ABSTRACT
In December 1799, some sixty scholars—naturalists, geographers, philosophers and medical men—established the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme in Paris. This was yet another scientific group among various short-lived associations at the time, thereafter quickly forgotten and ignored by almost all later commentators. Standard historiography is understandably absorbed by the drama of contemporary politics and the study of more illustrious personalities. At the turn of the century, indeed, politics provided a great deal of excitement. On the international scene, the members of the Second Coalition—England, Austria, and Russia—pressed the French backwards on widely separated fronts. In France itself, Napoleon had given the Republic a final blow on the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII—barely a month prior to the launching of the society. Everywhere in Europe, moreover, the major intellectual figures of a coming new age were already formulating their creeds: Joseph de Maistre’s Considérations sur la France was published anonymously as early as 1797; by 1799 Novalis had completed his Christenheit oder Europa, Hölderlin his Hyperion, and Schlegel—his fragments on poetry. Immanuel Kant was by then publishing his last works and the young Hegel wrote his first political essay. Nevertheless, it may be instructive to take a look at that rather obscure group of ideologues at the very end of a glorious century, striving—as they then believed—to accomplish what their predecessors repeatedly failed to do, namely to establish a true “Science of Man.” 1
