Savoirs sur le cerveau et construction de la race en Europe (fin xviiie-milieu xixe siècle)

Abstract

Starting in the late 18 th century, European scholars studied the brain to make racial classifications. Across colonial Europe, new theories emerged that related brain size, mass, or morphology to racial differences. In the early 19 th century, Louis-Antoine Desmoulins, a French physician, constructed a classification of sixteen races based on the study of the cerebral hemispheres. Yet, like most of his contemporaries, Desmoulins had no opportunities to dissect the brains of the different races he identified. How, then, were racial differences established on the basis of cerebral factors? Taking Louis-Antoine Desmoulins as a significant case, this article shows how the case of brain studies invites to unravel the idea that the construction of medical and anthropological knowledge on race was necessarily based on a systematic study of racially defined bodies.