The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France

In the next century people will be slaughtered by the millions for the sake of one or two degrees on the cephalic index. That will be the sign, replacing the biblical shibboleth and the linguistic affinities that are now the markers of nationality. Only it will not have anything to do, as it does today, with questions of moving frontiers a few kilometers; the superior races will substitute themselves by force for the human groups retarded in evolution, and the last sentimentalists will witness the copious exterminations of entire peoples.

—Georges Vacher de Lapouge, “L’anthropologie et la science politique”

Georges Vacher de Lapouge initially presented this idea in a series of lectures held at the distinguished University of Montpellier in the early 1880s. He first published it in 1887, in Topinard’s Revue d’anthropologie. The article, entitled “L’anthropologie et la science politique,” contained Lapouge’s first descriptions of “anthroposociologie”: the application of anthropology to social politics. Phrases such as “slaughtered by the millions” and “copious exterminations of entire peoples” remove this quote from run-of-the-mill nineteenth-century eugenics, though Lapouge himself was not calling for copious exterminations. The statement was intended as a warning about what would happen if governments did not take rational control of breeding practices. Lapouge was not, it should be noted, angry at the inferior races, but he was very angry at “the last sentimentalists.” He had been taught anthropology by the freethinking anthropologists in Paris in the years between 1883 and 1886, and at some point he became enraged that they embraced anthropology and atheism and yet remained egalitarian republicans. Lapouge believed that these and other atheists had stopped just short of the awful truth: no God meant no meaning and no morality. For Lapouge, this translated into a complete indictment of the existing society, culture, and government, based as they were on principles derived from deistic morality. “Here is why I have been speaking to you of the abyss and of a cataclysm,” wrote Lapouge:

It is obvious, to my eyes anyway, that if one eliminates the supernatural element from the universe, it is necessary to eliminate, at the same time, a number of fundamental notions—all of which were, in the past, deduced from supernatural tenets. All of morality and all of the ideas that serve as a base for law and for the political sciences, in their present-day conceptions, constitute a series of deductions of which the first term assumes the existence of a personal divinity. . . . Remove all validity from this source, and there is nothing left.¹

He was not happy about this meaninglessness, except insofar as it allowed him to eradicate moralist barriers to a “selectionist state.” He did, however, relish the amorality of his imagined future and its brutal rule of science.

Lapouge is of interest here because he studied with the freethinking anthropologists and then remained a politically engaged atheist anthropologist throughout his long and strange career. He, too, completely rejected philosophy as a source of meaning and comfort. In an attempt to replace religion (without philosophy), Lapouge took what he had learned from the freethinkers and created his own impassioned science. Because he spent most of his life in the French provinces—that is, in republican France and not even at its urban center—he did not have many local converts. He did have some, but what is more important is the extensive community he was able to create by mail—a relatively new possibility as inexpensive, reliable postal systems had only just come into being, changing the nature of group formation as much as the Internet has done today. Through his articles, books, and tremendous correspondence, Lapouge led a vast, thinly spread, and distant flock. Central to his project were the deconsecration of sex and its translation into a scientific ritual and the reordering of humanity on the basis of skull measurements. To his far-flung audience he delivered scientific sermons, dramatically detailing the paradoxes of infinity, eternity, and other scientific enigmas.

Lapouge noted the freethinkers’ attempt to replace religion with science and mocked them for it, insisting that humanity would never again know religious comfort. Yet his own religious behaviors and intonations show how much he wished to re-create religious experience and how far he was willing to go in trying. Lapouge occupied an odd conceptual space: his rhetoric was as adamant in its atheism as that of the freethinkers, and as suggestive of a cultic science, and yet it was racist and antirepublican, thus beginning the collusion of science and conservatism that is the hallmark of the new right. Further, Lapouge created an employable science: there was governmental use of Lapouge in Germany and the United States both during his life and after; in France, such use was made just after he died in 1936. (The next two chapters will explain how it was suppressed in France until Vichy.) Like the freethinking anthropologists, Lapouge’s work was impassioned by a fiery and agonized commitment to the disenchanted world or, rather, a commitment to a world reenchanted by scientific proposal and paradox. But he also offered pragmatic suggestions that became part of the technology of the state in the twentieth century. There is a direct relationship here to the origins of the Shoah that lends further consequence to these issues. I will begin with a quick look at what Lapouge was claiming, and then, because Lapouge responded to it, I will examine a feature of the limited but important French Catholic revival in the mid-1890s. I then move on to demonstrate the anguished atheism, explicit antimorality, and deconsecrated human sexuality proposed by Georges Vacher de Lapouge.

Lapouge saw humanity as divided into two races, each of which could be identified by its “cephalic index”: one dolichocephalic, the other brachycephalic. The index was calculated by comparing the width and breadth of the human skull: a low index, that of the dolichocephalic, meant a long, narrow head; the brachycephalic had a higher index—a round head. The notion of a cephalic index had been around for some time, originating with the Swedish anthropologist Anders Retzius. While Retzius clearly thought dolichocephalics were superior to brachycephalics (he had in mind a good Swede/bad Slav binary), Lapouge’s innovation was to attribute a host of specific qualitative characteristics to these labels. Dolichos, as he referred to them, were fair skinned with blue eyes, temperamentally energetic, creative, adventurous, and refined. They were more often Protestant than Catholic and were the majority population in northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England. Later, Lapouge came to use the terms “Aryan” and “dolicho” interchangeably.² Because of migration and intermixing, all those who spoke Aryan languages were not dolichos, but all large groups of dolichos spoke Aryan languages.³ “Brachies,” (also his term) were much darker in complexion, tended to live in mountainous regions, and were more often Catholic than Protestant. They preferred to stay near their homes and chose constancy over change. In a word, they were good, honest people whose lack of imagination and courage marked them as mediocre. They upheld civilization but did not create or advance it. Indeed, explained Lapouge, brachies were more comfortable in positions of servitude than in positions of leadership. It was this mild and uninspired group that dominated the populations of France, Spain, Italy, all of Asia, and most of the Slavic countries. Interestingly, where Broca had seen a causal relationship between skull size and aptitude, Lapouge saw skull shape (not size) as a general marker of aptitude rather than as its decisive causal agent. He could thus declare that some African peoples were dolichocephalic, but that in their case this did not indicate superiority.⁴

Lapouge saw his dolichos and brachies as belonging to different socioeconomic groups, and while his depiction of the relationship between social standing and skull shape sometimes shifted, he was unswerving in his insistence that the aristocracy of the ancien régime had been dolichocephalic. Because the French Revolution had removed the aristocracy from control in France, the dolichos were overwhelmed by the masses of brachies. Without legal or financial power, the group was losing its identity, intermixing, and dying out. Meanwhile, the brachies were ruining the country. Capitalist democracy was a disaster because it selected for mediocrity, allowing the spoils to go to whomever could outcompromise, outlie, and outhaggle everyone else. Lapouge wanted France, redesigned as a socialist-selectionist state, to regulate its citizens’ professional and reproductive lives accordingly. As he would frequently assert, “Liberty, Egality, Fraternity” had to be replaced by “Determinism, Inequality, Selection.”⁵

In his major works Les sélections sociales (1896) and L’Aryen: Son rôle social (1899), Lapouge attributed another notable evil to capitalism, namely, that it was the economic system most favorable to the Jews. Lapouge classified Jews as dolichocephalic, which was precisely why he considered them dangerous. This is significant when taken with the knowledge that, first, the cephalic index was a very slippery set of measurements, and there are many instances where one scientist declared that a given people were dolichos and another claimed that those same people were brachies; prior assumptions guided these measurements. Second, even to the degree that Lapouge may have assiduously measured Jews to be dolichos, he could have dismissed this as not, in this case, implying intelligence, as he did with African dolichos. Hence, it is reasonable to suppose that Lapouge chose to denigrate the Jews as an intelligent and therefore formidable people within the context of contemporary anti-Semitism. He saw them as the only human group that practiced eugenics, in that they stressed marriage within the group and steered clear of mixing with the brachies. They were thus the only group that seemed to have both intelligence and foresight; still, he considered them venal outsiders. Through their clever breeding and conspiratorial behavior, he argued, Jews were quite likely to become the new aristocracy of Europe, and the danger of Jewish domination was especially pronounced in France because of the thorough displacement of the proper, traditional aristocracy. Countries with large populations of dark, Catholic brachies were described as being more susceptible to Jewish domination than dolicho countries, partly because brachies preferred to serve (“they have found the master for whom they had been looking”) and partly because they tended to set up the mediocrity-producing capitalist-republican societies that the Jews were able to dominate.⁶ Anti-Semitism was not prominent in Lapouge’s early articles, however, and in terms of scientific theory, Lapouge’s work was similar to most of the other essays in Topinard’s scientific journal. The most striking difference between Lapouge and the other anthropologists was in tone, for already in these early essays Lapouge envisioned the world as being on the brink of a total revolution based on his theories of heredity.

In France in the middle of the 1890s, a Catholic revival was getting under way. Of its several manifestations, I will deal here only with the one most debated in the academic press and most prominently rejected by Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Léonce Manouvrier. These two ex-students of the freethinking anthropologists of Paris came to situate themselves in opposition to this rather academic religious revival. Lapouge and Manouvrier were intellectual and political adversaries, but they both stood up for science.

In 1895 Ferdinand Brunetière, editor of the Revue des deux mondes, penned and published an article entitled “Après une visite au Vatican.”⁷ The article said very little about the interview he had had with the pope, instead presenting an aggressive argument for the revival of Catholicism. This article has been mentioned in several histories of the Third Republic and was discussed at length in Harry Paul’s article of 1968 “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895.”⁸ Paul’s analysis of the changing relationship between religion and science identifies 1895 as a moment of heightened tension between the positivist French state and Catholic revivalism. The concerns of the present study lead to a different reading of the “bankruptcy of science” debate, concentrating on its preoccupation with the loss of the soul and its attempt to find a reasonable description of humanity balanced between materialism and the idea of spirit.

Ferdinand Brunetière was a prolific and respected literary critic, famous for his multivolumed tomes on lyric poetry and the history of French literature. Before 1895 he was widely known as an avid republican, rationalist, freethinking scholar, maître de conférence at the Ecole normale supérieure, and editor of the Revue des deux mondes. He used the pages of that journal to discuss Darwinian theory, anticlericalism, and philosophical materialism—all in the name of secular democracy. In his last decade, however, he became increasingly conservative and nationalistic, and when the Dreyfus Affair polarized the country, he joined the anti-Dreyfusards in their defense of the state and the forces of order. His shift toward the political right can be dated from his article “Après une visite.” Vigorous reaction to his apparent conversion (including a banquet held in express opposition to the essay) seems to have pushed him still further to the political right. Yet it is crucial to note that in “Après une visite,” Brunetière was neither announcing a personal conversion nor even a changed intellectual position regarding the nature of reality. Rather, he was calling for a change in social strategy. He feared that without the morality of religion, the republican body politic would fall into chaos. In defense of bourgeois security, he dramatically asserted that he had been mistaken in the past: science could not convince the mass of human beings to be good.

Brunetière suggested, but did not insist on, the bankruptcy of science. Scientists had invented and discovered a great deal, but so far they had failed to provide meaningful answers to the great questions of human origins, human destinies, and human values. In late-nineteenth-century science, observed Brunetière, questions of free will and moral responsibility were outrageously dependent on results garnered from physiology. The “theory of evolution,” he asserted, “will never tell us where we are going,” and “neither anthropology, nor ethnology, nor linguistics will ever tell us who we are.”⁹ When Brunetière needed a quotation to demonstrate the position of total antimetaphysics, he turned to André Lefèvre’s La religion. Lefèvre claimed: “Religions are the purified residues of superstition. The value of a civilization is in inverse proportion to its religious fervor. All intellectual progress corresponds to a diminution of the supernatural in the world. The future is science.”¹⁰ In citing him, Brunetière did not choose a scientific claim as “exhibit A” but rather a piece of evangelism of a level that even many secular republicans found a bit trying. Brunetière insisted that the progress that was intended by joining the moral sciences to the natural sciences was not progress at all but rather a step backward: “If we ask Darwinism for lessons in moral behavior, the lessons it gives us will be abominable.”¹¹ Still, his chief concern was not that scientific morality would be vicious. Rather, his main point was that the secular morality of scientists taught the same lessons as religion without the requisite supervision. He had become convinced that science could not provide a convincing social morality because without sanctions in the afterlife, no morality could be sufficiently imposing.

