CHAPTER FOUR

Careers in Anthropology and the Bertillon Family

By the 1880s there existed a second generation of atheist anthropologists who had trained with the freethinking anthropologists and then moved off in disparate new directions. The most important of these were the Bertillon brothers, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and Léonce Manouvrier (this and the next two chapters will be dedicated to each of them in turn). This second generation did not form a cohesive social or political group; in fact, there were some major rows here. They each shared a great many common assumptions with the original group—they all joined or crucially enabled the Society of Mutual Autopsy—but they can be meaningfully distinguished from them in several ways.

The core group of freethinking anthropologists had written for Libre pensée or Pensée nouvelle in the 1860s, dedicated themselves to a wide range of freethinking anthropological projects, and cited the group as a primary allegiance. There were some exceptions to this: Louis-Adolphe Bertillon and Yves Guyot wrote for those early, atheist publications and took part in many freethinking-anthropology projects but were not as cultishly devoted to the group in their rhetoric and often had other things on their minds. (Bertillon had been part of the Société d’anthropologie before the freethinkers came on the scene; Guyot was an important political figure.) Also Duval and Hovelacque were younger and did not write for the early freethinkers journals, but became avowed and lauded members of the core group.

The second-generation figures were much younger and came to the freethinkers after the group had embraced anthropology. The original freethinkers were all about Broca’s age: Broca was born in 1824; Mortillet and Louis-Adolphe Bertillon were born three years earlier, in 1821; Eugène Véron was born in 1825; Letourneau in 1831; and Royer in 1830. Lefèvre, the poet, was the youngster of the original group—born in 1834. By contrast, Jacques Bertillon was born in 1851, his brother Alphonse in 1853, Léonce Manouvrier in 1850, and Vacher de Lapouge in 1854. Though these younger men differed immensely, all of them spent their entire adult lives dealing with the consequences of a godless world and bodies bereft of soul. And all of them found a way to apply the anthropometry they had learned from the freethinkers to political interactions with the French population and the French state. This took place on an intellectual plane that was supported by a social, political, and economic dimension.

CAREERS IN FREETHINKING ANTHROPOLOGY

The freethinking anthropologists managed to create elite careers for themselves—often with a considerable amount of imagination and hustle—in ways that brought a great deal of attention to their atheism. Most of them were able to make their living from a combination of politics and anthropology. They curated anthropological museums and exhibits, organized anthropological conferences, applied for government grants for fieldwork or to visit foreign anthropological museums, conferences, and so forth, and hosted short excursions to anthropologically interesting sites for paying amateurs. With Broca, they created the Ecole d’anthropologie, where many of them had professorships. They also earned income from their books and articles. All this served the dual purpose of allowing the group to live comfortable lives and assuring that their ideas received attention.

Consider, for example, the career of Gabriel de Mortillet. As I have already discussed, Mortillet was forced into exile after having published inflammatory socialist pamphlets during the Revolution of 1848. When he returned to Paris in 1864, he actively contributed to several scientific and political journals, including his own archaeological journal and Libre pensée. In 1865 he founded the International Congress of Archaeology and Prehistoric Anthropology, taking an active part in its increasingly prestigious meetings. In 1867 Mortillet was hired to organize the anthropological exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair, and he published a pamphlet describing and explaining the presentation. (He arranged anthropological exhibits for the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 as well, and both events brought tremendous attention to French anthropology and to Mortillet in particular.) In 1868 he was made conservator of the National Museum of Antiquities at Saint-Germain, which had been founded in 1862 by Napoleon III to complement the Histoire de César that the emperor was then writing. During his tenure at the museum—and after—he served as mayor of Saint-Germain (1882–1888) and retained his post at the museum until 1885, when he ran for a seat in the French parliament and was elected deputy of Seine-et-Oise, sitting on the extreme left. It was during his time as mayor and as deputy that he carried on his infamous local program of deconsecration.

Mortillet was by no means the only freethinking anthropologist to fill a political post. Abel Hovelacque was a Socialist deputy and was president of the Paris Municipal Council from 1886 to 1887. According to the Grande encyclopédie, in 1887 Hovelacque prevented Jules Ferry from being renominated as president by physically locking him out of the National Assembly.¹ Henri Thulié also served as president of the Paris Municipal Council, as well as the general councillor of Seine.² Louis Asseline was mayor of the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris from 1870 to 1871 and in 1874 served as representative to the Paris Municipal Council (from which position he was instrumental in procuring an annual allotment of twelve thousand francs for the Anthropological Institute).³ Lefèvre served on the Paris Municipal Council as well. LouisAdolphe Bertillon served as mayor of the fifth arrondissement of Paris.⁴ Yves Guyot was the most politically successful as municipal councillor of Paris, deputy of the Seine (1885), and minister of public works in the governments of Tirard, Freycinet, and Carnot. He also served as director of Le siècle and editor-in-chief of the Journal des economistes (where he regularly featured Royer’s work) and published extensively on economics and republican politics.⁵

Returning to the career of Mortillet, in 1876 he and Broca founded the Ecole d’anthropologie on private funds, having collected one or more subscriptions of 1,000 francs from each of its thirty-four founders.⁶ Joined by Eugène Dally and Paul Topinard, Mortillet and Broca served as the school’s first professors. By 1880 it was receiving 20,000 francs per year from the French state. The Institut anthropologique received a yearly 6,000 francs from the Department of the Seine, and the laboratory was yearly awarded another 6,000. These funds, along with the substantial gifts and donations, allowed the school to pay an annual salary of 3,000 francs to each of its seven professors. Professors at established Parisian institutions earned a starting salary of about 6,000 francs, which could rise to 7,000 (they began at 3,000 francs and went to 5,000 in the provinces), so the salary offered at the Ecole d’anthropologie was a healthy contribution to a scholar’s yearly income in Paris at the time.⁷

After Broca’s death, the possession and distribution of these stable positions were entirely controlled by the freethinking anthropologists. Not only was Mortillet able to support a family by these means, but he was also able to install his son in a similar position. By the 1889–90 academic year, there were eight regular chairs at the school: Mortillet’s son, Adrien de Mortillet, held the chair in prehistoric anthropology; Mathias Duval took embryology and anthropogeny; Abel Hovelacque covered ethnography and linguistics; George Hervé was charged with zoological anthropology; Topinard had general anthropology (but would be dramatically ousted from his chair that year); Arthur-Alexandre Bordier taught medical geography; Charles Letourneau handled sociology and the history of civilizations; and Léonce Manouvrier received the central task of explicating physical anthropology.⁸

Whereas Durkheim was able to legitimate sociology by winning a chair at the Sorbonne, the freethinking anthropologists did not steward anthropology into any established institution. They could not grant degrees, and, largely because of this, anthropology remained slightly outside mainstream scholarship. But they avoided a great deal of rivalry and contention by forming their own semiprivate institute and filling it with excited fellow travelers. From all descriptions, it seems the place buzzed with a thrilled camaraderie as colleagues and specialized students worked together with a common methodology and spirit of action. As Royer said, it was a little church.

Over the years, Mortillet organized countless archaeological-anthropological tours. Each year the journals attached to the Paris anthropologists ran ads for these events. In 1885, for instance, L’homme announced anthropological day trips, inviting excursionists to guided tours of prehistoric sites a short train ride away from Paris.⁹ Mortillet also frequently applied for government grants for anthropological conferences and archaeological investigations.¹⁰ More often than not, he was awarded the sums he requested. He was given 1,200 francs to examine archaeological sites in the Midi in 1872 and was funded for a trip to a Stockholm conference in 1874 (600 francs). Broca, who was also attending, had heartily recommended Mortillet to the Ministry of Public Instruction.¹¹ In 1879 he was given 1,200 francs to attend a conference in Moscow after having written to Jules Ferry, then the minister of public instruction, explaining that France was the “terre classique” of anthropology, that for this reason more Frenchmen had been invited than any other group, and that they must attend in like proportion in order to maintain this reputation.¹² Following this trip, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent several published reports on the Moscow conference to Ferry, all of which celebrated Bertillon, Mortillet, Hovelacque, and Topinard as national treasures.¹³ The freethinking anthropologists had done an excellent job of promoting themselves, and their discipline, within the contemporary climate of nationalist competition for leadership in the sciences.

Success bred success. In 1880 Mortillet received 1,000 francs to take part in a conference in Lisbon. An official observer of this Lisbon conference reported to Ferry, who by then had ascended to prime minister of France, that the king of Portugal had personally welcomed the visiting scientists and that the queen had invited them to an “intimate ball” that she held every year for her son’s birthday. At the conference, the opinions of the French anthropologists were particularly honored, and in general “the scientific importance of the representatives of France . . ., the speeches and the toasts they had the opportunity to pronounce, have augmented the prestige of our nation.”¹⁴ France also played host to scientists from around the world. Foreign visitors to the society, school, museum, and laboratory were numerous and were given significant attention by those who ran these institutions. Some of the visitors were among the hundred or so foreign members of the Société d’anthropologie; they came to attend special conferences and regular meetings, to debate their positions, and to study at the museum and the school. Visitors of every background came to observe the many projects undertaken in the laboratory: the preparation of skull and plaster bone molds; the invention and use of new measuring instruments; the cataloging of human pathological specimens collected from the hospitals; the collection, characterization, and study of fossils; the dissection and anatomical description of primates; and the recording of thousands upon thousands of measurements taken from human subjects and specimens. Visitors also came simply to meet the authors of widely respected works of anthropology.

