Alexis Carrel: The Perfectibility of Man

In 1990, Jean Le Pen, leader of the reactionary French political party Front National, called his followers the “heirs of Alexis Carrel” (p. 371). Proof that not all publicity is good publicity, Le Pen’s comments helped initiate a reaction against the historical memory of Carrel, culminating in the “debaptism” of the Lyons medical faculty that bore his name (now named after Laennec) in 1996 (pp. 371–76). What might a Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon, dead for more than half a century, have done to deserve such dubious recognition? Though Le Vay has given us a biography that takes us from Carrel’s birth to his death and into his legacy, his intention in writing it seems principally to have been to provide an answer to this question.

On the one hand, Carrel (1873–1944) is known as an innovator of surgical technique. In 1902 he pioneered a method of suturing veins in which separate ends were initially triangulated and then sealed together with fine stitch-work (perfected in his youth at the feet of his widowed mother, who taught the young Alexis lacemaking). The anastomosis of arteries and veins was fundamental to the development of vascular surgery and blood transfusion. Further, Carrel’s innovative investigations of tissue culture and transplantation helped establish the basis for new fields of medical research. Though born in Lyons, he made his career in the United States, at the Rockefeller Institute (1906–39). Adding to his institutional prestige, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912. It was his involvement with another institution—the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems—that provides us with our “other hand.”

The Foundation for the Study of Human Problems was Carrel’s institute. It was his idea; he persuaded the government to fund it; and he directed it. However, it opened in 1942: the government that funded it was that of Vichy France. And, though Carrel claimed that he was interested in creating his Foundation primarily to assure that the children of France would be properly nourished, his eugenic past—in combination with his fruitful negotiations with Pétain—cast doubt on the purity of his motives. This is, centrally, what Le Vay is concerned to address: Was Carrel a collaborator? He has combed the archives and Carrel’s texts (though not, unfortunately, the many excellent historical studies of the period currently available) to make his case. In so doing, he has provided the reader with lengthy summaries of Carrel’s famous 1935 book, Man, the Unknown, as well as his posthumous Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie (1950). Le Vay’s conclusion is unambiguous. Carrel was a “patriot” (p. vi): “Though some contacts with the German authorities were necessary for Carrel in his planning and this was later to be held against him, in no way can he be said to have been a collaborator” (p. 287).

Le Vay justly points out that collaboration comes in degrees. And perhaps he is right to claim that Carrel really was concerned about the welfare of French children during wartime. Yet, even beyond the historical, philosophical, and ethical questions that might be raised about the fundamental categories of Le Vay’s defense of Carrel, his book contains historical inaccuracies that cast a long shadow of doubt on his interpretations. Central among these is his portrayal of his story’s “bad guy,” Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot. Vallery-Radot, grandson of Louis Pasteur and, from 1940, president of the Administrative Council of the Pasteur Institute (though never, as Le Vay asserts on p. 167, the director of the Institute), is the man who pressed for Carrel’s arrest shortly after the liberation of France. Le Vay argues that it was “the flowering of a personal rancour that had been nursed over the years” (p. 306), rather than any substantive evidence of collaboration, that led Vallery-Radot to take the action against Carrel that has so damaged his name. The...