Founding of the Musée géologique vaudois in 1874, 150 years ago
by Aymon Baud, Honorary Director of the Cantonal Museum of Geology and Associate Researcher at the Institute of Geology, University of Lausanne.
Introduction
In 1874, a meeting of the Commission des Musées was concerned about a dramatic lack of space for the collections of the Musée cantonal, created in 1818 and housed in the Académie building in the Cité. As the Conseil d'État had just acquired the Maison Gaudard south of the Cathedral, it offrit the possibility of transferring the geology collections and the botany cabinet to the first and second floors of this house.
Free from other natural science collections, the new "Musée géologique vaudois" will enfin its first visibility. This is thanks to Professor Eugène Renevier, honorary curator Philippe de la Harpe and the preparators who will take the greatest care of this heritage and welcome numerous new collections.
When it moved to the Palais de Rumine in 1906, the museum acquired an international reputation.

But who is Eugène Renevier?
Eugène Renevier, son of Charles, a well-known lawyer, was born on March 26, 1831 in Lausanne. His mother Henriette died when he was a child. His father remarried and took an active interest in his son's education, first attending secondary school in Lausanne and then the Polytechnic School in Stuttgart, where his father had sent him to boarding school. There, he learned the rudiments of the geology of the time.


It was here that he met Albert Oppel, a young man the same age as him, with a passion for paleontology. During his vacations in Lausanne, from the age of 16, Renevier ventured into the rock faces of the Diablerets massif to look for fossils, which he took to Stuttgart to trade with Albert Oppel, who already had a very extensive collection and was to become a renowned German paleontologist.
Eugène Renevier: his studies and first publications
At the age of 19, he presented his first paper to the Société vaudoise des sciences naturelles on the Jorat molasse. At the age of 20, he moved to Geneva to study with paleontologist François-Jules Pictet de la Rive, and began to study the geology of the Pertes du Rhône region.



In 1854, he went to Paris to study with paleontologist Edmond Hébert, and with him published a major paper on the Nummulitic fauna of the Alps.
He returned to Lausanne in 1855, armed with a wealth of scientific knowledge and a well-deserved reputation. The authorities understood the importance of attaching the young scientist to the Academy. As early as 1856, he was put in charge of a zoology course, taken over in 1858 by Auguste Chavannes. In 1859, at the age of 28, he was appointed Professor Extraordinaire of Geology.
The Cantonal Museum and Philippe de la Harpe
From the outset, Eugène Renevier surrounded himself with enthusiasts of geology and paleontology. First, in 1858, physician Philippe de la Harpe (1830-1882) succeeded Charles Lardy as curator of the geology and mineralogy collections at the Musée Cantonal, in the Académie building... In 1863, however, Philippe de la Harpe resigned from this position, having become too busy. It was then Eugène Renevier who, in addition to his position as Professor Extraordinaire, took over the curatorial activity, which he retained until his death, giving Philippe de la Harpe the honorary title of Assistant Curator of Paleontology. Until his death in 1882, Philippe de la Harpe came to work and study at the Museum on a regular basis.


Eugène Renevier and events in his life as a teacher
Four events will mark Professor Eugène Renevier's fifty years of teaching:

- The opening of an independent Faculty of Sciences at the Académie, which separated from Lettres et Sciences in 1869.
- The provision of premises for geology and mineralogy collections and teaching at the Maison Morave or Maison Gaudard (the latter name was adopted in the 20th century) south of the Cathedral in 1874.
- The creation of the University of Lausanne in 1890.
- The opening of the Palais de Rumine in 1905, with the installation of all the dispersed geology, paleontology and mineralogy collections and the opening of the new teaching rooms, just before his accidental death in 1906.
Creation of the Geological Museum at Maison Gaudard
In 1874, the State of Vaud provided premises for the geology and mineralogy collections and for teaching purposes. The premises were located in the Maison Morave, also known as the Maison Gaudard, to the south of the cathedral. This building, whose earliest elements date back to the 15th and 16th centuries, was purchased and restructured between 1671 and 1673 by the bailiff lieutenant Gaudard, who gave it much of its current appearance. The house remained in the hands of the Gaudard family until 1780, and from 1837 it housed the Moravian Institute until it was bought by the State of Vaud in 1873, hence its two names.
Renevier also obtained the installation of an auditorium for teaching geology and botany. Following this transfer, the relocation of the collections marked the first phase in the creation of geology and botany museums independent of the Musée cantonal, also known as the Musée vaudois.