Mortillet published at least twelve full-length books on archaeology and anthropology, and his articles appeared in most issues of several anthropological journals. As I have reported, many of the freethinking anthropologists were extraordinarily prolific, a fact that is less surprising when one remembers they had originally come together not as anthropologists but as journalists and essay writers. Most of them supported themselves through careers that were quite similar to that of Mortillet: an amalgam of political, scientific, educational, and entertainment-oriented positions, with a good deal of their money coming directly from the state. Along with politics and anthropology, Letourneau continued to work as a doctor; Hovelacque as a lawyer. Lefèvre wrote novels and poetry and translated throughout his life. In these endeavors, members of the group continued to propagate their atheist anthropology and to transform the world from religious to scientific. Lefèvre’s published translations, for instance, included a version of Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things, one of the great essentially atheist works of the ancient Roman world, which itself owed its content to Epicurus, one of the great essentially atheist philosophers of the Greek world: a nice daisy chain of materialist atheism. There is little evidence as to Lefèvre’s literary success, but Zola did review one of his novels favorably, and Lefèvre consistently published his poetry in the republican literary journals of the period. Some of these, like La jeune France and La vie littéraire were also happy to publish Lefèvre’s (anti)philosophical musings and anthropological pronouncements. Some sample titles include “La vie philosophique,” “L’histoire” (sonnet), and “Paléontologie intellectuelle.”¹⁵ I have translated the first three poems in a series of five that ran in an issue of La jeune France. The subject matter is typical of Lefèvre: the awe in the face of scientific revelation, the dismissal of the gods, and the wistful sadness and mannered courage with which he confronts the facts of life in an atheistic world.

THE RETIREMENT OF THE GODS

The gods in their youth lived on earth.

They were well nourished, free and vicious.

They stole the eyes from the forests

And the mystery from the mountain peaks.

Diminishing respect made their faces austere.

They showed themselves less: alas! they were old!

Finding man too close they took to the skies.

Copernicus chased them from the planetary world.

They climbed higher yet, toward the unknown. Their bodies

Emaciated, more hollow than the ghosts of the dead,

They made themselves a coat of the silver of the stars.

But to the eyes of humans, the skies were open.

Poor gods! Science has lifted all the veils.

They are gone. And nothing is missing from the universe.

POSTHUMOUS RAYS

There are dead stars from which ancient light,

For millions of years, falls from the depths of the skies

And will bathe our night in a mysterious flow

Until its wave has run out entirely

And meantime even our dust will have perished.

Longtime, longtime after the extinction of our eyes,

In the void where once turned men and gods,

The river of light follows its career.

The poet and the star have the same destinies:

When the future receives their flame or their memory,

It comes from the depths of far away sepulchres.

Yes, the flash projected into the azure of history

Is the radiance of ancient extinct stars.

There is nothing but melancholy in our dreams of glory!

IMMORTALITY

Several millions of years! And the earth frozen,

In one block and naked, funerary flame

Will be seen engulfing it in its moving tomb.

Vegetation, life, and thought,

Nothing will rest of its eclipsed glory,

Nothing, not even a reflection of the True, the Good, the Beautiful.

Time will have taken back, to the last shred

Of the work of humanity, a page erased forever.

Nothing will exist anymore, nothing, not even the dead.

The world will be closed to immortal souls,

Because to be, they need to be in a body.

And those of the past? Alas! Where are they?

In the vague country of treasures spent,

Hopes accomplished, and futures past.¹⁶

Lefèvre was moved by these questions, writing historical verse on the origins of the secularist worldview and psalms to the mysteries of science. He was not just saying that the world was material and meaningless and so what? Rather, he was purposefully enjoying the invocation of disturbing scientific enigmas, staring boldly at the facts of death in a materialist schema and working to create a mood of deep, “religious” wonder.

In January 1881 Lefèvre published a short essay in La jeune France that had to do with a certain popular Christmas gift that year: the book was Robinson suisse, the French translation of The Swiss Family Robinson.¹⁷ The book was great, asserted Lefèvre, but there was one big problem: it was brimming with prayers and other “religious banalities.”“What was the author trying to prove?” asked Lefèvre, adding that if there is a Providence, it had thrown horrible trials in the path of this poor family, so why be impressed with it or thank it? Because of this, the prayers in the book seemed ironic to Lefèvre, who added: “What is worse is that they are as boring as they are superfluous. I will be amused, one day, to suppress from my copy all these superfluities. One would not believe how much of the text that would entail. Voilà the correction that we propose to an intelligent editor.” Lefèvre cautioned that he did not mean that people ought to get rid of devotional books—we would need to study those in future—but to edit all “instructive and moral stories destined to the laic youth.” Everyone in charge, “editors, authors, fathers of families,” had to be strong and not let such things reach the children: “Never has such weakness been more foolish, more inopportune: it’s a real absurdity. All its litanies, its invocations . . . are not only intolerable and nauseating; these literary pests are social pests. This is a solemn and terrible hour; it amounts to knowing if the world of science will definitively prevail over the world of tradition and of theocracy. And it is in this moment that they stuff nascent minds with twaddle and superstition!” Instead, he continued, children should be taught that nothing happens outside of “known, constant” natural laws that we “cannot escape” but can turn to our profit through our intelligence and courage and use to help establish justice, virtue, and happiness, “on earth and not elsewhere.” In closing, he took up another scientific metaphor, warning that “we must not ourselves throw into their spirits, still vague and troubled, the germs of possible errors,” since we have learned from Pasteur what “bad seeds” or “spores” can do. Such books should be edited out of respect for the future liberty of the children. Lefèvre also wrote a long essay entitled “Voltaire et les religions,” in which he excused the philosophe for his deistic beliefs, reminding the reader that “if we go beyond Voltaire, it is thanks to him that we may do it. He cleared the path.”¹⁸ There was also an article on “man, according to the discoveries of anthropology,” in which he discussed the accomplishments of all his friends at the Société d’anthropologie and told the story of humanity as an evolution of various races, some of which were destined to become extinct.¹⁹ Of course, it was in modern humanity’s religiosity that we most keenly showed the vestiges of these “earlier forms” of evolution (221).

As I have noted, the freethinking anthropologists managed to carry out a wide range of projects in pursuit of their goals. Some of this various work was more lucrative than it was influential, and some of it more influential than it was lucrative, but all in all it seems to have been a lot of fun and amounted to a career in anthropology at a moment when no clear pattern for such a career existed. Not surprisingly, the exception to this general success was Clémence Royer. As a woman, she had been barred from a scientific education, and throughout her life she was barred from most paying positions in science. As a result, she lived dangerously close to the edge of poverty. She was not ignored: she was well published, won prizes from such establishments as the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and was awarded the Legion of Honor, but the weight of economic penury took its toll. As she wrote in her will of 1895:

A victim of those prejudices that still are opposed to the intellectual development of women, I have worked all my life without pay to illuminate a blind humanity that has only created obstacles to the construction of my philosophical work by closing off to me schools, academic chairs, and laboratories. Everything that I know I have acquired after a great struggle, and I was obliged to forget everything that I was taught in order to learn everything by myself. I shall carry with me to the tomb useful truths that others will have to discover anew. Because I have had the bad luck to be born a woman, I have lacked all means to express, to correct, or to defend my thought, and I have done only the smallest part of what I could have done.²⁰

A heartrending lament. Still, she wrote a great deal and managed to participate meaningfully in the creation of a new discipline. She was an active participant in society meetings and in a whole range of national and international conferences, and her theories on the nature of the universe and the meaning of life were publicly debated in the prestigious journals and institutions of her time. Moreover, while sometimes serving the discussion in important and imaginative ways, one reason she met with professional difficulty was that she was more racist and determinist than were her colleagues. In any case, all her other contributions aside, her preface and translation of Darwin’s great work profoundly influenced the French reception of natural selection and determined the freethinkers’ turn to anthropology. In their hands, it was becoming a viable profession, and since their work also amounted to an extremely multifaceted work of evangelist propaganda for atheism and feminism, merely by this she had done much to forward her ideals.

