Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt

·GEOGRAPHY·UNBOUND·

·G·E·O·G·R·A·P·H·Y· French Geographic Science from

ANNE MARIE CLAIRE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

·ll·N·B·D·ll·N·D·

GODLEWSKA

CHICAGO AND LONDON

ANNE MARIE CLAIRE GODLEWSKA is associate professor of geography at Qyeen's University, Canada. She is author of The Napoleonic Survey 0/ Egypt and coeditor of Geography and Empire. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1999 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1999 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 12345 ISBN (cloth): 0-226-30046-3 ISBN (paper): 0-226-30047-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Godlewska, Anne. Geography unbound: French geographic science from Cassini to Humboldt / Anne Marie Claire Godlewska. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-226-30046-3 (cloth: alk. paper).-ISBN 0-226-30047-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Geography--France-History-18th century. 2. Geography-France-History-19th century. 3. Geography--PhilosophyHistory-18th century. 4. Geography--Philosophy--History-19th century. I. Title. G97.G63 1999 914.4-dc21 99-34189 CIP § The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For my parents

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES

IX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XI

INTRODUCTION

1

Part One / Geography's Fall ONE

TWO

The Nature ofEighteenth-Century Geography: Cartographic and Textual Description

21

Geography's Loss ofDirection and Status

57

Part Two / Reaction and Continuity THREE

Universal Description

FOUR

The Powerful Mapping Metaphor

129

FIVE

Handmaiden to Power

149

89

Part Three / Innovation on the Margins x

Explaining the Social Realm

193

S EVE N

Innovation in Natural Geography

235

EIGH T

Tough-Minded Historical Geography

267

SI

CONCLUSION

305

NOTES

315

REFERENCES

367

INDEX

433 VII

Figures

FIG I

"The vanishing grid." Jean-Baptiste-Bourguignon d'Anville, Partie occidentale du Canada et septentrionale de la Louisianne, avec une partie de la Pensilvanie (Venise: Par P. Santini, 1775). Author's collection.

FIG 2

FIG

3

Photographed by Brandon Beierle. Brittany sheet from the Cassini map of France." Cesar-FranIYois Cassini. Carte generale de la France, vol. I, Partie du nord, Diocese de Quimper (Paris, 175(}-1815). Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. '~ comparison of the seas of the world." Alexander von Humboldt, '~

Atlas zu Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos: in zweiundvierzig Tafeln

FI G

4

(Stuttgart: Verlag von Krais &Hoffmann, 1851), plate 18. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. "The monumental importance of Egypt." Frontispiece of Description de rEgypte, ou, Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont etefaites en Egypte pendant l'expidition de l'armeefranfaise, publiepar les ordres de Sa Majeste l'empereur Napolion Ie Grand (Paris: Imprimerie imperiale,

FI G

5

FI G

6

FIG

7

1809-1828). Reproduced by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. "Military geographers working in the field." Frontispiece from Colonel Henri-Marie-Auguste Berthaut, Les Ingenieurs-geographes militaires, 1624-1831, etude historique, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie du Service geographique de l'armee, 1902). Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. "Paris at the time of Chabrol de Volvic's administration." Frontispiece from David Carey, Life in Paris; comprising the rambles, sprees, and amours ofDick Wil4fire. .. (London: Printed for J. Fairburn, 1922). Reproduced by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. "The geography of plants." Geographie des plantes equinoxiales. Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, from Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland. Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent.

FIG

8

FI G

9

Cinquieme partie, Essai sur la geographie des plantes (Paris: Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1805). Facsimile integral de l'edition Paris 1805-1834 (Amsterdam and New York: De Capo Press, 1973). Reproduced by permission of Blacker-Wood Rare Books, McGill University. Alexander von Humboldt, "Cartes des diverse routes par lesquelles les richesses metalliques refluent d'un continent al'autre." Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. A set of four graphs: Alexander von Humboldt, "Produit des mines de l'Amerique depuis sa decouverte; Qyantite de l'or et de l'argent extraits IX

