Most Handsome and Best

France​ doesn’t do race. Article 1 of the French constitution asserts ‘the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion’. In 1978 a law banned the collection and use of personal data based on ‘the alleged racial origin or the ethnic origin’ of individuals. Breaching the ban is a criminal offence, inviting a fine of up to €300,000 or a jail sentence of up to five years. In public discourse, this official colour blindness is justified by the enlightened universalisme of French republican values, and contrasted with Anglo-American communautarisme, a word which has a connotation similar to that of apartheid in English. A world devoid of racial or ethnic distinctions – distinctions which have no scientific merit – is a beautiful project. At least I find it beautiful, but perhaps this is because I grew up in France and enjoyed never having to think about my own ethnically mixed ancestry. It was only after moving to Britain, where the census has since 1991 asked respondents to identify their ethnic group, that I reluctantly began to think of myself as white. In an era in which many people lament the tyranny of identity politics, it may seem healthy that the state should discourage racial or ethnic identification.

Yet since returning to France twenty years later, I have become disillusioned with French pseudo-universalism. Official colour blindness did not prevent the National Rally, a party dedicated to the defence of an implicitly white conception of French identity, from growing into the country’s largest political force. In the absence of statistical data, centrist governments and administrative services cannot respond to claims of discrimination. Above all, it is hard not to feel angry about the hypocrisy surrounding the issue, since in private the French talk about race and ethnicity more than the British, and tend to employ cruder language. The discrepancy between the official negation of race and social reality almost recalls Soviet attitudes towards social and economic inequities: the abolition of class, too, was a beautiful project.

Most people, at least in France, attribute official colour blindness to the abstract conception of citizenship in the French republican tradition, a product of the Enlightenment and the revolution. The tracts of French philosophes against slavery still retain their power because they appealed to reason, whereas Anglo-American abolitionists were inspired by a now quaint concern with salvation. The language used by Nicolas de Condorcet in his Reflections on the Slavery of Negroes (1781) is essentially the same as that of modern anti-racism: ‘Although I am not of the same colour as you,’ he imagined himself addressing enslaved Africans, ‘I have always regarded you as my brothers. Nature has formed you to have the same mind, the same reason, the same virtues as whites.’ The most forceful incarnation of this secularised universalism was Henri Grégoire, a Catholic priest who broke with Rome and helped to bring about the civil emancipation of French Jews in 1791, and then in 1794 the abolition of slavery in the French colonies.

For the past forty years, historians have been pointing to the limits and contradictions of French universalism. It did not extend to women, who obtained citizenship only in 1944. The inclusion of Jews was ambiguous: Grégoire considered them morally and physically degenerate and propounded their emancipation as a means of eradicating Judaism, especially through intermarriage with Christians. The abolition of slavery resulted from the insurrection of slaves themselves in Saint-Domingue rather than French revolutionary generosity. Grégoire welcomed emancipation but hoped that interracial marriages would dilute their Blackness. French universalism was even reversible. Slavery was reinstated between 1802 and 1848, and 19th-century France proved to be a cradle of modern antisemitism: Édouard Drumont’s rabid denunciation of Jewish influence, La France juive, first published in 1886, was a European bestseller, with more than two hundred reprints by 1914.

How can we account for France’s historical wavering on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? William Nelson’s Enlightenment Biopolitics offers an elegant solution to the puzzle. French revolutionaries held such extreme views, he argues, because the French Enlightenment pioneered scientific racism a century before adepts of Darwin built racist sandcastles on his theory of natural selection. This first scientific formulation of racial prejudice was rooted in the classification of plant and animal species conducted by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. Near the beginning of his monumental Natural History (1749-88), Buffon addressed the classification of human beings. He maintained that there was a single human species, but stressed the differences between races. Although cautious not to challenge the Christian account of Creation openly, he sketched out what amounted to an early theory of evolution: ‘White therefore seems to be the original colour of [human] Nature, which climate, food and customs alter and change into yellow, brown or black.’ The ‘most handsome and best built men’ among the whites were to be found in the most temperate part of Europe, between the fortieth and fiftieth degrees of latitude. By a happy coincidence, Perpignan sits on the 42nd degree of latitude and Dunkirk on the 51st, so the French could be held as a model for the rest of mankind.

After the revolution undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck put forward a more explicit theory of evolution based on transmutation and the preservation of acquired characteristics: ‘transformism’. But Nelson, rather than revisiting the origins of evolutionism, is interested in the swift political impact of Buffon’s views on race and degeneration. He traces the way Buffon’s organicist conception of society permeated intellectual life, from Rousseau to the first political economists. The Buffonian emphasis on cross-breeding as a means of preventing degeneration inspired proto-eugenic schemes, including Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Essay on the Manner of Improving the Human Species (1756), and the first practical projects of racial engineering in French colonies. These revolved around the creation of a mixed Euro-African race, in charge of military defence, while white masters would continue to direct the labour of Black slaves. In Paris, the Buffonian fear of degeneration encouraged plans for rounding up vagrants in labour camps and expelling Blacks and mixed-race people from France. It also reinforced the emphasis laid by political thinkers on the biological differences between men and women.

The most disturbing example of Buffonian biopolitics was a plan by the Abbé Sieyès to create ‘a species between men and animals, a species capable of serving man for consumption and production’. These ‘new races of anthropomorphic monkeys’ would serve as the ‘slaves’ of modern citizens; the new species ‘would have fewer needs and be less apt to excite human compassion’ than African slaves. Sieyès was one of the most significant political figures of the French Revolution. His pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? (1789) kicked off events by justifying the turning of the Estates General into a Constituent Assembly in June 1789. (The Third Estate was ‘everything’, Sieyès argued in answer to his question, though it had so far been ‘nothing’ in the political order and aspired to become ‘something’.) He also helped bring the revolution to an end, playing a crucial role in Napoleon’s Brumaire coup of 1799.

Other revolutionary luminaries dabbled in Buffonian biological politics. The wild optimism of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) owed something to his appreciation of cross-breeding experiments by Buffon and his disciples: improvements in the ‘physical’ but also ‘moral and intellectual faculties’ of human beings could be ‘transmitted’ from one generation to the next, as shown by the ‘various breeds of domestic animals’. This prefigured the inheritance of acquired characteristics that Lamarck used to buttress his conception of evolution: revolutionary ideology can be construed as political transformism. Similarly, Grégoire’s belief in the powers of intermarriage to reverse the degeneration of Jews and Blacks derived from his adherence to Buffon’s conception of race.

Buffonian organicism had a detectable influence on the French Enlightenment and revolutionary thinkers. But, as Nelson concedes, the political and social thinking of Condorcet, Grégoire and Sieyès was also grounded in other philosophical and theological traditions. Sieyès’s bizarre fantasy of a new servile species, half-human and half-monkey, is expounded only in an unpublished and undated manuscript. Did he never publish these views because, as Nelson implies, they revealed too much about his inner convictions, or because they were unimportant to him? Nelson proves himself a disciple of Foucault, who saw the emergence of biopower (population control by nation-states) as a fundamental aspect of political modernity. Enlightenment Biopolitics also endorses Foucault’s archaeological method, which focused on discarded fragments of the human past. The result is stimulating, but is likely to leave other kinds of historian sceptical.

Intellectual historians may take issue with Nelson’s tendency to search for the origins of modern ideas, as when he casts Vandermonde as a eugenicist avant la lettre. While Vandermonde’s project to improve the human species was concerned with the management of population, his own background – he was born in Macao of a French father and a Eurasian mother – and the tenor of his call for universal race-mixing make his ideas fundamentally different from late 19th and 20th-century projects of racial purification. Social historians, for their part, may find fault in Nelson’s Foucauldian disregard for discrepancies between representation and practice. The Ancien Régime passed laws to ban racial intermarriage and expel Blacks and mixed-race people from the kingdom. But this outburst of anti-African racism was confined to elite circles and the laws met with so much indifference or opposition that they were barely enacted.

Nelson’s argument about the role of secularisation in the emergence of a scientific discourse about race is more persuasive: ‘In France, the science of man was particularly bold and influential because many of its leading practitioners broke free from theologically based explanations … that attempted to demonstrate divine creation and predetermined natural order through empirical evidence.’ Buffon paid lip service to Church doctrine only in order to preserve his elevated social position. Condorcet was an atheist. Grégoire supported the disestablishment of Roman Catholicism and became a bête noire of French Catholics. Sieyès considered organised religion ‘the first enemy of man’. From 1750, France experienced a sharp decline in religious observance. Is racial thinking a consequence of godlessness? The popularity of a novel type of pseudo-scientific racism, inspired by Darwinian natural selection, coincided with a notable fall in religious observance in Britain and Germany after 1880. Perhaps our current obsession with race and ethnic identity owes something to a precipitous drop in religious identity: between the early 200os and the early 2020s, the proportion of respondents who declared ‘no religion’ rose from 14 to 29 per cent in the US General Social Survey and from 15 to 37 per cent in censuses for England and Wales.

