Michelet et La Mer. Biologie et philosophie de l’histoire

Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century, at the same moment as Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire contribute to a historicization of natural sciences, moral sciences are searching in natural history for a model of thought and a positivity. Michelet, an interior exile during the Second Empire, publishes several books on Nature: he is searching for a logic of the living which would allow to rethink historical evolution and progress on a large timescale. Situated in between science and literature, La Mer develops a vitalist thought which mingles archaic beliefs and modern biological knowledge. Michelet cites Lamarck, Felix Pouchet (the defender of spontaneous generation), Darwin and his corral studies. He imagines a historical transformism, founding democratic or socialist ideas on biological and geological knowledge: evolution supplants revolution. The strangeness of La Mer results from the blend of political and scientific ideas, the intertextual encounter between Darwin and Leroux, the scientific and the socialist. It results as well form a curious form of materialism, developing an idea of transcendency internal to time and matter.