Geoffroy married the daughter of an eminent Parisian politician in 1804; his wife gave birth to a son a year later, Isidore, who would become an eminent and important zoologist in his own right. In the same year, after several rejections from other, younger women, Cuvier married a widow whose first husband had been guillotined in 1794. She and her four children now moved into Cuvier’s house in the Jardin des Plantes, where his first child, a son, christened Georges, was born in 1804. The baby lived only a few weeks. The bereaved Cuvier plunged back into his brilliant magnum opus, Lessons on Comparative Anatomy, a detailed five-volume study of the four classes of vertebrates and an explanation of his own radical methods of anatomical investigation. He also began to sketch out a new series of lectures on geology.
In the spring of 1805, before an audience of society people drawn to the public lectures delivered in the Royal Athenaeum of Paris by talk of giant fossil animals and by his theatrical and flamboyant lecturing style, which, people said, he modeled on the performances of the great Parisian actor François-Joseph Talma, Cuvier spoke about the new discoveries in geology. He described earth time as a sequence of epochs interspersed with revolutions or catastrophes and claimed that human history had begun only relatively recently, after the last such revolution. The epochs were, he added, remarkably close to the descriptions of the seven days of creation described in Genesis.
A twenty-six-year-old Italian nobleman, Giuseppe Marzari-Pencati, taking notes in the auditorium that day, was disappointed to see Cuvier, who was well known for his religious skepticism, making what seemed to him a show of piety; the professor was, he speculated in a letter written to a friend in Geneva, surely “eyeing a Cardinal’s hat.” The pope was in Paris, he pointed out, to witness Napoleon crown himself as self-styled emperor, an act intended to show the world that Catholicism was recognized once again as the majority religion in France. Marzari-Pencati was convinced that he was watching Cuvier compromise himself and the cause of science.
But the reality was more complicated. The revival of Catholic conservatism in France posed a problem for everyone in the Jardin, especially for geologists; books such as François-René Chateaubriand’s recent bestselling The Genius of Christianity (Génie du Christianisme) declared science, and particularly geology, to be impious. Nature’s laws were, Chateaubriand claimed, forever hidden from man; only the beauty and goodness of the Creator were proper objects of discovery. Cuvier, who had never before tried to square his scientific evidence with the biblical record, was now walking something of a rhetorical tightrope in these public lectures; he wanted to persuade his bourgeois audiences that geology need not be antireligious, and at the same time he wanted to use both the mummified ibises and the fossil record to refute what seemed to him to be the scientific heresy of transformism. The result required some considerable rhetorical gymnastics.
Lamarck was now in his sixties and, with a large family to support, burdened by debt. With no substantial salaried positions like Cuvier’s, he was struggling to make ends meet while refusing to make compromises or concessions. Only seven auditors signed up for his lectures in 1805: two Italian brothers from Naples and their young professor of zoology and comparative anatomy, a German doctor, two French doctors, and a student. There had never been so few. But the audiences rose to respectable numbers the following year.
Geoffroy returned to the Egyptian fish skeletons in 1806 when the Commission of Sciences and Arts pressed him to complete his contributions to the monumental Description of Egypt (Description de l’Égypte), the series of books the Egyptian savants had been commissioned to write offering a comprehensive description of Egypt’s ancient and modern history and its natural history. Laying out the preserved specimens of the Egyptian fish on the table in his rooms in the Museum of Natural History, Geoffroy must have remembered the excitement of the moment when, on a table in the Cairo palace, he had first seen their strangely human-shaped bronchioles and been so certain of his theory that there was a common body plan for all animals. With Cuvier’s volumes nearby, he began looking for other homologies across the vertebrate-invertebrate border. To his amazement, he started to find structures common to vertebrates and invertebrates everywhere. The furcula, or wishbone, for instance, thought to be unique to birds, was, he discovered, also present in fish. All bodies did indeed seem to have a common abstract organizational plan.
