Société des observateurs de l'homme, rendered in English as Society of Observers of Man, was a French learned society founded in Paris in 1799. Long considered the birthplace of French anthropology, the society nevertheless dissolved in 1804.
The Constitution of the Society was set at its inaugural meeting in the Rue de Seine, in August 1799. There they brought together naturalists, physicians (including psychiatrists), philosophers, writers, historians, linguists, orientalists, and archaeologists under the chairmanship of John de Maimieux.[1] Louis-François Jauffret, at whose home they met, was named permanent secretary.
In 1800, the Society offered a 600 franc prize for the study of very young children with an eye toward discovering the extent to which their physical, intellectual, and moral faculties are supported or opposed by the influences of the objects and people in the child's environment.
Déterminer par l'observation journalière de un ou plusieurs enfants au berceau l'ordre dans lequel les facultés physiques, intellectuelles et morales se développent et jusqu'à quel point ce développement est secondé ou contrarié par l'influence des objets et des personnes qui environnent l'enfant.
The Society went silent in 1804, and was largely forgotten until the time of the French Third Republic, when Paul Broca of the Society of Anthropology of Paris cited the existence of the Observateurs in his claim that French anthropological societies predated those of Great Britain, which were then in ascendency.
(in French)Jean Copans and Jean Jamin, Aux origines de l’anthropologie française, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1978.
Jean-Luc Chappey, The ‘Société des Observateurs de l’homme’ and the history of French anthropology (1799–1804) How Napoléon Bonaparte ended the French Revolutiononline PDF
Efram Sera-Shriar, The Making of British Anthropology, 1813-1871, London: Pickering & Chatto and Routledge, 2013, pp. 53-80.
^ abcChappey, Jean-Luc (2002). La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (1799-1804). Des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (in French). Paris: Société des études robespierristes. p. 46. ISBN2-908327-45-7.
