Introduction

This special issue is born out of a desire to revisit and interrogate the relationship between the racial sciences that emerged during the nineteenth century and literary representations of race from this period in order to gain new insights into how ideas of science, race, and culture were constructed in its wake. By ‘racial sciences’ we refer to those theoretical writings that sought to define race on a scientific basis, thereby selectively and erroneously infusing racist narratives and biases with the weight of fact to project scientific rigour and cogency onto them (we will use the adjective ‘racialist’ to distinguish this particular form of racist discourse from others). The very definition of these theories as ‘science’ is inherently suspect, as it was a cultural construction serving to promote an imperial agenda. One cannot underplay the profound material consequences of these theories. ‘Armchair theorists’, as Alice L. Conklin describes the first generation of scholars of anthropology, ‘in industrializing – and especially colonizing – nations compared, classified, and ranked data (physical and cultural) about “primitive” peoples and “races” believed to be at an earlier evolutionary stage of political, social, and technological development’ (2013, 2). This ‘denial of coevalness’, as it has been termed by Johannes Fabian in his critique of anthropological writing (1983), became a cornerstone of the French imperial ideology of the mission civilisatrice, to which we shall return later in this introduction. In this context, it is important to note, as Achille Mbembe does, that ‘[s]ince the eighteenth century, Blackness and race have constituted the (unacknowledged and often denied) foundation, what we might call the nuclear power plant, from which the modern project of knowledge – and of governance – has been deployed’ (2017, 2). This special issue contributes to the growing body of work investigating the instrumentalization and weaponization of race for this ‘modern project of knowledge’ in nineteenth-century France, following the official abolition of the transoceanic trafficking and enslavement of African people in France and its colonies in 1848. As the articles in this issue show, race, science, and culture were profoundly entangled. This entanglement is crucial to understanding what Mbembe means by ‘governance’, a term which encompasses France’s mission civilisatrice, the consolidation of its second colonial empire in Africa and Asia, and its disastrous consequences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mbembe writes: ‘race, operating over the past centuries as a foundational category that is at once material and phantasmic, has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary psychic devastation and of innumerable crimes and massacres’ (2017, 2). While it is important to keep in mind that, as Emmanuelle Saada argues, the relationship between the racial sciences and the French colonial project was varied and equivocal and ‘the very definition of “race” was not consistent across that field of ideas’ (2019, 353), this special issue operates from an understanding of science as always-already political and culturally constructed. As such, we are sceptical of any strict distinction between ‘scientific racism’ and racism in so-called ‘popular culture’. The close imbrication of the cultural, the political, and the scientific in discussions of race in nineteenth-century France is powerfully illustrated by Robin Mitchell’s recent study Vénus noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France, which reads cultural productions such as plays, poems, novels, and cartoons alongside scientific writings, such as Cuvier’s account of his dissection of Sarah Baartmann’s body, which was intended to scientifically prove the inferiority of Black people (see Mitchell 2020).

As we will see, one of the avenues that this cataclysmic entanglement of science and culture operates through is language, including the language of literature. The scientific fields discussed by our contributors encompass both disciplines that are today viewed as ‘hard sciences’, for instance, biology and medicine, as well as the academic fields of philology and history, which were only beginning to be professionalised at the time and which their practitioners sought to invest with the same level of academic authority. The evolving professionalisation of scientific disciplines, in turn, reveals the way in which these sciences were culturally constructed.¹ Indeed, the very division of ‘science’ (understood in the general sense of ‘intellectual pursuit’) into disciplinarily distinct ‘sciences’, which we take for granted today, was subject to debate during the mid-nineteenth century. Until then, the ideal scholar had been an inspired individual versed in all areas of knowledge, not a professional confined to one specialism (Blanckaert 2006). Scientific writing, whether it fell under the category of natural history, medicine, or philology, informed cultural perceptions of race and therefore influenced the representation of race in literature and the arts. The relationship between science and race was similarly symbiotic. Theories of race both informed the development of scientific disciplines and were in turn bolstered by them, since scientific discourse provided such theories with a sense of method and discipline, giving their claims greater credibility. When Ernest Renan, today mostly remembered for his 1882 lecture Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, classed philology alongside physics and chemistry, he was investing what would today be viewed as a discipline of the humanities with a greater level of authority, capitalising on the sense – still prevalent today – that the ‘hard sciences’ are more objective (Renan 1862, 8). This in turn served to invest his categorical pronouncements on the racial inferiority of those who speak Semitic languages with a greater level of credibility.

