A retired royal musketeer between science, salon, and boudoir

Abstract

The present paper aims to examine the biological works of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a prominent French scientist and philosopher, on the problems of animal reproduction and heredity. His scientific career exemplifies how, in mideighteenth-century Europe, various scientific disciplines were intertwined with literature, art, and philosophy. In one of his major publications dealing with these issues, “Vénus physique” (1745), from one role to another time and again, combining theory, observation, everyday experience, and literary narrative. His objections to preformationism unfold in a stylized literary context that itself references the more personal context of salon conversation and flirtation. Maupertuis’s epigenetic conception of reproduction (with its origins in Antiquity) drew on a wide range of arguments from a variety of sources: anatomy and monster studies, observations of racial differences and family resemblance, analysis of the breeding experience of animal breeders, microscopic observations, and chemical insights. The French scientist presented the dynamics of processes in living nature in terms of naturalized desire and aversion, which function as guiding inclinations inherent in the smallest units of organic matter. In “Vénus physique”, Maupertuis, in presenting his biological views, played on the appeal in certain Parisian circles of socially acceptable epathetics associated with philosophical texts, eroticism, unorthodox religious beliefs, and illicit sexual liaisons.