Making an Authorial Voice: Buffon and the Anti-Anonymity of Natural History

In May 1763, the death of Durand, the bookseller who owned the commercial rights to the Histoire naturelle of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, left for sale the already printed volumes of the book as well as the manuscripts yet to be published. During the course of the following year Buffon, not wanting to work with someone he did not know and had not personally chosen, furnished enough money to buy the publication rights to the Histoire naturelle (including all of the printed copies that had not yet sold).¹ Given what is known about copyright and printing laws in France at the time, this situation was not typical—while the author of a book composed its intellectual content, once the manuscript was transferred to the editor and publisher, neither the ideas, nor the words, nor the published copies of the book were considered to belong any more to the original writer. Many eighteenth-century authors, unlike Buffon and a few others who were rich enough to be able to control their entire enterprise, did not have a say or much of a share in the financial future of their works, and the ideas therein, once handed over to the publisher, henceforth belonged to the general public.² By purchasing the copyright to what he had written, Buffon starts to look more familiar, as his relationship to his own work becomes comparable to the notion of droit d'auteur in the modern French publishing world, where—unlike in the United States—the author is understood as an independent and autonomous entity, who legally owns his or her ideas and has a say in the publication and marketing of his or her work.

However, as some scholars, particularly Geoffrey Turnovsky, have recently argued, there is a need to rethink our approach to the history of authorship. That is, it does not make sense, nor is it particularly enlightening, to search the past for the roots and the bases of the modern author, living "by the pen" independently or in spite of the constraints of the time, breaking away from and criticizing the social norms. Some historians of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume, according to Turnovsky, that "the history of writing must be the history of the liberation of the intellectual from nobility and monarchy [patronage] that yields an investigation prioritizing the growth in payments from publishers as the privileged markers of this liberation" (Turnovsky 28). This financial freedom also coincides with the realization and definition of self, showing the "tendency for the history of intellectual autonomization that is the history of authorship to double, in turn, as a history of individualization" (29). Looking at the case of Buffon, one might say that it is definitely one of "individualization," that he embodies the larger struggle of the author to go against tradition and to create an identity with the help of his monetary skills. Yet while the fact that Buffon had money and rank in society cannot be forgotten, this is not, I believe, the most interesting or enlightening reason behind what indeed seems to be the formation of a particular identity in his texts, of an authorial voice.

Since this article comes out of a conference based upon the notion of anonymity in the intellectual world of the early modern period, the example of Buffon certainly seems out of place. He was a member of scientific and literary societies in France—notably the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Académie française—England, Scotland, Germany, and America and, as we have seen, was wealthy and famous, two factors that greatly contributed to the widespread publication and distribution of his works, and to his practical immunity to royal censorship at the end of his career (not to mention that members of the Parisian Académie des Sciences benefited from special publishing rights that allowed their works to be printed with royal approval). Over the thirty years between the publication of the first volume of the Histoire naturelle, in 1749, and the...