This dynamic network of connections between science, culture, and race explains why Robert Young argued in his landmark study of nineteenth-century British and French writing on race that ‘the racial was always cultural, the essential never unequivocal’ (1995, 28). A key example of this is Young’s reading of blood in Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853), which demonstrates how the word works both on a metaphorical level to describe the eventual weakening and fall of all civilisations over time and on a literal level by drawing on the biological notion of degeneration and applying this to the ‘human races’ (Young 1995, 28). Already in the nineteenth century, the scientific validity of Gobineau’s method was questioned from both within white French intellectual circles and from without, as is explored in Bastien Craipain’s contribution to this issue. Yet by choosing to anchor his racialist narrative within a biological vocabulary of blood and degeneration, Gobineau shows an awareness of the allure of science as a rhetorical device. However, unlike his contemporary Ernest Renan, who was speaking at the Collège de France when he claimed that philology was like chemistry, Gobineau lacked the academic credentials to bolster the illusion of objectivity (Irwin 2016).

For all the flaws that he identified in Gobineau’s Essai, Renan nonetheless praised the work for its ambition. Yet this praise came with a word of warning: ‘la France croit très peu à la race, précisément parce que le fait de la race s’est presque effacé en son sein’ (Renan 1947–1961, X: 203). Read in light of the French nineteenth-century texts analysed in this issue, in which racial difference plays a central role, Renan’s claim that the French ‘believe very little in race’ seems hard to sustain. Renan explicitly points to the racial homogeneity of France as a reason for this assessment: his assumption is that the French population was descended from various branches of the white race. Thus, his key distinction between Aryans and Semites (supposedly the two main branches of the ‘white race’) could no longer be applied, following centuries of intermingling. That said, the term ‘presque’ suggests that certain distinctions do remain, for instance between Christians and Jews. Moreover, Renan is only saying that race ceases to be relevant in an exclusively white context. Were the French population to include more non-white individuals (both Renan and Gobineau consider the ‘black race’ and ‘yellow race’ to be the other two main races), then race would be a glaringly obvious fact. Renan’s letter to Gobineau dates back to 1856, but its logic foreshadows the clear-cut distinction between white (and therefore sympathetic) metropolis and the dehumanised inhabitants of French colonies in Africa and Asia at the height of French imperialism thirty years later. Jennifer Yee identifies this combination of race and geographic distance to dehumanise non-white individuals in her analysis of Zola’s La Joie de vivre (1883). In writing from the assumption that one needs to travel to the colonies in order to experience racial difference, Renan, Gobineau, but also Zola were erasing the presence of non-white people in nineteenth-century France.

There is, however, another way of interpreting Renan’s claim that French people do not believe in race. His words could also be in reference to the Enlightenment ideology of universalism; it is in this sense that the speech by President Macron, cited in the introduction to Ryan Pilcher’s contribution, repudiated race in 2020 and this is equally visible in the attempt of 119 members of the Assemblée Nationale in 2018 to remove the word ‘race’ from Article 1 of the French Constitution.² At first glance, Gobineau and Renan’s efforts to divide humanity according to racial categories stand in opposition to eighteenth-century ideals of equality, which assumed the inherent universality of human nature. As has been shown by Todorov (1989), both positions are equally untenable, since they resemble each other in their extreme forms: universalism is often a thin veil for ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s values should be shared by all others, while, in turn, cultural relativism in its extreme forms denudes one’s cultural others of their humanity, since they are assumed not to be deserving of the same human rights. The French ideology of the mission civilisatrice, first formulated by Jules Ferry in his infamous speech of 1885, shows how these extremes meet: by claiming that the French had a moral duty to civilise ‘inferior races’, Ferry simultaneously justifies his imperialist ideology on the basis of a universalism that has become ethnocentrism (by proclaiming that French ways are good for everyone) and cultural relativism that has become dehumanising (by stating that certain races are by nature ‘inferior’). In doing so, Ferry provided an ethical justification for the French colonial enterprise, which would allow subsequent French imperialists to present themselves not as mercenary, but dutiful. His words also served to elevate French culture as the pinnacle of civilisational achievement for all the world’s cultures. It is, however, worth noting that already at the time that he delivered his speech, Ferry was met with criticism. The Moniteur Universel records a number of members of the Assemblée Nationale, mostly but not exclusively from the left, countering his justification for colonialism for economic and ‘humanitarian’ reasons with indignation. One impassioned counter argument, expressed by Joseph Fabre, was that Ferry’s reasoning went against the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: ‘C’est excessif! Vous aboutissez ainsi à l’abdication des principes de 1789 et de 1848’ (1885). In other words, according to Fabre, the mission civilisatrice was from its very origins anti-French, since racial hierarchies went against the ideals of equality and universalism that defined the French nation. This defence of Enlightenment values nonetheless demonstrates a peculiar obliviousness regarding the co-existence simultaneously of the peak of the transoceanic trafficking and enslavement of Africans and of the expression of these ideals of equality. Indeed, as Mbembe notes:

[…] they [Rousseau and Voltaire] inaugurated a tradition that would later become one of the central characteristics of the consciousness of empire: making slavery a metaphor for the condition of human beings in modern European society. Tragic events concerning savages, in which Europeans were partly implicated as responsible parties, were turned into metaphors. This gesture of ignorance, this dialectic of distance and indifference, dominated the French Enlightenment (2017, 67).³

We recognise this ‘gesture of ignorance’ in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823), a novel set in the eighteenth century, which, as Sarga Moussa observes in his contribution, despite having a Black African protagonist, fails to confront the realities of enslavement. This special issue investigates what happened after what could be described as a turn from ‘ignorance’ to knowledge construction. Nineteenth-century racial theorists postulated racial inequality as an unshakeable fact of nature, one that could be evidenced through objective scientific processes. In doing so, these ‘scientists’ implicitly (and sometimes rather more explicitly) legitimised epistemological violence and white supremacy, the oppression of the colonised, and the dismissal of non-Western knowledge systems. The articles in this issue explore how the period’s literary culture and education were shaped by such theories but could also resist them. The contributions also illustrate how porous the boundary was between literary and ‘scientific’ writing on race.

Sarga Moussa’s analysis of (anti-)racism and racialist imagery in Ourika and Pauline Moret-Jankus’s uncovering of the language of racial evolution in the work of Henri Cazalis and Marcel Proust show literary writing’s potential both to contest and to reinforce scientific ideas contemporary with it. Ourika illustrates how racial evolutionist theories were used to dehumanise Black people by presenting them as an evolutionary step between apes (‘singes’) and the white race, which in turn served to present them as ontologically unequal to white people. As Moussa argues, Duras’s novel positions itself against this notion of racial predetermination by showing how racial difference is something that is enforced upon the character of Ourika by others, rather than being innate. Indeed, Ourika ultimately realises that these racial hierarchies are an ‘illusion’. Pauline Moret-Jankus demonstrates how the writings of Cazalis and Proust, in contrast, embrace racialist theories, specifically the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s notion that every human individual carries within them all the steps of the evolution of their race. Haeckel’s theory is buried within these texts, presented under the guise of Buddhism in the literary writings of Cazalis and under the guise of ‘involuntary memory’ in Proust, so that its racialist underpinning is not obvious, until revealed by Moret-Jankus. The case of Henri Cazalis is of particular note, since he wrote across genres: under his real name, he published scientific essays, which carried the authority of his profession as a physician, and under the pseudonym of Jean Lahor, he published poems which overtly drew on the mysticism and exoticism associated with Buddhism and Hinduism. What might therefore appear to be entirely different discourses – the one scientific, the other literary and metaphysical – are thus the work of one and the same author, and share similar concerns.

An entirely fictional physician, Dr Cazenove in Emile Zola’s 1883 novel La Joie de vivre, as well as the author’s own interest in medical sciences, serve Jennifer Yee’s exploration of the limits and failures of empathy, which in Zola’s novel are determined by racial background and geographical distance. Reading the Rougon-Macquart text alongside Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of compassion and Paul Bloom’s more recent Against Empathy, and within its historical context, during ‘the rise of scientific racialism and its popularisation’, Yee demonstrates how in the novel, empathy fails as a guide to ethical behaviour. The complex and complicated intersections of race and emotions, and in particular, of race and empathy, also represent the focus of Ryan Pilcher’s article on Aglaé Comte’s Histoire naturelle racontée à la jeunesse (1853). Published thirty years prior to Zola’s novel, and as a textbook aimed at French female students, Comte engages more directly with the anticipated emotive responses of her white readership. Pilcher shows how Comte mobilises tropes of sentimentalist writing to render a biocultural account of race that, while encouraging ‘sympathy for the suffering’, perpetuates white supremacy and colonialism.