Brunetière directed little attention to philosophical attempts at a science of morals, though he did not mind the idea that Christianity might eventually be replaced by another moral system, so long as it was metaphysical and not physiological. “I dare to advance the idea,” wrote Brunetière, “that if we ever establish a laic morality, a morality independent not of all metaphysics but of all religion, it will not be in physiology that we find its base” (111). For the moment, democracy required Christianity. The only question, according to Brunetière, was which kind of Christianity. As I mentioned in chapter 2, many progressivists had hoped that France might deal with its anticlericalism by embracing Protestantism and thereby keep faith but lose the onerous authority figures. In an interesting reversal of ideas, Brunetière advocated Catholicism, “which is a government,” while “Protestantism is nothing but the absence of government” (113). He wanted the authority figures and was looser about the faith.

This whiff of utilitarian motivation pervades the essay. What did Brunetière actually believe? He insisted that even were we to accept that all our human emotions and instincts were of a purely animal origin—“which, moreover, one can absolutely refuse to admit”—that would not discount the fact that “the object of the last six million years of civilization has been to separate humans from nature,” not to tie human beings to a “moral determinism” based on the physical sciences and natural law (116). Further on, Brunetière explicitly referred to himself as “a partisan of the idea of evolution” and seemed to grin as he excused the Catholic orthodoxy as “no doubt hav[ing] its reasons” for not subscribing to the argument that “ferocious, prehistoric blood” flowed in our veins. But, Brunetière continued, evolutionists such as himself could enthusiastically agree with the church that “virtue is nothing but the victory of the will over nature. Which is to say, without metaphor, that the will only determines itself in breaking with nature” (117). As I have noted, the question of whether humanity ought to follow nature or distinguish itself from the natural world was a central issue of the period. Brunetière’s choice to distinguish humanity served to remove the natural sciences from the position of authority on human affairs and thereby to support the validity of religious claims to knowledge.

Brunetière warned that to keep people of goodwill divided on the question of morality because of differences of opinion that were based on “exegeses and geology” would be “the most unpardonable, stupid mistake.” He challenged those who had been long and publicly committed to materialism to swallow their pride and reverse their position. “Suppose,” he asked, “that social progress could be made only at the price of a transitory sacrifice, which did not cost anything of our independence, nor of our dignity, but only of our vanity. Hesitation would not be permitted.” So in late-nineteenth-century France, not believing in God supported or allowed a certain kind of vanity? Yes, and independence and dignity, too: the denial presupposes the notion. Brunetière was willing to trade in these feelings for comfort and stability. His call was for the intellectuals to fix society even if it meant reliance on a realm of unscientific (even untrue) ideas. As he put it, “Sick people don’t care about rules, so long as you heal them” (117).

Published responses to this article were numerous and passionate. Catholics celebrated it, if not with all of Brunetière’s caveats. Materialists disagreed with Brunetière’s proposition outright, arguing that science was doing fine and had no need to run back into the arms of a paternalist, dogmatic religion. The famed chemist and Unremovable Senator Marcellin Berthelot was among the most prominent in this role.¹² In his several studies on science and morality, Berthelot argued that “the laws of natural determinism” were the only rational basis for a moral system worthy of free, republican citizens.¹³ Religious dogma, he asserted, never helped to abolish slavery or torture or helped to further respect for life, universal liberty, tolerance, equality, or solidarity.¹⁴ He held that Christian charity was inferior to positivist solidarity, and he met the unsavory connection between scientific morality and the “ferocious egoism” of the “pitiless struggle for life,” with a similarly unpleasant connection between religion and the “fanatic who desires to conquer and dominate the world in the name of his God” (466). Ethics and politics. The natural sciences, on the other hand, were offering a new morality through the demonstration of morality’s instinctive origins. “The hereditary perfecting of these instincts,” wrote Berthelot, “is the true basis of morality and the point of departure for the organization of civilized societies” (463). This was very much the rhetoric of the freethinking anthropologists. They were not often personally involved in the debate—they were aging, and many had already been dissected—but Clémence Royer did weigh in on the question. Stymied, she asked, “How dare they accuse science of being bankrupt at the end of a century in which it has renewed the face of the world and created a new humanity?” and she listed the great accomplishments of technology as proof of her position. True to her life’s convictions, she believed that the problem lay with those who held “their science in one cerebral hemisphere and their religion in another.”¹⁵

The other major scientistic response to Brunetière’s challenge was issued by Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet. As demonstrated in the pages of his journal, Revue scientifique, Richet was an enthusiastic supporter of the freethinking anthropologists, though he sometimes cautioned against their mixing of politics and science. His “La science a-t-elle fait banqueroute?” appeared in Revue scientifique immediately following the appearance of Brunetière’s piece, which had appeared in his own journal: they were dueling giants.¹⁶ Of course, Richet did not think science was bankrupt. For him science could not possibly fail in its promise to explain everything, because it had made no such promise. As we know, the freethinking anthropologists had made this promise, and, of course, Richet knew it, but he let Brunetière be the only one to quote Lefèvre. Second, Richet claimed that anthropology had, in fact, done a great deal to explain human origins. He recognized that there was unknowable mystery in the world but argued that though science could not unveil the “intimate nature of things” (34), it was not an oppositional relationship; in fact, science kept discovering new mysteries. Richet argued that science was so profoundly responsible for all aspects of modern civilization, it was silly to judge it singularly, in any particular limited function. Science could not discover laws of morality, but it had indeed improved morals by creating the context in which liberty and responsibility came to represent the ideals of society. “Without getting lost in the clouds of the questionable future that awaits us after this terrestrial existence” (38), humanity could now simply be just and good and kind. In a rather open spirit, he claimed that the morality of religion and science was the same, but, in the event, we had come to uphold the ideals of peace and justice through scientific, civilized modernity. As Richet put it, it was not religion that stopped slavery and torture, it was enlightenment: “The terms science and civilization are identical” (34).

As I will discuss in chapters 7 and 8, Brunetière’s call for a return to Catholicism also drew a vigorous response from philosophers and sociologists, challenged by having been left out of this “science versus religion” discussion of morals and unwilling to agree with either strict materialism or pragmatic religiosity. Some of this vigorous response, denouncing anthropology and religion, was a direct result of the vicious, scientistic antimorality proposed by Vacher de Lapouge at the very end of the century.

In his lectures and written texts, Lapouge assumed his audience to be secular republicans who believed in Darwinism and in the inequality of human beings but were not brave enough to take these notions to their logical conclusion. “I take a malicious but vivid pleasure,” he wrote, “in catching the myriad errors in a number of recent articles that have appeared in the socialist, anarchist, or so-called democratic journals. In Darwinism, or in more general terms, in scientific doctrines on the origin of the species of the world, they have seen, above all, an argument with which to oppose religion and, here in France, an argument with which to oppose the church, which is creationist and dedicated to the text of Genesis.” This was certainly true of Clémence Royer and the other anthropologists of Paris and could also be applied to the younger Brunetière, among many others. According to Lapouge, they were all using science to disprove religion, but when science suggested a course of action that contradicted their own moral and/or eschatological universe, they refused to acknowledge it. “They have not understood,” he wrote, “that Darwinism applied to human beings in their social existence excludes for the future all elements of nonscientific social explanations, which is to say, it removes all supernatural causes from the general causality of the universe. When I say ‘they’ I mean the freethinkers, or those who qualify as such, because from the very beginning the churches have seen the consequences of these new theories and have taken steps to denigrate them.”¹⁷ Lapouge used the word “supernatural” to imply anything spiritual or philosophical: anything that could not be proven by his science. Consider, for example, his discussion of human equality: “Some people, believing in the mystical principle of human equality, cannot bear it when one speaks to them of superior races. I am not even going to take the trouble to contradict them. It is perfectly useless to reason with minds that are thus turned toward the supernatural; only fictions have value in their eyes. I address myself only to those for whom facts have meaning, as do numbers, which are also facts, grouped and counted” (397).

The freethinkers were so devoted to materialism that they wrote books on the biology of aesthetics, pronounced philosophy dead, and dissected each other’s brains, yet Lapouge accused them of mysticism because they were egalitarians, and he believed that the idea of equality had originated in Christianity (rather than, say, the other way around). Themselves troubled by the idea of unscientific ideals, the Paris freethinkers had created an inherently progressive evolutionary model as a secular basis for their political values, but Lapouge did not accept it. He thought they were just too frightened to admit the truth. As he saw it, the republican postulates of fraternity and equality were based on the Christian idea that all God’s children are brothers; liberty and individualism were based on the idea that each human being has a distinct and significant soul, and charity and morality were God’s commandments. Many devoted republicans had similar misgivings: the republic did seem to have been based on Judeo-Christian ideals and philosophical tenets, from religious morality to the idea of individual free will. Like the freethinking anthropologists, other republican social theorists found new ways of justifying these notions, either scientifically or philosophically. Lapouge, however, was as angry at democracy as he was at Christianity, so he tried to salvage neither one nor the other from their damning mutual association. Christianity, it should be said, was despised by Lapouge because of the ideas the religion promoted—ideas Lapouge considered to be false, patronizing, and dangerous to the race. Christians, as a group, however, were not despised by Lapouge. This was because he did not define them as a homogeneous racial group but rather as representing two major racial categories, dolichocephalic Protestants and brachycephalic Catholics. By contrast, Lapouge’s discussion of the Jews was sharply critical of the Jews themselves and not particularly mindful of the religion’s doctrines.

In pronouncing the failure of Christianity, Lapouge wrote that religion had originally served three purposes: it explained the origins of things, it provided a moral system, and it comforted sorrows and assuaged the fear of death. Now, he maintained, the mass of people believed in natural evolution and thus no longer required religion to explain human origins. That no one had an explanation for the origin of living matter itself, he claimed, did not bother “a great part of thinking humanity”: “This problem, they imagine, will soon be resolved like all the others; it all depends on a laboratory experiment that might take place tomorrow.” Religion’s second charge, morality, was a more formidable problem. People had always thought that society could not exist without morality and that morality could not exist without religion. Now, Lapouge contended, there was a modern understanding of the “arbitrary character of our morals.” Yet that had not really changed anything, since the Christian moral system was the only one that most people knew. This was a problem because Lapouge believed the Christian moral system to be “among the worst” since it was based on the existence of a life after death, which he saw as “infinitely improbable.” The belief in an individual’s life after death had precipitated a moral system that “sacrifices society to the individual and real life to imaginary mystical interests.” While Brunetière and others were trying to find the most meaningful and coercive basis for standard Judeo-Christian ideas, Lapouge was not interested in keeping those ideas. “Our contemporaries have seen all this, the moral crisis that has thrown everything into disarray. The morality of yesterday is on its way out, and the morality of tomorrow has not yet been born” (508). Taking the notion a step further, he mused, “We are on our way, by new formulas based on social hygiene, toward the elimination of the idea of morality. It is an evolution that has its advantages and its inconveniences but that the progress of human knowledge renders inevitable” (509). Lapouge saw the political and cultural battle over Brunetière’s Catholicism as meaningless in comparison to the war on morality that was to come in the twentieth century. Operating without a heavenly censor and burdened with scientific proof of racial superiors and inferiors, human beings were about to face some extraordinary questions. Among his many warnings of crises and revolutions to come, Lapouge wrote that “our epoch of apparent indifference is the beginning of the greatest crisis of religion and morality that has struck humanity since it has begun to think.”¹⁸

Christianity’s third and final purpose, to be a comfort “during painful crises in life and at the hour of death,” was, according to Lapouge, completely invalid now that it was clear that there was no life after death. “Oh, the millions of mourners who have been consoled by the golden promises of Christianity! Oh, the millions in agony that it has soothed—up until the supreme instant of the fall into nothingness!”¹⁹ These phrases express both disdain for those who believed such ideas and envy for their existential comfort. The freethinkers running the Society of Mutual Autopsy had managed a slightly mournful culture of optimism. Lapouge seemed to celebrate his misery, but there was nothing optimistic about it. “The great consoler is gone. If religion has done harm to society, it is also true that individuals will never again have such promises of happiness” (509).

