François Bernier and the invention of racial classification

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 50, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-21

  Stuurman, Siep ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CLASSIFICATION; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; FRANCE; HISTORY; HUMAN; INFORMATION SYSTEM; RACE; SOCIAL PROBLEM;

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; CLASSIFICATION; CONTINENTAL POPULATION GROUPS; FRANCE; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INFORMATION SYSTEMS; RACE RELATIONS;

EID: 0034264236     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2000.50.1     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. On the first stirrings of racialist thought in the anti-semitic ideology of the Spanish Reconquista, see Richard H. Popkin, 'The Philosophical Basis of Modern Racism', in Craig Walton and John P. Anton (eds), Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, Athens Ohio, 1974, pp. 126-65;
2. on the sixteenth-century origins of racism, see e.g. Dante A. Puzzo, 'Racism and the Western Tradition', Journal of the History of Ideas 25, 1964, pp. 579-86;
3. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World, London, 1959;
4. G. V. Scammel, 'On the Discovery of the Americas and the Spread of Intolerance, Absolutism, and Racism in Early Modern Europe', International History Review 13, 1991, pp. 502-21.
5. For consensus that modern, 'scientific' racism only came into its own during the Enlightenment, see e.g. Richard H. Popkin, 'The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism', in Harold E. Pagliaro (ed.). Racism in the Eighteenth Century, Cleveland and London, 1973, pp. 245-62;
6. Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo. La nascita dell'antropologia come ideologia coloniale: dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali, 1500-1700, Firenze, 1977;
7. Michael Banton, 'The Classification of Races in Europe and North-America, 1700-1850', International Social Science Journal 111, 1987, pp. 45-60;
8. Dominique Tombal, 'Le polygénisme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: de la critique biblique à l'idéologie raciste', Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 71, 1993, pp. 850-74;
9. Nicholas Hudson, 'From "Nation" to "Race": The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought', Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, 1996, pp. 247-64;
10. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Washington, Baltimore and London, 1996;
11. Hannah F. Augstein (ed.), Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760-1850, Bristol, 1996.
12. Useful information on Bernier is found in Corpus. Revue de Philosophie 20-21, 1992 (ed. Sylvia Murr).
13. A good exposition of Gassendi's thought, its theological background and the differences from Cartesianism is Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World, Cambridge, 1994;
14. on the dissemination of Gassendism in Europe, see Sylvia Murr (ed.), Gassendi et l'Europe, Paris, 1997.
15. Complete titles can be found in H. Ternaux-Compans, Bibliothèque Asiatique et Africaine, Paris, 1841;
16. a revised English translation was published in 1891, reissued as Travels in the Mogul Empire, New Delhi, 1972.
17. On Gassendi's and Bernier's influence on Locke, see Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi's Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe, Ithaca and London, 1996, chap. 8. Locke acquired and annotated all of Bernier's books on India, as well as the second (1678) edition of the Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi,
18. see Gabriel Bonno, Les relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955, pp. 55-67, 80-7, 97-105;
19. John Lough, 'Locke's reading during his stay in France', The Library, fifth series, 1953, VIII, pp. 229-58;
20. like Bernier, Locke embraced the Acostean theory of the origin of the Americans, see William G. Batz, 'The Historical Anthropology of John Locke', Journal of the History of Ideas 35, 1974, pp. 663-70.
21. See Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Philadelphia, 1964, p. 213.
22. See Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie-Rey Goldzeiger and Jacques Tobie, Histoire de la France coloniale, Paris, 1991, chap. 5;
23. Dirk van der Cruysse, Louis XIV et le Siam, Paris, 1991, chaps 6, 7.
24. Hannaford, Race, pp. 187-95, 203.
25. 'Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les differentes Especes ou Races d'hommes qui l'habitent, envoyée par un fameux Voyageur à M. l'Abbé de la Chambre, à peu prés en ces termes', Journal des Sçavans, 24 Avril 1684, pp. 148-55.
26. (Unless otherwise indicated all translations in this article are mine.) Some scholars have assumed that the 'Abbé de la Chambre' mentioned in the title is Marin Cureau de la Chambre, a medical doctor and pioneer of natural history (first conservator of the Royal Jardin des plantes and member of the Académie Royale des Sciences from its inception in 1666), who was an old acquaintance of Bernier (see Lettres de François Bernier, ed. H. Castonnet des Fosses, Angers, 1890, p. 5).
