The abolition of all privilege: Race,equality,and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin

Race and inequality in nineteenth-century French thought

The question of the origin and nature of inequality has long been at the heart of modern social theory. Rousseau sought to answer it by distinguishing between natural and moral inequality – the former based on physical differences, the latter on historical and social ones. Of course, Rousseau’s view – like all ideas of equality – was based in good measure on his sense of actually existing forms of inequality. In this sense, it was both a description of the world (inequality exists) and a normative account of how the world ought to be (many forms of inequality need not exist). By the time of the French Revolution, these ideas were being tested in practice. It was not clear, though, how much equality could be equally distributed among all peoples, as the debates about slavery among republicans, colonial planters, and defenders of the ancien régime clearly showed. While the Revolution initially ended slavery in the colonies, there was much dispute about the policy. This tension was clearest in discussions of the Haitian Revolution, which remained an “unthinkable” event even as it happened (Trouillot, 1995). On the eve of the declaration of independence in Haiti, French philosophers and politicians reversed the abolition of slavery in the colonies, arguing, as Saint Simon did in 1803, that the extension of freedom to blacks had been a categorical error since the physical makeup of blacks meant they were “not susceptible, even with the same education, of rising to the intellectual level of Europeans” (Stocking, 1982: 38).

Lying behind the political debate about the granting of rights and freedoms to slaves was a deeper issue, that of the capacity of slaves – and Africans more broadly – to attain or exercise freedom and equality. Throughout the nineteenth century, the question of capacity was increasingly posed in the language of race. Nineteenth-century race thinking revived Rousseau’s idea of natural inequality and made it the explanatory basis of moral or social inequality. As the concept of race took center place in anthropology in the nineteenth century, it did so in tight connection with the idea of inequality, which itself became a defense – or naturalization – of colonialism, slavery, and other forms of domination. As race became a way of talking about objective facts, it did so alongside racism as a social practice rooted in what Glenn Loury calls the “withholding of the presumption of equal humanity” (Fields and Fields, 2012: 17). As Fields and Fields (2012: 17) remind us, “race is the principal unit and core concept of racism.” But the discourse of race hides the social practice of racism, and in the nineteenth century the turn to natural history, Linnean taxonomy, and Lamarckian and Darwinian accounts of evolution all gave race a seemingly neutral scientific gloss. Race was so central a concept in the nineteenth century that even abolitionist thinkers tended to accept the general frame of reference that linked the physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics of human groups (Drescher, 1992: 364–366).

The question of race thus took shape in relation to the twin values of equality and hierarchy. French thought remained committed to equality as central to democratic life. And yet, democratic equality is a thin concept, aiming at universal significance without regard to concrete details. It is always confronted with the thick reality of particular forms of social inequality, and it is here that a “serious and unexpected consequence of egalitarianism” emerged: “In a universe in which men are conceived no longer as hierarchically ranked in various social or cultural species, but as essentially equal and identical, the difference of nature and status between communities is sometimes reasserted in a disastrous way: it is then conceived as proceeding from somatic characteristics – which is racism” (Dumont, 1970: 51). And the somaticization of inequality made it possible for equality and hierarchy to coexist without apparent contradiction.

At the beginning of the century the first major line of scientific defense of racial hierarchy was comparative anatomy, of which Georges de Cuvier was the leading figure. Cuvier’s approach to race and anatomy differed markedly from that of the abolitionists. The latter tended to view their studies of racial difference in philanthropic terms, so that even when they argued blacks were inferior or deficient when compared to whites, they did so as part of a humanitarianism inflected with a case of noblesse oblige. In contrast, Cuvier treated race as a scientific object of study and argued that a rational study of anatomical difference should be based only on facts and material artifacts, not on humanitarian values. Cuvier urged colonial and scientific travelers to gather bodies and skulls from around the world “in any manner whatever.” As George Stocking (1982: 30–31) has noted, “his attitude toward the savage was that of a grave-robber rather than a philanthropist” (see also Bender, 1965; Conklin, 2013; Fogarty and Osborne, 2003).

Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was based on the idea that racial types were not only distinct but that racial groups varied in terms of their physical, moral, and intellectual composition, and thus his system for classifying races was also a system of ranking them. This position was typical of a general frame of reference that guided European science as it emerged from Enlightenment philosophy, a frame that linked race, progress, and reason. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997: 4) suggests, “the Enlightenment’s declaration of itself as ‘the Age of Reason’ was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could historically only come to maturity in modern Europe, while the inhabitants of areas outside Europe, who were considered to be of non-European racial and cultural origins, were consistently described and theorized as rationally inferior and savage.” As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003: 7–28) puts it, the idea of European civilization required a savage slot against which it could construct itself. ² While Enlightenment philosophy provided the foundations for this position, in the nineteenth century the new science of race carried it further – and when it came to discussions of race, French anthropology was at the forefront. ³

It is possible to grant French anthropology the symbolic birth date of 24 August 1800, when Louis François Jauffret, the founder and secretary of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, led the group’s members in a toast “to the progress of anthropology” (Stocking, 1982: 16). The Observateurs were part of a flourishing network of scientific and learned societies that emerged at that start of the century, and it was the world’s first such society devoted to the new discipline of anthropology. Jauffret had ambitious plans for his organization, including the development of methods of classification based on comparative anatomy and a catalogue of the customs and habits of peoples around the world. The Observateurs soon disappeared from the intellectual scene but left an important legacy in French anthropology. They saw anthropology as a science that united the study of anatomy and custom – what would later become physical anthropology and ethnology – into a single study of the physical, moral, and intellectual aspects of humans. This approach was to remain at the center of anthropological discussions of race in France for over a century (Bender, 1965; Blanckaert, 1988, 2003; Conklin, 2013; De L’Estoile, 2003; Peabody and Stovall, 2003).

In retrospect, it is impossible to separate the scientific debates about race in France from the debates about slavery in the colonies, but at the time the correlation between theories of race and the practice of slavery was seldom raised. It was thus possible for the Parisian Société Ethnologique to hold a series of sessions on the differences between whites and blacks in 1847 to which “no African or black Caribbean participants were invited. Blacks were ‘represented’ at the sessions only as objects, through the various African skulls in the Society’s collection. The one living black brought into the Society was a resident of Paris who posed as a model for local artists. He was brought in for visual observation” (Drescher, 1992: 383). The Society, founded in 1841, counted among its members Saint-Simonians, naturalists, historians, physical anthropologists, and even representatives of French colonial plantations (Blanckaert, 1988). Its secretary, Gustave d’Eichthal, opened the 1847 sessions by presenting three interrelated claims, all of which shaped subsequent discussions of race. He asserted that the difference between whites and blacks was fundamental to all other human differences; that the white race was superior; and that whites and blacks were not only physically different but also different in terms of their mental capacity, social relations, and even their role in the economy (Drescher, 1992: 379–380).

The only person at the sessions who argued otherwise was Victor Schoelcher, then the leading abolitionist thinker in France and soon to become a member of the revolutionary provisional government that, in 1848, presided over emancipation in the colonies. Schoelcher presented detailed evidence that countered many of the claims made by other speakers at the session. But facts did not win the day. Some members of the Society suggested Schoelcher’s evidence could be explained by the so-called civilizing influence that white groups had on blacks. Others simply asserted that slavery itself was proof of innate difference, showing clearly who was superior (the master) and who was inferior (the slave), an argument that reiterated Aristotle’s quite durable claim that some people are naturally born to be slaves (Drescher, 1992: 382–385). In both cases, the reaction to Schoelcher’s position showed just how much the question of race in France was connected to colonialism and slavery (Peabody and Stovall, 2003: 4). ⁴