For another quick angle on who all these people really were, we may gain something by noticing the progressive and radical figures with whom they spent their lives—a defuse network of materialist, freethinking friends and family alliances. As a detail here I will offer only the most engaging and strange, a sort of train wreck of associations recorded in Edward Hallett Carr’s The Romantic Exiles of 1933.²¹ Alexander Herzen was a materialist freethinker, a professor of physiology at the University of Florence, and a follower of the materialist anthropologist Carl Vogt (who was friend to Broca and Mortillet). His father, also Alexander Herzen (who died in 1870), had been the famous Russian radical émigré and one of the founders of Russian socialism. Nicholas Ogarev, another key founder of Russian socialism, was a close friend of the young physiology professor. Both Ogarev and Herzen were married, both had mistresses, and Herzen’s mistress was Ogarev’s wife, Natalia Tuchkova-Ogareva. The linked families traveled together and in mixed clusters. Herzen and Natalia had a daughter, Liza, who in the early 1870s was in her teens and alone with her mother: her father had stuck with his wife, her mother’s husband was living with his mistress. Mother and daughter were tense together, so Liza went to Florence to be near her father. She was living with her half-sister, Herzen’s other daughter, Olga, who was acting as guardian, when young Liza fell madly in love with one of her father’s friends: Letourneau. He had come to Florence to lecture at the university in 1874. Carr writes of him:

The other principal actor in it was a French savant, Charles Letourneau by name. He was already known as the author of a work entitled La physiologie des passions, now remembered chiefly as one of Emile Zola’s sources of inspiration; he published during the year 1875 a text book of biology; and these two works were followed by numerous other treatises of scientific or philosophical character. He survived until 1902; and there was nothing either in his earlier or in his later life to suggest that his share in Liza’s tragedy was anything but an incalculable and irrelevant episode in an otherwise ordinary career.

(350)

As for Liza, Carr tells us she was marked by imperiousness and shyness, that she was sixteen, and that she was the “most brilliant of Herzen’s children” (348). Letourneau was forty-four years old when they met and was happily sharing his stint abroad with his wife and children. There were intellectual and scientific salons in Florence at the time that were open to women as well as men, and these families all seem to have taken part. Perhaps that is where Letourneau and Liza first spent time in each other’s company. Letourneau tried to explain to Liza that he was thirty years her senior and married (we have their letters), but Liza was inconsolable and determined. Gabriel Monod, Olga’s husband, stepped in to try to mend the situation. An important leader of the new French “scientific” history, Monod was another significant figure on the secularist scene, a founder of the Revue historique, and, later in the century, one of the earliest Dreyfusards.²² Tragically, and even though Letourneau, too, made some serious efforts to discourage Liza’s affections, the young girl remained heartsick and actually killed herself over him (chloroform, a towel, a note). The story takes on a strange weight when one considers that Letourneau had translated Herzen’s Physiology of the Will from Italian to French, and Herzen had surely read Letourneau’s work on the material basis of the passions, yet these students of the will and the passions had utterly lost their girl. The living arrangements of her family, the idleness of her hours, and the fact of Letourneau’s status as her often-absent father’s colleague—well, each explains enough, and the nature of the anthropologists’ efforts to explain passion and will scientifically seems particularly maladroit in this context. In any case, this is a rare glimpse into the lives of these anthropologists and their social set; mostly we are able to know them only by their public writings and the slightly more personal material of their scientific societies.

The exception, again, is the case of Clémence Royer, whose private life with her lover, Pascal Duprat, a significant figure in the governments of both the Second and Third Republics, has been chronicled in much detail by Joy Harvey. Not least because she was a woman, and a feminist, and in a relationship with Duprat—who was married and with whom she had a son—Royer ran in different circles from most of the other anthropologists. Still here, too, Royer was part of a world of well-known progressivists, radicals, and active secularists. Harvey tells us that Royer and Duprat also spent time with Letourneau and Herzen in Florence, along with the materialist Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza, and that the families of Broca, Mantegazza, and Letourneau sometimes met in summer by the seaside in Spezia.²³

THE FAMILY BERTILLON

In turning to the second generation of materialist anthropologists, we must confront the profoundly overdetermined significance of the human body at the end of the nineteenth century. Michel Foucault’s work along these lines is central to the present discussion but not the only source of this observation and attendant critique. In a broad sense, with hindsight, it would be hard to miss the sudden concern with the body—counting it, measuring it, and documenting it—that became an implicit part of the state’s function by the early twentieth century.

The rise of the nation-state was attended by a new breed of experts, hired to guide and justify the state’s bureaucratic and penal interactions with the body politic. The experts were self-invented at first and were trusted because of the immense prestige of science in this period. Through its chemical and technological service to industry, science had transformed the material world. In medical science, the identification of pathogens and the creation of vaccinations seemed likely to bring an end to all known disease. It was conceivable that even death itself might be vanquished. The movement toward democracy in many countries also seemed to be a sign that the Enlightenment vision of science would be borne out as all humanity progressed to a kind of rational paradise on earth. The social sciences were developed in this period and in this mood. Anthropology, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry all borrowed the confidence of recent scientific triumph, and as each competed for public attention, government funding, and university positions, the leaders of the new social sciences often made utopian claims. Governments were increasingly taking it upon themselves to cure the ills of their societies—often directly replacing the religious functions of the church—and the social sciences were called upon to act. Often, however, they profoundly overstated their knowledge and abilities. What they claimed was that they could make society happy, healthy, and normal. That is, they claimed they could identify and cure deviance and thereby eradicate poverty, crime, and social unrest. Psychiatry was going to do it through the mind of the individual; sociology was going to describe and manipulate the patterns of society as a whole; and anthropology concentrated its attention on the human body, pledging to explain and regulate our physical and social evolution.

There was always a temptation—as there is to this day—to define away social problems by declaring some people to be less fit, innately criminal, biologically predisposed toward housework, or innately suited to poverty and squalor. It then becomes easy to argue that, for their own good and for the good of society, such people need to be kept in a certain role or excised from the population; the policies deporting criminals to far-off colonies were born in this logic as were a plethora of arguments about the role of women and the working classes.²⁵ Yet the vast majority of French social scientists examined in this study remained dedicated to egalitarian principles of race, class, and gender. With as much grandeur as exhibited by social pessimists, they declared that their social science would lead the way to an atheist, socialist, feminist utopia. Comparatively few of them, well represented by Georges Vacher de Lapouge, argued that the problems of the world were located in certain bodies and that utopia could only be achieved if these bodies were bred out of the population.

As we know, this approach would eventually be given a hearing. More palatable, environmental solutions were tried first, and governments busied themselves counseling individuals, changing curricula, and engineering public programs to enhance moral and physical hygiene. But deviance and poverty were not eradicated. As the rising eugenic movement of the early twentieth century earnestly advised men and women about whom they should marry and how they should raise their children, modern Western governments began to entertain the notion that the body politic could only be cured through surgery: metaphorically in the enactment of immigration quotas and quite literally in the establishment of involuntary sterilization within the penal system.²⁵ The results were horrific. They were not, however, the only effects of the governmental shift from traditional political power to what Foucault called “pastoral power,” that is, the state’s attempt to fulfill the historic role of religious care for the flock.²⁶ As Foucault put it, the modern state took it upon itself to “constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one” (2:235). This recalls the kind of mission statement made by the freethinking anthropologists in the name of anthropology. The two claims taken together suggest a lot about how social services that had traditionally been negotiated through religious institutions and theories were reassigned in modernity. The monolithic state did not simply try to take more control of bodies in order to perpetuate its own power; sometimes individual people and communities of theorists began this process not only to collaborate with the state for the sake of prestige and reward but in response to philosophical crises and in an explicit attempt to fill the gap created by the rejection of religion.

The freethinking anthropologists did not make this move of helping the government in its attempt to control or manipulate the body politic. The practical use of freethinking anthropology to the French government was almost entirely contained in their deconsecration project. They served to support the general legitimacy of the new government by providing an alternate source of truth that could rival tradition and church. Also, in disavowing the soul and its philosophical equivalent, the freethinkers helped to establish the body further as the site for social change. In the anthropological work of the Bertillons, Lapouge, and Manouvrier, the markings, shapes, and affiliations of the body now became the key categories through which human beings tried to imagine their most authentic selves.

The whole project of locating the meaning of human beings in their physical form was partly initiated and profoundly augmented through Broca’s work. After Broca died, anthropologists kept on measuring bodies, but measuring was never the central focus of the freethinking group. The freethinking anthropologists supported craniometry, and their work usually contained a good deal of it, but they did not generally base their conclusions on the measurements. They simply included such data as important descriptive information. They do not seem to have entertained the idea that the practice could translate into a powerful conservative social tool. Many of them had spent much of their lives as writers, and while they honored and supported craniometry as cleanly unmetaphysical, their own theories were primarily literary. In any case, whatever they measured, they were rarely making any other point than that there is no God, nothing is sacred, and religion is wrong.

The Bertillon family became interested in a very different set of problems, problems that served as an essential part of the new concern with the body politic. As noted, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon was a friend of Broca and one of the nineteen founding members of the Société d’anthropologie. As a young man studying medicine in Paris, Louis-Adolphe took courses at various institutes. He followed the lectures of Michelet at the Collège de France, and the two men began a long-term friendship.²⁷ Elsewhere, he studied population and statistics with Achille Guillard, an inventor and businessman who had christened the new science of demography (first publishing the word in 1855) and who had written a good deal on the subject. Bertillon and Guillard actually met in jail: between June 1848 and December 1851, Bertillon was arrested three times, Achille Guillard twice.²⁸ They were arrested amid the melee of demonstrations and police actions that accompanied the Second Republic and its fall, and into the Second Empire. It is harder to know whether they were involved as dedicated republican partisans, which the number of arrests suggests, or as physicians tending to the wounded on both sides of the barricade, which is what family members would later report. In any case, on one of these occasions the student recognized his professor. The older man was apparently able to arrange for somewhat more pleasant accommodations for both of them, which was lucky since they ended up spending some six months sequestered together in these hard circumstances.²⁹ After their incarceration had ended, Bertillon was welcomed into the home of his new friend and there met Guillard’s daughter Zoé. They were married in 1850 and thus began a demography dynasty.

