Contenu du sommaire : Voyages, voyageurs et mutations des savoirs entre Révolution et Empire

Nicolas Baudin fell into disfavor six years later, his expedition to Antarctica considered a failure, despite the wealth of the collections brought back to France. The campaign of personal denigration led against him by those who had accompanied him to the opposite side of the world only partly explains this reversal of fortune. An analysis of his voyage to the West Indies and the circumstances of his success permits a better understanding of the fluctuations of his reputation, caused by the far-reaching transformations in France between the Directory and the Empire on the political and institutional levels, transformations that influenced the practice of scientific voyage.

The profession of mining engineer was shaped at the turn of the eighteenth-century to the nineteenth-centuries, when the effort to reconcile the knowledge of mineral resources and the control of their exploitation was imposed on public action. To deal with mines consisted at the time of being informed and having the means of control necessary to organize a better use of the resources in the soil. As the administration developed, the metallurgical voyages whose model was constructed towards 1750 began to decline, as did the race for minerals as well. With its formal establishment in 1802, the relationship with the terrain changed ; the practices of advice were complicated by missions of surveillance and expertise closely tied to economic issues of mining. Against this normalization of field practices, and favored by the political context of the wars of the years 1790 and 1800, certain territories conquered by France became the privileged sites of voyages of investigation led by some exceptional engineers. As Heron de Villefosse demonstrated, the voyages of investigation in foreign territories contributed to integrating transnational knowledge to the science of mines by the French administration.

Dauxion-Lavaysse was an enigmatic and paradoxical personage whose problematic identity is reflected even in the rare biographical entries written about him. His reputation rests on the publication in Paris in 1813 of the Voyage aux îles de Trinidad et Tobago. In this work that remained faithful to the canons of the Encyclopedia, the author uses multiple facets of the enlightened and impassioned observer, in turn naturalist collector, cartographer, geologist, a planter involved in social and political upheavals, a chronicler and an historian. He represents the transition from the genre of travel literature to the journalism of large-scale reportage. Dauxion-Lavaysse used this reputation to obtain advantages in his career. He was a military officier in the general staff at a time when this military institution was less than steady, as well as a diplomat in the service of a power that used his talents for the reestablishment of the colonial order in Santo Domingo, whereas he, himself, displayed abolitionist sentiments close to those of the Abbe Gregoire – contradictions that would only led to failure, then force him into secrecy, and later into exile. Although traces of him grew obscure in Europe, he resurfaced on the American continents, first in the United States, then in the Rio de la Plata, and finally in Chile, always using multiple identities : military officer, naturalist, journalist.

Traduction assurée par l'auteur This article explores the politics of travel literature in France during an era that stretches from the end of the Ancien Régime, through the turbulence of the Revolutionary decade, and into the first years of Napoleonic Empire. It tracks the rambles and writings of a single voyager, a renowned travelling philosopher named Constantin-François Volney, from Egypt in the 1780s to the United States in the 1790s, and back to France during the Empire. In doing so, it offers reflections on continuities and transformations in travel writing as it passed from an « old world » to « a new one », in France as much as across the globe.

From its translation in 1793, the Travels in France of Arthur Young enjoyed a veritable public success, largely because of the Republican Institutions and the community of agronomists. But this reception was ambiguous. Beginning with the Consulate, the work of Young was used by French agronomists to compel the State to undertake a major agricultural program to which they had aspired for more than a decade. The Empire met these expectations, and in the rationale of the reorganization of knowledge it instituted, was an attempt at redefining the conventions of an agricultural voyage. This institutionalization, its scientific specialization, as well as its use for political ends, became its new and unfinished characteristics.

Heirs of a tradition of scholars and technicians who had been sent on mission under the Old Regime, the engineers of the French Ponts et chaussées undertook an inspection tour in Italy under the Empire, and were faced with a context of political and military domination. They participated in an enterprise of the reshaping of space, where roads, canals, ports, and cleaned up swamps became part of a strategy of influence in the Mediterranean and of a resistance to the Continental Blockade. Yet the missions of Prony and his colleagues, Sganzin, Bruyère and Rolland, appear to have introduced not so much a colonizing and imperial dynamic as a will to work with the French in local posts, together with their Italian colleagues, in a vast effort at territorial development – an endeavor based on precise knowledge, and negotiated thanks to a dialogue between experts, an enterprise carefully recorded in an abundant production of reports, correspondance, and travel notes.

Traduction assurée par l'auteur During his voyage of discovery to the South Pacific (1817-1820), Louis de Freycinet drew up new rules for the selection of scientists and the organization of their observations in order to encourage collaboration on board the Uranie. As he issued methodical lists of scientific investigations his officers might conduct irrespective of their scientific specialisms, he felt it necessary to remark to the members of his état major that they should not expect to follow in the footsteps of Humboldt. While they could not hope to aspire to the fame and glory of the Prussian explorer of South America, they could, nevertheless, still pursue an ambitious overarching scientific program by collaborating on his fixed agenda. Freycinet's paperwork scheme facilitated the integration of multiple viewpoints in his official historical account of the voyage. It also changed the way in which his officers approached the day-to-day scientific operations of the expedition and on the sort of discoveries Freycinet's men were able to make.

Traduction assurée par l'auteure During the French Revolution there was a marked increase in the interest that French expeditions in the Pacific showed in the internal dynamics and social roles of indigenous families. The observations recorded by the expeditions of Antoine Raymond Joseph Bruni d'Entrecasteaux (1791-1794) and Nicolas Baudin (1800-1804) were influenced in part by the development of the « science of man » during this era but also, it is argued, by Revolutionary politics, reforms and anxieties about the family in France. This is supported by comparison between Pacific-expedition – particularly d'Entrecasteaux-expedition – and Revolutionary records. It is also argued that from this point family observations began to play a central and vital role in French anthropology at sea, as they brought together the individual and society while also, by giving deeper insight into human, social and political development, facilitating more complex evaluations of « civilisation ».