Lapouge certainly was not offering promises of happiness, but his passionate sermons on the meaning of life were meant to cast a kind of religious thrall. The freethinking anthropologists imagined an edenic future, to replace heaven, and replaced reliance on God with an appropriation of his power. Vacher de Lapouge instead cultivated a parallel to hellfire, even within his plans for a relative utopia, and replaced pained religious awe with pained wonder at scientific paradox. He wore his pessimism as a badge of honor, arguing that his bravery in accepting such a dismal situation proved that he was honest and, by extension, correct. Lapouge billed his relativism as the quintessence of objectivity, but it was all in the service of a passionate description of the emptiness of life. “There is no such thing as superiority in and of itself,” wrote Lapouge, “any more than there is a top and bottom of the universe, or a good and bad, but we are used to orienting ourselves in space according to certain conventions. Accordingly, we regard the courageous as superior to the cowardly, the active to the indolent, the free to the servile, the intelligent to the weak of mind, the man of character to the waverer, the far-seeing to the shortsighted” (398). It is a classically religious gesture to announce that the hierarchies and truths of everyday life are of no consequence in the immense, real world. Lapouge echoed these religious concepts as had other freethinkers, but he refused the usual conclusion that science would now save us:

Progress is a purely human conception. Evolution is happening all around us, moving forward, backward, to the side, progressing, regressing, turning and returning. It does not tend indefinitely toward the best; it tends toward nothing. It is, at the moment, made to tend toward whomever has the greatest consciousness of it, but that consciousness will be extinguished along with the conscious being, who must eventually die. There is no heaven, not even on earth. One must not ask science to give more than it can give. It can give man consciousness and power. It doesn’t have a direct control over happiness: for that you have to go to a priest, a sorcerer, a seller of alcohol, of morphine, or, best of all, go to the gun shop—the seller of suicide. (512)

His books were not teeming with this kind of religious-philosophical pronouncement; they were mostly descriptions of head shapes, language types, bone shards, and material culture, with all discussion dominated by neologisms and numbers. But every hundred pages or so Lapouge began to lecture on the ramifications of his materialist position and to stir up a sermon on the cosmic pointlessness of even his own project within this schema. Such conclusions made it easy to believe that only cowardice prevented his contemporaries from agreeing with his anthroposociological theories. They certainly stroked the readers who nodded as they read. As I have said, he was especially contemptuous of those who understood Darwinian evolution and claimed to be freethinkers and yet still supported the republic. Indeed, he said that it was purely “an act of faith that allowed these freethinkers to escape the conclusions of Darwinian political science” (514). Lapouge did not specify to whom he |was referring; he may have been directing this primarily at the freethinking anthropologists or he may have had in mind Brunetière and his “bankruptcy of science.” The general nature of his accusation implies that he was referring to both, as well as to an entire segment of society that was freethinking and yet believed in equality, republicanism, and morality. Lapouge described all these people as lost between two extremes: that of the orderly, safe, familiar world of the Catholic Church, which they knew to be false, and that of the unknown, frightening, violent world of the amoral future. In his own startling words:

They only had a choice between a return, pure and simple, to the theological doctrines from which they had come or the acceptance, pure and simple, of the scientific explanation of social phenomena and the abandonment of all philosophical principles on which their political doctrine had rested. It is not toward science that they went. Their psychology is that of men who in times gone by would prostrate themselves in churches and light heretics on fire, and we are not the least surprised, as they are their descendants. Already liberals, socialists, and anarchists treat Darwinians as barbarians. So be it! The barbarians are coming, the besiegers have come to be besieged, and their last hope of resistance is to lock themselves up in the citadel they were attacking. The near future will show our sons a curious spectacle: the theoreticians of the false modern democracy constrained to shut themselves back up in the citadel of clericalism. (514)

Clearly, Lapouge heard hypocrisy in this about-face and in the willingness to jettison materialist science in favor of peace and comfort. Brunetière wrote that if we allow Darwinism to dictate morality, the lessons it gives us will be “abominable.” Lapouge championed the abomination. Yet it was not the barbarism of the Darwinian vision that turned Lapouge away from morality, just as it was not really the barbarism of Darwinian evolution that had frightened Brunetière. Like Brunetière, Lapouge did not invoke the brutality of the natural world when arguing about morality; he explicitly referenced the loss of God rather than the law of the jungle: “If one no longer wants the supernatural, it is necessary to be logical and to say: there is no good or bad, in and of themselves; nothing is just, or unjust. All our ideas of morality and law are due to circumstances of ancestral evolution and the social conventions that are the most severely sanctioned by opinion and by law have, in themselves, the exact same value as the rules to a game of cards” (514). As such, morality was not to be reestablished or propped up; rather, it was to be bravely rejected along with religion.

It is fascinating to see the position Lapouge took on the question of humanity’s place in nature. Brunetière had supported Catholic authority by declaring humanity distinct from the natural world owing to its will, its morality, and its spirit. Hovelacque and the other freethinking anthropologists of Paris had supported republican secularism by arguing that humanity was part of the animal world but distinguishable in its material makeup (the possession of an enlarged third left circumvolution) and the resultant ability of speech. Lapouge supported his amoral selectionist vision by arguing that humanity was not at all distinct from other animals. He came at this in several different ways, negating both free will and human rights. “Man,” wrote Lapouge, “is not a being ‘set apart’; his actions are controlled by the determinism of the universe” (511). But if humanity shares in the materialist determinism of the universe, we also share in the violent self-interest of the animal world. “Man, in losing his privilege as a being ‘set apart’ and created in the image of God, has no more rights than all the other mammals. Even the idea of right is a fiction. . . . All men are brothers, all animals are brothers, to one another and to man, and fraternity extends to all beings, but that they are brothers does not get in the way of their eating one another. Fraternity, so be it, but too bad for the victims! Life is only maintained by death” (512). His vision was the worst of all worlds because he would not give credence to any feelings of meaning, morality, love, or transcendence since as far as he was concerned they could not be proven scientifically. He dismissed free will and human rights as not real. Their existence was not enough to convince him of their existence.

Lapouge felt rather isolated in coming to these conclusions. He had spent several years studying with the freethinking anthropologists, so he could not have felt alone in his atheism. But this idea of amorality was certainly outside their canon. The freethinking anthropologists understood evolution as inexorable progress. Lapouge was furious with them and the host of secular sociologists and philosophers who were attempting to devise a new moral system: “We have attempted many systems in order to maintain morality and the fundamentals of law. To tell the truth, these attempts were nothing but illusions. . . . The conscience is nothing but a particular aspect of instinct, and instinct is nothing but a hereditary habit. . . . Without the existence of a distinct soul, without immortality, and without the threat of the afterlife, there are no longer any sanctions.”²⁰

The end of the soul meant that every aspect of human behavior had to be reconceived. As soon as scientists managed to generate life spontaneously in laboratories, science would vanquish religion and finally assume its full authority over society. Lapouge did not think that science could replace the role of religion: “When the biologists have finished their work of destruction [of religion] on this point, the anthropological sciences will not have the ability to fill this lacuna, which will be eternal.” Lapouge well understood the project of the freethinking anthropologists of Paris, for if “the anthropological sciences” were not trying to fill the lacuna created by the destruction of religion, then why mention that they would not be able to manage it? After this direct attack on his former professors of anthropology, he mused that eventually, “they will limit themselves, as they should today, to studying the processes of the formation of moral ideas (like all those that are generally referred to as common sense), and their hereditary transmission.” Freethinkers tried to ground republican principles in biology in order to wrest them from Christianity and thus preserve them. “The rescue of those so-called political principles,” wrote Lapouge, “is, on the contrary, not possible, not by these means or by any other. But though the current doctrines find no more mercy before science than do religious beliefs, biology does, at least, have the means to replace them” (144). There would be no replacement comfort, but there would be replacement principles: selectionist racism, anti-Semitism, and the state-controlled breeding of a superior, Aryan race.

Lapouge held that as long as humans were nothing more than a physical conglomeration of matter, the only possible way of relating to the past and the future was to foster biological continuity. He saw this creation of meaning as retroactive as well as future oriented, so to fail to reproduce was not only a crime against the future of humanity but a crime against one’s own ancestors. Without God or soul to give an individual life meaning and a place in eternity, only “le plasma germinatif” could serve this role. “What is immortal,” wrote Lapouge, “is not the soul—that unlikely and probably imaginary personage—it is instead the body or, rather, the germ plasma. . . . The individual who dies without leaving descendants puts an end to the immortality of his ancestors. He manages to kill his own dead.”²¹ With this statement, Lapouge revived his own dead, along with the deceased ancestors of his auditors.

Very rarely, Lapouge made use of a spiritual metaphor in describing his scientific vision. The metaphor had a lot in common with both monism and Bergsonian vitalism. Vitalism and monism were a bit mystical for Lapouge, but he agreed with their rejection of religion and their sense of coming drama. This is clear in a preface Lapouge wrote for a work by Ernst Haeckel, the most prominent monist in Europe. The book was Le monisme: Lien entre la religion et la science (Monism:The link between religion and science), and Lapouge translated it from the original German.²² As I have noted above, many scientists were interested in such ideas because they seemed to make room for a rationalist concept of a unified, “spirited” universe. Some went further, seeing monism or vitalism as supporting a kind of group afterlife. Clémence Royer dabbled in monism when she began writing explanations of the world that emphasized its godlessness and its atomic and lawful unity. She was also interested in it as an alternative to the Western dualism that seemed to support the sharp division between masculinity and femininity. Because of their atheist materialism, neither Lapouge nor Royer was particularly dependent on the spiritualist concept of monism, but Lapouge, too, made some use of it in his writing. Several years before his translation of Haeckel, Lapouge wrote that “living beings are really the depositories of the conscience of the world. This conscience rises from inferior animals up to man and from man up to scholars. One could say that these are the cells of the cosmic brain.”²³ “From man up to scholars,” indeed. Among atheists in late-nineteenth-century France, there was pride in unbelief, and this pride was intelligible to the wider society; it was part of the profile.

With the universe empty of consciousness save that of animals and empty of intelligence save that of human beings, Lapouge saw the mass of living things as closest to traditional ideas of divinity. “This is why the sexual act is not only a creative act because it brings about a new being, the accomplishment of the absolute condition of immortality. It shines with a divine character because it is the transmission of the world’s consciousness, it becomes theogonic. That is why the only absolute sin is infecundity” (306–307). Historian André Béjin has read this passage as an attempt to replace the Christian idea of God as simultaneously human and divine with a parallel idea of the germ cell as human and divine.²⁴ The literary flourish does not mean that much (because Lapouge was elsewhere and often explicit about there being no replacement divinity), but Lapouge’s anthropology was certainly designed to perform religious functions—without any gods. He was saying that procreation is the only godlike thing because it attaches us to the eternal, such as it is.