Newly certain of his insights, Geoffroy set out a new methodology for comparative anatomical research centered on his idea of a common structural plan of organization. His papers met with approval from the Academy, from Cuvier, and from Napoleon himself. Cuvier continued to praise the facts of Geoffroy’s work—the careful collection of weighty data—and to ignore the philosophical inferences that sometimes pulled dangerously toward transformism. Promotions followed. Geoffroy was appointed professor of zoology at the newly created Faculty of Sciences in the Imperial University in 1809 after Lamarck turned the position down for reasons of poor health.* Geoffroy’s income increased; he gained an entourage of bright young students; his influence spread. Students set out to find common structures and patterns in the bodies of insects, spiders, and crustacea. They discovered how the mouthparts of caterpillars mirrored the nectar-sucking coiled tubules of butterflies. Even Cuvier’s protégés were practicing philosophical anatomy. Then, in 1809, the year Geoffroy’s twin daughters Stéphanie and Anaïs were born, his quest came to a standstill. Although he had found homologies for almost all bones across the vertebrate-invertebrate border, he had failed to find a homology for the bones of the gill cover in fish anywhere in the human body. He would keep on searching for a further eight years without success.
After 1802, through the years of Napoleon’s rise and then spectacular fall at Waterloo in 1815 and through the coronation of a new French king placed on the throne of France by the Allies, as the priests and the police agents returned and the government became gradually more conservative under the Restoration, Cuvier became a medaled minister of state and eventually a baron in 1819, while Lamarck, working against time and ill health, doggedly continued to revise, clarify, and elaborate his theory, garnering as much proof as he could from the display cabinet drawers and vaults of the museum. In 1809 he published his most developed transformist work yet, Zoological Philosophy. In 1815, while Cuvier did his best to fend off the emissaries arriving in Paris to reclaim the natural history collections that Napoleon had stolen, Lamarck published the first of the seven volumes of Natural History of Animals Without Backbones. By the time the last volume appeared in 1822, he was completely blind.
Lamarck’s eyesight, always poor, had deteriorated quickly since 1809, but in 1818, only a few months before his third wife died, his eyes failed completely, consigning him to ten years of utter dependency on three still unmarried and increasingly impoverished daughters, Rosalie, Cornélie, and Eugénie, then forty, twenty-six, and twenty-one years old respectively, and his partially deaf thirty-two-year-old artist son, Antoine. All four children still lived at home in the Maison de Buffon, on the grounds of the Jardin. His eldest son, André, a naval officer, had died in the Antilles in 1817; his third son, Charles René, had died before he reached adulthood; his youngest son, Aristide, mentally ill, was at the asylum at Charenton. Only his second son, Auguste, seemed to be forging an independent life for himself.
For those last ten years of Lamarck’s life, while visitors lined up to see Baron Cuvier’s spectacular new displays in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and celebrated the baron’s achievements and genius, his daughter Rosalie struggled to run the Lamarck household and to find enough money to put food on the table and to pay the printers’ and illustrators’ bills. Cornélie sat upstairs with her blind father in an airless room battling to finish the final volumes of the Natural History of Animals Without Backbones as it was dictated to her, or received the visitors who came to view her father’s treasured botanical collection that was now up for sale, or passed on instructions to the students who were now giving her father’s lect
ures on his behalf. Then, in 1822, the year the Lamarck sisters finally sold their father’s prized herbarium, Eugénie, the youngest, fell ill and died. She was only twenty-four. Auguste was now a successful engineer of bridges, but he was married with children of his own, and the salary of an engineer could not support two households. He often complained of his father’s lack of familial responsibility. Lamarck had never been able to manage money or play the political games necessary to secure his power and influence in the hierarchy of the Jardin. Both his children and his science suffered as a consequence.
When Lamarck died in 1829, his children had to ask the Academy of Sciences to lend them money to pay for their father’s funeral. Lamarck was buried in a temporary grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse; his bones were later dug up and, with thousands of other skeletons that had been disinterred from the overcrowded cemeteries of the city, scattered into the Parisian catacombs. There was very little money to spare in the museum coffers because the operating costs of the menageries, the expenses of natural history expeditions, and the upkeep of the buildings, as well as the extension of Cuvier’s Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, had all been substantial.
