Marta Sukiennicka

In the poem Les Fossiles (1854), Louis Bouilhet tells the story of the evolution of life. Inspired by various naturalists, he imagines the emergence of life on Earth, the birth of species, and their extinction followed by the emergence of new forms of life. The destiny of humankind is subordinate to this law of nature: humans will be supplanted by more perfect beings. The purpose of this article is to consider the influence of Charles Bonnet's palingenetic philosophy on Bouilhet from the perspective of epistemocritical methodology, allowing the identification of epistemological transfers between the work of the naturalist and that of the poet.

In Stoic philosophy, the term ‘palingenesis’ represents the cyclical rebirth of the world after the universal confl agration. Over the centuries, it has also received alchemical and naturalistic interpretations. The 18th-century Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, in his Palingénésie philosophique (1769) reinterprets ‘palingenesis’, employing Leibnizian metaphysics as well as the results of his own research on living organisms. In his view, ‘palingenesis’ can be used to present the development of species on the ladder of beings, thus becoming a synonym for the concept of specifi cally understood evolution. 

Long before the first translations of Charles Darwin’s works, evolutionary thought had been developing in France thanks to such authors as Georges‐Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Charles Bonnet and Jean‐Baptiste de Lamarck. Although Georges Cuvier’s fixism and creationism remained the dominant scientific paradigm throughout the 19th century, writers drew their inspiration from evolutionary thought, subjecting it to lyrical and often parareligious interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Charles Nodier in his essay “De la palingénésie humaine et de la résurrection” and Camille Flammarion in his short stories “Clairs de lune” reinterpret different theories of evolution.