Natural history, national interest and war booty on the eve of the French Revolution

Although the seizure of natural-history objects as war booty had precedent in the ancient world, medieval and early modern European armies and navies had largely eschewed the seizure of natural-history objects as prize. As late as the 1750s, natural-history collections were considered a savant's private property, and European governments evidenced little interest in retaining seized birds and insects as booty. Indeed, when the French entomologist René de Réaumur appealed to the British government to return a collection of birds and insects from Saint Domingue, as well as a young East Indian elephant that had been seized during the opening salvos of the Seven Years War, his request was granted, and his claim that these items were his personal property went uncontested.Footnote ⁹ However, four decades later, Enlightened European nation states' embrace of the actual and symbolic utility of natural-historical knowledge made returning captured natural-history collections more fraught.

The practice of natural history in early modern Europe changed markedly between the Renaissance and the eve of the French Revolution. What had begun in the Renaissance with renewed engagement with classical natural-history texts and with a humanist interest in the allegorical functions of nature had become, by the eighteenth century, an observational enterprise enriched by knowledge of previously unknown New World species.Footnote ¹⁰ During the eighteenth century, natural-history practitioners increasingly emphasized the utility of natural knowledge for medicine, agronomy and industry. After 1750, prominent European naturalists, including Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Carl Linnaeus, William Aiton, Joseph Banks and André Thouin, contended that knowledge and management of the natural economy could enhance the prosperity of nation states and the welfare of their inhabitants.Footnote ¹¹ By the onset of the French Revolution, nature and natural history were seen not merely as a tool of good government in many parts of Europe, but also as a basis for constituting social, political and imperial organization.Footnote ¹²

In the decades after 1760, Europe's Enlightened monarchs and their reform-minded ministers proved receptive to ideas concerning the utility of natural knowledge and increasingly leveraged scientific expertise – and natural-history knowledge in particular – to provide scientific principles for the organization of state, society and empire.Footnote ¹³ Accordingly, the French and British governments financed projects to acclimatize non-indigenous plants, improve crop yields, enhance mining techniques and promote animal breeding. They also sponsored voyages of commercial, geographic and scientific exploration to the Levant, the Americas, the Pacific and Africa. European governments, interested in collecting, cataloguing and acclimatizing specimens, coveted natural-history objects for their economic value, for their symbolic political capital as metonyms for control of colonial space, and for the national glory provided by the use of specimens in research and publication.Footnote ¹⁴ To accommodate these objects, governments established or expanded national museums, gardens and menageries. These settings provided a permanent home for the collections and elevated them to national and educational purposes.Footnote ¹⁵

The transformation of natural history from a predominantly private enterprise to an ambiguous amalgam of private and public endeavours proceeded rapidly in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, the marked growth in government patronage of expensive, labour-intensive, long-distance natural-history projects during the Enlightenment has prompted at least one scholar to suggest that natural history amounted to eighteenth-century ‘big science’.Footnote ¹⁶ In both France and Britain, late eighteenth-century government patronage of natural-historical pursuits was accomplished through the European scientific community's existing social structures – the institutions and members of the scientific Republic of Letters. The expansion of formal and informal government patronage of science obscured distinctions between public and private, collective and personal, national and cosmopolitan, political and scientific on which the scientific Republic of Letters, despite its structural basis in national and regional academies, had long depended.Footnote ¹⁷ Ambiguities in the 1780s about the quasi-private, quasi-public aspects of voyages of exploration lingered into the war years. As the stories of Labillardière's and the Stadholder's collections demonstrate, uncertainties about the public versus private character of the seized collections were skilfully used by interested parties to their advantage.

In this context in which natural history was seen as increasingly integral to visions of nation and empire, it is unsurprising that natural-history specimens became coveted booty once the French Revolution became an international war. In this era, which pre-dated international conventions governing the seizure of artistic and scientific objects as war booty, savants, expedition leaders, conquering armies and government officials drew selectively and opportunistically on the perspectives on war booty expressed by medieval and early modern legal thinkers. These perspectives ranged from the victor's absolute right to seize and maintain enemy property, to respect for private property when it lacked military value or did not belong to an enemy government, to the notion that cultural property ought not to be seized.Footnote ¹⁸ Both the French savants' approach to the seizure of the Stadholder's collection and Banks's response to the seizure of Labillardière's collection demonstrate efforts to articulate a position on the propriety of scientific collections as war booty. The positions espoused by Banks and Labillardière were consistent with their respective conceptions of national interest and transnational science.

The seizure of the Stadholder's collection

The French seizure in 1795 of the natural-history collections of the Dutch Stadholder William V of Orange-Nassau, as well as the Dutch efforts to reclaim them after Napoleon's defeat, illustrate how French savants of the Revolutionary era appropriated the rhetoric of eighteenth-century scientific cosmopolitanism to articulate a universalist and nationalist vision of French science. Manipulating the rhetoric of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism, French savants justified seizing and transferring scientific collections to Paris by arguing for their role in establishing Paris as a centre for pan-European scientific learning and in regenerating the French nation through public instruction. French rhetoric of science in the Revolutionary era as a peaceful activity serving all Enlightened men implicitly suggested that French science and European science were synonymous.

