(The subject treated in the following pages has made great...)
The subject treated in the following pages has made great progress in the course of forty years. Now what we are concerned with in psychical studies is always unknown forces, and these forces must belong to the natural order, for nature embraces the entire universe, and everything is therefore under the sway of her scepter.
Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer, novelist, and parapsychologist. He is remembered for encouraging public interest in the subject of astronomy, although many of his scientific and philosophical arguments were eccentric.
Background
Nicolas Camille Flammarion was born on February 26, 1842, in Montigny-le-roi, Champagne-Ardenne, France to the family of Etienne Jules Flammarion and Pauline Françoise Lomon. At the time of Flammarion’s birth, his parents owned a small store, but his father had been a farmer and Flammarion often mentioned this with pride. He was the oldest of four children. His interest in astronomy dated from his early childhood, when on 9 October 1847 and 28 July 1851 he was able to observe solar eclipses. By the time he was eleven he was busily making astronomical and meteorological observations.
Education
It is recorded that Flammarion was a master of reading and writing at the age of four and that when seven years old he was specially commended by the prefect of his department for the way he acquitted himself in an examination at his school. At the age of ten years, Flammarion was placed in a seminary and continued his education under the care of the Jesuits. After the removal of his family to Paris, Flammarion was transferred to another Jesuit school, in the St. Roch quarter of the capital. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to an engraver and worked in his shop for some months. Whilst thus engaged, however, he managed to continue his studies, mastered English and the classics, and was able to pass his two examinations for the degree of bachelor, as well as his matriculation to the École Polytechnique, and at the age of sixteen to enter the Paris observatory as pupil astronomer.
A chance encounter in 1858 marked the start of Camille Flammarion's career; a physician who was treating Flammarion noticed a bulky, 500-page manuscript written by the young man and entitled Cosmogonie universelle. The doctor read it and was so impressed that he brought it to the attention of Le Verrier, who was director of the Paris Observatory. A few days later, Flammarion was hired by the observatory to work in the Bureau de Calcul as an apprentice astronomer.
In 1861 Flammarion wrote La pluralité des mondes habités, his first book to be published. In this, he revealed the pleasant literary style that was to make him the most important popularizer of science at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1862 he was a calculator to the Bureau des Longitudes. He wrote for the Annuaire du cosmos and published the Annuaire astronomique et météorologique, first in the Magasin pittoresque, then later in L'astronomie. During the same period, he also wrote many popularizing articles for the newspapers and delivered a very successful series of lectures in Paris, the provinces, and several other European capitals.
Flammarion became greatly interested in the problems of the atmosphere. Between 1867 and 1880 he made many balloon flights in order to study atmospheric phenomena. In 1871 he published L'atmosphère. Les terres du ciel appeared in 1877 and then, in 1880, the famous Astronomie populaire, his best-known work, a true bestseller that was translated into many languages and which, more than any other book ever written, spread interest in astronomy. It was followed in 1882 by Les étoiles et les curiositès du ciel.
At this point in Flammarion's career, his scientific output was considerable and concerned with many subjects, including volcanology, atmospheric electricity, and climatology. Special mention must be made of his research concerning Mars. Scientific opinion of that time held that Mars was the only planet on which traces of life might be found. At the Juvisy Observatory, founded by him in 1883, Flammarion made numerous observations of the planet. As early as 1876 he had noticed the seasonal variations of the dark spots. In 1909 he completed La planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité, a compilation of all known observations since 1636.
Flammarion's love of life and his profound sensitivity led Flammarion to a literary as well as a scientific career. He published several novels, in which science serves as a backdrop.
Camille Flammarion's first book, La pluralities mondes habites (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds), originally published in 1862, secured his reputation as both a great popularizer and a leading advocate of extreme pluralism. As a scientist, he was celebrated for his research on double and multiple stars and the topography of Mars. He was named a commander of the Legion of Honor, one of France's highest nonmilitary honors.
Camille Flammarion was a Roman Catholic and believed in the existence of the soul.
Politics
Camille Flammarion wasn't involved in politics and his political views are not widely known.
Views
It was inevitable that Flammarion, who possessed an extraordinary intellectual curiosity and imagination, take an interest in what today is called parapsychology. His taste for scientific precision and his intellectual honesty led him to unmask the inaccuracies, lies, and hoaxes that have always encumbered this field. He directed investigations of and performed experiments in psychic phenomena and gathered most of the results into several books, including La mort et son mystère, L’inconnu et les problèmes psychiques, and Les maisons hantees.
Membership
In 1887 Flammarion founded the French Astronomical Society, a model for all groups aiming to spread interest in science among the general public. For the first time, relatively powerful astronomical instruments were put at public disposal, thus allowing numerous amateurs to indulge their taste for science. The activities of the French Astronomical Society created a reservoir of scientists from which emerged most of the outstanding French astronomers of this century.
French Astronomical Society
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France
Royal Astronomical Society
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United Kingdom
Personality
Flammarion possessed an extraordinary intellectual curiosity and imagination.
Interests
science fiction
Philosophers & Thinkers
Christiaan Huygens, Jérôme Lalande, David Brewster, Bernard de Fontenelle
Writers
Edmond Rostand
Connections
In 1874, Camille Flammarion married Sylvie Pétiaux with whom he had had an affair for several years and shared the same interest in astronomy and took her on a balloon trip for their honeymoon. After the death of his first wife from the Spanish flu, he married his assistant Gabrielle Renaudot on September 9, 1919, whom he had known since 1893. Flammarion earned the amorous attention of a French countess who died prematurely of tuberculosis. Although they never met, the young woman made an unusual request to her doctor, that when she died he would cut a large piece of skin from her back, bring it to Flammarion, and ask that he have it tanned and used to bind a copy of his next book. The woman also had a picture of Flammarion tattooed on herself. Flammarion's first copy of Terres du Ciel was bound thus, with an inscription in gold on the front cover: "Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish/ Binding in human skin (woman) 1882."
