Ruse, Michael. “Darwinism fleurit!.” (1997): 111-117.
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The history of evolutionism in France is distinctly odd. Although it may well have been the English, notably Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who first spelled out in a modern-sounding sense the idea of evolution—the gradual development of living forms from primitive beginnings by a long and natural law–bound process—it was surely the French who took up the idea and made of it a system to be articulated, extended, discussed, and opposed. Most important, of course, was the botanist and (later) invertebrate zoologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, whose Philosophie zoologique (1809) was the path-breaking and definitive evolutionary work. Following Lamarck, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire developed his French version of transcendental morphology. And, as Goulven Laurent has shown in his magnificent Paleontologic a evolution en France, 1800-1860: De Cuvier-Lamarck a Darwin (Paris, 1987), evolution gained many other proponents in the 1840s and the 1850s.