When Lapouge spoke of immortality, then, it was within the context of an entirely atheist conception of the universe. His approach to the question reminds one distinctly of his anthropology professors. The freethinkers had written that the “only means of not dying entirely was to disperse to the four winds all that one could of the fire of one’s heart and the light of one’s mind,” and they had augmented these intangibles by donating their corpses to the future of science.²⁵ They had enshrined intellectual and humanistic labor such that it represented all there was of the sacred and the immortal. Vacher de Lapouge referred to biological procreation in similar terms, writing that “the only immortality to which man could lay claim is not at all in the domain of theological dreams, it is that which he is assured in transmitting his germ plasma to future generations. Each of his descendants is a part of himself, indefinitely reproduced, transmitted and constructing new organisms.”²⁶ His language even contained the same sense of posthumous dispersion.

Though Lapouge did not make it explicit, he seems to have seen himself as back in the position of the biblical Abraham. Abraham lived before the Hebrew development of the idea of an afterlife, and God promised him, as the greatest possible gift, that he would become a multitude. Lapouge positioned himself as living after the idea of an afterlife had expired, and he, too, sought meaning and immortality in procreation. “The ancient world had a vivid instinctual understanding of this material immortality by reproduction. The double cult of ancestors and of reproduction rested on a scientific base infinitely superior to that of all the spiritualist religions” (190–191). In what he perceived as an unfair, Godless, and socially atomized society, Lapouge could imagine only one way to attain a meaningful relationship with the past and the future: to have children and trust that they would have children, too. Yet no matter what arrangements were made for selectionist breeding, all that could be achieved thereby was a “relative immortality,” which would last “so long as the rites of fecundation are repeated, this is the only immortality: all others are chimera” (307). Why mention it? Why was he so interested in some kind of immortality? The not-believing mission was a passionate, active faith: the wider meaning of existence was aggressively confronted, and faith was boldly enacted in the negative.

It is at this point that morality really began to get in the way. If the most crucial role of every human being is reproduction and if failure to reproduce wipes out the reproductive effort and the very essence of all one’s ancestors, then there can be no true morality that prevents the individual from reproducing. “Selectionist morality,” wrote Lapouge, “places responsibility-to-the-race in the supreme place—there where the morality of Christianity put responsibility-to-God” (191). Individuals were temporally finite and thus meaningless.²⁷ Properly understood, they did not even exist: “The individual is crushed by his race and becomes nothing. The race and the nation are everything” (511). Here was a glorification of the state and defense of social hierarchies that did not rely on religious dogma or tradition for its authority. The rites of fecundity would take on powerful new meanings in the twentieth century.

Lapouge’s weird pessimism critically distinguishes him from later French eugenists. His brave new world was never described in glowing terms. It was depicted, instead, as the only possible way that civilization might survive, and as often as not Lapouge expressed more doubt than hope that it would ever come to pass.²⁸ According to him, the ultimate “law of anthroposociology” was that since prehistoric times the cephalic index had everywhere and constantly tended to increase (meaning that the population had grown ever more brachycephalic). In arguing this, Lapouge was drawing on an element of Darwinian evolutionary theory that most Social Darwinists ignored: the most complex, intelligent life forms are not necessarily the “fittest,” that is, the most successful reproducers. Darwin had noted that wonderfully complex species had died out, while simpler, less impressive species survived.²⁹ Spencer and Haeckel, two of the earliest and most influential Social Darwinists, generally ignored this evidence that survival of the fittest could not always be equated with progress. Darwin wrote that a quick or cataclysmic environmental change, allowing no time for the species to adapt, results in particularly dramatic changes in the relative populations of species. The cataclysmic event that Lapouge referred to in order to explain the waning of dolicho dominance was the French Revolution, though he argued that the process had been going on since prehistoric times. He saw a delicacy linked to the refined qualities of the dolicho. This meant that all else being equal, the superior people would not necessarily rise to the top—an excellent rationalization for professional failure. It was also a strong argument for a controlled society, since a free market and a social meritocracy both rest on the notion that the best minds and best products have an ability to assert themselves as such. Other eugenists believed that the best would eventually triumph and that the important work was essentially to speed up a process that was already in motion naturally. Lapouge thought the natural process had to be stopped and put into reverse.

Another reason for the general optimism of most French Social Darwinists was that they were only marginally Darwinists. As discussed in previous chapters, the French held on to notions of Lamarckian evolutionary theory long after it was discredited elsewhere. Lamarck had worked out and published his transformist theory during the revolutionary decade, and the theory continued to be associated with the political left. The very notion that species could be altered was revolutionary, echoing political discourse on the ability of the individual to raise his or her social station. Lamarck’s mechanism took this even further, for in it species change is enacted by individuals. Within this theory, when a creature spends its life striving to adapt itself physically or mentally (the giraffe stretching its neck to reach sweet but lofty leaves is the classic example), the personal improvements it attains are passed on to its progeny. Working one’s way up was thus naturalized within a scientific framework.³⁰ By the late-nineteenth-century, Lamarckianism was no longer a revolutionary stance, but it still retained a strong measure of its leftist significance. Unlike Darwinism, it provided a mechanism for evolution in which environmental amelioration could be seen as having direct and positive influence on future generations, which meant that social welfare could be seen as promoting evolution. Educate this generation, and the next will be ever so slightly smarter and perhaps less dependent, criminal, or offensive.

Vacher de Lapouge did not believe that any significant inheritance of acquired characteristics was possible, so even if social reform and education could improve people, these improvements could not be heritable. In evolutionary terms, it would be a totally pointless endeavor. He came to this by interesting means:The soul doesn’t exist, so you don’t exist after your body dies. If everything you are is physical, however, you can pass yourself into the next generation by physical means. It was not as good an afterlife as one in which you remember the first life, but it was all we had:

The soul and the body are one; the psychic phenomena are functions of the brain. The soul is thus hereditary, like the body. An individual’s psychology is dependent on his ancestors. The fundamental inequality of individuals results from the difference of birth, and the inequality of birth is the only one that cannot be repaired. The effects of education are essentially conditioned by heredity; they are not transmittable. Education can disguise the individual, but none of this lie will be passed on to future generations. One cannot enter a family or a nation by decree. The blood that one carries in one’s veins at birth is the same all one’s life.³¹

For it to be emotionally compelling to imagine living on in this way, the “psychic phenomena” have to be relatively inviolate. That is why an individual’s psychology has to be “dependent on his ancestors,” and that is why education cannot fundamentally change the soul. “Nations” (of Lapouge’s defining) and families are more than groups that join individuals together: they are biological groups that share physiological “souls.”

So evolution was not naturally progressing, nor was it able to be directed by anything short of a breeding project. Further, Lapouge believed civilized society, and especially modernity, were forcing evolution backward. Mechanized war drafted only the fittest and then further endangered the bravest, and capitalism promoted marriage for money rather than racial type (502). Capitalism was also responsible for a general abasement of refined values. Moreover, industrial machines caused injury and loss of life to some of the most hard working, and religion lured the most honest and generous men and women into lifelong celibacy. The only way to combat the decline of civilization was to practice scientific selection: the controlled breeding of dolichos. While other eugenists merely proposed reeducation regarding marriage choices, Lapouge envisioned eugenics as a fully controlled scientific process in which children would be conceived through artificial insemination of fit women with the diluted sperm of a few perfect dolichos.³²

With all this talk of breeding, one might well expect Lapouge to have some very firm ideas about women’s role in society. Certainly, his belief in the power of heredity over environment explains his lack of concern about some of the usual eugenic issues: the mother’s behavior before, during, and after conception and the nature of the mother’s relationship with the child. But Lapouge did not even say much about who the woman should be. His few references to women, as such, occur in his discussion of negative social selection. Catholic countries, he wrote, were wasting large numbers of particularly bright women by allowing them to be sequestered in convents. A cultural preference for the demure Catholic girl had made French women weak and ignorant. “Religious selection,” Lapouge insisted, had created “the extraordinary French doll,” whose concerns were confined to her toilette and to living a safe and quiet life with her husband—so unlike “the Aryan woman.”³³ His public stance is not much augmented by his private writings, though he himself married a cousin and seems to have given his son something of a hard time about the eugenic quality of his future wife.³⁴ He clearly thought that both women and men contributed important hereditary traits to their children, but even when he spoke of diluting the sperm of perfect dolicho specimens, he said nothing about the women who would be making use of it. The mother is not the only one missing from this picture. After the moment of conception, Lapouge gives no practical description of the ideal selectionist family. This is a serious omission, because his plan of artificial insemination using “a perfect dolicho’s” sperm inherently disrupts the existing family structure. Would fathers then exist as such? Lapouge didn’t say. The image we are left with is that smart women were to be inseminated (apparently at their own request, for no constraint is ever mentioned) with the help of the male scientist, who would, essentially, stand in for all males. She would then raise the children alone or with the aid of her less-than-dolichocephalic husband. There was socialist precedent for reconfiguring the traditional family, but Lapouge never made reference to it.

The socialism of Lapouge’s socialist selectionism is another odd aspect of his ideology. It was not, obviously, based on a love of egalitarianism but rather on a preference for the pre-Revolutionary social hierarchies and regulatory government. Capitalism and republican democracy were the most significant forces that Lapouge saw as accelerating the demise of civilization. He believed both to be based on the erroneous notion of human equality and accused both of favoring the social, political, and thus reproductive triumph of the brachycephalics and the Jews. Socialism would redress this problem in several ways: It replace respect for money with respect for intelligence and refined cultural qualities. It would actively support dolichos so that they could produce dolicho culture. Most crucially, it would control physical reproduction so that dolichos could someday outnumber brachies. His socialism was in the service of his anthroposociology, but he also argued that the relationship was the inverse, positing that socialism would only be possible after the population was eugenically manipulated. “Socialism, in any case,” wrote Lapouge, “will be selectionist or not at all: it could only be possible with people made differently from us, and selectionism can make those people.”³⁵

Lapouge’s anti-Semitic socialism may seem like an odd mixture of left- and right-wing ideologies, but in the mid-nineteenth century socialism was by no means an inherently humanitarian and egalitarian idea. Indeed, many early socialists, such as Charles Fourier, Alphonse Toussenel, and Pierre Leroux, identified capitalism with the Jewish people.³⁶ It is thus possible that Lapouge came to his notions of anti-Semitism and racial hierarchy through socialism rather than despite it. In any case, by the time L’Aryen came out in 1899, Lapouge had largely rejected socialism, pronouncing it unfeasible and undesirable for the brachycephalic present but occasionally suggesting it for the dolichocephalic future. As French socialists moved away from designating Jews as the quintessential capitalists, Lapouge increasingly argued, in his correspondence and in his last major work, Race et milieu social (1909), that there was no Jewish proletariat—in other words, the equation of Jews and high capital was as valid as ever.³⁷ But it still was not simple. For instance, the anti-Semitic Edouard Drumont, editor of La libre parole, often quoted long passages from L’Aryen in his journal. In one article, after recounting the Jewish influences on Dreyfusard scholars, Drumont argued the racial differences of Jews and brought out Lapouge for authority, writing “on this point we have the witness of a learned man, a real learned man this time,” and he also quoted Lapouge so that the anthroposociologist seemed to praise Drumont.³⁸ Yet L’Aryen actually robustly dismissed Drumont. Lapouge explained that for Drumont “and his friends,” the term “Aryan” referred to the French, or even the Europeans, as opposed to foreigners and Jews.³⁹ These brachies did not know what they were. According to Lapouge, political anti-Semitism was just a brachy bid for power against the Jews—the one dolicho group giving them any trouble. It made sense for them, mused Lapouge, but he wanted none of it. Brachy “economic anti-Semitism” was just a brachy “form of protectionism,” and their “religious anti-Semitism,” just a “form of clericalism” (464). His chief political concern remained the biological creation of a hereditary ruling elite.

