Mythologies de l’ Héréditéau XIXe siècl by Jean Borie (review)

B ook R eviews JeanBorie. M y th o lo g ie s d e l ’H é r é d ité a u XIXes iè c le . Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981. Pp. 217. 86FF. In the mid-eighties, to open Jean Borie’s book is to experience something close to a tem­ poral shock: “ La bourgeoisie française est une classe révolutionnaire, en vertu d’un passé que la plupart de ses membres préféreraient oublier, mais qu’y faire?” (p. 11). The mock­ ing, familiar style vehicles a consciously political tone, reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, that is all but extinct in French criticism today. The title’s first word returns readers to those heady days when Sartre, Barthes, Foucault, and others applied methods borrowed from the social sciences in an ambitious project of ideological demystification. Borie’s study par­ takes equally of that project’s second moment in which the discourse of social science is in turn brought before the tribunal of ideological critique and unmasked in its Enlightenment origins as implicated in the emerging modes of social and cultural domination. Following Sartre’s example, Mythologies de l’hérédité maps out how, with the Revolution of 1848 and the tide of reaction which swept the bourgeoisie in its wake, the abstract determinism lurk­ ing in the bourgeois ideology of Nature (particularly in its instrumental concepts of the family, and sexuality) came to the fore in scientific discourse and marginalized bourgeois individualism as a disruptive force. Once portrayed as the repository of personal freedom and creative subjectivity, Nature was then transformed into the realm of bleak Necessity, biological determinism, and destructive desire. Heredity (biological reproduction in its broadest temporal extension) became what bound men and women to Nature and to the past. Medical discourse on heredity, by virtue of the prestige positivistic science enjoyed in the nineteenth century, at once permeated the bourgeois social unconscious and the works of writers and ideologues and served as a means of dealing with the historical (revolution­ ary) past (ambivalently regarded with pride and guilt) and with the social contradictions of the present (arising from the domination of “Nature” taken in its ideologically widest sense: of colonial peoples and lands, women, the working class, and the countryside). In this respect Mythologies continues Borie’s earlier explorations in his preceding works (Le Tyran timide, 1974, and Le Célibatairefrançais, 1976)—woefully unacknowledged, if not altogether ignored by literary critics in this country and France—of the tensions which lay at the heart of bourgeois culture’s exaltation of Nature, the family, marriage, motherhood, and the individual. Shifting strategically back and forth between on the one hand the writings of Michelet, Zola, the Goncourt brothers, and Huysmans and on the other widely read treatises on heredity by Lucas (Traitéphilosophique etphysiologique de l’hérédité, 1850), Morel (Traité de dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine, 1857), Moreau de Tours (La Psychologie morbide, 1859), Féré (La Famille Névropathique, théorie tératologique de l’hérédité, 1894 and L ’Instinct sexuel, 1900), Gobineau (Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 1855) and Gustave Le Bon (Psychologie des foules, 1895), Borie convincingly analyzes the rise of a new ideology of Nature closely aligned with the defensive pessimism prevalent in the discourse of disenchanted radical republicanism and liberalism. Social and historical narratives were cast in terms of genetic malfunctioning and racial dissolution in which no room was made for individual subjectivity. Writers con­ structed an ambiguous, increasingly disturbing concept of Nature: still exalted but now feared, “ Nature” was invoked not only as source of social revolution but also as the guardian of race and tradition; the wellspring of destruction, it was equally the source of new social energies; fertile terrain of xenophobia and racism, Nature served as the basis for social engineering and eugenics as well. The fact that in the closing pages the trajectory from the Enlightenment through Michelet and liberal medicine and naturalist writers leads us to the writings of L. Daudet, Barrés, Maurras, and fascist discourse gives one pause. For it may be legitimately asked whether...