Œuvres

The thirty-six volumes of the Natural History offer a selection of texts organized according to the plan traced and followed by Buffon; it is illustrated with one hundred and twenty engravings taken from the original edition. This work was one of the most resounding successes in bookstores in the 18th century, which immediately recognized the literary genius of the author. In the 19th century, it was classified among the four most prominent writers of the previous century, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. The Natural History soon declined into anthologies, from the Buffon of schools to the Buffon of families, passing through the Buffon of young ladies.

And in the 20th century, Francis Ponge hailed Buffon as "one of the greatest prose poets in our literature" and his equal, in short. However, a few decades ago, Buffon seemed to have faded away, to the point where he could be believed to have been relegated to the limbo of literature. This was counting without the theoretical imagination of a thinker who has recently restored his place in the debates and struggles of the Enlightenment. This was also counting on the power of attraction of the sentence, on the variety of language, on the freedom of a style that appropriates the near and the far to talk to us about the world in which we live.

If the horse has disappeared from our cities, if the cat is no longer considered the most hypocritical of our companions, if the desert and the savannah have become tourist destinations, the descriptions that Buffon gave of them remain documents on an era that has disappeared and testimonies to a sensitivity to reality that can remain ours.