Once Lapouge turned his attention to the social system most appropriate for this potential hereditary ruling elite, he described a surprisingly democratic utopia. Using the United States and England as his best models of dolichocephalic rule (though both were compromised by the influx of brachy immigrants), Lapouge proclaimed that dolichos loved liberty above all else. Though each item on his list of rights and freedoms essential to the Aryan is, indeed, represented in the Declaration on the Rights of Man, Lapouge argued that the brachycephalic French only speak of these rights, they do not respect them. While the French citizen, “the supposed sovereign,” only has permission to express his thoughts by a voting ballot, “in silence,” the United States and England have huge and numerous political groups that are not only tolerated but legal and encouraged.⁴⁰ Such groups, and other manifestations of political liberty, “are always a cause of astonishment for French people landing in an Aryan country.” This astonishment was, according to Lapouge, not merely because of the novelty of the situation; rather, “they are missing something in their brains that would allow them to understand it” (376). The French citizen does not vote on questions but only on representatives, and these representatives are not chosen by the citizens but presented to them. Once the elections poll is over, “the poor sovereign,” that is, the French citizen, “does not matter anymore. . . . The elected ones are everything. . . . He does not retain any control or any right to express what he thinks if the elected ones betray him or exploit him” (377). Lapouge criticized the republic, but it was the brachy race that was to blame, and he considered no political change possible until biological change had been effected. “It is certain,” wrote Lapouge, “that functionarism suits the brachycephalics. In France, in the last fifty years, the number of functionaries has gone from 188,000 to 416,000. It is the same in the other brachycephalic countries. . . . If we continue to require, as the premier quality of a subject, that they are perfectly inert and submissive to authority, the brachycephalics will end up having the last word” (482). All of which, in Lapouge’s characterization, led to the French Third Republic functioning as a constantly changing and entirely arbitrary monarchy, while in Aryan England the monarchy functioned as a stable, egalitarian republic (377–378). So, in a sense, Lapouge had classic republican values; he just wanted to create new human beings who would be better suited to these values. His Aryans would make material what had been metaphysical because they would be bred as flesh and blood embodiments of past theoretical goals.

In the 1880s Louis Liard, the director of higher education, was in the process of reorganizing the entire French university system.⁴¹ He is best known for this work, as well as for having promoted the careers of young, republican, “modern” scholars. He helped to secure a fellowship for Durkheim and in 1887 made him professor of social science and pedagogy at the University of Bordeaux, a post created especially for him.⁴² It is thus rather intriguing to find that, the very next year, Liard intervened on behalf of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, arranging for him to give a cours libre at the University of Montpellier.⁴³ The odd match of Liard and Lapouge was mostly the result of youthful friendship—and enough physical distance that Liard may not have understood just whom he was helping. Lapouge was born on December 12, 1854, in Neuville, a large town in the department of Vienne. His father was a minor government functionary, apparently of mixed Catholic and Protestant heritage, who, in his son’s words, “died poor.”⁴⁴ In 1868 Lapouge entered the Poitiers lycée, where his professor of philosophy, Louis Liard, introduced him to the works of Spencer, Darwin, Galton, and the Genovese racist naturalist Alphonse de Candolle.⁴⁵ Happenstance, then, brought these two men together, but Liard was an intense young man who saw promise in the younger Lapouge and took him under his wing.

Liard’s own youth is worth a brief look. According to the reports in his personnel file concerning his years as a professor at the Académie de Bordeaux, Liard himself took much criticism for his ardent anticlericalism, his efforts in developing a worker’s library (“which got him noticed and made him popular in a ‘certain’ party”), “and above all a degree of confidence in himself and in his opinions that his young age alone (twenty-four) cannot quite excuse.”⁴⁶ Soon after this report, Liard was transferred, at a large reduction in pay and prestige, to the Académie de Poitiers. He wrote to the minister of public instruction asking him to remedy this “disgrace” with another transfer but was instead left at Poitiers for four years, during which time he taught and befriended Lapouge.⁴⁷ Here, again, Liard was criticized for his anticlericalism and his “exalted” opinions.⁴⁸ Now, however, the censure was more severe, centering on Liard’s alliance with a professor of natural history, M. Contejean, “a learned man but of paradoxical and often dangerous ideas.”⁴⁹ This alliance and the opinions that were at its base do not seem to have outlasted Liard’s youth. They do, however, help to substantiate Lapouge’s claim that Liard greatly influenced his anthropological approach to history and philosophy. Liard’s troubled personal experience may also help to explain his encouragement and toleration of Lapouge long after Lapouge had begun to express ideas that would seem anathema to the social project of the mature Liard.

Lapouge attained his baccalauréat in 1872, for which he received high honors in the concours of 1873.⁵⁰ He went on to become one of the Université de Poitiers’s star law students; one of his studies, a 750-page volume, was recommended by the faculty to be published at the expense of the state.⁵¹ When, in his final year, he applied for a position as the university’s law librarian, the director of the school wrote to the minister of public instruction promoting his candidacy, expressing, however, his reservation that Lapouge would soon attain his agrégation and leave the position for an illustrious career elsewhere. The minister took this worry to heart, and the request for the position was denied.⁵² Late in his life, Lapouge would write that at this early juncture he had thought to go to Paris to prepare for his agrégation, but, fearing a life of penury in the capital, applied for a position in the magistracy instead. As a young man, however, he wrote that he offered himself for this service out of love for the republic. In March 1879, only days after receiving his doctorate, he was installed as substitute procureur, a public prosecutor, at Valence. Within a week’s time, however, he applied for a position nearer to his mother and in this request also demonstrated his feelings toward the republic. He worried that, were he to choose his career over his filial responsibility, “I would neither dignify service to the republic, nor to the magistrate, because a bad son could not hardly be anything but a bad citizen.”⁵³ Despite such ardor and the extensive concern he expressed regarding the responsibilities of the position, Lapouge was not very successful.⁵⁴ At this point, private letters and published articles, by Lapouge and about him, confirm the future antirepublican racist as a passionately anticlerical republican.⁵⁵ In his actions, the young Lapouge behaved as the freethinking anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet had behaved when newly empowered: Mortillet secularized street names and uprooted cemetery crosses. Lapouge took advantage of a revolutionary law forbidding ecclesiastic dress that had never been officially revoked and arrested the first priest he saw passing in the street outside his window.⁵⁶ The list of attempts to deconsecrate people, objects, and places now included the priest himself.⁵⁷

Lapouge was soon made procureur at Blanc; at twenty-six, he was the youngest in all of France. His superiors at Blanc described him as friendly, intelligent, and extremely well educated but with too little knowledge “of men and of things.”⁵⁸ As a result, he was not recommended for a promotion.⁵⁹ On the July 23, 1881, he was transferred to Chambon, a move the republican newspaper Journal du centre reported as an act of political persecution against an “earnest and militant republican” who had simply let people know his beliefs. “We are not in on the secret between the gods and the prefecture,” ran the final paragraph of the article, “we simply pose this question: Why was the radical and anticlerical M. Vacher-Lapouge sent away in disgrace to Chambon?”⁶⁰ The minister of justice, however, wrote that Lapouge had created an impossible situation for himself at Blanc and had been transferred for this reason.⁶¹

Lapouge was quietly tolerated at Chambon for almost three years, but this ended when he accidentally shot someone in a gun shop. The victim—it was the shop’s proprietor—was not badly harmed: the bullet had lost much force in ricochet before striking him in the neck. But the situation encouraged Lapouge’s superiors, who had until then held their tongues “out of pity” for him, to speak up and report that the incident could only diminish Lapouge’s “moral authority,” which “was already as meager as possible—one can be assured that whatever little he had is now completely gone.”⁶² They fired him. It was at this point, between 1883 and 1886, that he went to Paris to prepare for his agrégation and took courses at the Ecole d’anthropologie and the Muséum d’histoire naturelle. He later listed Quatrefages, Milne Edwards, Manouvrier, Mortillet, Hamy, and Topinard as his anthropological professors and reported that he quickly developed a distinct dislike for most of them (especially Quatrefages, whom he described as “resolutely opposed . . . to new ideas”).⁶³ His correspondence indicates he knew Hovelacque and Letourneau as well. Only in Paul Topinard did he find an intellectual companion, and their friendship lasted throughout their professional lives.⁶⁴ (In his Revue d’anthropologie, Topinard published five long articles and about a dozen book reviews authored by Lapouge.) Despite Lapouge’s relative silence on the matter, the experience at the anthropology school must have been extremely meaningful. Whether or not he already shared it, Lapouge must have been struck by the atheism of the freethinking anthropologists. They may have converted him. Also, Topinard’s racialism may have colored Lapouge’s thinking during his years as a student in Paris.⁶⁵ Lapouge himself credited Louis Liard as his chief influence on these matters.⁶⁶

In 1886 Lapouge prepared a series of lectures on inferior and superior races, which Topinard encouraged him to offer at the Ecole d’anthropologie.⁶⁷ According to Lapouge, this did not happen because while in Paris he had married and had a child, and his precarious financial situation forced him to leave the city and find a steady job. It is true that he had married: accompanied by some terrific brouhahas with his mother (they had an extensive, often contentious correspondence), the twenty-nine-year-old Lapouge married his “little cousin,” the seventeen-year-old Marie-Albertine Hindré, on September 4, 1883.⁶⁸ Yet it is unlikely that this is what stopped him from running a course at the école.⁶⁹ It is more likely that the freethinking anthropologists, by now firmly in control of the school, rejected his proposal. Also during these years, Lapouge entered into the concours d’agrégation twice. Both times he failed to win a professorship.⁷⁰ With a family to support, no steady means of employment, a miserable record as a magistrate, and few professional friends in Paris, Lapouge returned to the career manqué of his youth and applied for a job as a law librarian. This time no one worried that he would leave this career of expediency for bigger and better things. He was assigned to be the underlibrarian at Montpellier—the town that would soon become known as the site of Vacher de Lapouge’s anthroposociological lectures—and given a salary of 2,000 francs.⁷¹ Though he would move around a bit, Lapouge would spend the rest of his professional life as a librarian.

Lapouge did not really want to be a librarian. In 1887, his second year at Montpellier, he was judged to be a very honorable man with a superior education but “without a hint of good judgment.” In his superior’s words, “an excess of tact [was] not one of his great faults either.”⁷² Meanwhile, he arranged for Topinard to visit Liard in person and plead his case for a new position.⁷³ Liard did not relocate Lapouge, but in 1888 he did arrange for him to give his cours libre at the University of Montpellier.⁷⁴ In report after report, his superiors at the library said that he did what he was told, “but nothing, absolutely nothing else; it’s just too bad for you if you don’t give him instructions.”⁷⁵ However, as long as Liard was in a position to assist him and was well disposed to do so, Lapouge did not suffer excessively from his unpopularity at the university. In 1890 he wrote to Liard asking again for a raise and for an indemnity for his courses and his research, which he claimed were yielding, especially that year, “important discoveries.”⁷⁶ He received both.⁷⁷ In later years Lapouge claimed that these courses were an enormous and popular success.⁷⁸ According to Paul Valéry, however, who frequented the lectures while studying law at Montpellier, the courses were never well attended. The young poet found them fascinating, however, and though he did not put much stock in the racial theories argued by Lapouge, he credited him with being a thrilling lecturer. Valéry even joined Lapouge in his laboratory, helping him to measure six hundred skulls taken from an old cemetery. Valéry later commented that he did not learn anything useful from this effort but that, “among all the things that I learned that were never useful to me, those pointless measurements were not more pointless than the others.”⁷⁹ An interesting assessment.