A cross-section shows the organization and access to the floors referred to here as - rez inf., rez sup., étages and combles. A spiral staircase from the rue Saint-Etienne no. 7 entrance provided access to the auditorium, collections and exhibitions.



The Geological Museum's exhibits were located on the 1st and 2nd floors, on the light side. The second floor included the preparator's and curator's rooms, with windows overlooking the cathedral, and the two general and regional geology rooms. The second floor housed the paleontology and mineralogy exhibits, while the storerooms were on the ground floor (the view here dates from the 1930s, long after the Museums had left).
Renevier's description of the showrooms
These new spaces were opened to the public in 1880. In 1894, in his book on the Geological Museum, Renevier describes the layout of the exhibits, which we have transferred to the floor plans found in the Vaud Cantonal Archives (ACV).

Second floor exhibition
First, on the second floor on the right as you enter :
a) The general geology room displays collections of stratigraphy, sedimentary rocks and Cretaceous fossils from the region.
b) The regional geology room features rocks and fossils from the Alps, Plateau and Jura.
Second floor exhibition
Renevier also describes the layout of the second-floor exhibits, with the Paleontology Room on the right as you enter, and the Fossil Mammals grouped in the center of the room. The Mineralogy Room, the second room at the back, includes the general Mineralogy collection, displayed in twelve showcases, as well as minerals and rocks from the Urals from the collection given by Tsar Alexander I to Frédéric César De La Harpe.

Eugène Renevier describes in detail the contents of the two rooms on each floor. These descriptions can be found in Appendices I and II.
Maurice Lugeon, Museum designer
Maurice Lugeon, then a young teenager with a passion for the natural sciences, was welcomed to the Museum in 1882 by G. Leresche, botany preparator, who taught him how to determine plants and minerals. After Hermann Goll's departure in 1883, Renevier hired a new preparator, the young naturalist Théophile Rittener, who had already been working under Renevier on geological surveys in Savoy. So, after Leresche, it was Rittener who took the young Lugeon into the field and gave him a taste for the observations in which he was to excel throughout his life. However, Lugeon's parents felt that studying natural sciences was too costly, so they placed him in an apprenticeship at a bank in Lausanne.
To his bosses, he was a poor apprentice, spending his time preparing labels for his collections or herbarium, or furtively reading natural science books. His parents gave up, and by chance in 1886, a position as a preparator at the Museum became available, and the position was offered to Lugeon, who was then just 18 and had just started Gymnasium! Fascinated, he prepared his first paper for the Société vaudoise des sciences naturelles on fossil plants discovered in the Lausanne molasse, which he presented at a meeting on January 23, 1889.


The Cantonal Geological Museum and its preparators
But from 1888 onwards, Lugeon was entirely taken up with his studies. Renevier then hired Charles Bertschinger, who had worked́ with Goll in Professor Albert Heim's collections at Zurich Polytechnic, to replace him, and who would work as a preparator until 1893. Lugeon, on the other hand, between his lectures, will be busy classifying cantonal herbariums at the request of Professor Schnetzler. Following the illness and death of Charles Bertschinger in 1893, Renevier hired Henri Lador, a young Swiss watchmaker and naturalist who had emigrated to Nîmes, in 1894. The gifted Henri Lador had a remarkable career as a preparator at the Museum, where he remained until his death in 1932.
Relocation of the botanical cabinet and new premises for teaching and the Geology Museum in 1896

