Abstract
In many fields of scientific and intellectual activity, French scholars and institutions had built up a leading, even dominant, position over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In disciplines such as medicine, anthropology, mathematics and physics, French scientists were often at the forefront of developments and in key positions within international networks.1 However, in the late nineteenth century, and particularly across the twentieth, this ascendant position often seemed to unravel, particularly under competition from larger and better-funded institutions in other countries — first through the prominence of German science, but then the even greater rise of well-funded institutions in the United States. This was exacerbated by shocks to French society and its global position following the world wars, and the general decline of French as the international language of scholarship and intellectual endeavour in favour of English. In this narrative, the interwar period occupies a potentially uneasy position, with French predominance retained in many areas, but with a growing sense that its position was threatened.
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Notes
The specialist literature here is vast, but see particularly R. Fox (2012) The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press);
M. Crosland (1995) Studies in the Culture of Science in France and Britain since the Enlightenment (Brookfield, VT: Variorum);
H. Paul (1985) From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939 (Cambridge University Press);
and J. Hecht (2003) The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (New York: Columbia University Press).
For more general examinations of this, see R. Overy (2010) The Inter-War Crisis, 1919–1939 (Harlow and New York: Longman);
Z. Steiner (2005) The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford University Press); and (2011) The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford University Press).
This point is particularly strongly made in C. Cohen (2012) La méthode de Zadig: la trace, le fossile, la preuve (Paris: Seuil).
For a general study of the development of the concept of ‘deep time’ across Europe in the early nineteenth century, with an international, but largely Franco-British-German framework, see M. Rudwick (2005) Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press), and (2008) Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (University of Chicago Press).
For palaeontology, see C. Cohen (1994) Le destin du mammouth (Paris: Seuil);
C. Grimoult (2000) Le dé veloppement de la palé ontologie contemporaine (Genève: Droz);
and E. Buffetaut (1987) A Short History of Vertebrate Palaeontology (London: Croom Helm).
Human prehistory has been studied in A. Hurel (2007) La France préhistorienne de 1789 à 1941 (Paris: CNRS)
and N. Coye (1998) La pré histoire en parole et en acte: Mé thodes et enjeux de la pratique archéologique, 1830–1950 (Paris: L’Harmattan).
A. Bowdoin Van Riper (1993) Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (University of Chicago Press)
and A. O’Connor (2007) Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860–1960 (Oxford University Press) give Britain-centred accounts, but acknowledge the importance of French scholarship.
See G. Laurent (1987) Paléontologie et évolution en France de 1800 à 1860: une histoire des idées de Cuvier et Lamarck à Darwin (Paris: CTHS) and Rudwick, Bursting the Limits, 349–416.
Discussed in P. Corsi (1988) The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press);
T. Appel (1987) The Cuvier–Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (Oxford University Press) and Laurent, Paléontologie et évolution.
Indeed, French evolutionary ideas serve as one of the key case studies in P. Bowler (1983) The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 107–17.
A. Schnapp (1996) ‘French Archaeology: Between National Identity and Cultural Identity’, in Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Timothy Champion (eds) Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press) 48–67.
S. Teller Ratner (2002) Camille Saint-Saëns 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works I (Oxford University Press) 192.
The popularising works and novels included L. Figuier (1863) La terre avant le dé luge (Paris) and (1870) L’homme primitif (Paris),
J. H. Rosny (1892) Vamireh: roman des temps primitifs (Paris)
and J. Verne (1867) Voyage au centre de la terre (Paris).
The genre of prehistoric fiction is discussed in N. Ruddick (2009) The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press).
M. Hammond (1980) ‘Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late-Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1:2, 118–32,
and Nathalie Richard (2012) ‘Archeology, Biology, Anthropology: Human Evolution according to Gabriel de Mortillet and John Lubbock’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 34:1–2, 9–31.
G. de Mortillet (1867) ‘Promenades Préhistoriques à l’Exposition Universelle’, Matériaux pour l’histoire positive et philosophique de l’homme, 3, 368.
Gaudry’s thought and career are discussed in J. Gaudant (1991) ‘Albert Gaudry (1827–1908) et Les “Enchaînements Du Monde Animal”’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 44:1, 117–28.