Not all anthropological accounts of race were such a bold defense of slavery. But at its core, race thinking has always been a defense of European power and privilege. As the concept of race slowly displaced the older concept of civilization, with all of its attendant meanings of progress, development, and perfection (see Kuper, 1999: 23–29), there was a new need to explain race more fully. The new “racial science” united the Enlightenment concern with progress with a system according to which peoples could be classified and ranked through physical features or other measurements (Conklin, 2013: 5). In the first half of the nineteenth century, monogenism, which anchored a belief in the single origin of humanity in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, was the dominant position. By the 1850s, however, polygenism, which asserted the separate origins of the different races, had replaced it. After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, polygenists adapted their beliefs to the new evolutionary theory without giving up on the idea of a hierarchy of races and innate moral and intellectual differences. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the most prominent French intellectual to develop this position was Paul Broca, who in 1859 founded the Paris Anthropology Society (Fluehr-Lobban, 2000: 453; Stocking, 1982: 39–40).

Broca saw physical anthropology as the solution to the monogenist–polygenist debate, but it was not the major break in race thinking he imagined it to be. There remained deep continuities between his physical anthropology, imagined as a scientific study of human race, and the colonial medicine and colonial science of previous decades (Fogarty and Osborne, 2003: 225). For example, under Broca, the Society began to focus on two central questions: Did pure racial types, free from any mixture, exist in the world?, and Did sexual unions between races produce viable hybrid offspring? Both questions assumed more than they asked, implying the existence of pure racial types and the hierarchical distinction between them. For in the absence of the idea of hierarchy, how else are we to understand the problem of race mixing? Broca and others were forced to acknowledge the difficulty of providing empirical proof of pure types, leaving the question of miscegenation and “hybrids” as the main focus of race thinking (see Bender, 1965; Blanckaert, 2003; Broca, 1864; Conklin, 2013: 22–26; Stocking, 1982). Of course, the underlying idea was the problem of degeneration of pure types, a problem that was solidly rooted in the concern over the end of slavery in the colonies (Bender, 1965; Blanckaert, 1988, 2003; Conklin, 2013; Parkin and de Sales, 2010).

When Broca died in 1880, Paul Topinard took up the mantle of the most prominent French anthropologist. Topinard continued in his predecessor’s footsteps, using craniology, phrenology, and other methods to attempt to demonstrate innate differences between races. (The same methods were also being used by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, who developed the field of criminal anthropology and who argued there were “born criminals.”) But as George Stocking notes (1982: 57–58), “the more precise and extensive the observation and the measurement of mankind, the more tenuous was the ‘reality’ of the races they served to define.” This tension between theory and data was a central contradiction in race thinking, since it showed just how much the so-called facts of racial differences were value-laden claims. As Fields and Fields (2012) have argued, for the American context, it is not that race begat racism but rather that racism gave rise to the ideology of race (cf. De L’Estoile, 2003). In this sense, French Anthropology was less an objective science and more a folk model of difference naturalized.

Equality as a fact and value

I want to return now to Firmin’s election to the Paris Anthropology Society. Firmin notes in Equality that he was drawn to anthropology because of its claims about racial inequality and difference – claims that he aimed to disprove. While he disagreed with the conclusions of anthropologists, he had a much more flattering opinion of the discipline itself, describing it as the field of knowledge that united just about all others, from philosophy and morality to the natural sciences and history (Firmin, 2002: 2–13). By working through the leading anthropological arguments of the time, he sought to show not only that all humans were equal but also how natural or biological equality could ground a normative value of social, economic, and political equality. He referred to his project as a “positive anthropology,” influenced by the positive sociology of Auguste Comte, but it is more accurate to see Firmin’s argument as an immanent critique of anthropology, since it proceeded from its central categories and concepts in order to arrive at a fundamentally different position about race and equality. In so doing, he was posing the problem of racism in a new way. He was not content, for example, to argue that theories of racial inequality were factually wrong. Others, like Schoelcher, had made similar arguments to little effect. Rather, he wanted to show the necessary connection between the factual error of the doctrine of racial inequality and the social context that produced such an idea. In effect, he was arguing that inequality was a central organizing value of European culture and that this value had in turn generated an ideology of racial inequality.

