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

1. Claude Blanckaert: see, for instance: “L’anthropologie au féminine: Clémence Royer (1830–1902),” Revue de synthèse 105 (1982): 23–38; and “Préface: ‘L’anthropologie personnifiée’ Paul Broca et la biologie du genre humain,” in Paul Broca, Mémoires d’anthropologie (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1989), i–xliii; see also “La science de l’homme entre humanité et inhumanité,” in Claude Blanckaert, ed., Des sciences contre l’homme: Classer, hiérarchiser, exclure (Paris: Autrement, 1993), 14–46. Nélia Dias: see Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908): Anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991). Michael Hammond: see “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 118–132. Joy Harvey: see “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 1859–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983). Elizabeth Williams: see “The Science of Man: Anthropological Thought and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1983).

2. Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Anthropological Utopias and Republican Morality: Atheism and the Mind/Body Problem in France, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995).

3. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1977), 994.

1. Archives of the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, Musée de l’homme, Paris (Hereafter ASAM), procès-verbal, Commissariat de police des Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée), Commissaire de police Eugène Corneaud, October 4, 1889.

2. ASAM, Extrait du registre des actes de décès de l’an 1889, Décès de Louis Victor Eugène Véron, May 23, 1889.

3. See Michael Hammond, “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 118–132; Elizabeth A. Williams, “The Science of Man: Anthropological Thought and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1983); and Joy Harvey, “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 1859–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983).

4. Nélia Dias, “La Société d’autopsie mutuelle; ou, Le dévouement absolu aux progrès de l’anthropologie,” Gradhiva 10 (1991): 26–35.

5. My own work on the society includes a chapter of my dissertation and an article: “Anthropological Utopias and Republican Morality: Atheism and the Mind/Body Problem in France, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995); and “French Scientific Materialism and the Liturgy of Death: The Invention of a Secular Version of Catholic Last Rites (1876–1914),” French Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (fall 1997): 703–735.

6. See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Presuppositions of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Löwith concludes that as mere reconfigurations of Christian eschatology, these models are inherently illegitimate. For a fascinating response, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

7. For general studies of French attitudes toward death, funerals, and cemeteries, see Philippe Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en occident (Paris: Seuil, 1975); Michel Vovelle, La mort en l’occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Brittany (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989); and Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

8. “Statuts de la Société d’autopsie mutuelle,” Revue scientifique 11 (November 25, 1876): 527–528; Les droits de l’homme, October 25, 1876; Le bien public, October 24, 1876; La tribune médicale, no. 128 (October 29, 1876): 525–526.

10. Cited in David Bakan, “The Influence of Phrenology on American Philosophy,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 2 (1966): 214.

11. Mathias Duval, “L’aphasie depuis Broca,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter BSAP), 3d ser., 10 (1887): 769. See also “Société d’autopsie,” Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris 3 (1893): 233–236; and Auguste Coudereau, “L’autopsie mutuelle,” La pensée libre 17 (November 13, 1880): 1.

12. For a discussion of autopsies and the poor in nineteenth-century England, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

16. There was very little discussion of eugenics among these anthropologists. Papillault was a member of the Paris Eugenics Society.

18. Henri Thulié, “Sur l’autopsie de Louis Asseline, membre de la Société d’anthropologie et de la Société d’autopsie mutuelle,” BSAP 3d ser., 10 (1878): 161–167.

20. Mathias Duval, Théophile Chudzinski, and Georges Hervé, “Description morphologique du cerveau de Coudereau,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 337–389.

21. Théophile Chudzinski and Mathias Duval, “Description morphologique du cerveau de Gambetta,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 129–152; and Mathias Duval, “Le poids de l’encéphale de Gambetta,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 399–417.

22. Gabriel Deville, editor of the republican journal Droits de l’homme, joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy in 1876, having read about it in the Bien publique. Dr. J. Bach, of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, joined in 1876, having learned of it in the Revue scientifique. Not surprisingly, Droits de l’homme ran an article on the society soon afterward, as did Le réveil médical, soon after its director, Dr. E. Monin, joined the society in 1880 ASAM, Dr. J. Bach to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, September 28, 1876; “Statuts de la Société d’autopsie mutuelle,” Revue scientifique 11, no. 22 (November 25, 1876): 527–528;ASAM, Gabriel Deville to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, October 1876; ASAM, Dr. E. Monin to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, June 28, 1880. The article in Droits de l’homme ran on October 25, 1876.

23. ASAM, Aline Ducros to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, February 26, 1877.

24. ASAM, Stéphen (Jean Marie) Pichon, April 18, 1879. He revoked his will in 1930, three years before he died. ASAM, Stéphen (Jean Marie) Pichon, 1930.

27. An article in L’écho de Paris, no. 267 (October 18, 1889), on Faidherbe’s membership in the society, provoked a considerable response.

28. Henry Céard, “Sapeck l’incomparable,” Le siècle, October 15, 1889. The Temps article, “Pour l’humanité” (date missing), was preserved among the papers of the ASAM. See also Le petit bleu, April 13, 1903.

29. Eugène Véron, Aesthetics, trans. W. H. Armstrong (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), 60.

31. Jean d’Echerac, “André Lefèvre,” Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris 14 (1904): 386.

35. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 75. On the origins of this doctrine, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” in Thomas Kselman, ed., Belief in History (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 68–106.

41. On Robin, see Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, Paul Robin: Un militant de la liberté et du bonheur (Paris: Publisud, 1994). On Neo-Malthusian groups, see Francis Ronsin, La grève des ventres: Propagande néo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalité française, 19e-20e siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 42–74. See also Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

42. Malthus’s Essay on Population concluded that the poor would always exist because people reproduced food arithmetically but reproduced themselves exponentially. The later, euphemistic term was a long leap but meaningful: as neo-Malthusianism, the birth-control movement was generally conceived as more social than selfish.

45. ASAM, Léonce Harmignies to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle (83 and 84), January 3, 1881.

46. ASAM, Barbe Nikitine to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, April 24, 1883. Nikitine wrote for La justice under the pseudonym B. Gendre.

47. Archives de la Société d’anthropologie, Musée de l’homme, Paris (hereafter ASA), box: “Correspondance: 1905,” letter from Lapouge to the Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris, September 22, 1897.

48. ASA, box: “Correspondance 1905,” letters and telegrams from Dr. Baudry to the Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris, September 24–30, 1897.

49. ASAM, Victor Chevalier to the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, December 1, 1889.

50. ASAM, clipped article, “Pour l’humanité! La Société d’autopsie mutuelle,” no newspaper name, no page, no author, no date.

51. Cited in an obituary for Letourneau, Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie 12 (1902): 8.

58. ASAM, Extrait du registre des actes de décès de l’an 1889, Décès de Louis Victor Eugène Véron.

59. ASAM, procès-verbal, Commissariat de police des Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée), Commissaire de Police Eugène Corneaud.

61. ASA, box: “Correspondance 1905”; folder (tan): “Correspondance à classer: 1906–07”; and folder (tan): “I. 1888–1902” (actually extends to 1914), series of letters from Vve Eug. Véron.

62. “Un dîner pour la vulgarisation de la dissection mutuelle,” Morning News, February 7, 1884, cited (in translation) in L’homme 1 (1884): 113–118.

63. For a detailed intellectual biography of Royer, see Joy Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

64. Compte-rendu: Congrès de la libre pensée à Rome, 1904 (Ghent, 1905), 1. These congresses were held every year in various locales, and full-length books were generally published describing the events and including many of the lectures. The compte-rendu of the Congress in Paris, 1905, is particularly well organized and informative.

65. ASA, box: “Correspondance 1905”; folder (tan): “I. 1888–1902,” Vve Véron, September 23. 1902 (Véron heard of Royer’s death rather late).

67. Henry T. F. Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1956), 41.

68. Suzanne Bertillon, Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon: Inventeur de l’anthropométrie (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 11.

69. ASA (located in the ASAP though they were addressed to the Société d’Autopsie), Notes biographique de Jeanne Véron, December 17, 1906.

70. These included Le chat (1880), Le chien (1880), Le petit cousin Charles (1880), L’âne (1881), and Histoires enfantines (1881). The publishing enterprise was launched by Eugène Véron, Hovelacque, Lefèvre, Letourneau, and Barodet, all fellow anthropologists.

71. ASA, Jeanne Véron, December 17, 1906. No one ever did read these notes; they were sealed when I found them.

72. ASA, Testament: Vve Eugène Véron, neé Jeanne Guillaud, December 15, 1906.

74. Mathias Duval, “Le cerveau de Louis Asseline,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 260–274.

75. La Société, l’Ecole et le Laboratoire d’anthropologie de Paris à l’Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris, 1889), 105.

76. Mathias Duval, Théophile Chudzinski, and Georges Hervé, “Description morphologique du cerveau de Coudereau,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 377–389.

77. As cited in René Rémond, L’anticléricalisme en France (Brussels: Complexe, 1985), 176.

78. Gambetta, letter of September 4, 2874, to M. and Mme. Edmond Adam, in Juliette Adam, Mes souvenirs vol. 6 (paris: A. Lemerre, 1908), 150.

79. Mathias Duval, “Le poids de l’encéphale de Gambetta,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 400.

80. Chudzinski and Duval, “Description morphologique du cerveau de Gambetta,” 129–152.

82. Rémond, L’anticléricalisme en France, 191. Rémond includes several pages of Bert’s very colorful anticlerical speeches (188 and 190–193).

86. Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde, Léon Gambetta: Biographie psychologique—Le cerveau, la parole, la fonction et l’organe (Paris, 1898), x.

88. Charles Letourneau, “Adolphe Bertillon,” BSAP, 3d ser., 6 (1883): 187–192.

89. For a discussion of the use of liturgical models in the modern secular ritual of the court, see Richard K. Fenn, Liturgies and Trials: The Secularization of Religious Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).

90. John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 191–206.

92. Archives nationales (hereafter AN), F/17/13491–94, Sociétés savantes, Préfecture de police to Ministère de l’instruction publique, August 7, 1880.

93. “Gavarret,” Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1982), 15: 875–876.

94. AN, F/17/13491–94, Sociétés savantes, Ministère de l’instruction publique to Gavarret, Inspecteur Général de l’Université, September 21, 1880.

95. AN, F/17/13491–94, Sociétés savantes, Gavarret, Inspecteur général de l’université, to the Ministère de l’instruction publique, November 6, 1880.

96. Brès reports that after having seen Royer (and been moved by the respect with which her much esteemed professor had treated her), she went home and read Darwin the next day (Mme le Docteur [Madeleine] Brès, speech given at the Clémence Royer banquet, March 10, 1897, dossier Clémence Royer, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris, cited in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”, 104–105).

97. Armande de Quatrefages, L’unité de l’espèce humaine (Paris: Hechette, 1861); and Rapport sur le progrès de l’anthropologie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1867). Later in the century, his Histoire générale des races humaines (Paris: A. Hennuger, 1887) also became a classic in anthropology.

98. AN, F/17/13491/4, Sociétés savantes, Armande de Quatrefages to the Ministère de l’instruction publique, September 1, 1880.

99. AN, F/17/13491/4, Sociétés savantes, Ministère de l’instruction publique to the Ministère de l’interieur, November 1880.

100. AN, F/17/13491/4, Sociétés savantes, M. Delabarre, Ministère des affaires étrangères, to M. Ferry, Ministère de l’instruction publique, September 1, 1879, including two articles from the Télégraphe dated September 5 and December 7, 1879. The quotation is from the latter article.

101. AN, F/17/13491/4, Sociétés savantes, Ministère de l’instruction publique to the Ministère de l’interieur, November 1880.

102. Freycinet had been complicit in the creation of this decree but apparently had no intention of enforcing it. Indeed, he was already in negotiations for a more amicable settlement when Gambetta encouraged Republican Union ministers to execute the decrees. See, “Constans, Jean,” in the Dictionnaire de biographie française, 493–496, and in Yves Benoît, Dictionnaire des ministres: De 1789 à 1989 (Paris: Perrin, 1990), 417–418. See also Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 80.

103. ASAM, préfet de police (Quartier Vivienne), authorization, December 29, 1880.

104. René Fauvelle, “Les desiderata du matérialisme scientifique,” L’homme 3 (1886): 107.

105. This issue was a central focus of the freethinkers’ movement in general from at least as early as 1879. See Archives of the Préfecture de police, 1,493, Libre pensée: 1879 to 1891, and, in a file with overlapping dates, 1880–1897, both in 193032; Propagation de la foi civil. See also Jacqueline Lalouette, “Science et foi dans l’idéologie libre penseuse (1866–1914),” in Christianisme et science (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 21–54; and idem, La libre pensée en France, 1848–1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).

106. ASA, letter by Gabriel de Mortillet, February 16, 1886. While cemeteries became religiously neutral under a law of 1881, and secular funeral rights increased thereafter, it was not until a law of 1904 that the church lost its monopoly on pompes funèbres.

107. This prohibition was published in a number of Catholic journals of the time, as well as in L’homme 4 (1887): 382–383.

108. Journal officiel de la République française: Débats parlementaires, Chambre des députés, March 31, 1886, 609–624, cited in Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 196. Ellis discusses the cremation law from the point of view of the physician-legislators who, though also fiercely anticlerical, were primarily attempting to rid the cities of France of their supposedly unhygienic cemeteries.

110. Laborde was an important doctor and scientist, an editor of La tribune médicale, and a leader of the French Antialcoholic Union.

115. ASAM, procès-verbal, October 15, 1903. A Dr. Regnault, who was a member of the society, was also present at this meeting, though in what capacity it is difficult to discern. These rare notes were written on loose paper. I have found no book of meeting minutes.

119. ASAM, “Questionnaire,” Felix Auguste Blachette, Neuilly, February 18, 1905. He was fifty-eight when he completed the questionnaire.

120. ASAM, “Questionnaire,” Regnauth Perrier, Paris, March 23, 1905; “Questionnaire,” Alfred Guède, Paris, June 1914.

122. Georges Montandon, “Le squelette du Professeur Papillault,” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 8th ser., 6 (1935): 4–22.

123. On Royer’s death, see Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius.” For another version, in which Royer requested to be buried without a casket, see André Billy, L’époque 1900 (Paris, 1951), 215.

124. Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius,” 182. See also Albert Milice, Clémence Royer et sa doctrine de la vie (Paris: J. Peyronnet, 1926), 210–212.

125. For more on Laborde and Manouvrier see chapter 6. For Manouvrier’s quiet insult, see “Cerveau de M. Laborde,” BSAP 5th ser., 4 (1903): 424.

126. ASAM, Paul Robin, February 14, 1904. Robin’s assertion that membership in Freemasonry precluded true atheism was questionable. By the 1890s there was a considerable shift away from belief in a “Supreme Architect” and toward a more radically materialist cosmology within the ranks of French Freemasonry. See Mildred Headings, French Freemasonry under the Third Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949).

127. Théophile Chudzinski and Léonce Manouvrier, “Etude sur le cerveau de Bertillon,” BSAP 3d ser., 10 (1887): 558–590. The offensive remarks were made by Letourneau in the discussion that followed on pages 590–591. For Letourneau’s reaction, see “Discussion,” BSAP 3d ser., 11 (1888): 694–696.

1. England established civil marriage in 1837, Italy in 1866, Spain and Germany after 1870. The term “civil” was explicitly in contrast to confessional or religious. See René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 137, 138.

2. Just as the battle was to reach its most fevered pitch, Proudhon was expressing the possibility of reconciliation, though couched in extreme terms: “What difference would I have with you if you would only agree to take up the spiritual side of the Revolution?…A Christian, a deist, an antitheist, I am quite as religious as you are-and even in the same terms. I accept all of the categories of Catholicism-with the proviso of interpreting them in the light of this formula which sums up my whole book: God is the conscience of humanity” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église [Brussels, 1868–1870], end of the 12th étude, cited in Jacques Gadille, “On French Anticlericalism: Some Reflections,” European Studies Review 2, no. 2 [April 1983]: 138). That was a lot to ask, but it is useful to note that some of those engaged in the matter could see that republicanism and the church were not innately divided.

3. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1977), 998.

4. Maurice Agulhon, The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1982).

6. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 155–156.

8. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 1992), 61–62.

9. Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848 (1890; reprint, Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 75.

12. See the section “Beliefs and Unbelief” in Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 101–109. See also Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind; René Rémond, L’anticléricalisme en France (Brussels: Complexe, 1985); and the section “Religion and Anticlericalism” in Zeldin, France, 983–1039.

13. John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Harper, 1972), 5–6.

14. “The myth that France was pious and Catholic before the Revolution was invented by modern conservatives idealizing the Middle Ages. In the eighteenth century there was little militant abstention from religion, but only a small and unorganized minority was fervently devout. Most people went to church, but by no means every Sunday” (Zeldin, France, 984). John McManners makes the same point: “To understand the dechristianization of rural society, it is important to abandon the myth, dear to conservative churchmen, of an earlier epoch that was ‘Christian’” (McManners, Church and State in France, 9–10).

15. Gadille, “On French Anticlericalism,” 129. Gadille argues that, in this sense, anticlericalism will always be a part of religious history (141).

17. Jules Michelet, Le prêtre, la femme et la famille (1845; reprint, Paris: Michel Lévy and Librairie nouvelle, 1875), 267, 307, cited in Zeldin, France, 993.

18. Jean Pommier, “Les idées de Michelet et de Renan sur la confession en 1845,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, July-October 1936, 520–522; and Zeldin, France, 992.

20. Cited in the preface of the English translation of his novel Lourdes, trans E. A. Vizetelly (Chicago: Neely, 1894), v–vi.

24. The term was used by Ferdinand Buisson, who, along with Ferry, effectuated the overhaul of the educational system.

25. Revue pédagogique, 1882, cited in Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic, 85.

28. Having inherited a Napoleonic bureaucracy of some two hundred thousand members, the Third Republic rapidly expanded this corps in order to serve the needs of an increasingly urban, industrial nation. Through its expansion of state monopolies and public service (especially education), the Third Republic employed nearly five times that number by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Judith Wishnia has shown that this vast increase in state employees (admittedly, this includes the military) represented “one of every forty living Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and even more impressive, one of every ten voters received a salary paid out of public funds” (Wishna, The Proletarianizing of the Fonctionnaires [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990], 68).

29. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982); and idem, “Race and Gender : The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (June 1986): 261–277.

30. See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); idem, Face au racisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).

31. See George W. Stocking, After Tyler: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); idem, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free, 1987); idem, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free, 1968).

32. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Conception of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Key examples of the large literature on anthropology outside France includes George W. Stocking Jr., ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

33. Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie au féminine: Clémence Royer (1830–1902),” Revue de synthèse 105 (1982): 23–38; idem, “Préface: ‘L’anthropologie personnifiée’—Paul Broca et la biologie du genre humain,” in Paul Broca, Mémoires d’anthropologie (Paris: JeanMichel Place, 1989), i–xliii; and idem, “La science de l’homme entre humanité et inhumanité,” in Claude Blanckaert, ed., Des sciences contre l’homme: Classer, hiérarchiser, exclure (Paris: Autrement, 1993), pp. 14–46; Nélia Dias, Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908): Anthropologie et musicologie en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991); Michael Hammond, “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 118–132; Joy Harvey, “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 1859–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983); Elizabeth A. Williams, “The Science of Man: Anthropological Thought and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1983).

34. Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Anthropological Utopias and Republican Morality: Atheism and the Mind/Body Problem in France, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995).

35. Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 41–44.

36. Without even entering into the question of data manipulation or the effect of suppositions on experiments, political ideology is inherent in the very choice to study a given relationship scientifically. Importance and meaning are conferred on (and revealed as already socially present in) those questions that we imagine and thus choose to pose. Even when we “find” equality, a given test may reinforce group divisions: there are no research projects on the intellectual variation between middle-class Caucasians in Montana versus Colorado, for example, and neither is there an institute studying moral differences between tall and short people, because we do not see these as legitimate groups. They are not interesting because they have no sociopolitical component; that is to say, no one has an interest.

37. For a discussion of Broca’s life and work, see Blanckaert, “Préface.” See Blanckaert, Des sciences contre l’homme. In English, see Francis Schiller, Paul Broca: Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain (1979, reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); see also Williams, “The Science of Man”; as well as Harvey, “Races Specified.”

38. Letter of March 11, 1948, in Paul Broca, Correspondance, 1841–1857, vol. 2, 1848–1857 (Paris: Paul Schmidt, 1886), 12, cited in Jacqueline Lalouette, La libre pensée en France, 1848–1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 27–28.

39. Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

40. The Société de biologie was founded in 1848 by Charles Robin, a close associate of Littré, who would later be honored as a senator for life by the Third Republic. For more on this society, see Eugène Gley, “Histoire de la Société de biologie,” Revue scientifique 4, no. 13 (1900): 3 –11.

41. This is Broca’s account of the events. See Paul Broca, “Histoire des travaux de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1859–1863),” Mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 2 (1865): vii–li.

42. Debates on monogenism and polygenism reflected concerns about racial difference and in turn transformed the terms of debate about human difference in general. See Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science. For the French case in particular, see Harvey, “Races Specified.”

43. The Paris medical profession, in general, was renowned for its republicanism and anti-clericalism. See Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 30–51. See also Jacques Léonard, La médecine entre les saviors et les pouvoirs: Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la médecine française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981); George Rosen, “The Philosophy of Ideology and the Emergence of Modern Medicine in France,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (July 1946): 328–339; and Owsei Temkin, “Materialism in French and German Physiology of the Early Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (July 1946): 322–327.

44. Henri Thulié, “L’Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris depuis sa fondation,” in L’Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris (1876–1906) (Paris: Alcan, 1907), 3.

45. Paul Broca, “Discours sur l’homme et les animaux,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter BSAP), 2d ser., 1 (1866): 75. See also his comments in “Discussion sur la religiosité,” BSAP 2d ser., 12 (1877): 33–36.

46. Cardinals Donnet and Bonnechose led this outcry. See the debates in Le moniteur, March 28, 1868, 455–456; May 20, 1868, 689–691; May 21, 1868, 701–704; May 22, 1868, 709; May 23, 1868, 712; May 24, 1868, 718–721. For a discussion of this, see Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France, 39.

49. For the history of theories of evolution in France, see Yvette Conry, L’introduction du Darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1974); Denis Buican, La révolution de l’évolution (Paris: PUF, 1984);Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); Linda Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984); Peter Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution and social theory in France, see Robert Nye, “Heredity or Milieu: The Foundations of Modern European Criminological Theory.” Isis 67, no. 3 (September 1976): 335–355.

50. See, for instance, Paul Broca, “Discours de M. Broca sur l’ensemble de la question,” Congrès international d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques (Paris, 1868), 367–402.

51. Paul Broca, “Sur le transformism: Remarques générales,” BSAP 2d ser., 5 (1870): 169–170.

52. Nord, The Republican Moment, 27–28. For a history of women and the Freemasons in an earlier period, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 149–159.

54. After the society was given its status of “public utility,” it was legally able to accept bequests. Several members bequeathed money to the society in order to fund annual essay prizes bearing the name of the benefactor. Many others left a portion of their estates to the society’s treasury.

55. Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, Dias’s excellent work on this museum characterizes these various classificatory systems and highlights the significance of museums in the development of ethnographic and anthropological techniques and assumptions.

56. Broca to Vogt, March 8, 1865, Correspondance Carl Vogt, 2188, no. 154, Geneva, cited in Harvey, “Races Specified,” 92.

58. Official Record of the French Senate, 3/27/68, 731, cited in Francis Schiller, Paul Broca, 273.

59. See the debates in Le moniteur, March 28, 1868, 455–456;May 20, 1868, 689–691; May 21, 1868, 701–704;May 22, 1868, 709;May 23, 1868, 712;May 24, 1868, 718–721. See Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France, 39.

60. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France, 40. In his thesis for Robin, Clemenceau also argued for the possibility of spontaneous generation, which was seen as a necessary starting point for life in the absence of God. See Georges Clemenceau, De la génération des éléments anatomiques (Paris: Baillière, 1865), 104–109, 221.

61. Paris, January 17, 1880, Bibliothèque nationale (manuscrit), NAF 24803 ff 89–91, microfilm 1296, doc. 89.

62. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.

63. The only other sustained inquiry into the movement in France (and French-speaking countries) is in a collection of essays entitled Libre pensée et religion laïque en France: De la fin du Second Empire à la fin de la Troisième République, intro. J.-M. Mayeur (Strasbourg: Cerdic, 1980). J.-M. Mayeur’s piece “La foi laïque de Ferdinand Buisson” (247–257) is particularly insightful on the relationship between philosophy and free thought, as well as on the passionately religious nature of the freethinkers’ convictions. The essays in this collection are, however, on very specific subjects and give little sense of the movement overall. They also miss the connection between freethinking and anthropology in France. See also Jacqueline Lalouette, “Science et foi dans l’idéologie libre penseuse (1866–1914),” in Christianisme et science (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 21–54. Lalouette chose 1866 as her starting date because that is when the future anthropologists began to publish their journal La libre pensée. Through almost all the above-mentioned studies, the importance of this journal is generally recognized, though it goes unnoticed that its authors would all soon become anthropologists.

65. Pierre et Paul, “Thulié,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 144 (1880): 2. For more on this journal, see chap. 3, below.

67. E. Houzé, “Gabriel de Mortillet-Notice nécrologique,” in Extrait du Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Bruxelles, vol. 17, 1898–1899 (Brussels, 1899), 1; Salomon Reinach, “Gabriel de Mortillet,” in Extrait de La revue historique, 1899 (Paris, 1899), 8–10; Inauguration du monument de G. de Mortillet-Extrait de L’homme préhistorique, 3e année, no. 11, 1905 (Paris, 1905).

68. For a review of Louis Asseline, Histoire de l’Autriche depuis la mort de Marie-Thérèse jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: G. Baillière, 1877), see “L’Autriche contemporaine,” La revue politique et littéraire 2, no. 15 (1879): 183–185.

69. André Lefèvre, La renaissance du matérialisme (Paris: Doin-Bibliothèque matérialiste, 1881), 118.

70. See Robert Fox, “Science, the University, and the State in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Gerald L. Geison, ed., Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 66–145. Fox notes that the empire deeply angered and frustrated “a network of young, liberally minded philosophers, recent graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure” and that “many of them turned from academic life to other pursuits, notably journalism” and cites Véron as typical of this phenomenon (88, 132 n. 83). See also Antoine Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), 80–82. For a personal account, see Francisque Sarcey, Journal de jeunesse (Paris: Bibliothèque des annales, n.d.), 44–47.

71. Eugène Véron, “De l’enseignement supérieur en France,” Revue des cours littéraires de la France et de l’étranger 2 (1865): 401–404, 435–437, 449–452.

72. Lefèvre, La renaissance du matérialisme, 120. The “terrible year” was a common term for the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

73. Darwin seems to have been amused by the preface at first, but a few years later another translator was chosen and the text retranslated, at Darwin’s request.

74. Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). See also idem, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

75. The most complete account of Royer’s life is Joy Harvey’s “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); see also Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie au féminine: Clémence Royer (1830–1902),” Revue de synthèse 105 (1982): 23–38; and Joy Harvey, “‘Strangers to Each Other’: Male and Female Relationships in the Life and Work of Clémence Royer,” in Pnina Abiram and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 147–171.

76. Clémence Royer, preface to Charles Darwin, L’origine des espèces, cited in full in Geneviève Fraisse, Clémence Royer: Philosophe et femme de science (Paris: Découverte, 1985), 127.

77. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 488.

78. For a comment on her notion of men’s and women’s brains see Manouvrier, “L’anthropologie des sexes,” Revue de l’Ecole d’Anthropologie 9 (1909): 41–61.

80. From Royer’s unpublished autobiography, “Rectifications biographiques,” [1899], 6, in Dossier Clémence Royer, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (hereafter BMD), cited in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”, 38.

81. Bert later published some of these articles in book form. See Paul Bert, ed., Revues scientifiques pour la république française, 7 vols. (Paris, 1879–1885).

82. M. Mévisse, Des droits de la femme-Rapport-2ème congrès: Libre pensée (Brussels, 1893).

85. Coudereau, “Program,” Libre pensée: Science, lettres, arts, histoire, philosophie 1 (October 21, 1866): 1–2.

86. Anatole Roujou, “L’anthropologie,” Libre pensée 6 (November 25, 1866): 42–43. The same issue carried an excerpt of a debate published in the BSAP that argued the case for Darwinism (48).