Boule has been relatively understudied in the secondary literature. but see M. Hammond (1982) ‘The Expulsion of the Neanderthals from Human Ancestry: Marcellin Boule and the Social Context of Scientific Research’, Social Studies of Science, 12:1, 1–36,
and M. Sommer (2006) ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and “Distortion” in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press’, Social Studies of Science, 36:2, 207–40.
This has been discussed in Fanny Defrance-Jublot (2005) ‘Question laïque et légitimité scientifique en préhistoire, la revue “L’Anthropologie” (1890–1910)’, Vingtième Siècle, 87, 73–84,
and A. Hurel (2011) L’abbé Breuil: un préhistorien dans le siècle (Paris: CNRS).
I. Nieuwland (2010) ‘The Colossal Stranger: Andrew Carnegie and Diplodocus Intrude European Culture, 1904–1912’, Endeavour, 34:2, 61–8.
M. Boule (1916) ‘La Guerre et la Paléontologie’, in Gabriel Petit and Maurice Leudet (eds), Les Allemands et La Science (Paris: Alcan) 33–46. This has also been discussed in Buffetaut, Vertebrate Palaeontology.
M. Boule (1922) ‘L’oeuvre anthropologique du Prince Albert Ier de Monaco et les récents progrès de la paléontologie humaine en France’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 52, 163.
See for example S. Tomášková (2003) ‘Nationalism, Local Histories and the Making of Data in Archaeology’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9:3, 485–507.
G. Maier (2003) African Dinosaurs Unearthed: The Tendaguru Expeditions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (1930) Proceedings of the First International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences: London, August 1–6, 1932 (London), frontispiece.
The massive expansion of palaeontology in the United States has been studied in P. Brinkman (2010) The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Palaeontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press);
R. Rainger (1991) An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press);
and L. Rieppel (2012) ‘Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History’, Isis, 103:3, 460–90.
R. White (2002) ‘The Historic and Legal Context of Foreign Acquisitions of PalaeoPalaeolithic Artifacts from the Périgord: 1900 to 1941’, in Lawrence G. Straus (ed.) The Role of American Archeologists in the Study of the European Upper PalaeoPalaeolithic (Oxford: Archaeopress) 71–83.
H. Fairfield Osborn (1915) Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art (New York).
See L. Pyenson (1993) Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830–1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press)
and P. Petitjean (2005) ‘Science and the “Civilizing Mission”: France and the Colonial Enterprise’, in Benedikt Stuchtey (ed.) Science across the European Empires, 1800–1950 (Oxford University Press) 107–28.
M. Boule and H. Vallois (1932) L’Homme Fossile d’Asselar, Sahara (Paris).
M. Boule and A. Thevenin (1920) Mammifères fossiles de Tarija (Paris).
C. Cuénot (1966) ‘Le Ré vé rend Pè re Emile Licent S. J.’, Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Indochinoises, 61:1, 9–83, gives a biographical outline of Licent.
Letters from the expeditions by Teilhard de Chardin have also been published in A. Vialet and A. Hurel (2004) Teilhard de Chardin en Chine: correspondance inédite, 1923–1940 (Paris: Edisud).
The Central Asiatic Expeditions have been discussed in P. Kjærgaard (2012) ‘The Missing Links Expeditions — or How the Peking Man Was Not Found’, Endeavour 36:3, 97–105.
M. Boule et al. (1928) Le palé olithique de la Chine (Paris).
C. Depéret (1917) Monographie de la faune de mammifères fossiles du Ludien inférieur d’Euzet-les-Bains (Gard) (Lyon).
See Hurel, L’abbé Breuil and A. Houghton Brodrick (1963) Father of Prehistory: The Abbé Henri Breuil: His Life and Times (New York: Morrow).
A. Lawson (2012) Painted Caves: Palaeolithic Rock Art in Western Europe (Oxford University Press) 49–106 and Hurel, L’abbé Breuil, 85–130.
É. Cartailhac and H. Breuil (1906) Peintures et gravures murales des cavernes palé olithiques: La Caverne d’Altamira à Santillane près Santander (Monaco)
and L. Capitan and H. Breuil (1910) La caverne de Font-de-Gaume aux Eyzies (Dordogne) (Monaco).
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Manias, C. (2014). Prehistory and Palaeontology in France, 1900–40. In: Broch, L., Carrol, A. (eds) France in an Era of Global War, 1914–1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137443502_10
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