x

FIGURES

FIG 10

FIG II

FIG 12

FIG 13

des mines du Mexique; Proportion dans laquelle les diverses parties de l'Amerique produisent de l'or et de l'argent; Proportion dans laquelle les diverses parties du Monde produisent et de l'argent." Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. Alexander von Humboldt, "Tableau comparatif de l'etendue territoriale des 1ntendances de la Nouvelle-Espagne" (I), together with "Etendue territoriale et Population des Metropoles et des Colonies en 1804" (II). Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. Alexander von Humboldt, "Esquisse geognostique des formations entre la Vallee de Mexico, Moran et Totonilco." Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University. Alexander von Humboldt, "Tableau physique de la Nouvelle-Espagne. Profile du Chemin d'Acapulco a Mexico, et de Mexico a Veracruz." Reproduced by permission of HaIVaId University Libraries, Harvard University. "Syracuse as reconstructed by Letronne." Jean-Antoine Letronne. Essai critique sur fa topographie de Syracuse au commencement du cinquieme siecle avant /'ere vufgaire (Paris: Pelicier, 1812). Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Libraries, Harvard University.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure after years of work on a manuscript to be able to thank those who supported, guided, encouraged, and cajoled. lowe a great deal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Without their support and fair-minded patience, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to write this book. I also owe the Advisory Research Committee at Olteen's a significant debt of gratitude for always responding favorably to my heart-rending pleas for financial assistance. Support of another kind was forthcoming from my colleagues in the Geography Department at Olteen's, both faculty and staff, who sometimes spoke on my behalf, sometimes made it easier for me to escape to the library in the summer, and always provided an atmosphere of pleasant collegiality in which to think and write. Finally, very early on in the planning stages of this work, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library provided me with access to their collection and a summer of intellectual bliss. This book is very much mine and so are all its shortcomings and errors. I did receive some significant guidance and criticism from colleagues and friends. My friend Paul Claval listened with interest and support to my ideas, suggested further references, and majestically contained his impatience at my publishing speed. Colleagues who heard me present or read bits and pieces of the book responded with ideas and criticism that have proved invaluable, even if! have not always taken their advice. These include Daniel Nordman, Bernard Lepetit, Michael Heffernan, David Livingstone, Denis Cosgrove, Robert Fox, Ingo Schwarz, Nicolaas Rupke, Derek Gregory, Neil Smith, Cole Harris, Christian Jacob, Matthew Edney, and Patrice Bret. I would especially like to thank Charles Withers, Paul Claval, Peter Goheen, Paul Datta, and an anonymous reader for a very close and suitably critical reading of the manuscript. Librarians have been some of my most appreciated guides. The collection and staff at the Bibliotheque nationale, including the book runners and the security guards, provided me with a home away from home which, although it may have been cold in the winter and hot in the summer, was always warm. Equally helpful were the archivists at the Service historique de l'armee de terre. Shirley Harmer at Olteen's University provided sure assistance at home base, as did the general XI

xu

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

reference librarians at Qyeen's. Penny Kaiserlian, Associate Director of the University of Chicago Press, provided me with sage advice early on in the writing of this book. Her staff, including Russell Harper, Mary Laur, and David Mtandilian, have done all they can to present my thoughts in the best possible way. Lys Ann Shore proved a very careful and imaginative indexer. My studen~s Michael Imort and Robert Davidson helped me to tidy up the bibliography. I have presented my evolving ideas about the thesis of this book to colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduate students at conferences and at Qyeen's University, Paris-IV, the University of Syracuse, York University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia over the last ten years. Their comments and observations have been invaluable to me. My friends and family have encouraged me all the way through the research and writing of this book. My dear friend Walter Schatzberg saw the greatest number of iterations and managed to appear excited and interested to the end. Wendy Craig read parts of the manuscript, attacked my writing style precisely where it needed to be savaged, and kept my thinking in proportion by regularly launching me into fits of laughter. Peter Goheen was always willing to talk about ideas and rescued me from my moments of self-doubt with gentle words firmly delivered. Others whose friendship lent me support include Evelyn Peters, Sheila MacDonald, Michael Imort, and Nancy Wood. My family encouraged and cajoled and provided the kind of support that has made me among the happiest and most privileged of people. My gratitude to them is beyond expression.

Introduction

The end of Classical thought and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible-will coincide with the decline of representation, ... And representation itself was to be paralleled, limited, circumscribed, mocked perhaps, ... posited as the metaphysical converse of consciousness. Something like a will or a force was to arise in the modern experience-constituting it perhaps, but in any case indicating that the Classical age was now over, and with it the reign of representative discourse, the dynasty of a representation signifYing itself and giving voice in the sequence of its words to the order that lay dormant within things. -Foucault, The Order of Things (1971), 209 This book is about the nature of geography two hundred years ago. It is not a disciplinary history.! It has not been written as a reassuring reconstruction of the activities of great men or women long past. 2 1t is also not a classical history of ideas, searching for elements of contemporary thought in past societies. 3 N or is it a normative history of"our discipline" seeking to establish the correct path to the future through the insights of the past. 4 Nor is it even a reconstruction of the "tradition" of geography seen as stretching from today back into the mist of the Anglo-Saxon (or non-Anglo-Saxon) past. 5 1t is an argument about what the discursive formation ofgeography was and was not in France about two hundred years ago. It is Foucaultian in its focus in that it seeks to explore one of those "curious entities which one believes one can recognize at first glance, but whose limits one would have some difficulty in defining," in this case the discursive formation called geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 6 It is also Foucaultian in that it wants to get at changes that alter discursive patterns: change that alters the objects of the study of particular discursive formations, the operations they may engage in, the apparent relevance and importance of their concepts, and the theoretical options open to thinkers; change that alters the boundaries of a given discursive field and the means by which it reinvents itself; and change that overturns hierarchies in the intellectual division of labor and consequently the orientation of research. Change is a difficult concept: it seems to immediately catapult one into evolutionary modes of explanation, 1