As I have intimated, one strain of the family’s anthropological concern would become centered on natality, so it is interesting to note that Achille Guillard thought population changes were almost exclusively to be understood through death rates: natality did not have to be studied because it simply rose and fell with available sustenance. Also, he believed an automatic mechanism regulated the birthrate so that “when lives are short, there are lots of children.”³⁰ Though he coined the term, demography was not Guillard’s main concern; he was an inventor, ran a progressive school, and wrote on botany. His son-in-law, on the other hand, hammered out the basics of the science. Bertillon had earned his medical degree, but his friendship with Broca helped to lead him out of medical practice proper. He decided to join Broca in creating anthropology and took the impetus for his own specialty from Guillard.

According to a pamphlet written on Bertillon when he died in 1883, the whole thing was a kind of blind leap. Broca had bravely marched away from the Société de biologie and decided to create “a scientific society where one would have the right to draw all the philosophical consequences from one’s observations. Few men at first had the daring to join him. M. Bertillon, naturally, wanted nothing better, but he feared being out of his element in such a society: ‘I wouldn’t be able to render it any service,’ said he, ‘as I don’t know a word of anthropology.’ ‘Neither do I,’ responded Broca with his usual swagger. ‘All the more reason to learn it or, rather, to create it, because in truth, it doesn’t exist!’”³¹ When they got the society under way in 1859, Bertillon took a course with Quatrefages at the Museum of Natural History and studied craniology with Broca. Soon Bertillon was delivering papers on statistics and health to the illustrious Academy of Medicine, and in 1860 he assisted in the creation of the Société de statistique de Paris. In 1876 he became professor of demography and medical geography at the Ecole d’anthropologie. We can imagine that the first chair in demography would have taken a lot longer to materialize were it not for these relationships.

Bertillon was a freethinker. Under “Religion” on his sons’ birth-certificates, he wrote “None.”³² He collaborated with the freethinking group before they joined the Société d’anthropologie, publishing in their Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle. There he weighed in on issues of life and death in a godless world. For example, in his discussion of spontaneous generation, he reminded his readers that while Pasteur had proven that what we had thought was spontaneous was, in fact, a matter of contamination, there was no reason to assume that no spontaneous generation was possible, that is, that the creation of life required a God.³³ He was convinced that humanity would “very soon subjugate the living substance” as we had already begun to dominate the mineral world (171). The point of biology was “to vanquish illness and force death to recede! . . . That such a result might be despised by immortal gods, I can understand, but men?!” (172). The quotation is a lovely representation of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon’s concerns: atheism, materialism, progress, medicine, and the scientific mastery of death. He saw the notion of gods as retrograde, and depicted them as wanting to hold down humanity, to keep immortality for themselves. Since he did not believe in God, he used the term “gods”—the plural suggested defunct deities but also implied that he was speaking not of God but of those who claimed to represent him. “They” wanted to keep humanity mortal, “they” actually “despised” the idea of progress toward immortality or even longer life, but “men” should want to take over the roles, rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the gods, especially the privilege of immortality. “Men” were those brave enough to defy the infantalizing coterie of the gods and their representatives and take the good stuff for themselves. He was optimistic about our ability to do this because so much had lately been conquered, why not death too? But especially in this community of avowed atheists, the question of immortality in a world without God was not only about stealing long life from the gods in heaven and locating it on earth; it was also about recognizing that one’s own options for “living on” had been drastically reduced. His concern with death was as pronounced as that of the other freethinkers: a recent article on Bertillon by demographic historian Michel Dupaquier explains that he was “mostly interested in death: effects of vaccines, mortality by mushrooms, mortality in nursing infants, mortality of bachelors, statistics in causes of death, tables of mortality . . ., maps of mortality in France, etc.”³⁴

Bertillon’s interest in “mortality in nursing infants” seems to have had a profound impact on the history of modern France. In 1858 Louis-Adolphe Bertillon addressed the Academy of Medicine with a paper entitled “Etude statistique sur les nouveau-nés,” the general point of which was that urban French women were sending their newborns out to wet nurses in the countryside and the babies were dying in droves. Statistics made this visible by showing that infant deaths were highest in the thirteen departments surrounding Paris. Of course, many urban families who sent their newborns off for a few months or a few years knew full well that it was a dicey practice but were dependent on women’s remunerative work to survive. When very poor families contracted with the very cheapest wet nurses, the practice amounted to semipurposeful infanticide. Better-off families might send the babies out, too, because they thought rest healthier for the mother and the countryside healthier for the child, but such families could afford to increase the infant’s odds considerably by paying more for a reputable wet nurse—one who was lactating, for example.

Bertillon’s announcement was not directed toward unsuspecting families but toward the nation. In his recent book The Power of Numbers, Joshua Cole has argued that Bertillon’s paper led rather directly to the 1874 Roussel Law establishing strict regulations for wet nursing in France and thereby opened the way for a new kind of state intervention in the private lives of French families. Bertillon himself may have been primarily interested in showing that statistics could be useful; after all, the newborns were only one of his many concerns. But, as Cole points out, state control of the population was resisted at first because it offended ideals of individual autonomy. For this reason, early attempts to control the nation’s individuals were discussed in terms of controlling families, that is, women and children, and thus preserving the ideal of the independent male citizen.³⁵ There is a considerable literature, into which this argument fits, that understands the welfare state as natalist in origin and, further, as being negotiated through women so as to preserve a semblance of autonomy for the male citizen.³⁶ It is logical that the first steps toward a new caretaking and controlling role for the state would be most easily tolerated if directed toward a group so variously disenfranchised and so plainly in need: barred from most assemblages that generate new, articulated ideology; easily silenced when it does manage to speak (remember Broca on Royer’s study of natality); and unable to defend itself at the polls or in the legislature. The particular import of Bertillon’s statistical observation, then, was that it started the French down the path to the welfare state. Of course, there were a lot of factors involved, but it is a persuasive argument.

The first-generation freethinking anthropologist Louis-Adolphe Bertillon did not make this issue his life’s campaign. In fact, he never published the speech in question; his sons brought it to print in 1883, just after he died. At the very end of his life, he did become concerned with natality, but as late as 1874 he wrote, “Our fatherland is in need of workers and defenders . . . but I think that before studying the conditions of increase . . . it is urgent to discover the causes of our devastation, and in a word . . . it is better to conserve generations than to renew them.”³⁷ Note that this was written four years after the Franco-Prussian War. I will have cause to return to this matter, but for now let us remain in Louis-Adolphe Bertillon’s world in the 1870s. He was at the Ecole d’anthropologie hardly a year before he attracted an energetic disciple, the young doctor Arthur Chervin. Chervin joined the Société d’anthropologie in 1877 and launched the Annales de démographie internationale that same year. He published therein an eighty-page article by Bertillon. Chervin also organized a Congrès international de démographie in conjunction with the 1878 World’s Fair, and Bertillon was co-president of this with the economist and statistician Emile Lavasseur. In 1880 Louis-Adolphe Bertillon became chief of the Bureau of Statistics of Paris, located at the Hôtel de Ville.

All this work involved a good deal of general population counting, but, again, its practitioners wanted statistics to be useful and engaged as well as merely informative. They devoted their studies to a range of social questions. Bertillon was particularly interested in the various mortality rates of the Parisian social classes, a popular topic at the time. He cooked up a formula for comparing life expectancy to hygiene but found there were many such formulas being used by different people and that made it hard to compare data for the various areas of France. Bertillon made it his particular business to champion the use of a single formula. The mess of competing doctrines had to be replaced with “a truly scientific method,” a particularly difficult task when analyzing the mortality rate of, for instance, a hospital.³⁸ (He concluded it could only be done if calculated for the mean duration of stay.) As a modern observer has noted, while Louis-Adolphe is not always listed among the founders of the discipline, he “showed a remarkable perspicacity in figuring out a large part of the principal demographic problems.”³⁹ He also received a good deal of approving attention in his own time.

