Jean-Baptiste-Christian Fusée-Aublet (1723-1778) described more than 240 genera and 550 species and today he remains an authority in the field of tropical botany. He was first sent to the Ile de France (Mauritius) in order to establish a pharmacy with the title of “Botanist and first Apothecary-composer of the Compagnie des Indes” (1753-1761) (Fusée-Aublet, 1775, t. 1, p. 5). He was then appointed botanist by the King and stayed in French Guiana (1762-1764) within the framework of preparations for the Kourou expedition (1763). Unlike his predecessor Pierre Barrère, Aublet succeeded in assembling and identifying a substantial collection of plants. On his return to Paris in 1765, he published the voluminous Histoire des plantes de la Guiane françoise in four volumes (1775) with the help of Bernard de Jussieu. When he died in 1778, a large part of his herbarium collection ended up in the hands of Joseph Banks (1743-1820); another part ended up somewhat mysteriously in the collection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) (Lanjouw, Uittien, 1940; Lourteig, Joyet, 1997). Its scarce remaining parts were redistributed to a few European institutions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s herbarium at the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel contains some of Aublet’s specimens in the form of notebooks.
In order to better understand the importance of Aublet’s collections from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, we surveyed the various digitised collections available, either on site at the institution concerned, or on general databases (e.g. JSTOR Global Plants, eReColtNat).
The Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris holds numerous manuscripts by Jean-Baptiste Fusée-Aublet concerning his travel in French Guiana. The systematic study of these documents will allow us to highlight how Fusée-Aublet carried out his fieldwork: Where did he collect plants in French Guiana? Which local networks, both French and indigenous, did it mobilise? What methods did he use to identify the plants he gathered? How was the drafting of the Flore de Guiane carried out? What role did Bernard de Jussieu play in this work?
These questions are addressed by two post-doctoral researchers, Thibaud Martinetti (literature), and Guilhem Mansion (botany), and a PhD student, Perrine Besson. Interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial to this project’s goals. The reconstruction of Fusée-Aublet’s working methods within the framework of a social history of science can only be achieved by tackling the writings he left in his herbaria. Guilhem Mansion has gathered valuable data on the particularity of Fusée-Aublet’s botanical work by carrying out with great precision an inventory of his herbaria, an analysis of their contents and type specimens, and by carefully investigating the inscriptions and metadata of this material. Thibaud Martinetti examines as closely as possible the naturalist’s work in the field. In particular, he is developing a digital mapping project based on encoded travel manuscripts from Aublet’s expeditions inland in French Guiana, and on descriptions of the collecting sites reported in the Histoire des plantes de la Guyane françoise. The aim is to generate an interactive map of Aublet’s travels in chronological order, with the names of plants and localities as provided by the author. Digital cartography will allow to reconstruct the different stages of his botanical collections, to visualise the structure of his travels, and to recreate their temporality. It should thus constitute a valuable tool for representing and understanding botanical travel in the 18th century colonies.
Perrine Besson will study Fusée-Aublet as part of her PhD thesis on indigenous knowledge and its use in 18th century travel reports and geographical works. The Histoire des plantes of Fusée-Aublet contains, in fact, a vast and richly illustrated catalogue of local plants, several essays and observations, part of which describes the local therapeutic uses of the plants studied. The study of these indigenous practices by Europeans is currently attracting renewed interest from researchers. Perrine Besson will make a comparative study of texts by different naturalists, travellers, and philosophers in order to determine how the sources of knowledge are highlighted, or, on the contrary, hidden; what type of dialogue is established between European and indigenous perspectives; how a rhetoric of secrecy is set up in these texts; and finally, what image of the indigenous is produced by the knowledge conveyed. Some figures warrant our attention: from the simple guide to the village chief or the sorcerer, the traveller’s interlocutors are numerous, sometimes, becoming commonplaces expected from the story. What, then, is their precise function, both in documentary terms and in the narrative economy? The study will not be restricted to lists of “recipes” or observations on the medicinal uses of plants. Its aim is to suggest a more global approach of the exotic territory and the remnants of the indigenous knowledge it transmits.
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