ABSTRACT

The essential question in the writing of the present book was to determine how the taking root of Darwinism influenced the presentation of popular spectacle in France. Our project is therefore not only temporally circumscribed (1875-1910) but scientifically, even if it must be placed within the larger context of “how, in the long process of the staging of the other, science has influenced the different gradations of this exhibition” (Boetsch and Ardagna 55). Another specificity in considering Darwinism in France has been to delineate its interstices with existing scientific fields that had been growing in importance from the 1840s, such as ethnology, comparative anatomy, and anthropology, and to note Darwinism’s immediate conflation with the study of degeneration. This chapter explores how closely the discourses of Darwinism and degeneration were knit together in the popular press and in popular spectacle as well as in scientific thought. The implications for the popular perception of theories on race that are evoked here will be explored in greater depth in Chapters 3 and 4. Nonetheless, this chapter should make clear that the construction of a social Imaginary surrounding the Other, be they black or hystero-epileptic, was indebted to the scientific theorization of a racial hierarchy as part of human evolution, and to theories of degeneration. The dissemination of these parallel lines of thought was assured by the popular press and, to a very large extent, by popular spectacle.