When Louis-Adolphe died in 1883, his last words to his sons were remembered as follows: “I have always labored to serve the truth; You, my dear children, must do the same.”⁴⁰ Jacques Bertillon served in the same manner his father and his grandfather had. He became a doctor, and in 1878 he joined the Société d’anthropologie. He had long been casually involved in demography, joining the Society of Statistics, which his father had helped found in 1879, becoming a member of the Permanent Commission on Municipal Statistics of the city of Paris that same year, and publishing Statistique humaine de la France in 1880. When his father died, Jacques took over Louis-Adolphe’s professorship at the Ecole d’anthropologie, as well as several of his other professional posts, editing the Annales and heading up the municipal statistics office at the Hôtel de Ville. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the daily newspaper Le temps ran a regular column, “Statistique de la ville de Paris,” which Jacques Bertillon provided and for which he was boldly credited. The popular column reported on the prior week’s deaths, broken down according to death by violence, suicide, typhoid, tuberculosis, and so on. It also offered a much briefer catalog of the week’s marriages and births.⁴¹

In 1885 Jacques helped found the International Institute of Statistics. For the Chicago meeting of this group in 1895, he was asked to provide an international nomenclature for causes of death, which the American Public Health Association adopted in 1897 and which remains the basis for the current international nomenclature. These included such caveats as, “In collective suicides there should only be counted those who have attained their majority. Minors ought to be regarded as the victims of assassination,” and, for death by amputation, “Do not include Amputation of the breast; Amputation of the penis.”⁴² This was an attempt to create a uniform language through which varied localities could meaningfully communicate, even in an immense world full of weird occurrences, and it was a crucial part of the transformation of the modern state. The state was too big to form a useful, fulfilling community unless it could become visible, be tied together by likeness and difference, and speak of its members in unifying, overarching terms. As Bertillon noted, “The important thing is not that the classification be perfect but that the morbid unities counted by statistics be the same everywhere.”⁴³ His classification was later modified, but he had started a movement with an important future. The World Health Organization describes the history of its mission thusly: “The history of the systematic statistical classification of diseases dates back to the nineteenth century. Groundwork was done by early medical statisticians William Farr (1807–1883) and Jacques Bertillon (1851–1922). The French government invoked the first International Conference for the revision of the Bertillon or International Classification of Causes of Death in August 1900. The next conference was held in 1909, and the French government called succeeding conferences in 1920, 1929 and 1938.”⁴⁴ Bertillon made health visible in the population by the simple gesture of insisting that everyone use the same terms. In the history of modern France, another of Jacques’s projects had an even more significant impact.

Despite his contribution of standardized nomenclature for causes of death, and unlike his father and grandfather, Jacques was not primarily interested in death. It was the other end of human experience that caught his attention. Cole has offered two reasons for the temporal gap between Louis-Adolphe Bertillon’s 1858 paper on infant mortality and the government action that resulted from it in 1874: First, there was real contention over the meaning and use of statistics because they seemed to minimize individual clinical cases, which were all most doctors relied on and which they defended for ideological and professional reasons. A wider population expressed epistemological unease about seeing the nation in terms of these numbers; the many essays on statistics and health that followed Bertillon’s study seem to have been necessary before the idea could influence policy. Second, the director of the Statistique générale de France between 1852 and 1870 was Alfred Legoyt, and he had been convinced, largely by the famine in Ireland, that French population “restraint” was to be applauded and encouraged. The devastating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War convinced a humiliated nation that Legoyt was dead wrong: he lost his job, and the nation turned to pronatalist doctrines so it would not be outnumbered in the future.

Jacques Bertillon was nineteen in 1870. The war must have had a terrific effect on anyone coming of age at that time, but we should not overstate the immediacy of the connection between the war and his obsession with the French birthrate: for most of the 1870s he lived as a general science writer. In the popular journal La nature, he described his father’s statistical work, bone collections at the Museum of Anthropology, natural human “monstrosities,” the importance of Broca’s findings, the courses at the School of Anthropology, and many other efforts of his freethinking friends there. It was only when his father died and he became a full-time demographer that Jacques championed the notion that the French military debacle had been due to demographics. To explain this, he turned from the Guillard-Bertillon concern with death rates and announced that the imbalance in population had its origin in a dangerously low French birthrate. Even he claimed only that the natural rate of increase was slowing, not that it was actually declining. Still, the population in France was not increasing as quickly as it was in Germany or England. In most European countries, better nutrition and various other factors of industrialized modernity were allowing people to live longer lives about a half-century before social mores and bourgeois family ambitions slowed the birth rate. For reasons that still partially elude demographers, the situation was different in France: the death rate declined more slowly, and the “grève des ventres” or “belly strike” started much earlier.⁴⁵ Population decline was not the entirely French problem it was made out to be, but it hit a nerve for a sufficient reason, and depopulation anxiety became a central feature in fin-de-siècle and twentieth-century France. Of course, as intimated in the idea of a “grève des ventres,” a lot of this had to do with controlling the “new woman” and blaming her for the perceived loss of national vigor.⁴⁶ Yet the population movement was also part of the ideological work of deconsecration taken up by the freethinking anthropologists and their students. Human sexuality and procreation had been monitored by religion and law. What the Bertillons inaugurated was a new, secular, even numerical way of talking about people’s sexual and reproductive behavior.

France also supported an opposing doctrine that was also based in numbers, statistics, and science. Bertillon’s pronatalist movement was in competition with the energetic and inspired neo-Malthusian campaign led by Paul Robin. A lycée teacher whose radical politics led to arrest and exile in 1870, Robin was a well-known revolutionary before he became an antinatalist. Karl Marx nominated him to the executive committee of the International Working Men’s Association, but he fought with both Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and was expelled from the International by 1871. His exile in London brought him in contact with the founders of the British Malthusian League, Charles and Elizabeth Drysdale, and they convinced him that limiting the production of workers and soldiers was one of the real powers that could be wielded by the working class. He published La question sexuelle in 1878 and returned to France as the Third Republic came into the hands of republicans. The new government appointed him director of an orphanage (of which he spoke in his testament for the autopsy society). In a modern observers’ words, he probably got the job “because his secular beliefs accorded well with the anticlerical bent of the government.”⁴⁷

Bertillon and Robin were competing openly in the late nineties: in 1896 Jacques Bertillon created the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française, which would generate the great bulk of pronatalist propaganda for many decades. In the same year, he published De la dépopulation de la France et des remèdes à apporter, which would be followed by several other books analyzing the problem and suggesting solutions.⁴⁸ Robin responded by creating the Ligue de régéneration humaine in 1896, dedicated to shrinking the population, and founding the journal Génération consciente as the organ for his own propaganda campaign. The intention of Robin’s group was mainly to impede war by slowing the production of working-class cannon fodder and to increase working-class wages by decreasing the population. But active feminists like the political organizer Nelly Roussel and the doctor Madeleine Pelletier joined his effort hoping to liberate women from the constraints of child rearing. Feminism and anarchism made this a prickly doctrine for some: Robin and Pelletier came under police surveillance, and it is no surprise that Bertillon eclipsed Robin in French public discourse.

In contrast to Robin’s internationalist desire to reduce the working class, Bertillon championed a nationalist call for more French soldiers. It does not take a postmodern to spot the theme: In a 1938 study entitled France Faces Depopulation, Joseph Spengler listed a multitude of measures introduced in the French legislature in 1878–1895 but not adopted. They included such gems as “that every Frenchman (not a clergyman or infirm) aged 26–40 years be deprived of all electoral rights until he had contracted marriage,” “that the state educate one child in each family of six or more,” and “that medals be issued to parents of large families.” In Spengler’s words, “These programs were explicitly or implicitly based upon the assumption that each individual citizen was duty-bound to defend and contribute to the support of its government. Whence it followed that he who shirked the first [procreative] duty needed to bear more than his normal share of the defense and support of the state.” Speaking of his own time, Spengler also noted that “all the principles and measures proposed and/or put into effect in the last thirty years were described and advocated in 1890–1913 by J. Bertillon and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, each of whom believed that the ‘normal’ French family must include at least three living children.”⁴⁹ Spengler went on to detail accurately the difference between those two theorists: Leroy-Beaulieu “urged that the attack on religion, especially Catholicism, cease, since its tenets and practices were favorable to natality.” Bertillon called for an end to such efforts “to restore religious faith and sentiments,” announcing that they were “illusory.” Also, Leroy-Beaulieu was less convinced than Bertillon that people’s life-and-death decisions could be manipulated by material gifts and punishments. Bertillon advocated, for instance, complete tax exemption for households of four or more living children and a tax increase of up to 50 percent for households of less than three living children; inheritance tax rates for families of three children high enough that the inheritance would have been the same for each child had there been fully twice as many heirs; limitation of the military requirement to one son per family; all government jobs, scholarships, and certain state loans reserved for members of families of three or more living children; leave with pay for women workers before and after pregnancy; suppression of all information on birth control; and celebrations for members of large families, designed to honor the children and encourage a sense of pride, responsibility, and national gratitude.

