The Gender of Fieldwork

Fieldwork was at the heart of the Linnaean practice of natural history that swept across Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, Lisbet Koerner suggests that Linnaeus devised his breakthrough binomial nomenclature in response to the needs of his students rapidly scribbling notes in the field.[1] Stéphane Van Damme has argued that in France, fieldwork distinguished Linnaeans from Buffonians. Whereas Buffonians exemplified book knowledge: the science of the cabinet, the court, and the salon, of botanophiles rather than botanists; Linnaeans practiced the active science of the field, what Van Damme calls “local natural history in a global city.”[2] And yet, as Pascal Duris has argued, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the artisan in France of the popularization of Linnaean ideas,” was the champion of botanophilia, not botany.[3] By the end of the eighteenth century, French botanophilia had diverged completely from the natural history of the botanists, and was, as Roger Williams concludes, “Rousseauean in spirit and Linnaean in classification.”[4]

The triumph of Linnaeus in France in the 1790s thus did not bring botanists and botanophiles together, but gave rise to two distinctly gendered forms of Linnaeism: a moralizing Linnaeus for ladies based on his canonical Systema naturae mediated through the mostly posthumous French writings of Rousseau; and a Linnaeus that inspired young men to become citizen-naturalists based on Latin and Swedish Linnaean texts associated with his travels, pedagogical practice, and economic theory. Fieldwork was central to both versions of Linnaeism but carried very different meanings. As Van Damme emphasizes, Linnaeus encouraged his male readers to be active and goal-oriented – intrepid even — whereas Rousseau set himself as a model of pointless, lazy rambling for his female readers. Friendship and pedagogy figured in both forms, but for Linnaeus they emerged through male camaraderie in the field under the command of an inspiring leader and in the sociable spaces where specimens were identified and collections were arranged; for Rousseau, friendship and pedagogy structured the relationship between himself and his reader, both in texts that were primarily epistolary and moral, and in the exchange of herbaria as gifts. The relationships structured by Rousseau’s botany were dyadic, modeled on the heteronormative couple or the mother-daughter relationship or that between tutor and pupil; in contrast, the collective sociability encouraged by Linnaeus was homosocial and expansive. As such, it resonated with the dynamic of fraternity that shaped the masculine revolutionary and republican discourse in the 1790s, even as Rousseauean Linnaeism resonated with the discourse of republican motherhood.

In this paper, I first discuss the lesser-known writings of Linnaeus in which fieldwork and male camaraderie are central to the practice of natural history. I then show how these writings influenced the Société d’Histoire Naturelle and the Société Philomatique, two voluntary societies that sprang up in Paris in the early years of the Revolution, and the masculine practice of natural history they embraced. I conclude by looking closely at several young men associated with these two societies and the role Linnaean fieldwork played in their development as men, citizens, and scientists in Revolutionary France. In order to place the masculinity of their scientific practice into relief, I contrast it with the feminized practice of botanizing popularized by Rousseau.[5]

The Young Man’s Linnaeus

On 17 October 1741, Linnaeus delivered his inaugural address at the University of Uppsala on “the Necessity of Travelling in One’s Own Country.” In it he declared that

For Linnaeus, the university, with its libraries and collections, laid the foundation for the fieldwork where knowledge is produced; and travel through one’s own country, in turn, laid the foundation for travel abroad.[7] Linnaeus took up this subject several years later in his essay, Instructio Peregrinatoris, the most influential guide for how to conduct scientific travel across the globe in the eighteenth century and the model for all subsequent guides.[8] Both the inaugural address and the guide were published in Amoenitates academicae, a multi-volume collection of dissertations written by Linnaeus’s students and claimed by Linnaeus among his own works. The botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet opened the volume of selections from the Amoenitates that he published in English in 1775 with Linnaeus’s inaugural address. After lauding Linnaeus for the system of classification and nomenclature he had invented and for all the plants, animals, and minerals he had identified, Stillingfleet celebrated Linnaeus’s travels. “Besides his writings, of which I have mentioned but a small part,” Stillingfleet wrote, “this indefatigable man, born to be nature’s historian, has travelled over Lapland, all Sweden, part of Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland, England, and France, in search of knowledge.” Inspired by him, Linnaeus’s students had traveled even further, across the globe. “When we consider him in this light a master of such disciples as these, and many others, some of whose works make up the following book, he must appear like Homer at the head of the poets, Socrates at the head of Greek moralists, and our Newton at the head of the mathematical philosophers,” Stillingfleet concluded.[9]

Linnaeus’s travels, and especially his on-the-ground surveys of different regions of Sweden, were fundamental to his interrelated theories of natural history, political economy, and theology. Linnaeus saw in nature a divinely guaranteed order on which social and political order were built. “Nature’s economy,” he wrote, “shall be the base for our own.” As Göran Rydén has argued, “unveiling this oeconomia natura was a religious duty and for Linnaeus this required travel. Only by journeying could people discover Creation’s wonder.”[10]

Linnaeus believed that nature was improved through human activity. In Linnaeus’s theology, technology would solve the problem of human suffering, and the “science of economy” would teach people how to use and improve nature for human benefit. As Lisbet Koerner argues, for Linnaeus, “economics did not mean the study of the allocation of scarce resources. ... It denoted a principled search for advances in agriculture, mining, and manufactures.” A thorough natural historical knowledge of the land and its resources thus formed the necessary basis of a cameralist economic theory and policy that aimed at national self-sufficiency through technocratic control of nature and technological innovation. When Linnaeus produced a list of his most important works for how to “apply nature to economics and vice versa,” he omitted his taxonomic works and included all the publications of his travels throughout Sweden.[11]

