On the Edge of Eternity by Ivano Dal Prete;

Author:Ivano Dal Prete;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Political Fossils, 1740–1800

What greater and more telling proofs [than the existence of fossil fish on mountains] could be brought to confirm the ancient tradition, that all the waters of the globe once overcame their levees, and flooded the earth in its entirety?

s. volta, Fossil Fish of Verona, 1796

In eighteenth-century France, the philosophes tied the history and the political future of humankind to an ancient or timeless Earth, and to the denial or de-Christianization of the Flood. It is hardly surprising that radicalized reactions should target the geological basis of the “new philosophy.” While France was a constant source of either inspiration or scandal across Europe, the characteristics and relative strengths of the opposing fields varied considerably according to local cultural traditions and political and social contingencies. This chapter focuses on Venice and its mainland in northeastern Italy, as an especially valuable case study of how late eighteenth-century conservative elites politicized Earth history in the service of their agendas.

Louder, more effective, and more influential than historians have long suspected, the voices of the French anti-philosophes were still muffled by the brilliant quills and by the immense celebrity of their antagonists. Italian conservatives, in contrast, were able to present themselves as the spokespersons for public opinion and to exert considerable influence on the discourse on science in general and on the history of the Earth in particular, at a local level. Firmly in control thanks to a combination of economic power, cultural prestige, and cautious reformism, the aristocratic circles that were the backbone of the conservative camp never allowed the emotional and apocalyptic appeals of more extreme elements to dominate their rhetoric. Their strategy rested on a politically conservative science, meant to counter the agenda of a nascent technocracy that in their eyes was the vehicle for radical ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy—in other words, social mass destruction. Slowly but surely, in the second half of the century they elaborated a diluvialist orthodoxy allegedly supported by “true philosophy” and “sane science,” which appeared very different than the Earth history many enlightened Catholics conceived only a few decades earlier. By physically and culturally appropriating the outstanding “marine petrifications” provided by their territory, they turned those fossils into politically charged statements that reaffirmed the existing social order. Finally, like their French counterparts, they burned the bridges with the past and built new ones leading to a tradition that never existed, one in which a young Creation and the diluvial origin of fossils had always been the undoubted beliefs of Christian Europe, only recently questioned by “philosophical fanaticism.” In the end, Vallisneri’s legacy was undermined not by “priests and friars” afraid of losing their credulous customers but by the scientifically minded heirs of the aristocrats who applauded and patronized him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.