This book is about atheism and its relationship to science, especially the science of people—of race, gender, class, and nation—at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. I started researching this topic about ten years ago because I read of the existence of a Society of Mutual Autopsy, and I wanted to know more. The French anthropologists that created it dominated the Society of Anthropology of Paris in the last decades of the century and championed an outspoken, overt mixture of science and anticlerical politics. The history of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in this period had been explored in several works, most notably, in French, in several articles by Claude Blanckaert and a book by Nélia Dias and, in English, in an article by Michael Hammond and the dissertations of Joy Harvey and Elizabeth Williams.1 These answered a lot of questions, and the present work is much indebted to them. But these studies were all primarily concerned with tracing the interaction between political ideology and the development of particular lines of scientific theory; most often, this had to do with more or less subtle assumptions of human hierarchy. I wanted to know more about some of these anthropologists’ outspoken defense of an entirely unsubtle, politicalized science and their zealous campaign against belief in God. I soon found that a distinct group had first come together as freethinkers—atheists—in the period of the conservative Second Empire and had then entered into anthropology as an intact group, with the explicit intention of using the young science against religion, God, and, specifically, the Catholic Church.2
By the late nineteenth century, French culture was dominated by the notion that tradition, church, monarchy, and dogma were naturally and inextricably united in a struggle against change, freedom, democracy, and science. The confrontation between science and religion was a constant theme. But before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, even most left-wing intellectuals felt that some deistic notion was necessary to account for human existence. Evolutionary theory did not cause anticlericalism or atheism, but it was a great and encouraging windfall for those who were already in opposition to the church. Some forms of anticlericalism reach back before the Revolution, but under Napoleon III’s Second Empire, political repression and the privileges of the Catholic Church wildly exacerbated the hostility between Catholicism and republicanism. As Theodore Zeldin has put it, “Clericalism and anticlericalism became probably the most fundamental cause of division among Frenchmen.”3 Indeed, Zeldin credits the anticlerical passion of this period with the creation of a two-party political system in France: without much agreement on anything else, everyone in France was either for or against the clergy (p. 1027). In this great division, there were several sites of the anticlerical avant-garde—or those who saw themselves as such—and this book is the history of one of them.
By the time the Third Republic was instituted in 1871, a community of left-wing atheists were using anthropology to argue against religion and, more surprisingly, using the rituals of this new science to cope with the distress and alienation occasioned by the loss of God and of church community. These freethinking anthropologists of Paris were as intent on their freethinking mission as on their anthropology and saw themselves as central figures in a great project of transforming France into a scientistic, antireligious—indeed, atheist—country. They were jubilant in this dechristianizing project, but they were also somewhat agonized over the end of the soul and its consequences for humanity. In interesting ways, they managed this agony through the invention of various anthropological ideas and practices.
Throughout its investigations, this book concentrates on relationships and behaviors as much as it does on the ideas of science. Through behaviors as well as ideas, the freethinking anthropologists created a purposeful cult, whose central gesture was a somewhat fantastic translation project by which the entire context of public and private discourse was to be changed from basically religious to basically scientific. Even in the world of the new, secularizing Third Republic, the freethinking anthropologists were extremists—by most contemporary estimations, they took antitheism and antiphilosophical metaphysics a bit too far—but now they found a niche. For pragmatic secularists who saw the Catholic Church and political conservativism as their real enemies, they were useful allies, and the government and the general public supported them by funding and flocking to a variety of their anthropological activities—books, schools, journals, conferences, and tours. For the much smaller group of French men and women who truly agreed with the freethinking anthropologists on questions of God and naturalism, they offered a more dramatic service. They came to provide a kind of replacement cult, complete with death rites in the form of an autopsy society and a variety of other services that paralleled Catholic ritual. Thus the community had common rites of a most serious nature, as well as an eschatological vision in which the triumph of science over faith coincided with a worldly utopia of equality, democracy, and self-fulfillment.
