Penser l'ordre naturel, 1680-1810 ed. by Adrien Paschoud and Nathalie Vuillemin (review)

This collective volume, originating in a conference held in Lausanne in 2007, deals with a subject of particular importance in the eighteenth century. As the book's description explains, thinking about the natural order means asking about humans' role and place in nature between chance and necessity; some of these points are developed in Adrien Paschoud's Conclusion, emphasizing the imbrication of science and literature in France, which is the underlying subject of the book. The contributors discuss various questions, philosophical and scientific on the one hand, literary and aesthetic on the other, and often the former in terms of the latter, mainly focusing on France but with a few exceptions. In her opening 'Présentation générale' Nathalie Vuillemin provides an overview of some of the developments in France during the period, also explaining that political and economic theories of the natural order, being part of a different field, have mainly been excluded from the study. A number of the chapters provide interesting insights or references, in particular Marc J. Ratcliff 's study of the naturalist Michel Adanson's attempts to reform French vocabulary, which throws a fascinating light on the link between various aspects of reflection on natural order. On occasion, however, the spotlight is directed towards an interesting but relatively limited question, whose link to the overall theme is tenuous, for example Aurélie Luther's chapter on geographical descriptions of Switzerland in the first half of the century. At other times, the authors studied could have been situated in a wider European perspective, as in Andreas Gipper's contribution on European physico-theology, which is almost exclusively concerned with Germany. Two of the chapters deal with Diderot's thought (Caroline Jacot Grapa; Vanessa de Senarclens on the 1767 Salon). Also studied is the interaction between literature and science in late eighteenth-century French poetry (Claire Jaquier), in Sade (Virginie Pasche), and the use made in late eighteenth-century French novels of theories of artificial procreation (Joël Castonguay-Bélanger), in particular those of the abbé Spallanzani, who is the subject of a chapter dealing with his defence of preformation (Geneviève Goubier). While there is much of interest here, the volume as a whole is somewhat uneven and does not always conform to SVEC's usually high standards of proof-reading and harmonization of bibliographical references. Several chapters ignore relevant literature on the subject under review, and Adrien Paschoud's essay on La Mettrie contains several errors, including an important one (p. 53) resulting from the misreading of a secondary work. It is, of course, impossible to provide an exhaustive picture of a notion that, as Paschoud points out in his Conclusion, is unstable, difficult to define, and challenging to present in such a variety of fields. But, despite the editors' attempts to situate these individual studies in a wider context (with the aid of sometimes questionable generalizations), the reader is left with a certain feeling of frustration at the limited geographical scope and the frequent failure to come to grips seriously with the underlying issues.