2

INTRODUCTION

into a focus on the theme of becoming rather than on the "analysis of transformations in their specificity."7 I have tried to avoid that trap in this book. I am not sure that I have always entirely succeeded. The argument in this book is also Foucaultian in that it posits a sea change at the end of the eighteenth century and in that it sees modern geographic thought as emerging-certainly not fully formed-in that period. It differs from Foucault's abstract approach in Les Mots et les chases and in Politics and the Study oJDiscourse in that it is fundamentally interested in how the individual experienced, helped to create, and negotiated discursive formations. 8 Up to the end of the eighteenth century the discursive formation of geography revolved around exactly what its name suggests: earth description. What the describable earth encompassed was substantially determined by contemporary understanding of the nature of the earth and its motivating forces. In Classical Greek thought, geography and astronomy were profoundly linked. In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the cosmos studied by geography necessarily included the divine will which bestowed fundamental motivation and meaning upon the earth and all of the creatures living there. Thus, for a considerable period stretching, for some geographers, well into the nineteenth century, geography and theology were closely tied. 9 In the course of the eighteenth century with the discovery of geology, the geologic structures of the earth, and geologic time, geography began to dip beneath the surface of the earth. Thus, throughout the history of geography, earth description tended to be broadly inclusive, expanding in focus in accordance with contemporary interests and understandings about what was important about the earth. So that at different times, it encompassed not only the earth's natural and human topography, but the air above it, the oceans alongside it, and even the layers beneath it-not to mention all of the creatures flying, swimming, and burrowing there. It is important to note, however, that while the breadth of these geographies was enormous, its approach was limited. Geography was description. That description could take a number of forms, but earth measurement, sketching, and literary depiction were its primary and most ancient tools. In all periods up to the end of the eighteenth century, the ultimate purpose of geography was, using those tools, to create a unified, true, comprehensive, and complete picture of the earth or of parts of the earth. This, it was believed, would, in and of itself, expand knowledge. This is not to argue that there was a lack of ideology or bias or even that there was no worldview behind the writings of geographers. Pure description, in that sense, does not exist: we are incapable of functioning without presuppositions. But there is a large difference between untested

INTRODUCTION

suppositions used for daily functioning (which often happily allow the coexistence of eclectic and contradictory "truths" and erratic and vague demarcations between relevant and even irrelevant phenomena or processes) and the deliberate theory formation and testing that characterizes modern scientific thought (which, whether it succeeds or not, is generally trying to avoid self-contradiction). Theory, in this sense, establishes ideal arguments about the world or some aspect of it-intellectual models-which are then explored for the meaning and insight they can give. Theories can closely approximate the world or they can seem far removed from it and yet be useful tools for the exploration of understanding. Part of the growing sophistication of scientific thought through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revolves around the fact that theories have been increasingly understood as constructions whose relationship to reality is problematic. It is argued in this book that the geographers of the eighteenth century were describing the world without critically examining the theory upon which their descriptions were based. They were more interested in locating phenomena than in understanding them. They were engaged in the project oflocation and in the development of a language oflocation but not in the project of validating theories oflocation. Nor did they recognize the theories emerging from other discursive formations as in any way different from their own descriptions. Instead they were preoccupied with erecting a spatial classification scheme whose relationship to understanding was unstated and essentially beyond criticism. It is difficult to conceive today of just how nonexplanatory geography then was. It was not geography's function to explain the forms it found, the flow of rivers, the shape of coasts, the distribution ofplants and animals, the variance in human ways oflife ... but to describe and locate these. While, for example, geographers periodically commented on the effect of a particular climate on a given people, this was never expressed as a problem to be explained or investigated by geographers but as a state of being. That is, the relationship was simply described. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, then, from astronomy to theology to geology, geography expanded to accommodate enlarging conceptions of the cosmos without fundamentally changing. Geography described, and description, whether mathematical, graphic or literary, was understood to lead to understanding and enlightenment. When, in the context of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the growth of state statistics, and the rise of modern economic thinking, geographers began to devote more attention to the description of human activity on the surface of the earth, there was every reason to think that geography would continue to be what it had always been, a respected descriptive, universalizing, and inclusive

