Science in support of racial mixture: Charles-Augustin Vandermonde's Enlightenment program for improving the health and beauty of the human species

Abstract

In 1756, while he was regent of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, Charles-Augustin Vandermonde published his Essai sur la Manière de Perfectionner l’Espèce Humaine. This treatise was situated within the French-led medical movement of meliorism, meant to increase public health by boosting the medical arrangement of marriages from all strata of society. What made Vandermonde different from his colleagues is that he was not just looking for a way to improve the health of society: he was also proposing a series of measures meant to increase the beauty of humankind. And, for the first time in the history of European medicine, he advocated mixed-race couplings as a means to obtain the best results. This latter development is so unexpected in the global setting of the Enlightenment that we could arguably hail Vandermonde as the founding father of what Michel Foucault later called ‘biopolitique’.55As developed by Foucault, ‘biopolitique’ stands for the progressive seizing by higher power of the population's daily life. For a lengthier description of how this process unfolds according to Foucault, see Foucault, Michel. L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie modern, in Dits et Écrits, t.2, Gallimard, Paris, 2001.