Proponents always presented eugenics as a progressive movement, a viewpoint that carried over into the work of early historians of eugenics. In light of the Nazi Holocaust, however, most scholarship of the past two decades has stressed the conservative, right-wing nature of eugenics, and occasional efforts to redress the balance have been loudly shouted down. The history of eugenics in France reveals the existence of both progressive and conservative elements, but eugenics can be better understood from the start as being fundamentally conservative in nature.

Eugenics in France grew out of several movements for biological regeneration at the end of the nineteenth century such as neo-Malthusianism and social hygiene, which at first glance appear to be progressive. But the beginnings of these movements cannot be fully understood separately from the perceptions of degeneration that they sought to correct. From this perspective, French eugenics was reactionary – that is, it attempted to restore a previous status quo or reverse negative trends. It was, therefore, less inspired by utopian visions of a shining city on a hill than by a fear of regression and decline. What Garland Allen has said of the American eugenics movement and Progressivism, can also be said of developments in France:

The campaign by the French Eugenics Society for a law requiring a physical examination before marriage was noteworthy in many respects. In the long run it produced the present French marriage law, which is the most obvious legacy of the eugenics movement's efforts to improve the population of France biologically. Although the present law requiring a blood test and tuberculosis x-ray is usually seen as a health measure, it was conceived and implemented in the name of eugenics and grew directly out of the legislation first proposed by Schreiber at the French Eugenics Society conference in 1920. Members of the society were central in proposing, lobbying, and keeping the idea of the premarital examination law before the French public between the wars. No other organization was as actively engaged in promoting the law.

In another sense, the premarital examination law was an important landmark in the history of the French eugenics movement because it represented the first major shift in emphasis of the society from positive to negative eugenics. Although critics argued with the law's effectiveness, there is no question that eugenicists saw the physical examination as part of a screening program whose ultimate purpose was to prevent procreation by the unfit. It is true that this point quickly became obscured (deliberately, one might argue, for political reasons) by related health diagnostic proposals aimed at detecting and treating certain diseases. But, as indicated by the history of the social hygiene movement in Chapter 5, ambiguity was typical of such measures.

The First World War cut short the initial phase of vigorous activity by the organized eugenics movement in France. Begun as a learned society with nearly regular monthly meetings and publication of a review, the French Eugenics Society attracted a wide range of interested parties and ideas. The society was in close touch with eugenicists in other countries, and exchanged visits with major proponents in both England and the United States. In fact, the French participation in the international movement was such that the Second International Eugenics Congress was scheduled to be held in Paris in 1915.

All of this was changed, of course, by the First World War. Meetings and publications of the French Eugenics Society were immediately suspended, and not resumed until after the war. Only occasional articles appeared on eugenics in other French journals, as the war completely absorbed the attention of the nation. The most far-reaching result of the war for eugenicists, as for most others, came from the loss of life that made the fear of depopulation an even greater concern than it had been at the turn of the century. In one sense, this heightened awareness of the population problem made people generally more open to the ideas eugenicists had talked about before the war. This is reflected in the many private initiatives begun after 1920 that, when added to the sharp increase in government involvement in everyday life that carried over from the war, blurred the distinction between private and public spheres that had made some people wary of eugenics before the war.

In December 1941, Eugen Fischer, a leading anthropologist of the Nazi Reich, visited the occupied city of Paris. As founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Fischer delivered a lecture entitled “Problems of race and racial legislation in Germany” at the Maison de la chimie, a noted center of collaborationist propaganda. Fischer was not the first who had come to spread the word to the French about the National Socialist revolution in applied human biology. Earlier in the year, Otmar von Verscheurer, the Frankfurt geneticist whose pupils included the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, spoke on human heredity and Nazi marriage laws, and others during the year lectured on “Public health in the reich” and “Biology and the organization of the state.”

