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ABSTRACT
The third edition of Aglaé Comte's Histoire naturelle racontée à la jeunesse (1853) includes an understudied introduction on “human races.” While it avows the theory of monogenesis, praises abolition and displays compassion for Black peoples, it also affirms white supremacy based on the “civilized” status of white bodies and Western cultures. Comte uses tropes of sentimentalism: sympathy with oppressed persons, appeals to pathos and calls for benevolent action. Using affect studies and Black studies, I demonstrate how Comte teaches a biocultural account of race that perpetuates hierarchies, encourages sympathy instead of structural change and mobilizes paternalistic power.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Fressoz and Pietralunga (Citation2020).
2 See the article in L’Express (2021). Blanquer made these comments in defense of his C’est ça la laïcité campaign, information about which can be found here: https://www.education.gouv.fr/lancement-d-une-campagne-nationale-de-promotion-de-la-laicite-l-ecole-324737.
3 For an analysis of this little-known text that centers questions of gender, see Monicat (Citation2019).
4 Comte received the Prix Montyon twice, for her novels Les Trois sœurs, ou de l’éducation des filles (Citation1827) and Sagesse et bon cœur, ou la science du bien (Citation1853). She won the Prix d’éloquence for her Éloge de Madame de Sévigné (Citation1840). The Prix Montyon was established by Jean-Baptiste Auget de Montyon (1733–1820) and is awarded by the Académie française, whose website states that it is given to ‘auteurs français d’ouvrages les plus utiles aux mœurs, et recommandables par un caractère d’élévation et d’utilité morale’ (‘Prix Montyon’, Académie française, accessed July 12, 2022, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/prix-montyon). The Prix d’éloquence was created by Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) and was also distributed by the Académie française. In contrast to the Prix Montyon, which still exists today, the Prix d’éloquence ceased to be awarded in 1931 (‘Prix d’éloquence’, Académie française, accessed July 12, 2022, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/prix-deloquence-0).
5 The use of quotation marks here does not signal a citation (although ‘la race blanche’ is indeed the term that Comte uses). Instead, I use quotation marks around such terminology in this article (i.e. ‘la race blanche’, ‘la race noire’, etc.) to avoid concretizing racial groups as identifiable objects of knowledge and power, and to recognize that what Comte is describing is, in a sense, a narrative or sociopolitical construct that, at the same time, carries material consequences (as this article will demonstrate). I also do not provide page numbers when using this terminology for this reason, and because such terms are found throughout Comte’s text, making the inclusion of pagination both an extensive and unnecessary practice in this case.
6 The topic of education in the colonies has recently been addressed by Reynaud-Paligot (Citation2022, Citation2020). Reynaud-Paligot’s studies focus on pedagogical materials used in the colonies themselves during the Third Republic. This article, instead, focuses on a text from the Second Empire that is addressed to readers in the métropole.
7 The most recent study of sentimentalism in French and Francophone studies, to my knowledge, is Bercegol and Meter (Citation2015). They cite Cohen’s work as reinvigorating the historical study of the sentimental genre (9), which is limited to romantic novels.
8 Precedents for this exist in eighteenth-century French studies (Vila Citation1998; Riskin Citation2002) and in nineteenth-century American studies (Schuller Citation2018, Citation2020). Readers who are curious about the links between science and sentimentalism are encouraged to seek out these works. Inspired especially by the latter, I develop an interdisciplinary and theoretically nomadic analysis of Comte’s textbook. I do this in part to push back against the calcifying effects of what has been called ‘area studies’ (Lowe Citation2015). As Jessica Tanner notes for nineteenth-century French studies, the ‘proper logic’ that pressures French and Francophone studies scholars to ‘work [only] with French thinkers’ is ‘both stultifying and reductive: it impedes our exposure to new ideas and modes of reading, but also prevents our work from resonating outside our field by consigning it to particularity’ (Foss et al. 2020, 213). Tanner goes on to suggest that reading across disciplinary and national boundaries might be a different way of finding value in the work we do.
9 See Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (Citation1997 [Citation1809]).
10 The term ‘sensible’ here refers to a concept essential to the development of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century: sensibility. This concept also plays a pivotal role in Lamarck’s proto-evolutionary theory.
