Physiognomy and Phrenology at the Paris Athenee

Abstract

Across a wide band of the French political spectrum in the early nineteenth century, mastering human affairs by scientific principles promised both order and progress. Republican and utopian socialist thinkers hoped to fulfill rational and humane ideals of progress, while moderate liberals like Frangois Guizot wished to stabilize a turbulent society. The forerunners of modem psychology offered a politically ambivalent human science which could comfort both partisans of social hierarchy and enemies of the old elites. Special cases of this phenomenon appeared with two new of estimating intelligence and character, physiognomy and phrenology. Identifying traits by external signs may have seemed more urgent in an era marked by the increasing convergence of dress and the waning of sumptuary laws. Previous studies have shown that, later in the nineteenth century, there was continued political ambivalence when progressives could advocate the primacy of fixed, possibly inferior racial inheritance or could endorse a subtle combination of hereditary and environmental factors constituting degeneracy. The tenets of psychological and anthropological sciences proved strikingly adaptable to conflicting social goals.' Before the era of university human science, an institution much neglected by scholars, the Paris Lycee (founded in 1785, renamed the Athenee in 1802) assisted the emergence from medicine of a nineteenth-century equivalent of a psychology of personality and counselling. The Athenee was for hundreds of well-heeled men and women subscribers a reading circle and private adult