Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Scholarly studies over the last half century by Simone de Beauvoir and
Edward Said have inspired scholars to examine the processes and the
values we invoke in seeking to understand people who, by socio-economic
status, ethnicity, gender, geographic origin, or culture, differ from
ourselves. Too often, our picture of the “Other” becomes a
reflection of our own search for self-validation, reassurance and will
to power. The Other is shaped as a bit player in our own drama.

French scholars and intellectuals who, in the early 19th century,
joined learned societies in Paris and the provinces to debate and
advance the new sciences of phrenology, geography, and
ethnology/physical anthropology sought to categorize the mental
abilities and potential for civilized improvement of non-Caucasians
beyond Europe on the basis of physical characteristics: brain size,
pigmentation, race, climate, geography. But whatever the supposed
objectivity of the variables, the norms against which the Other was
assessed and valued were usually male, white, and European.

Staum presents a collection of idiosyncratic scholars and committed
amateurs, many of whom were medical men. Their place in the pantheons of
medicine or the social sciences may be modest, but in drawing attention
to the existence of strange and exotic peoples, especially in Africa,
they laid the groundwork for the emergence of physical and cultural
anthropology and geography and promoted France’s imperial and colonial
expansion, especially from the 1880s.

There were important implications at home. Before mid-century the
“facial angle” was being measured (draw a line from ear to upper lip
and then from lip to forehead: the larger the angle the less room for
brain mass, hence the less scope for intelligence) and was being applied
to non-whites and, by implication because of their smaller foreheads, to
women. This opened the field to speculation about the origins of races.
Whether they constituted separate species was hotly debated; but all
agreed that there was a hierarchy of races in which Europeans were
pre-eminent. The soil was prepared: all that was necessary was a context
in which French colonial expansion might take place.