3

4

INTRODUCTION

science. Indeed, with the growth in interest in both physical and biological nature and increased awareness of the social realm, geography's descriptive purview seemed about to expand dramatically. Instead, geography entered a period of uncertainty and extended dormancy which lasted until at least the 1870s (and some would argue that it has still not entirely emerged from this hibernation). Geography's loss of direction, documented in chapter 2, was manifested in a loss of purpose, uncertainty about what to teach both junior and advanced students, discomfort with the role and nature of theory, loss of status, a jettisoning of both the most technical and the most theoretical aspects of the field, a proliferation of exclusivist definitions of the discursive formation, and general uncertainty about how to assess research quality. The nature of the malaise evident in the discourse, the inherently conservative reaction of many geographers to the challenges emerging from other discursive formations, the survival of the weakened field through a momentum more structural and circumstantial than substantive, and the new and stimulating directions pointed out but largely left unexp10ited by scholars working at the margins of the field are the subject of this book. Because discursive formations are fluid and not easily dissociable, and because important change was taking place in a number of arenas of academic and social thought in the period covered by this study, the relevant contexts of geography are many. Thus, developments in astronomy, natural history, geology, archaeology, government administration (the nursery of the social sciences), and, of course, geodesy and mapping are touched upon. Though perhaps not in sufficient detail to satisfY historians of those fields. The context that this book explores is the context of geography. Thus the ideas of Malte-Brun, Balbi, Cassini,]omard, etc., are contextualized not to construct a broad background but as "part of an attempt to 'explain' the position taken by an individual by means of a full account of the possible positions available."lo This history of this geography will be in part explanatory and in part descriptive. The complexity of the conjunction of events, personalities, and ideas demands explanation-no matter how tentative-to allow us to progress beyond the detail of individuals, books, institutions, and opinions to a general understanding of the role of geography in post-Revolutionary France. And there is much to explain. It seems paradoxical that just as the scientific world began to focus on systematic exploration of the nature and age of the earth, and the organization of life on earth, geography-a field which had long been closely associated with these concerns-should lose direction. The rise to prominence of natural history and its evolution into biology and geology in

INTRODUCTION

the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entailed a shift from a focus on the mostly static depiction ofform and location to an increasing appreciation of the mostly dynamic behaviors, interactions, and movements of living and nonliving phenomena. It also entailed a shift from the domination by the distant past (as laid down by God or long-past [and hence essentially not investigable] physical forces) to the immediate, interactive present moved by forces very evidently still active. Both of these shifts reduced the value of the static geographic map. Instead, it became necessary to move from the possibility of building one kind of model at different scales to that of building many different kinds of models each with a logic dictated by the dynamic, immediate, interactive phenomena under study (thematic maps and scientific models). As Bruno Latour has pointed out, each of these maps or models, from Mendeleev's periodic table to Reynolds's turbulence coefficient, created a new and distinct space and time. ll This space and time was the product of an intellectual construct or classification, the logic of which was related to the reshuffling of connections between elements (such as chemical elements or plant genera) which was made possible by the separation of these from their geographic context and their representation by mobile, stable, and combinable inscriptions. The space and time created by this reshuffling was and is accessible only to those trained to read the inscriptions and able to understand the logic behind the reshuffling. The space and time of chemistry, geology, hydraulic engineering, and sociology is not necessarily closely related to that of geography. Consequently, geographers were and are no more able to describe and map these space/time relations than any other noninitiate. The aim of geography was the description of the earth. The aim of the new sciences was the explanation of selected aspects of the earth's (or its inhabitants') functioning. Geography's holistic but nontheoretical, nonexplanatory, and unanalytical vision of the earth, together with its static and geographic representational system, could not incorporate these sciences into its descriptive system. Latour seems to suggest that in the late twentieth century perhaps only mathematics is capable of describing the world in inscriptions which are sufficiently mobile, stable, and combinable to allow exchange across the modern sciences and social sciences. This may be the case, but there is little doubt today that geography cannot play the holistic, yet theoretical and scientific, unifYing role that Humboldt sought in his Cosmos. 12 It also seems paradoxical that geography lost a sense of direction just as Europe moved into the most dynamic and aggressive phase of its age of exploration. Barbara Stafford, in my view confusing geography and

5

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INTRODUCTION

exploration, has described the geography of this period as a speculative or theoretical science because geographers theorized about the form and content of the earth's continents when these were substantially unknown.13 It is possible to see geography as theory-driven in cases where exploration of location and form were driven by geographic hypotheses formulated by geographers. An example of this is Philippe Buache's highly conjectural system of mountain chains and river basins. In 1752 Buache proposed a predictive description of the world's mountains arguing that they formed a regular structural framework which could be used to locate all of the mountains and rivers of the globe. 14 This did suggest theoretical possibilities for geography, as the somewhat barbed response to his theory at the Academy of Sciences indicates: This approach to our globe opens a whole new career for geography. It is perhaps more interesting to know the direction of mountain chains ... than to recognize the ancient limits of a country or empire no longer in existence. is

