ABOUT THIS BOOK

An authoritative history of the first metropolitan zoo explores how visions for the menagerie collided with the interests of humans and animals alike.

The Paris menagerie at the Paris Museum of Natural History has a special significance in the history of zoos. Founded in 1793–1794 at the height of the French Revolution, it was the model for the other great zoos of the nineteenth century that followed, beginning with London in 1827, Amsterdam in 1838, and Berlin in 1844.

Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. has written the definitive history of the Paris zoo and its early inhabitants, human and nonhuman. The book features narrative or thematic chapters interwoven with chapters focused on particular animals. Combining current scholarship with fresh discoveries gleaned from his immersion in the Paris Zoo’s extensive archive, Burkhardt shares historical treasures that illuminate not only the workings of the menagerie but also various dimensions of the golden age of French zoology (the years of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Georges Cuvier). His history reconstructs the diverse sources of specimens, the growth of the collection over time, the efforts to make the menagerie scientifically significant, contemporary attitudes toward animals, and the lives of the animals themselves in colonial and diplomatic contexts.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. is emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology and Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology.

REVIEWS

“This deeply researched and richly detailed study of the founding and early years of the Zoological Garden and Natural History Museum of Paris seamlessly interweaves social and cultural history of science with the history of animal-human relations from the Revolutionary to the post-Napoleonic period. The book will become the standard work on this topic, due to the wealth of information it conveys, and also to the enormous cast of animal and human characters brought together by Burkhardt’s lively storytelling.”

— Mitchell G. Ash, editor of “Science in the Metropolis: Vienna in Transnational Context, 1848–1918”

“Paris’s Zoological Garden, attached to the Natural History Museum, became a symbol of national pride and the envy of other European metropolises. Yet animals that were supposed to be freed from exploitation and enslavement were long confined to cramped cages, the victims of unhealthy conditions and unruly visitors. Staff and naturalists too were housed on the grounds of the Garden, a truly fascinating human zoo. Unprecedented in its interweaving of the history of the first modern zoo and the history of science, The Leopard in the Garden monitors the emergence of a science of animal behavior. A monument to scholarship, the book offers a highly enjoyable and witty narrative, one that includes concerts for elephants and Franz Liszt’s proposal to play for Jack, the orangutan.”

— Pietro Corsi, author of “The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830”

TABLE OF CONTENTS