De l'origine des espèces, ou des lois du progrès chez les êtres organisés
Paris, Guillaumin & Cie, Victor Masson & fils, 1862.
12° ; contemporary half cloth. Some foxing. Inscription trimmed to the right, with loss of 3 letters at the end of “Royer”. Item #3802
Precious copy of the French first edtion inscribed by the translator, Clémence Royer, “one of the cleverest & oddest women in Europe” according to Darwin.
The dedicatee, “Monsieur Block”, is most probably the German-French statistician and economist Maurice Block (1816-1901) who, like Royer, published in the Revue des Deux-Mondes and the Journal des économistes.
“Getting Origin translated into French was harder than Darwin had expected. The first translator he approached, Madame Belloc, turned him down on the grounds that the content was ‘too scientific’, and then in 1860 the French political exilé Pierre Talandier rescinded his offer to translate it on the grounds that no publisher was willing to work with such a politically controversial figure. [...] First published in 1862, Royer’s translation of Origin was remarkable. Prefaced with a long anti-clerical rant, Royer added numerous footnotes to the body of Origin which over-ruled Darwin’s apologetic tone. She also took the opportunity to explore the issue of eugenics, to alert readers to the perils of nineteenth-century marriage and to ‘correct’ Darwin’s theory of an ongoing, universal war in nature. Royer even went so far as to edit Origin’s title, inserting the non-Darwinian, distinctly Lamarckian phrase ‘laws of progress’ into her revised subtitle.” (See the Darwin project online)
The “enormously long & blasphemous preface” certainly disconcerted Darwin but his opinion on Royer’s translation was ambivalent : “Madelle. Royer, who must be one of the cleverest and oddest women in Europe : is an ardent deist and hates Christianity, and declares that natural selection and the struggle for life will explain all morality, the nature of man, politicks, etc. etc.!! She makes very curious and good hits, and says she shall publish a book on these subjects, and a strange production it will be.” (letter to the American botanist Asa Gray). Royer published two amended editions of her translation with Darwin’s approval. However, after her first three editions, the book was re-published in 1873 in a new translation undertaken at Darwin's request by Jean-Jacques Moulinié.
“First French social Darwinist” and first woman member of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, Clémence Royer (1830-1902) is best remembered for giving the first French translation of the Origin of Species in 1862 and “introducing the Darwinian theory of evolution to the French intellectual community, a theory that challenges the mainstream French preference for the theory of Georges Cuvier claiming a fixity of species. […] While the translation of Darwin guarantees Royer a place in history, it also minimizes the impact she had on the contemporary, intellectual community. In addition to making accessible the theory of the survival of the fittest, Royer proposes an extension of Darwin’s theory to encompass the evolution of societies […] later know as social Darwinism.” (Elizabeth French Rose, Positively Engaging : Women Intellectuals and Comtean Positivism Circa 1850, 2021).
Presentation copies of the first French translation of Origins are very scarce. We did not manage to locate any other.
Price: €6,800.00