Rue Cuvier, rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, rue Lamarck: Politics and Science in the Streets of Paris

In the City of Light the hegemonic right to affix identities is everywhere encoded in the commemorative nomenclature exhibited by streets and squares, statuary and monuments. The Paris city council's belated decision to grant space to a rue Lamarck, opened in 1875 and located far across the great city from the area surrounding the Jardin des Plantes where fellow scientists are memorialized, may be read as political metaphor. Indeed, such reading resurrects the institutional and political history of French science from the founding of the Jardin du Roi in 1635 to the anti-Darwinism of the late-nineteenth century.