Because the freethinking anthropologists saw themselves as egalitarians before they were anthropologists, it is not surprising that they argued that anthropology was inherently emancipatory and egalitarian in its conclusions. Nevertheless, their philosophical materialism and brash hostility to all metaphysics caused them to flatten the human experience into that which could be weighed and measured. Numbers rarely meant much in the anthropological theories they generated, but the freethinking anthropologists carried out a tremendous amount of measuring anyway and proselytized the truth and antimythic purity of facts expressed in weights and numbers. This is particularly important because some of the central techniques by which governments have come to understand their populations through biological measurements and statistics were created by students of the freethinking anthropologists. When these former students went on to become influential scientists and politicians, they were generally far less focused on evangelizing atheism than their anthropologist teachers had been, but they remained animated by the freethinkers’ sense of materialism, naturalism, and measuring. Borrowing ideas, language, techniques, and behavior from the freethinking anthropologists, they turned these toward measuring bodies for criminal identification, or trying to control the national birthrate, or theorizing mass exterminations in order to “correct” the population. In these and other endeavors—literary as well as political—some key French men and women passionately connected their work to the freethinking anthropologists and their particular version of materialism. Through discussions of physical anthropology, these students of humankind manipulated, “proved,” and publicized a host of deeply private and broadly public concerns—and generated some very troubling doctrines. In late-nineteenth-century France, these anthropologists were by no means the only people replacing interest in the soul with interest in the body, but their particular variation on this theme had some significant consequences.
The first part of this book is about a self-identified group and its lay following. The book then follows that story from the extraordinarily zealous, left-wing freethinking anthropologists and their conclusions about humanity to a second generation of body measurers, some of whom, such as the Bertillon brothers, successfully brought these numerical techniques to the modern state as systems for gaining usable, if problematic, information about the populace. By contrast, some of these students of the Paris anthropologists, most notably the scientific racist Vacher de Lapouge, brought biological reductionism to a level that could not be supported by the republican regime. Finally, I will follow the early-twentieth-century dismissal of the more racist and sexist of these doctrines from within anthropology, as well as from philosophy and from Emile Durkheim’s sociology. In the context I examine, leftist, secularist concern with the body (instead of the soul or the spirit) helped the modern state come to see its population and try to ameliorate its troubles, but it also generated an attitude toward humanity that was not compatible with leftist ideology. This forced an explosive confrontation over the issues of atheism, religion, morality, racism, sexism, and equality, and neither the political left nor the political right has ever been the same since. The left had seen itself as the keeper of science, but when it became clear that the peculiar authority of science could be used to create dogma and false hierarchies as well as to dismantle them, some preferred equality to science. While science remained in the arsenal of the politically progressive, its numbers and laws were suddenly and vividly understood as a potential enemy of equality and as a possible support for any given social hierarchy. The final part of the book offers a revision of the common narrative of the history of racism, which held that scientific racism went relatively unchallenged until the horrors of Nazism made clear its dangers.
This book, then, is the story of a leftist, atheist movement and the fascinating experience of being an atheist in France when it was both the absolute cutting edge and a wild bit of the fringe. Following key students of this group, the book examines how the atheist anthropologist’s turn from the soul to the body helped to generate several theories of biological determinism. Finally, it demonstrates how some of the more moderate of the irreligious were able to catch the error, dramatically reject those theories, and revise the left’s antimetaphyscial, scientific ideals in order to defend its moral vision.
The atheism of the anthropologists had a variety of interesting consequences and influences that will show up throughout this book. Though the freethinking anthropologists had hundreds of devoted followers who identified themselves as atheists, nationally this was still a small group, and though they had the attention and even the ardent sympathy of many important figures in the French public world, they were rarely matched in their antitheist zeal by even their own body-measuring students. A host of better-known figures encountered the freethinking anthropologists, however, and let it be known that the dogmatic, passionate materialism of these anthropologists was crucial to their own artistic, political, intellectual, and even personal lives. Thus, as fascinating as they are on their own, much of the importance of the freethinking anthropologists lies in this network of associations. Much of the significance of the present study is that it examines the figures in this network—Emile Zola, Jules Ferry, Arthur Conan Doyle, Maria Montessori, Margaret Sanger, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Hamlin (Hannibal) Garland, and Bram Stoker are among the better known—in a new light, that is, in a context made visible by the freethinking anthropologists’ attack on theism and their attempt to replace it with anthropology.
The ardor of these anthropologists and their followers is perhaps best characterized by the Society of Mutual Autopsy—a club in which one waited for one’s friends and fellow members to die and then dissected them—unless they got to you first. When the great republican statesman Léon Gambetta died in 1882, only his heart was laid to rest in the Panthéon, surrounded by the more complete tombs of other national heroes. Gambetta had believed in science with such conviction that he had willed his brain to its most outrageously dedicated disciples, the freethinking anthropologists, who had promised that brain autopsies would yield scientific advancement and, through it, social progress. This event also characterizes the anthropologists’ profound failure: next to nothing was learned from Gambetta’s autopsied cerebrum. Instead, the society’s great success was its ability to lend a sense of meaning and purpose to a death otherwise experienced as meaningless. As this book will show, anthropology served not only to provide hypotheses for questions of morality and mortality but also to alleviate the fears surrounding these questions and to provide a community of hope and enthusiasm for those who had explicitly rejected the spiritual.