The cooperative partnership among French savants, army officials and Convention and Directoire leaders to expropriate the Stadholder's collection marked a departure in the history of the treatment of natural-history collections within the pan-European context. Although eighteenth-century Europeans had demonstrated little compunction about taking natural-history specimens from Pacific islanders (whom they presumed possessed no concept of property rights), the seizure and shipment to Paris of nearly thirty thousand natural-history specimens and a menagerie including two live elephants from the Stadholder's collection marked the first substantial seizure of natural-history objects from European neighbours.Footnote ¹⁹ In July and August of 1794 the Committee of Public Safety and the Temporary Commission of Arts had assigned the botanist André Thouin, the geologist Barthélemy Faujas de St-Fond, the antiquarian Michel Le Blond and the architect Charles deWailly to follow the Armies of the North and of Sambre and Meuse to the Low Countries, instructing them to ‘collect all the monuments, riches, and Knowledge that relate to arts, sciences, for the benefit of the Republic’.Footnote ²⁰ In September 1794, the commissioners departed for the Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium), where they found literary and artistic treasures but little of scientific value.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, it was not until General Pichegru's army toppled the regime of the United Province's hereditary prince, the Stadholder William V, in January 1795 that the French commissioners uncovered a valuable scientific collection. To the delight of the commissioners, the Stadholder, who had fled to England on 18 January 1795, had abandoned most of his renowned collection.Footnote ²²

The French commissioners coveted the Stadholder's collection due to the rarity of its specimens, its fine preservation and its potential to complement the Muséum's existing collections. Thouin and Faujas's letters from The Hague chronicle the extraordinary character of the Stadholder's collection, a collection renowned among eighteenth-century European naturalists.Footnote ²³ Enumerating the intellectual reasons for seizing the collection, Thouin wrote enthusiastically to the Committee of Public Instruction,

Not limiting himself to the stuffed and dried specimens, Thouin added that the Stadholder possessed at his country house at Oude Loo a menagerie that included two large elephants and a cassowary, all of which could augment the Muséum d'histoire naturelle's menagerie.Footnote ²⁵

Although Thouin and his colleagues could readily generate intellectual reasons for seizing and shipping the Stadholder's collection to Paris, the commissioners, on arrival at The Hague in late January 1795, had to bide their time.Footnote ²⁶ Before the commissioners could commence their work, officials had to determine the nature of the political settlement, and, in turn, how the French government could lay legal claim to the Stadholder's valuable collection. The United Provinces posed particular challenges in both of these regards. For unlike previously conquered areas in the Austrian Netherlands and in the German lands, the French viewed the United Provinces' inhabitants as their revolutionary compatriots.Footnote ²⁷ Seeking to capitalize on the Dutch public's contempt for the unpopular Stadholder, to use the United Provinces' wealth to France's advantage, and to recognize the Dutch populace's assistance in fomenting revolution in advance of the arrival of the French army, the Directoire eschewed conquest and annexation, instead establishing the Batavian Republic, a so-called ‘sister republic’, on 20 January 1795.Footnote ²⁸

The establishment of the Batavian Republic as a ‘sister republic’ meant that the laws of conquest, which had been used to justify seizure of artistic and scientific objects in the conquered and annexed Austrian Netherlands and in German lands west of the Rhine, were inapplicable in the Dutch case since the Batavian Republic was not technically conquered.Footnote ²⁹ In the period from January to March 1795, French officials and the commissioners grappled with the question what the United Provinces' sister-republic status meant for France's ability to seize valuable natural-history collections. At issue was how the seizure of collections in the United Provinces could be reconciled with the rhetoric that France was a friend and ally; with the ideals of scientific cosmopolitanism; and with France's image as a progressive, Enlightened nation.Footnote ³⁰

In March 1795, French officials issued a statement exempting all private property in the United Provinces from seizure, except that of the former Stadholder.Footnote ³¹ Distinguishing between collections of the Dutch populace and those of its former ruler, French officials justified their claim on the Stadholder's collection by portraying it as the personal and private property of a hostile and deposed head of state. As Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier, the French army representative responsible for the administrative organization of Holland, stated before the Dutch Estates General,

French officials' decision to cast the Stadholder's collection as a defeated ruler's private property was crucial since it enabled them to seize that particular collection while articulating a broader respect for private property of individual Dutchmen. Moreover, casting the collection as the Stadholder's personal property avoided the question whether the collection was technically public property – having been amassed with public funds.Footnote ³³ Portraying the collection as private property was therefore key because French officials did not want to be seen as seizing the property of the Dutch people – an act that would have undermined the sister-republic construct. Following the collection's designation as private property in mid-March 1795, four shipments of minerals, fossils, corals, stuffed birds and quadrupeds, a hippopotamus stuffed with straw, atlases, books on scientific topics and geography, instruments for conducting experiments, armaments, medals, and twenty-four cases of paintings travelled from The Hague to Paris between April and June 1795.Footnote ³⁴

French science as cosmopolitan science: French scientific universalism and the Stadholder's collection