Similarly, it was theories about the location and nature of El Dorado that led to the exploration of the interior of Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Orinoco and Amazon basins; the quest for Prester John that directed European attention to the Middle East, the Far East, and ultimately to Ethiopia; and the myths ofCibola, Qyivira, etc., that led to the exploration of parts of Central and North America. It was, however, also toward the end of the eighteenth century that exploration driven by theories concerning location began to seem irrelevant end even irresponsible. The voyages of La Perouse (1785-1788), Bouguer and La Condamine (17351743), Maupertuis (1735-1736), Cook (1768-1771, 1772-1775, 17761780), and Bougainville (1766-1769) marked the advent of the age of statefunded, large-scale, team-structured exploration incorporating the talents of many specialists. The opinions of cabinet-bound geographers working from interpretations of previous accounts, old maps, and sometimes the views of the ancients on the nature of a world they had never seen, became increasingly obsolete and scarcely interesting. Explorers turned more and more to the results of other expeditions rather than to the speculations of geographers which were not based on any explanation of the shapes, forms, and locations described but on compilations of earlier descriptions. The speculative descriptions of geographers were of some interest only as long as the shape and articulation of the world was unknowable. Geographers, variously aware of the malaise and confusion they were witnessing, struggled to maintain the profile and quality of their work. Some sought validation for their work through the renovation and extension of

INTRODUCTION

well-tried traditional approaches: principally literary description, mapping, and the harnessing of geography to the will and needs of the state. To a very large extent these failed to win geographers recognition in scientific circles. There were other geographers and scholars with strong geographic interests who explored the possibility of rendering geography more explanatory without abandoning its integrative and universalizing role or its strong spatial focus. Already early in the nineteenth century there are signs of these efforts in subfields as varied as what today might be termed incipient anthropological, physical, historical, and social scientific geography. For a variety of reasons, these efforts did not "save" geography, which continued to struggle with its identity, purpose, and place in the "connaissances humaines" well beyond the period covered by this study.16 This book builds on the already considerable literature positing that a profound shift took place in the nature of scientific thought at the end of the eighteenth century.17 In the 1960s, arguing that historians of science and of thought were too focused on the biographies of great thinkers, on the progressive linearity of thought, on the success and failure of concepts, and on seeking unitary causes for hopelessly complex events and developments, Michel Foucault identified a new focus of analysis: the episteme.1 8 Foucault saw the episteme-the product of research into the archaeology of thought-as the fundamental regularity to knowledge, determining the possible and the impossible dimensions of scientific thought. Foucault was particularly interested in the transition points between three epistemes: the pre-Classical (ending approximately in the mid-seventeenth century), the Classical (ending at the end of the eighteenth century), and the Modern (still in effect today). The centerpiece of Foucault's analysis was language, but his study ranged widely from literature to art to biology (or natural history), to economics, psychology, sociology, history, ethnology, psychoanalysis, and medicine, encompassing, in fact, the full panoply of Western intellectuality focused on the study of "man." Within the pre-Classical episteme, it was the adjacency, similarity in form, and sympathy of phenomena which were understood to provide all clues to the meaning and message left by God for humans to discover in all of creation. Thus language, under this episteme, was a symbolic-although warped by Babel-representation of the world, and the words of which it was composed were to be itemized (not analyzed) in terms of their adjacency, form, and sympathy. The Classical episteme, marked as beginning with Don Qyixote, rejected resemblance as "the fundamental experience and primary form ofknowledge,"19 regarding knowledge instead as existing only through and as a result of the comparative analysis ofidentity

