Duchenne de Boulogne

Abstract

Abstract In this 1986 article ‘The Body and the Archive’, Alan Sekula argues that the Essays on Physiognomy of Johann Casper Lavater, which were published in the 1770s, helped to establish a belief that was augmented and elaborated during the nineteenth century through the use of photography.1 To give an example, Francis Galton based much of his photographic work on the premise that the surface of the body could provide an observer with clues about the inner character of an individual, a virtually timeless supposition that Lavater had revived and systematized. Of course, nineteenth-century physiognomic studies aimed to corroborate a wide range of assumptions about the social and biological status of the individual, which may be seen as responses to the socioeconomic needs of the time — Galton's eugenic theories are generally cast against the background of growing, impoverished urban populations in the second half of the century.2 Nevertheless, Lavater's original delineation of the subject of physiognomy may provide us with a valuable starting point for the study of nineteenth-century work in that area, and this holds true when we come to examine the work of Duchenne of Boulogne, whose Le Mçcanisme de la Physionomie Humaine was published in Paris in 1862.