Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Vol. 6 No. 1
© 1993 SAGE (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi) 13
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,
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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
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 -
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
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
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).
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
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.
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:
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
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
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)
[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
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
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).
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
essence shared by all men, something that might incline the species to certain
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
crystallization there
neither the stroke of intuitive genius of a solitary
was
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
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
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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