For the naturalists associated with the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the appropriation of the Stadholder's prized natural-history collection and its integration within the French collections at the Muséum symbolically reproduced France's military triumph and territorial annexation in the scientific realm. As French armies dominated more and more of Europe, French naturalists attained an analogous stewardship over Europe's best, rarest and most valued natural-history specimens. Despite the imperial and nationalist approach to the treatment of the Stadholder's collection, French savants justified its seizure – an act hostile to certain understandings of Enlightened values, scientific cosmopolitanism and Franco-Dutch amity – as consistent with the ideals of scientific cosmopolitanism, France's image as an Enlightened nation and Franco-Dutch amity. In justifying the collection's seizure, French naturalists and government officials promoted the concept of French scientific universalism, the idea that the savants' realm was the ‘patrimony of the French Republic’. By coopting the rhetoric of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism, specifically the language of encyclopedism and of the benefit of scientific knowledge to mankind, and using that rhetoric to promote a nationalist and imperialist vision of science, French naturalists helped transform the definition of scientific cosmopolitanism in the 1790s.

French rhetoric concerning the ‘cosmopolitan’ character of France's seizure of the Stadholder's collection obscured a fundamentally French political programme. The leading naturalists associated with the seizure of the Stadholder's collection had played an active political role during the early period of Revolution and were associated with the Muséum d'histoire naturelle, one of France's foremost revolutionary, republican and imperialist institutions.Footnote ³⁵ The commissioners' discussions of the Stadholder's collection with the Committee of Public Safety explicitly linked the acquisition of the collection to the promotion of the Revolutionary programme of public instruction; the collection was to be divided among Parisian and provincial museums to increase public knowledge of the sciences, perceived to be an essential component of creating an educated, republican citizenry.Footnote ³⁶ The seized collection was also viewed as promoting national glory by forcing Europe's savants to rely on the collections housed in Paris for the creation of useful knowledge. Finally, the commissioners argued that their observations of the mechanical arts and sciences in the conquered lands would serve to strengthen France. As Thouin noted, ‘if, as exemplified by the conquerors of China [the Mongols] we instruct ourselves in the arts of vanquished nations, it will be the means for us to make the most of our victories’.Footnote ³⁷

However, the confiscation of seized natural-history collections was also an imperial endeavour. French naturalists, undeterred that confiscation of natural-history collections from fellow Europeans violated the principles of the pre-war scientific Republic of Letters, did not hesitate to describe the seizure of the Stadholder's collection in neo-Roman imperial terms when communicating with French officials.Footnote ³⁸ Thouin, in a letter to the Committee of Public Safety, used the language of conquest, tribute, legitimate spoils and glory to the victor, writing,

Thouin further insisted that the collection's origins in military victory be clearly labelled on specimens entering the Muséum, an action suggesting that he possessed little sympathy for the cosmopolitan shibboleth that the ‘sciences are never at war’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Muséum's savants' argument that seized collections rightfully belonged to a victorious France, a France superior militarily and scientifically to its neighbours, was well received by French officials. As the Committee of Public Instruction remarked to Thouin, ‘Continue to use our victories, salvage from the ravages of war masses of artistic and scientific objects whose isolation renders them almost useless, which, when reunited at the centre of a great nation will serve one day for the instruction of all of Europe.’Footnote ⁴¹

Similar to the patina that French savants gave the metre – which was portrayed as ‘a measure for all people for all time’ despite its basis on a section of the meridian running through France – the Muséum's natural historians recast the seizure of the Stadholder's collection, a seizure that mixed national and imperial interest, as a cosmopolitan, Enlightened and universally beneficial act.Footnote ⁴² While reserving the neo-Roman imperial language exclusively for French audiences, the Muséum's professors in their communications at home and abroad more frequently characterized the collection's seizure as an act of Enlightened largesse. In so doing, the professors portrayed their imperial ambitions and programme of public instruction as embodying the Enlightenment values of encyclopedism, openness and science for the benefit of humanity. By reframing an imperial approach to collections as encyclopedism and public instruction, and also as the means of achieving open exchange and expansion of scientific knowledge, the Muséum's professors sought to make tribute consistent with the values of the pre-war scientific Republic of Letters.

Portraying a nationalist and imperial project as a predominantly cosmopolitan endeavour entailed employing the language of French scientific universalism. Recasting the seizure of the Stadholder's collection as a magnanimous act designed to advance European scientific knowledge, Alquier stated before the Dutch Estates General,

Savants' and officials' appeals to openness and encyclopedism were consistent with the theme of propagating useful knowledge. French savants and officials justified their seizure of natural-history objects noting that their transfer to Paris benefited European science by making collections such as the Stadholder's – which were previously sequestered in palaces, homes and religious edifices – available for public view and use.Footnote ⁴⁴ Likewise, the Muséum's professors emphasized that the amassing of specimens from conquered and annexed nations would facilitate comparison of all the known species in Paris. Specifically, the Muséum's savants noted that the Stadholder's collection complemented those items assembled by the mid-eighteenth-century French naturalist Comte de Buffon, thereby rendering the Paris Muséum one of the most magnificent in the world and allowing scholars to view in one location all the specimens featured in eighteenth-century Dutch natural-history books.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet despite these claims in the name of cosmopolitan science, the French savants benefited most directly from the specimens that arrived as war booty. As Richard Burkhardt has noted, specimens from the Stadholder's collection formed the basis for Georges Cuvier's work on living and fossil species of elephants; Cuvier and Geoffroy St-Hilaire's study of orang-utans; and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck's study of the features of the squid, cuttlefish and octopus.Footnote ⁴⁶

