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Science and the sublime in the discovery of the Alps. This study is based on a historical anthropology of culture. Using this approach, it is able to relate to both the history of geography and the pro- blems concerning the construction of scientific knowledge and the imaginary. Its focus is the "sublime", a concept frequently used in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The proposed thesis shows how this notion unified the approaches of scholars, painters and writers. Two works are discussed and compared : Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes and the alpine landscape paintings of Caspar Wolf. Questions are raised with regard to the association between aesthetic consciousness and the search for scientific objectifica- tion. The analysis examines the common concern of writer and painter with presenting themselves as the "object", with observing themselves observing and thus with placing the observer's gaze as well as the representations of the real world at the heart of their work. Both examples are characteristic of a time when the Alps were being explored. These mountains became known and knowledge of them was diffused in a fairly extensive social environment. Through these works, travellers and, more recently, tourists obtained a new perception and understanding of high mountain ranges, an understanding which has spread throughout Europe thanks to the contribution of travel narratives and guides.

The invention of the massif Central. The idea that there is stuctured group of highlands in the southern central part of France is of recent origin. It was developed in the nineteenth century by geologists who referred to this area as the "Plateau central", which later became more popularly known at the end of the century as the Massif Central. Before this time, only a few of the more prominent areas of relief, such as the Cevennes and the Auvergne, although never clearly delimited, were identified and given names. The emergence of the term "Massif Central" and the acceptance of the area as a structured group of high- lands bears witness to the decline of the river basin theory proposed by Buache, and is a clear sign of the credibility that geologists enjoyed at the end of the nineteenth century. The extraordinary popularisation of the idea of the Massif Central also illustrates how collective images of space can be permeated and modified by certain scientific conceptions which not only allow but also legitimise new images of an area and its consi- tuent parts.