In 1892 new rules regarding the cours libres at Montpellier placed almost full control in the hands of the university’s professors, and within the year Lapouge’s courses were banned. He wrote to Dr. Collignon, an army doctor, avid head measurer, and amateur anthroposociologist, informing him of his situation: “Here I am in the same situation that Topinard was in, the only difference being that I saw it coming a long time ago and so I was able to bring all the work and specimens of my last five years into my private laboratory.”⁸⁰ As he later wrote in L’Aryen, “They can destroy scientific documents or allow them to be destroyed, they can close courses, interfere with the publication of a book, and suppress a scholar into poverty—but they can not suppress science.”⁸¹ This does not seem to have been empty paranoia; I do not know what the mechanism was, but it does seem that some kind of ban was placed on publishing Lapouge’s books. Contemporaries complained that they were nearly impossible to find after about 1900, and copies are still quite rare.

It was around this time that Lapouge carried out his experiment in “telegenesis.” He had decided that one perfect dolicho man could impregnate 200,000 women a year if the semen were correctly diluted and if sperm turned out to travel well. He claimed that to check the second variable he performed the first experiment of telegenesis, mailing a dose of human sperm from one town to another and there attaining a successful conception. There is reason to believe this did occur, that he used his own sperm, and that it was his mistress who conceived the child.⁸² To this oddity must be added a rather strange event that took place in 1896, when Lapouge was reassigned to Rennes.⁸³ An anonymous letter was sent to the commissaire général accusing Lapouge of luring five young girls between the ages of ten and sixteen into his laboratory on the pretext of a scientific experiment. Lapouge took pictures of the girls completely naked and allegedly engaged in acts of oral and manual sex with them.⁸⁴ The photographs were definitely real, but when energetically questioned the girls rescinded their more damning accusations and conceded that Lapouge had measured their skulls and chests. This, remarkably, convinced the judicial representatives of the state and of the university that the nude photographs had been taken for scientific rather than lascivious purposes. All charges were dropped. Louis Liard, now director of higher education, was informed of all this, including the tidbit that Lapouge was actively hunting for his anonymous accuser and he “will not abstain from resorting to violence or even ‘shooting him in the head.’”⁸⁵ After this incident and throughout the rest of his stay at Rennes, it is reported that Lapouge lived in almost complete seclusion, hiding himself in his anthropological laboratory.⁸⁶

The strained nature of Lapouge’s relationships with women seems worth noting: his personal correspondence with his mother was extensive and turbulent, full of pleas for understanding, bursts of anger, and petitions for forgiveness. Before his marriage, correspondence between Lapouge and Albertine show him counseling her on how to deal with her difficult aunt, his mother; afterward, they seem to have had as difficult a time with each other. Add this incident with the young girls as well as the conception of a child, with his mistress, by “telegenesis,” and a picture emerges of a particularly overwrought relationship with family, with gender, and with sex. Lapouge’s theoretical dismantling of the traditional family and his extreme social isolation contribute yet more to the picture. Historians of race and gender have described the way systems of value based in race and gender share the same metaphors and patterns of logic, social conduits, and familial enactment.⁸⁷ Here, I think it is enough to mention that these relationships were fraught with tension for Lapouge, whose alienation and bitterness increased steadily as the years advanced. No one in his daily life seems to have been much impressed by Lapouge’s first book, Sélections sociales. It certainly never entered into any assessment of his professional worth, where deeply negative employee evaluations were offset only by observations that he was “very miserable in his intimate life.”⁸⁸

It was in April 1897 that Lapouge contracted typhoid fever and offered his brain to the Society of Mutual Autopsy.⁸⁹ After his recovery, Lapouge’s requests for a transfer increased in frequency and tone. When a position opened up in 1900, he was relocated to the library of the Université de Poitiers, where he would stay until retirement in 1923. This was where he had so brilliantly distinguished himself as a student of law. Now he was back as a librarian, while as an anthropologist he was growing increasingly famous outside France, especially in Germany and the United States.⁹⁰ As I discuss below, he kept up correspondence with an extraordinary number of mostly foreign adepts, disciples, and fellow racialist anthropologists, who all treated him with deference. His L’Aryen had come out in 1899 and been widely panned in France—for reasons that will become clear—but was lauded elsewhere. When he and his son Claude (then fifteen) visited Germany in August 1901, he was celebrated as he never had been in France. According to the Badische Press, which referred to him (erroneously) as a professor and as a “famous French anthropologist,” as soon as Lapouge arrived, admirers came from all over and bestowed on him a crown of laurels, “one meter in diameter,” which bore a large ribbon in the colors of the German and French flags and read, “To the great thinker who has shown us the way.”⁹¹ When he returned to France he was once again a little-known and disliked librarian—apparently, he socialized with no one.⁹² In a rare indication that his superiors knew the extent of his renown, a 1903 report on his library work notes that “M. Lapouge is the head (outside of France) of a School of Anthropology.”⁹³

When Durkheim was offered a post at the Sorbonne in 1902, Lapouge wrote to Liard presenting himself as a candidate for the post Durkheim would be vacating: the chair of social sciences at Bordeaux. Having offered his candidature, he explained to Liard:

In doing so, I in no way renounce my opinion that no sociology is yet possible. I still believe that everything that is said or written in its name is pure metaphysics. . . . It is precisely to protest against the pretensions of those who want to teach what they do not know, against the metaphysicians who seek to model a fiction of social science on their spiritual and sentimental prejudices, that I pose my candidature. I do it as the most authorized representative in France of the scientific school, which relies on facts and on their evident and immediate consequences, excluding abstractions and arguments, which knows neither sentimentalism nor partiality.⁹⁴

In this light “sentimental prejudices” start to look awfully attractive. When one takes into consideration that Liard’s interest in Durkheim lay in the latter’s commitment to establishing a republican morality, it is evident that Lapouge’s proposal was hopelessly out of touch with Liard’s project. Lapouge was not offered the position.

In 1909 Lapouge applied for the chair of anthropology at the Paris Muséum d’histoire naturelle.⁹⁵ He did not get it. One of Lapouge’s disciples, the German language teacher Henri Muffang, wrote to Lapouge regarding the application, and he juxtaposed Lapouge’s failure with the Durkheimian success. “I was thrilled,” wrote Muffang, “to learn that you had put up your candidature for the chair at the museum. You should have had a chair at Paris long ago. When one sees such people as Durkheim and Bouglé at the Sorbonne, with their egalitarian sociological phraseology, and Lapouge still at Poitiers despite a global reputation, one sees a beautiful illustration of backward selection.”⁹⁶

I have elsewhere demonstrated some of the direct lines of influence between Lapouge and the Nazis.⁹⁷ Very briefly, Lapouge’s work first entered into Germany between 1885 and 1920, through the anthropological and historical work of Ludwig Schemann, Ludwig Woltmann, and Otto Ammon—the three men who are generally cited as the originators of race theory in Germany.⁹⁸ But Lapouge lived until 1936 and actively supported his science until the end of his life, so he had a personal influence on theorists of the 1920s and 1930s as well, most noticeably on the racial theory and career of Hans Günther, generally known as the chief Nazi race theorist. Here, I want only to demonstrate that Lapouge’s atheist, scientific materialism had an effect on his racialist colleagues, though they rejected it in almost all cases, and to point to some of the religious tones of his wider ministry. Consider, for example, Schemann’s response to Lapouge’s second major work, L’Aryen: Son rôle social:

Even though, as a Christian idealist, I was seriously saddened, not by the pessimism but by the materialism, not to say the nihilism of your final pages, I still read your book with the greatest interest for its first part and the most profound emotion for the second part. Your imposing erudition, your so universal penetration, the grandeur and the profundity of your views, and more than all of that the heroism of your truthfulness made the same indelible impression on me as your Sélections sociales did in its time. The more I know your works, the more convinced I am that they are destined to play the most remarkable role in the science of the future.⁹⁹

Schemann was saddened by the materialist nihilism of the book, but that is what lent Lapouge his air of truthful “heroism.” The power of Lapouge’s stark pessimism, even for those who did not agree with it, must be appreciated. Schemann, Woltmann, and Ammon were also impressed by his rejection of the sanctity of fatherhood, but they explicitly refused to go along with it. Still, they were enthralled. Consider a few brief comments from Ammon to Lapouge: “One often says ‘poet, prophet,’ but in our case it is a man of science and not a poet who has predicted everything, and that man is called M. De Lapouge!” In the same letter, speaking of a work of his own that was soon to be published, Ammon wrote, “You will see material that will excite the jealousy of your colleagues, applied to the glorification of your theories.”¹⁰⁰ The deference was deep. As Ammon later told Lapouge: “I always regard you as a student regards his master.”¹⁰¹

In the twenties and thirties, Günther came under Lapouge’s influence. Often, as in the case of his influential Racial Elements of European History, Günther cited Lapouge more frequently than any writer except Gobineau.¹⁰² And Günther also specifically praised Lapouge for his scientism, widely publishing that Lapouge had written “the first scientific work from the racial historical standpoint” (257). Beyond Günther’s praise and direct citations of Lapouge, his works were profoundly influenced by Lapouge’s very particular paradigm, and his prose drew heavily on Lapouge’s odd lexicon. Their correspondence was tutelary but warm.¹⁰³ Günther sent Lapouge his books and gratefully accepted the elder man’s criticism. In his letters to Schemann, Lapouge referred to the young writer as “mon bon disciple Günther.”¹⁰⁴ In 1930 Günther was interested in a post at the University of Jena, but the Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte (a group of thirty-one professors from all over Germany) did not think that he possessed the base-level qualifications the university demanded of its faculty.¹⁰⁵ Lapouge intervened with a few letters praising Günther’s work.¹⁰⁶ Thereafter, Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior and education in Thuringia and the first Nazi minister of a German state, took matters into his own hands, installing Günther at Jena against the continued protests of the professorial senate and the league.¹⁰⁷ Günther’s chair was in “anthroposociology,” a term of distinctive Lapougian origin.¹⁰⁸ That Günther’s appointment was a serious affair is evident in the fact that Hitler attended his inaugural address in the spring of 1933.¹⁰⁹

A casual letter that Lapouge wrote to an A. Assire (Lapouge had arranged for him to translate Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race)¹¹⁰ in 1932 lends insight into the period and bears an extended quotation.

It has been a long time since I have had news from Grant, who is quite old. I am expecting Lothrop Stoddard sometime soon. They created for Günther, at the University of Jena, a chair of anthroposociology under my auspices. It was imposed by Frick, with pressure from the Nazis. Notice that the Nazis are nothing but the German branch of selectionist monists and that their nationalism makes no sense in selectionist internationalism, but the contradiction does not worry them. Hitler’s social program was patiently constructed from the facts and ideas of my selectionist publications over the past years—except the milk has turned, and there is nothing in the casserole but a sorcerer’s brew. The obligatory work for all . . . the methodical multiplication of eugenic people, the exclusion of noneugenic people from the right to reproduce, all that was already in the aristocratic socialism of Woltmann and of Lapouge when they founded, twenty-five years ago, the Politisch Anthropologische Revue, and when we lost my lieutenant, his place was filled by Hitler and Günther. Pan-Germanism has been an idea of political philologists for the past century, which they have attempted to hold together with the equation: “Aryan” = “dolicho-blond” = “German” = “all that is of the kraut culture [de culture boche] and German language.” These things have nothing to do with one another. Another ingredient, which is very poisonous, is militarism. This is how demolishing things and massacring people became marks of high superiority and pious work.

You certainly cannot have doubted, my dear Assire, when you were translating Madison Grant’s book, that this American work, translated into German, would become one of the catechisms of the Hitlerian party—oh! With how many little changes!