One of Linnaeus’s students made the case for studying natural history in “Cui bono?”, a key dissertation published in volume 3 of the Amoenitates. Since nature was created by God for the use of human beings, he argued, studying it was obviously useful. Nevertheless, he continued, the ignorant often ridiculed those who were engaged in observing nature, asking “What purpose does it serve?” Noting that natural history was absent from most curricula, he expressed his frustration: “These people believe that this Science is nothing but pure curiosity, an amusement to pass the time for the carefree and idlers.” “Cui bono?” was meant as a response to this affront. The student began with the food chain: grains and insects that human beings do not eat provide nourishment for animals that we do eat or that serve us in some other way, such as the worms eaten by fish and birds. Birds of prey, mosses, lichens, fungi, and seashells, all serve human purposes, and if all of nature is at least of indirect utility, knowledge of nature is too. The most obvious application of such knowledge was agriculture. “Whoever wishes to conduct agriculture profitably must certainly learn to recognize all plants and to know which species grow best in which soil; certain species must be planted in full sunlight, others in shade, others in arid places, others in humid ones, others in sandy soil, others in clay,” and so on. Technology and invention were of course important, he concluded, “but the knowledge of these inventions is not sufficient, so long as the farmer does not concern himself with plants that are harmful to the fields, to the nature to which agriculture must adapt itself in each locale. In this way, the necessity of natural history is evident.” ^[12]

Herbationes Upsalienses, a description of eight fieldtrips in the area around Uppsala on which Linnaeus took his students at the end of each spring term, also appeared in the Amoenitates. Here is historian Hanna Hodacs’s description of these expeditions:

Hodacs observes that for Linnaeus, “the field was also a social place, in which relationships could be established between novices en route to becoming naturalists.”[14] In the field, students did not simply learn how to collect and identify specimens, they were initiated into a corps of naturalists that would serve the nation and the world through the collective mastery of nature.

The Linnaeus who emerges from the Amoenitates was not simply the inventor of a nomenclature, but a man of action who led young men into the field and into the world like an intrepid explorer or a general into the field of battle. He was a mentor to his students who provided them and his readers with a model of citizenship and a vision of natural history as a masculine, patriotic endeavor of supreme utility. Fieldwork in mountains and woods, with its masculine spirit of camaraderie, lay at the center of this vision.

The Société d’Histoire Naturelle and the Société Philomatique: The Fraternal Practice of Linnaean Fieldwork

“Linnaean natural history,” as the editors of a recent volume of essays on Linnaeus remind us, “was a collective and collaborative enterprise .... It was also a set of practices embedded in a materiality, and in social contexts.”[15] This masculine, fraternal, patriotic practice of natural history associated with Linnaeus flourished in Paris in two voluntary associations dedicated to the natural sciences that emerged in the 1790s,: the Société d’Histoire Naturelle and the Société Philomatique, whose motto was “Study and Friendship.”[16] Both their collective activities and the lives of their members were inspired and shaped by their reading of Linnaeus. And although women were not formally prohibited from joining either organization, the issue was never discussed, no women were ever nominated, and their memberships remained exclusively male.[17]

Linnaean fieldwork was one of the core activities of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, founded in Paris in August 1790. In lieu of a prospectus, the Société d’Histoire Naturelle announced its purpose in the preface to the first volume of its Actes, a narrative “Discours sur l’origine et les progrès de l’histoire naturelle, en France,” which culminated in the triumph of Linnaeus over Buffon. Aubin-Louis Millin authored the preface, which the society approved in November 1791.[18] “Natural history in general will thus be the object of the work of the Society,” Millin declared; “but it will pay particular attention to that of France, and above all to that of the Paris region; it will make this its principal occupation.” The society would organize weekly field trips, and members would annotate their discoveries on a topographical map displayed in the meeting room, while also keeping a “general and systematic catalog” of everything observed and collected based on the Linnaean system.[19]

In the meetings that followed approval of Millin’s text, the society began to organize the weekly expeditions around the Paris region. Each member signed up for one of the realms of nature (seventeen mineralogists, eighteen botanists, thirteen zoologists) and leaders were designated for each team. The first excursion took place on 27 November 1791, and they continued (although not always weekly) until July 1792. In October, the members voted to start them up again. The members shared and discussed the results of each excursion in subsequent meetings; a copy of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae was on hand for identification of their finds.[20]

The Société d’Histoire Naturelle was forced to suspend its weekly excursions in July 1793, after the mineralogist Nicolas Gillet de Laumont reported on the “unpleasantness” that several members had encountered when they were unable to present passports authorizing their movements. The requirement that passports had to indicate “the exact location where one proposed to go,” did not serve the practice of natural history fieldwork, so Gillet recommended that the society ask the minister for a blanket authorization for its members to “freely conduct their business of searching for different natural history objects anywhere within twenty-five leagues of Paris.”[21] Such authorization was apparently not forthcoming and no more excursions were scheduled until 1796.

Despite the suspension of the weekly expeditions Linnaeus’s spirit continued to inspire at least one member of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, even during his imprisonment under the Terror. In January 1794, Millin sent his colleagues at the society a translation of an excerpt from the Norwegian travels of the Danish naturalist Johann-Christian Fabricius. In his introduction Millin echoed Linnaeus’s observation that it was foolish to travel to distant lands before mastering the natural history of one’s own country and closed by informing his colleagues that “once he had regained the liberty to travel around the Republic as an observateur naturaliste,” he planned to begin “in the departments that are not in the theater of war.”[22]

