Société de Géographie

Among its 217 founders were some of the greatest scientific names of the time, including Pierre-Simon Laplace (the Society's first president), Georges Cuvier, Charles Pierre Chapsal, Vivant Denon, Joseph Fourier, Gay-Lussac, Claude Louis Berthollet, Alexander von Humboldt, Champollion, and François-René de Chateaubriand.

Although the Society rarely funded scientific travel, by issuing instructions to voyagers, encouraging research through competitions, and publishing the results of their work, it served in its early years as "an important institutional support" for the study of Mesoamerica.

Two members in the "active core" of the society played central roles in this regard: Jomard and the Irish exile and former United States consul David Ballie Warden.

[2] Their terms for a competition for the best new work on "American antiquities", including maps "constructed according to exact methods" and "observations on the mores and customs of the indigenous peoples, and vocabularies of the ancient languages.

[2] The society was to be associated in time with the greatest French and foreign explorers from René Caillié, the first European to return alive from the town of Timbuktu, to the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, and leading geographers, among them Vidal de la Blache, founder of the French School of Geopolitics.