Summary

In 1788, while Buffon was near death, the man set to inherit leadership of the Jardin gave the role to his brother, the Marquis de la Billaderie. The Marquis was a military man, and did not care much about the garden, letting it fall into a self-perpetuating state of neglect. There was a growing pro-Linnaeus faction in Paris at the time of the revolution, who rejected Buffon's theories and associated him with the despised French monarchy. They successfully petitioned to place a bust of Linnaeus inside the Jardin du Roi in 1790. This greatly upset a young man named Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. Geoffrey was a devotee of the garden, and a strong supporter of Buffon's theories.

In 1793, Lacépède, fleeing the revolution, appointed Geoffrey as director of the Jardin. Geoffrey was young and inexperienced, and needed help protecting the garden from the revolution. He...