If the excursions around Paris were inspired by the Herbationes Upsalienses, the society also found inspiration in Linnaeus’s Instructio Peregrinatoris. In January 1791, the society had launched a campaign for an overseas expedition in search of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, whose own scientific expedition had set off from France in 1785 but had gone silent since his departure from Australia in 1788. This new expedition would have its own scientific aims, cast in a Linnaean mold. “If the search for this navigator does not succeed,” the society wrote in its petition to the National Assembly, “it will be more than compensated for by the nautical and astronomical discoveries that one can expect from this new voyage, by the transplantation of useful plants that France will be able to cultivate with success, by the commercial ties that it will be easy to establish.”[23] Astronomical and nautical purposes had been central to scientific voyages sponsored by the Academy of Sciences throughout the eighteenth century, but the idea of naturalizing foreign plants to redress an imbalance of trade was a central tenet of Linnaean economic theory. “Linnaeus understood voyages of discovery as the necessary precondition for a cameralist policy of import substitution, the success of which was guaranteed because of the way God had constituted nature,” Lisbet Koerner explains.[24] When the expedition was approved by the National Assembly, the society drew up detailed instructions for the naturalists who would join it. Building on the Instructio Peregrinatoris, they prepared a guide for each branch of natural history, from preparations for the voyage to the collection, preservation, identification, and transportation of specimens.[25] In September, the Entrecasteaux expedition set off in search of La Pérouse, with several members of the society on board.[26]

The Société Philomatique, whose membership overlapped with that of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, was also inspired by Linnaeus. Founded by six young men for their mutual instruction in the sciences in December 1788, by 1793 it had twenty-five resident members who met weekly in rooms they shared with the Société d’Histoire Naturelle.[27] That year, the Philomaths began to translate the Amoenitates Academicae as a collective project.[28] Despite Linnaeus’s fame and influence, most of his works had not yet been translated into French. In 1788, Auguste Broussonet had bemoaned in particular the fact that the “Amoenitates Academicae are not well-known, hardly anyone has read his different voyages, his beautiful prefaces full of such beautiful views of nature, and never soiled with obviously false assertions.”[29] Millin echoed Broussonet the following year in his preface to the French translation of Richard Pulteney’s A General View of the Writings of Linnaeus: “The name of Linnaeus is often repeated among us, but few people have read his Voyages, his Amoenitates Academicae and his prefaces, full of such beautiful views of nature.”[30] Rather than making the case for the utility of natural history himself in his preface to the Actes of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, Millin referred the reader to the Amoenitates.[31] In taking up the project to translate the Amoenitates, the Philomaths aimed to make the Linnaeus who inspired them — the citizen, the traveler, the broad thinker, the inspiring teacher — available to the French public. The value of such a project was as patriotic as it was scientific; indeed, making Linnaeus’s ideas about the economy of nature and the utility of natural history widely known could only contribute to the cause of the Republic and thus the claims to patriotism and utility of the society itself.

In February 1793, the Philomaths instructed their secretary, Augustin-François Silvestre, to draw up a list of all the dissertations and a plan for translating them. The first four assignments included “Cui bono?” the key dissertation on the utility of natural history.[32] In October, Silvestre noted that the society had “placed the translation of the Amoenitates of Linnaeus among its most important projects.”[33] But as the translations began to come in, it became clear that the actual science, some of it now fifty years old, was too dated to be useful.[34] While the society ultimately abandoned the translation project as contrary to its goals of keeping abreast of current research and contributing to it, it had served a useful purpose: giving the society a collective aim and individual members the sense that they could still do useful scientific work during challenging times.

Fieldwork, Citizenship, and Scientific Careers

In August 1793, a month after the Société d’Histoire Naturelle suspended its weekly excursions around Paris, one of its members, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Brongniart, who was also one of the founders of the Société Philomatique and its treasurer, organized his own fieldtrip in the Paris region: three days of botanizing in the Forest of Fontainebleau. On their second day in the woods, he and his friends were arrested by local officials when they failed to produce the required passports. The local National Guard, Brongniart later told his father, “placed us in their midst and conducted all three of us, knapsacks on our backs and drums beating, to the city of Nemours, two leagues distant from the place where we were arrested.”[35]

Brongniart’s description of being marched off to Nemours, “drums beating,” mimics the description of Linnaeus’s Herbationes Upsalenses, an ironic ending to a botanical excursion that ran into a political revolution. But the Linnaean resonances do not end there. The Forest of Fontainebleau turns out to have been a Linnaean site: when Linnaeus visited Paris in the summer of 1738, he botanized there with Antoine and Bernard de Jussieu.[36] When the Société d’Histoire Naturelle defined the area they would study around Paris, they measured out the distance to Fontainebleau and then drew a circle using it as the radius.[37] Brongniart had already led two expeditions there for the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, one in May 1792 and the other in February 1793.[38] When the society suspended its weekly expeditions Brongniart continued on his own because, he said, it helped him to “relax his mind,” and he was so bored if he stayed home that he “couldn’t do much of anything.”[39]

Just days after his release, and with the levée en masse looming, Brongniart successfully underwent an oral examination for a position that allowed him to avoid conscription. Less than a month later he was on the road to Bayonne, where he had been assigned to serve as a pharmacy assistant with the Army of the Pyrenees.[40] As he told his father: “I certainly wish to fulfill my duties as a pharmacist to the letter [...]. But even so, I’m sure I’ll find time to do some natural history, and the country where I’m being sent is so rich that it would be impossible not to do something worthwhile no matter how little time is put into it.” Moreover, he continued, the war had to end sometime and the peace that followed would allow him to continue doing fieldwork in the Pyrenees, and maybe even the Alps. According to Brongniart, those who examined him, some of whom were his colleagues in the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, had the same idea: “they considered that in sending me to a region that was interesting for natural history, I could in serving the republic, acquire new knowledge that could someday perhaps become equally useful.” ^[41]

Brongniart tried as much as possible to impose a Linnaean framework on an expedition whose purpose was primarily military. He tried to go south on a fourgon (a military van), because, he said, he “would have the pleasure of going on foot and collecting natural history all along the route, since it goes only two leagues a day.” ^[42] But he was forced to take the diligence as far as Bordeaux to save time. From Bayonne he wrote to Silvestre that he could not find any interesting fish to dissect at the local market, had little free time to explore the countryside, and anyway the weather was lousy. Until things improved, he proposed translating Linnaeus’s Instructio peregrinatoris.[43] Nevertheless, following Linnaeus’s dictum to write every day rather than relying on memory, Brongniart filled notebooks with his observations.[44] In late November he managed to send Silvestre a box of plants he had collected along the road from Bordeaux to Bayonne and then in the environs of the city itself. He had carefully numbered each specimen and retained a duplicate. He asked that the botanists among the Philomaths make the identifications and then send him “the list of numbers with the names at the bottom and the observations that will have been made about them.” He would then collect more specimens of any plants that proved rare or interesting.[45]

