Grandjean de Fouchy, elected to the Paris Académie des sciences at the age of 24, was still active fifty years later, when he celebrated what has been called his « remarriage » in 1781. He broke all records of longevity, holding the position of permanent secretary for thirty years, contributing thousands of pages to the « History of the Academy », delivering sixty-four eulogies, all of which were published, including those of the major scientists of his time : James Bradley, Alexis-Claude Clairaut, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Abraham de Moivre, François Quesnay, René- Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Guillaume-François Rouelle, Caspar FriedrichWolff, etc. Yet his work when not passed over in silence is most often disdained, taken to be second-rate. This is quite unfair : Fouchy may not have had the flights of lyricism of a Fontenelle, nor the anticipations of a Condorcet (such was not his intention), but he gave precise, serious and accurate accounts of the work of his contemporaries. Toward the end of his life he drew up the project of a history of the Academy since its beginnings, which had been on his mind for a long time, bringing together all the eulogies and synthesizing the « History », providing the main founding texts, etc. Illness and ultimately death prevented him from carrying it out, but traces can be found in the archives, which we shall present. This project is perhaps not unrelated to Condorcet’s Sketch for a historical tableau of the progress of the human mind.