8 - Eugenics, race, and blood

Summary

In the 1930s, new eugenic arguments for improving the French race gained prominence. Although proponents of the milder, positive eugenics attempted to rally support from a diminishing base, the most significant trend of the decade was the growth of a more strident, negative eugenics. The issues and developments that prompted the change have been discussed in the last chapter: the economic decline of the Great Depression, the large number of immigrants in France, the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, and the papal encyclical of 1930. This chapter examines one important feature of the new French eugenics: its racism.

The racist eugenics of the 1930s was only in part a return to the older tradition of Gobineau and Vacher de Lapouge. Like the earlier eugenics, it was also based on new anthropological definitions of race, but with different scientific underpinnings. Whereas older definitions had relied on certain cultural characteristics and specific physical features of skin color, hair texture, and the size or shape of the skull to distinguish races, new discoveries in the twentieth century of human blood groups and their distribution patterns among populations offered a seemingly more clear-cut and “scientific” basis for defining races. Although the theoretical explanation offered by blood groups was elegantly simple, the notions of “blood” and “race” were so fraught with historical and psychological implications that the result was confusion and misapplication of the new discoveries in ways that the first medical and anthropological researchers would never have thought possible.