7

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INTRODUCTION

and difference, structured and given meaning through measurement and the imposition of order. In this episteme, language is not an hermeneutic sign or form of truth, but a transparent semiology. In the transition to the third, "Modern," episteme, the surficial unity of the known world breaks up and unity and insight is to be found only through relationships established through an analysis of invisible, interior, and functional relationships. In this episteme, "mathesis" and the taxonomic order of appearances-surficially determined identity and difference-are not only relatively unimportant but deceiving. Foucault's point is that much of what is interesting about the history of thought is inexplicable outside of the context of the dominant episteme. However, he does recognize the value of multiple levels and methods ofanalysis. 20 The action covered in this book takes place in precisely the period identified by Foucault as transitional between the Classical and Modern episteme. I certainly did not begin my research into early-nineteenth-century French geography by looking for an archaeological explanation for geography's position in early-nineteenth-century France. Nevertheless, as I explored the nature of French cartography and geography of that period, I found significant and thought-provoking resonance between Foucault's grand perspective and my own much smaller-scale and smaller-scope study. I agree profoundly with his impatience with simple-minded causal explanations for hopelessly complex constellations of events, conceptions, and interactions. I also feel that the complexity of events, concepts, and relationships demands an explanation which reflects the complexity and multifarious nature of knowledge and human existence. Indeed, in my view, there are at least three foci of analysis appropriate and essential to the history of thought: the conceptual, the sociological, and the epistemological. Although analysis of the past is often written with the assumption that there is only one focus of analysis-and specialists differ with respect to their preferred focus-the levels are interdependent, and truly explanatory history demands an interactive exploration of aspects of all three levels. Writing in the 1960s and '70s, Foucault felt that most history was focused on concepts. He was consequently seeking to diversifY and deepen historical analysis. There are, however, many aspects of conceptual history which are entirely unexplored. This is especially true of the discursive formations of geography and, for reasons elaborated on below, of the geography practiced in the early nineteenth century. Conceptual history focused on geography might explore the nature of geography practiced by geographers or those writing "geographies." What were the kinds of questions they asked? Does there appear to have been a wide consensus among geographers about those

INTRODUCTION

ideas? What failed to draw their interest? What contemporary scholars did they read and what did they take from them? How did other scholars respond to their works and ideas? Did geographers generate any particularly powerful and influential concepts? Part of a good, solid conceptual history is the recovery of forgotten ideas and personalities. These abound in the history of nineteenth-century geography. We have, for example, entirely neglected one of the important players in the development of a non-racebased ethnogeography, Adrien Balbi. He has attracted more attention from anthropologists, linguists, and even historians of French identity than from historians of the field in which he understood himself to be practicing. This is equally true for Conrad Malte-Brun, Jean-Antoine Letronne, EdmeFrans:ois Jomard, Louis Vivien de Saint Martin, Andre de Ferussac, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, and a large number geographers less known to other fields. What was the aim of their research? Were they using an established methodology or research tailored to the problem at hand? What constituted original and derived research for them? What was the structure and course of their reasoning? What were their key ideas? Which were the decisive influences shaping not only their ideas but the method and presentational form of their work? Why, for example, was geography so seduced by classics in the first half of the nineteenth century? What if anything does this have to do with the humanism of the period? What was, and what has been, the impact of their ideas and approaches to problems? These often apparently banal questions are the foundation of conceptual history.2! Answering them requires extensive research. Sadly, they have not been asked for even the best-known geographers of this period. As has been so often pointed out, ideas and concepts do not have lives of their own. No matter how disembodied historians have made them seem, they do not float across the ages over the heads of thinkers and practitioners but are the products of not only individual thinkers but of social organizations, networks of scholars, and of acrimonious and often highly personal debate. They do not have a life apart from the technologies, cultures, economies, and polities which spawn, foster, or oppose them. The second focus of historical analysis, the sociology of thought is, then, essential to an explanatory history of thought. The sociology of thought is integral to Foucault's analysis but expressed in very abstract terms precisely because his attention is riveted on discursive formations largely to the exclusion of the individual. I am not arguing that all social dimensions of any given question must be identified, any more than all ideas spouted by an author must be taken equally seriously. The social context to be explored depends on the central question posed. The sociology of thought might explore the formal

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INTRODUCTION

and informal structure within which individuals function and present their ideas. In geography, for example, how and where did geographers meet? Where did they publish? For whom did they write? How many journals might they have published in? What were the relations between these, and what criteria did particular journals use for the acceptance or refusal of submitted articles? To what extent did the societies and associations to which geographers belonged direct and control their research? And by what mechanisms? Were there subjects or themes that they rejected out of hand? What role did they play in the transmission or blockage of ideas? What were the relations between these societies and journals and secular power? As anthropologists and linguists have shown us, even informal and relatively unrecognized structures can sometimes have a determining influence. The way in which I have asked these questions implies a static view of the sociology of thought. However, it is important to remember that institutions change over time and in the face of circumstances as subtly as do the thinkers which both form them and provide their context. It is especially important to bond these structural and institutional questions to the geographic ideas and research endeavors which gave them life and meaning. A social history of an institution which substantially ignores the ideas and debates which motivated it is like the aesthetic study of architecture apart from its immediate function, structural integrity, and larger social role. 22 Ultimately all it offers is arbitrary judgment far more reflective of the society offering the judgment than any past aesthetic, architecture, or society. It is for this reason that I have found myself so dissatisfied with the history of geographic institutions written by historians: it is virtually impossible to strike a balance between the context, the social dimensions of research, and the realm of ideas in an institution such as the Societe de geographie de Paris if one does not explore the changing nature of the geography being practiced or excluded by that society.23 Of course, the sociology of geography alone is inadequate to describe the discursive formation of geography at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was a period of ragged edges in discursive formations. Thus to understand the society of geographers, one must understand the society of geologists, statisticians, historians, protolinguists, proto-archaeologists ... , not to mention the larger society. It is a massive project to truly reconstruct even one discursive formation in this period. I have sought to provide contextualization adequate to the subject at hand in this book. But I am well aware that further contextualization would greatly enrich the subject.