In the wake​ of the revolution, French scientists remained preoccupied with race, but their ideas became increasingly pessimistic. A loss of belief in the perfectibility of man led to the reinstatement of colonial slavery in 1802 and the restoration of the monarchy, under Napoleonic guise, in 1804. In a concluding chapter on the enduring influence of Buffonian ideas in 19th-century France, Nelson mentions Julien-Joseph Virey’s advocacy of selective human breeding under Napoleon. Virey, a mediocre scientist, was an effective populariser of the new pseudo-scientific discourse about the inequality of races. In the bombastic prose of Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1801), accompanied by striking drawings of alleged racial types, the science of man became a paean to the superiority of white Europeans, or ‘man par excellence’, while other races were ‘a vile mulch of barbarians’. Breaking with Buffon, Virey went so far as to claim that Black Africans were not a different race but a different species, making their regeneration impossible.

This hardening of ideas about race mattered because French science still enjoyed immense international prestige. Translated excerpts from Virey’s Histoire naturelle were published in 1837 as a Natural History of the Negro Race at Charleston, the heart of America’s cotton kingdom. Throughout the anglophone world and beyond, the French science of man served to inspire or legitimise increasingly strident assertions of immutable racial hierarchy. The Scottish surgeon Robert Knox, who claimed in Races of Men (1850) that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word civilisation depends upon it,’ completed his medical training in Paris in the 1820s. So did Josiah Clark Nott, a surgeon from South Carolina, who with the Egyptologist George Gliddon edited an influential compendium on the irremediable differences between races, Types of Mankind (1854). The career of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and another influential believer in the plurality of human species, began in Paris in the early 1830s.

Knox, Nott and Agassiz were disciples of the anti-evolutionist Georges Cuvier rather than Lamarck. (Cuvier explained geological change with reference to land upheavals, floods and other catastrophes, and argued that organisms did not evolve over time.) Unlike the transformists, they abhorred racial mixing. But they remained shaped by French debates and, like Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, could pass for ‘first-rate’ doctors because they had ‘studied in Paris’, even if their tendency to see in race the explanation of everything rather recalls Casaubon’s vain quest for the key to all mythologies.

Many of the proponents of pseudo-scientific racism otherwise held progressive opinions. Virey supported the liberal revolution of 1830 and in a second edition of his Histoire du genre humain advocated the abolition of African slavery: Blacks, he maintained, ‘are not our equals’, but Europeans should ‘hold out a protective hand to the weak’. Paul Broca, founder in 1859 and president for twenty years of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which sought to systematise attempts to rank races according to their physical characteristics, was a freethinker and ardent republican who ended his political career as senator for life under the Third Republic. Broca was a stalwart abolitionist, too, on the disturbing grounds that the end of slavery would do away with liberal hypocrisy and facilitate research on the inequality of races. He lamented in 1860 that, before the definitive abolition of 1848 in the French colonies,

the scientific question was replaced by a question of sentiments, and whoever wished for the abolition of slavery felt obliged to admit that Negroes were Caucasians whose skin has been darkened and the hair curled by the sun. Today, now that the two greatest civilised nations, France and England, have definitively emancipated the slaves, science can reclaim its rights without worrying about the sophistry of the slavers.

This intellectual context explains why French opposition to the theory of natural selection did not come from creationists: the main obstacle to its acceptance was a patriotic defence of transformist evolutionism. The statue of Lamarck erected in 1909 at the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes still taunts British visitors with the inscription: ‘Au fondateur de la doctrine de l’évolution’. Natural selection, since it emphasised innate characteristics, served to harden beliefs in racial hierarchies and dispel the earlier enthusiasm for race-mixing. Prefacing the first translation into French of The Origin of Species in 1862, Clémence Royer, another freethinker and a women’s rights advocate, held Darwin’s findings as proof that ‘superior races [are] destined to supersede inferior races, and not to mix and merge with them.’ Transformist racism is abhorrent, but its emphasis on racial mixing as a panacea for the world’s troubles makes it slightly less repulsive than the racism grounded in natural selection which came to fascinate European intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century.

Nelson’s book is a reminder that France or at least French elites used to speak about race a lot. So where does the resistance to a frank debate about racial discrimination in modern French society come from, if not the hallowed republican tradition? It seems more likely that it was a reaction against the collaborationist Nazi racism of the Vichy regime in 1940-44. Germany and Italy also strictly ban the collection of data based on ethnic or racial origin. Since French censuses in Algeria continued to distinguish between Europeans and Muslims until independence in 1962, the ban is probably designed to suppress memories of colonisation as well as collaboration. It is an instance of historical rather than colour blindness.