The Société de Géographie (; ), is the world's oldest geographical society. It was founded in 1821 as the first Geographic Society. Since 1878, its headquarters have been at 184
Boulevard Saint-Germain
Boulevard Saint-Germain () is a major street in Paris on the Rive Gauche of the Seine.
It curves in a 3.5-kilometre (2.1 miles) arc from the Pont de Sully in the east (the bridge at the edge of Île Saint-Louis) to the Pont de la Concorde ( ...
,
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
. The entrance is marked by two gigantic
caryatid
A caryatid ( or or ; grc, Καρυᾶτις, pl. ) is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term ''karyatides'' literally means "ma ...
s representing ''Land'' and ''Sea''. It was here, in 1879, that the construction of the
Panama Canal
The Panama Canal ( es, Canal de Panamá, link=no) is an artificial waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean and divides North and South America. The canal cuts across the Isthmus of Panama and is a conduit ...
was decided.
History
The Geographical Society was founded at a meeting on 15 December 1821 in the
Paris Hôtel de Ville. Among its 217 founders were some of the greatest scientific names of the time, including
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (; ; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized ...
(the Society's first president),
Georges Cuvier
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (; 23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier, was a French natural history, naturalist and zoology, zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier ...
,
Charles Pierre Chapsal,
Vivant Denon
Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon (4 January 1747 – 27 April 1825) was a French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist. Denon was a diplomat for France under Louis XV and Louis XVI. He was appointed as the first Director of the Louvre ...
,
Joseph Fourier
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (; ; 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French people, French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier an ...
,
Gay-Lussac
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (, , ; 6 December 1778 – 9 May 1850) was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (with Alexander von Humboldt), for two laws ...
,
Claude Louis Berthollet
Claude Louis Berthollet (, 9 December 1748 – 6 November 1822) was a Savoyard-French chemist who became vice president of the French Senate in 1804. He is known for his scientific contributions to theory of chemical equilibria via the mecha ...
,
Alexander von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 17696 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, p ...
,
Champollion, and
François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocrati ...
. Most of the men who had accompanied
Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition were members:
Edme-François Jomard
Edme-François Jomard (; 1777 – September 22, 1862) was a French cartographer, engineer, and archaeologist. He edited the ''Description de L'Égypte'' and was a member of the Institut d'Egypte established by Napoleon. He supervised the educa ...
,
Conrad Malte-Brun
Conrad Malte-Brun (12 August 177514 December 1826), born Malthe Conrad Bruun, and sometimes referred to simply as Malte-Brun, was a Dano-French geographer and journalist. His second son, Victor Adolphe Malte-Brun, was also a geographer. Today he ...
,
Jules Dumont d'Urville
Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (; 23 May 1790 – 8 May 1842) was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his nam ...
,
Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert
Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert (14 February 1773 – 1 March 1847) was a French banker and naturalist. He was an honorary member of the Académie des Sciences and many species were named from his natural history collections.
Biography
He was bor ...
,
Hottinguer
Hottinger or Hottinguer is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Swiss family
* Klaus Hottinger (1467–1524), first martyr of the Swiss Protestantism movement
*Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1620–1667), Swiss philologist and theologi ...
,
Henri Didot
Didot is the name of a family of French printers, punch-cutters and publishers. Through its achievements and advancements in printing, publishing and typography, the family has lent its name to typographic measurements developed by François-Amb ...
,
Bottin
Bottin (Guglielmo Bottin, born 1977) is an Italian composer, producer, DJ and music scholar, based in Venice, Italy.
His tracks have a clear italo disco and retro-futurist electronic music influences. Before moving to contemporary space disco, ...
and others such as
Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès
Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (; 24 June 176713 June 1846) was a French geographer, author and translator, best remembered in the English speaking world for his translation of German ghost stories '' Fantasmagoriana'', published anonymously in 18 ...
.