Lamarck’s reputation would rest on what Baron Cuvier now had to say in his obituary. When he went to visit the grieving family to gather details of Lamarck’s early life, Cuvier must have been shocked to see how shabby the house had become, how threadbare and impoverished everything looked. When he suggested to Cornélie that she come for a walk with him, she was so overcome by the fresh air in the winter garden that he thought she would faint. But she gladly recounted her father’s story, his struggles, his heroic years in the army, and the tale of his last stand at Fissinghausen as a seventeen-year-old soldier during the Pomeranian War. Cuvier was touched to see how devoted his children were.
But in the spring of 1830, when he might have been composing Lamarck’s obituary, Cuvier had little time for anything but politics. The increasingly unpopular King Charles X had introduced the reactionary ultra-Catholic Polignac government in the summer of 1829 in order to pass more draconian and proaristocratic laws. Outraged republican groups formed in opposition. The Chamber of Deputies met in March 1830 to lodge a protest against the new government, but in May the king dissolved the Chamber and declared new elections and the suspension of freedom of the press. Riots broke out in the workers’ sections of Paris. Heavily armed insurgents took control of the city over three days, attacking what remained of the Royal Guard, chopping down trees and pulling up paving stones to erect four thousand barricades across city streets, and raising the revolutionary tricolor flag over more and more buildings—the Louvre, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Palais de Justice, and finally the Hôtel de Ville. Eventually, the revolutionaries declared Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, to be the new king.
In the Jardin, Cuvier faced his own upheavals. He had introduced a new classification system for dividing up the animal kingdom: every organism, he declared, belonged to one of four branches—vertebra, articulata, molluska, and radiata—and there were absolutely no connections between them. But now an alarming scientific paper appeared among the piles of Paris newspapers that his stepdaughter and assistant, Sophie Duvaucel, ensured were on his desk every day: a paper by two young naturalists from Lyons, Pierre-Stanislas Meyraux and Laurencet.* The two men claimed to have discovered homologies between two of Cuvier’s divisions of the natural world, the mollusks and the vertebrates. If you bent the vertebrate backward so that the nape of the neck was attached to the buttocks, they wrote, then it was evident that the internal organs were arranged just like those of the mollusks.
When Geoffroy delivered a glowing report of the paper at the next meeting of the Academy, in which he declared this discovery to be proof of his own theory, mocked Cuvier, and declared the end of the era of mere facts and the beginning of a new philosophical zoology, Cuvier rose to his feet and demanded a retraction. There was a great deal at stake. Lamarck’s death had changed the dynamics of power in the Jardin. For ten years Cuvier had refused to allow Geoffroy and his disciples to provoke him into public debate about transformism, but now there were too many people watching, too many disciples, too many journalists with pens poised, for Cuvier to continue maintaining a pointed silence. If he was to keep his power base in the Jardin, he knew he had to win this fight.
Over the following two months the two professors slugged it out in the debating chamber of the National Institute of the Sciences and the Arts. Ostensibly, this was a debate not about transformism, but about grand theory versus dry fact. The presence of journalists and the public fanned the flames of their disagreement into a public conflagration. Cuvier called Geoffroy a dreamer. Geoffroy insisted that all his ideas were grounded in fact. The crowds of visitors increased session by session. Journalists from all over Europe took notes in the auditorium. Cuvier attacked every part of Geoffroy’s theory. Geoffroy defended and enlarged his evidence. They were both right in part; their argument turned on time scales. Finally Cuvier shifted the debate away from bones to heresy, accusing Geoffroy of contradicting religious truth, of being a virtual transformist and a supporter of the German school of philosophical natural history, the Naturphilosophie. The audiences cheered and clapped at each twist and turn of the increasingly theatrical debate. There was no resolution. Geoffroy, frustrated that theology had been brought into the contest alongside zoology, withdrew from the field, publishing the original report and the papers that made up the debate.
