Modern Europe
light on L'Hopital's relations with the house of Guise.
He was one of its proteges and, for this reason,
aroused the suspicion of Protestants. But the cardinal
of Lorraine was for a time genuinely interested in
religious compromise; it was only after returning from
the Council of Trent that he and L'Hopital parted
company. Ironically, the Catholics suspected the chancellor of being a crypto-Protestant.
Given his importance, L'Hopital has not received
much serious attention from historians. No biography
in English has been published since 1905, and two
more recent biographies in French were aimed at the
general reader. In the meantime, our knowledge of
sixteenth-century France in all of its aspects has been
much enlarged and refined by recent scholarship.
Kim's monograph, based on solid research into printed
and manuscript sources, is therefore both timely and
welcome. After tracing L'Hopital's family background
and. education as a humanist lawyer in France and
Italy, she describes his career as premier president of
the Chambre des Comptes and as chancellor of
France, which brought him into conflict with the
Parlement of Paris. Kim has no misgivings about
calling L'Hopital an absolutist. She stresses his total
commitment to the idea of an all-powerful monarch
under God. For this reason, he strongly objected to
any move by the parlement or by its provincial counterparts to amend or impede royal legislation. During
Charles IX's grand tour of France in 1564 and 1565,
the chancellor trounced several parlements for dragging their feet in regard to the implementation of the
Edict of Amboise. L'H6pital also made enemies in the
legal profession by vigorously condemning the venality
of judicial offices. He was among the first statesmen to
see that, in the long run, this practice would undermine the king's authority.
Kim's reassessment of L'Hopital is made all the
more effective by her choice of a mainly thematic
rather than chronological treatment. The various
strands in the minister's thinking and policy are thus
more easily followed through. His ideas are illustrated
by excerpts from his many remarkable speeches, some
of which have been recently reedited by Robert Descimon. Kim makes no exaggerated claims for her
subject. She admits that he achieved little within his
own lifetime but sees him as "a rare blend of pragmatist statesman and idealist reformer" (p. 194), who
helped lay the foundations of the absolutist monarchy
of the seventeenth century.
R. J. KNECHT
University of Birmingham,
England
JACQUES ROGER. Buffon: A Life in Natural History.
Translated by SARAH LUCILLE BONNEFOI. Edited by L.
PEARCE WILLIAMS. (Cornell History of Science Series.)
Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xvii, 492.
$49.95.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1601
This study is a peculiar brand of the biographical genre
that has unfortunately lost much in translation from
one culture to another. Like its subject, it is somewhat
singular. George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was,
by eighteenth-century standards, both a prominent
scientist and a literary figure who published a voluminous, illustrated Natural History (1749-1767) and
wrote an elegant Discourse on Style (1753). Yet by
modern measures, he was neither an accomplished
natural historian nor a towering author. Buffon is not
even a typical representative of the Enlightenment or
a trendsetter of its intellectual or political realm.
Although he purported to be an intellectual, he wrote
for a popular audience and his books appear in more
library inventories than even the famed Encyclopedic,
Yet his Natural History was more often displayed on
bookshelves than read or studied, and few modern
historians of literature have had the stamina to do
more than flip through the twenty-nine quarto volumes
that extend to thousands of pages. The colored illustrations were often reproduced more for their aesthetic value than their naturalistic accuracy.
For all these reasons, writing about Buffon is a
mighty challenge. How appropriate that a literary
historian of the eighteenth century turned historian of
science should attempt to meet it! This book was
Jacques Roger's last major project and was finished in
1989, shortly before his sudden death. Thirty-seven
years earlier, Roger had prepared a detailed critical
edition of Buffon's Epoques de la nature as his secondary thesis along with the masterful Les sciences de la vie
dans la pensee [rancaise du XVIIr siecle (1963), which
has recently been rendered into English. Buffon was at
the core of both dissertations and remained central to
the rest of Roger's distinguished career. This biography should therefore stand as definitive; yet it is far
from the smooth, integrated work one might have
expected.
It was originally written as if spoken to an informed,
cultured French public, and the English editors have
been forced to add notes to explain allusions not
readily understood by non-French readers. The elegant French is at times not properly conveyed in
English; verse in particular loses rhyme and charm in
translation. Moreover, even the original French version was unorthodox. Chapters recounting Buffon's
life story, based on solid documentation including
correspondence, are interrupted by chapters devoted
to a synopsis of the contents of his writings, which
spare the modern scholar from reading his garrulous
prose. Using the traditional French technique of explication de texte, Roger draws us into Buffon's mind,
revealing how this majestic figure was led to his
problematic arguments. So attached is he to his subject
that Roger more often appears like an apologist for
Buffon's serious shortcomings than a dispassionate
commentator. Buffon is scarcely measured fairly
against his detractors Reaumur, d'Alembert, Diderot
or Voltaire, who are today considered more influential
figures in science or literature. What Roger is able to
DECEMBER 1998
1602
Reviews of Books
do is provide a convincing case for the pattern of
thought Buffon chose to adopt. At the end of the book,
he also points to the way Pierre-Simon Laplace and
Georges Cuvier turned some of Buffon's brilliant
insights into respectable scientific theories.
