In this fascinating biography, Jean-Marie Augustin exposes the multiple intellectual strands of the nineteenth-century race “science” developed by Georges Vacher de Lapouge. A lawyer by training, Lapouge was a pioneer of “anthroposociology,” the academic discipline that purported to establish the superiority of the Aryan race and its normative implications. Lapouge famously advocated eugenics policies based on his racial theories, some of which were embraced in the United States and implemented in Nazi Germany. This new biography highlights several divergences between Lapouge's scientific racism and the racist political ideologies it influenced.

Lapouge began his career as a prosecutor in the early days of the Third Republic, strongly motivated by his love for republican principles, especially secularism. During this period (1879–1883), he wrote several articles in the republican press articulating anticlerical positions, particularly regarding the education of children. Lapouge attacked the rights of fathers to choose their children's schools, arguing that children did not belong to parents, as they were an element of society. He defended reforms that weakened the influence of the clergy on education. He was radical in his anti-Catholic secularism, attacking the designation of Sunday as a day of rest, in part because it was oppressive to Jews and Muslims. Augustin's exposition of the leftist secular and anticlerical origins of Lapouge's intellectual trajectory complicates the lineage between Lapouge and the anti-Semitic Catholic extreme right that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, while Lapouge's most well-known 1899 work, L'Aryen, son rôle social (The Aryan and His Social Role) was praised by the anti-Semitic extreme right in France, Jews were not the target of Lapouge's racist project. Augustin notes that Lapouge valorized the intellectual capacity of Jews, whom he did not necessarily regard as a separate race.

Augustin also draws out the influence of Lapouge's legal training on his unique brand of eugenics. For Lapouge, biology provided a critique of several legal rules and institutions. For instance, he criticized the citizen's duty of testament under Roman law, preferring the Germanic rule of basing the right of succession on blood relations. Similarly, he thought it made little sense for the law to distinguish so significantly between the rights of natural and legitimate children. From a biological standpoint, natural and legitimate children inherited equally from their parents; thus, legal inheritance should also recognize this equality. Finally, perhaps most controversially, Lapouge believed that marriage was in decline and should eventually wither away, since it was a surviving form of domestic slavery. In fact, he attributed the decline in fertility to marriage and the law of succession: There was a strong drive to limit the number of children in marriage to avoid the sharing of inheritable goods.

Augustin suggests further aspects of Lapouge's thinking, including his interdisciplinarity, that were ahead of his time. Lapouge had resigned from his post as a prosecutor to prepare for the agrégation en droit (competitive exams to become a law professor), which he failed, largely because he spent his time studying anthropology, Oriental languages, and zoology instead of preparing lessons in French and Roman law. During this intellectual awakening, Lapouge developed a passion for craniology—measuring heads and comparing cephalic indices of various classes of persons—as well as the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Galton. While he never became a law professor, his career as a university librarian appears to have liberated him from the constraints of disciplinary boundaries. Anthroposociology, an idea clearly articulated in Lapouge's essay on depopulation in France, combined theory and practice. It aspired to use racial anthropology, Darwinian biology, history, and sociology to understand contemporary problems like population decline and class conflict, while also developing practical solutions, specifically the societal pursuit of racial eugenics. Instead of focusing on “negative” eugenics, the practice of sterilizing or preventing the reproduction of the least fit, Lapouge proposed the “systematic selection” of the most fit. This would entail “imposed fertility” on the most fit women—those belonging to the blue-eyed blond “dolichocephalic” race. For these women, sexual service could become the equivalent of military service for men. At the same time, Lapouge advocated the use of reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination, to maximize the reproduction of the few socially superior men.

An important theme running through this biography is Lapouge's rejections by the French intellectual elite. Not only did he fail the agrégation, as well as his many attempts to attain faculty positions in the universities, but his racial ideas were refuted and dismissed by the intellectual mainstream. Lapouge's racial classifications were denounced as “false science,” and Durkheim declared that anthroposociology had no place in the history of sociology. Jean Finot, a Jewish journalist, published a book in 1905 denying the existence of races, and insisted that the term race was merely a product of mental gymnastics, and anthroposociology a fantasy doctrine. The approach of Lapouge's denouncers became the official republican understanding of “race” in France after World War II.

Even though Hitler embraced Lapouge's racial theories and eugenics, Augustin makes clear that Lapouge disapproved of Hitler's militarism. And many of Lapouge's followers disapproved of his hostility to Christianity, marriage, and the traditional family. By mapping these differences, Augustin has delivered a richly engaging intellectual portrait that conveys the complex texture and myriad possibilities—and dangers—of racism as an academic project.