27. According to Sylvia Murr, Bernier's essay was written in response to an essay by Cureau de la Chambre. On this hypothesis, the essay was conceived in the late 1660s or the 1670s, and first presented in the so-called 'étrenes' ('presents presaging good fortune') text to Madame de la Sablière, the salonnière who hosted Bernier and a number of other men interested in natural science; Bernier became acquainted with her around 1672, well after his return from India. However, the 'letter' alluded to in the title must have been addressed to a son of Marin, Pierre Cureau de la Chambre (1640-1693), who was the only Cureau to become an 'abbé'. The 'étrenes' text and the article in the Journal des Sçavans are identical, except for a few minor passages. The 'étrenes' text has been reprinted by Sylvia Murr in Corpus. Revue de philosophie 20-1, 1992, pp. 280-3. In this article, I use the text published in the Journal des Sçavans. (Part of the information provided here was communicated to me in an e-mail message by Sylvia Murr for which I wish to thank her.)
28. See L. de Lens, Les correspondants de François Bernier pendant son voyage dans l'Inde, Angers, 1872, p. 4.
29. Bernier might have informed himself better on Laponia: the issue of the Journal des Sçavans of 27 June 1678 contained a review of an Histoire de la Laponie published in Paris in that year. To judge by the review, the book presented a slightly more nuanced picture of the 'Lapps' than Bernier.
30. Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo, p. 603, calls Bernier's discussion of women 'futile';
31. Hudson, 'From "Nation" to "Race"', p. 252, only mentions it in passing;
32. and Hannaford, Race, p. 203, omits it entirely. Only Londa Schiebinger pays serious attention to it:
33. see Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Boston, 1993, pp. 126, 131.
34. One of Bernier's correspondents, the influential literary figure Jean Chapelain, implored him to find out as much as he could about the Oriental women: Letter to Bernier at Delhi, 13 November 1661, Lettres de Jean Chapelain, publ. by Ph. Tamizey de Larroque, Paris, 1883, vol, 2, p. 169.
35. Londa Schiebinger, 'The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science', Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, 1989-90, pp. 387-405.
36. Originally, Bernier's essay was addressed to his patron, Madame de la Sablière, but the addressees of the published article were the mostly male readers of the Journal des Sçavans.
37. Article 'Mogol', Encyclopédie, vol. X, pp. 612-4 (De Jaucourt).
38. See Théodore Morison, 'Un Français à la cour du Grand Mogol', Revue Historique 156, 1927, pp. 83-97.
39. Suite des Mémoires du Sr. Bernier sur l'Empire du Grand Mogol, Paris, 1671, p. 11;
40. elsewhere, he calls the Aga 'one of the most learned men of Asia', Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, Paris, 1674, vol. I, p. 138.
41. Abrégé, vol. III, p. 42.
42. Suite des Mémoires du Sr. Bernier sur l'Empire du Grand Mogol, The Hague, 1671, p. 179.
43. Suite des Mémoires, pp. 119-22.
44. Suite des Mémoires, p. 172.
45. Suite des Mémoires, pp. 163-4.
46. Suite des Mémoires, p. 129.
47. Suite des Mémoires, p. 147;
48. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book I, line 101. In seventeenth-century translations Lucretius's 'Religio' is usually translated as 'superstition', thus avoiding the impression that the Christian religion might be implicated by the logic of his critique. Lucretius, however, clearly refers to the dominant, official religion of the Greeks, and his analysis is about the evil consequences of belief in the supernatural in general. By quoting the Latin text Bernier avoids the issue.
49. See Geoffrey Atkinson, Les relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l'évolution des idées (1924), Geneva, 1972, p. 170.
50. See M. N. Pearson, 'The Thin End of the Wedge: Medical Relativities as a Paradigm of Early Modern Indian-European Relations', Modern Asian Studies 29, 1995, pp. 141-70, esp. 165-7.
51. Histoire de la dernière révolution dans les Etats du Grand Mogol, Paris, 1670, pp. 131-2. Elsewhere, Bernier observes that the Mughal employed European gunners in their artillery, but the implied assertion that the Indians were inept in such matters is historically incorrect, for the Mughal commanders were extremely skilful in their deployment of artillery, an an they had acquired from the Turks before their invasion of India in the early sixteenth century,
52. see Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, History of India, London and New York, 1998, pp. 184-6.
53. See Franco Venturi, 'Oriental Despotism', Journal of the History of Ideas 24, 1963, pp. 133-42;
54. Lucette Valensi, 'The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism', in Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (eds), The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 173-203;
55. Michael Curtis, 'The Oriental Despotic Universe of Montesquieu', Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies 3, 1994, pp. 1-38.
56. For Anquetil's criticisms of Bernier, see Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Législation Orientale, Amsterdam, 1778, pp. 135-54.
57. See Sylvia Murr, 'Le politique "au Mogol" selon Bernier', in J. Pouchepadass and H. Stern, De la royauté à l'état: Anthropologie et histoire du politique dans le monde Indien, Paris, 1991, pp. 239-310.
