Jean-Baptiste Christophe Fusée-Aublet and the practice of botany in French Guiana and Paris (1762–1775)

As part of the Kourou Expedition (1762–1764), the botanist Jean-Baptiste Christophe Fusée-Aublet (1723–1778) was sent to French Guiana to investigate and report on the colony’s natural resources with a view to exploiting them. This mission enabled Fusée-Aublet to collect plants in the Amazon rainforest with the help of a team made up of Amerindians, enslaved Africans and European colonists. His herbaria and the botanical manuscripts describing the plants he collected were then shipped to Paris, providing Fusée-Aublet with the material he needed to write his Histoire des plantes de la Guiane françoise (1775). Based on Fusée-Aublet’s archives in Paris and London, this paper looks at the two stages of his botanical adventure – the expedition in the field and the work of identifying the plants in Paris – with the aim of reconstructing the material conditions of this undertaking and the botanical methodology that led to the publication of his work on the flora of French Guiana.