One of the more telling suggestions was “plural suffrage,” which here meant “reform of electoral laws, providing to each voter an additional vote if he is married and further votes for each minor child” (234–235). The tense equation of rights and reproduction reminds us that the very word “proletarian” comes from the Latin for reproduction; they were proles because all they could offer the state was their reproductive power. The notion of celebrations for children from big families was very significant as well, and the Mother’s Day celebrations that grew out of the eugenic, pronatalist concerns of fascist and democratic states between the world wars also served the celebratory needs and ideological dogma of the secular state. In 1919 Jacques Bertillon proposed the first of these for France: a “Journée des mères de familles nombreuses.” The idea was accepted by the minister of the interior. Jacques Bertillon was charged with organizing the event, and the first was held on the May 9, 1920. At another event for mothers of large families later that year, a gold medal was awarded to Marcelle Comblet-Sue, mother of thirteen. The celebrations continued annually and were more officially instituted in 1941, under the Vichy regime. Historian Karen Offen has shown that in the face of this pronatalism, feminists argued that women were having fewer children because of the huge economic, political, and social burdens and humiliations under which they labored.⁵⁰ She explains, however, that Bertillon thought this was ridiculous; it was all about men and money. Interestingly, Offen cites Dr. Thulié’s contribution to the debate because he was one of the few who championed women’s own explanations for limiting family size, and he lamented their precarious and undignified position and the fear that went with it. But when it came to offering remedies, Thulié, too, suggested patterns of funding that would only increase women’s dependence on men (648–649). As for Jacques Bertillon’s personal feelings about women’s participation in the public world, the first woman admitted to the Paris Faculty of Medicine, in 1875, was Madame Jacques Bertillon née Caroline Schultze. She was Polish and Jewish; her forward-looking thesis was on women doctors in the twentieth century.⁵¹ Their daughter, Suzanne, wrote the booklength biography of her uncle Alphonse that is a major source of the family’s history.⁵²

Jacques Bertillon’s works guided the Third Republic’s active struggle against depopulation, and his generally economic approach dominated French policy for much of the twentieth century (234–235, 239). The Alliance Nationale organized conferences, published a journal, raised funds for various natalist programs, and lobbied the French government with an impressive array of pragmatic suggestions. It also served as a nexus for registering and responding to real fears about the future. As Jacques Bertillon put it in 1897, “In fourteen years Germany will have twice as many conscripts as France; then that people which detests us will devour us.”⁵³ He was close with the date: seventeen years later he found himself serving as director of medical and surgical statistics for the army, a post he held for the duration of World War I. When the fighting was over, Bertillon founded the magazine La femme et l’enfant and generally resumed his propopulationist campaign. It was clearly convincing his peers: the Chamber of Deputies formed a natalist group in 1914, the Senate followed in 1917, and an official Conseil supérieur de la natalité et de la protection de l’enfance was set up in 1920.⁵⁴ Jacques Bertillon was an honored member of this significant branch of the Ministry of Public Health. Also in 1920, the National Assembly passed a new law on abortion and contraception, increasing the likelihood of conviction for both doctors and patients and mandating high penalties for advertisers of contraceptive methods. By the time Jacques Bertillon died in 1922, the propopulationist movement had eight national associations and sixty-two regional associations. A number of other institutions regularly paid out subsidies to larger families (128). In 1938 Spengler was still speaking of the Bertillon movement in the present tense, concluding that “since the war period, the collectivistic populationist philosophy of Bertillon has come to prevail in an ever increasing degree” (239). Several Bertillon economic schemes were put into action in the 1930s: the Family Allowance Act of 1932, for instance, and the Family Code of 1939.⁵⁵ Under Vichy, abortion was made a crime against the state. The Vichy government famously accused Marie-Louise Giraud of performing abortions; a thirty-nine-year-old washerwoman from Cherbourg, she was guillotined on a Friday morning in July 1943. The Alliance Nationale applauded the action.⁵⁷ Throughout all of this, by the way, the population rate did not respond.

Jacques’s younger brother Alphonse took a different road but was equally concerned with reconceptualizing the body politic for the new French state. Apparently, in youth he was a poor student and a bit of a black sheep in the family. Years later, his niece, Suzanne, would attest that although Bertillon père, Louis-Adolphe, gave no credence to phrenology, he allowed one of his closest friends, “the biologist Letourneau, who was strangely fascinated” by the art, to analyze the bumps on his two young sons’ heads. Letourneau announced that both had methodical and precise minds and that Alphonse in particular was capable of meticulous and orderly work.⁵⁷ This was not in any other way apparent for years. Alphonse was kicked out of several schools and seems to have gotten most of his education at home. It would have been an interesting one: His mother, Zoé, was remembered as an extremely intelligent and engaging person; for example, the family took a house at the seaside because “Zoé Bertillon wanted to rest on the beach and read the Ethics of Spinoza.” Jules Michelet and his family were with them on the trip, and when Michelet heard of her reading material, he laughed at the notion of a woman understanding philosophy. “It was Zoé Bertillon who laughed last. In a few days the professor of history was to be found continually upon the beach arguing the merits of the systems of Comte and Spinoza with the young and elegant woman, the wife of his disciple.”⁵⁸ In 1862 Madame Adolphe Bertillon and Elisa Lemonnier, wife of the Saint-Simonian turned Mason Charles Lemonnier, started a school together.⁵⁹ Called the Free Society for the Professional Instruction of Young Women, it aimed to help girls learn a range of employable skills. The school stood for “tolerance, respect for oneself and for others, devotion, sincerity, fraternity, and above all hatred of idleness.”⁶⁰ Zoé must have been an interesting mother. According to her granddaughter, she was lean and graceful, and she dressed and decorated her home in simple republican good taste. To his distress, she was noticeably taller than her husband.

As for the influence of the Bertillon boys’ father and grandfather, there are two early indications, one referring to extreme youth, one to the beach trip just mentioned. They are rather literary musings on the part of a biographer but were derived from unpublished correspondences among the Bertillons and biographical work written by the Bertillon family and are interesting enough to consider: “Dr. Bertillon and his father-in-law were deep in their statistical investigations. His room was full of calipers and gauges used for anatomical measurement. Even at the age of three, these mysterious instruments fascinated Alphonse and his elder brother. It was the beginning of an education in the guise of an intriguing game. In the course of a month of two they had measured with pieces of ribbon every article of furniture in the house.”⁶¹ Broca was also a common participant in skull measuring at the Bertillon house and was said to have been particularly impressive to the boys. Moving forward in time, while the rest of the family sunned itself with the Michelets, Jacques was at school abroad, and the Bertillon brothers wrote frequent letters to one another. Using the full Latin names, Jacques described the new methods of classification of rare plants that his grandfather was studying in Italy. “Not to be outdone, Alphonse retorted with grandiloquent descriptions of the marine plants he was collecting on the sea-shore. There was some mockery in this, but behind it was a real preoccupation with the Latin, and the botany, and the need to label the things they handled if they were to be recognized and understood” (36). There is a hint here about the nature of modern measuring, counting, naming, and labeling. After some category shift in theory, any collection of measurements or descriptive terms can suddenly become useless; but some of the use of these facts is in the experience of collecting them.

Alphonse eventually made up his mind to earn a medical degree and was doing well, but since he came to it late, military service interrupted his studies, and he never returned to them. While in the barracks he made “a metrical study of the 222 components which make up the human skeleton” (62). But according to his niece, when he returned to Paris, he infuriated his father with his ennui and indecision. His older brother, Jacques, was already well accomplished, and his younger brother, Georges, was passionately studying medicine, while he was without direction. At this point, his niece describes a moment when the prodigal son announced to his father that he had recopied a sentence from one of his father’s publications; the sentence was about how science finds order within what seems to be chaos. The father “who listened with much interest, smiled affectionately and proposed to him that he become a member of the Société d’anthropologie, which Alphonse accepted with joy.”⁶² It is significant that this society was the core community of Louis-Adolphe’s life, to which he would long to bring his errant son, at last an active member of the fold. Alphonse began attending the Ecole d’anthropologie and tried his hand at writing, publishing Les races sauvage.⁶³ The book was not well received. At last, he asked his father for help, and in 1879 Louis-Adolphe was able to find him a low level job at the Paris Préfecture de police, recopying police-report descriptions of criminals so that repeat offenders could be identified even if they gave false names.

Recidivism was one of the great questions of the day, so the concept here was important, but the casual descriptions and muddled filing system made the project almost useless.⁶⁴ Like his father before him, Alphonse decided to make his endeavor “more scientific,” and he pitched the idea of taking the anthropometric techniques practiced at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie (and discussed in every issue of the anthropology journals) and using them to regularize police descriptions. It was several years before they let him try out the system, but in 1882 he was given two assistants and three months to prove himself; as his niece would tell it, his future wife, Amélie Notar, joined them and did a disproportionate amount of the work.⁶⁵ When suspects were brought in, the group measured heads, forearms, fingers, feet, and a host of other minute bodily features. They also applied the anthropologists’ precise calculations for eye color, patterns of the iris, nose and ear shapes, and forehead lengths. Making use of his father’s statistical findings, Alphonse concluded that it would take eleven matching measurements to be sure that two sets of numbers had been taken from the same individual. Alphonse Bertillon took photographs along with his measurements, but, as Bertillon demonstrated, people could change their appearances easily from one photo to the next.

