Les « trois glorieuses de 1859 » [Broca, Boucher de Perthes, Darwin] et la genèse du concept de races historiques

Abstract

In 1909, on the occasion of the joint jubilee of the creation of the Anthropological Society of Paris, the official recognition of prehistory by the French Academy of Sciences, and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species , Georges Hervé retrospectively celebrated the “glorious three of 1859”. The synchronicity of these events has become familiar to us. Its unexpected character and even revolutionary implications for the history of ideas no longer need demonstration. A half century later, during the celebration of the centenary of the Anthropological Society of Paris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in turn, did not hesitate to idealize this “exceptional moment” when the universe expanded in every dimension of space and time, from nature to culture. He too acknowledged this “hallowed epoque” of the unification of the sciences which make man their object. Beyond a collective memory, as pious as it is convenient, which combines Broca, Boucher de Perthes and Darwin within the same eulogy, the historian must interrogate the true principle of their liaison. By its statutes of 1858, the Anthropological Society had set itself the program of “the scientific study of human races”. The racialist paradigm was static, in line with its threefold Edwardsian determinants: resemblance, permanence, descent. The transformist doctrine, whatever its level of acceptance, contradicted this classic schema which was further weakened by the vast span of the human adventure. Anthropologists had to respond to this double challenge without truly threatening their raciological capital with its old naturalist, often polygenist roots. In this context, I shall probe the genesis of the concept of “historic race” in the work of Paul Topinard, Paul Broca’s successor as secretary of the Anthropological Society of Paris, by replacing the standard glorious three with another, better grounded technical sequence: heredity, milieus, and civilization.

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