87. Gabriel de Mortillet, “L’homme-singe perfectionné,” Libre pensée 3 (1866): 23–24.

89. Girard de Rialle, Jules Soury, Paul Lacombe, Emile Leclerq, and P. Sierebois, to name a few.

90. See, for example, Charles Letourneau, “Variabilité des êtres organisées,” La philosophie positive 3 (1868): 99–121.

91. “Mathias Duval et le dîner du matérialisme scientifique,” L’homme 3 (1886): 25–2 8. This unsigned article appears to have been written by Mortillet, but the quotation comes from Lefèvre’s address to the “Dinner,” which the article cites at length.

92. Charles Letourneau, “Banquet Tribute,” unpublished speech given at the Clémence Royer banquet of 1897, Dossier Clémence Royer, BMD, cited in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius,” 105.

94. In one of several exceptions, Mortillet spoke out against French colonialism during his term in the Chamber of Deputies (Mortillet addressed the tenth bureau of the chamber). As reported in L’homme, he “argued against colonial politics, basing his position on the nonaptitude of the French to acclimatize to Tonkin. To keep this colony is to sentence to death, in full knowledge of the cause, our compatriots forced to go live in that murderous climate” (“Acclimatation,” L’homme 2 [1885]: 701). Mortillet did not write much on this subject. It would appear that he was more interested in embarrassing Jules Ferry, the initiator of French fin-de-siècle colonialism (whose moderate republicanism drew much anger from the freethinking anthropologists), than he was in championing theories of acclimatization. He was also interested in promoting political anthropology. Earlier in that same volume of L’homme, a blurb on “L’anthropologie et la politique” ran as follows: “In a meeting of the Reichstag of March sixteenth, the deputy Virchow combated the colonial politics of Prussia in an argument based on anthropology. It is an excellent example that he has given. Anthropology can furnish precious documents for the solution of the great questions treated in most of our political assemblies. Its introduction into parliamentary practice (la vie parlementaire) would make a good number of laws more logical and would be a real act of progress” (222).

99. Hammond’s “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat” and the dissertations of Harvey and Williams (“Races Specified, Evolution Transformed” and “The Science of Man,” respectively) all see more of an ideological gulf between Broca and Mortillet and therefore see Broca’s death as a more marked turning point in the Société d’anthropologie and its institutions.

100. Coudereau, “De l’influence de la religion sur la civilisation: Réponse à M. Bataillard,” BSAP 2d ser., 2 (1867): 580.

101. André Lefèvre, “La philosophie devant l’anthropologie,” L’homme 19 (October 10, 1884): 583.

104. René Fauvelle, “Conséquence naturelle de la science libre,” L’homme 2 (1885): 742.

105. René Fauvelle, “Il faut en finir avec la philosophie,” L’homme 2 (1885): 139–146.

107. Letter from Broca to Royer, May 15, 1875, Archives of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter ASAP), Musée de l’homme, Paris.

108. The essay appears in its entirety in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius,” 190, 193–203.

109. Paul Topinard, La société, l’école, le laboratoire et le musée Broca (Paris: Chamerot, 1890), 3. Topinard’s partial account (he finished his list with “etc.”) of the group’s membership is as follows: Asseline, Assézat, Coudereau, Bertillon, Gillet-Vital, de Mortillet (father and son), Duval, Letourneau, Hovelacque, Thulié, Fauvelle, Salmon, Collineau, Hervé, Issaurat, Nicole, Lefèvre, Yves Guyot, and Arthur-Alexandre Bordier (14).

110. Topinard never gave any indication of why he “could not reveal” these facts to Broca. It weakens his case.

112. Charles Issaurat, “Analyse de l’ouvrage de M. A. Hovelacque intitulé: Les nègres de l’Afrique sus-équatoriale,” La tribune médicale 45 (1890).

114. See, for instance, Charles Letourneau, “L’origine de l’homme,” Pensée nouvelle, 1867, reprinted in idem, Science et matérialisme.

115. Eugène Dally, comment in “Discussion sur le questionnaire d’ethnographie,” BSAP 3d ser., 5 (1882): 495.

116. “Suite de la discussion sur l’anthropophagie,” BSAP 3d ser., 11 (1888): 27–46.

118. These studies—such as Distorting Mirrors by Susanna Barrows, Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, and Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France by Robert Nye—all judge Le Bon to have been a synthesizer and popularizer rather than an innovative thinker.

120. Paul Broca, in Congrès internationale d’anthropologie, 9e session à Lisbonne, 1879 (Lisbon: Académie royale des sciences, 1884).

122. Letter from Le Bon, May 22, 1888, ASAP, Box C2 C3, folder C, P2, doc. #4059.

123. Archives nationales (hereafter AN), F/17/17199, “Enquète sur des faits graves imputés à M. Topinard, en sa qualité de Professeur…avec pièce justificatives” (printed document).

125. By the end of his life, however, Topinard did have considerable renown. He had written several books especially for an English-speaking audience and had lived for some time in the United States, bringing his work to the attention of the English and American public. His major works, however, were considered by his colleagues to be largely syntheses of works by Broca and others. A significant portion of his Eléments d’anthropologie, published in Paris in 1885, was devoted to descriptions and discussions of Broca’s final experiments and hypotheses. As Elizabeth Williams notes in her dissertation, “The Science of Man,” there were complaints that Topinard did not sufficiently acknowledge his references to the ideas and experiments of his colleagues (238–240). Even Manouvrier, whose equanimity was frequently noted by his colleagues, complained in 1889 that, because of the lack of proper citations in Eléments d’anthropologie, Topinard was often credited for work that had actually been done by colleagues (BSAP 3d ser., 12 [1889]: 377). Mortillet was more vicious in his critique of the work. Claiming that he did not want to criticize a colleague personally, Mortillet translated and republished—in his journal, L’homme—an Italian review of Topinard’s work. The review mocked Topinard for his narrow interpretation of anthropology and called Eléments a “detailed and rather tedious discussion of results obtained only from craniology and anthropometry” (L’homme, 1885, 345–347). The review first appeared in Rivista di Filosofia scientifica (Turin), May 25, 1881.

126. Actes du deuxième congrès d’anthropologie criminelle (Paris, 1889), 490–496.

127. Léonce Manouvrier, “L’atavisme et le crime,” Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie 1 (1891): 225–240; and idem, “L’anthropologie et le droit,” Revue internationale de sociologie 2 (1894): 241–273, 351–370. For his discussion of Topinard’s position in the latter, see 352–353, 360–370.

128. Paul Broca, Mémoires d’anthropologie (Paris, 1871), 1: 30, cited in Manouvrier, “L’anthropologie et le droit,” 365.

129. “Un coup d’état à l’école d’anthropologie,” La patrie, February 8, 1890.

130. Marc-Antoine-Marie-François Duilhé, “Le problème anthropologique et les théories évolutionnistes,” in Congrès scientifique international des Catholiques tenu à Paris du 8 au 13 avril 1888 (Paris: Bureaux des Annales de philosophie chrétienne, 1888), 2: 621.

131. Charles Jeannolle, “Le positivisme et les sociétés de libre-pensée,” Revue occidentale, 1st semester (1885): 98–113, 237–257.

132. André Lefèvre, Religions et mythologies comparées (Paris: LeRoux, 1877), 328.

133. Abel Hovelacque, Les débuts de l’humanité (Paris: Doin, 1881), iii–iv.

134. Abel Hovelacque, Plus les laiques sont éclairés, moins les pràtres pourront faire du mal (Paris, 1880), 5.

139. Jacques Bertillon, “Le musée de l’Ecole d’anthropologie,” La nature 6 (1878): 39.

140. Jacques Bertillon, “Des monstruosités: Principes généraux de tératologie,” La nature 1 (1874): 209.

141. For another article that demonstrates this interest in the science of “monsters,” see Jacques Bertillon, “Rosa et Josefa: Les deux soeurs tchèques,” La nature 2, no. 2 (1884): 293–294, in which Bertillon claimed, for instance, that the conjoined girls’ back-to-back position conformed to the “theory of self-attraction” put forward by the famous naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

143. Jean-Marie Lanessan, Revue internationale des sciences biologiques 1, nos. 1 and 5 (1878): 61–63, 158–159, cited in Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France, 99.

146. Pierre et Paul, “Hovelacque,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 128 (1880): 2–4.

148. Etienne Roc, “Professeur Mathias Duval,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 273 (1886): 2–4.

150. Assézat seems to have been a friend of Thulié at first; the two cofounded Le realisme in the fifties. He wrote a few articles for Pensée nouvelle and then pretty much disappeared from the anthropological record, but he must have continued to work with the group in other capacities since they usually list him among their true believers. He is also among the list of freethinkers that Topinard provided (see n. 109, above).

151. He is speaking here of the Ligue d’union républicaine des droits de Paris, an association of moderate republicans who worked to reach a compromise between the leaders of the Paris Commune and Versailles in 1871.

152. Clémence Royer, speech for “Banquet 1897” March 10, 1897, cited in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius,” 173.

1. Paul Broca, Instructions générales pour les recherches anthropologiques (Paris, 1865), 2.

2. See, for instance, Charles Letourneau, Questionnaire de sociologie et d’ethnographie (Paris, 1882), which also appeared, in a slightly revised form, in the Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter BSAP), 3d ser., 6 (1883): 578–597.

3. Charles Letourneau, La sociologie d’après l’ethnologie, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1884), cited in Frédéric Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau-La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie,” Revue philosophique 11 (1881): 546.

4. Eugène Dally, comment in “Discussion sur le questionnaire d’ethnographie,” BSAP 3d ser., 5 (1882): 574.

5. For a more detailed discussion of the questionnaires in general, see Nélia Dias, Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908): Anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991): 72–89.

6. Michael Hammond, “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 123–125.

7. All societies, everywhere, were believed to go through the exact same stages of development. They believed that “one still encounters today human populations that are the living image of ancient prehistoric races” (Abel Hovelacque, Les débuts de l’humanité [Paris: Doin, 1881], i). Thus every society progressively emerges from any given savage behavior, and “primitive” populations were understood to “occupy at the present time the last (or the first) rung on the human ladder” (ii). Since the “human ladder” was essentially consistent in all instances, the anthropological prehistory and history of France could stand in for any other place; there was no need to travel. Or, if one was inclined to travel, there was no need to stay home and dig.

8. Henri Thulié’s book La femme: Essai de sociologie physiologique (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1885), for instance, complained that the French state hurt women through unequal political, social, and economic policy but also claimed that the only true role for women was maternity.

9. Eugène Véron, “De l’enseignement supérieur en France,” Revue des cours littéraires de la France et de l’étranger 2 (1865): 403.

10. Mortillet, “L’antisémitisme,” L’homme 1 (1884): 522–528. Much of his argument was constructed by offering historical explanations for the various prejudices against the Jewish people. Follow-up pieces on the same subject included a “rectification” in which Mortillet softened his claim of anti-Semitism among the Germans by citing the campaign against anti-Semitism waged by fellow anthropologist (and member of the society) Professor Virchow (564–565).

11. Zola, Bibliothèque nationale, don 3988, vol. 81, NAF 10, 315. Among Zola’s many notes (including a section called “Differences between Balzac and me,” where he confirms, to himself, his intention to write “scientific” novels) are the résumés of only three books, Letourneau’s, a study of the Second Empire by Taxile Delord, and Traité de l’hérédité naturelle by Prosper Lucas. For a transcription of these notes (abridged but including all Zola’s notes on Letourneau), see Henri Massis, Comment Emile Zola composait ses romans—D’après ses notes personnelles et inédites (Paris: Charpentier, 1906), 28–35. Letourneau, Physiologie des passions (Paris: G. Baillière, 1868).

12. Zola, “Compte Rendu: Letourneau,” Le globe, January 23, 1868. For mentions of the Letourneau-Zola connection, see Henri Mitterand, Zola, vol. 1, 1840–1871 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 590, 721. Mitterand refers to Letourneau and Lucas as the ‘bibliothèque souterraine des Rougon-Macquart.” See also Philip Walker, Zola (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 90.

15. Cited in Frederick Brown, Zola (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), 460.

16. Bibliothèque nationale, don 3988, vol. 81, NAF 10, 315, cited in Walker, Zola, 91.

17. On the Bibliothèque anthropologique, see “Livres et journaux,” L’homme 2 (1885): 403. The article lists seven volumes of this collection. Their authors include Véron, Mortillet, Letourneau, Hervé, Hovelacque, Thulié, and Duval.

18. Vogt to Mortillet, Geneva, April 20, 1880, Musée de l’homme, Paris, Manuscrits: Ms 54 R; emphasis in original.

19. Preface to Abel Hovelacque, Charles Issaurat, André Lefèvre, Charles Letourneau, Gabriel de Mortillet, Henri Thulié, and Eugène Véron, eds., Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologiques (Paris, n.d.). The first section seems to have come out in 1881, and the first full volume in 1884.

20. Charles Letourneau, The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family (London: Scott, 1891), 227.

22. Charles Letourneau, “Banquet de Mme. Clémence Royer, Grand Hitel,” March 19, 1897, Clémence Royer Dossier, 122, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, cited in Joy Harvey, “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 1859–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983), 251 n. 38. For more of the speech, see 332 n. 80.

25. The “prohibition on searching out paternity” refers to a law, originating under Napoleon, forbidding mother or child from seeking out a missing father.

26. His Nobel Prize (1913) was in medicine and physiology and was specifically for his work on anaphylaxis. He worked in many fields and made several important contributions; for instance, scientific study of allergic phenomena dates from his work.

28. André Lefèvre, La philosophie, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1879), 414–415.

29. Charles Letourneau, La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1884), 450. In his Evolution of Marriage, Letourneau wrote: “Man is neither a demigod nor an angel; he is a primate more intelligent than the others, and his relationship with the neighboring species of the animal kingdom is more strongly shown in his psychic than his anatomical traits” (341–342). This comment means that though we resemble apes physically, we are even more like them mentally.

31. Durkheim, “Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century (1900),” in On Morality and Society (Selected Writings), ed., Robert Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 3–24.

33. Abel Hovelacque, La linguistique, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1892): 23.

34. “La linguistique moderne: D’après M. Hovelacque,” Revue scientifique 12 (1876): 424–428.

35. Eugène Véron, L’esthétique, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, n.d.), v. This quotation is taken from the English version, dated 1879: Aesthetics, trans. W. H. Armstrong (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), v.

37. Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephan Crane, and Frank Norris with Special Reference to Some European Influences, 1891–1903 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 140.

39. From a letter to Eldon C. Hill, February 14, 1939, cited in Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism, 139.

40. From the manuscript of “Literature of Democracy,” chap. 10, cited in Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism, 142.

41. Régis Michaud, The American Novel Today: A Social and Psychological Study (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), 200.

42. Paul Topinard, L’anthropologie, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1876). Quotations in the text have been taken from the English version, Anthropology, trans. Robert Bartley (London, 1890).

43. This addition must have been a terrific sore spot for Topinard, especially after he had been kicked out of the Ecole.

44. “Bibliographie scientifique,” Revue scientifique 12 (1876): 333–334.

45. Insisting that the “human races” are very different from one another had two major and very different political meanings at the time: (a) it could be part of an apology for slavery, since humanity was not an equal brotherhood; and (b) it could be antireligious, since it contradicted the biblical account of creation.

46. Mortillet, Le préhistorique, Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (Paris: Reinwald, 1883).

47. The Reinachs were an interesting leftist, Jewish family of scholars, authors, and scientists. Salomon is perhaps best known for his arguments against the historical validity of the Christian Gospels. His brothers were Théodore Reinach, the Hellenist scholar and archaeologist, best known for his now classic study of ancient Jewish coins and for having built, in France, a remarkable re-creation of an ancient Greek villa (now an official historic landmark); and Joseph Reinach, a publicist and lawyer who had a long parliamentary career: he was an associate of Gambetta and waged a campaign against General Boulanger in the journal République française in 1889. He was elected a deputy that year but lost his seat in 1898 because he was an early and vociferous Dreyfusard, publishing articles to this effect in Yves Guyot’s Le siècle. His pro-Dreyfus campaign was understood as particularly courageous because Reinach was Jewish himself. He was again a deputy from 1906 until 1914. He wrote a history of the Dreyfus Affair in seven volumes, and during World War I he wrote celebrated military articles for Le figaro.

49. Mortillet’s system is described in most general treatments of archaeology. See, for example, Warwick Bray and David Trump, The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology (Middlesex: Penguin, 1970) 152–153.

50. Glyn E. Daniel, A Hundred Years of Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 1952), 99. Daniel cites Gabriel de Mortillet, “Silex taillés de l’époque tertiaire du Portugal,” BSAP 3d ser., 1 (1878): 428; and idem, “L’homme quaternaire à l’Exposition,” Revue d’anthropologie 2d ser., no. 2 (1879): 116; Abel Hovelacque, “La linguistique et le precurseur de l’homme,” in Association française pour l’avancement des sciences—Compte rendu, vol. 2 (Lyon, 1873).

51. Here is a translation of Daniel’s Mortillet quotation: “It would be impossible to put into doubt the great law of human progress. Stone shaped by blows, polished stone, bronze, iron, they are the great stages that all humanity has traversed in order to arrive at our civilization.” Daniel does not give the citation, but the quotation comes from Mortillet, “Promenades préhistoriques à l’Exposition universelle,” Matériaux pour l’histoire positive et philosophique de l’homme 3 (1867): 181–283, 285–368.

52. Mortillet, Le préhistorique, 665. After Mortillet’s death, this edition was revised by his son, Adrien de Mortillet.

54. “Bibliographie scientifique,” Revue scientifique 23 (1886): 535–536. See Charles Letourneau, L’évolution de la morale (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1887).

55. “Bibliographie scientifique: La physiologie des passions,” Revue scientifique 14 (1878): 1167–1170. See Charles Letourneau, La physiologie des passions, 2d ed. (Paris: Reinwald, 1878).

56. Schopenhauer disagreed, arguing that our internal thoughts are intelligible only in chronological series; therefore they are possessed of time and consequently not noumenal.

57. Isaac Benrubi, Contemporary Thought of France (London: Williams and Norgate Limited, 1926), 38.

58. Frédéric Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau—La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie,” Revue philosophique 11 (1881): 546.

59. Frédéric Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau—L’évolution de la morale,” Revue philosophique 23 (1887): 80.

60. Frédéric Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau—L’évolution du mariage et de la famille,” Revue philosophique 26 (1888): 184.

61. Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau—La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie,” 550.

62. Georges Belot, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Letourneau—L’évolution de la propriété,” Revue philosophique 28 (1889): 645.

63. G.S., “Analyses et comptes rendus: Dr. H. Thulié, La femme: Essai de sociologie phusiologique,” Revue philosophique 20 (1885): 538–540.

64. H. Dereux, “Analyses et comptes rendus: André Lefèvre, La philosophie,” Revue philosophique 7 (1879): 457–458.

65. Frédéric Paulhan, “Analyses et comptes rendus: E. Véron-La morale,” Revue philosophique 18 (1884): 475.

66. See Léonce Manouvrier, “Société de psychologie physiologique: Les premières circonvolutions temporales droite et gauche chez un sourd de l’oreille gauche (Bertillon),” Revue philosophique 25 (1888): 330–335; idem, “Société de psychologie physiologique: Mouvements divers et sueur palmaire consécutifs à des images mentales,” Revue philosophique 26 (1886): 203–207. See chap. 6, below, for more on these articles.

67. Léonce Manouvrier, “Etude comparative sur les cerveaux de Gambetta et de Bertillon,” Revue philosophique 25 (1888): 453–461.

68. For another Manouvrier monograph for the Revue philosophique, see “La fonction psycho-motrice,” Revue philosophique 17 (1884): 503–525, 638–651.

69. P.-G. Mahoudeau, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Manouvrier, Sur l’interprétation de la quantité dans l’encéphale et du poids de cerveau en particulier,” Revue philosophique 24 (1887): 321.

70. Léonce Manouvrier, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Duval—Le Darwinisme,” Revuephilosophique 21 (1886): 398.

71. Léonce Manouvrier, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Quatrefages—Introduction à L’étude des races humaines,” Revue philosophique 24 (1887): 322.

72. Léonce Manouvrier, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Hovelacque et Hervé—Précis d’anthropologie,” Revue philosophique 24 (1887): 325.

73. For more of Manouvrier’s reviews for Revue philosophique, see Léonce Manouvrier, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Broca, Mémoires sur le cerveau de l’homme et des primates,” Revue philosophique 27 (1889): 405–409; idem, “Analyses et comptes rendus: Hervé, La circonvolution de Broca,” Revue philosophique 27 (1889): 409–411.

77. François Pillon, “La lutte contre le cléricalisme, ce qu’elle ne doit pas être et ce qu’elle doit être: Il ne faut pas que la politique anticléricale soit une politique d’irréligion,” La critique philosophique 9 (1880): 113–123.

78. F. Grindelle, “Bibliographie: La renaissance du matérialisme,” La critique philosophique 10 (1881): 397–399.

79. F. Grindelle, “Bibliographie: Les débuts de l’humanité” La critique philosophique 10 (1881): 399–400.

80. F. Grindelle, “Bibliographie: La morale,” La critique philosophique 13 (1884): 236–239.

81. See, for instance, François Pillon, “A propos du substantialisme de Mme. Clémence Royer et de M. Roisel,” La critique philosophique 11 (1882): 81–89; F. Grindelle, “Bibliographie: Le bien et la loi morale,” La critique philosophique 13 (1884): 204–208.

82. François Pillon, “Revue bibliographique: Léfevre, L’histoire: Entretiens sur l’évolution historique,” L’année philosophique 8 (1897): 261–262; idem, “Letourneau: L’évolution de l’éducation dans les diverses races humaines,” L’année philosophique 9 (1898): 262–263; idem, “Letourneau: L’évolution de l’esclavages dans les diverses races humaines,” L’année philosophique 8 (1897): 266–267; idem, “Letourneau: L’évolution du commerce dans les diverses races humaines,” L’année philosophique 8 (1897): 267–268; idem, “Letourneau: L’évolution religieuse dans les diverses races humaines,” L’année philosophique 3 (1892): 260–261.

84. Adrien Arcelin, “Matériaux pour l’histoire primitive et naturelle de l’homme,” Revue des questions scientifiques 6 (1879): 319.

85. Adrien Arcelin, “Le cerveau de Gambetta,” Revue des questions scientifiques 21 (1887): 271–272.

86. Abbé E. Vacandard, “Le nouvel homme préhistorique de Menton,” Revue des questions scientifiques 20 (1886): 74–122.

87. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, “La morale de Darwin,” Revue politique et littéraire 5 (1883): 169–175.

88. Alphonse Bertillon, “Questions des récidivistes: L’identité des récidivistes et la loi de relégation,” Revue politique et littéraire 3, no. 17 (1883): 513–521.

89. Jean Réville, “Une histoire des religions par un adversaire de la religion: M. Eugène Véron,” Revue politique et littéraire 5 (1883): 14, 15, 17.

90. Observed by Robert Alun Jones in his “Religion and Science in the Elementary Forms,” in N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, eds., On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Routledge, 1998), 39–52. Réville is one of the most frequently cited historians of religion in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms.

92. Jacqueline Lalouette, “Science et foi dans l’idéologie libre penseuse (1866–1914),” in Christianisme et science (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 38–39.

93. André Lefèvre, Philosophy: Historical and Critical, trans. A. H. Keane (London: Chapman and Hall; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1879).

94. Annick Chauvière, “Les hommes d’aujourd’hui,” in Jean-Michel Place and André Vasseur, eds., Bibliographie des revues et journaux littéraires des XIXe et Xxe siècles (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1974), 90–97.

95. Etienne Roc, “Professeur Mathias Duval,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 273 (1886): 1.

96. Pierre et Paul (the journal’s generic pseudonym), “Yves Guyot,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 1, no. 46 (1878): 1.

97. Pierre et Paul, “Hovelacque,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 128 (1880).

98. Pierre et Paul, “Thulié,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 144 (1880): 1.

99. Pierre et Paul, “Clémence Royer,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 4, no. 170 (1881).

1. “Abel Hovelacque,” La grande encyclopédie, 3d ed. (Paris, n.d.), cited in Joy Harvey, “Races Specified, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 1859–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983), 66. The freethinkers’ attitude toward Ferry fluctuated over the years, but he was never sufficiently anticlerical for them. I do not know to what extent the anecdote about the lockout should be accepted or rejected; Mortillet was one of the contributors to La grande encyclopédie and may have embellished his friend’s biography.

2. See Jacques Léonard, La médecine entre les savoirs et les pouvoirs: Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la médecine française au XIXe siècle (Paris, Aubier, 1981), 274.

3. Henri Thulié, “Sur l’autopsie de Louis Asseline, membre de la Société d’anthropologie et de la Société d’autopsie mutuelle,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie (hereafter BSAP) 3d ser., 10 (1878): 162.

4. Henry T. F. Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1956), 50.

5. See, for instance, Yves Guyot, La science economique et ses lois inductives (Paris, 1881); idem, Les principes de 1889 et le socialisme (Paris, 1894); idem, Sophismes socialiste et faits economiques (Paris, 1908).

6. Archives of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter ASAP), procès-verbaux, January 15, 1891. See also Henri Vallois, “Le laboratoire Broca,” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie 9th ser., 11 (1940): 3.

7. Archives nationales (hereafter AN), F/17/17199, “Ecole d’anthropologie, 22 mai 1880.” These numbers are for 1872. See Antoine Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), 74, 75. It is also useful to compare Vacher de Lapouge’s librarian salary over several years (see chap. 5, below). In 1887 he earned 2,000 francs as a librarian, in 1893 his salary was 3,000 francs, and it reached 4,000 francs in 1900. AN, F/17/22640, documents 98–170.

12. AN, F/17/2994, letter from Mortillet to Ferry, Ministère de l’instruction publique, June 17, 1879.

13. AN, F/17/2994, letter from M. Delabarre, Ministère des affaires étrangères, to M. Ferry, Ministère de l’instruction publique, September 1, 1879, including two articles from Télégraphe dated September 5 and December 7, 1879.

14. AN, F/17/2994, letter from M. Laboulaye to Jules Ferry, Ministère de l’instruction publique, Lisbon, September 30, 1880.

15. André Lefèvre, “La vie philosophique,” La vie littéraire 52 (December 28, 1876); idem, “L’histoire (sonnet),” La vie littéraire 6 (February 8, 1877); idem, “Paléontologie intellectuelle,” La vie littéraire 46 (November 16, 1876). Lefèvre was a “principal collaborator” on La jeune France, and his work was featured in a series called “Les hommes de la jeune France”; see Emmanuel des Essarts, “André Lefèvre,” La jeune France, no. 35 (March 1, 1881). For Lefèvre’s many articles and poetry publications, see Jean-Michel Place and André Vasseur, eds., Bibliographie des revues et journaux littéraires des XIX et XX siècles (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1974).

16. André Lefèvre, “Sonnets philosophiques,” La jeune France, no. 21 (1880–1881): 38–40.

17. André Lefèvre, “Un vice de la littérature enfantine,” La jeune France, no. 33 (1880–1881): 404–406.

18. André Lefèvre, “Voltaire et les religions,” La jeune France, no. 10 (February 1, 1879): 367.

19. André Lefèvre, “L’homme, d’après les découvertes de l’anthropologie,” La jeune France, no. 1 (October 1, 1878): 214–221.

20. Testament: Clémence Royer, May 5, 1895, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, cited in Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 168–169.

21. Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles (1933; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 349–362.

22. In 1876 Monod founded Revue historique, a journal dedicated to “strictly scientific” history, which transformed historical studies in modern France. See his introduction to the journal: Revue historique 1 (January–June 1876): 36. For a discussion of Monod’s scientific history, see William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

24. On criminal deportation, see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Conception of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

25. For more on forced sterilization in the United States and elsewhere, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One-An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990); and “Omnes et Singulatum: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason,’” in The Turner Lectures on Human Values, (Salt Lake City: Sterling M. McMurrin, 1981), vol. 2.

27. Republican students had a medal made for Michelet, who was at the time being harassed by the government for his republicanism, and Bertillon was chosen to award the gift. Thus there were informal meetings that led to friendship. See Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 17–18. Rhodes borrowed a great deal from Suzanne Bertillon, Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon: Inventeur de l’anthropométrie (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). (Much of his book is simply uncredited translations of her text.)

28. Michel Dupaquier, “La famille Bertillon et la naissance d’une nouvelle science sociale: La démographie,” Annales de démographie historique, 1983, 294.

31. La vie et les oeuvres du docteur L.-A. Bertillon, professeur de démographie à l’Ecole d’anthropologie, chef des travaux de la statistique municipale de la ville de Paris (Paris, 1883), 25–26.

33. Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, “La biologie,” La pensée nouvelle 22 (October 11, 1868): 170–172.

35. Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 116 and throughout.

36. See, for instance, Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880–1950s (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Seth Kovin and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1933).

37. Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, La démographie figurée de la France (Paris: G. Masson, 1874), 2.

38. Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, “Des diverses manières de mesurer la durée de la vie humaine,” Journal de la Société de statistiques de Paris 7 (1866): 45–64; idem, “Méthode pour calculer la mortalité d’une collectivité pendant son passage dans un milieu déterminé…,” Journal de la Société de statistiques de Paris 10 (1869), 29–40, 57–65, cited in Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 82–83.

40. Suzanne Bertillon, Vie de Alphonse Bertillon, 79. See also Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 95.

41. Sometimes Bertillon offered some explanation of the numbers he reported, sometimes not. See, for instance, Le temps, July 19, 1889; July 27, 1889; August 2, 1889; August 9, 1889.

42. Jacques Bertillon, “The International System of Nomenclature of Diseases and Causes of Death (Bertillon Classification),” Public Health Reports 15, no. 49 (December 7, 1900): 42, 40.

43. Jacques Bertillon, Cours élémentaire de statistique administrative, élaboration des statistiques, organisation des bureaux de statistique, éléments de démographie (Paris: Société d’éditions scientifiques, 1895), 262.

44. World Health Organization Website, “Library and Information Networks for Knowledge, Disease Classifications and Nomenclature Documents,” 2002, www.who.int (August 2, 2002).

45. See Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 330; and Cole, The Power of Large Numbers, 2. On the belly strike (or womb strike), also see Francis Ronsin, La grève des ventres: Propagande néo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalité en France, 19e-20e siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980).

46. See, for instance, Cheryl A. Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism: The Alliance Nationale and the Pronatalist Backlash Against the Femme moderne, 1933–1940,” French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 699–723.

48. Jacques Bertillon, De la dépopulation de la France et des remèdes à apporter (Paris, 1896); idem, Le problème de la dépopulation (Paris, 1897); idem, La dépopulation de la France, ses conséquences, ses causes, mesures à prendre pour la combattre (Paris: Alcan, 1911).

49. Joseph J. Spengler, France Faces Depopulation (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1938), 234.

50. Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 648–676.

51. Madame Jacques Bertillon, La femme médecin au XXe siècle (thèse de médecine, Faculté de médicine, Paris, 1888), cited by Jacques Léonard, La médecine entre les savoirs et les pouvoirs: Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la médecine française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1981), 33. Madeleine Brès became the first French woman to work as a doctor.

53. Jacques Bertillon, “Le problème de la dépopulation: Le programme de l’Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française,” Revue politique et parlementaire, 4th year, no. 12 (April-June 1897), 538–539. See also Spengler, France Faces Depopulation, 123.

55. See Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Robert Owen Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 166–167.

56. Revue de l’alliance nationale 359 (September 1943): 143. It was hoped that the sentence would act as a deterrent to others. See Pollard, Reign of Virtue, 237 n. 24.

57. Suzanne Bertillon, Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon, 22. See also Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 33.

60. François Favre, “Enseignement professionel des femmes,” Le monde maçonnique, November 1862, 385, cited in Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 26.

61. Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 33. Suzanne Bertillon related a similar version of this story: see her Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon, 22–24.

63. Alphonse Bertillon, Les races sauvages: Les peuples de l’Afrique, les peuples de l’Amérique, les peuples de l’Océanie, quelques peuples de l’Asie et des regions bovéales (Paris, 1882).

66. Head measurements were first divided up into small, medium, and large, and these were physically separated in the file cabinet, so that the measurement card of a criminal with a big head was sure to be in a single area. The secondary measurement narrowed the location further, and tertiary measurements still more, until the card could only be in one place. It was essentially like finding a word in the dictionary: to spell cat you first eliminate the twenty-five letters that are not c, then you do the same for a, and t, and you have your definition.

68. Document archives de la Préfecture de police, as reproduced in Ronsin, La grève des ventres.

69. Ronsin tells us the phrase was a favorite among anarchists. Ronsin, La grève des ventres, illustrations, Robin caption.

70. Ida M. Tarbell, “Identification in Criminals: The Scientific Method in Use in France,” New McClure’s Magazine 2, no. 4 (March, 1894): 355–356.

71. Alphonse Bertillon’s Instructions for Taking Descriptions for the Identification of Criminals and Others by the Means of Anthropometric Indications, trans. and intro. Gallus Muller (Chicago: American Bertillon Prison Bureau, 1889), 11–12.

72. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 187.

75. Rhodes has it that bloody fingerprints marked the woman as having committed a double homicide, but an account closer to the sources identifies the crime as infanticide. See ibid., 149; and Kristin Ruggiero, “Fingerprinting and the Argentine Plan for Universal Identification in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 191. Caplan and Torpey’s book contains nineteen essays covering a great range of topics relevant to the matter of identity information, spanning several centuries.

76. The bill was passed on July 18 and became law on July 20. Vucetich was appointed director on August 3, 1916.

80. The note he had allegedly written is generally understood to have been forged by a Major Esterhazy in an attempt to pin recent intelligence leaks on Dreyfus.

81. Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–139.

82. Reported in Le matin (December 17, 1903), collected by the Préfecture de police, DB 47, cited in Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern, 136.

83. Musacchio, “Bertillonnades,” L’assiette au beurre, July 3, 1909, as reproduced in Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 113.

84. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. and intro. William S. Baring-Gould (New York: Clarkson and Potter, 1967), 2: 202.

87. Edmond Locard, Alphonse Bertillon: L’homme, le savant, la pensée philosophique (Lyon: A. Rey, 1914), 7.

1. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, “L’anthropologie et la science politique,” Revue d’anthropologie 16 (1887): 1422. He had some reservations about this equation of terms, largely because other anthropologists sometimes depicted Aryans as brachycephalic. In his later works, he suggested that the term “Homo Europaeus” should replace “Aryan,” but before and after this clarification he largely used “Aryan” to denote the dolichocephalic. On the idea of the Aryan people, see Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Basic, 1974).

3. See, for instance, his “Questions aryennes,” Revue d’anthropologie 18 (1889): 183.

4. One of his clearest explanations of this point is in L’Aryen: Son rôle social (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1899), 352n.

5. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, preface to Ernst Haeckel, Le monisme: Lien entre la religion et la science, trans. Georges Vacher de Lapouge (Paris: Schleicher, 1897), 1–8.

7. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Après une visite au Vatican,” Revue des deux mondes 7, no. 127 (1895): 97–118.

8. Harry Paul, “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895,” French Historical Studies 3 (1968): 299–327.

10. André Lefèvre, La religion (Paris: A. Costes, 1921), 572–573, cited in Brunetière, “Après une visite,” 98; emphasis mine.

12. Elected in 1881, he also served as inspector general of higher education, minister of public instruction, and minister of foreign affairs.

14. Marcellin Berthelot, “La science et la morale,” Revue de Paris, February 1, 1895, 461.

15. Clémence Royer, La constitution du monde: Natura rerum, dynamique des atomes, nouveaux principes de philosophie naturelle (Paris: Schleicher Frères, 1900), xx.

16. Charles Richet, “La science a-t-elle fait banqueroute?” Revue scientifique 3 (January 12, 1895): 33–39.

18. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1896), 307.

22. Lapouge, preface, 1–8. On Haeckel, see Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971).

24. André Béjin, “Le sang, le sens, et le travail: Georges Vacher de Lapouge, darwiniste social, fondateur de l’anthroposociologie,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 73 (1982): 335–336.

25. Charles Letourneau, “Adolphe Bertillon,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie (hereafter BSAP) 3d ser., 6 (1883): 192.

28. Several other early eugenists wrote from this pessimistic Darwinian stance and were concerned with combating “degeneration.” It seems that none of these other authors also rejected the Lamarckian evolutionary mechanism. See William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11 and 56–63.

29. Lapouge illustrated this by describing an academician and a fish in a row boat on the high seas: if the boat springs a leak, the fish is the fittest. Progress, as such, is not guaranteed (L’Aryen, 503).

30. In his Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Adrian Desmond wrote of “Red Lamarckians” in England in the 1830s, who “used Lamarckism explicitly to legitimate a cooperative society, female emancipation, and an equal education program” (329–330). Also see his “Lamarckism and Democracy: Corporations, Corruption, and Comparative Anatomy in the 1830s,” in James R. Moore, ed., History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays in Honor of John C. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 99–130.

34. As he wrote to his son Claude in 1916 : “Concerning your marriage, it is important to me that you continue my effort, but that does not make it my business to choose your wife for you. I only ask, in the name of the race, that she be capable of giving children of my worth or of yours and that she have enough good qualities that it will not be out of the question for them to turn their merits to the best account” (Georges Vacher de Lapouge to Claude Vacher de Lapouge, Fonds Vacher de Lapouge, Université de Montpellier [hereafter FVL/UM], A068–50). The fact that he felt he had to write such a disavowal suggests that he had exerted pressure on his son in the past, and in the rest of the letter Lapouge is plainly responding to considerable anger from his son.

35. Lapouge, Les sélections sociales, 262. The statement is an echo of Gambetta’s famous dictum that the republic would be scientific or not at all.

36. Some, especially Toussenel, made anti-Semitism a cornerstone of their socialism. To a degree, one can identify anti-Semitism as a leftist phenomenon in its origins and follow its crossover to the right along a path similar to that of nationalism, which also began on the left (when pride in the nation was in opposition to obedience to the monarchy). For a concise discussion of the history of anti-Semitism on the left, see Paul Bénichou, “Sur quelques sources françaises de l’antisémitisme moderne,” Commentaire 1 (1978): 67–79.

38. Edouard Drumont, “Napoleon antisémite,” La libre parole, March 26, 1900: 1.

41. For a detailed treatment of Liard’s role in remaking the French university system, see George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

42. See Raymond Lenoir, “L’oeuvre sociologique d’Emile Durkheim,” Europe 22 (1930): 294, cited in Terry Clark, “Emile Durkheim and the Institutionalization of Sociology in the French University System,” European Journal of Sociology 9 (1968): 37–71.

43. Henri Bégouen, “Vacher de Lapouge-Père de l’Aryenisme,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, August 22, 1936, 3. See also Georges Vacher de Lapouge, “Souvenirs,” in Henri H. de La Haye Jousselin, Georges Vacher de Lapouge: Essai de bibliographie (self-published, 1986), 15. This essay was written on request for the German journal Hammer in 1929, on the occasion of Lapouge’s seventy-fifth birthday.

46. AN, F/17/25839, personnel file, Louis Liard, renseignements confidentiels, Académie de Bordeaux, July 1870.

47. AN, F/17/25839, personnel file, Louis Liard, Liard to the Ministre de l’instruction publique, Académie de Poitiers, October 24, 1972.

48. AN, F/17/25839, personnel file, Louis Liard, renseignements confidentiels, Poitiers, August 29, 1974.

54. For example: “The closer the moment approaches when I will have to begin functioning, the more I find myself struck by the heavy moral responsibility that weighs upon the magistrature. There cannot be a magistrate so attentive and so hard-working that he doesn’t occasionally condemn the innocent and ruin, in civil affairs, honest men who are in the right” (AN, BB/6(II) 419, May 18, 1879).

55. AN, BB/6(II) 419, March 29, 1879. Lapouge published articles in the town’s republican newspaper under the name Verax. See the following articles by him in L’avenir de laVienne: “Liberté, liberté, chérie,” May 22, 1879, 2; “La liberté des fils de famille,” May 23, 1879, 1; “Paroles pour la liberté,” July 1 and 2, 1879, 1; “La messe de corvée,” January 20, 1880, 1; “La réforme de l’organisation judiciaire,” February 24 and 25, 1880, 1–2; February 26, 1880, 1; February 27, 1880, 2.

56. Told to Henri Bégouen (who was writing an obituary of Lapouge in 1936) by the people of Niort; see Bégouen, “Vacher de Lapouge,” 3.

57. The very existence of the law is a reminder that this deconsecration project had a great deal in common with the revolutionary interest in deism and with destroying the contemporary vestments of hierarchy. When Lapouge revived the law, he did it for different particular reasons, but the law’s two incarnations were both about manipulating people and things in order to revise the ideological terrain in which people live.

59. Another report indicated that he was creating embarrassing situations and needed to be in a much more supervised position (AN, BB/6[II] 419, n.d.).

60. “Magistrats de M. Cazot-Danton,” “Journal du centre, August 5, 1881. It seems Lapouge had been quite vocal at several political banquets at Blanc and Mezières, and the Journal du centre hypothesized that this had “troubled the sleep” of his newly appointed superior.

62. AN, BB/6(II) 419, divers. On March 22, 1883, Lapouge walked into an arms shop, chose, and was handed a gun. He opened the barrel, looked inside, closed the barrel, and pointed the gun at a wall. Two seconds later one of the proprietors had a bullet in his neck. As all witnesses would later attest, the revolver had gone off on its own, “for no discernible reason,” except that it was rather old. The victim, a M. Aufort, did not press charges and was soon up and about (AN, BB/6(II) 419, April 6, 1883).

63. He also studied at the Ecole des hautes études, the Louvre, and the Ecole des langues orientales. See Lapouge, “Souvenirs,” 13.

64. Hovelacque to Lapouge, FVL/UM, A 047–3 to A 047–4. See also Topinard to Lapouge, FVL/UM, no. 5, A099–1 through A099–37.