Fischer admitted at the beginning of his talk that he had chosen his topic because “racial problems and German racial legislation are often the subjects of the greatest incomprehension by foreigners.” His aim was not only to explain the laws but also to persuade the French to join the Germans in their campaign to preserve the “hereditary health” of the population. He did this in part by flattery, telling his audience of the superiority of “the race called ‘Nordic,’ to which a great proportion of the French population also belongs.” Fischer also played on racial fears, warning that

In the 1930s, new eugenic arguments for improving the French race gained prominence. Although proponents of the milder, positive eugenics attempted to rally support from a diminishing base, the most significant trend of the decade was the growth of a more strident, negative eugenics. The issues and developments that prompted the change have been discussed in the last chapter: the economic decline of the Great Depression, the large number of immigrants in France, the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, and the papal encyclical of 1930. This chapter examines one important feature of the new French eugenics: its racism.

The racist eugenics of the 1930s was only in part a return to the older tradition of Gobineau and Vacher de Lapouge. Like the earlier eugenics, it was also based on new anthropological definitions of race, but with different scientific underpinnings. Whereas older definitions had relied on certain cultural characteristics and specific physical features of skin color, hair texture, and the size or shape of the skull to distinguish races, new discoveries in the twentieth century of human blood groups and their distribution patterns among populations offered a seemingly more clear-cut and “scientific” basis for defining races. Although the theoretical explanation offered by blood groups was elegantly simple, the notions of “blood” and “race” were so fraught with historical and psychological implications that the result was confusion and misapplication of the new discoveries in ways that the first medical and anthropological researchers would never have thought possible.

The split in French eugenic thought that widened in the 1930s was typical of much in French society on the eve of the Second World War. In the initial months of the conflict, these divisions were temporarily masked until the disastrous failure of the French armed forces in the spring of 1940. The military defeat and formal political changes of June 1940 had dramatic consequences for French eugenics, as it did for the rest of life in France. It was now possible for the racist, anti-immigrant proponents of harsh, negative eugenics to install themselves comfortably in Paris and attempt to implement their ideas not simply unfettered by the lethargy of the Third Republic, but encouraged by the Nazi occupiers. The neo-Lamarckian, natalist eugenicists who had favored a program of positive measures to improve the overall hereditary health of the populace also saw the delays and restrictions of the Third Republic give way to the new Vichy regime, which proclaimed the family as one of the three pillars of society. This setting even permitted the implementation of proposals that were the result of more idiosyncratic eugenic thought, such as that of Alexis Carrel, whose Fondation pour l'étude des problèmes humaines was chartered in 1941.

This chapter will examine these developments during the complex years of 1940 to 1944. It is not a definitive analysis of all racial and eugenic aspects of the Vichy era. Rather it considers the period to be a transition.

In February 1940, Eugène Apert published an article in the journal Pédiatrie entitled “Eugenics in France,” which was one of the last of his writings to appear before his death in April of that year. It was a timely moment to reflect on eugenics in France, because the course of events was about to alter its nature dramatically. Apert was certainly qualified to assess the work of French eugenicists. He attended the First Eugenics Congress in London in 1912, was one of the founders of the French Eugenics Society later that year, and had been an officer in the society from the start – first as general secretary, then vice president, and finally president, beginning in 1934.

In describing the major accomplishments of French eugenics, Apert listed three as being most important: the campaign in favor of a mandatory premarital examination, work on arresting the population decline, and the monitoring of foreign immigration to France. Previous chapters have shown the great deal of attention paid to the first two of these accomplishments, as well as some of the concerns about immigration expressed by members of the French Eugenics Society in the 1920s. For eugenicists to be concerned with the question of immigration was not unusual. In the United States, for example, they made it a major issue after the First World War, and lobbied successfully for the Immigration Act of 1924, which put quotas on the so-called inferior populations of southern and eastern Europe.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this study that help our understanding of eugenics in general as well as specific movements for the biological regeneration of France in the twentieth century. The most obvious general conclusion is that eugenics was not simply an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. A cursory look at any international eugenics congress reveals several participants from other countries of Southern and Eastern Europe and, later on, Latin America and Japan. In France there were organizational, propaganda, and legislative activities that not only supported this international participation, but made eugenics part of the national debate on political and social questions during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

The history of French eugenics also demonstrates that acceptance of Mendelism was not a prerequisite for those whose goal was the biological improvement of the human race. In fact, Mendelian eugenics only appeared in France in the 1930s as part of one of the more extreme proposals for immigration restriction. Although in this case it confirmed the link between Mendelism and harsher negative measures, it was exceptional. The French Eugenics Society, which was founded in 1912, deserved its reputation as the home of a neo-Lamarckian eugenics whose main emphasis was on positive measures. One key reason for the development of this emphasis was the population problem. The decline of the French birthrate in the nineteenth century, and the fear of depopulation at the turn of the century, worked against proposals for negative measures (even though aimed at the “unfit”) if they might be a general hindrance to marriage or procreation.

