truggle for existence, survival of the fittest ... It has long been believed that the use for political and social purposes of the theories of Charles Darwin was a specialty of the Anglo-Saxon countries only. Contrary to this generally accepted idea, the author maintains that a real Darwinian culture developed in France in the last century, far beyond the inner circle of scientists, and often against their will. For the attention to mediators of a scientific culture, this book shows how in his philosophical debates, religious and political, the France of the long nineteenth ecentury first expressed its fascination and then its reluctance for the new evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin. The in-depth study of the phenomena of circulation, rooting or rejection of a scientific ideology ultimately sheds a singular light on the resistance of French scientists to Darwinian theories, resistance which made them fall far behind in the field of evolutionary biology. |