11 White supremacy refers to ‘the sociopolitical and economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefits those defined and perceived as white’ (Cohen and Mazouz Citation2021, 2).
12 This citation comes from the fourteenth volume of Buffon's (Citation1749–1767) Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, but it is not the only instance where he discusses degeneration. For an overview of Buffon’s thought regarding degeneration, see Sloan (Citation1974, 306–310), and Blanckaert (Citation2003, 137).
13 See Schuller (Citation2018), especially chapter one on (Neo-)Lamarckism in the United States. Although an Americanist, Schuller’s work draws heavily on francophone primary sources. See also Riskin (Citation2002).
14 Schuller notes, in contrast, that racialized bodies were assigned to an ‘impaired state of throwing off affects but being incapable of being affected by impressions themselves’ (Citation2018, 13).
15 I do not mean to imply here that Hindus cannot be phenotypically white. It is strange, of course, that Comte includes Hindus as a racial group at all, as it more appropriately names a religious community that can include peoples of any race. Nevertheless, Comte’s terminology defines Hindus as white, and as such my concern is what this implies for a theory of whiteness.
16 The term ‘Hottentot’ is a particularly racist term in today’s language, especially in Germany. It originates from Dutch and was imposed by white Europeans on the Khoekhoe peoples. In nineteenth-century France, it is likely that the referent brought to mind by the term was Saartjie (Sarah) Baartmann, the so-called ‘Vénus hottentote’, who was displayed to the general public like a museum exhibit in both London and Paris in 1810 and 1814 respectively. See ‘Hottentot’ in Oxford Reference (Citation2022), and Mitchell (Citation2020), especially chapter 2.
17 It is not clear what Comte might have known or predicted about the imminent French conquest of Southeast Asia, beginning with Vietnam in 1858. Her aesthetic prescriptions against exogamy seem to imply, at least, a foreshadowing of colonial contact, and perhaps some anxiety about racial ‘contamination’. Southeast Asia is still an under-researched area of Francophone studies. Some examples include Au (Citation2011) and Stoler (Citation1992).
18 For a brief, but thorough, overview of historical scholarship on the relationship between climate and colonialism, see Mahony and Endfield (Citation2018).
19 For more on physiognomy and phrenology in the nineteenth century, in addition to Rivers (Citation1994), see Boshears and Whitaker (Citation2013), Renneville (Citation2020), and Hamilton (Citation2008). Hamilton writes that the notable Scottish phrenologist George Combe ‘clung to a classical, Eurocentric model of aesthetic beauty when mapping the organs upon the standard phrenological model of the head, virtually ensuring that deviations from this norm would become markers of personal and racial inferiority–an inferiority conceived not just in aesthetic terms, but in terms of character and ability as well’ (176). Phrenology began to lose its cultural influence in the 1840s (Renneville, 24-25) and especially by 1850 (Conklin Citation2013, 24), but Comte’s textbook demonstrates that its influence lived on even if or when it was disavowed.
20 Both Buffon and Lamarck were proponents of monogenesis. Others more temporally proximate to Comte include noted abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, Victor Courtet de l’Isle, and Gustave d’Eichthal, all of whom participated in an 1847 debate held by the Société ethnologique de Paris about the distinction between ‘white and black races’ that Goldstein describes as marked by ‘freewheeling candor’ (Citation2015, 6). While each is a monogenist in theory, they put their beliefs to very different ends in practice. See Bulletin (Citation1847, 63–244) for the text of the debate, and Goldstein (Citation2015, 6–10) for a discussion of the varying positions within it.
21 As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Citation2020, 1) points out, ‘there has historically been a persistent question regarding the quality of black(ened) people’s humanity’. See also Wynter (Citation2003). Comte’s response is one of many to that historic (and racist) question.
22 On Voltaire and polygenesis, see Curran (Citation2009). Georges Cuvier opposed both monogenesis and Lamarckism, believing instead in the fixity of races and/or species. See Cuvier (Citation1812) as one example. Paul Broca was a staunch defender of polygenesis, exemplified in the second part (‘Des phénomènes d’hybridité dans le genre humain’) of his Recherches sur l’hybridité animale en général et sur l’hybridité humaine en particulier (Citation1860). See Staum (Citation2003, 174–76).