By spring, Brongniart’s friends had arranged for him to be transferred to Bagnères, high up in the mountains, where he could do extensive fieldwork before heading back to Paris. He found a companion for these expeditions in Auguste Broussonet, the Linnaean naturalist and Girondin on the run who was now staying with his brother, a doctor at a military hospital not far from Bayonne.[46] Over the winter, Brongniart and Broussonet had dissected various animals and made plans to explore the mountains together come spring.[47] In late July, they were doing fieldwork when Broussonet took off by himself across the Spanish border. Although Brongniart denied any foreknowledge of Broussonet’s plans, he was again arrested, and marched off to prison in Pau as Robespierre fell in Paris. He was eventually released thanks to the intervention of colleagues in Paris, and returned home on 7 September, almost a year after his departure.[48]

In Paris, Brongniart joined the Corps des Mines as an inspector because it would allow him to continue to travel and do fieldwork. As he explained to his father: “I will travel eight months of the year and spend the winter in Paris. It pays a thousand écus and travel expenses; the three agents, the inspectors, the engineers, are almost all members of the Société Philomatique or [the Société] d’Histoire Naturelle.”[49] In 1795 he made several trips into the Alps with the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, thereby fulfilling the goal he had set for himself on leaving Paris for the Pyrenees two years earlier.[50]

In the spring of 1798, Brongniart had the opportunity to join the scientific expedition to Egypt. According to Charlotte Coquebert de Montbret, the wife of Brongniart’s friend and fellow philomath Charles Coquebert de Montbret, Brongniart spoke about the expedition with “the ardor that it inspires in everyone who is passionate about the sciences,” but it was the Coqueberts’ son, seventeen-year-old Ernest, who signed on as a naturalist’s assistant. Madame Coquebert at first saw only the dangers that her young son would face. However, she explained to a friend, “I feared that someday I would blame myself for having caused my son to miss a perfect opportunity for someone his age, when, by his education and his talent, he could already take advantage of it without it getting in the way of his future career prospects. It will simply complete his education brilliantly and usefully.”[51]

Ernest had been raised a Linnaean.[52] He had embarked on his first Linnaean expedition at the age of eight when he accompanied his father on a trip from Paris to Dublin, where Charles Coquebert was to take up a diplomatic post as France’s trade representative.[53] According to his friend, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, it was on this trip that Ernest’s passion for botany emerged.[54] On his family’s return to Paris in 1791, he took up the formal study of natural history at the Jardin du Roi, soon to be the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. We know that he was reading Linnaeus’s travel writings because in March 1794, Charles Coquebert read parts of his son’s translation of Linnaeus’s voyage to West Gothland at a meeting of the Société Philomatique.[55] Two years later, Ernest himself attended a meeting of the society, where he observed that the recently announced invention of a machine for polishing marble had been described by Linnaeus decades earlier in another one of his Swedish voyages.[56]

Candolle, who was two years older than Ernest, remembered most fondly the pleasure they shared in botanizing all over Paris. “Will I ever forget those solitary botanizing walks [herborisations], where, united by a shared passion we tasted at once the charms of the countryside, study, and friendship? ... It was through this intimate connection that I learned to appreciate the spirit of observation, exactitude, and perseverance that characterized his judgment, as well as the frankness and firmness of his character.”[57]

For these two boys, botanizing was as much a Rousseauean as a Linnaean experience. Unlike their fathers, and perhaps even Brongniart, they had access to Rousseau’s writings on botany, published posthumously in the 1780s. In the introduction to his dictionary of botanical terms, first published in 1782, Rousseau presented Linnaeus as having rescued botany from chaos through the invention of the binomial nomenclature and attributed the failure of its adoption in France to national prejudice.[58] In 1786, the Journal de Paris published a 1771 letter from Rousseau to Linnaeus in which he called himself “the most zealous of your disciples.”[59] In the final book of the Confessions, published in 1789, Rousseau praised Linnaeus as a “great observer” who views botany “as a naturalist and a philosopher.”[60] Alexandra Cook has connected Rousseau’s embrace of Linnaeus in part to his exile in Switzerland, England, and the French provinces at the moment in the mid-1760s when Linnaean ideas were being adopted there and resisted in Paris, under the dominance of Buffon.[61] For Rousseau, part of the attraction of Linnaeus was no doubt that the Parisian establishment spurned him.

Rousseau saw his own role not as overturning the Buffonian establishment, however, but as making Linnaean botany accessible to children and amateurs, and especially to his female friends and readers. The twentieth-century editors who published the correspondence that included the letters on botany admitted that Rousseau was not a great botanist since he had made no discoveries and invented nothing to advance the field. Rather, the letters showed him to be a great pedagogue precisely because he had improved on Linnaeus by making his Latin even simpler and his system even more accessible. They credited Rousseau and not Linnaeus himself with getting botanists to leave their gardens for the open fields.[62]