In making this argument, Firmin made three key moves. First, he argued for the natural equality of all humans as an already established scientific fact. Second, he offered a critique of the theories of racial inequality in which he showed how these beliefs served to uphold specific forms of social, political, and economic domination. Finally, he showed how the doctrine of racial inequality was the central contradiction blocking human emancipation and he suggested that overcoming racial hierarchy would amount to the abolition of all forms of privilege. Let me turn to a detailed explication of each of these moves.

The abolition of all privilege

Firmin’s critique is impressive, and it should be reclaimed as a valued piece of the history of the discipline. But it is also important to recognize that Firmin remained committed to many ideas we would now reject. He was, for example, a firm believer in the Enlightenment idea of progress. Like other philosophers of his time he saw human history as a moral success story, a working out of the perfectibility of the human species. He saw the black race as playing a key part in that historical arc, since it had known most directly the effects of unfreedom, slavery, racism, and exploitation. But in knowing and feeling the full weight of dehumanization, blacks had also developed a uniquely critical and emancipatory view since, as Firmin put it, “the more one has suffered, the more one is prepared to understand and exercise justice” (2002: 446). By contrast, Europeans had only paid lip service to equality and in European society “the notion of universal brotherhood has remained a mere joke.” After all, “one cannot conceive of brotherhood without equality” (2002: 448). In making this claim, Firmin signaled his allegiance to an emerging liberal cosmopolitanism.

How, then, might we read Firmin today? My suggestion is that we read him not as a critic of race, but as a critic of racism. That, after all, is the promise and the challenge of his work. To embrace Firmin today, to invite him into our own intellectual genealogy after a century of exclusion, is to also push ourselves beyond the now comfortable sense that race is a social construction or a fiction (or just bad science) and into a more direct encounter with racism as a deeply embedded set of beliefs and practices. Firmin’s work is, in fact, an important rejoinder to the Boasian intervention, which as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003: 105–13) has suggested, replaced race with culture in part by distancing American anthropology from a direct political confrontation with racism. And yet, there are important limits to Firmin’s critique, for he remained tied to the idea of race itself (even as he argued for the equality between distinct races). It was anti-racism but not anti-race, for the standpoint of his critique was the very same idea of civilization that anchored French social thought.

It is tempting to wonder what Firmin could have done if he had the concept of culture (rather than civilization) that was available to Boas. Would he have moved beyond race into a more radical critique? Magloire-Danton (2005: 160–161) suggests Firmin’s work contains hints of a “Boasian humanism based on the principle of the intrinsic value and the plurality of cultural practices.” But perhaps this goes too far. I suggest instead we recognize the limits of Firmin’s own thinking, especially his commitment to a “liberal space of Enlightenment” (Trouillot, 2003: 114). When Firmin turned to the case of Haiti at the end of Equality, he described his native country as a “field of sociological observation” in which we could see direct evidence of the regeneration of the black race. But in order for that regeneration to succeed, Haiti had to adopt the values of European civilization and “completely weed out of its political culture those customs which are but an unfortunate legacy from the past” (2002: 313). And when he noted the historical shift that had made equality a real possibility in the world, he dated it to the French – not the Haitian – Revolution (2002: 447–448).

Despite these limitations there remains something important in Firmin’s work. Indeed, his critique at times exceeds the bounds of his own framework, especially in the way he theorizes the historicity and persistence of the concept of race in relation to European colonialism and domination. If Boas gave us the language of culture to move beyond race, than Firmin gives us a language of power with which to confront racism, especially the racism embedded in our own concepts and categories. Perhaps, then, we would do well to return to Firmin, not only for his conclusions (which remain relevant and prescient) but also for his radical hope that anthropology has a key role to play in the critique of power and privilege. We might not agree with his teleological sense of progress or his commitment to the idea of race, but we have something to learn from his insistence that some values – like inequality and racial hierarchy – are not just relative to a society but are actually wrong, that other values are better, and that anthropologists can and should take a stance on such matters. In so doing, anthropology might also contribute to the abolition of privilege.