Prophet for Profit in French North Africa: Charles Nicolle and the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, 1903-1936

It was 1933. Emile Roux, sole living “disciple” of the mythic French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur, was in what would be his final year as director of Pasteur’s Institute, and the final year of his life. Frail from age and from years of battling tuberculosis, Roux was idolized by France as Pasteur’s heir—and as a great scientist in his own right. ¹ This reverence was not shared by all pastorians, however. In private correspondence, Charles Nicolle, Nobel Prize-winning director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, described his interactions with the man he called “Le Patron”: “I have collided with the stubbornness of a venerated and spiteful old man. A popular legend has been woven around Roux. It is spun from numerous yarns, a few of which are even true. . . . the false saint is defrocked, but the Cause remains sacred.” ² Nicolle saw Roux as a barrier, fortified—or perhaps calcified, ossified—by personal inclination and cultural myth, serving only to obstruct him from his goal of preserving the pastorian “Cause.”

This paper focuses on Charles Nicolle’s commitment to the pastorian “Cause,” or “Mission,” in the context of his changing notion of the best means to carry out that mission. It was his redefined conception of “best means” that led him to “collide” with Roux. Simply stated, the mission was to attain and preserve the health of human civilization through bacteriological understanding and vaccine production. ³ Defined by the disease studies of “founding father” Pasteur, this missionary ideal served to rally and unite the internationally distributed pastorians in their extension of Pasteur’s methods. It also fit into the “mission civilisatrice” of Third Republic France. ⁴ Accordingly, the mission metaphor links the pastorian project to the structures of both the Catholic Church and French imperialism. Moreover, because a commitment to this mission guided Nicolle’s own work, an analysis of his changing notion of “best means” will underscore how his bacteriological successes, personal inclinations, and colonial location led him to challenge the very core of pastorian policies.

In the centralized French system, Roux, in Paris, clearly defined the center; Nicolle, in the colonial periphery, spoke for Tunis, and attempted to act as the voice of the “filial” institutes outside France proper. Roux embraced a charitable and monastic conception of bacteriological administration in keeping with the Pasteur Institute’s nineteenth-century founding ideals. Nicolle, on the other hand, espoused a profit-centered ideal that, he believed, more closely reflected twentieth-century society’s needs. Within this new, profit-centered notion of means, Nicolle remained an unwavering prophet of the pastorian mission of universal bacteriological extension. Indeed, he was convinced that Roux’s failure to adapt his direction of the Institute to society was threatening the mission’s continued existence—and thereby threatening civilization itself. ⁵

It was in the years following World War I that Nicolle came to articulate his (almost heretical) commitment to profit-oriented means to serve missionary ends. At that time, the Pasteur Institute of Paris was beleaguered by the financial burdens and staff depletions inflicted by war. Nicolle was not alone among pastorians in privately attributing blame for the severity and persistence of these conditions to Roux and his policies—but it was he who lobbied most actively for reform. Ever a believer in the ties that bound human civilization to nature, Nicolle looked to nature itself for models of how to effect change. Ultimately, he decided to realign the pastorian cosmos by creating an alternate center of gravity in Tunis: he could “write and act at a distance” to shift the orbit around Paris. ⁶

Detached from France in geography and power, Nicolle was well placed to observe the limitations of Roux’s administration. Still linked to France by imperialism and missionary commitment, Nicolle sought to effect the kind of change that would alter, not destroy, the direction of bacteriological administration in Paris. ⁷ It is my contention that his placement in the pastorian periphery helped shape his notion of “best means” to missionary ends. Thus, a...