Boys like Ernest Coquebert and Pyramus de Candolle who aspired to careers as naturalists were not Rousseau’s target readership. “This work is written primarily for women,” declared the editor of La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, first published in 1802. Rousseau, he said, “understood how to inspire in them the taste for this pleasant and simple science.”[63] Another editor declared that Rousseau’s great contribution had been to turn botany, which before had been “nothing but a systematic study of words and medications,” into “a study of pleasure and leisure. It was up to the sublime genius that recalled mothers to the sweet and sacred duties of maternity to put at their level the peaceful study of the loveliest of the realms of nature.”[64] Rousseau embraced Linnaean nomenclature for its simplicity and because during his lifetime it was spurned by the Parisian scientific establishment; like Linnaeus, he sent his readers out into the field (while claiming that Linnaeus did not in fact do so); but he fundamentally disagreed with Linnaeus about everything else, especially in his understanding of nature and the meaning of herborisation, which for him was anything but useful work.[65]

For Rousseau, the primary aim of teaching botany (or anything else, for that matter) was moral: the study of nature would dull a girl’s “taste for frivolous amusements, prevent the tumult of the passions, and nourish her soul by filling it with the most worthy object of its contemplation,” he told his correspondent, Madeleine Catherine Delessert.[66] As in his notorious preface to Julie, however, in which he advised against young women reading his novel, Rousseau was being somewhat disingenuous here: the centrality of sexuality to Linnaean botany made it both a titillating guilty pleasure and singularly conducive to the language of love that saturated much of the botanical writing for women.[67]

Drawing on a tradition that went back at least as far as Molière, Rousseau reassured his reader that studying nature would not turn her daughter into a femme savante. Indeed, Rousseau had no patience for savants of either sex and saw Linnaeus as paving the way for a non-savant love of nature rather than laying the groundwork for the professionalization of the discipline. Before Linnaeus, Rousseau wrote, “nothing was more pedantic or ridiculous, when a woman, or one of those men who resemble them, asked you the name of an herb or a flower in a garden, than having to answer with a long string of Latin words that resembled a magical incantation.”[68] But whereas Linnaeus kept his herbier open and unbound so that sheets could be compared and the whole could be expanded and rearranged as knowledge increased, Rousseau prepared his herbiers as bound aesthetic objects to be exchanged with his aristocratic friends as tokens of their friendship.[69]

For Rousseau, Linnaeus’s great contribution was to simplify Latin nomenclature so that even the unlearned could come to know and thus to love a nature that was reduced to flowering plants. This aestheticized nature was the antithesis of the useful nature that Linnaeus sent young men out into the world to study. Although he claimed to be Linnaeus’s disciple, Rousseau disdained the idea that nature and its study might be useful. In “Cui bono?” Linnaeus’s student had responded to those skeptics who saw no value in the study of natural history because they could not see its immediate utility; Rousseau turned the tables by arguing that botany’s value lay precisely in its complete uselessness. He called botany “a study of pure curiosity that has no other real utility than that which a thinking and sensible being can draw from the observation of nature and the wonders of the universe.”[70] Whereas Linnaeus aimed to comprehend all of nature, Rousseau distinguished botany from the other realms of natural history precisely for its uselessness and the lack of effort it required: it required neither “tedious and costly experiments” as mineralogy did, nor chasing after animals, as zoology did. For Rousseau, the only reason to study nature was to love it.[71]

In the Rêveries Rousseau complained that “medical ideas” only made botany disagreeable and was pleased to say that “all that pharmacy did not at all sully my rustic images, nothing in them was farther from tisanes and plasters.”[72] Whereas Linnaeus believed that nature was created for the use of humanity and that botany was part of an economy of nature that through human art and action was the foundation of the economy of the nation, Rousseau saw human intervention in nature as a violation, a “deformation” of nature for human purposes.[73] If the Linnaean’s notebook and collections made it possible to remember what he had observed and to subject nature to analysis and organization, the Rousseauean herbarium was the record of captured moments without order or reason. As Pierre Saint-Amand observes, for Rousseau, “botany traces a topography of the random, a nomadic pursuit of forgetfulness.”[74] Finally, for Rousseau nature was a refuge from the masculine world of competition, striving, knowledge, and achievement; botany’s value was primarily moral and aesthetic, not political, economic, or intellectual. It was “a study for an idle and lazy solitary person,” as Rousseau declared in the Rêveries.[75] Thus he described his pleasure in going forth each day, “a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema Naturae under my arm,” to survey a single canton of the island on which he was then living in retreat from the world of men.[76]

Ernest Coquebert and Pyramus de Candolle did love nature, and they took pleasure in a friendship nurtured in nature, but that was not their sole reason for studying it. Rousseau had advised his reader to avoid all books, reading “only in that of nature” and his own letters, but they studied in libraries and lecture halls, as Linnaeus advised, as well as in the field.[77] And Ernest leaped at the chance to build on his book learning out in the field. As Candolle recalled, “Instead of limiting himself to following the ideas of Linnaeus, he wanted to imitate him through a voyage undertaken for botany.”[78] The scientific expedition to Egypt, as the mirror image of the military one, was perhaps the best opportunity for a young Frenchman to serve the patrie through the practice of Linnaean natural history, and in so doing to become the man, the citizen, and the scientist he strived to be. As Coquebert wrote to his son just days after he set off:

Ernest, too, saw the expedition as more than just an adventure or an educational opportunity: “It is not without risks that one can botanize here, and those who strive for the title of ‘Martyrs of Natural History,’ could not find a more conducive place,” he declared in a letter written from Rosetta two years later.[80] Alas, Ernest was right: in April 1801 he succumbed to the plague in Cairo, just as his comrades were boarding ship to come home. Candolle, who had met Ernest Coquebert on his first visit to Paris, at the age of eighteen, had the sad task of delivering his friend’s eulogy at a meeting of the Société Philomatique in November 1803. He had returned to Paris in April 1798, just as Ernest was about to set off for Egypt.[81]

That June, Brongniart organized another expedition to Fontainebleau, this time with passports in order, and invited Candolle to join the party. The group included both members of the Société d’Histoire Naturelle such as Georges Cuvier (two years younger than Brongniart), and students, among them François Silvestre’s sixteen-year-old nephew Henry Bonnard, who was a student at the Ecole Polytechnique, and Ernest Coquebert’s twenty-one-year-old cousin Barthélémy de Cressac, a student at the Ecole des Mines. “Brongniart was the leader of the group,” Candolle recalled. “Each morning we left Fontainebleau under his orders; we crossed the forest methodically, guided by hunting maps and responding to the whistles of our supreme leader. We attacked every branch of natural history simultaneously.”[82] Linnaeus, who once referred to himself as the “general” of an army composed of “Officers of Flora,” was Brongniart’s model.[83] Like Linnaeus, Brongniart had divided the group into teams; Candolle and Bonnard were assigned to plants, Cressac to birds.

