Science en exil

• Main Author: Piotr Daszkiewicz
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme 2012-10-01
• Series: Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie
• Subjects: beginning of anthropology; Poland; political émigrés; prehistory research; the rise of Darwinism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nda/1832

Beginning in 1831, in the period known as the «Great Emigration» after the crushing of the November Uprising, political exiles were of primordial importance for the development of Polish science. With the country partitioned between three foreign powers (Russia, Austria and Prussia), Poland was plunged in an occupation that lasted 123 years (1795-1918). As a result, a great many forbidden or restricted activities developed abroad, mainly in France. Naturalists and physicians exiled in Paris played an important role in developing physical and cultural anthropology. Polish political émigrés were behind the first translations of Darwin and Quatrefages, and disseminated information concerning the work of Boucher de Perthes, the beginnings of craniological research and the anthropological and ethnographic exhibitions at the Paris World Fair of 1878. Often linked to the Société d'anthropologie de Paris created in 1859, the year of Darwin's Origin of Species, they provided an enthusiastic welcome for Darwinism and heralded, not only in France but also in Poland, the emergence of a new science: prehistory.