Which French scientist independently suggested dark stars in 1796?

Pierre-Simon Laplace independently suggested dark stars in 1796.

In his Exposition du système du monde, Laplace proposed that gravity might affect light and that an extremely massive star could have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. Light would then be unable to leave its surface, creating an object resembling the modern black-hole concept.

Laplace’s idea used Newtonian gravity and the older corpuscular picture of light, not Einstein’s general relativity. It therefore was not a correct description of a black hole’s curved spacetime or event horizon. John Michell had proposed a similar “dark star” in 1783, so Laplace’s contribution was an independent development rather than the first suggestion.

The idea was largely forgotten as wave theories of light became influential. Black holes returned to mainstream physics after general relativity, especially through Karl Schwarzschild’s 1916 solution and later work showing that gravitational collapse can produce them.