Knowledge of diptera in France from the beginning to the early twentieth century

Abstract

Although insects have been objects of observation in French-speaking countries since the seventeenth century, and were illustrated by Reaumur and other scientists during the eighteenth, specialized dipterology only emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. The two main divisions of the Order Diptera were defined by French entomologists, namely Nemocera (currently Nematocera) by Latreille in 1817, and Brachocera (currently Brachycera) by Macquart in 1834. Insects as a whole were rarely studied until the late nineteenth century, when the discovery of their role in the transmission of important diseases resulted in the creation of a new discipline: medical entomology. From this time on, medically important groups (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.) have been objects of intense concern and study, especially at the Pasteur Institute and the Paris Faculté de médecine. But the most important French dipterist* in the twentieth century has probably been the Museum specialist Eugène Séguy.