The first decades of 19th century in France saw the triumph of the natural sciences. This period, dominated by such charismatic figures as George Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, saw in particular the birth of two scientific disciplines, geology and paleontology. Both disciplines were going to bring about “a great and sudden revolution” that opened the vertiginous dimension of “deep time”, affecting profoundly the world vision and the imagination of their contemporaries. Imagination was not absent from science itself, from the operation of reconstructing extinct beings and fauna, to the construction of discourse with the necessary use of rhetoric figures, verbal creation, narrative and fiction for the creation and presentation of knowledge. But science also had a deep influence on artistic and literary imagination and creation. In this paper, I will attempt to analyse some aspects of the impact of the knowledge and practices brought about by these scientific disciplines upon French literature during the 19th century..

Throughout the 19th century, poets tried to represent and reflect in their works geological and paleontological knowledge. Poems such as Delille’s Three Kingdoms of Nature (1808) presented on a didactic mode the major themes of the natural sciences, and Louis Bouilhet published in 1854 a poem entitled Les Fossiles (written between 1852 and 1854), in which he told, in a form in turn lyrical and epic, the story of the successive appearance of vegetation, fauna and man, inspired by the themes of the geology and paleontology of his time.

However, As I will argue, the strongest literary impact of these disciplines should rather be sought in novels, the grand literary genre in 19th century French literature : in their plots are exemplified the adventure of scientific research, the oniric themes of the voyage through deep time, the fascinating discoveries and wonders of mineralogy, geology and paleontology, the passionate debates between scientists, and stressed the success and failures of these scientific disciplines. Examples will be drawn from George Sand’s Voyage dans le cristal (1854), Jules Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre (1863), and the 3rd chapter of Flaubert’s last novel published posthumously in 1880, Bouvard et Pécuchet.