Most notably, French savants and officials gave the seizure of natural-history collections a cosmopolitan veneer by befriending the local savants in areas where they seized collections and by offering seized specimens to them to augment their personal collections. As Alquier wrote,

Alquier's overture was designed to demonstrate French solidarity with fellow republicans in her sister republic and pay lip service to the cosmopolitan ideals of the scientific Republic of Letters. Yet the sacrifice made by distributing a few items from the Stadholder's collection to Dutch savants was minimal. In exchange, France obtained a valuable natural-history collection, and in the process rendered the Dutch savants complicit in the collection's cross-border expropriation. Indeed, the Muséum's savants later used their distribution of specimens to Dutch savants in 1795 to their advantage when the Dutch reclaimed the Stadholder's collection in 1815.

The French natural-history community's response to the Dutch restitution claim in 1815 demonstrates its commitment, even after Napoleon's defeat, to French scientific universalism. Despite France's change in political fortune after Waterloo and the Prussian occupation of Paris and the Muséum's grounds in July 1815, the Muséum's professors, nonetheless, thwarted the Dutch attempt in September 1815 to recover the Stadholder's collection.Footnote ⁴⁸ In a letter to the Muséum's professors, the Dutch natural philosopher Sebald Brugmans announced his intent to reclaim the collections that had been transported ‘by the circumstances of war and placed in your Muséum’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Suggesting that a defeated France no longer had a legitimate claim to the Stadholder's collection, Brugmans requested its immediate return. Brugmans employed the rhetoric of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism, stating,

Flattering the Muséum's professors, Brugmans praised the exemplary quantity and quality of the Muséum's natural-history specimens, arguing that the Stadholder's collection's return would not constitute a great loss to the Muséum.Footnote ⁵¹

Citing the impossibility of tracking down individual items and the potential to compromise the French collections if replacements were arbitrarily selected, the French savants issued a counterproposal.Footnote ⁵² Noting the French desire to reconcile ‘the rights of his Majesty the King of the Low Countries with the interests of our Establishment [the Muséum], which as you know, is also the interest of science and all who cultivate it’, the Muséum's professors offered King William I (the son of the Stadholder who had fled in 1795) an ‘equivalent’ collection, comprising doubles of natural-history specimens collected during the French navigator Nicholas Baudin's voyage to Australia in 1800.Footnote ⁵³ Evading the question of the equivalency of the collections, the Muséum's professors attempted to convince Brugmans that a complete series of items from the Baudin voyage would enhance the Dutch collections far more than would the return of the original items.Footnote ⁵⁴ In concluding the letter, the Muséum's professors pressured Brugmans to accept the counterproposal, writing, ‘This manner of proceeding appears to us too equitable and too advantageous both to science and to the two parties for us not to flatter ourselves that it will obtain your assent and that of your superiors and ours.’Footnote ⁵⁵

In 1815, the Muséum's professors portrayed the French retention of the Stadholder's collection as congruent with their redefined vision of transnational science that equated French interests with those of science in its entirety. While the French savants may have been correct about the impossibility of returning the entire Stadholder's collection since some items had been dissected, doubles had been exchanged, and other specimens had been distributed to museums in the French departments, the French counterproposal was engineered to retain as much of the Stadholder's collection as possible. In lieu of returning those original specimens in their possession, the French instead tried to keep the Muséum's collections intact by offering the Dutch specimens from the Baudin voyage. Baudin's Pacific voyage, circa 1800, had yielded many natural-history specimens of which the French obtained multiple copies. By offering the Dutch doubles from the French voyage in lieu of returning items from the Stadholder's Collection, the French counterproposal sought to preserve the Muséum's pre-eminence. The persistence of this deeply nationalist conception of French scientific universalism is illustrated in a letter from the French naturalists to the minister of the interior, wherein they stated,

Although Brugmans initially resisted the counterproposal, the French savants prevailed. When Brugmans asked to consult the collection's catalogue and to have the returned collection contain a combination of original items from the Stadholder's collection and substitute items from Baudin's collection, the Muséum's savants erected impediments.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Muséum's savants informed Brugmans that the catalogue was useless, because it contained items that had remained in the Netherlands and had been granted in 1795 to Vosmaer, Brugmans and scientifically inclined members of the Dutch Estates General. Moreover, the professors claimed no responsibility for items that had been distributed to the French provinces. The Muséum's professors likewise enlisted the famed naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and his diplomat brother Wilhelm von Humboldt to persuade the Dutch to accept the counterproposal.Footnote ⁵⁸ Plagued by excuses, resistance and bureaucratic hindrances, Brugmans accepted the substitute collection and left Paris in October 1815. The Muséum's professor–administrators reported the successful conclusion of their negotiations, crowing, ‘Among the numerous objects that we have handed over, none was unique so that the collection of His Majesty has lost nothing essential.’Footnote ⁵⁹ As the French reaction to the Dutch attempt to reclaim the Stadholder's collection suggests, French scientific universalism outlasted Revolutionary and Napoleonic France's military and imperial eclipse.