Following the relocation of the Musée botanique to another government building in the Cité in 1895, geology, which had been very cramped in the Maison Gaudard, was given additional space, and in 1896 the two rooms vacated were made available for the laboratory and for the museum's repositories. A new arrangement of the collections was organized, with the creation of a study and, from 1898, a new workroom for practical geology.
This is how Lugeon later described it in his memoirs (LUGEON 1940):
" What, in the ambition of a young scientist, I had pompously called a geological laboratory, consisted of a small, damp basement chamber. To improve the light that the sky was trying to let into this den through two small windows overlooking a narrow street, I had obtained, after a long justificatory report, two butterfly gas spouts. At each window, there was a small table, in the center a larger one, against the walls a meager bookcase with a few books bought at the lowest possible price from antique dealers, a few caned chairs borrowed from who knows where, so that when there were three or four of us working, it was crowded and we had to share space and light as best we could. But in this palace of science, enthusiasm, faith, belief, hope, joy, the desire to live and the thirst to learn reigned supreme.. "
Eugène Renevier and Henri Golliez
In 1887, Renevier entrusted another geologist, Henri Golliez, a young engineer from Vaud trained at Zurich Polytechnic, science teacher at the Collège de Sainte-Croix and member of the Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, who regularly came to the Museum to make determinations, with a professorship in geology and mineralogy at the Faculté Technique. The same year, Golliez was appointed General Secretary of the Department of Public Instruction, and took part in negotiations to transform the Academy into a modern university.
In 1889, he teamed up with Maurice Lugeon to describe turtle faunas discovered in new molasse outcrops at a construction site on rue de la Borde in Lausanne. This discovery was presented in the auditorium of the Musée Industriel on rue Chaucrau, where meetings of the Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles were held.


Eugène Renevier and the new University

The transformation of the Academy into the University of Lausanne, inaugurated with great fanfare in May 1891, provided the occasion for a major popular celebration. For geology, it brought a new development with the opening of two separate laboratories and two teaching chairs. The geology laboratory was housed in a room in the Gaudard house, and linked to the Museum's collections.
Henri Golliez, professor at the School of Engineering and the Mineralogy Laboratory
As Professor Extraordinaire at the newly named "École d'Ingénieur", Golliez creates the mineralogy laboratory, which, along with the zoology laboratory, will be located at no. 9 Place du Tunnel, in the Sollichon building leased by the State of Vaud. Renevier provides him with the Museum's collections for teaching mineralogy and petrography, as well as specialized books in this field.

Eugène Renevier rector and Maurice Lugeon teacher
In 1898, following Renevier's appointment as Rector of the University for two years (" You'll be led by a Rector fossilis instead of a Rector magnificus "In 1900, Lugeon took over as director of the Institut and the geology laboratory, with an important part of Renevier's teaching, namely paleontology and stratigraphy.
In 1902, the 100-page synthesis by Lugeon (1902) was published, extending the ideas developed by Bertrand (1884), then by Schardt (1893, 1898) and Bertand & Golliez (1897), showing that the northern front of the Alpine chain, from the Arve valley to Salzburg, is formed of large superimposed nappes that completely cover the true autochthonous front, hidden at depth. This synthesis, extended to the Carpathians and the Tatras in Poland by Lugeon and Termier at the International Geological Congress in Vienna in 1903, was to revolutionize the geological sciences and have a lasting impact on our understanding of Alpine tectonics.
The geological mastery displayed by the Lausanne School acquired an international reputation, and the new students attracted by Renevier and Lugeon, such as Emile Argand, Alphonse Jeannet and Ferdinand Rabowski, extended this reputation through their work in the fields of global tectonics and paleontology.
1905: opening of the Palais de Rumine and relocation of the museum
For Lausanne geology, 1905 was a very important year. First of all, there were the new students who came to Lausanne to prepare their thesis in geology. With them, Lausanne's impact on the earth sciences would grow on a Swiss and European scale! It's also the end of construction work on the Palais de Rumine and the start of the relocation of the laboratories, the Science Museums and the Cantonal Library. The transfer of collections from the Maison Gaudard to the Palais de Rumine is supervised by Renevier, and carried out by Lugeon with the preparator Lador and new assistants Argand, Jeannet and Rabowski.
On November 3, 1905, the Palais de Rumine opened to the University.


