A PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE? TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF GEORGES CUVIER'S WARTIME CORRESPONDENCE

Georges Cuvier remains one of the best-known scientists of the early nineteenth century, noted for significant contributions to both paleontology and comparative anatomy as well as popularizing the idea of extinction. His thoughts on these topics are neatly summarized in his best known work, Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom (published in 1825), which describes geologic history as the result of a series of catastrophic revolutions. Cuvier also witnessed firsthand one of the most complex social revolutions of his time, the French Revolution, as he spent most of his later life working for various forms of the French government. His reflections on the politics of the day are recorded in a series of letters he wrote to old school fellows while tutoring in France during the early stages of the revolution (1788-1792).

The purpose of this research was to discover the extent to which Cuvier’s observations of the political turmoil in 1788-1792 foreshadow his later publicized opinions on what he called “life’s revolutions.” To ascertain this, we used content analysis to turn two separate texts, Letters to Pfaff (the aforementioned collection of letters) and The Discourse, into quantitative data. Social scientists use content analysis to identify underlying trends in texts, through manifest coding (word counts and co-occurrences) and latent coding (using a set continuum to evaluate the author’s tone surrounding particular words). We used each of these methods to discover trends in the texts relating to Cuvier’s opinions on revolutions in politics and in nature. The results demonstrate a correlation between the two subjects, indicating that his early experiences watching the French Revolution may well have influenced his catastrophic view of natural history.