Yet though he downplayed the importance of photography in order to support the need for measurements, he would find new ways of using the camera for identification and for other police work. Because of Bertillon, in 1883 France was the only country in which a police department took identification photographs as a matter of routine (107). The measurements and photographs were cataloged using a clever new system.⁶⁶ Toward the end of the three-month trial period, a repeat offender did happen into the police station. The Bertillon team found him in their files, and when confronted the man confessed. Thus the “police identification” budget was extended. In the first year, they made 7,336 measurements and identified 49 repeat offenders. The next year, they identified 241, and in 1888 Bertillon was made head of a new branch of the police department, the “Service d’identité judiciare,” at a salary of 3,600 francs a year.⁶⁷ Identity cards were standardized and printed with room for side and frontal photographs and spaces for a host of measurements. Such a card exists for Paul Robin. It was surely done for amusement, because none of the measurements were taken, and Robin smiles slightly in his double portrait. But it tells us something about the mood within the materialist movement that Robin was in so amiable a relationship with the brother of the man with whom he spent his life publicly disagreeing.⁶⁸ The fun here has something to do with the growing fame of Bertillon’s endeavor. His techniques and his name would spread around the world, but even early on, in Paris, street lingo for an arrest was: “Un sourire pour le studio Bertillon”—a smile for the Bertillon studio.⁶⁹ The journalist and author Ida Tarbell described Bertillon’s office at the police station in a piece on Bertillon for McClure’s Magazine:

There was a peculiar individuality about the place—the look which a room takes when the utensils of one’s trade are scattered about it. They were odd enough—these utensils of M. Bertillon’s trade—maps of France dotted with bewildering figures and marks; rows of photographs of criminals, some of them better looking than the most upright man; a chromatic chart of the hair of the head: huge cases of notes; queer measuring-appliances; pictures from the Russian prison service; volumes bearing the titles, “Anthropology,” “Ethnology,” “Criminology,” and the names of Lubbock, Galton, Lombroso.⁷⁰

She also tells us it was a bright little room, that in the corner stood a tall green palm, and that the view out the window was the chimneys of the Conciergerie, the Palais de Justice, and the Sainte Chapelle (355). Tarbell was quite serious of purpose—McClure’s was an ambitious new general-interest magazine, and Tarbell had interviewed Pasteur for it the year before she covered Bertillon—but nonetheless, as an author, she capitalized on the exotic curiosities in Bertillon’s studio. It was essentially the same exotica of secret knowledge one would find at the Laboratory of Anthropology, and it could still create a bit of a thrill in its new location and new role.

In the modern state there are many reasons for identification beyond criminality, and even in its beginnings “Bertillonage,” as it was called, served a variety of needs. Consider a case that brought Bertillon early fame, in which a Madam Rollin complained of a missing husband. Friends visiting the Paris morgue for fun (apparently a somewhat popular idea) suddenly recognized a corpse as Rollin, and when they brought the “widow,” she took a look at the bloated body, thought of her missing man, and confirmed the situation with tears and lamentation (103–104). Bertillon looked up Rollin’s name in his files and found a card for him; he was no criminal but had been measured when arrested for drunken disorder. A photograph was attached, and everyone confirmed that the picture matched the corpse. Amid the sorrowful company, Bertillon was remembered as having shouted out: “The same man! Look at the ear!” and indeed the ears were very different (104). Bertillon was right. Rollin later turned up on his own. He had gotten drunk, fought with a policeman, and spent seven days in jail. Apparently the ex-widow was embarrassed but pleased. Photographs Bertillon took of the corpse “Rollin” and of the real Rollin have survived and confirm that without Bertillon’s trick of comparing ears, anyone might think the two men were but one. A whole range of Bertillon cases remind us that the populace was much more slippery in his century. He won a medal from Queen Victoria for helping to identify ten of fifty-seven bodies found after the shipwreck of the Drummond Castle in 1896 (130–138). There were few comparative materials for Bertillon to work with, but his precise observations allowed some relatives to recognize and claim their dead.

Bertillonage was adopted all over the Western world, and though it was rather quickly superseded by fingerprinting, Bertillon had a hand in popularizing fingerprinting, too, and was mistakenly known as its inventor in the United States and elsewhere. Evidence of Bertillon’s fame is legion; consider, for example, the testimony of Gallus Muller, a clerk of the Illinois State Penitentiary in 1889, who gave a detailed account of Bertillon’s American converts and summed up by saying: “The Bertillon system is in a fair way becoming a fixture of permanent and universal usefulness in the United States and Canada.” The existence of an “American Bertillon Prison Bureau” helps to confirm the assessment.⁷¹ Photographers for American green cards (which confirm a foreigner’s status as a resident alien) must still, to this day, insist that the subject’s right ear be clearly visible, a convention set purely for the sake of Bertillonage.⁷² In 1938 the retired royal commissioner of police in Dresden wrote that “Paris became the Mecca of the police, and Bertillon their prophet.”⁷³

A quick glance at the fortunes of Bertillonage in South America is presented by Alphonse Bertillon’s biographer Henry Rhodes.⁷⁴ In the mid-1880s, Doctor Drago, an Argentine, visited France to study anthropometry in order to advise his government on the type of criminal identification system it might set up. The government was particularly keen on this because of the unprecedented immigration Buenos Aires was experiencing at the time: a full 60 percent of the city was foreign born and effectively unidentifiable, and petty crime was rampant. When Drago came back, he heartily recommended the Bertillon system, and 1889 saw the creation of the Anthropometric Bureau of Identification, attached to the Provincial Police of Buenos Aires. Juan Vucetich was appointed chief of the bureau, installing the Bertillon’s system as he learned it from Drago and from the several textual explanations then available. Only two years later Vucetich decided the system was too inconclusive (Bertillon blamed this on insufficient training) and began adding fingerprinting to his identification bureau. He dropped the rest of the identification measurements after 1895, claiming that these alone had not served to identify a single recidivist. Apparently, Vucetich was the first to secure a conviction with fingerprint evidence as the only clue: a Francisca Rojas left prints that identified her as guilty of infanticide—an interesting first case, considering contemporary concerns.⁷⁵

Despite the demonstrated power of fingerprinting, Bertillonage continued to stand for measuring and identifying the population. In fact, when Vucetich publicly expressed his desire to fingerprint the entire population, there grew up Bertillon and anti-Bertillon parties in Argentina. In 1916 the government passed a law establishing a General Register of Identification to pursue Vucetich’s plan.⁷⁶ Vucetich was made its director, and he announced that everyone was required to submit to fingerprinting. Large sections of the population refused to comply with the ordinance, there were arrests, the windows of the General Registry were broken, and serious riots ensued. As an immediate result, the law ordaining the General Register was repealed. Not only that, all the identification records that had been compiled—according to the Bertillon method and the simple fingerprint method that came after—were burned by order of Don José Luis Cautilo on May 28, 1917.⁷⁷ Reportedly, Vucetich never recovered from the shock.

Kristin Ruggiero’s recent essay “Fingerprinting and the Argentine Plan for Universal Identification in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” confirms Rhodes’s account of periodic assaults on identification files.⁷⁸ Ruggiero shows that Vucetich’s motives were grand; he envisioned a world of peace and safety through identity knowledge. Everyone would feel “seen” and would therefore be their best selves, and he imagined this on an international scale. She also tells us that right from the beginning of this movement, in 1889, the Buenos Aires police department asked the Court of Appeals to force judges to let them measure people in their custody and the court had said no. “The court held that ‘Bertillonage [involved] the mistreatment of people being prosecuted and that judges should not authorize it,’ because of the view that measuring and photographing were intrusive and were like calumny and slander, and damaged reputation” (186).

It is interesting to note that the eclipse of Bertillonage measurement by fingerprinting may turn out to be a temporary lapse of a hundred years or so: computers will likely make facial measurements the basis for identification. Compared to biometrics, handwriting recognition has been more constant in its success, and it was also a major part of Adolphe Bertillon’s program. This had some dramatic and dire consequences: in 1894 Major du Paty de Clam, “expert in identifying handwriting by the Bertillon method,” along with Bertillon himself, concluded an investigation by these means.⁷⁹ The result that both announced was that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was, in fact, the author of a note that pointed toward espionage.⁸⁰ Dreyfus had been framed because there had been intelligence leaks to Germany, and because he was Jewish he made a convenient fall guy. The affair became famous for its ability to divide families and friends. Anti-Semitism was a defining issue of the day: the secular nation state could not be defined by monarch or deity, so the state was the people, and citizenship had no educational or property requirements: French birth and a Y chromosome would do. Taken together, these facts made the legitimacy of France and its elected government nervously dependent on the sense of a cohesive, true population. Anxieties in this regard were often negotiated through attitudes toward the Jewish minority. So Dreyfus was convicted, and, after an appeal, reconvicted, for reasons understood as protecting the French army from scandal and thereby protecting forces of authority and order. Half the population fought his conviction because they were defending the rights of the individual, even the outsider, in a just and decent state. But if the Dreyfus affair meant many subtle things, it is also true that Dreyfus was arrested and convicted because scientists said the handwriting matched—the bodies matched—and, at least at first, almost everybody listened.

