Contrary to popular belief, France did not escape the intellectual and moral influence of eugenics during the XXe century. Based on an investigation into a garden city in Strasbourg, P.-A. Rosental traces its transformations and legacies, in the post-war social state and up to the present day.
Until now, we more or less all believed that France had been protected from eugenics both by its republicanism and by the impregnation of Christian beliefs. It was therefore thought that French natalism, which aimed more at numbers than quality, had been content with a few measures of positive eugenics, of which the prenuptial medical certificate was the best, if not the only, example. “Negative” eugenics advocating the sterilization, or even the elimination, of carriers of hereditary defects would only have been defended by a few exceptional individuals, certainly renowned (Alexis Carrel, Charles Richet, two Nobel Prize winners), including the works would, however, have been without much practical influence. Furthermore, eugenics was deemed to have been buried under the rubble of Nazism, despite the multiple reissues of Man this unknown after 1945: although evoking the elimination of the weakest, Alexis Carrel’s work did not seem to shock anyone. In a book of remarkable erudition and culture, Paul-André Rosental gives the final blow to these reassuring representations.
A city to procreate
Using the approach of microstoria hitherto especially fruitful for modern Italy (thanks to Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi), the author opens his investigation with the examination of a very localized work, the Ungemach gardens (named after an Alsatian industrialist who had financed from its war profits), inaugurated in 1924 in the immediate outskirts of Strasbourg. Made of small pavilions in typical regional style, this garden city was intended to accommodate young couples, modest without being poor, recruited after a drastic selection which was based on the probability (duly measured) of their capacity to procreate children. healthy. Its goal was therefore to give birth to healthy babies and not to protect those who had already been born. The most extraordinary thing is that this openly eugenic city continued to operate according to the same rules until the mid-1980s, although thirty years earlier it had come under the management of the city of Strasbourg. Until less than thirty years ago, the slogan (if not the reality) of this experience remained “procreate or move” (p. 248). At first glance, the survival of this institution which has become “out of date” is linked to the person and longevity of its designer, Alfred Dachert (1875-1972), whom the author presents, always with reference to the microstoriaas an “exceptional-normal man”, that is to say whose highly singular qualities are at the same time revealing of deep trends in society. He also takes seriously the profuse poetic writing of this character, designed to give a new form to eugenic conceptions.
P.-A. Rosental questions the space of “receivability” (by tenants, local authorities, scientists, etc.) of the experience, a notion that he prefers to that of consent or adhesion and which consists of “being able to seek one’s own objectives as long as the constraint is not unacceptable” (p. 93). Also, despite its heavy regulations, the work always found many candidates ready to sacrifice a little of their freedom (by submitting, for example, to regular visits and inspections on the running of their home) for the benefit of the comfort offered by the pavilions. The municipal authorities also found their account there. It is in fact first and foremost at the local level that things play out. Thanks to a colossal documentary effort, the author decodes how and why the municipalities of Strasbourg (from the socialist Jacques Peirotes in the interwar period to MRP Pierre Pflimlin) have remained faithful to the initial orientations, sometimes despite their astonishment at provisions that have become “out of date”. Reading the regulation requiring conditions of morality from women only, Pierre Pflimlin angrily added “and men” in the margin. If it is difficult to measure how the rules of the city were also acceptable on the part of its tenants, the number of applications and the strategies developed to stay there are good indicators in this sense.
The ambition of the book is not limited to understanding how an exceptional man was able to take advantage of a local context to bring his creation across the century. The survival of the city poses a problem of a more general scope: it is a question of knowing how “an experience inscribed in British and German eugenics from the beginning of the XXe century (which explicitly aimed at improving the quality of the population, more than increasing its quantity), was deemed admissible in a national and chronological framework (post-war France) a priori very far from these firstfruits” (p. 353). From the start, P.-A. Rosental warns the reader that if the city is indeed his field of study, it is not his object strictly speaking: it is a question of using it as a a lever (p. 30-32) to study how eugenics was recomposed in the post-war period, then survived, before being “rejected wholesale in the 1980s as an intrinsically dangerous ideology” (p. 346).