In the context where science and its associated connotations of progress, of rationality and of order had been central to the Revolutionary state's self-image since 1789, French discourse surrounding the Stadholder's collection proves noteworthy not for its nationalist character, but rather for its recasting of the rhetoric of scientific cosmopolitanism to that end. Because French science of the Revolutionary era was unapologetically ‘of the state’, French savants did not share their British counterparts' discomfort with blurring the lines between the theoretically private, apolitical realm of science and the public realm. Nor were they particularly concerned with how their practices – in 1795 and 1815 – violated the ideals of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism. As the example of the Stadholder's collection shows, French naturalists instead promoted the notion of French scientific universalism – a concept that relied on the familiar Enlightenment cosmopolitan rhetoric of encyclopedism and openness – to justify a national and imperial scientific programme. Capitalizing on the still ambiguous status of seized natural-history objects and the malleability of Enlightenment rhetoric, French naturalists in the Revolutionary era helped to undermine science's pre-war cosmopolitan ideal.

Labillardière's collection

The French seizure and assembly of the Stadholder's collection in Paris renders Joseph Banks's decision to petition the British government to return Labillardière's collection all the more intriguing. Numerous scholars have been fascinated by Banks's role in the return of Labillardière's seized collection; there is no dearth of explanations for Banks's actions. In the 1950s, Sir Gavin de Beer argued that the collection was returned because of Banks's unwavering commitment to the ethos that the ‘sciences are never at war’.Footnote ⁶⁰ More recently, Edward Duyker attributed Banks's actions to his friendship with Labillardière, which dated from the French naturalist's visit to London in 1783.Footnote ⁶¹ Most recently, Carol Harrison has attributed the collection's return to ‘scientific internationalism’ and the ‘miscarriage of French national science policy’.Footnote ⁶² All of these works assume that Banks's rhetoric of scientific cosmopolitanism owed itself predominantly to the long-standing traditions of the pre-war scientific Republic of Letters. However, examination of the geopolitical context and the circumstances surrounding Banks's change of heart regarding the seized collection suggest the primacy of national interest in shaping Banks's approach to Labillardière's and other seized scientific collections.

The seizure of Labillardière's collection

The collection reclaimed by Labillardière originated as a result of the 1791 French expedition to the South Pacific under the command of naval officers Joseph-Antoine-Raymond de Bruny d'Entrecasteaux and Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. This expedition was a cooperative venture among the French scientific community, the Revolutionary National Assembly, and the French navy. This expedition served a dual purpose to find Lapérouse, a French navigator who had disappeared in 1788, and to demonstrate that the National Assembly had inherited the mantle of the Bourbon kings by serving as the primary patron of science and exploration.Footnote ⁶³ As had prior French voyages to the Pacific, the d'Entrecasteaux voyage included naval officers, sailors, artists, naturalists, botanists, hydrographers and astronomers. Between October 1791 and July 1793, the Recherche and the Espérance stopped in Tenerife (the Canary Islands), the Cape of Good Hope, the southwest coast of New Holland (modern-day Australia), Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania), the Friendly Islands, New Zealand, Tonga and New Caledonia. In these locations, Labillardière and his colleagues made observations in diverse branches of natural history and assembled botanical, mineralogical and entomological specimens.

The series of events leading to Banks's involvement with the collection's return began in the Pacific some two years before the seized collection arrived in England. By winter 1793, the d'Entrecasteaux expedition had become beset with difficulties: supplies ran low, scurvy afflicted the crew, and savants and naval officers quarrelled over French politics. The death of both ships' captains from illness in May and July 1793 left the expedition in disarray. Under these challenging circumstances, the expedition's new commander, naval lieutenant Alexandre d'Hesmivy d'Auribeau, had little choice but to seek land. Given the long distance to the nearest French colony – the Ile de France (Mauritius) in the Western Indian Ocean, d'Auribeau proceeded toward the more proximate Dutch Java. D'Auribeau and the crew, having received no news from Europe since their departure from Brest, were unaware of the political transformations in France and the outbreak of pan-European warfare that had rendered their safe conducts, issued in 1791, invalid on their arrival in Sourabaya in October 1793. The expedition collapsed during the following months; it remained moored in Dutch enemy territory, uncertain of those French individuals or organizations to which it now reported, and fractured irrevocably along political lines.Footnote ⁶⁴ On 4 February 1794, d'Auribeau, a committed royalist, elected Dutch protection and requested that the Dutch Governor General arrest Labillardière and the other ‘republican’ members of the expedition and seize their collections and papers.Footnote ⁶⁵ The circumstances that led to a committed royalist's assumption of responsibility for the expedition's dissolution had enduring consequences for the collections.

