Clémence Royer (21 April 1830 – 6 February 1902) was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy,[1] science and feminism.

After the failure of a rebellion in 1832 to restore the Bourbon monarchy the family were forced to flee to Switzerland where they spent 4 years in exile before returning to Orléans.

The next 3 years of her life were spent in self-study which enabled her to obtain diplomas in arithmetic, French and music, qualifying her to work as a teacher in a secondary school.

[9] In June 1856 Royer abandoned her career as a teacher and moved to Lausanne in Switzerland where she lived on the proceeds of the small legacy that she had received from her father.

She borrowed books from the public library and spent her time studying, initially on the origins of Christianity and then on various scientific topics.

One of these was Pascal Duprat, a former French deputy living in exile, who taught political science at the Académie de Lausanne (later the university) and edited two journals.

The two women became friends and started corresponding with Royer sending long letters enclosing articles that she had written for the Journal des Économistes.

We know from a letter dated 10 Sep 1861 that Darwin asked his English publisher Murray to send a copy of the third edition of the Origin to "Mlle Clémence-Auguste Royer 2.

[21] René-Édouard Claparède, a Swiss naturalist who lectured at the University of Geneva and who had favourably reviewed the Origin for the Revue Germanique,[22] offered to help her with the technicalities of the biology.

In her preface she challenged the belief in religious revelation and discussed the application of natural selection to the human race and what she saw as the negative consequences of protecting the weak and the infirm.

"[27] He was unhappy with Royer's footnotes and in a letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker he wrote: "Almost everywhere in Origin, when I express great doubt, she appends a note explaining the difficulty or saying that there is none whatever!!

It is really curious to know what conceited people there are in the world,..."[28] For the second edition of the French translation published in 1866, Darwin suggested some changes and corrected some errors.

[29][30] The words "des lois du progrès" (laws of progress) were removed from the title to more closely follow the English original.

[32] In the new edition Royer also toned down her eugenic statements in the preface but added a foreword championing freethinkers and complaining about the criticism she had received from the Catholic press.

She removed her foreword but added an additional preface in which she directly criticised Darwin's idea of pangenesis introduced in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868).

In November 1869 Darwin wrote to Hooker: I must enjoy myself and tell you about Madame C. Royer who translated the Origin into French and for which 2d edition I took infinite trouble.

When the new French translation finally appeared in 1873 it included an appendix describing the additions made to the sixth English edition which had been published the previous year.

She also worked on her only novel Les Jumeaux d’Hellas,[39] a long melodramatic story set in Italy and Switzerland, which was published in 1864 to no great acclaim.

[41] In August 1865 Royer returned from Lausanne to live in Paris while Duprat, proscribed by the Second Empire, joined her and secretly shared her apartment.

[42] With a small child to care for she could no longer easily travel but she continued to write, contributing to various journals and publishing a series of three articles on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

This was a subject that Darwin had avoided in On the Origin of Species but was to address in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex published a year later.

However, in spite of her generally anti-egalitarian views, Royer did maintain that there was no biological basis of patriarchy, seeing women's subordinate position as an only an aberration from original equality between genders that she believed had prevailed.

[49] Although Darwin had withdrawn his authorization for Royer's translation of his book, she continued to champion his ideas and on her arrival in Paris resumed giving public lectures on evolution.

[56] Royer was always ready to challenge the current orthodoxy and in 1883 published a paper in La Philosophie Positive questioning Newton's law of universal gravitation and criticising the concept of "action at a distance".

She found herself in a difficult financial situation and applied to the Ministère de l'Instruction Publique for a regular pension but instead was given a small lump sum.

Similar elitist views were held by many French feminists at the time who feared a return to the monarchy with its strong links to the conservative Roman Catholic Church.

[66][67] When in 1897, Marguerite Durand launched the feminist newspaper La Fronde, Royer became a regular correspondent, writing articles on scientific and social themes.