Clémence Royer

Clémence Royer (Nantes, 1830 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1902) was a French philosopher, scientist, translator and economist, largely self-taught. She is remembered above all for her 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which helped introduce Darwinism to France. Her work sits at the crossroads of freethought, feminism and popular science in the nineteenth century.

Born into a Catholic, royalist family, she was the daughter of an army officer who took part in the failed 1832 rebellion, after which the family went into exile in Switzerland before returning to France. After the 1848 revolution Royer rejected her father's political views. She worked as a governess and housekeeper, using her employers' libraries to read anthropology, economics, biology and philosophy. In 1856 she settled in Lausanne, where she studied at the public library and gave well-attended logic lectures for women. There she met Pascal Duprat, an exiled republican with whom she had a relationship.

Her book Théorie de l'impôt (1862), which won a prize from the canton of Vaud, brought her attention beyond Switzerland. That same year she published her translation of Darwin, adding a long preface. In it she argued for a progressive view of evolution, closer to Lamarck than to Darwin, and applied natural selection to human society, criticising the protection of the weak. These early eugenic ideas brought her considerable controversy.

In 1870 she became the first woman admitted to the Société d'anthropologie de Paris, and in 1881 she founded the Société des études philosophiques et morales, aimed at spreading philosophical learning to the public. Her legacy lies largely in linking French Darwinism with social readings of evolution, and in opening a path for women in the science of her time.