The competing politically charged narratives produced by the d'Entrecasteaux expedition's surviving members complicate historians' efforts to follow the natural-history collection assembled by Labillardière during the seventeen months between the Dutch seizure of the items from the ‘republican’ naturalists and the British capture of a subset of that collection aboard a Dutch merchant ship on 10 June 1795.Footnote ⁶⁶ Significantly, the Dutch did not keep the collections seized at d'Auribeau's request. Instead of treating the collections as war booty, the Dutch governor in Sourabaya relinquished the natural-history collections to d'Auribeau and the other royalists.Footnote ⁶⁷ Following d'Auribeau's sudden death in August 1794, several royalist officers returned to Europe bringing the thirty-seven cases of natural-history objects seized from Labillardière and the other republican naturalists as well as journals, maps, books and documents from the d'Entrecasteaux expedition. However, the royalist officers and the collections were seized when, on 10 June 1795, Captain William Essington of HMS Sceptre captured the Hougly, the Dutch East Indiaman on which they sailed.Footnote ⁶⁸ Since Britain was at war with French-controlled Holland, Essington forced the Hougly into harbour in St Helena and seized the ship's natural-history collections, maps and documents. Unlike the Dutch governor, Essington was unconvinced by the French naturalists' arguments that European nations since the days of Captain Cook had respected one another's scientific expeditions even amid war.Footnote ⁶⁹ When HMS Sceptre arrived in Britain in October 1795, the charts, maps, journals and registers were sent to the Admiralty, where Alexander Dalrymple, the chief hydrographer, ordered the nautical charts copied. The cases of natural-history objects were sent to the Customs House.

When the French royalist officers who had been on the Hougly arrived in Britain in October 1795, they reclaimed the seized collection in the name of the exiled Comte de Provence, claimant to the French throne.Footnote ⁷⁰ The commander of the remnants of d'Entrecasteaux voyage, Edouard de Rossel, informed the Duc d'Harcourt, the representative to the British government of the exiled Comte de Provence, of the events that precipitated the British seizure of the collections from the d'Entrecasteaux voyage and petitioned Britain's King George III, requesting that the collection be placed at the Comte de Provence's disposal. In arguing that the collection was French royalist property, Rossel downplayed the Revolutionary National Assembly's sponsorship of the voyage and instead emphasized the late King Louis XVI's role in outfitting the expedition.

Although George III acceded to Rossel's request, the Comte de Provence, having no interest in the collection, gifted it to George's III's wife, Queen Charlotte, as a token of the Comte de Provence's gratitude and goodwill.Footnote ⁷¹ On 29 March 1796, the Duc d'Harcourt invited Banks to inspect the collections that the Comte de Provence had gifted. Ignoring a plaintive letter written by Labillardière during his imprisonment in Java in April 1794, Banks embraced the Duc d'Harcourt's offer to advise the Queen on which items to accept. Thus, by early April 1796, the collection's future appeared settled. Queen Charlotte accepted the plants and the Duc d'Harcourt gifted the stuffed animals and the minerals to Banks for placement in the British Museum.Footnote ⁷² Banks lauded the collection's acquisition, stating that Britain was now home to the ‘vast Herbarium collected in all the places at which the [French] ship touched, a very large collection of dried Birds, a considerable number of dried Lizards & Snakes, some fish in Spirits, and some insects’.Footnote ⁷³ Emphasizing that the plant collection ‘bore testimony of an industry all but indefatigable in the Botanists who were employed’, Banks praised the rarity of the specimens that reflected many plants ‘almost or entirely unknown to Europeans’.Footnote ⁷⁴

In the interim, Labillardière, who had been released by his Dutch captors, returned to Paris in 1796. Upon learning of the collection's fate, Labillardière wrote to Thouin, then a professor at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle, requesting that Thouin urge the Directoire to petition the British government for the collection's return.Footnote ⁷⁵ In mid-April 1796, Labillardière also wrote to Banks and to James Edward Smith, the founder and president of the Linnean Society of London and the purchaser of Linnaeus's collections, pleading for the collection's return. In his letter to Banks, Labillardière recounted how the Dutch had robbed him of his personal natural-history collection:

Labillardière then detailed the collection's subsequent British seizure. In closing, he appealed to Banks as a savant, friend and fellow explorer to return his property. Labillardière stated,

In his letter to Smith, Labillardière expressed that the collection needed to be returned to France to reap its full benefit for science.Footnote ⁷⁸

Although King George III remained unmoved by the Directoire's request for the collection's return, Labillardière's letter of 14 April 1796 altered Banks's attitude toward the collection.Footnote ⁷⁹ In responding to Labillardière on 9 June 1796, Banks eschewed the thorny question of the collection's ownership, namely whether it was the property of Labillardière, the Comte de Provence or the French Republic. Banks also downplayed that the collection's restitution would entail the queen returning a collection gifted to her. Rather, Banks assured Labillardière that he had petitioned his government for the collection's return, stating,

In late June 1796, the British foreign secretary Lord Granville orally agreed to the collection's return, and arrangements were made for its restitution at the time of the next exchange of prisoners of war.Footnote ⁸¹

Private property and the return of Labillardière's collection

Although Labillardière knew that the instructions given to the d'Entrecasteaux voyage had specified that the specimens gathered under its aegis were state property, he correctly anticipated that he would need to represent the collection as his personal property to convince the British to consent to its return.Footnote ⁸² Writing to Thouin ten days prior to his 14 April letter to Banks, Labillardière outlined his strategy for reclaiming the collection, writing, ‘I think that, for the English to decide to return [the items] to the Republic, it would be necessary to make them perceive them as private property; the war we have with them would be a powerful motive for them to keep all national property.’Footnote ⁸³ This letter suggests that Labillardière knew that the only hope for the collection's restitution lay in claiming it as his private property. For if the collection belonged to Britain's enemy, the French Republic, the British were entitled to retain it as war booty. If, instead, it belonged to the legitimate royalist successors of Louis XVI, the British could retain the collection since the Comte de Provence had gifted it to the British queen.