65. On his friendship with Topinard, see Lapouge, “Souvenirs,” 14, as well as the correspondence between Topinard and Lapouge in the FVL/UM. The idea that Topinard might be seen as an influence on Lapouge was noted by Etienne Patte in 1937, a year after Lapouge’s death. “Certain French historians have previously entertained some degree of racial determinism; Topinard, who was one of Vacher de Lapouge’s teachers, had echoed this but was much less enthusiastic about it, it seems to me” (“Georges Vacher de Lapouge,” Revue générale du centre-ouest de la France 46 [1937]: 775). When Lapouge finally retired from anthropometrical research, only a few years before his death, he gave his vast collection to Patte. The two men did not know each other very well, but Lapouge did not know of anyone else to whom he could make the gift and Patte wanted the skulls for his own research. This helps to explain why Patte wrote the article.

66. During his years in Paris, Lapouge wrote several letters to Liard asking him about possible job opportunities, keeping him apprised of his intellectual development, and thanking him for having given direction to his studies. See Lapouge to Louis Liard, FVL/UM, no. 8, A068–95, 96.

69. For his own explanation of why he left Paris, see Lapouge, “Souvenirs,” 15.

74. Bégouen, “Vacher de Lapouge,” 3. See also Lapouge, “Souvenirs,” 15.

75. AN, F/17/22640, doc. 164. As noted in a report of 1888, “he still sees—and doesn’t try to hide it—the functions of a librarian as beneath him, and he only does them so that he need not worry about his daily bread while he engages in his advanced and original scientific research.”

77. AN, F/17/22640, docs. 81, 67, and 83. Lapouge also asked for permission to teach his anthroposociological courses in the Faculté de Droit. He had already asked a committee of the law professors if they would allow this, but they had declined. Liard intervened for him, awarding him a salary of 500 francs for his courses. According to Lapouge, the law faculty was favorably disposed to his teaching law; however, they asked him to set aside his specialty and teach a “preliminary course” that the other professors did not want to teach.

79. Letter of Paul Valéry to Henri Bégouen (1936), cited in Bégouen, “Vacher de Lapouge,” 3. In light of this quotation, and others like it, Eugen Weber’s comment that Valéry admired Lapouge is a bit misleading (My France [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991], 34).

80. Letter from Vacher de Lapouge to Collignon, October 5, 1892, cited in Bégouen, “Vacher de Lapouge,” 3.

82. Lapouge, Sélections sociale, 472–473. An anonymous source asserts that Lapouge’s mistress received the package and telegenetically conceived a child (interview with the author, Paris, 1993).

84. AN, F/17/22640, docs. 62–64. An inquiry ensued and soon found the five girls in question, who all attested that the accusations were true. The mother of one of the girls, a Madame Guillemin, went to confront Lapouge in his laboratory and appropriated a nude picture of her daughter and several other girls. One of the girls apparently offered the further evidence that Monsieur Lapouge had a scar on his “membre viril.” When confronted with this, Lapouge agreed that he did have such a scar, but at the time of the alleged events it was still a painful wound. He had undergone surgery, later attested to by his doctor (who agreed that it could not have yet healed), and had offered this as evidence in his favor when confronted by the furious mother. He suggested to the inquisitor that she herself had later coached the girls to mention the scar. The girls were then questioned again, and some eventually retracted all accusations regarding sexual acts, saying they had been put up to it by the young Guillemin. Perhaps Madame Guillemin was so angry about the nude photographs that she embellished the girls’ reports in an effort to ensure a conviction. Alternatively, the accusations may have been true.

85. AN, F/17/22640, doc. 64. With his usual inability to understand his own reputation, Lapouge requested that if the minister of public instruction should see the necessity of transferring him, he should be promoted in the process, because a simple parallel move would seem like a condemnation (doc. 62).

87. See, for instance, Nancy Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (June 1986): 261–277; and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 1995).

89. Letter, Lapouge to Ecole, September 22, 1897, Archives de la Société d’anthropologie, box: “Correspondance: 1905.”

90. From 1900 to 1923 Lapouge also served as librarian for the Ecole préparatoire de médecine et de pharmacie, also located at Poitiers. (AN, F/17/22640, doc. 35, among others).

91. Badische Press, August 11, 1901, as quoted in Jean Boissel, “Autour du Gobinisme: Correspondance inédite entre L. Schemann et G. Vacher de Lapouge,” Annales du CESERE 4 (1981): 114.

95. The chair had been occupied by Ernst Hamy. See AN, F/17/22640, doc. 57, for details on the librarian application. For the museum chair, see Patte, “Georges Vacher de Lapouge,” 782.

97. Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Vacher de Lapouge and the Rise of Nazi Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 2 (April 2000): 285–304.

98. Often Lapouge is mixed in with these figures. Consider Karl Dietrich Bracher on “the European background”: “The second half of the nineteenth century has been called the Darwinian Age. Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Madison Grant, and the great sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz, in his early writings, all sought to apply biological considerations to sociohistorical developments. While Gumplowicz ultimately discarded this line of inquiry, one of his students, Ludwig Woltmann, developed an extreme form of Social Darwinism which later was incorporated into the ideology of National Socialism” (Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg, intro. Peter Gay [New York: Praeger, 1970], 14).

99. Correspondence: Schemann to Lapouge, April 24, 1900, FVL/UM. In this same letter, Schemann promised once again to do everything in his power to make Lapouge’s work known and appreciated in his country.

101. Correspondence: Ammon to Lapouge, February 4, 1893, FVL/UM. A letter later that same month merits quotation:

Your news that you lost the struggle struck me as a disaster that has happened to science in all the civilized countries! I understand well that the rulers of your country would not be enchanted by your theories, but I was naive enough to believe that science is free, especially in a republican country. I see that I was wrong. Having recovered my countenance, I told myself that the war is never decided by one battle alone. You will be the winner in the end, that is to say: the real winner. If I was in your place, I know what I would have to do. I do not dare give you counsel, recognizing your superiority, but if I possessed your knowledge and your faculties, I would be sure of my success. (February 19, 1893, FVL/UM)

102. Hans F. K. Günther, Racial Elements of European History, trans. G. C. Wheeler (New York, 1927). Ernst Haeckel, whose influence on Nazi doctrine is insisted upon in Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism), was cited once, and without significance. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is absent entirely.

105. Karl Saller, Die Rassenlehre des Nationalsozialismus in Wissenschaft und Propaganda (Darmstadt, 1961), 27.

106. Lapouge to Ludwig Plate, March 20, 1930, FVL/UM. The fact that Günther later dedicated one of his books to Plate further suggests that Plate came to his aid.

107. Saller, Die Rassenlehre, 27–28. This event is mentioned in many studies. See, for example, Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde,” in George Stocking, ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (Wisconson: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 158; Bracher, The German Dictatorship, 166; and Eugene Davidson, The Trial of the Germans: Nuremberg, 1945–1946 (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 265.

108. The German term for anthroposociologie is Sozialanthropologie. See Hans Fabricius, Reichsinnenminister Dr. Frick: Der revolutionaere Staatsmann (Berlin, 1939), 44. Günther was often cited above Rosenberg as the single most important racial theorist. See, for example, Robert Proctor’s study “Nazi Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge,” in Sandra Harding, ed., The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 352, which discusses Günther’s “widely recognized status as father of German Rassenkunde and the Nordic movement” (323). Saller attributes great importance to Günther, arguing a direct relationship between Nazi theories and Günther’s work. Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft, Der Nordische Gedanke in Deutschland, 1920–1940 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1971), on the other hand, sees the ideology of Günther and other Nordicists as significantly different from that of the Nazis, describing the Nazi use of Günther as highly opportunistic. The truth, I would argue, is a combination of the two: Günther’s work may well have inspired the young Hitler, and it was certainly taught to a generation of schoolchildren, and yet that does not mean that it was a blueprint for later events. Practice and doctrine both changed over time (and place) and were never in more than loose alignment.

In September 1933 “racial science” became a compulsory subject in German schools, and there arose a sudden, acute need for a textbook on the subject. Teachers met this problem by giving their students selections from the works of Günther and of Alfred Rosenberg. See Wolfgang Wippermann, “Das Berliner Schulwesen in der NS-Zeit: Fragen, Thesen und Methodische Bemerkungen,” in Benno Schmoldt, ed., Schule in Berlin (Berlin: Colloquium, 1989), 57–73; and Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (New York, 1991), 213. According to one school principal: “In our school, a thorough course in racial studies and hereditary studies was enacted. Special emphasis was put on racial studies of the Jews following Günther and his skull measurements” (cited in Wippermann, “Das Berliner Schulwesen in der NS-Zeit,” 65). In a parallel effort, for purposes both pedagogical and classificatory, the children’s heads were measured, and their cephalic indexes calculated. That Günther was an avid head measurer is evident in all his works, but it is rarely mentioned in historical accounts of the period. In general, in modern studies, the details of racial science are simply omitted. In Bracher’s study, the first chapter is devoted to historico-social anti-Semitism, but while he recognizes the profound influence of early scientific racist doctrine and that of Lapouge in particular, the subject is dispatched in two pages (14 and 15). Ammon, Grant, Gumplowicz, and Woltmann are also briefly mentioned. A few sentences in the rest of the work mention scientific doctrine during the Nazi period (see, for instance, 252).

When mention of these measuring tasks is made, it takes on an oddly comical tone, as if the practitioners were crackpots, outside the official doctrine. In fact, they were the official doctrine. One modern scholar reports, for example, that, “there were men like . . . Hans F. K. Guenter [sic], who conducted an investigation in Dresden that showed the streetcar motormen to have more Northern blood than the conductors” (Davidson, The Trial of the Germans, 40). Another states that “skull measurements were used by the Nazis in an attempt to sort out those with Jewish ancestry” (Steve Jones, The Language of Genes [New York: Doubleday, 1993], 201).

110. Lapouge to Grant, March 23, 1919, FVL/UM. For the book’s first publication, see Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribners, 1916). Assire’s French translation was published as Le déclin de la grande race in 1926. Lapouge continued to write instructive (and very friendly) letters to Grant. See, in particular, Lapouge to Grant, April 4, 1929, FVL/UM.

112. For Hitler’s reliance on Günther, consider, for example, Karl Dietrich Bracher on Mein Kampf: “The book borrowed from the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich, 1922) by the anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther and his theories of ‘Nordification.’” He adds that “Chamberlain, Fritsch, Spengler, Lagarde, Schopenhauer, Wagner, in addition to numerous obscure, pseudo-scientific works, are the sources which the author, naturally without direct citation or annotation, used and vulgarized” (The German Dictatorship, 128). See also Joachim C. Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Pantheon, 1970), which cites Günther as the source of Hitler’s race theory, particularly the notion of the blond “Nordic type” (99–100). According to Ernst Nolte, “Hitler was probably not familiar with Vacher de Lapouge, but the ideas which Lapouge was one of the first to express were well known to him” (Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vennewitz [New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1966], 515 n. 4).

113. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Der Arier und seine Bedeutung für die Gemeinschaft (Frankfurt A.M.: Moritz Diesterweg, 1939). The preface to the German translation places the book as a major work in racial science: “Much of what here appears as an admonition is now the practical politics of today. This translation was encouraged by the high governmental minister Dr. Ruttke and Miss Kietta, and it comes with the clear permission of the publisher and the estate of the author.” Falk Ruttke went on to publish several works under the title Rasse und Recht in 1937 and 1938.

114. Edgar Tatarin-Tarnheyden, “Georges Vacher de Lapouge: Visionnaire française de l’avenir européen,” Cahiers franco-allemands 9 (October–December 1942): 336–346.

115. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind (New York, 1961), 254. This is the revised edition of Metapolitics: From Romanticism to Hitler (New York, 1941).

116. Hans F. K. Günther, “Zum Tode des Grassen Georges Vacher de Lapouge,” Rasse: Monatschrift der Nordischen Bewegung 3 (1936): 95–98.

117. Dr. Werner Kulz, “Marquis de Lapouge zum Gedenken!” Volke und Rasse 6 (June 1936): 255.

118. Lapouge to Schemann, December 10, 1934, in Boissel, “Autour du Gobinisme,” 109.

119. Lapouge to Madame DuPont, May 12, 1935, FVL/UM. Lapouge was writing to Madame DuPont because her husband had just died. The letter is, however, full of anthroposociological discussions.

120. See Lapouge’s extensive collection of correspondence in the Fonds Vacher de Lapouge, housed in the Paul Valéry library of the University of Montpellier, as well as his government personnel files, located in the Archives nationales de Paris, especially BB/6(II) 419 and F/17/22640; and the Archives of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, located at the Musée de l’homme in Paris.

121. I will here note one major work from each: Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York: Blue Ribbon, 1920); Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Holt, 1911); Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, intro. Madison Grant (New York: Scribner, 1920);William Ripley, The Races of Europe (London: Trench, Trübner, 1897); John Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1885); Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper, 1901); Francis Galton. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869); Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895); Charles Robert Drysdale, The Cause of Poverty: A Paper Read at the National Liberal Club on 21st October, 1890 (London: Standring, 1891); Bessie Ingman Drysdale, Labour Troubles and Birth Control (London: Heinemann, 1920); Luis Huerta, La doctrina eugénica (Madrid: Editorial Instituto Samper, 1933); Angelo Crespi, Contemporary Thought of Italy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1926); Georges Chatterton-Hill, La physiologie morale (Paris: P. V. Stock, 1904); Carl Closson, “Further Data of Anthropo-Sociology,” Journal of Political Economy 7 (March 1899), 243–252; Jean-Richard Bloch, L’anoblissement en France au temps de François Ier: Essai d’une définition de la condition juridique et sociale de la noblesse au début du 16e siècle (Paris: Alcan, 1934); Charles Ujfalvy, Les Aryens au nord et au sud de l’Hindou-Kouch (Paris: G. Masson, 1896).

123. Lapouge to Haeckel, December 22, 1896, cited in Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York: Lang, 1998), 140–141.

125. Lapouge to Madame Albertine Lapouge, September 23, 1921, and September 28, 1921, FVL/UM, no. 068–50 and no number. See also Guy Thuillier, “Un anarchiste positiviste: Georges Vacher de Lapouge,” in Pierre Guiral and Emile Temine, eds., L’idée de race dans la pensée politique française contemporaine (Paris: CNRS, 1977), 59.

127. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1938), 372. The scalding anecdote runs as follows:

The next morning the Hotel McAlpin, where the convention was to be held, called me up to report that Dr. Lapouge had been severely burned, and an interpreter was needed. Dr. Drysdale hurried off to find the poor little man of seventy in excruciating pain but carrying on a dissertation, highly amusing, about the hazards of America’s much advertised plumbing. Without understanding how to regulate a shower he had stood under it and turned on the hot water. The skin fairly peeled off his chest. Nevertheless, bandaged and oiled, he undauntedly attended all the sessions.” (372–373)

128. Even in L’Aryen, published in 1899, Lapouge was much heartened by the eugenics movement in the United States and the work that had been done there to control births according to eugenic concerns (504–507).

130. Calvin Coolidge, “Whose Country Is This?” Good Housekeeping 72 (February 1921): 14, cited in Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 97.

131. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 205, 207 (1927), cited in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 111.

132. See chap. 7, “Eugenic Enactments,” in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 96–112. See also Edward Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

133. Including a grand rabbi. See Lapouge to unknown, November 26, 1926, FVL/UM.

134. Gaultier would later serve as general editor of the Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique published by Flammarion in the thirties and forties.

137. The “zealous assistant” was Lapouge disciple Du Pont, who published under the pseudonym Warren Kincade. At this point, Du Pont was the European correspondent for Review of Reviews. See Correspondence: Lapouge/Du Pont, FVL/UM.

138. See Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914–1938 (Cambridge, 1985), 131, 168, 224, 226. Marthe Hanau “made extravagant promises and went bankrupt at the end of 1928” (131). Le quotidien “did not survive …the rash connection with Madam Hanua” (168).

139. By the very beginning of the century, Lapouge’s theories had become well-established aspects of the study of sociology in the United States. In 1905 Thomas Nixon Carver, professor of political economy at Harvard, compiled a sourcebook “for students of sociology” for a series called “Selections and Documents in Economics.” The text, entitled Sociology and Social Progress: A Handbook for Students of Sociology (Boston: Ginn, 1906), included a significant section by Lapouge, as well as one by the racialist writer William Ripley, then professor of economics at Harvard and the editor of the series. Pitirim Sorokin, professor of sociology at Harvard, published Contemporary Sociological Theories with Harper and Brothers in 1928 and included a large section on Lapouge (219–308). It was not utterly accepting of anthroposociological principles—indeed, it argued against them on several points—but it explained them extensively and took them seriously. In this context, Gûnther’s Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes (1924) was praised as “a very valuable work” (263).

1. Léonce Manouvrier, “Conclusions générales sur l’anthropologie des sexes et applications sociales,” Revue de l’Ecole d’Anthropologie 13 (1903): 406.

2. The only study dedicated to Manouvrier until now, that I know of, is my article “A Vigilant Anthropology: Léonce Manouvrier and the Disappearing Numbers,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 33, no. 3 (summer 1997): 221–240.

3. On the history of statistics, see Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and idem, The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, ed. Lorenz Kruger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger; vol. 2, ed. Lorenz Kruger, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Mary Morgan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

4. On eugenics, see William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest For Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Linda Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984).

5. See, for instance, “Académie de médecine (1er Octobre),” Le temps, October 3, 1889. The article reported Laborde’s argument that even the vapors of absinthe could have fatal effects.

6. This took over twenty years because “preparateur” had a salary to it, and “director” did not, and this was Manouvrier’s main employment. Until Laborde suddenly wanted use of his personal office at the lab—which had been Manouvrier’s work space for two decades—Manouvrier did not mind the situation. When Laborde insisted (despite explanations of the difficulty involved), Manouvrier contacted the minister of public instruction who sided with Manouvrier and gave him the official power he had lacked until then. AN F/17/23860.

7. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 73–113.

8. Archives of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter ASAP), Musée de l’homme, Paris, Bibliothèque.

10. Paul Broca, “Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter BSAP), 1st ser., 2 (1861): 139–207, 301–321, 441–446.

11. For a discussion of the wide influence of Broca’s data on women’s inferiority, see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 35–36.

12. Gustave Le Bon, “Recherches anatomiques et mathématique sur les lois des variations du volume du cerveau et sur leur relations avec l’intelligence,” Revue d’anthropologie 2, no. 2 (1879): 60.

13. Léonce Manouvrier, “Recherches sur le développement quantitatif comparé de l’encéphale et de diverses parties du squelette,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France 6 (1881): 77–94.

14. Léonce Manouvrier, “Sur la grandeur du front et des principales régions du crâne chez l’homme et chez la femme,” BSAP 3d ser., 6 (1883): 694–698.

15. Léonce Manouvrier, “Variétés: L’internat en mèdicine des femmes,” Revue scientifique 3, no. 19 (1884): 592–597.

16. Léonce Manouvrier, “Indications anatomiques et physiologiques relatives aux attributions naturelles de la femme,” Congrès français et international du droit des femmes (Paris, 1889)

17. Madame Conta, “Quelques considérations d’ordre social concernant l’homme et la femme,” Congrès français et international du droit des femmes (Paris, 1889), 131–135.

19. Congrès français et international du droit desfemmes (Paris, 1889), 226, 40, and 146–163.

22. Condorcet’s feminism may not be as well-known as Mills’s. Consider, for example, his discussion of the “tenth stage” of human development:

Among the causes of the progress of the human mind that are of the utmost importance to the general happiness, we must number the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes, an inequality fatal even to the party in whose favor it works. It is vain for us to look for a justification of this principle in any differences of physical organization, intellect, or moral sensibility. This inequality has its origin solely in an abuse of strength, and all the later sophisticated attempts that have been made to excuse it are in vain. (Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [1795], trans. June Barraclough [New York: Noonday, 1955], 193)

23. Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, trans. F. T. Cooper (New York: Fredrick A. Stokes, 1913). For a brief discussion of this work, see Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 107, 123.

24. Jacqueline Lalouette, La libre pensée en France, 1848–1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 331.

26. “Intelligence,” in Charles Turgeon, Le féminisme français (Paris: Larose, 1907), 1: 131–134.

28. The observation is Gould’s. See his Mismeasure of Man, 123.“Nordau” refers to Max Nordau, author of Degeneration (New York, 1895).

29. “Metaphysical criminology,” was a term utilized by its opponents rather than by anyone claiming to practice it. See, for example, E. Ferri, “Various Short Contributions to Criminal Sociology,” Internationaler Kongress der Kriminalanthropologie 7 (1911): 251.

30. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 26, 106, 107, 139; Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Conception of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 106, 108, 116, 118, and 125.

31. Both Nye and Gould mention Manouvrier as one of the most dedicated French critics of Lombrosian theory. A thorough examination of Manouvrier’s critique, however, lay outside the projects outlined by both Nye and Gould. Perhaps because of this, neither appears to appreciate Manouvrier’s dominant role in formulating the French position. In particular, Nye gives inordinate weight to the influences of Paul Topinard and Gabriel Tarde, both of whom fashioned far less rigorous critiques of Lombroso than did Manouvrier. Nye and Gould also mistakenly exaggerate the exceptional nature of Manouvrier’s egalitarianism. Neither seems to have been aware that the Société d’anthropologie de Paris was, at this time, dominated by left-wing egalitarians.

34. Manouvrier discusses this and similar metaphors in his “Les aptitudes et les actes dans leurs rapports avec la constitution anatomique et avec le milieu extérieur” (paper delivered at the Septième Conférence Broca), BSAP 4th ser., 1 (1890): 918–939.

35. Actes du deuxième congrès, 31–35. 36. See Thomas Wilson, “Criminal Anthropology,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1891).

36. See Thomas Wilson, “Criminal Anthropology,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1891).

38. Tarde also discussed his belief that there exists “a residue of incorrigible criminals, real antisocial monsters” (104).

39. See Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, 106, for a similar assessment of the importance of this congress.

40. See his “Questions préalables dans l’étude comparative des criminels et des honnàtes gens,” in Actes du troisième congrès d’anthropologie criminelle de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1893), 171–182.

41. Ida M. Tarbell, “Identification in Criminals: The Scientific Method in Use in France,” New McClure’s Magazine 2, no. 4 (March 1894): 369.

43. Léonce Manouvrier, “L’anthropologie et le droit,” Revue internationale de sociologie 2 (1894): 367.

44. Manouvrier, “La genèse normale du crime,” BSAP 4th ser., 4 (1893): 405–458. The conference referred to evolution as “species transformism” so as not to imply a bias toward the Darwinian model. Manouvrier used the term instead of “evolution,” but their meaning here is identical, and I paraphrase it as such for clarity.

46. Muffang to Lapouge, Fonds Vacher de Lapouge, Université de Montpellier (hereafter FVL/UM), A067–1 through A067–91.

49. Léonce Manouvrier, “L’indice céphalique et la pseudo-sociologie,” Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie 9 (1899): 233–259.

50. Gustave Rouanet, “Les théories aristocratique devant la science,” La petit republique, January 2, 1900, 1.

51. Salomon Reinach, “Compte rendu: L’Aryen,” Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, February 12, 1900, 121–125.

52. Emile Durkheim, “Notre siècle: La sociologie en France au XIXe siècle,” Revue bleue, 4th ser., 13, no. 20 (May 19, 1900): 651.

56. Manouvrier, “L’individualité de l’anthropologie,” Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie 14 (1904): 397–410.

57. See Prokopec, “Hrdlička,” 57–61; Erik Trinkaus, “A History of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens Paleontology in America,” in Frank Spencer, ed., A History of American Physical Anthropology, 1930–1980 (New York: Academic, 1982), 261–280; and Thelma S. Baker and Phyllis B. Eveleth, “The Effects of Funding Patterns on the Development of Physical Anthropology,” in A History of American Physical Anthropology, 31–48.

58. Trinkaus, “A History of Homo erectus,” 261;Aleš Hrdlička, The Skeletal Remains of Early Man (Washington D.C.: The Smithsonian institution, 1930).

60. Royer to Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix, n.d. [1900], Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, cited in Joy Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 179.

61. Gilles de La Tourette, “Le professeur J.-M. Charcot,” Revue hebdomadaire 15 (1893): 608–622. Tourette’s association with the syndrome named for him was due to a long article he wrote on the tic disorder in 1885. After Charcot died, Tourette switched professions and took up forensic medicine. He was, by the way, such an unbearable personality that his obituary demanded a rebuttal. See Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 322.

62. Charles Richet, “Les démoniaques d’aujourd’hui: L’hystérie et le somnambulisme,” Revue des deux mondes 37 (1880): 340.

64. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 322–377.

67. Reproduced in Goetz, Bonduelle, and Gelfand, Charcot, 92–93. The tableau is just the stage: the men here are the select group allowed to come in close, while a large audience outside the frame watches from the seats of an amphitheater.

68. Richet, “Les démoniaques d’aujourd’hui”; Charles Richet, “Les démoniaques d’autrefois: Les sorcières et les possédées,” Revue des deux mondes 37 (1880): 552–583.

73. Paul Bert, ed., Revues scientifiques pour la république française publiée par le journal “La république française” sous la direction de M. Paul Bert (Paris: G. Masson, 1879), 1: 4, cited in Goldstein, Console and Classify, 368.

74. Sigmund Freud, “Charcot,” trans. J. Strachey, in Selections-Collected Papers, authorized translation under the supervision of Joan Riviere, trans. and ed. James Strachey with Alix Strachey (New York: Basic, 1959), 1: 10, 11. See also Goldstein, Console and Classify, 383–384.

75. Theodore Zeldin wrote that in 1960 about two-thirds of French nuns were engaged in hospital or other social services and one-third in education. “It is no wonder the lay republic could not expel them en masse” (France, 1848–1945 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1977), 2: 1015, see also 1010–1015.

76. Archives of the Société d’autopsie mutuelle, Musée de l’homme, Paris, clipped article, “Le cerveau des grands hommes: Au musée d’anthropologie,” Le petit bleu, no. 329 (April 13, 1903).

77. Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 195.

78. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Dr. Voulet, De la contracture hystérique permanente; ou, Appréciation scientifique des miracles de Saint Louis et de Saint Médarde (Paris, 1872).

79. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, Louise Lateau; ou, La stigmatisée belge (Paris, 1875).

80. See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

81. Desiré-Magloire Bourneville and P. Renarde, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 3 vols. (Paris: Progrès médical, 1876–1880).

82. Jean Weir, Histoires disputes et discours des illusions et impostures des diables, pref. Desiré-Magloire Bourneville (Paris, 1885).

84. Jean-Marie Charcot, “Faith-Cure,” New Review 8 (January-June 1893): 18–31; idem, “La foi qui guérit,” Revue hebdomadaire 1, no. 5 (December 3, 1892): 122–132. I take my quotations from the original English.

85. Léonce Manouvrier,“Etude comparative sur les cerveaux de Gambetta et de Bertillon,” Revue philosophique 25 (1888): 453–461; idem, “Société de psychologie physiologique: ‘Mouvements divers et sueur palmaire consécutifs à des images mentales.’ Séance du 29 mars 1886 (présidence de M. Charcot),” Revue philosophique 22 (1886): 203–207; idem, “Les premières circonvolutions temporales droite et gauche chez un sourd de l’oreille gauche (Bertillon),” Revue philosophique 26 (1888): 330–335.

86. See Goldstein, Console and Classify; Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 372–373;W. Paul Vogt, “Political Connections, Professional Advancement, and Moral Education in Durkheimian Sociology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991): 56–75; Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France, 39; George Rosen, “The Philosophy of Ideology and the Emergence of Modern Medicine in France,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (July 1946): 328–339; Gerald L. Geison, ed., Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); H. Tint, “The Search for a Laic Morality Under the French Third Republic: Renouvier and the ‘Critique Philosophique,’” Sociological Review 5, no. 1 (July 1957): 5–26.

1. The first section of this chapter grew out of my article: “The Solvency of Metaphysics: The Debate Over Racial Science and Moral Philosophy in France, 1890–1914,” Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 90 (spring 1999): 1–24.

2. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had novels translated into French between 1884 and 1888.

3. “Introduction,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (hereafter RMM) 1 (1893): 1. See also the unsigned article “La philosophie au Collège de France,” RMM 1 (1893): 369–381.

4. The “terrible forces” probably referred to the rise of scientific racism (see chap. 5 for a discussion of this in RMM) as well as the anarchist violence that raged between 1892 and 1894.

5. Alphonse Darlu, “Réflexions d’un philosophe sur les questions du jour: Science, morale et religion,” RMM 3 (1895): 249.

