Introduction
Louise Lyle and David McCallam
This book is based on the proceedings of a highly original international conference entitled Histoires de la Terre which took place at the
University of Sheffield from 30 March to 1 April 2007. Its chapters
explore how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in
the earth sciences and related fields (palaeontology, mining, agronomy, archaeology, seismology, oceanography, evolutionary theory,
etc.) impacted on contemporary French culture. They reveal that geological ideas were a much more pervasive and influential cultural
force than has hitherto been supposed. From the mid-eighteenth century, with the publication of Buffon’s seminal Théorie de la Terre
(1749), until the early twentieth century, concepts and figures drawn
from the earth sciences inspired some of the most important French
philosophers, novelists, political theorists, historians and popularizers
of science of the time.
The chapters follow a broadly chronological approach and are divided into four sections. These sections deal successively with:
i.)
the tentative beginnings of earth science as a discipline in
mid-to-late-eighteenth-century France, examining the fascinating divergences between theory and practice, ideas
and experience, as well as exploring how such new conceptualizations were presented to an increasingly knowledgeable public;
ii.)
how early nineteenth-century thinkers and writers capitalized on the rhetorical and figurative scope of contempo-