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The situation of biology in France in the twentieth century has always been considered something of an oddity. The theories of the Darwinian Modern Synthesis and of population genetics were not included in standardized university curricula and the main research programs until the 1970s. Against the Darwinian picture that was developing abroad, French life scientists promoted various forms of Lamarckism. The aim of this chapter is to produce a general picture of these different twentieth century Lamarckian research programs which deeply structured various fields of the French life sciences, like morphology, zoology, paleontology but also microbiology and virology. We first recall the failure of the first Lamarckian program, based on a mechanistic understanding of life, and which aimed at explaining evolution in terms of cumulative adaptation through the inheritance of acquired characters. We show that during the interwar period, French Lamarckians were no longer unified in their understanding of the evolutionary process but instead defended a heterogeneous array of concepts. In particular, we examine philosopher Henri Bergson's legacy, which was pivotal in the setting up of a second Lamarckian program that started to develop in the 1940s with the work of zoologists Albert Vandel and Pierre-Paul Grassé. While it is true that the various forms of Lamarckism delayed the reception of Darwinism and, to a lesser extent, genetics, we assess their impact on the way the Modern Synthesis and molecular biology were conceived and developed in France by non-Lamarckian biologists like Georges Teissier, Philippe L"Héritier, André Lwoff, or Jacques Monod.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69123-7_11

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