6. For a discussion of solidarism, see J. E. S. Hayward, “The Official Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism,” International Review of Social History 9 (1961): 22–25; and idem, “Solidarity: The Social History of an Idea in Nineteenth-Century France,” International Review of Social History 4 (1959): 261–284. See also Célestin Bouglé, Le solidarisme (Paris, 1907).

7. The relationship between Fouillée’s philosophy and Bourgeois’s political career has been well established; see Hayward, “Solidarity,” as well as John A. Scott, Republican Ideas and the Liberal Tradition in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); and Linda Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 54–57, 157–186.

8. As William Logue has characterized it, solidarism was a kind of neoliberalism that asserted that the maximum liberty for all could only be attained through an organized social action that ran counter to classic liberalism’s concept of freedom. See William Logue, “Sociologie et politique: Le libéralisme de Célestin Bouglé,” Revue française de sociologie 20 (1979): 141–161. In a different context, Hayward had said as much when he cited the growing nineteenth-century notion that “in the inegalitarian economic sphere, it was laissez-faire that oppressed and social intervention that liberated” (“The Official Philosophy,” 33). Neither Hayward nor Logue, however, take into account the themes of natural history and evolution that dominated nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of solidarism.

9. Several studies have demonstrated that French scientists (and in some cases the English as well) held on to Lamarckianism long after Darwinian theory had replaced it elsewhere. See Yvette Conry, L’introduction du Darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1974);Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas, 1974); and Robert Nye, “Heredity or Milieu: The Foundations of Modern European Criminological Theory,” Isis 67, no. 3 (1976): 335–355; Peter Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). As for the prominence of Darwinian theory in political discourse, the works examined in the present study all ignore Lamarck (though, in some cases, he would have aided their arguments) and use the terms “Darwinism,” “Darwinian,” “struggle for life” (“lutte pour la vie” or “lutte pour l’existence”), and “natural selection” in their references to evolution—as is clear in the quotations used herein. See also Bourgeois, Essai d’une philosophie de la solidarité: Conférences et discussions (Paris, 1902). This conference was attended by twenty-one prominent French philosophers, academics, lawyers, and politicians. In the discussions, no one brought up Lamarck or his “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” This is not to say that they discussed Darwinism in detail, either, or that they never assumed a gradual human progress that might be construed as a sort of Lamarckian improvement. My point is that the French wrote copiously about the meaning and consequences of the struggle for existence. Our discovery of the French romance with Lamarck should not blind us to their obsession with the Darwinian “struggle” and “violent natural selection” (for specific references to these terms, see, for instance, Bourgeois, Essai d’une philosophie, 3, 29, and 78).

10. Hayward, “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic,” 27.

11. Alfred Fouillée, “La psychologie des peuples et l’anthropologie,” Revue des deux mondes 128 (March 15, 1895): 365. Fouillée also quoted Lapouge’s warning of “copious exterminations”—without attribution—on this page. His reference to Manouvrier predated the latter’s specific critique of Lapouge.

12. See, for instance, Alfred Fouillée, “As Others See Us,” The Living Age 212 (1899): 67–72.

14. Muffang to Lapouge, undated, and Fouillée to Lapouge, undated, Fonds Vacher de Lapouge, Université de Montpellier, A 91–6 and A 42–1 through A 42–3, respectively.

15. Alfred Fouillée, Esquisse psychologique des peuples (Paris, 1903), 529–530.

17. Célestin Bouglé, “Anthropologie et démocratie,” RMM 5 (1897): 443–461.

18. He correctly named Otto Ammon as Lapouge’s German counterpart and referred to other authors as “their disciples” (443 and throughout).

19. Of course, Lapouge did not agree. He held that members of the superior race were fewer in number and sometimes constitutionally delicate, such that they required and deserved privilege.

21. Bouglé cited Manouvrier’s “Les aptitudes et les actes” (1890) and his “Genèse normale du crime” (1893). See chap. 6 for a discussion of these works.

22. Bouglé to Brunetière, no date, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Manuscrit, NAF 25033 ff 79–80.

23. Célestin Bouglé, Essais sur le régime des castes (Paris: Alcan, 1908). See esp. the section “Race,” 129–156.

24. Don Martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 265.

26. Célestin Bouglé, Qu’est-ce que la sociologie? (Paris: Alcan, 1907), 143.

27. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen: Son rôle social (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1899), 514.

29. Later called La revue and then La revue mondiale. Finot wrote many of the journal’s articles. According to his son, in the few years before he became a French citizen he used ten different pseudonyms in order to write freely and fill the journal’s pages. See Jean-Louis Finot, “Mon père,” La revue mondiale 33 (May 15, 1922): 143–150.

30. Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Manuscrit: 24494 (1) doc. 264; microfilm 2278/NAF 24519 (174–180); NAF 24530 ff 380–382; NAF 25038 ff 292–293.

31. René Worms, “Jean Finot, sociologue,” La revue mondiale 33 (May 15, 1922): 228.

32. The only figure Worms mentioned was Gobineau, but he spoke at length about Finot’s attack on the cephalic index.

33. Jean Finot, Le préjugé des races, 2d ed. (Paris, 1905–1906); and idem, Le préjugé et problème des sexes (Paris: Alcan, 1912).

35. Jean Finot, Race Prejudice, trans. Florence Wade-Evans (New York, 1906), vi.

38. Henri Bergson, “Rapport sur ‘Progrès et bonheur’ de J. Finot,” in Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: PUF, 1972), 1090–1094.

39. According to Finot’s son, this book was translated into fifteen languages. For the English version, see The Science of Happiness, trans. Mary Stafford (New York: Putnam, 1914). All quotations in the text are drawn from this edition.

40. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Baudelaire, M. Renan, Flaubert, M. Taine, Stendhal (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1883), quoted in Finot, The Science of Happiness, 97 n. 1.

42. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Race et milieu social (Paris: Rivière, 1909), xi, xx.

44. Lapouge to Madison Grant, March 23, 1919, Fonds Vacher de Lapouge, Université de Montpellier, A 068–80.

45. Charles Péguy, Oeuvres en prose, 1898–1908 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 483.

46. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911), 270–271.

47. The Times, October 28, 1911, EB VII, 38–41, reprinted in Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: PUF, 1972), 951–959.

48. Jacques Chevalier, Henri Bergson, trans. Lilian Clare (1928; reprint, New York: AMS, 1969), 168–169.

49. Robert Owen Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 151, 159, 266, 272, 344.

50. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 44.

51. Emile Durkheim, “La philosophie dans les universités allemandes,” Revue internationale de l’enseignement 13 (1887): 439–440, cited in W. Paul Vogt, “Political Connections, Professional Advancement, and Moral Education in Durkheimian Sociology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991): 64.

55. Emile Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris, 1894), 127.

56. Alphonse Darlu, “Réflexion d’un philosophe sur les questions du jour: La solidarité,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 5 (1897): 126.

57. Emile Durkheim, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” RMM 6 (1898), translated as “Individual and Collective Representations,” in Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D. F. Pocock (New York: Free, 1974), 33.

61. Bouglé, “Sociologie, psychologie, et histoire,” RMM 4 (1896): 362–371.

62. Emile Durkheim, “Sociologie,” in La science française (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1915), 382.

63. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. and intro. by Karen E. Fields (New York: Free, 1995).

Nevertheless, it will be said, no matter how religions are explained, they have certainly erred about the true nature of things: The sciences have demonstrated that. So the modes of action they encourage or imposed upon man could only rarely have had useful effects: It is not with purifications that sicknesses are cured, or with sacrifices or songs that the crop is made to grow. . . . But . . . let us suppose that religion answers a need quite different from adapting us to tangible things: There will be no risk of its being weakened solely because it satisfies this need poorly or not at all. . . . But for that to occur, religious ideas must not draw their origin from a feeling that is disturbed by the setbacks of experience, for otherwise, where would their resilience come from? (80–81)

1. “Considérations présentées par M. L. Manouvrier à l’appui de sa canditature,” Collège de France Archives, G.IV. f-45F. In detailing these struggles, Manouvrier cited his studies showing that the height of the French people had not diminished since prehistoric times, contrary to the opinion universally accepted, and thus asserted that he had proven invalid the supposed degeneration of the French population. He further noted that he had defused both of the “two opposed camps” to which the feminist movement had given rise. One of these groups, he explained, attributed to women mental incapacities corresponding to a plethora of anatomical inferiorities. “The majority of these inferiorities, cerebral or otherwise, do not exist, and the others have been wrongly interpreted.” As for the other camp, which considered social competition between the sexes to be possible and desirable, Manouvrier announced that “physiologically and anatomically, I can demonstrate the inanity and the danger of these aspirations.” This was more critical than his usual take on feminism, perhaps because of the constraints of trying to get a job. As for the Lombrosian theories of atavistic criminality, Manouvrier asserted that they contain “such an immense number of errors of every sort” that one can hardly begin to critique them (ibid., companion essay).

3. Papillault, “Discours de M.G. Papillault aux obsèques de M. Manouvrier,” BSAP 7th ser., 6–8 (1927–1927): 6.

6. The most extensive account of this event can be found in George Sarton, “Paul, Jules, and Marie Tannery (with a note on Grégoire Wyrouboff),” Isis 38 (November 1947): 33–51. See also Pierre Duhem, Paul Tannery (Montligeon [Orne]: Librairie de Montligeon, 1905), 14; and Harry Paul, “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895,” French Historical Studies 3 (1968): 325–327. See also Paul’s study of the origins of twentieth-century history of science through an analysis of the Collège de France chair: “Scholarship and Ideology: The Chair of the General History of Science at the Collège de France, 1892–1913,” Isis 67, no. 238 (1976): 376–387. There are several recent contributions to the history of the science and religion debates in the Third Republic. Fritz Ringer has explored the question in terms of educational practice and ideology; see Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 207–225. Also important is Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity,1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Chapter 1 of Lebovics’s book considers the anthropologist and politician Louis Marin in a study of the activity and eventual decline of the “old right” vision of France in the twentieth century (12–50).

7. Paul, “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science,” 322. See also Antonin Eymieu, La part des croyants dans les progrès de la science au XIXe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Perrin, 1920–1935).

8. Sarton, “Paul, Jules, and Marie Tannery,” 40. In his “Debate over the Bankruptcy of Science,” Paul argues that Sarton was overstating the point a bit but agrees that Tannery was considerably more qualified.

9. See Emmanuel de Margerie, “Albert de Lapparent,” Annales de géographie 17 (1908): 344–347, esp. 346; and Charles Barrois, “Albert de Lapparent et sa carrière scientifique,” Revue des questions scientifiques, 3d ser., 16 (1909)): 9–44, esp. 18–19, cited in Robert Fox, “Science, the University and the State in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Gerald L. Geison, ed., Professions and the French State, 1700–1900, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 66–145, esp. 119, 145 n. 198.

10. See Hélène Pierre-Duhem, Un savant français: Pierre Duhem (Paris, 1936), 95–157, cited in Fox, “Science, the University and the State,” 119, 145 n. 198.

11. The marquis protested that the republic denied favors to those who were not in complete accord with it on questions of politics and religion. Apparently, in 1877 he was removed from his prefecture in Indre-et-Loire because of his oppositional stance. See his “Foi et science,” Le correspondant, no. 179 (1895), 801–835, cited in Paul, “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science,” 316–317. Interestingly, in the context of the Brunetière controversy, Paul here notes de Nadaillac’s opposition to “the narrow and outmoded rationalism of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century,” without, it would seem, any knowledge of the specific censorship de Nadaillac had experienced at the hands of the freethinking anthropologists.

12. “Banquet offert à M. Berthelot,” Revue scientifique, April 13, 1895, 466–474, cited in Paul, “The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science,” 320.

13. “Considérations présentées par M. L. Manouvrier,” Collège de France Archives, G.IV.g–13 Q.

14. Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 158–159.

15. Charles Richet, “Du somnambulism provoqué,” Revue philosophique 10 (1880): 337–374, 462–484.

17. Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion of the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1983), 130, 132.

18. Charles Richet, Metapsychics (London, 1905); idem, Our Sixth Sense (London: Rider, 1929).

19. Sir Oliver Lodge, Past Years: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), 296.

20. Sigmund Freud, On Aphasia: A Critical Study (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). Some Freud scholars call this the first Freudian book, some see it as a neurological study without much significance for psychoanalysis.

21. Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic, 1979), 271.

22. Freud, “Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth, 1953), 1: 41.

23. William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1986), 166.

24. Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism,” in The Standard Edition, 1: 126–127.

26. For a brilliant discussion of this and a number of other ways that Freud fits into the context I have been describing, see Philip Reiff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 257–299.

27. Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 294.

28. Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Wiley, 1962), 92.

29. Léon Daudet, Devant la douleur (Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1915), 176; and idem, Paris vécu (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 97, as cited in Goetz, Bonduelle, and Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology, 278.

30. On Guyau the philosopher, see Geoffrey C. Fidler, “On Jean-Marie Guyau, Immoraliste,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 1 (1994): 75–97.

31. Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 87.

32. Inauguration de monument de G. de Mortillet-Extrait de L’homme préhistorique, 3e année, no. 11, 1905 (Paris, 1905), 1.

33. “Discours de M. A. Chervin, Président de la Société des Conférences Anthropologique,” in ibid., 15–17.

34. “Discours de M. H. Thulié, Directeur de l’Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris,” in ibid., 12–15.

35. Raoul Anthony, “Rapport du secrétaire général pour l’année 1936,” Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (hereafter BSAP), 8th ser., 1–11 (1930–1940): 70–71.

36. Anthony, “Discours de M. R. Anthony aux obsèques de M. Manouvrier,” BSAP 7th ser., 6–8 (1925–1927): 2–4.

37. Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 13th ser., 1 (1974).

38. See, for instance, Bernard Chopineaux, “Etude de l’articulation tino-tarsienne chez des populations du ‘mésolithique,’” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 8th ser., 1 (1974): 1; and Pranab Ganguly, “Variation in Physique in North India in Relation to Urbanization and Economic Status,” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 8th ser., 1 (1974): 6.

1. I am, of course, paraphrasing the Durkheim quotation cited above. See page 291.

2. Robert Owen Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

3. Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Jane Caplan and Thomas Childers, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich, intro. Charles S. Maier (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 234–252.

4. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183–206.

6. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. and intro. by Karen E. Fields (New York: Free, 1995), 267.