Gilles Auguste Bazin's "True Novel" of Natural History

During the eighteenth century, the study of insects became a worthy pastime, which many theologians endorsed as a spiritually uplifting activity, an opportunity to admire God's handiwork. In the tradition of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle or Algarotti, many writers encouraged women, in particular, to put down their copies of L'Astrée and to pick up a book about science. When properly presented, Fontenelle believed that science could be not only palatable, but also pleasurable to women. Passions normally stirred by fiction could be stimulated by scientific truths and directed towards useful ends.¹ Louis de La Caze, physician to Louis XV, argued in favour of the inclusion of women in science, but his reasons for such a concession to equality only reinforced the notion that a woman's capricious attention span would naturally reduce her involvement to mere flirtations with serious knowledge. Owing to their distinct physiological makeup, claimed La Caze, women naturally required continuous change and variety in their studies. In this light, the sciences became yet another possible diversion.² For many, the promotion of God's "Book of Nature" as a morally superior alternative to romance novels justified the (limited) inclusion of women in science as amateur naturalists.

Often derived from more substantial works, popular writings were too quickly discounted by scholars for their apparent superfluity. Traditionally, works such as Charles Devillers's Journées physiques (1761) or Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu's L'Élève de la nature (1763), if studied at all, were cited only as hollow representatives of salon jargon and flowery rhetoric, while their content and its relation to a literary style were ignored.³ Only in recent years have scholars— particularly those with an interest in gender and science—begun to reassess the importance of scientific literature written for women.⁴ While women have partici

pated in the sciences more than traditional historical accounts have granted, their role is best characterized as a problematic oscillation between inclusion and exclusion. In the eighteenth century, men of science excluded women from their academies, yet they actively sought the approbation of refined women through both lecture hall and salon.⁵ Nature herself, commonly personified in the feminine, was linked to women, who, in turn, could be viewed alternately as possessors of sacred powers or as hyphens between the world of men and that of animals.⁶ Similarly, literary science represents a borderline genre, often seen as lacking the legitimacy of its masculine academic counterpart, yet resembling more closely the object of study—nature as book or spectacle. One might ask, then, not only how feminized scientific literature both includes and excludes women, but also what it includes and excludes of nature herself. This article focuses on the writings of Gilles Auguste Bazin (d. 1754), a best-selling author of entomology literature for women in eighteenth-century France. Through two female characters, Clarice and Hortense, Bazin models a feminized natural history. A popularizer of René Réaumur's (1683–1757) Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes (1734–42), Bazin transformed his academic source into something more suitable for the salon. This study will argue that Bazin's creation of what he calls a "true novel" of the history of insects represents not merely a case of flowery rhetoric obscuring serious science, but a hybrid genre that more closely resembles the fluidity of the great Book of Nature than do taxonomic lists.

Bazin's first popular work, Histoire naturelle des abeilles (1744), focuses on the admirable economy of domestic bees.⁷ Before entering into the dialogue form, Bazin briefly introduces the reader to the two characters: Clarice, an educated mother of a country household, and Eugène, a personification of the author himself. The story begins with Clarice's attempt to return the fifth volume of Réaumur's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes to Eugène. She announces that although he had almost persuaded her to read it, further reflection produced two strong deterrents: first, that not having been exposed to the sciences, she is inclined to fear anything that...