1906: The death of Eugène Renevier
On May 5, 1906, Renevier accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft in his home and died the following day, ten days before the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of his teaching at the Academy and the posthumous awarding of an honorary doctorate by the University of Geneva. At Lugeon's request, the large exhibition hall devoted to geology and stratigraphy, which has just been set up in the Palais de Rumine, will bear the name "Renevier", engraved on the entrance pediment. The other large room, dedicated to paleontology, will bear the name "De la Harpe", also engraved. Through perseverance and hard work, Renevier succeeded over a period of some forty years in transforming a small geological cabinet, housed in an early 19th-century museum, into a large, independent and internationally renowned museum of geological sciences, superbly housed in the Palais de Rumine from 1906 onwards.
More detailed article: The stupid death of Eugene Renevier
Conclusion
As Henri Blanc, professor of zoology, wrote in 1912 in his book "Historique du musée zoologique", about the separation of the museums in 1874: "A great good was to result from this new organization; it enabled our museums to have the useful staff they most urgently needed, and from that time onwards they took on a new lease of life".
It is interesting to note that this separation of the museums and this new organization of 1874, so necessary to their development, were curiously overlooked in the book "Le Musée cantonal 1818-2018" published in 2021, and in particular in the chapter written by Nicolas Gex "Entre enseignement et recherche. Le Musée d'histoire naturelle comme lieu de savoir (1870-1940)", even though there was not just one natural history museum, but three distinct cantonal museums: botany, geology and zoology.

Compared to the plethora of natural history museums in Switzerland, a museum that every major city has, the Canton of Vaud had the privilege and originality of having three very distinct museums that collaborated and each offered their well-targeted services to a demanding public. However, in 2022, the Conseil d'Etat approved the creation of a "Cantonal Museum of Natural Sciences" and placed a single director at its head, thus erasing the cantonal museums of botany, geology and zoology, reduced to the status of departments within the new "Naturéum". Is this costly solution a step forward? Only time will tell.
Bibliography
Baud, A. (2019). The academic teaching of geology in Lausanne from 1832 to 1906: Eugène Renevier and the geological naturalists. Bulletin of the Société vaudoise des sciences naturellesvol. 98, 159-197 (ISSN 0037-9603).
Bertrand, M. 1884. Structural relationships between the Glarus Alps and the northern coal basin. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France (3), 12, 318-330.
Bertrand, M. and Golliez, B. 1897. The northern ranges of the Bernese Alps. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, 3, 568-595.
Blanc, H. (1912). Le Musée zoologique de Lausanne: ses origines - son installation au Palais de Rumine - ses collections. Bulletin of the Société vaudoise des sciences naturellesvol. 48, 71-124
Collective of authors (2021). The Cantonal Museum, 1818-2018. Histories and issues of encyclopedic museums. Bibliothèque-Historique-Vaudoise, vol. 150, 1-208.
Gex, N. (2021). Between teaching and research. Le Musée d'histoire naturelle comme lieu de savoir (1870-1940). In The Cantonal Museum, 1818-2018. Bibliothèque-Historique-Vaudoise, vol. 150, 79-92.
Golliez, H., & Lugeon, M. (1889). Note sur quelques Chéloniens nouveaux de la mollasse langhienne de Lausanne Compte-rendu de la SVSN du 19 juin 1889, 12
Lugeon, M. (1902). Les grandes nappes de recouvrement des Alpes du Chablais et de la Suisse: Bulletin de la Société géologique de France, 4, 723-825.
Lugeon, M. (1903) Les nappes de recouvrement de la Tatra et l'origine des Klippes des Carpathes. Bulletin of the Société vaudoise des Sciences naturelles 39 :17-63.
Lugeon, M. (1949). 100 ans de géologie vaudoise. Suisse contemporaine, vol. 7-8, 13-22.
Renevier, E., (1894). Notice sur l'origine et l'installation du musée géologique de Lausanne. Bulletin of the Société vaudoise des sciences naturellesvol. 30. 199-208
Renevier E. & Golliez H. 1894. Les Alpes centrales et occidentales. A geological guidebook to the Swiss Jura and Alps dedicated to the International Geological Congress 6.ème session in Zurich. Payot Lausanne. 197-235.
Robert, O. & Pavese F., (2000): Dictionnaire des professeurs de l'Université de Lausanne dès 1890. Université de Lausanne, Etudes et documents, vol. 36.