Margaret Sankey

Writing the Voyage of Scientific Exploration: The Logbooks, Journals and Notes of the Baudin Expedition (1800–1804)

The 1800–4 scientific expedition that was commissioned by Bonaparte and captained by Nicolas Baudin was a vast note‐producing machine. Recording information in the form of notes was indeed its mode of being. The expedition, conceived in the late eighteenth century, represents in its scope and achievements Enlightenment knowledge‐gathering at its most ambitious: the exhaustive collection, measurement, description and classification of objects of the natural world. Aiming at encyclopædic inclusiveness and at the same time seeking accurate knowledge, the achievements of the expedition were remarkable. Some 72,120 items (including drawings and writings) were brought back to France: raw material for future research, as well as quantities of notes, reports and narratives that in themselves constituted fragments of new knowledge about the natural world. Underpinning this plethora of note‐taking was a particular understanding of what constituted science and the scientific enterprise at this time in post‐Revolutionary France, and this understanding welded together both officers and naturalists in a common aim. The written traditions of sea‐voyaging intersected with the reporting requirements of the emerging natural sciences, producing a unique social and intellectual interaction and cross‐fertilisation, supported by the methods of recording.

The Baudin Expedition in Review: Old Quarrels and New Approaches

The Baudin expedition (1800–1804) was the third French scientific voyage to New Holland, after those of La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux. It was led by Nicolas Baudin, a seasoned botanical voyager, who set out in command of the Géographe; its second-in-command was Captain Emmanuel Hamelin in the Naturaliste. Commissioned by Napoléon, the expedition was organized on a grand scale and consequently generated a wealth of written material in the form of sea journals, letters written to and from members of the expedition, reports and official documents, but also left an important iconographic record, in the form of charts, maps and drawings. While the expedition’s return, and its reputation, were obscured by its internal dissensions, as by the events of the Napoleonic wars, the voyage nonetheless yielded rich results: its naturalists brought large numbers of zoological and botanical specimens to the collections of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris, as well as providing live plants and animals for the gardens and menageries of the Muséum and of Malmaison. In spite of this impressive bounty, it is only in recent years that the voyage has begun to receive the attention it deserves for the long-term contribution it made to science and to the history of early Australian exploration, too long dominated by the English conquest story, and particularly by the competing claims for superiority made on behalf of the contemporaneous Australian voyage of Matthew Flinders. Indeed, establishing an accurate record of events has been a long and difficult process, and not only because of the accusations made by the English that the French explorers had plagiarized Flinders’s charts or claimed his cartographic achievements on the south coast as their own. The French authorities were also anxious to forget about an expedition that had brought them neither glory nor diplomatic advantage. In these conditions, the surviving expeditioners were hard pressed to protect their interests and their careers, not to mention the expedition’s

Nationalism and Identity in Seventeenth-Century France: the Abbé Paulmier and the Terres australes

In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the phenomenon of nationalism comes into being in eighteenth-century Europe when the old unifying forces of sacred language, divine-right monarchy and cosmology break down. Elements in this important development were the discoveries of non-Christian societies in the New World and the invention and spread of the printed word as a means of communication. These factors undermined the authoritarian tradition of the Church and favoured the emergence of the individual critical consciousness which would seek its identity in a social, rather than religious, context. The process of the development of a national consciousness is, however, a gradual one, and if, accepting Anderson’s hypothesis, we agree that “nationalism” is clearly identifiable in the late eighteenth century, it is nonetheless true that we can pinpoint examples of protonationalistic discourse before this period uncovering the fault lines in the articulation between Church and State and preparing, as it were, the conceptual shift to come. From the sixteenth century in France cracks had begun to appear in the close alliance between Church and State. Arguably the most important of these was brought about by the Reformation, where Protestants seceded from the Catholic Church, creating social as well as religious tensions and rifts, and giving rise to the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century. Then in the seventeenth century the quarrel between Jansenists and Jesuits caused further tensions in French religious and political life. At the same time, France was also concerned with affirming her identity within the wider European Catholic community and with the role she wished to play in relation to discoveries and evangelization of the New World, which depended on the will of Rome. The writings of the Abbe Paulmier, at the same time as they present a resolutely nationalistic discourse, reflect on several levels the different tensions existing between the State and Church in France. The Abbe argues in his Memoires touchant l’etablissement d’une mission chrestienne dans le troisieme monde. Autrement appele, La Terre Australe, Meridionale, Antartique, & Inconnue, dedicated to Pope Alexander VII, that France should search for the unknown Terra australis and then evangelise it, asking for the support of Rome in conferring its rightful place to France in the forum of world discovery. Paulmier’s Memoires can be read as an attempt to reinforce and support the unity and glory of the French nation by carving out a specific role for his country, defined in itself, but also in relation to the roles of the other European Catholic nations, notably Spain and Portugal, who had hitherto monopolized colonization and its concomitant missionary endeavour. But the Abbe at the same time dissociates himself from the

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Rational Religion and Mythical Science in the Novels of Cyrano de Bergerac

Whether the seventeenth-century French writer Cyrano de Bergerac can be considered to be a philosopher or not is debatable1, and continues to be debated.2 It is evident from his work that he has an extensive knowledge of the philosophic thought of the period and an intense interest in the unfolding of the ‘new philosophy’, the prelude to the ‘new science’.3 At the same time, his colourful writing in which he blends myth and imagination with reasoned argument makes it hard to determine what his own views actually were.