The weirdest part is that Alphonse Bertillon was certain that the document had been written in a false hand to look like Dreyfus’s handwriting: repeated words were so “metrically identical” as to suggest they were traced from a single source. But because he thought that the method used was derived from a common method of constructing military maps, he believed an army officer must be at fault. Thus he contended that Captain Dreyfus had actually written the note, purposefully making it look like someone had tried to copy his handwriting so that he could later use this as his defense. This is what Bertillon proposed, rather than the much more obvious idea that someone had in fact forged his writing. The whole thing was pretty incredible and was certainly guided by the little bits of information that Bertillon had been given before he began his analysis. He does not seem to have known that the suspect was Jewish, only that he was strongly suspected; yet he did not change his mind once he knew the details of the drama, and in defense of his findings he came to speak of “the Jews” as somehow responsible for whatever subterfuge was going on. Given his background, it was a strange response. The Bertillons were an egalitarian, anticlerical family, and Jacques became an avid Dreyfusard. It is true that Jacques’s wife was Jewish, but that should suggest that he never was an anti-Semite more decisively than it suggests that her influence shaped his response to the affair. Meanwhile, Alphonse thought that the very forces of decline that his brother charted were actually at work here in a conspiracy to undermine French military and governmental authority. The affair so came between the brothers that they did not speak for many years. It will not be missed that Louis-Adolphe Bertillon’s injunction that his sons should “serve truth” had consequences not only in the inclusive, caretaking role of the nation state but in its self-legitimating, exclusionary behaviors as well: the male citizen and the fatherland were fabricated by the exclusion of women from full citizenship, and the nation found its self-image through the rejection of its Jewish minority. Alfred Dreyfus on Devil’s Island and Marie-Louis Giraud at the guillotine have more in common than the name of their accusers. Jews and women, signs and wonders.

Along with this infamous connection, Alphonse Bertillon is best remembered for his police work, and despite all the measuring, the most important aspect of this had to do with photography. He got very good at it, standardizing mug shots and improving flash technology through empirical experimentation. In the United States, too, he is widely credited with having invented the institution of the mug shot. Also, he created the portrait parlé, or “speaking portrait,” a book of charts made by cutting up photographs (often of himself and his colleagues), with which he trained policemen to recognize and name a variety of distinctive facial characteristics. In his Memory of the Modern, Matt Matsuda demostrates Bertillon’s important role in creating modern institutional memory.⁸¹ An article in Le matin on Bertillon’s training courses tells us that Bertillon’s philosophy was written in big black letters on the white walls of the classroom: “The eye sees in each thing only what it is looking for, and it only looks for what is already an idea in the mind.”⁸² Bertillon specifically asserted that only what could be named could be seen, let alone remembered, or, harder still, communicated across space and time.

Alphonse Bertillon also began bringing his camera to crime sites and was among the very first to do so. Most important, perhaps, he helped to popularize the idea that an untouched, recorded crime site could aid in police detection. On the cover of a popular journal in 1909, a caricature depicted Bertillon studying a bloodied wall with a large magnifying glass; the heading was “Bertillonnades” and the caption read: “Assassins always leave traces somewhere.”⁸³ Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes contribute “two short monographs” on the distinctiveness of ears to The Anthropological Journal in the short story “The Cardboard Box.” In this tale, Holmes takes Bertillonage as a proven fact, commenting, “As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear.”⁸⁴ In “The Naval Treaty,” Watson records a casual talk with Holmes as follows: “His conversation, I remember, was about the Bertillon system of measurements, and he expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant” (2:183). Finally, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, we find the following dialogue between client and detective:

“. . . I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe—”

“Indeed sir! May I inquire who has the honor to be the first?” asked Holmes, with some asperity.

“To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.”

“Then had you not better consult him?”

“I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently—”

“Just a little,” said Holmes. (2:7)

So Bertillon was cool enough to turn the great Sherlock Holmes a little green. Taken together, the Conan Doyle quotations demonstrate how completely the mythic Anthropological Journal shared a cultural meaning with “the man of precisely scientific mind.” Amusingly, between the world wars, Bertillon’s disciple, Dr. Edmond Locard, the founder of the Laboratoire de criminalistique de Lyon, was referred to as “the French Sherlock Holmes.” Art copied reality, then reality copied art. As these cultural responses suggest, Bertillon did a good deal of detective work, but he reportedly preferred measuring as a central occupation. Friends commented that Bertillon “worshiped precision to the point of idolatry” and that his “love of precision, even for its own sake . . . was almost obsessional.”⁸⁵

Detective work and measurements created a different kind of world of identity. Ida Tarbell put it rather neatly back in 1893, after describing Alphonse as “a tall man of slightly haughty bearing,” with a grave face, of long regular lines, “a dark, almost melancholy eye,” with a bit of a squint and “a nervous trick of knitting his brow”:

This was M. Bertillon, the originator of the modern system of anthropometric identification; the man who has so mastered the peculiarities of the human anatomy and so classified and organized his observations, that the prisoner who passes through his hands is subjected to measurements and descriptions that leave him forever “spotted.” He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless. The record against him is unfailing. He cannot pass the Bertillon archives without recognition; and, if he is at large, the relentless record may be made to follow him into every corner of the globe where there is a printing press, and every man who reads may become a detective furnished with information which will establish his identity. He is never again safe.⁸⁶

Adding “how this infallible Nemesis, this mathematically exact identifying machine, is constructed, was what I had come to learn,” Tarbell echoed her earlier hints that measurements and identity science were a hostile force. With Bertillon, she went through a whole course of measurements on a man who had been caught stealing rabbits and who claimed it was a first offense. After pages of description of all sorts of measurements, they went to look for a matching card in their files and, to Tarbell’s surprise, found one: “the rabbit-man” had been caught before. For her article, Tarbell also examined the photography studio and herself posed for a Bertillon photo. The description she left again reflects her sense of the hostility of the event: “In order that the distance may be invariable, the chair and camera are screwed to the floor, and there is a perfect system of adjustment. The light is thrown into the face. The result is hard on the subject. One does not care to display his judicial photograph, but for the purpose they are admirably, brutally exact.” Especially for the most troubled citizens of the nation, there must have been a profound change from living in a world in which one might always slip into the faceless crowd, no more connected to past deeds than any single pigeon in a flock might be held responsible for a crumb of bread that eyewitnesses, only moments ago, had seen it steal. Of course, near one’s home there would always be people to recognize one, but in the wider world changing one’s name essentially meant one could plead “first offense” every time. With the mug shot, the measurements, and the portrait parlé, the individual bodies became visible, and in ways that could be communicated at a distance.

Jacques and Alphonse Bertillon used the gestures of the freethinking anthropologists but took a leap into aggressive utility. The Bertillon brothers learned practices of counting and measuring at home with the freethinking anthropologists and within the specifically religio-atheistic context of the Société d’anthropologie. In that context, these practices had remarkably little practical function. They were published, taught, and discussed by a large section of society because the freethinking anthropologists included such measuring behaviors in their journals, books, school, and various meetings. The freethinkers themselves were more interested in piling up archaeological artifacts and ethnological details, but they also took thousands of measurements, and their many fellow travelers were heartily encouraged to do so as well. When the freethinking anthropologists used numbers, it was above all else a complicated secular gesture, and one so pragmatically useless, while so prodigiously meaningful, that we are justified in calling it a rite.

When the Bertillon brothers found uses for their quantifying behaviors and convinced the French state of their necessity, they branched off into practices that may have had equal passion but look familiar to us—as pragmatic endeavors and as the subject of present-day critique of the power of science. Neither brother completely ignored the social aspects of natality and criminal identification, but their concern with bodies would be difficult to overstate. They were discussing health and class by noting life spans, counting up bodies as the salient factor in assessing the nation, measuring individual bodies for personal identification, and encouraging bodies to produce more bodies in order to save the nation from decline. Each of the brothers became the head of a large group of acolytes and devotees; they had flocks and converts, students, and central texts. They were also using numbers to talk about sex and taking measurements to talk about identity. Whatever it was that they were saying, they were making scientific, public claims about subjects that had been understood as private and religious.

Jacques dropped out of the autopsy society soon after his father died in 1883. He lived until 1922. His younger brother, Alphonse, did not have his constitution and died in 1914. A tribute pamphlet published in that year tells us that Alphonse’s brain, noted to weigh in at 1.525 kilograms, was handed over to Manouvrier at the Laboratory of Anthropology.⁸⁷ He thus joined both his parents in having a publicly materialist death.

Though it was not in their official job titles, what was most visible to contemporaries of the freethinking anthropologists, what was constantly and explicitly articulated, was that they were atheists. Their job was to argue that everything, absolutely everything, could be explained and handled without recourse to God, priests, religious homily, saints, the devil, Catholic history, traditional morality, miracles, unctions, incense, or prayer. As for the Bertillons, their job titles accurately describe that for which they were best known: they were encouraging the production of soldiers for an as-yet-imaginary war and learning to identify the French populace. They were still measuring and counting all day long, but because the Bertillons convincingly applied the measuring and counting to specific “problems” of the French state (competition with Germany, criminals at large), they transformed the measuring and reclassifying behaviors into techniques of the pastoral modern state.