The absence of a uniform pan-European policy on the property status of natural-history collections associated with voyages of exploration enabled Labillardière to cast the collection as personal property, an act that Harrison rightly notes was a ‘miscarriage of French national science policy’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In portraying the collection as his property, Labillardière deftly exploited inconsistencies in instructions to voyagers and eighteenth-century legal notions that rendered an individual's labour a basis for a property claim. Prior to the late 1790s, instructions for French and British voyages frequently did not deny naturalists the right to retain some natural-history specimens as their personal property. Banks, who was not privy to the instructions given to the d'Entrecasteaux expedition's members, therefore might have found Labillardière's personal-property claim plausible. Further, Labillardière invoked a tenet of eighteenth-century legal thinking that acknowledged the exertion of labour – in this case, Labillardière's efforts to gather, identify, preserve and transport specimens – as an entitlement to a personal-property claim. Banks, as a veteran of Pacific voyages and patron of subsequent British voyages to that region, may well have been sympathetic to Labillardière's labour-as-property argument and to the French naturalist's desire to reclaim the collection in order to publish his findings. Finally, Labillardière's claim that the collection was his personal property allowed him to invoke the idea that the ‘sciences are never at war’, an appeal which functioned rhetorically to establish science as a neutral and apolitical endeavour at the very moment when both French and British savants recognized the increasing integration of science and state. Labillardière's portrayal of the collection as personal and private property suggested that the collection was a matter for science rather than states and engendered the notion that objects acquired during voyages of exploration were illegitimate war booty.

Banks capitalized on Labillardière's portrayal of the collection as his personal property. While sufficiently savvy about the state uses of science in that era to doubt that the collection was actually Labillardière's private property, Banks nonetheless promoted its return in the name of cosmopolitan science and perceived British national interest.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, although Banks was troubled by Labillardière's ‘Jacobin principles’ and his role in fomenting ‘rebellion’ on the ship, he nevertheless viewed the collection's return as an opportunity to affirm that savants ought to retain control over the care, interpretation and publication of specimens gathered on voyages of exploration, including those voyages that were state-funded.Footnote ⁸⁶ Echoing Labillardière, Banks attempted to establish the notion that the exertion of labour in scientific endeavour gave the savant a claim on property even in the context of a state-funded voyage of exploration. As Banks wrote,

British liberal scientific improvement and the return of Labillardière's collection

Although the cosmopolitan ideal certainly played a crucial role in Banks's efforts to facilitate the return of Labillardière's collection, prior explanations have overlooked the role of geopolitical considerations and the interests of the British scientific community – and, above all, those of the British nation – in accounting for Banks's change of heart following Labillardière's appeal. Given that Britain was unwilling and unable in 1796 to imitate the French strategy of carting Europe's scientific riches back to the metropole, Banks, in returning Labillardière's collection, saw an opportunity to affirm scientific collections as private property while simultaneously discrediting the French practice of seizing scientific objects as war booty. In the process, Banks cast Britain as the protector of the pre-war values of the scientific Republic of Letters while implicitly suggesting that French plunder violated those same long-standing cosmopolitan principles. However, in appropriating the ideals of the pre-war scientific Republic of Letters and making them synonymous with British national interest, Banks also turned cosmopolitanism to national ends.

Banks's advocacy for the collection's return is explicable in the context of Georgian Britain's scientific and state organization. Unlike France, where savants served on the government payroll and science was central to the Revolution's transformation of society and government, science in Britain was a comparatively conservative enterprise directed toward ensuring the monarchy's political stability, enhancing the gentry's prosperity and strengthening the empire. British liberal scientific improvement was thus characterized by the informal cooperation of government officials with savants, who remained financially and organizationally independent of the state. This different structural dynamic meant that British savants depended more than their French counterparts on the free flow of information through traditional channels and on maintaining the appearance of science as a private, apolitical endeavour. From Banks's perspective, the return of Labilladière's collection provided an opportunity to reassert the neutrality of science as well as the distinctions between state and science, public and private, notions that had eroded during three years of Anglo-French warfare.

