The reverend Alexandre César Chavannes, born at Montreux on 30 July 1731 and translated to glory at Lausanne on 2 May 1800, sprang from steadfast Huguenot stock and bore the yoke of Christ and learning with singular constancy. Schooled in philosophy and divinity at the Academy of Lausanne, he was ordained in 1753, served beside his father, and from 1766 until death held the chairs of professor, rector, and librarian, compiling the academy’s first catalogue and its earliest history. During his Basel pastorate he cultivated fellowship with the Bernoulli savants while preaching the evangelical Word to the French Reformed congregation. His magnum opus, Anthropologie ou Science générale de l’homme—a 1788 printed abstract of a vast thirteen-volume manuscript—sought to wed bodily anatomy with the science of the soul, and there he first coined for the French tongue the term ethnologie, charting the study of the nations. In that “new science of man” he forged a pedagogic schema meant to marshal every branch of knowledge toward the cultivation of intellect and virtue. More than three hundred essays for the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon flowed from his tireless pen, trimming the lamps of the Helvetic Enlightenment. Remaining a bachelor, he walked humbly yet cut a broad channel through which modern anthropology still courses, esteeming him a father of its first principles.

The reverend Alexandre César Chavannes, born at Montreux on 30 July 1731 and translated to glory at Lausanne on 2 May 1800, sprang from steadfast Huguenot stock and bore the yoke of Christ and learning with singular constancy. Schooled in philosophy and divinity at the Academy of Lausanne, he was ordained in 1753, served beside his father, and from 1766 until death held the chairs of professor, rector, and librarian, compiling the academy’s first catalogue and its earliest history. During his Basel pastorate he cultivated fellowship with the Bernoulli savants while preaching the evangelical Word to the French Reformed congregation. His magnum opus, Anthropologie ou Science générale de l’homme—a 1788 printed abstract of a vast thirteen-volume manuscript—sought to wed bodily anatomy with the science of the soul, and there he first coined for the French tongue the term ethnologie, charting the study of the nations. In that “new science of man” he forged a pedagogic schema meant to marshal every branch of knowledge toward the cultivation of intellect and virtue. More than three hundred essays for the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon flowed from his tireless pen, trimming the lamps of the Helvetic Enlightenment. Remaining a bachelor, he walked humbly yet cut a broad channel through which modern anthropology still courses, esteeming him a father of its first principles.

Systematical Theologies:

Theologiae christianae fundamenta et elementa; (Lausannae)