58. Histoire de la dernière révolution, p. 6.
59. Bernier and Tavernier met at Patna in January 1666, Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, seconde partie, Paris, 1681, p. 69;
60. see also Murr, 'Le politique "au Mogol" selon Bernier', p. 245.
61. Six voyages . . ., première partie, Paris, 1682, pp. 444-5;
62. see also Suite des voyages de Mr. Tavernier, Paris, 1679, vol. 2, pp. 16, 22.
63. See Leonara C. Rosenfield, Front Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie, New York, 1968, pp. 10, 111-3;
64. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, pp. 63-77;
65. Sarasohn, Gassendi's Ethics, pp. 69, 127-31. In some respects Gassendi's position resembles later varieties of a vitalistic materialism, but his reluctance to adopt a purely mechanistic conception of non-human life was firmly rooted in his theology,
66. see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, Stanford, 1997, pp. 109-28.
67. See Sylvia Murr, 'Gassendi's Scepticism as a Religious Attitude', in Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds), Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Leyden, New York and Cologne, 1993, pp. 12-30;
68. Murr, 'Bernier et Gassendi', in Murr (ed.), Gassendi et l'Europe, pp. 81, 107-9;
69. Gianni Paganini, 'Bonheur, Passions et Intérêts: l'Héritage des Libertins', in Henri Méchoulan and Joël Cornette (eds), L'Etat Classique: Regards sur la pensée politique de la France dans le second XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1996, pp. 71-92.
70. See J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, London, 1960, p. 161.
71. Abrégé, vol. III, p. 49.
72. Abrégé, vol. V, p. 303.
73. Abrégé, vol. VI, pp. 166, 217-23.
74. Abrégé, vol. VI, p. 344.
75. Abrégé, vol. V, pp. 313-9.
76. Abrégé, vol. V, pp. 345-6; further on Bernier discusses the modern opinion that women contribute to the formation of the foetus by their 'oeufs'
77. (Abrégé vol. V, pp. 363-4). The theory of the female 'eggs' was reviewed in 1672 by the Journal des Sçavans, supplements of 15 and 22 March 1672.
78. Abrégé, vol. VI, pp. 249-54.
79. Abrégé, vol. VII, pp. 219-20.
80. Abrégé, vol. V, p. 376.
81. Louis de la Forge, Traité de l'esprit de l'Homme, Paris, 1666, p. 354; on the status of the Tupinambu as 'arch-cannibals',
82. see Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale. Grandeur et décadence, Paris, 1994; on Poulain's egalitarianism,
83. see Siep Stuurman, 'Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the Enlightenment', Journal of the History of Ideas 58, 1997, pp. 617-40, esp. 620-2.
84. Abrégé, vol. VII, p. 286.
85. Abrégé, vol. I, p. 115; see also vol. IV, pp. 75-7;
86. on the intellectual origins of this view, see John M. Headly, 'The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe', Journal of World History 8, 1997, pp. 1-27.
87. Abrégé, vol. I, p. 44;
88. Bernier believed that the 'monsters' reported by travellers in Africa and elsewhere represented the offspring of copulation by animals of different species; another explanation was that the power of the human imagination might in some cases deform the foetus, see Abrégé, vol. V, pp. 351-2.
89. Abrégé, vol. VI, p. 355.
90. Abrégé, vol. V, p. 31.
91. The Strait or Sea of Anian would be reached by Vitus Bering in 1727.
92. See Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origin of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729, Austin and London, 1967, pp. 48-54, 118-28.
93. Abrégé, vol. I, p. 39.
94. See J. S. Slotkin (ed.), Readings in Early Anthropology, Chicago, 1965, pp. 42-3.
95. See Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, 1596-1676, Leiden, New York etc., 1987.
96. Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo, pp. 602-5.
97. Suite des Mémoires du Sr. Bernier, 1671, pp. 214-6.
98. The passage demonstrates Bernier's continuing reliance on questionable etymological evidence of the sort that had led Hugo Grotius a generation before to assume that the similarity of the Mexican suffix Ian and the Germanic land proved the North-European origins of the people of Central America. See Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians, p. 120.
99. See the entry 'Classification' in Michel Blay and Robert Halleux (eds), La science classique, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Dictionnaire critique, Paris, 1998, pp. 457-64.
100. Abrégé, vol. I, pp. 48-9.
101. The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne, 2 vols, New York, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 21-34, esp. 30-1. The passage dealing with the subdivision of humanity is less than two pages, and stands isolated in the corpus of Petty's writings. The notes were probably written in 1677,
102. see The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676-1687, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne, New York, 1967, p. 43.
103. Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, Cambridge and Oxford, 1994, pp. 129-130.
104. See Henry Lowood, 'The New World and the European Catalog of Nature', in Karen Ordahl Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750, Chapel Hill and London, 1995, pp. 295-323;
105. Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, Cambridge, 1990, p. 161;
106. Phillip Sloan, 'The Gaze of Natural History', in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science, Berkeley and London, 1995, pp. 118-9.
107. See Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, Chicago and London, 1987, pp. 3-5.
108. See Harold J. Cook, 'Physicians and Natural History', in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary, Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 91-105;
109. E.-T. Hamy, 'Les débuts de l'anthropologie et de l'anatomie humaine au Jardin des Plantes', L'Anthropologie 5, 1894, pp. 257-75.
110. See Lettres de François Bernier, par H. Castonnet des Fosses, Angers, 1890, p. 7;
111. Murr, 'Bernier et Gassendi', p. 75.
112. See also his remarks on fossils: Abrégé, vol. II, p. 50.
113. See Popkin, 'Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism', pp. 126-8;
114. Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme, Paris, 1981, vol. I, pp. 146-97.
115. Puzzo, 'Racism', p. 583;
116. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, p. 14.
117. Juan Friede, 'Las Casas and Indigenism in the Sixteenth Century', in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (eds), Bartolomé de las Casas in History, DeKalb, Illinois, 1971, p. 134.
118. See Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, pp. 41, 47, 69.
119. See Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas, Edmonton, 1984.
120. See for instance François Hartog, Le miroir d'Hérodote, Paris, 1991.
121. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge, 1982.
122. See Nancy Shoemaker, 'How Indians Got to Be Red', American Historical Review 102, 1997, pp. 625-44;
123. on the divergent trajectory of the language of race in Central America, see Vinicio Gonzalez, 'The history of ethnic classification in Central America, 1700-1950', International Social Science Journal 111, 1987, pp. 61-84.
124. See Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black, Baltimore, 1971, chaps 1, 2;
125. Richard G. Cole, 'Sixteenth-Century Travel Books as a Source of European Attitudes toward Non-White and Non-Western Culture', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116, 1972, pp. 59-67;
126. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555-1945, London, 1973, chap. 1;
127. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880, Bloomington and London, 1980, chaps 1-3;
128. Sue Peabody, 'There Are No Slaves in France': The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime, Oxford and New York, 1996.
129. See Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan, Paris, 1987.
130. See Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2: A Century of Wonder, Chicago and London, 1977, pp. 559-66.
131. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3: A Century of Advance, Chicago and London, 1993, pp. 390-434;
132. Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France, 1640-1740, Paris, 1932, chap. 1;
133. Robert Shackleton, 'Asia as seen by the French Enlightenment', in Shackleton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed. David Gilson and Martin Smith, Oxford, 1988, pp. 231-41;
134. Van der Cruysse, Louis XIV et le Siam.
135. See Walter Demel, 'Wie die Chinesen gelb wurden: Ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte der Rassentheorien', Historische Zeitschrift 255, 1992, pp. 625-66.
136. Hartog, Miroir d'Hérodote, p. 33;
137. article 'Eskimaux', Encyclopédie, vol. 5, p. 953; this view is also found in a treatise on the Amazons by Bernier's contemporary (also a medical doctor)
138. Pierre Petit, De Amazonibus Dissertatio qua an vere extiterint, necne, variis utro citroque conjecturis & argumentis disputatur, Amsterdam, 1687, pp. 103-7 (first edn: Paris, 1685).
139. Therefore I cannot entirely concur with Nicholas Hudson who rather plays down the importance of these seventeenth-century intellectual trends in his otherwise enlightening discussion of the origin of racial classification, see Hudson, 'From "Nation" to "Race"', p. 252; Hudson rightly points to the powerful impact of Locke's anthropology on eighteenth-century human science, but he pays no attention to Locke's seventeenth-century context nor to Locke's indebtedness to Bernier, see notes 3 and 4 above.
140. Paul Hazard. La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715 (1935), Paris, 1961;
141. but see also J. Mesnard, 'La crise de la conscience européenne, un demi-siècle après Paul Hazard', in De la mort de Colbert à la révocation de l'édit de Nantes: un monde nouveau?, Paris, 1984, pp. 185-98;
142. Margaret C. Jacob, 'The crisis of the European mind: Hazard revisited', in Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob (eds), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge etc., 1987, pp. 251-71.
143. However, the defence of slavery cannot by itself explain the origin of racism, as is maintained by Pierre H. Boulle, 'In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist Ideology in France', in Frederick Krantz (ed.), History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, Montréal, 1985, pp. 221-42.