INTRODUCTION

Without the marriage of the conceptual and the sociological, one cannot begin to enter into the third and perhaps most explanatory level of analysis: the epistemological. Epistemological questions are focused less on the birth and existence of concepts or on the sociology of thought than on that more volatile dimension opened by Foucault and explored by a large number of successors: the episteme, the zeitgeist, the paradigm, the exemplar, and the logic of the discourse (among other epithets). These kinds of issues are stimulating, suggestive, highly provocative, virtually impossible to prove, extremely difficult to argue, and utterly meaningless when ungrounded to individuals, institutions, and concepts. The key epistemological questions are, What kind of thought was possible or impossible under the reign of a particular episteme? What sorts of subjects and preoccupations were deemed worthy of attention by, for example, the geographical engineers? And why? Why might a theory such as Buache's system of mountains and river basins be so convincing to field scientists who had had ample evidence to note its inconsistency with the actual shape and patterns of mountain chains and river basins?24 Why would a geographer like Jomard so persistently use mapping to explore questions with little or no geographic-spatial dimension? Is the answer to both of these questions the cartographic model or, more broadly, the descriptive model of thought which seems to have dominated the geography of the time? Or is the explanation the "pan-mathematics of Descartes, the self-deception of believing that the multiplicity of the world could be overcome by mathematical ordering," as Cassirer would suggest?25 But why the tenacious hold to these approaches? What we are seeing there, I would argue, is some of the undermining strength of the bonds of discursive formations acting on an extremely subtle-indeed epistemological-level. On a level, in fact, that contemporaries as involved participants could not have understood. The answer to these questions, then, lies in a zone where concepts, the sociology of thought, and epistemology interact. Similarly, we can ask, What gave reigning ideologies (in the oldest sense of the term) their power and hold? What and why is the form of their resonance? How did the ideologies facilitate and hinder exchange? How did they filter ideas and types of scholarship or scholars? Did the eclectic character of the Societe de geographie in approximately the first sixty years of its existence reflect an absence of competing ideologies-or a lack of recognition of these? Behind these questions lie others still more profound and less answerable: what is intellectual creativity, where does it come from, what does it need to find realization, and what is its relationship to discursive formations? The focus of this book is on a discursive formation which was the representational discourse par excellence, which moved easily from "math-

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esis" to order, which in the course of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century had developed one of the best universally valid constructed languages (cartography), and which unified the sciences having anything to do with the earth or the cosmos through the mapping of identity and difference in space. In fact, the early-nineteenth-century discursive formation of geography (in France)-at least into the 1830s-was one formed by pre-Classical and Classical modes of thought. There was, at least initially, virtually no place for such a field within the Modern episteme. The extraordinary importance accorded adjacency-which is almost definitional of geography-had already waned with the Classical episteme. The unity geography offered and proclaimed through representation or description seemed empty and futile in the face of the fragmentation and explosion of the epistemological field. Geography's language became so accessible, unanalytic, and everyday as to be general or part of the basic equipment of all scientists. Yet there were still geographers who sought to practice geography as had their predecessors and who puzzled over the diminishing respect the field gathered to itself Here we will look at the fate of a discursive formation which once spanned much of the terrain later claimed by the empirical earth sciences and incipient social sciences-one that was crippled and left behind by the changes. The aim is not to ponder the scientific failures along the side of the road to some sort of truth but to understand the nature of the change not just through what was retained or added but through what was cast off or left behind. Geography, it will be argued here, provides an excellent vantage point on both the nature of the new episteme and the old because it so completely embodied the old. There are both discontinuities and longduration continuities in the history of thought. In early-nineteenth-century geography, we can see some of their interplay and their consequences. I also describe the nineteenth-century epistemic change with a slightly different vocabulary than Foucault. His characterization of modern science as focused on "internal" and "invisible structures" in terms of their "functions" is useful for understanding the new episteme as it is manifested in biology, literature, and economics. But the vocabulary for explaining an absence of something to be found in other sciences must be different. It is not so much that geography failed to find interior spaces, or develop functional explanations, but that it could not give up surficial description for explanation of interior functions without fundamentally altering its nature, its composition, and, above all, its unifying scope. This difference in vocabulary has significant implications in drawing the line between the Classical and Modern epistemes. For example, while Foucault sees Linnaeus's "system" and Adanson's "method" as "two ways of defining

