Bernard de Lacepède (1756 1825). Un naturaliste entre science et politique

David Armando, Director of Research at the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in the Modern Era at the National Research Council (ISPF-CNR) in Naples, Italy, and former fellow researcher, 2024-2025 year, at the Paris IAS, will speak at the conference organized at the École normale supérieure de Paris (ENS-PSL) on 27 November at 9:45 a.m.

Presentation

In tribute to Claude Blanckaert

The bicentenary of his death provides an opportunity to devote a symposium to a figure who remains largely unknown despite the major role he played in the political, administrative, scientific and cultural life of France at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries: Bernard Germain Étienne de Lacepède (1756-1825). Indeed, two hundred years after his death, the historiographical fate of this figure remains mixed, and the few biographies written about him have not exhausted the questions raised by the trajectory of a figure who, as a professor at the National Museum of Natural History and the first Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, allows us to re-examine, from new perspectives, the stages and modalities of the transformations that took place in the political and scientific spheres between the end of the Ancien Régime and the Restoration. Drawing on the most recent historiographical developments (on the history of animal magnetism, administration, state knowledge and education), this symposium aims to shed light on and contextualise how such diverse activities as zoology, music theory, political engagement and the construction of a new institution were articulated by a single actor, in a period marked both by major social and intellectual upheavals and by a remarkable continuity of the elites.

Several areas of study were chosen:

1. Examining the relationship between scientific and political activities that characterised Lacepède's career from 1789 onwards: elected to the Legislative Assembly, of which he became president in November 1791, he held important political (senator and count of the Empire) and administrative (Chancellor of the Order of the Legion of Honour) positions from the Consulate onwards. How can we consider his political and scientific careers together?
2. To examine his status as Buffon's heir and the transition between the 18th and 19th centuries. What role did Lacepède play in the transformation of naturalist knowledge? Did he seek to preserve or re-establish Buffon's natural history in the new organisation of knowledge in the first half of the 19th century?
3. Question Lacepède's image/reputation among his contemporaries and the construction of his posterity.