France’s National Museum of Natural History: Revolutionary Reorganization and Research

The 1793 reorganization of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle built on Paris’s existing botanical garden and natural-history cabinet. Plants, specimens, buildings, and researchers did not vanish with the monarchy. What required new arrangements were administrative authority, staff remuneration, and public teaching. Scholars at the garden had already proposed reforms in 1790, and the decree three years later incorporated many of their ideas.

In spring 1793, plans to transfer the natural-history collections at Chantilly to Paris exposed a shortage of rooms, making gallery repairs and transport practical concerns. Joseph Lakanal, a deputy in the National Convention, helped resolve these difficulties. On June 10, the Convention passed the reorganization decree, establishing the institution under the name of the Museum of Natural History, with public education in natural history as its principal purpose and particular attention to the development of agriculture, commerce, and the crafts.

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The decree abolished the old office of intendant and gave the relevant scholarly staff the common title of professor, with equal rights. Professors elected the director from among their colleagues. His chief responsibility was to implement regulations and decisions of the professors’ assembly, rather than inherit all the former intendant’s powers. The term lasted one year, and renewal required another vote. Vacant professorships were also filled by a vote of the museum’s professors.

Administrative transfer still had to follow passage of the law. On July 3, Interior Minister Garat formally notified the garden to undertake the procedures for the new organization. A meeting on July 9 elected Daubenton director, André Thouin treasurer, and Desfontaines temporary secretary. In his reply of July 19, Desfontaines also reported that the professors were thereafter meeting regularly twice a week to discuss museum affairs and draw up internal regulations.

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Reorganization linked scholarly status with financial arrangements. The former intendant’s salary was divided equally among the professors, while the annual appropriation was paid as a single sum to the elected treasurer for allocation. The treasurer was a member of the professors’ assembly bearing financial responsibility, not an independent official added from outside. State funding, professorial self-government, and administrative oversight thus coexisted.

Space was also reassigned to new uses. One floor of the former intendant’s residence became a natural-history library. Alongside existing books, it could receive natural-history duplicates from the national library. Two museum professors and two members of the Committee of Public Instruction were authorized to select relevant works from state-owned collections, including those of suppressed religious institutions, adding literature on anatomy, minerals, chemistry, plants, animals, and travel.

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The decree provided for twelve courses covering mineralogy, general chemistry and chemical technology, botany within the museum and in the field, agriculture and horticulture, zoology, anatomy, geology, and natural-history illustration. This curriculum brought observation, classification, cultivation, and visual recording into one institution and made collections objects of teaching rather than displays for viewing alone.

Professors were to set the details of courses with seasonal conditions in mind. The decree also required two public meetings each year to report on research. Responsibility for herbarium management, descriptions of French plants, and the organization of synonyms was explicitly assigned to the appropriate staff. Teaching was thus connected with organizing collections, harmonizing names, and accumulating material from local investigations.

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The new arrangements placed the museum within interregional natural-history networks. It was to correspond with similar institutions in French departments, exchanging information about newly discovered or cultivated plants, cultivation results, and minerals and animals. Attention extended beyond recording species to the uses of that knowledge in agriculture, commerce, and the crafts.

The professor responsible for cultivation was also to send seeds of rare plants and trees harvested at the museum to departmental botanical gardens and could exchange them with foreign institutions. The cooperation envisaged by the decree therefore had concrete carriers: seeds, specimens, books, images, and correspondence jointly supported observation and comparison. Cultivation results from local gardens could in turn inform teaching and collection work in Paris.

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The bird collection shows how this organization operated. Louis Dufresne became a museum taxidermist in 1793 and participated in classification and arrangement. He left acquisition inventories from after 1793, and Desmoulin also contributed to this recording work after 1798; labels on specimen pedestals preserve further traces of organization. Dufresne’s inventory of 1809 listed 3,411 bird specimens, including 1,234 duplicates, distinguishing sources such as the old collection, expeditions, and correspondents.

War also affected the growth of the collections. The French government commissioned Thouin and Faujas de Saint-Fond to confiscate the collections of the Dutch stadtholder William V; the bird specimens arrived in 1795. Jansen’s research examines such forced transfers separately from gifts and exchanges. He also notes frequent losses of early original labels and collecting records, cautioning against treating every date in a later accession register as a collecting date.

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