I strongly believe that the Nazis will eventually come to understand my explanations and how much they risk in fighting with their neighbors, especially because in the pure doctrine it is not Germany that is the country of dolicho-blonds. But what still worries me is to see Germany—an essential part of the machine of the world—end up in the most horrible civil war without much advancing the progress of selectionist monism. And this is the philosophy of those to whom we speak, with Grant’s book in hand.¹¹¹

So Lapouge saw himself as creator of the new German agenda.¹¹² It was a bit of an exaggeration, but Günther was quite clear about his reliance on and debt to Lapouge, and historians certainly have credited Günther as Hitler’s primary influence on racial questions—from Mein Kampf through the Final Solution. Lapouge’s L’Aryen, translated into German and edited, was published in 1939.¹¹³

French collaborators were impressed with Lapouge as well. Consider, for example, an article in the Cahiers franco-allemands in 1942, by Edgar Tatarin-Tarnheyden, on “Georges Vacher de Lapouge: Visionnaire française de l’avenir européen.”¹¹⁴ The article’s proclaimed goal was to demonstrate that the changes going on in France were not “merely a result of the war.” Rather, the author asserted, there had been isolated French precursors who had invented race science. These precursors were Gobineau and Lapouge, but Tatarin-Tarnheyden was considerably more impressed with Lapouge as a direct source of Nazi doctrine. Lapouge, he asserted, “was the first to . . . have established exact anthropological types and to have proceeded to a systematic subdivision of the principal European races.” Tatarin-Tarnheyden credited Lapouge’s work as having a fundamental importance “for today’s German researchers.” According to him, it was due to Lapouge that the Aryan “became a precisely established scientific fact” (339).

Among other reasons, Tatarin-Tarnheyden cited Lapouge as more significant because where Gobineau “was still solidly attached to the church’s theory of the independence of the soul,” Lapouge recognized that “the essence of psychic substance was the hereditary plasma, the racial soul” (344). Gobineau, he reported, had even specifically rejected Darwinian theory because it was too materialist. Tatarin-Tarnheyden hit this point several times, insisting that Gobineau’s work was weak because it was based only on intuition and citing scholarly attacks on Gobineau’s lack of scientific facts. Lapouge, however, he found irreproachable because of the combined effect of his atheist materialism and his scientific exactitude. Wrote Tatarin-Tarnheyden, “It is on this point that rests the grand progress and is the true progress of Lapouge. He did not separate the body from the soul” (345). As long as the greatness of a human being was understood as somatic, one could conceive of this greatness as heritable, and one could design a state around encouraging that hereditary line. But consider how, even this late, and even from the extreme right, the Frenchman sees science and a new future as dependent on the rejection of the church: “The subjugation of even spiritual leaders to natural laws appeared in Lapouge’s work in the decisive weight that he attributed to the need for great space for the political success of a people—an idea that was foreign to Gobineau. Lapouge also surpassed him when, in detaching himself from the constraints of the church, he pronounced these prophetic words: ‘The morality of today is almost dead and that of tomorrow is not yet born’” (346).

With the Germans, one sees a celebration of science but not antireligious scientism. Günther was editor of Rasse: Monatsschrift der nordischen Bewegung (Race: A monthly for the Nordic idea), which published discussions of dolichocephalics and brachycephalics, blood groups, and other biological determinations—all presented in strictly scientific terms, replete with numbers and comparatively devoid of vitriolic eruptions. As one contemporary critic noted: “It makes racism respectable among the educated classes by having a dazzling array of Herr Doktors and professors among its editors and contributors.”¹¹⁵ The invocation of science and scholarship mentioned here is plainly meant as a contrast to charlatans and boors, not religion and tradition. In Rasse, Günther published several short pieces by Lapouge and penned several more celebrating the older man as the “founder of racial science.” Günther did not mention God or the church much, but he did appreciate the pessimism. When Lapouge died, Günther wrote a mournful obituary that he published in his journal.¹¹⁶ In it, he cited Lapouge as the first to apply the studies of heredity and selection to the life of peoples and credited him with having “gone further, earlier, than Galton, Gobineau, or Ammon in predicting the downfall of civilization.” He also celebrated Lapouge for having “based morality completely on biology.” Günther attributed uncommon insight to his mentor, writing, “We will never forget Lapouge. His name belongs among the great names of northern racial theorists!” (98). An obituary in the journal Volk und Rasse praised Lapouge as the founder of all race science, stating that, “though Gobineau was trained in the natural sciences, it was Lapouge who was the first to apply the scientific studies to the theory of races.”¹¹⁷ Most of the many German articles about him, before and after his death, mentioned his scientism but skipped over his atheist materialism.

The Volke und Rasse obituary proclaimed that “the success of the development that his theories had in Germanic lands, especially in National Socialist Germany, must have given him the assurance, in his final years, that his work would carry on” (258). This was true, to a degree. Lapouge did on occasion celebrate the influence he had had on Germany, as in a letter to Schemann written in 1934: “Tomorrow I turn 80, and I no longer hardly hope to take up my work on social science based on biology again, but as far as that goes, the battle is won, and in Germany above all they work with ardor on political and social applications of selectionism!”¹¹⁸ A year later, however, he sounded a very different note, writing that “the future will tell us if this great man’s politics-of-the-bogeyman could end in any way other than in horrifying exterminations and the end of the best people. But who would dare, who could proclaim this truth?”¹¹⁹ This note of worry and remorse, and the few other comments that resemble it, help to place Lapouge historically, but they do not undo the fact that he helped to create the situation. In writing the history of the Shoah, we should at least note that in the mind of this first-generation scientific racist, morality was actively rejected rather than merely ignored. Moreover, that rejection followed a logic outside of racial science, a logic that rested on the apparent consequences of the end of the soul when coupled with an insistence on the end of philosophy. We must also note that this proponent of antimorality and state racism lived and campaigned until his death in 1936.

Lapouge was extraordinarily industrious in the service of his science. Aside from the skull measuring and publishing, he kept up a tremendous correspondence with disciples, sympathizers, opponents, journal editors, and colleagues all over the world.¹²⁰ These included a host of obscure men and women, as well as very well known racial theorists, eugenists, and other interested parties. Among the prominent racists and eugenists who held extensive correspondence with Lapouge were such figures as Madison Grant, Margaret Sanger, Charles Davenport, Lothrop Stoddard, William Ripley, John Beddoe, Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton, Gustave Le Bon, Charles and Bessie Drysdale, Luis Huerta, Angelo Crespi, Georges Chatterton-Hill, Carl Closson, JeanRichard Bloch, and Charles de Ujfalvy-Huszar. These were among the best-known racialists of the time, and they had tremendous impact; they all wrote immensely popular books, and many also proselytized in lectures.¹²¹ In the United States the two most popular racial scare books were Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Ripley’s The Races of Europe; in Britain, Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color and John Beddoe’s The Races of Britain preached xenophobic hatred and encouraged the Nordic movement there. Many of these figures held extremely prestigious positions in their respective countries. Ripley was a professor at Harvard and MIT and also lectured on anthropology at Columbia; Beddoe served as president of the Anthropological Society of London and of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and lectured widely; Davenport was founding director of the famous biological laboratory of Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and of the Eugenics Record Office; Closson lectured at the University of Chicago; Charles and Bessie Drysdale were the leaders of the British Neo-Malthusian Society and delivered frequent lectures on eugenics. In the Lapouge archives, there are hundreds upon hundreds of letters to and from these people, and hundreds more to editors of journals and amateur scientists, both male and female, near and far.

Lapouge kept up these relationships (both in letters and visits) over the course of six decades, energetically facilitating the exchange of information, translation of work, publication of new studies, and organization of conferences. He introduced his friends and followers to each other, arranged for them to translate each other’s work, and encouraged their friendships. He sent these fellow travelers his collections of data and his photographs of “types,” lent them skulls, annotated their work, wrote their prefaces, and, as with Günther, even helped them attain university positions. They all flattered each other a good deal, but Lapouge was unquestionably respected as the master—or even “my superior,” in many cases. Carl Closson informed Lapouge that his course on “Social Selection” at the University of Chicago was based on Lapouge’s Sélections sociales.¹²² William Ripley’s interaction with Lapouge began when Ripley wrote a very critical review of this rival race theorist’s work. Lapouge, however, wanted cooperation, not rivalry; he wrote charming, graceful letters to Ripley, and the two became friends and consistent supporters of one another’s work. Much of the correspondence between Lapouge and his colleagues was filled with details of the quotidian, serving essentially as cathectic ritual. Some disciples were in contact with several other members of the far-flung network, and most regularly either asked Lapouge for news about the others or supplied him with such information. In general, the letters kept track of disciples, colleagues, and various racial theorists around the world. Many of these colleagues knew each other’s personal situations and issued congratulations for good selectionist marriages, for the arrival of children, and then for the betrothals of these children. Another large portion of the correspondence was devoted to the dissemination of specific anthroposociological facts. In France, Germany, Britain, Spain, and the United States, Lapouge’s friends and disciples kept him apprised of their almost constant head-measuring plans, expeditions, and results. They asked hundreds of procedural questions, and Lapouge answered them. They also worked to defend and promote Lapouge.

With figures who were more colleagues than disciples, Lapouge carried on more balanced relationships. His language changed ever so slightly for each of these figures, though his general concerns remained consistent. For example, Lapouge told Ernst Haeckel, author of the very optimistic, monist-racist The Riddle of the Universe, that he himself was “a pessimist monist” because he understood that “cold, darkness, death, and unconsciousness constituted the final reality.”¹²³ Lapouge rarely if ever described himself as a pessimist monist (essentially, a materialist) elsewhere. In another letter to Germany (the name is obscured, but Haeckel seems the likely candidate), Lapouge wrote, “You are . . . like me, a medieval chevalier lost in the modern world,” and he congratulated himself and his correspondent on their ability to maintain “a perfect detachment.” “I really fear that our great courage will not serve for much and that we will finish like Don Quixote. The world, which was never worth much anyway, has gone rotten. My opinion is that a reform will require a profound moral disturbance, and where can one nowadays find a crowbar with which to raise souls? There is no more God, no more duty, no more morality, no more country.” Lapouge further complained that “the biggest moral movement ever, Christianity,” had failed. The republican movement was even more of a disappointment. Lapouge told of those who had “sacrificed everything and even their lives to found the republic, the political regime that was going to put power into pure hands and create happiness for everyone. You cannot doubt the enthusiasm and the righteousness of the apostles of the republic at a certain moment: the dream of purity and of happiness came to an end with the Wilson scandal, the Panama scandal, and the ruin of honest naive folk and the enrichment of rogues.”¹²⁴ Lapouge was still invigorating the anthropological cult by invoking the loss of belief—in God, in Christianity, and in the republic.

With Margaret Sanger and other advocates of birth control, Lapouge concentrated his language on the prophylactic aspect of anthroposociology. Not surprisingly, his ties with this movement grew as the discourse of birth control shifted from feminism to eugenics. In 1921 he was invited and welcomed to the White House along with other members of the International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference.¹²⁵ On this visit he got to know Sanger, and they subsequently exchanged a series of letters; when she requested it, he agreed to lend his name to several of her projects. In 1925 he wrote telling her to be assured that

you will have in me, henceforth, a very resolute collaborator and that I consider the interests and programs of selectionism as inseparable from those of the Birth Control League. There is a formidable amount of work to accomplish in order to change opinion and modify ideas on morality in general and on sexual morality in particular, but the future and progress of the human species demands that this work be accomplished without delay or timidity. I do not know how to thank you and all the other women sufficiently for your kindness toward me—I was very touched. I return to you the note sent by Dr. Drysdale. It is very good as it is and can be published with my signature.¹²⁶

Sanger’s description of Lapouge in her autobiography conforms to the rather maladroit image of him that emerges from the archives: he was an example of things that went wrong at the conference, getting lost when everyone was picked up and then finally found on the pier, “whence all had fled save one inconspicuous, desolate man sitting on top of his luggage, reading, waiting patiently for someone to come for him—so unimportant-looking that no one would have suspected him of being a renowned scientist,” and later burning himself badly in the shower because he didn’t know how to regulate the “much advertised American plumbing.” He nevertheless charmed everyone that he wanted to charm.¹²⁷

Because of the eugenics movement and the new immigration laws in the United States, Lapouge grew increasingly optimistic regarding the country’s fate.¹²⁸ In 1925 he expressed as much to Charles Davenport, a Mendelian biologist and America’s leading eugenist. Writing that the situation in France was getting worse all the time, Lapouge told Davenport that he was “very discouraged” and that “the only hope for stopping the decline of civilization was in America. . . . The progress of democracy has made Europe a land decivilized.” He praised Sanger and lamented that in France, neo-Malthusianism was “above all else a doctrine of people who wanted to retain the fun of sex and get rid of the fecundity.” In America, by contrast, “it seems to be inspired by selectionist tendencies more than anything else. I have a very firm opinion on this: the sacerdotal act of fertilization must not be open to everyone and in all circumstances; reproduction is a social function that must be put under society’s control. By the weakness of the state and of the church, which opens marriage to all comers, it has most often become an affair of personal interests, sometimes of love. . . . This situation has been very badly handled.”¹²⁹ When Lapouge wrote of “the sacerdotal act of fertilization,” he was furthering his religious atheism, proselytizing to an attenuated flock. For Lapouge, and for some of his audience, a passionate, communally binding, meaning-laden science was replacing religion in very specific ways.

