Nature and Culture in the History of the Earth: F.X. de Burtin’s Catastrophist View of Human Progress, the 1780s

This paper sets out to chart different views of history and progress in the study of the deep past in the late eighteenth century. It focusses on the Brussels naturalist François-Xavier de Burtin (1743-1818) and examines his scholarly network, his letters, a range of published works, and society archives. I argue that Burtin drew on his study of earth history to present a view of human history filled with contingency and catastrophe. In the 1780s, Burtin was among the first to reconstruct the planet’s past from traces in fossils, rocks, and strata—explicitly excluding evidence from historiography, antiquarianism, linguistics, theology, and philology, which up to then had been integral parts of the field. Yet Burtin still saw an intimate connection between the ‘moral’ and the ‘physical’ history of the earth, and explored parallels between natural history and human history. Historians of earth science have noted the use of such parallels before. They point to the influence of antiquarian methods and historical metaphors in the earth sciences, but neglect topics which do not fit the disciplinary trajectories of either natural or cultural history. Burtin's cross-disciplinary thoughts on progress and catastrophe in human and earth history are a case in point. His view of the past illuminates how earth science gave rise to radically new notions of a past shaped by contingency rather than Providence.