Although the Society rarely funded scientific travel, by issuing instructions to voyagers, encouraging research through competitions, and publishing the results of their work, it served in its early years as "an important institutional support" for the study of
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
. Two members in the "active core" of the society played central roles in this regard: Jomard and the Irish exile
David Ballie Warden. Their terms for a competition for the best new work on "American antiquities", including maps "constructed according to exact methods" and "observations on the mores and customs of the indigenous peoples, and vocabularies of the ancient languages." extended decades-old scientific practices to a new field of anthropological inquiry.
The society was to be associated in time with the greatest French and foreign explorers from
René Caillié
Auguste René Caillié (; 19 November 1799 – 17 May 1838) was a French explorer and the first European to return alive from the town of Timbuktu. Caillié had been preceded at Timbuktu by a British officer, Major Gordon Laing, who was murdere ...
, the first European to return alive from the town of
Timbuktu
Timbuktu ( ; french: Tombouctou;
Koyra Chiini: ); tmh, label=Tuareg, script=Tfng, ⵜⵏⴱⴾⵜ, Tin Buqt a city in Mali, situated north of the Niger River. The town is the capital of the Tombouctou Region, one of the eight administrativ ...
, to the underwater explorer
Jacques Cousteau
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , ; 11 June 191025 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). T ...
, and leading geographers, among them
Vidal de la Blache, founder of the French School of
Geopolitics
Geopolitics (from Greek γῆ ''gê'' "earth, land" and πολιτική ''politikḗ'' "politics") is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to ...
.
The Society was the location of the
Arab Congress of 1913
The Arab Congress of 1913 (also known as the "Arab National Congress," "First Palestinian Conference," the "First Arab Congress," and the "Arab-Syrian Congress") met in a hall of the French Geographical Society ( Société de Géographie) at 184 B ...
, which took place from June 18 to June 23 of that year and marked the confluence of events surrounding the decline of the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
, the beginnings of
Arab nationalism
Arab nationalism ( ar, القومية العربية, al-Qawmīya al-ʿArabīya) is a nationalist ideology that asserts the Arabs are a nation and promotes the unity of Arab people, celebrating the glories of Arab civilization, the language an ...
, and early Arab reaction to
Zionist
Zionism ( he, צִיּוֹנוּת ''Tsiyyonut'' after ''Zion'') is a nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to what is known in Je ...
immigration to
Palestine
__NOTOC__
Palestine may refer to:
* State of Palestine, a state in Western Asia
* Palestine (region), a geographic region in Western Asia
* Palestinian territories, territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely the West Bank (including East ...
.
Publications
The Society's revue has appeared monthly since 1822, as ''Bulletin de la Société de Géographie'' (1822–1899) – offering in octavo format early news of all the discoveries of the nineteenth century – or quarterly, as ''La Géographie'', with a break from 1940 until 1946. Since 1947 the Society's magazine has appeared three times a year, as ''Acta Geographica''.
The Society's library, map collection and photograph collection are among the world's deepest and most comprehensive.
List of presidents
Awards
Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations
The
Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations
The Grande Médaille d’Or des Explorations et Voyages de Découverte (Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery) has been awarded since 1829 by the Société de Géographie of France for journeys whose outcomes have enhanced geog ...
et Voyages de Découverte (Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery) has been awarded since 1829 for journeys whose outcomes have enhanced geographical knowledge. Notable recipients have been
John Franklin
Sir John Franklin (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through ...
(1829),
John Ross (1834),
David Livingstone
David Livingstone (; 19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, an explorer in Africa, and one of the most popular British heroes of t ...
(1857),
Ernest Shackleton
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of ...
(1910) and
Roald Amundsen
Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (, ; ; 16 July 1872 – ) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He was a key figure of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Born in Borge, Østfold, Norway, Amundsen bega ...
(1913).
Notes
References
Société de Géographie official site(in French)
External links
''La Géographie : bulletin de la Société de géographie''dans
Gallica, la bibliothèque numérique de la
BnF.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Societe de geographie
History of geography
Science and technology in France
1821 establishments in France
Organizations based in Paris
Geographic societies
Learned societies of France
ar:جمعية جغرافية