Geopolitically, the timing of Labillardière's request was fortuitous since Labillardière's letter of April 1796 coincided with the French retreat from the Terror's revolutionary extremism and with the emergence of the Directoire's more conservative political order. These auspicious political developments were mirrored in the scientific realm by the creation of the Institut de France, which provided for the first time since the 1793 disbanding of the Académie des sciences an academy-type institutional home for French science dedicated to communicating with foreign savants and scientific institutions.Footnote ⁸⁸ For Banks, who was eager to renew the flow of transnational scientific communication more generally, the return of the collection was a crucial first step toward thawing the two nations' icy scientific and political relations and reviving the ideals and practices of pre-war cosmopolitan science that had been eroded by the three years of war. As Banks wrote in a letter of 9 June 1796 to Labillardière, ‘I consider [the return of your collection] as a matter of no less importance than of making a peace between the science of the two nations.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Banks reiterated this idea in letters to British officials, writing to Foreign Secretary William Grenville,

Banks's championing of the values of cosmopolitan science in the return of Labillardière's collection should not, however, mask the politically strategic dimensions of his actions.Footnote ⁹¹ As a savant and a Briton, Banks had a vested interest in delegitimating the French approach to seized scientific collections and their transport to Paris. Banks's many English correspondents articulated their fears of a possible French invasion and its concomitant effects on Britain's artistic and scientific objects. Even Banks's quarrelsome countryman John Woodford, who had refused to return one of the birds from Labillardière's collection, eventually acknowledged that the return of the captured items was ultimately in Britain's national interest. As Woodford wrote, ‘I wish however that this peace offering may lead them [the French] hereafter to respect the Arts, if they should push their conquests as far as us; & that the Plunderers of Italy may spare the Collections of London.’Footnote ⁹² Given his recognition of the potentiality of a French invasion of the British Isles, Banks, as a loyal Briton, wanted the collection returned in order to establish the precedent that seized natural-history collections were private property, a status that by most eighteenth-century legal definitions made them illegitimate war booty.

Banks, in his correspondence with fellow Britons, also emphasized the national advantages for casting Britain as the defender of the mores and practices of the pre-war scientific Republic of Letters. Suggesting that Britain's treatment of Labillardière's collection had implications for Britain's international standing, Banks wrote to Britain's foreign secretary that

Banks echoed this idea in a letter to William Price, stating,

As these statements reveal, Banks's invocation of the mores and practices of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism was inexorably linked to his conception of British national interest. Indeed, in this case, Banks was so fervently committed to scientific cosmopolitanism as both a national and scientific strategy that he ultimately misrepresented his actions regarding Labillardière's collections to the French. In a letter to the French naturalist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Banks falsely stated that he had not inspected the collections – a statement designed to highlight the premium Banks placed on respecting Labillardière's private property.Footnote ⁹⁵

In viewing the return of Labillardière's collection as an armistice to science and a means of establishing that seized scientific collections were private property best left to those who had assembled them, Banks greatly underestimated the extent of many French naturalists' ideological transformation. While Banks, in the summer of 1796, was working with British officials on the last details associated with the return of ‘Labillardière's’ collection, Labillardière himself was in Italy looting that country's scientific and artistic collections as a member of the French Commission of Sciences and Arts.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, it was not until some years later that Banks accepted that the French approach to conquered natural-history collections in the Low Countries was the new model for the French treatment of seized natural-history collections and not an aberration. Unable to use the return of Labillardière's collection to restore harmony to Europe's transnational scientific community or to establish the impropriety of seizing specimens as war booty, Banks became increasingly frustrated by continued French seizure and shipment of scientific booty to Paris.

Not surprisingly, when French natural-history collections subsequently fell into British possession, Banks was less attentive to French requests for their return. In May 1803, the French naturalist Louis Deschamps alerted Banks that Deschamps's collection had been seized when HMS Jupiter intercepted the French vessel L'Union as it approached the English Channel.Footnote ⁹⁷ Deschamps requested the liberation of ‘his’ collection, citing as precedent Banks's restoration of Labillardière's collection.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although in his letters to Deschamps, Banks maintained the appearance of advocating on Deschamps's behalf, he let the request languish. Banks's flagging support, the ‘misplacing’ of the boxes containing the collection at the Customs House and the barriers to transporting goods across the Channel resulted in Britain's retention of Deschamps's collection. Following Napoleon's exile to Elba in June 1814, Deschamps again wrote to Banks seeking the collection's restoration. Banks responded that a renewed search of the Customs House had yielded no evidence of the collection. Although the fate of Deschamps's plant collection remains unknown, Deschamps's drawings, diaries and manuscripts today reside at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.Footnote ⁹⁹ As this example suggests, Banks became increasingly disinclined to return seized French natural-history collections after French savants persisted in seizing Europe's scientific treasures and retaining them in Paris.

Banks's zeal for Britain's retention of Labillardière's collection while he was under the assumption that it was French royalist property and his subsequent reluctance to return other seized natural-history collections affirms that Banks's facilitation of the return of Labillardière's collection in the spring of 1796 was not propelled by an automatic and timeless commitment to cosmopolitan science, nor by a consistent British policy supporting the return of collections. Rather, Banks's eventual facilitation of the return of Labillardière's collection was circumstantial and opportunistic. Recognizing an opportunity in Labillardière's portrayal of the collection as his personal property, Banks sought to establish natural-history collections as private and personal property at a moment when geopolitical circumstances favoured the re-establishment of Anglo-French scientific ties. In so doing, Banks invoked the rhetoric and ideals of pre-war scientific cosmopolitanism in the service of British national interest and British liberal scientific improvement.