The most original part of the study is Roger's
analysis of Buffon's unusual explanation of the evolution of adult human beings from children and of the
distinction Buffon made between humans and other
animals in the chain of being. Although not portrayed
as a founder of ethology, he attributed a large role to
the process by which learning and the environment
affected behavior, and by this logic he arrived at a
novel notion of the relationship between soul and
body. Roger's analysis reveals Buffon as an nonconformist philosopher of nature, unafraid of grand speculation and undaunted by contemporary critics. His
rejection of traditional Christian values is patently
obvious, not only in the early volumes he wrote on the
history of the earth but even more so when he discussed the spiritual nature of human beings.
Roger is not always successful in penetrating behind
the majestic exterior of his hero to Buffon's inner
psychology. Buffon appears at times as a faithful
defender of his Burgundian colleagues; at times as a
polite but scheming politician at Versailles or in his
official roles as treasurer of the Academic des Sciences, president of the Academie Francaise, or director of the Royal Gardens; and at other times as a
domineering patron of the naturalists under his command. As an individual he was equally idiosyncratic;
his old age was devoted to creating a modern metallurgical forge in Montbard, perhaps to surpass the
accomplishments of his arch-rival Reaumur, Roger
depicts Buffon in this enterprise as a bumbling entrepreneur with little business acumen whose bullying of
neighbors who interfered with his plans resulted in
protracted law suits. The reader is left with a jumbled
picture of a powerful individual whose life was filled
with unresolved paradoxes. Despite devoting his career to Buffon, Roger has left much for others to
explore. But any future scholar must reckon with this
engaging biography.
ROGER HAHN
University of California,
Berkeley
A. KAFKER. The Encylopedists as a Group: A
Collective Biography of the Authors of the Encyclopedic.
(Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,
number 345.) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 1996. Pp.
xxvii, 222.
FRANK
The famous Encylopedie has long been seen as central
to the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment. This
collective biography examines the similarities and diversity in the lives of the 140 collaborators who
contributed articles to the seventeen original volumes
published between 1751 and 1765. Frank A. Kafker's
careful study treats the following topics: family back-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ground, education, and occupations of the Encyclopedists; how and where they were recruited and how they
were paid; their contributions and the censorship and
persecution they suffered as a result of participating in
the project; their political and religious ideas; their
productivity in old age; and, for those who lived
beyond 1789, their reactions to the French Revolution
and Napoleon.
The work is based on a very useful earlier study by
the author (in collaboration with Serena L. Kafker),
The Encyclopedists as Individuals (1988), as well as on
a wide variety of other primary and secondary sources.
Meticulously documented, well organized, and clearly
written, this work provides a wealth of pertinent
information about the Encyclopedists, the Encyclopedie, and its place in the Enlightenment.
In addition to providing a collective biography of the
Encylopedists, Kafker states that he aims to fulfil two
additional objectives. One is to disprove the stereotype
of the Encylopedists as a unified group striving to
destroy the Old Regime. Biographical details, Kafker
argues, show they were instead a varied collection of
men of letters, physicians, scientists, and craftsmen,
each following his own bent. The Encyclopedic should
be characterized, Kafker believes, not as a party
statement but as a compendium of knowledge characterized by contradictions, including both progressive
and conservative ideas.
Kafker's other stated objective is to enlarge our
knowledge of the French Enlightenment by showing
that it was not merely the creation of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and a few others. By his
portrayal of the lives of the Encylopedie contributors,
Kafker seeks to demonstrate that, having been nourished and shaped by a great number of individuals, the
French Enlightenment is best understood as a movement characterized by remarkable diversity.
Kafker reaches other interesting conclusions as well.
He finds that, although their work was subject to
censorship and some suffered persecution because of
their collaboration in the enterprise, only a very few of
these individuals suffered serious inconvenience; selfcensorship by the contributors, the editors, and the
publisher seems to have affected the final product
more significantly than censorship by state or church.
Kafker finds as well that those Encyclopedists who
survived beyond the age of sixty-five remained remarkably productive, and those who survived into the
revolutionary and Napoleonic eras were almost all
disillusioned by the revolution and ready to accept the
kind of order that Napoleon brought to France.
In summary, Kafker's study provides a worthwhile
addition to our understanding of the Encyclopedic and
the French Enlightenment. Although none of his
conclusions are strikingly original, they do enrich
generally accepted judgements about the famous
French enterprise and its contributors. The volume
opens with a handy chart of biographical information
about the Encyclopedists and concludes with a complete index. It is handsomely produced and free of
DECEMBER
1998