Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (review)

Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt. By Anne Marie Claire Godlewska (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000) 444 pp., $65.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

This is less an interdisciplinary work than a work about the origins of the modern scientific disciplines themselves, told through the failure of an early modern intellectual field to take its place on the map of modern science. The "unbound" in the title refers not to geography's liberation, but to its disintegration at the end of the eighteenth century, when geography in France entered a period of incoherence and directionlessness, from which many would argue it has yet to recover. This book explores the nature of geography's crisis--both its loss of direction and its stubborn blindness to new opportunities--through studies of the lives and works of a dozen or so figures who more or less worked and lived within the institutions, genres, and traditions of French geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

What bound geography in France together for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a commitment to describing the earth and its contents, making a map of the world in text and picture. To us, this project might seem merely a technical challenge or a secondary school exercise (explaining why is part of Godlewska's point), but the first thirty pages of Part I ("Geography's Fall") successfully show it to be an understandable scientific aim by stressing the affiliation of geographical description with rhetoric and critical erudition. Even the complex trigonometrical descriptions of all France, for which Louis XIV built the Paris Observatoire and imported the Cassini clan in 1669, were devices for indexing and classifying knowledge spatially. The highest intellectual office in such an enterprise was the critical selection of elements and their placement in a system, which constituted the role of the geographer. The same commitment to true description in word and picture that Godlewska locates at the center of early modern French geography, and the relationship between language and the world that it embodied, structured some of the most striking expressions of the seventeenth-century "Scientific Revolution": Francis Bacon's tabular natural histories and encyclopedic schemes for histories of the arts and sciences, Robert Hooke's use of engravings in Micrographia (1665), Thomas Hariot's use of the telescope, and seventeenth-century Dutch painting and optics (which explicitly informed, and were informed by, Low-Country geography).¹ Adducing some of these connections might have blurred the focus on geography and its internal unity but would also have made the nature of science in the eighteenth century, and geography's role in it, more tangible, and placed less of the burden of its coherence on the rejection of speculation or explanation.

Toward the end of the century, the conviction that a sufficiently accurate language might supply a true picture of the earth lost its binding force. Godlewska builds a satisfyingly complex explanation of the failure, involving changing relationships between science, society, and the state during the Revolution; the very success of eighteenth-century French geographers in bringing the art of terrain mapping in the field and in the office to a high degree of accuracy, standardization, and organization; and an epistemic change--an increasingly sophisticated sense of the problematic relationship between description, theory, and reality. She finds the crisis full-blown in the lives and careers of the three men who arguably defined the field at the end of the century--Edme Mentelle and Nicolas Buache de Neuville, who failed to devise a respectable geography course for the short-lived École normale in 1795; and Jacques-Dominique Cassini IV, who even while rationalizing the mapping of France at the Observatoire found himself deprived of his patrimony, the map and its equipment nationalized, and the Observatoire occupied by the Bureau des longitudes and devoted to producing standards for the new metric system...