Nature and Nurture in French Ethnography and Anthropology, 1859-1914

The adaptability of non-European peoples to "civilization" was a critical issue deriving from the perennial nature-nurture question that haunted debates in the human sciences in late nineteenth-century France.¹ The emerging scholarly disciplines of anthropology and ethnography helped provide a scientific veneer that bolstered existing cultural prejudices concerning the innate limitations or retarded development of non-Europeans. Certainly there were many other pragmatic reasons for imperial expansion, and racists did not automatically become imperialists. But if, as Edward Said contended, imperialism "depends upon the idea of having an empire," there is no doubt that many ethnographers and anthropologists helped legitimate the idea.² Their debates retain a resonance in our twenty-first century postcolonial world struggling with questions of identity, integration, and cultural diversity.

Relying on reports from travelers, missionaries, or colonial officials, human scientists from across the political and religious spectrum justified European superiority. Although a few journalists and philosophers outside the scholarly societies represented a minority anti-imperialist counter-current, the remarkable pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking affected both socially radical anthropologists and more conservative ethnographers.³ While ethnographers proclaimed universal fraternity, they conceded that physical differences affected intellect and character. The later attack on hereditarianism by Durkheimian sociologists and isolated anthropologists with the catalyst of the Dreyfus Affair is all the more striking.⁴ As George Stocking has argued concerning a British Victorian thinker, the cultural differences between Europeans and non-Europeans became so entangled with biological issues that there was "difficulty conceptualizing them except in terms of 'race.' "⁵

The two most notable anthropological scholarly societies of the late nineteenth century, both founded in 1859, were the Société d'ethnographie orientale et américaine and the Société d'anthropologie de Paris. Historians have justifiably noted their mutual aversion and have contrasted their differences over scientific method, politics, and religion.⁶ The ethnographers, inspired by a student of Japanese language and Asian religion, Léon de Rosny (1837-1914), were largely linguists and specialists in Asian texts and pre-Columbian codices that represented partly civilized peoples. Rosny invented the term "ambiantisme" for a philosophy that ostensibly privileged the cultural milieu rather than inborn human nature.⁷ The society membership varied between 115 in 1864 and 470 in 1878, though it declined to 165 by 1903.⁸ As a group, compared to the anthropologists, they were more politically conservative, more socially elite, and more inclined toward conventional religion, with its belief in the unity of the species. Their "science of destiny" stressed human freedom and unalterably opposed philosophical materialism.⁹

The anthropologists, headed by physician and anatomist Paul Broca (1824-80) consisted of a hard core of like-minded medically trained colleagues. The anthropologists' membership peaked around 500 both in 1885 and 1905, though, they, too declined to 165 by 1914.¹⁰ Historians have analyzed the nature-nurture issue more subtly for the anthropologists.¹¹ While the Society almost always expressed interest in both physical and cultural spheres, they privileged the study of crania as an index to the intellectual and moral characteristics of "races." The more extreme hereditarians thought that the nature of allegedly inferior "races" precluded perfectibility. Armand de Quatrefages (1810-92), professor of anthropology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and pioneer of the so-called Muséum school, in his later years cast doubt on whether physical indicators actually demonstrated human superiority. However, the Muséum school did not generally renounce racial hierarchy, though they believed that environmental influences formed and continued to shape human varieties.¹² In addition, philosophical materialists, militant atheists, and politically radical thinkers dominated the society in the generation after Broca's death. Almost all were neo-Lamarckians who leavened the idea of a fixed human nature with the possibility of adaptation to a milieu and transmissible acquired characteristics.¹³ The medical physiologist Charles Richet reported that "heredity and milieu are not antagonistic, but synergistic."¹⁴ However, many accounts underplay the differential application of neo-Lamarckianism. In this "racial evolutionist paradigm" already noticed by Laurent Mucchielli, even the Muséum school found only civilized people adaptable...