Abstract
In addition to rehabilitating the role of microbes, whose crucial role in all living processes - human, animal, plant, telluric and oceanic - we tend to forget, this lesson aims to reflect Western man's perception of microbes since the birth of microbiology at the end of the 19th century. A kind of anthropology of microbial perception ranging from the rejection of a world perceived as hostile, because dominated by the theme of pathogenicity, thus leading to the utopia of a pure, microbe-free man, to the recognition of the vital role played by microbes in key life processes, from the nitrogen fixation essential to amino acid synthesis in plants, to the role of the intestinal microbiota in the development of the human immune system. The reduction in microbial diversity on our planet is a threat to many ecosystems.