Brongniart recorded the expedition in his journal. Day 3 included a “pond rich in microscopic insects” and ended in Linnaean fashion: “We returned to Fontainebleau from the direction of the Vallée de la Chambre in single file and marching in step.”[84] Drawing on the fraternal military model that formed so many young men in the 1790s, this Linnaean expedition was meant to mold Candolle and the other students into men and citizens as well as scientists. Candolle saw the experience as formative.

Although Revolutionaries deployed Rousseau’s language of nature from urban tribunes, and young ladies were taught to be virtuous through an appreciation of the beauties of nature, it was young men like Brongniart, Ernest Coquebert, and Candolle whose shared belief in the Linnaean vision of natural history, political economy, and citizenship sent them out into the field, not to retreat from society or to do battle, but to study nature in the company of others for the benefit of all. Embraced by these young men and their friends and colleagues in the Société Philomatique and the Société d’Histoire Naturelle, Linnaean fieldwork functioned as a practice of masculine citizenship in Revolutionary France.[86]

Notes

1. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 48-49.

2. Stéphane Van Damme, “In the Name of Linnaeus: Paris as a Disputed Capital of Natural Knowledge (1730-1789), in Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg, and Stéphane Van Damme, eds., Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2018), 113-15.

3. Pascal Duris, Linné et la France (1780-1850) (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 105.

4. Roger L. Williams, Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France: The Spirit of the Enlightenment, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 179 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 100.

5. For recent explorations of the topic of “scientific masculinities,” see the special issue of Osiris 30 (2015), and especially the editors’ introduction: Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye, “An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities,” 1-14.

6. Carl Linnaeus, “An Oration concerning the necessity of travelling in one’s own country, made by Dr. Linnaeus at Upsal, Oct. 17, anno 1741, when he was admitted to the royal and ordinary profession of physic,” from Amoenitates academicae, vol. 1 (1749), in Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick, trans. Benjamin Stillingfleet (London, 1775), 15.

7. Ibid., 7-12.

8. Silvia Collini and Antonella Vannoni, Introduction to Les instructions scientifiques pour les voyageurs : XVIIe-XIXe siècle, trans. Marc Rives (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 26-27.

9. Benjamin Stillingfleet, Preface to Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick, xiii-xviii. On Linnaeus’s role in European expansion in the eighteenth century see Hodacs, “Linnaeans Outdoors: The Transformative Role of Studying Nature ‘on the Move’ and Outside,” British Journal for the History of Science 44 (June 2011): 183-209; and Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Hodacs, et al.

10. Göran Rydén, “The Enlightenment in Practice: Swedish Travellers and Knowledge about the Metal Trades,” Sjuttonhundratal: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2013): 69. The main texts in which Linnaeus lays out his theory of the economy of nature are included in Carl Linnaeus, L’équilibre de la nature, trans. Bernard Jasmin, ed. Camille Limoges (Paris: J. Vrin, 1972), 29-121.

11. Lisbet Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean Travel: A Preliminary Research Report,” in David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121-27. In turn, Linnaean natural history was adopted as a firm foundation for German cameralism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. See David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28-33.

12. « Cui bono » (1752) in Amoenotates Academicae, vol. 3. My translation from the French translation in Linnaeus, L’Equilibre de la nature, 145-67.

13. Hanna Hodacs, “In the Field: Exploring Nature with Carolus Linnaeus,” Endeavour 34, no. 2 (2009): 45.

14. Hodacs, “In the field,” 48.

15. Hodacs et al., Introduction to Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, 1.

16. For the history of these two societies see Jean-Luc Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution : les procès-verbaux de la Société d’histoire naturelle de Paris (1790-1798), CTHS Sciences, no. 9 (Paris : Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2009) ; Jonathan Renato Mandelbaum, « La Société Philomathique de Paris de 1788 à 1835: essai d’histoire institutionnelle et de biographie collective d’une société savante parisienne » (PhD, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1983) ; Jonathan Mandelbaum, “Science and Friendship: The Société Philomathique de Paris, 1788-1835,” History and Technology 5 (1988) : 179-92.

17. The Société Philomatique does have female members today, but I suspect this is a late twentieth-century development. Certainly, there were no female members during the period covered by Mandelbaum, from the founding in 1788 to 1835. See http://www.philomathique.paris/index.php/membres-2018 (29 May 2019).

18. Minutes of 11 November 1791, in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 127. Millin was one of the founders of both the short-lived Société Linnéenne (1788-89) and the Société d’Histoire Naturelle.

19. Aubin-Louis Millin, “Discours sur l’origine et les progrès de l’histoire naturelle, en France, » in Actes de la Société d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, vol. 1, part 1 (Paris, 1792), xv-xvi.

20. Minutes of 18 November, 25 November, and 2 December 1791, in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 129-30; for the relevant portion of the règlement, “Des courses et de leur but – titre 5,” 324-25. Reports on thirty-five excursions were recorded in the minutes between December 1791 and July 1793, but sometimes there were two or three excursions on the same day, as each realm of nature was explored separately by a different team.