From the garden to the social state
Moving away from the example of the gardens of Ungemach, the author then explores the multiple and general conditions which made this experiment possible and from which Dachert was more or less explicitly inspired. Here, the analysis changes scale sometimes at the risk of neglecting the concrete relationships between the local example and the general context. The interest of the book is nevertheless increased tenfold. Passing from one side of the Channel to the other, from the European side to the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, P.-A. Rosental examines the changes affecting the different human sciences (psychology, demography) or medical ( biology), or even emerging “disciplines” such as sciences and occupational medicine, to understand in which intellectual environment such a project could have originated and developed. In these different fields, we see the development of new approaches such as biotypology, genetics and the refinement of statistical methods. It is never a question of a disembodied history of ideas, but rather of a “concrete history of abstraction” according to an expression of Jean-Claude Perrot dear to the author (p. 24), with his men and its institutions. Through his previous works and in particular Demographic Intelligence (O. Jacob 2003), P.-A. Rosental knows everything about the Carrel Foundation, the history ofINED and his great (Alfred Sauvy, Jean Stoetzel) or less great collaborators (Louis Chevalier, Louis Girard), but he leaves us unaware of the thought of other unknown French thinkers like Henri Laugier (1888-1973, high priest of biotypology), Jean Lahy (1872-1943, pioneer of psychotechnology), not to mention the scientific portraits of numerous Anglo-Saxon actors.
From all these approaches emerges “a large but indistinct whole which rarely shows its coherence through explicit labeling”. However, it does exist. Transmuted into domesticated eugenics or with a human face, this whole readily takes the name of qualitative demography. From the old eugenics, it kept at the center of its theory the differential value of individuals and populations (hierarchized according to their socio-biological characteristics), and at the heart of its practice triage. Certainly, this no longer condemns abnormal people to disappearance but to separate treatment and the hereditary vision of the transmission of characters is receding without disappearing completely.
But the most fascinating thing is not there. This theory could be associated with totalitarian regimes as well as with the rise of large social protection systems, as was the case in France. In the interwar period, an alliance between social, family and birth rate policies was built, particularly around the Minister of Labor in 1932, the demographer Adolphe Landry. Landry trained senior civil servants, including Pierre Laroque, who passed on his teachings to his successor (1951) at the head of Social Security, Jacques Doublet (1907-1984) and Michel Debré. If the second is well known, the first deserves to be better known. P.-A. Rosental unearths a text by Doublet dating from 1951, entitled “Population and eugenics”, from a conference given at the very Christian Social Weeks of France, just before his appointment as director of Social Security. With just a few words, one would think we were reading remarks inspired by the English eugenicist of the end of the XIXe century Francis Galton, with the opposition between evolved and healthy beings on one side, and defectives, abnormals and other human waste, on the other. Although he expresses the doubts now admitted about the notion of heredity, J. Doublet nevertheless affirms that “care will never transform a poorly constructed and poorly gifted child into a healthy and capable man” (p. 438). ). This vision of domesticated eugenics is not limited to the world of senior civil servants dedicated to social affairs. A strange coalition associating social Christians from MRP (with the irremovable Minister of Labor Paul Bacon) and the natalists of the French Communist Party (Jean Dalsace – 1893-1970 –, communist doctor, created a National Institute of Eugenics and Genetics). Even the precursors of family planning like Doctor M.-A. Lagroua Weill-Hallé describes places open to couples as “eugenic” centers, and his friend Pierre Simon assigns birth control to the preservation of genetic heritage and the blocking of hereditary defects (p. 517).
If the book, but that was not its point, is quite quick on the reasons why this eugenics “with a human face” disappeared in the 1980s (the history and memory of the Shoah, in full swing at that time , undoubtedly have a lot to do with it), he legitimately questions the current legacy of this buried eugenics. To those who oppose private eugenics which would be legitimate to state eugenics which would be by definition pernicious, P.-A. Rosental responds that our individual choices refer to widely disseminated and shared norms and values, and that Some of these values are based on eugenic affiliations. The aspiration for intensive exploitation of oneself (and the immense market for self-improvement) would thus be, according to the author, the distant fruit of this eugenics. This would continue to act in the form of “ligatures” (that is to say, in the words of the historian, as “multiple, heterogeneous interventions, located in different places in the political and scholarly space” , p.541).
This dense book, with multiple footnotes and frequent back and forth, requires sustained attention. But the reader is quickly rewarded for his efforts, because this is the masterful history of an essential phenomenon of the French post-war period, to which P.-A. Rosental makes a decisive contribution. No less important is the contribution of this book to the history of the sciences of “human”, this “true crossroads term” (p. 430) of XXe century.