ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that alcoholics, addicts, and homosexuals, amongst others, populated a significant exclusionary matrix, linked together in many ways because of the supposed dangers they represented to society, to its health and defence. It explains correlations between group theories and some actual groups that are to be found in this end-of-the-nineteenth-century cultural mix; the coincidence of the two helped to identify and imagine several feared groups, “dangerous classes”, who, from the dominant viewpoint, represented monstrous possibilities within society. The notion of degeneracy was central to a great deal of nineteenth-century culture, its portmanteau nature allowing it to be deployed in relation to the natural sciences, criminology, sociology, social debates, literature, and images of the crowd. Morel’s version of evolution posed the gloomy proposition that degeneration would spread, manifesting itself in a whole series of morbid transformations that would be passed down the generations.