23 Comte’s disregard for the debate about monogenesis versus polygenesis is perhaps a rhetorical strategy, made necessary by her gender, that allows her to take a position while maintaining plausible deniability of her involvement. See Monicat (Citation2019, 186–87).
24 The most obvious example of this is Claire de Duras’s novella Ourika (Citation1823), on which see Sarga Moussa’s contribution to this issue. Others include Sarah by Desbordes-Valmore (Citation1821) and La famille noire by Doin (Citation1825).
25 My thinking of the human as a ‘genre’ is indebted to Wynter (Citation2003).
26 Berlant (Citation2008, 2) suggests that all sentimental texts are ambivalent in that they place considerable hope for social change in the institutions and ideologies that their readers blame for the disappointments of lived reality.
27 It should be noted that the ‘nous’ of Comte’s text is explicitly white (Citation1853, XIV).
28 There is some debate about the appropriate language to use when discussing the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. On the one hand, there is a rightful push to better inscribe the humanity of African peoples by using terms like ‘enslavement’ and ‘enslaved peoples’ which emphasize the action being done to such people by an exterior, typically white, source. On the other, there is historical specificity to the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘slave’ that we risk erasing if these words are dropped from usage. I use the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘the slave trade’ to refer to the deployment of racist power structures in systemic forms that generated both massive amounts of economic capital for white, Western nations, and an epistemology of the human that uses race to demarcate which persons have access to the genre and that has an enduring legacy. At the same time, I avoid, as much as possible, using ‘slaves’ to refer to the actual persons enslaved by said power structures.
29 This move situates Comte’s thinking in the realm of what Berlant (Citation2008, 3) calls the ‘juxtapolitical’, a sphere of action adjacent to politics that on its face avoids and derides the political sphere as a space of disappointment governed by the powerful and self-interested. The juxtapolitical is consequently ambivalent in its outcomes; it can be a space where marginalized populations create networks of mutual care and practice self-determination without recourse to the permission of the law, and it can also be a space where one feigns political sentiments meant to be ameliorative but without material engagement.
30 Within affect studies, this idea dates as far back as Spinoza’s Ethics ([Citation1677] Citation2005, 70–71). See also Ahmed (Citation2014, 6).
31 On the association of women with sentimentalism, see Berlant (Citation2008). On women’s socio-politically designated role as instructors of morality, see Monicat (Citation2019).
32 There is likely a historical connection to be drawn here between Comte’s writing and the notion of the évolué that develops later in the century. See Hiddleston (Citation2014).
33 The logic of the Great Chain of Being is found in several moments throughout Comte’s introduction, though not always in reference to racial classification.
34 Thoroughly interrogating the questions of gender, especially masculinity, attendant in these institutions would require more space and time than what is available for this article.
35 Originally, perfectibility and education were tightly connected. See Le Ru (Citation2009).
36 The phrase ‘affective turn’ serves as the title to one of the first edited collections of essays on affect theory (Clough and Halley Citation2007), but affect as a concept and heuristic within academia initially gained steam in 1995 with two watershed essays, one by Brian Massumi (Citation1995), and another co-authored by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Citation1995). See also Massumi (Citation2002), Sedgwick (Citation2003), and Seigworth and Gregg (Citation2010).
37 See Pilcher (Citation2018–2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ryan J. Pilcher
Ryan J. Pilcher is a Visiting Lecturer in French at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his dual-title Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2023. He specializes in nineteenth-century Francophone literatures and cultures, with particular emphasis on the period between the French and Haitian Revolutions and the 1848 abolition of slavery, as well as feminist, queer, critical race, and affect theories. His dissertation, ‘Sensible Bodies: Race and Sentimentalism in the Nineteenth Century,’ interrogated the role of feeling in the definition and management of differently racialized populations through analyses of scientific treatises, textbooks, essays, novels, and short stories. His published work has appeared in George Sand Studies and, with co-author Tracy Rutler, in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect.