 1867: 12).
4 The notion of epistemological acts, that we today oppose to the notion of
epistemological obstacles, corresponds to the way scientific genius can suddenly
develop in a new, unexpected direction (Bachelard, 1965: 25).
5 See I. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires valuable testimony and Daubentons judgement,
quoted by F. Bourdier (1952: 60-1).
6 G. Cuvier, letter to Pfaff, quoted in Courtès (1970: 21).
7 One finds in Buffon an outlook that is not as shallow as that of Descartes, but which
only differs from it, basically, in respect of the terms used (Cuvier, 1845: 161).
8 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une
Société de Gens de Lettres (1765, Neufchastel: S. Faulche, Vol. 8, p. 257). The chapter
on Varieties amongst the Human Species is summarized in the article Humaine
Espèce, ibid., pp. 344-8.

9 For an overview of the suppression of references to materialist authors, see O. Bloch,
ed.,1979.
10 On Buffons isolation and his relationship to the Philosophes and their circle, see Roger
(1962: CXII-CXIV), Bourdier and François (1951: 228-32) and Fellows (1963: 610
ff.).
11 Also, an anonymous article entitled Buffon, in Nouvelle biographie générale deputs

45
les temps les plus reculés jusquà nos jours, sous la direction du Dr Hoefer (1855, Paris:
Firmin Didot frères, Vol. 7, col. 738).
12 Cf. Buffons epistemological remarks in the preface to Hales, La Statique des
, in Buffon (1954: 5, col. b).
Végétaux
13 The expression let us begin by setting aside all facts, for they have no bearing on the
question can be found on p. 132.
14 Buffon is quoted on p. 251.
15 That this is inspired by Locke seems certain. See J. Locke, Essai philosophique
concernant lentendement humain [An Essay on Human Understanding], translated
by D. Coste (1983, Paris: Vrin, book 3, ch. 6, para. 22 ff.).
16 In 1734, after the publication, a year earlier, of the Essai des effets de lair sur le corps
humain [Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies] by J. Arbuthnot, the
Academy of Pau set a competition on the following question: Does the difference in
climates where men are born contribute to the differences in their intellects? (Ehrard,
1981: 697).
17 On the epistemological role of the observation of recurrent events, see Sloan (1992).
18 The problematic of climate is everywhere exemplified in Buffons anthropology. The
addition to the article on the Variétés dans lespèce humaine, refines the concept of
climate by means of a synthetic definition. See Buffon (1971: 388).
19 See Dougherty (1980), in particular appendix 1, Charron et Buffon. On the theory of
climates in Buffons time, see Ehrard (1981: part 3, ch. 11). Buffons notion of climate
had already been worked out by lAbbé dEspiard in his Essais sur le génie et le
caractère des nations (1743).
20 D. A. Godron, speaking of the action of climate, refers to the principle applied by
Buffon to Man, in Godron, 1872: Vol. 2, 8.
21 In Buffons work, the classic example of the solving of this kind of enigma is provided
by the explanation of the unity of type manifested by the Americans. He first thought
the obstacle to a solution to be invincible. The way he solved the problem showed
how effective the paradigm was when applied. See Buffon, 1971 (Variétés dans
lespèce humaine): 292 ff.
22 The original text can be found in Buffons article entitled Le lion (Buffon, 1954: 378).
23 Buffon, who did not want classification, even in zoology, did not fail to propose it for
the varieties of humans (Quatrefages, 1867: 13).
24 Victor Courtet would speak in these terms of the imperfection of Buffons system
(quoted in Boissel, 1972: 117-18).
25 Cf. Leguebe (1963: 121), who states that the explanation in terms of climates proposed
by Buffon gives such malleability to the concept of race that it is no longer possible, in
such conditions, to propose a classification comprising clearly distinct categories.
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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES ___

Buffon and the natural history of

I THE CIRCLE OF EVALUATIONS

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finally the founder of anthropology. Since Aristotle, in fact, no name meriting

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the casewhen A. de Quatrefages de Br6au, professor of the Natural History of

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Reversing the relationship of temporal causality, historical writing did not

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II BUFFON IN HISTORY, OR HOW TO BECOME

Buffon wanted to create a Complete History of Man considered as individual

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for Daubenton, Cuvier judged that Buffons eloquence seemed to be employed

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which they frequently reproduced verbatim, as did Daubenton or Valmont de

anthropology, henceforth under the control of the now dominant anatomists.

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attachment to fact-based realism. His moderation in technical matters, his

studies. While Linnaeus was assigning a place to man in his zoological

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connected with the rehabilitation, in the framework of a certain geographical or

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anthropologists, spiritualists and materialists alike. He numbered man amongst

III FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN TO THE

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touched circumspectly on polemical political topics, preferring, as he himself

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anthropologies (ibid.: 479). Even when marked out by a relationship of

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Though conforming to this epistemological guideline, the first chapters of the

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specialized alimentary habits combined to repress individuation. All this can be

prejudices, contrary opinions about what could be seen to represent la belle

renounce all possibilities: ... it is not a matter of imagining what he [man]

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It was by a whole series of epistemological decisions of this kind that Buffon,

complete comparative history of the species that he condemned the kind of

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organs of different peoples, particularities of puberty in different milieux, the

obligatory forms of behaviour. Though a philosopher concerned with progress,

the upshot is that the value of man, as reflected in Buffons productivist

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by a critical break from established ideologies, in a move against the dominant

of his concrete relationship to the world. As a naturalist and an entrepreneur,

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diverse and, occasionally, so hostile to him. Certain climates discouraged human

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climatic variations? In 1748, in Lhomme-machine, and without going into

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Kuhns sense, meaning the kind of enigma-solving activity characteristic of

For an observer of society who noted nuances suggesting a general

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say that anthropology had been founded. (Topinard,1885: 57)

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the degenerationist paradigm was directly challenged by the polygenists.24

again as a contemporary authority. The law in question was of course Buffons.

IV CONCLUSION: DO FOUNDERS HAVE TO BE

Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris

Espèce, ibid., pp. 344-8.

Bachelard, G. (1965) Lactivité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, 2nd edn.

Buffon, G.-L. L., comte de (1971) De lHomme, présentation et notes de M. Duchet.

complétée par T. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy. Paris: Fortin, Masson, Vol. 4.

complétée par T. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy. Paris: Fortin, Masson, Vol. 5.

Ehrard, J. (1981) Lidée de

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, I. (1859) Histoire naturelle générale des règnes organiques

Lester, P. (1963) LAnthropologie et la Paléontologie humaine, in M. Daumas (ed.)