The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle

Abstract

The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle* Phillip R. Sloan I In THE HISTORY of eighteenth-century racial speculation, Buf­ fon’s Histoire naturelle, generate et particuliere occupies a posi­ tion of paradoxical ambiguity. Supplying the Enlightenment with the first fully articulated analysis of man as a natural and primar­ ily zoological phenomenon, a world-wide species whose "natural history" was to be studied in the same terms and categories as that of any other species of animal,1 Buffon offered a model of a natu­ ralistic and empirical science of man which would leave its deep imprint on scientific anthropology of the succeeding two centuries.2 In insisting, as an integral part of this empirical science, that theory be grounded on concrete empirical evidence, Buffon de­ parted from the previous, largely speculative, approach to the ques­ tion of racial origin and diversity. Against the polygenetic theory deriving from the writings of Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, and Isaac de la Peyrere, which had provided the backbone of much of the speculation on the origin of the races in the early Enlighten­ ment,3 Buffon unequivocally asserts that an empirical test, fertile interbreeding, is to stand as the sole criterion of specific identity, taking precedence over all distinctions made on the basis of mor- * Revised from a paper delivered at the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, annual meeting, March 24, 1972. The author wishes to acknowledge partial support for this research from the University of Wash­ ington Graduate School Research Fund, 11-1984. The author also wishes to express his appreciation to Dr. Paul L. Farber for useful comments on an earlier version of the paper. 293 Racism in the Eighteenth Century phology, culture, intellectual achievement, and technological ad­ vance: Les hommes different du blanc au noir par la couleur, du double au simple par la hauteur de la taille, la grosseur, la legerete , la force, &c., & du tout au rien pour l’esprit; . . . mais ces differences de couleur & de dimension dans la taille n’empechent pas que le Negre & le Blanc, le Lappon & le Patagon, le geant & le nain, ne produisent ensemble des individus qui peuvent eux-memes se reproduire, & que par consequent ces hom­ mes, si differens en apparence, ne soient tous d’une seule & meme espece. ... Si le Negre & le Blanc ne pouvoient produire ensemble, si meme leur production demeuroit infeconde, si le Mulatre etoit un vrai mulet, il y auroit alors deux especes bien distinctes; . . . mais cette supposition meme est dementie par le fait, & puisque tous les hommes peuvent communiquer & produire ensemble, tous les hommes viennent de la meme souche & sont de la meme famille.4 But to emphasize only Buffon’s strict monogenism, his occasional eloquent outcries against human slavery,5 and his glimmerings of egalitarianism6 would be to call attention to only part of the pic­ ture. For even though Buffon supplied, in its historically most in­ fluential form, the empirical criterion that was seen by many of his contemporaries to break the back of the polygenecist theory,7 he also used arguments that are cited by later polygenecists in sup­ port of their thesis.8 And if he hints in several places at the fun­ damental unity of mankind and the basic natural equality of men, explicit statements suggesting his intellectual, physical, and moral inequality could readily be culled by Buffon’s contemporaries and successors from the fifteen volumes and supplements of the His­ toire naturelle. To discern some intelligible unification of Buffon’s thought in the face of the overt ambivalence which a catalog of his statements on the race issue would disclose, Buffon must be read not so much against the background of the main currents of prior racial specula­ tion, from which he departs in significant respects, but rather in terms of his claimed resolution of seemingly remote problems in early eighteenth-century biological science concerned with the gen­ 294 Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle eration of organisms. Through the underlying biological theory that stems from Buffon’s confrontation with this issue, his specula­ tions on the race question are given a curious unity with far-reach­ ing consequences. In this paper, I will first summarize in brief the general back­ ground of the eighteenth-century...