21. SHN minutes of 30 July 1793 in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 199.

22. SHN minutes of 11 pluviôse an 2 (30 January 1794), in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 231-32. On Millin’s imprisonment see Sophie Matthiesson, “Aubin Louis Millin de Grandmaison,” in A Political Dictionary of Artists in the French Revolution 1789-1816: Activism, Emigration, Deportation, Denunciations, Arrests & Executions in the Artistic Communities of Revolutionary France (unpublished mss.).

23. Quoted in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 31.

24. Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean Travel,” 138. On the earlier type of scientific voyages see, e.g., Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

25. Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 31-32. The manuscripts of these various guides, itemized by Chappey, are in the Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (BCMNHN) and the minutes of the society discuss them over the course of 1791. A version of the guide for “Zootomie,” by Richard was published in the Actes, (1792) 1: 61-69.

26. On the Entrecasteaux expedition see Carol E. Harrison, “Projections of the Revolutionary Nation: French Expeditions in the Pacific, 1791-1803,” Osiris 24 (2009): 33-52.

27. Mandelbaum, “Société Philomathique de Paris,” 39.

28. On the influence of Linnaeus on the Philomaths see Mandelbaum, « Société Philomathique de Paris, » 46-51.

29. Quoted in Duris, Linné et la France, 117. Duris notes that not a single work by Linnaeus was found in the 500 Parisian libraries (1750-1780) studied by Daniel Mornet. As late as 1797, no copy of the last (12^th) edition of the Systema naturae was for sale in Paris. SHN minutes of 18 messidor an 5 (6 July 1797), in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 299.

30. L. A. [Aubin-Louis] Millin de Grandmaison, Preface to Richard Pulteney, Revue générale des écrits de Linné (Paris, 1789), vol. 1, i.

31. Millin, “Discours sur l’origine et les progrès de l’histoire naturelle, en France, » i.

32. SP minutes of 21 and 28 February 1793, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne (Sorbonne), MS 2082.

33. SP minutes of 5 October 1793, Sorbonne MS 2082. « Dissertatio Academica, in qua Anthropomorpha.» See http://huntbot.org/linndiss/linndiss (10 August 2018).

34. See SP minutes of 23 nivôse (12 January) [1794], Sorbonne MS 2082.

35. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 19 August 1793. Archives Nationales (AN) AP suppl. 668 AP [AP/ (NC) 3/32].

36. Van Damme, “In the Name of Linnaeus,” 114. The elder Jussieu became sufficiently known for such excursions to be mentioned by name in the article “Herboriser,” in the Encyclopédie: “To botanize is to travel around the countryside in order to learn to recognize the plants that one has studied in school. M. Haller in Switzerland and M. de Jussieu in Paris, both great botanists, botanized and were followed by a crowd of young students. These useful excursions are called herborisations.” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ (10 January 2019).

37. Millin, Discours sur l’origine et les progrès de l’histoire naturelle en France, xv.

38. SHN minutes for 15 June 1792 and 15 March 1793 in Chappey, Des naturalistes en Révolution, 152, 184.

39. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 27 May 1793. On the importance of these botanizing excursions for Brongniart see Stéphane Van Damme, Métropoles de papier: Naissance de l’archéologie urbaine à Paris et à Londres (XVIIe-XXe siècle) (Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 2012), 53-55.

40. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 9 September 1793, an 2. On the levée en masse see Isser Woloch, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” Past & Present 111 (May 1986): 101-29.

41. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 24 August 1793.

42. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 9 September 1793. On foot travel see Hodacs, “Linnaeans Outdoors,” 195-96.

43. Brongniart to Augustin-François Silvestre, 8 November 1793, BCMNHN Ms 1989/880.

44. Journal du voyage aux Pyrenées, BCMNHN MS 3357. On the importance of notetaking see Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travelers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries),” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010): 377-400.

45. Brongniart to Augustin-François Silvestre, 23 November 1793, BCMNHN MS 1989/882.

46. On Broussonet and the Société Linnéenne see Duris, Linné et la France, 69-87 and Georgia R. Beale, « Early Members of the Linnean Society of London, 1788-1802: From the Estates General to Thermidor,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 18 (1991): 272-82.

47. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 19 October 1793, 5 floréal an 2 (24 April 1794).

48. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 19 thermidor an 2 (6 August 1794), 27 thermidor an 2 (14 August 1794), 22 fructidor an 2 (8 September 1794).

49. Alexandre Brongniart to Théodore Brongniart, 26 fructidor an 2 (September 12 1794).

50. On Brongniart’s forays into the Alps with Dolomieu see his letters to his father between August and November 1795 (AN AP suppl. 668 AP [AP/ (NC) 3/32]) and his journal, in the form of eighteen letters addressed to his family, BCMNHN 2351. See also Cooper, “From the Alps to Egypt (and Back Again),” 49-53. On the tours undertaken by the mining inspectors see Isabelle Laboulais, La Maison des mines: La genèse révolutionnaire d’un corps d’ingénieurs civils (1794-1814) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 134-38.

51. Mme Charlotte Coquebert de Montbret to Mme Aimée Steck, 21 germinal (10 April 1798) in Correspondance adressée à Mme Steck, née Aimée Guichelin, par la famille Coquebert de Montbret (1797-1821), transcribed and edited by B. and P. Poujeaux from mss in the Bibliothèque de la Bourgeoisie de Berne, Archives familiales Steck – (9 – XLVI), 1 : 9-10. I am grateful to Madame Poujeaux and Catriona Seth for sharing this typescript with me. On those of Brongniart’s colleagues who did join the expedition see Charles Coulston Gillispie, « Scientific Aspects of the French Egyptian Expedition, 1798-1801,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (December 1989): 447-74.

52. On Ernest Coquebert’s education see Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, vol. 9 (1854), 164-5.

53. Charles-Etienne Coquebert de Montbret, Voyage de Paris à Dublin à travers la Normandie et l’Angleterre en 1789, ed. Isabelle Laboulais-Lesage (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1995). I call this a Linnaean expedition despite the fact that, as Laboulais points out, Coquebert was unsystematic in his journal and employed no systematic nomenclature in his descriptions. It was Coquebert’s economic approach to nature that made the voyage Linnaean.

54. « Notice historique sur A.F.E Coquebert de Montbret lue à la séance générale de la Société Philomatique le 12 brumaire an 12 [4 November 1803]. » BCMNHN MS 2352/4. Although the « Notice » is unsigned, it is listed among the manuscripts left by Candolle at his death. Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, Mémoires et souvenirs (Geneva and Paris: Joël Cherbuliez, 1862), 506, item 144. The minutes of the Société Philomatique record Candolle’s reading of the eulogy on 15 brumaire an 12 (7 November 1803), Sorbonne MS 2083.

55. SP Minutes of 13 ventôse an 2 (3 March 1794), Sorbonne MS 2082.

56. SP Minutes of 3 germinal an 4 (23 March 1796), Sorbonne MS 2082.

57. Candolle, « Notice historique sur A.F.E Coquebert de Montbret. » Note also the reference to study and friendship, an allusion to the motto of the Société Philomatique: Etude et Amitié.

58. Rousseau, « Réflexions sur la nomenclature botanique,” in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 302-303. In 1774 he wrote similarly to Madame Delessert: “I did well to propose to you in advance Linnaeus’s nomenclature, because, as I predicted, this nomenclature has just been adopted here at the Jardin du Roi, and in a few years no one will know any other one in France any more than in the rest of Europe.” Rousseau to Madeleine Catherine Delessert, 28 May 1774, in Lettres inédites de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Mme Boy de la Tour et Delessert comprenant les Lettres sur la botanique, ed. Philippe Godet and Maurice Boy de la Tour (Paris: Plon, 1911), 166.

59. Rousseau to Linnaeus, 12 September 1771, in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 199-200. On Broussonet’s role in its publication see Duris, Linné et la France, 103.

60. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1: 643.

61. Alexandra Cook, “Rousseau et les réseaux d’échange botanique, » in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Bruno Bernardi, eds, Rousseau et les sciences (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 100. Buffon’s power as head of the Jardin du Roi is central to the standard narrative of resistance to Linnaean ideas in France in the eighteenth century. See, e.g., Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 112-13; Charles Coulston Gilispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Duris, Linné et la France.

62. Godet and Boy de la Tour, Introduction to Lettres inédites de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Mme Boy de la Tour et Delessert, vii-viii.

63. Avis de l’Editeur sur cette seconde édition, » in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau (Paris: François Louis, 1823), v.

64. L. Girault, Préambule to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres sur la botanique (Paris: Librairie des Ecoles, 1835), 5-6.

65. Between 1762 and 1798, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française seems to have made room for Rousseau’s definition. It included the words “soit par pure curiosité,” in its definition of herboriser only in those two editions. https://bit.ly/38mKExE (10 January 2019).

66. Rousseau to Madeleine Catherine Delessert, letter 1 (22 August 1771), in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 4-5.

67. Carol E. Harrison, “Citizens and Scientists: Toward a Gendered History of Scientific Practice in Post-revolutionary France,” Gender & History 13 (November 2001): 447.

68. Rousseau, « Réflexions sur la nomenclature botanique, » 302.

69. Hanna Hodacs, “The Price of Linnaean Natural History: Materiality, Commerce and Change,” in Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Hodacs, et al., 91-92; Rousseau, Letter 11 to the Duchess of Portland, 17 April 1772, La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 102-103; Celia Abele, “Rousseau’s Herbaria as a Counter-Encyclopédie,” paper delivered at 2018 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Orlando, Florida).

70. Rousseau, Letter 7 to Madeleine Catherine Delessert, in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 59.

71. Rousseau, Rêveries, 1066-68.

72. Rousseau, Rêveries, 1064.

73. Rousseau, Letter 7 to Madeleine Catherine Delessert, in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 59.

74. Pierre Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 70-71. On notebooks, see Bourguet, “Portable World.”

75. Rousseau, Rêveries, 1069.

76. Rousseau, Rêveries, 1043. My reading of the Rêveries is indebted to Saint-Amand, Pursuit of Laziness, 65-75.

77. Rousseau, Letter 3 to Madeleine Catherine De Lessert, 16 May 1772, in La Botanique de J. J. Rousseau, 17-18.

78. Candolle, « Notice historique sur A.F.E Coquebert de Montbret. » 

79. Charles-Etienne Coquebert to Ernest Coquebert, 4 floréal an 4 (23 April 1798), quoted in Laboulais-Lesage, Lectures et pratiques de l’espace, 339. See also Charles-Etienne Coquebert to Jean-Rodolphe Steck, 20 fructidor [an 6] (6 September 1798) in Correspondance adressée à Mme Steck.

80. Ernest Coquebert to his father, 2 floréal an 8 (1 May 1800); on the dangers of collecting and the paucity of species see also letters of 5 thermidor [an 6] (24 July 1798); 6 germinal an 7 (27 March 1799); 8 ventôse an 9 (27 February 1801).

81. SP minutes for 15 brumaire an 12 (7 November 1803), Sorbonne MS 2083; Candolle, Mémoires et souvenirs, 43-44, 55-56. Candolle was elected to the Société Philomatique in October 1800 on the nomination of Brongniart. See Mandelbaum, “Société Philomathique de Paris,” 198.

82. Candolle, Mémoires et souvenirs, 67.

83. Koerner, Linnaeus, 49.

84. Brongniart, Journal sédentaire, entry for 12 June 1798, BCMNHN 3358.

85. Candolle, Mémoires et souvenirs, 67-68.

86. On the importance of utility to alternatives to “martial masculinity” as the basis of citizenship see Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, “Citizenship, the French Revolution, and the Limits of Martial Masculinity,” in Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective: Agency, Space, Borders, ed. Anne R. Epstein and Rachel G. Fuchs (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 19-38.