The concern for education and knowledge production, as it relates to race, is also a strong element in the two contributions that close this special issue. Sarah Budasz’s and Bastien Craipain’s articles both focus on the professionalisation of the racial sciences within different disciplines, here in anthropology and classics, and their institutionalisation in the nineteenth century. A central concern for both is constituted by the racial and cultural origins of Europe, which are associated with a highly mythologised Ancient Greece. Budasz investigates the ways in which modern ideas of race have influenced the history of classical scholarship by focusing on the work produced by the visiting scholars at the École Française d’Athènes (EFA). Budasz shows how their preoccupation with ‘the authenticity of the Greek language’, together with their rejection of modern Greek culture, uncovers how classical scholarship and philology ‘are used as tools to justify racial inferiority and theories of degeneration’, leading them to devalue the modern nation before them in order to better celebrate an idealised and constructed version of its antiquity. These scholars’ investment in a homogenised and monolithic vision of Ancient Greece, from which they claim to be intellectually and racially descended, corresponds to the vision of racial degeneration outlined by Gobineau in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, a text confronted by the work of Haitian intellectual Anténor Firmin, in particular in his De l’égalité des races humaines (1885), as Craipain demonstrates in his contribution. Craipain describes Firmin’s academic writing and activism as ‘indiscipline’, ‘a combination of anti- and inter-disciplinary efforts and strategies’ to combat pseudo-science and epistemological violence, which made him a visionary of anthropological research anchored in cultural enquiry rather than eugenics. In doing so, Firmin demonstrates his awareness of how academic institutionalisation aided and abetted the spread of racialist grand narratives.

The examples analysed in this issue span from 1823 (the publication of Ourika) to 1921 (the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe, the fourth volume of À la recherche du temps perdu) and include novels, poems, essays, and educational literature. These are works by both canonical and lesser-known authors, members of different social classes, genders, and, in the case of Firmin, a scholar from a former French colony. The breadth of genres covered by our contributors demonstrates the pervasiveness of racialist thinking, which seeps into all forms of writing from the period, whether it is contested, celebrated, or silently assimilated. Renan may have written to Gobineau that France did not sufficiently believe in race, yet what emerges from this issue is that their idea of ‘très peu’ was deeply flawed to begin with. Race played a key role in nineteenth-century France’s definition of its heritage as ‘Greco-Roman’ (and thus perceived as superior to non-European cultures), its dehumanisation of those who were not white and metropolitan, and the institutionalisation of academic disciplines. More research will be necessary to investigate the connections between the long-term consequences and reverberations of these processes (that have had a reach far beyond academia and literature), the French myths of universalism and colour-blindness, and the more contemporary widely dismissive and even hostile attitudes towards identity politics and critical theories, such as postcolonial studies and critical race theory, in France today.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Hartley

Julia Hartley is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, prior to which she was a Leverhulme early career fellow at the University of Warwick and a lecturer at King’s College London. Her first book Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy was published in 2019 by Legenda. Her current research focuses on the reception of Persian literature and representation of Iran in the French long nineteenth century. This is the subject of her monograph Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (London: I.B. Tauris, 2024) and a new project on archaeology, gender, and empire in fin-de-siècle France and Iran (under contract with Edinburgh University Press). Along with Wanrug Suwanwattana and Jennifer Yee, Julia was responsible for French Decadence in a Global Context: Exoticism and Colonialism (Liverpool University Press, 2021), an edited volume on the links between literary decadence and the politics of empire. Julia is also a BBC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 3’s programme and podcast ‘Free Thinking’.

Sarah Arens

Sarah Arens is a Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool. She was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews (2019-21) and at Liverpool (2021-23) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and has held several teaching and/or research positions in Germany, the UK and the US. She is currently working on two monograph projects, Imagining Brussels: Space and Diaspora in Francophone Fiction (under contract with Liverpool UP) and Experimental Empire: Science, Technology, and Belgian Colonialism (1897–1958). She is the editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies and recently published the edited collection Colonial Continuities and Decoloniality in the French-Speaking World: From Nostalgia to Resistance (Liverpool UP, 2023), along with Nicola Frith, Jonathan Lewis and Rebekah Vince. She is also currently co-editing, with Sam Goodman, a special issue of Social History of Medicine, entitled ‘Ailing Empires: Medicine, Science and Imperialism’. Sarah is a writing mentor for the British Academy-funded project ‘Building a Transnational Community of Practice: Writing and Researcher Development in Latin America and the Caribbean’.

Notes

1 See for instance Hayden White on the emergence of history as an academic discipline (2014, especially 136).

2 See, for instance, Bessone (2021). The 2018 attempt is part of a longer debate surrounding the term ‘race’ in the French Constitution (see Balibar 1992).

3 In this introduction, we are focusing primarily on the Enlightenment’s influence on nineteenth-century constructions of race in France. It is, however, important to mention that this builds on a much longer history, as Noémie Ndiaye demonstrates in her 2020 essay that calls for a rewriting of the seventeenth century in France as a period of ‘race-making’.