Journalists everywhere declared that the future of zoology and science itself hung in the balance in Paris. Students, writers, and intellectuals, including the novelists Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and George Sand, read the newspaper descriptions of the debates and declared Geoffroy to be fighting single-handedly against the dark forces of conservatism. In Germany, the esteemed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was more astonished at the news of the debate than at the news of the fall of Charles X. “The volcano has come to an eruption,” he told a visitor; “everything is in flames. Now the debates are finally out from behind closed doors.”
Through the months of 1830, through the abdication of the king and the fall of the government and the crowning of a new king, through the street riots and the building of barricades, Geoffroy and Cuvier continued to attack each other in their lectures, in their published papers, and in their jibes at each other at the Institute. Geoffroy, conscious that the eyes of the world were on him and that he had the support of Goethe and was corresponding with eminent intellectuals including George Sand and Honoré de Balzac, became increasingly and openly transformist in his ideas, claiming, for instance, in October that the famous fossil crocodiles that had recently been found at Caen were the ancient ancestors of modern crocodiles. Cuvier took the floor to protest, but he was careful not to be drawn back into direct combat. He was, however, preparing a subtle counterattack. In his long overdue obituary for Lamarck and his final series of lectures he determined to see off these philosophical speculators for good.
In the spring of 1832, Cuvier took to the lecturing platform again for the first time in fifteen years to give a series of lectures on the history of science from the Egyptians to the present day. Only facts, he declared, stood the test of time. At the same time he drafted and redrafted his memorial to Lamarck. Some esteemed men of science, he wrote—meaning, of course, Lamarck—had unfortunately neglected to collect evidence. “They have mingled many fanciful conceptions [with real discoveries]; and, believing themselves able to outstrip both experience and calculation, they have laboriously constructed vast edifices on imaginary foundations, resembling the enchanted palaces of our old romances, which vanished into air on the destruction of the talisman to which they owed their birth.” Using a cruel caricature of birds’ legs elongating over time simply because the birds could not bear to get their bodies wet, he mocked Lamarck’s transformist ideas as the fantasies of a dreamer; such notions might “amuse the imagination of a poet,” he wrote; “a metaphysician may derive from it an en
tirely new series of systems; but it cannot for a moment bear the examination of anyone who has dissected a hand, a viscus, or even a feather.” If Lamarck was a dreamer and a fantasist, he implied, he was also obsessive, blinkered, unused to contradiction, reclusive, a spendthrift, and a gambler who had failed to support his family and had died in poverty. All this, of course, was expressed in Cuvier’s most deferential and elegant prose.
But Cuvier did not live long enough to deliver his obituary. In May 1832, he took to his bed and died a few days later. His savage obituary of Lamarck was read at the Institute in his absence six months later.
Through the first decades of the nineteenth century, radical young men carried transformist ideas all over Europe. Some had attended Lamarck’s lectures, others had read his books in the museum library or seen them summarized in the pages of scientific journals. One such young man was the brilliant young soldier, botanist, and algae expert Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, who first visited Lamarck in the Maison de Buffon in the Jardin des Plantes in 1803 to discuss botany and followed his work closely thereafter. Having served Napoleon and then been forced into exile after the emperor’s fall following Waterloo, he had wandered through Europe for several years to evade the king’s secret police. For two years he lived in the caves of St. Peter, at Maastricht, in Holland, where he wrote a book of natural history, Voyage Underground (Voyage souterrain, ou Description du plateau de Saint-Pierre de Maestricht et de ses vastes cryptes), which described the caves and their fossils, strata, and animals from a Lamarckian point of view. All through his years of exile he published books and papers in which he deplored Lamarck’s treatment at the hands of Cuvier, and in 1822 he launched an encyclopedia, published eventually in seventeen volumes, to promote a materialist system of natural philosophy inspired by both Lamarck and Geoffroy.
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