The inspiration for this book came from a graduate seminar on comparative eugenics movements in the early 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania. I was working on a dissertation about French views of Africans during the period of colonial expansion, and I decided to study whether eugenics in France was connected to racist attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. This was not to be the case, alas, and I returned to complete the dissertation, publish it as a book, and take up my first teaching assignment.

When I returned to my investigation of eugenics, I uncovered a vast interconnection of movements that quickly took me in several new directions. Although race was not at the root of these movements – demography and health were – it was always present, and later became an important component. Of greater overall significance was the fact that the various movements for the biological regeneration of France in the twentieth century typified society's relation to science in the modern world that crossed national boundaries and continues to the present day. Because of the interest in eugenics and the social relations of science, and the importance of the comparative perspective, I have written this book to set forth the French experience in its broadest context. Rather than its being the last word on the subject, it will I hope prompt others to add, correct, and above all complete the study of the topic.

Work on this project has lasted for so long that it would be impossible to thank all of those who have helped.

It is clear by now that eugenics in France was hardly a static, unchanging movement. Even in the few decades since its formulation at the turn of the century, it was in an almost constant state of flux due to changes both in French society and the sciences upon which eugenics was based. Yet one can discern certain major turning points that help in understanding the broader development of the history of French eugenics. The First World War was one such turning point, and in many ways the 1930s was an equally profound if less abrupt juncture.

The most important reasons for the second turning point were undoubtedly the Depression and the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. But also important for the history of eugenics was the proclamation of Pius XI's encyclical, Casti conubii [On Christian marriage] in December 1930, which specifically condemned eugenic practices. Although the effects of the Depression were ambiguous and complex, the actions of the Nazis in power and the results of the encyclical quickly sharpened the line of debate about eugenics in France, where definitions had always been fuzzy. For example, after the papal pronouncement, the full weight of the Catholic church was unmistakably opposed to eugenics, whereas the passage of Nazi eugenic laws beginning in 1933 put a eugenics program into effect for the first time on a national scale – for Europeans and the world to see. This chapter will examine the impact of these developments, which originated outside France, and it will also look at changes in the people and institutions within the country that made the nature of eugenics in the 1930s very different from previous years.

Despite the great amount of attention paid to eugenics and issues related to the biological regeneration of France, as late as 1910 there was still no formal eugenics organization in the country. Yet the debate, discussion, and creation of organizations with similar though more limited scope had done much to prepare the ground, as can be seen by how quickly the French Eugenics Society was established and the breadth of interest it inspired once certain key people were convinced of the need. The most prominent names in the organization were the leaders on questions of demography, health, and biological decline at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century – Pinard, Richet, Perrier, and March.

The immediate inspiration for establishing a French eugenics society came from outside the country. But it was more than the example of already existing organizations in England, Germany, and the United States that prompted the French to form the society. The signal event was the holding of an international congress of eugenics in London in 1912. Those Frenchmen interested in the congress formed a Consultative Committee (Table 4.1) to represent their country; and it is a testimony to the interest in eugenics that despite the lack of a preexisting organization, the French committee was by far the largest one at the congress outside Britain. Forty-five individuals were listed for France, compared with ten or twelve each for such countries as Germany, the United States, and Italy.

Why was there a thirty to forty-year wait between Galton's first formulation of eugenic ideas and the creation of formal eugenics organizations? As Chapter 2 has shown, there was no lack of awareness that France faced many problems associated with decline and decadence at the end of the nineteenth century; and there were in fact many proposals to remedy them on a biological basis. Some proposals, such as the solidarism of Léon Bourgeois, soon moved away from their scientific origins to assume a more clearly political character, but others, such as the social hygiene movement, developed along strikingly similar lines to eugenics. As will be seen in this chapter, hereditarian ideas were also well enough known in these biologically based reform circles to produce several proposals of an explicit eugenic nature. For example, as early as 1862 Clémence Royer called in the preface to her translation of Darwin's Origin of species for allowing natural selection to do its job of eliminating “the weak, the infirm, the incurable, the wicked themselves and all the disgraces of nature.” The French also had available at an early date in their own language a contemporary study similar to Galton's Hereditary genius, thanks to the work of the Swiss botanist Alphonse Candolle, whose Histoire des sciences et savants appeared in 1873.