INTRODUCTION

identities by means of a general grid of differences" (and, thus, both firmly in the Classical episteme), I see them as fundamentally different and as belonging to two different epistemes. For while Linnaeus was concerned with mostly visible and external features of plants, his classification was explanatory and theory-laden description, focused on the reproductive "function."26 Adanson's method was a plant classification that made an ideal of pure description, impossibly forbidding the prior imposition of theory or argumentY Fundamentally, Adanson wanted to map and mathematize the plant world before coming to any conclusions about it. His view of the world was much closer to that of early-nineteenth-century geographers than to eighteenth-century natural historians like Linnaeus or Buffon. Thus, I highlight the stuttered and gradual shift between the Classical and Modern episteme which nevertheless left geography substantially behind its sister sciences by the 1830s. Despite Foucault's focus on the representational basis of science in the eighteenth century, he is relatively insensitive to the different modes of representation employed in science. Thus, apart from his analysis of the Meninas, he rarely mentions and does not take into account the wide variety of pictorial media such as maps, graphs, trees, diagrams, and their changing function in science within and across the epistemes. As a result, he misses an important consequence of the changes taking place in the shift from Classical to Modern thought: while representation was being abandoned as the guiding ideal of scientific thought, many of the sciences moved toward a far greater use of scientific illustration. This is neither paradoxical nor contradictory to Foucault's argument that the sciences were becoming more focused on invisible interior structures and their functional roles. 28 Indeed, the graphics and cartographics employed by discursive formations such as geology, and later climatology, botany, zoology, epidemiology, etc., were-as Martin Rudwick has pointed out for geology, as Jane Camerini has pointed out for plant biology, and as Cambrosio, Jacobi, and Keating have pointed out for immunology-theory-Ioaded. 29 Together with sections, sketches, and landscapes, maps were used extensively in the development, elaboration, and testing of theory. Indeed as LeGrand has shown for a later period, such graphics and cartographics could even replace experimentation in the testing of theory. 30 Thematic cartography, then, came to be because the use of maps in representing what could not be seen but could be hypothesized required the development of a new and extensive symbolic vocabulary.31 Focusing on the use of representation in science also adds dimension to the dilemma within which geography found itsel£ As we will see in chapters 1 and 2, ironically, just as mapping was developing a consistent, systematic,

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and comprehensive mode of expression32-or just as it was perfecting description-it could no longer win geographers intellectual status among astronomers, physicists, and analysts of literary and ancient culture. Yet, scholars in a wide variety of fields began to pay attention to maps, using their topographical content as incidental background for a larger and more significant intellectual argument, about which geographers (or those who chose to remain descriptive geographers) had little to say. The argument contained in this book is presented in three parts. In section 1 the focus is on geography's loss of direction and status in France toward the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 details the depth of geography's commitment to description and discusses the degree to which there was a sense of identity in eighteenth-century geography. Those institutions which gave geography a home and a means of dissemination are described, including the Encyclopedie, the Academies of Science and Inscriptions, the Jesuit colleges, and the military colleges. This chapter also reconstructs the sense of identity, community, and tradition among geographers such as Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, Didier Robert de Vaugondy, Guillaume Delisle, Joseph Nicolas Delisle, Philippe Buache, Cesar Fran~ois Cassini, Nicolas Desmarest, and Antoine Augustin Bruzen La Martiniere. Finally, it explores the kind of work geographers published in the eighteenth century, their principal intellectual concerns, and the relationship of those to the major intellectual debates of the period, such as that over the size and shape of the earth. Chapter 2 explores the signs and evidence of a loss of direction and status in the two most important branches of eighteenth-century geography: descriptive cabinet geography and largescale field cartography. It looks at a moment in the careers of the cabinet geographers Jean Nicolas Buache de la Neuville and Edme Mentelle in which they were informed by colleagues in one of the highest institutions of higher education that their geography had nothing to offer modern science. It then reviews and analyzes the even more spectacular casting out oflargescale cartographer Jacques Dominique Comte de Cassini from the halls of academe. This story is all the more compelling as Cassini did not go quiedy. Section 2, entided "Reaction and Continuity," is devoted to the intellectual reaction to this loss of status. Here, I explore the traditionalist solutions: those which were seen to be sound responses because they emulated traditional approaches. Chapter 3 looks at the tradition of universal geographies, or descriptions of the surface of the earth. By the nineteenth century this genre was dealing with an explosion of knowledge about the earth which rendered its descriptive task impossible. Here I try to understand the rationale for the genre and to capture its essence by going back to Strabo's

INTRODUCTION

geography and bringing the reader back through universal geographies as they were written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The core of the chapter focuses on Malte-Brun's universal geography as this was said both at the time and by historians of geography to have reestablished the genre. Included in this discussion are the remarkable works of Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos (1849-60), and Le Pere Jean Fran