The American immigration laws that had so pleased Lapouge were best represented by the Immigration Act of 1924, overwhelmingly passed by the House and Senate and quickly signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. When still vice president, Coolidge had publicly remarked that “America must be kept American. Biological laws show . . . that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”¹³⁰ The law of 1924 reflected these concerns quite closely, seeking to “keep” America Nordic by letting in fewer eastern and southern European immigrants. As for the forced sterilization of the unfit and criminal, eugenists such as Sanger and Davenport actively supported such measures. The first state sterilization law in America was passed in 1907. At the end of the 1920s, sterilization laws were on the books in twenty-four states, and there were people sterilized for little more than moral infractions. Frustrated by an opposition that called these laws unconstitutional, American eugenists brought a test case to the Supreme Court: seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck had been labeled a “moral imbecile” because she conceived a child out of wedlock. She, her mother, and her daughter “tested” below normal intelligence though there is no good reason to believe they were not all perfectly normal. According to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”¹³¹ Carrie Buck was sterilized. By the mid-thirties some twenty thousand legally performed, enforced sterilizations had been carried out on men and women in the United States alone.¹³² Lapouge’s role in all this should not be overstated, but neither should it be ignored. There were several routes to this kind of racism and coerced eugenics, but Lapouge certainly invented one of them, and through epistolary and organizational efforts, as well as through his publications, he devoted his life to supporting the doctrine’s popularity.

Amid Lapouge’s long-lived correspondences there are a great many incidental interactions, many with interested novices and many with ideological opponents.¹³³ These tended to concentrate on head shapes but sometimes contained striking ideological and cosmological assertions. In 1915 Lapouge sent a long letter to the writer Paul Gaultier at the Revue bleue, where Gaultier had recently published an anti-Lapougian article.¹³⁴ The letter claimed that the ideas Gaultier “took pleasure in destroying” had the power “to convulse the world such as it has never been before” and would “inevitably supplant the civilization that you love and that I will miss.” After several paragraphs of anthroposociology, Lapouge added an unusual coda, asking Gaultier:

Since God has died, don’t you feel at all that something has changed in the world? There always remains enough spiritualism for a doctoral thesis, but now that natural creation is a universally accepted fact, do you think that people are going to continue to believe in the existence of a creator? Now that the lawgiver of Sinai has disappeared, do you hope to keep people in the observance of prescriptions and the defenses that the wisdom of the church had deduced? Not one political principle, not one moral principle, can escape the revision.¹³⁵

One long quotation will round out this portrait of the epistolary Lapouge. The following letter was written to Madison Grant in April 1929.¹³⁶ It begins with a page and a half of chitchat about the weather and his health and then mentions his latest work, “Der biologische Ursprung der Ungleichheit der Klassen,” published in Die Sonne, and discusses the Norwegian translation of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Next, he praises “a zealous assistant” who reports from California that the Latin Americans are increasingly considered white, “especially the Mexicans.”¹³⁷ Except in Chile and Argentina, “it is very clear that the European element is going to disappear.” The remainder of the letter continues along these lines, touching on most of Lapouge’s major themes:

It’s a very good operation to fix quotas of immigrants to be admitted, following the proportions of elements composing the nation around the end of the eighteenth century and not from the period up to the present time. But to avoid the Law of Lapouge and eliminate the dung of the recent immigrations, it is necessary to employ efficacious methods to encourage the descendants of these immigrants to return to Europe. It will require envisaging measures forbidding marriage with Americans of origin and also to preserve the quality of the citizen among the pure Americans. Thus, little by little, it will be possible to determine which foreigners to remove and to decant the American nation. Be particularly wary of the Jews. Germany is nothing but a Jewish state, as is France, under exclusively mammonist politics today. The Jew understands nothing but money; in social life he sees nothing but the economic costs. The danger that Marxism has let loose on humanity comes because Karl Marx was a Jew. This is not appreciated these days. I knew Marx when I was in Creuse, where he had relatives, and I was at the time struck by the inability of this powerful mind to be interested in anything that couldn’t be translated into riches and material pleasures. For him, brains didn’t count; he only thought of bellies. That’s why Marxism has had so much favor among the Badly-Descended-from-the-Monkeys [Mal-Descendus-du-Singe], for whom ambitions are located below the diaphragm, and why the Jewish banker plutocracy finds a way to make a useful alliance with the rebellious elements of civilization.

This particular critique of Marx is obviously a lot easier when one’s own belly is full, but the important thing to note here is how adroit Lapouge was at combining two contradictory aspersions against the Jews: bolshevism and capitalism. To continue:

The most horrible corruption is developing in France and Germany, in all the classes and from all points of view. Mammonism devours everything. More and more, everything is for sale: women, judges, functionaries, the parliament, the clergy, the government. An honest man ends up scowled at, not only as an imbecile—an old idea—but as a latent danger for the success of the schemes of others. One after another, huge scandals kept breaking this winter, of which the most resounding was the Hanau affair. From the president of the republic and the directors of the major presses, all the way to the lesser functionaries, everyone is touched, but we have so easily extinguished the affair that apart from a few people of the second rank, no one will be condemned.

The “Hanau affair” refers to the Marthe Hanau financial scandal of 1927–1928 that did, in fact, bring down at least one major newspaper, Le quotidien.¹³⁸ There was a host of other scandals in these years, extreme enough to jeopardize the republic. Lapouge’s comment that everything is “for sale” and that an “honest man” ends up being scowled at are older aspects of his thinking, folded in with these new disappointments in the republic.

You’ll tell me that in all times moralists have said this. But the demoralization of Europe by the jolts of the war was so profound that its effects have been mounting instead of fading away, and all the resources of civilized life, after having served in the destruction of men and of things, put their formidable power in service of the destroyers of the civilization. I don’t necessarily believe in the definitive triumph of the Badly-Descended-from-the-Monkeys. The entire world hasn’t been affected, and even if it were and civilization returned to a state neighboring animality, there would survive in a good number of places residuals of the best lines, to enact the recommencing of evolution described in my “Ursprung der Ungleichheit,” and it will happen even faster because they’ll constantly uncover fabricated objects, and maybe inscriptions, and books to guide the animators of the new civilization. This is what I say to those who, especially in Germany, doubt the final end. As long as the sun shines and the descendants of man aren’t entirely lost, evolution will be able to start again. Whether it takes a hundred or a hundred thousand generations. Don’t forget that chronology no longer limits the past and the future of the earth to that of the incandescence of a cannonball cooling down and that the study of the decay of radium brings us to counting the past by the hundreds of millions of years; the future remains just about infinite. Evolutionists always have to enter the factor of “time” into their calculations, because the duration around the current time, the duration of the present civilization, counts for infinitely little. It’s an idea that still escapes everyone and that must be spread about because it assures the certainty of all hopes, even those that seem chimerical today.

Here Lapouge enters a weird kind of thinking that “assures the certainty of all hopes” but also assures the certainty of all failures. His reference to “a cannon-ball cooling down” is a particularly keen reflection of the anxieties about time common to this historical moment. By the late nineteenth century, some religious people still maintained that the world was about six thousand years old—a number derived by estimating the years described in the Bible. Scientists, however, generally believed that the earth was millions of years old, following Lord Kelvin, who had come to that number by estimating the rate of cooling of the planet. Marie Curie’s experiments with radiation led to a very new estimation: now geological indications that the earth was billions of years old could be taken seriously, since the planet had its own radioactive heat source. Lapouge was so stunned by the extensive amount of time available that he really defined even his own project out of existence: the Aryan might triumph, but, with an almost infinite amount of time, the Aryan might fall again, too. However, true to form, he managed to leap back into his peculiar teleology:

Notice that the profound demoralization of the present time is in any case a cause of selections that tend to compensate for it. All those deranged men and women who frighten us today will leave hardly any descendants, and their heredity will be snuffed out. The effect on the passive elements who follow them will subsist, but the number of factors of decadence will not be augmented.

The phenomenon of social disorder is due, above all, to the fact that the civic spirit is not developed among people to the same degree as the other faculties. Yet the base of societies is the spirit of abnegation and the devotion to social utility that neglects the interest of the individual, as one sees among the bees, the ants, and the termites. Individualism and the cult of me are at the base of the family life and social life of men. This is due to the imperfection of evolution and also very much due to Christianity and philosophy. Concern over a future life and the vindication of the rights of man put the interests of the collective into the shadows. One only finds the cult of the other developed in isolated individuals, by instinct, and among the adepts of the Great Consciousness, as with a religious base. The two of these together form only an infinite minority of humanity.

By “Great Consciousness” Lapouge means the composite intelligence that is humanity. Yet it is entirely unclear where the “mind” that Lapouge defended against “bellies” is supposed to find a place in an ant, bee, or termite collective. More important to my analysis are Lapouge’s persistent, explicit rejection of Christianity, philosophy, and the republic and his continued delivery of scientific sermons on infinity, eternity, and the paradox of human meaning in such a vast expanse of time and space.

THE COMPOSITE EFFECT OF HUNDREDS and hundreds of letters to and from Lapouge is remarkable. Throughout the correspondence, there are many striking references to Hitler, Günther, and the racialist events of the twenties and thirties. The overall picture is that from the 1880s to the 1930s Lapouge trained and maintained an extensive network of disciples and colleagues, all of whom felt they were involved in altering the racial content of the Western world. They saw themselves as having directly affected immigration laws, changed the social and legal status of contraceptives, influenced the rise of enforced sterilization (especially in the United States and Germany), and actively helped to shape Hitler’s ideas and put him in power. Except in France, where a concerted effort had been made to discredit him, Lapouge came to be accepted as a respectable representative of science.¹³⁹

Like freethinking anthropology, this branch of the atheist, materialist, anthropological creed was marked by distress, wild proclamations of the future, and the division of the world between a new sacred and a new profane. Lapouge’s science was pragmatic in a way, a powerful doctrine of exclusion, quite capable of being co-opted by governments for direct action on the populace. It adds interest and relevance to note that he shared the head measuring with Paul Valéry, shared the deconsecration of sex with Margaret Sanger, and, in his own assessment, counted Adolph Hitler among his disciples. Lapouge broadcast the tenets of his scientific cult with remarkable energy, in every direction, over the course of some sixty years and may have done considerable damage to the world in so doing. Throughout that long campaign, he continued to express awe and anguish regarding the challenges of late-nineteenth-century atheism, and he remained dedicated to a doctrine of antimorality and coleader of an extensive pastoral community that saw him as a scientist and a prophet.