The important point here is not the question of priority, but rather why it took so long in both the English and French-speaking worlds for these studies about the inheritance of superior intellectual qualities to inspire organized eugenic movements.

QUESTIONS

My central question here will be: why, with respect to medicine, did Thomas Sydenham see what he saw and do what he did? Answering this will of course entail answering the question what it was that Sydenham did with respect to medicine in the London of the three and a half decades 1656 to 1689.

Thomas Sydenham has posthumously acquired one of the greatest of all names in the history of western medicine. He is celebrated amongst historians of medicine as the inaugurator or reviver of clinical or (to express it in English rather than Greek) bedside medicine – which we treat as a highly positive achievement – and has been awarded the title of the ‘English Hippocrates’. Such was his fame in early nineteenth-century Britain that two successive societies dedicated to the publishing of modern and ancient ‘classic texts’ in medicine were named after him. The works of Sydenham, in Latin and then in English, were amongst the earliest works issued, and I like to think they were planned to be the first. Naturally enough, therefore, Sydenham has attracted his share of medical historians to celebrate his work and achievement. I trust that nevertheless it does not appear too arrogant of me to claim that all this effort has not yet given us a satisfactory account of either the activity or the achievement of Thomas Sydenham. At all events, it is to this most fundamental of issues that I address myself here.

The emergence of Isaac Newton as an intellectual force, as a patron and as a focus for social and political ideas strongly affected both medical theory and the medical profession. The influence of Newton's ideas, particularly his theory of matter on physiological theory, recast iatromechanism. Their effects ranged from chemical notions based on attracting atoms earlier in the eighteenth century, to attempts in the 1730s to resolve the mind–body relationship by means of a Newtonian ether.

The Scottish physician Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) and his students and disciples at Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford envisaged a medical theory on the same level of certainty as Newton's theory of the world, which they referred to as a ‘principia medicinae theoreticae mathematicae’. Indeed, they considered the two systems to be strictly analogous. Their work stemmed from the atomistic theory of matter Newton had outlined in the essay ‘De natura acidorum’ and from queries added to the 1706 Opticks. In 1713, the year of Pitcairne's death, the second edition of Principia appeared, with hints of a change in Newton's thoughts. This change became far more apparent in his 1717–18 revisions of the Opticks, in which Newton's previous reliance upon atomistic explanations of chemical and related phenomena shifted towards a theory relying upon various ‘subtle fluids’ or ‘ethers’. This change, which appeared fundamental to observers although it may not have seemed so to Newton, quickly manifested itself in works on medical theory, often by the same men who had written thoroughly atomistic treatises some twenty years earlier.

INTRODUCTION

What not to ask about science as it lies in the cradle of the ‘scientific revolution’ and in its early childhood, the age of enlightenment, is what ideas it supressed. To concentrate on this question would be to risk simplification in the complexity of the philosophy and natural science that was emerging in the seventeenth century. Ideas construct reality and their successful support by the important men of a period exercises pressure on other methods of perceiving the truth. Although little of what was believed to be scientific in the past would be reconcilable to our own construction of scientific reality, the claim of ‘science’ to ‘truth’ became firmly established by the eighteenth century. That science became equivalent to truth in a world which was primarily religiously oriented was a major shift in the Weltanschauung of an age and much more important than the ‘decline of magic’. In this sense, and indeed more so where science began to define human nature, it is justifiable first to ask who paid the price in political and cultural terms, and secondly to enquire whether science did in fact help to dislocate fundamental perceptions in its seemingly victorious advance.

Science in the seventeenth century has received much attention. Its opposite, ‘superstition’, has, like the ‘decline of magic’, more than equally found its historians. This convenient dichotomy, however, supports a two-class system in which only science is linked with the advancement of learning.