A Human Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation 9781789205442

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A Human Garden

BERGHAHN MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH STUDIES Editor: Michael Scott Christofferson, Associate Professor and Chair of Department of History, Adelphi University France has played a central role in the emergence of the modern world. The Great French Revolution of 1789 contributed decisively to political modernity, and the Paris of Baudelaire did the same for culture. Because of its rich intellectual and cultural traditions, republican democracy, imperial past and post-colonial present, twentiethcentury experience of decline and renewal, and unique role in world affairs, France and its history remain important today. This series publishes monographs that offer significant methodological and empirical contributions to our understanding of the French experience and its broader role in the making of the modern world. Recent volumes: Volume 16

Volume 11

Paul-André Rosental

Jackie Clarke

A Human Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation

France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy

Volume 15

Volume 10

Sarah Gensburger

Beth S. Epstein

National Policy, Global Memory: The Commemoration of the ‘Righteous’ from Jerusalem to Paris, 1942–2007

Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

Volume 14

Volume 9

Nicole C. Rudolph

Frédéric Bozo

At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort Volume 13

General de Gaulle’s Cold War: Challenging American Hegemony, 1963–1968 Garret Joseph Martin Volume 12

Building a European Identity: France, The United States, and the Oil Shock 1973–1974

Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War and German Unification Volume 8

Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present Paul Jankowski Volume 7

France and the Construction of Europe 1944–2006: The Geopolitical Imperative Michael Sutton

Aurélie Élisa Gfeller

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/monographs-in-french-studies

A Human Garden French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation

S Paul-André Rosental Translated from the French by Carolyn Avery

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com This is a translated, adapted and updated version of the original French book Destins de l’eugénisme published by Éditions du Seuil in Paris in 2016. A preliminary version of chapter 6 of this book was published in 2012 in the Journal of Modern European History under the title ‘Eugenics and Social Security in France before and after the Vichy Regime’ (10, 4, pp. 540–561). French-language edition © 2016 Éditions du Seuil Collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender English-language edition © 2020 Berghahn Books Translation by Carolyn Avery, with the support of INED (project 11-1-0) and Sciences Po’s Scientific Department, Center for European Studies and Center for History. Every reasonable effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits for images inside and on the cover of this book. If there are errors or omissions, please contact the publisher so that corrections can be addressed in any subsequent edition. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019040082 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78920-543-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-544-2 ebook

I dedicate this book to my cousin Cécile Rosental, time-travel companion, and to the memory of my masters Jean Rivier, Marcel Baleste and Bernard Lepetit.

By means of psychological and economic technique it is becoming possible to create societies as artificial as the steam engine, and as different from anything that would grow up of its own accord without deliberate intention on the part of human agents. Such artificial societies will, of course, until social science is much more perfected than it is at present, have many unintended characteristics, even if their creators succeed in giving them all the characteristics that were intended …. But I do not think it is open to doubt that the artificial creation of societies will continue and increase so long as scientific technique persists. The pleasure in planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy; whatever can be constructed according to a plan, such men will endeavour to construct. —Bertrand Russell, Scientific Outlook

Contents

S List of Illustrations

xi

Foreword Theodore M. Porter xiii List of Abbreviations

xvi

Introduction 1 Part I. The Intellectual and Political History of a Human Garden (1880s–1980s) 17 Chapter 1

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation Chapter 2

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen

19 40

Chapter 3

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? From the Reign of the ‘Dictator’ to the Republican Public Policy (1923–1984)

63

Part II. Eugenics, Biopolitics and Welfare in a Transatlantic Perspective (1914–1968) 97 Chapter 4

From Micro- to Macro-History: Ungemach Gardens and the Survival of Eugenics in France after 1945

101

Chapter 5

Stamping out Racism and Reforming Eugenics: A Transatlantic History of Qualitative Demography

121

x Contents

Chapter 6

Qualitative Demography, Reform Eugenics and Social Policies in 1950s France

138

Part III. Eugenics and Developmental Psychology: A Neglected Legacy 157 Chapter 7

Eugenics as a Moral Theory (1): The Theory of Human Capital

159

Chapter 8

Eugenics as a Moral Theory (2): At the Sources of ‘Personal Development’ 174 Conclusion 189 Epilogue Forgetting Eugenics: Back to the Ungemach Gardens

195

Appendix Works by Abel Ruffenach, Pseudonym of Alfred Dachert

199

Archival Sources

201

Bibliography 203 Index of Names

225

Index of Subjects and Institutions

227

Illustrations

S Figures Figure 0.1 Performance of Ungemach Gardens (poster for the 1935 hygiene exhibition in Strasbourg).

3

Figure 1.1 The evaluation of the Schumacher couple.

23

Figure 1.2 Interior architecture of Ungemach houses.

25

Figure 2.1 The broadcasting of the Alsatian Ibsen’s theater play, n.d. [1950s].

45

Figure 2.2 Poster for the performance of Le Val l’Évêque in Paris in November 1921.

46

Figures 2.3 and 2.4 Portraits of Alfred Dachert as a businessman.

48

Figure 2.5 Suzanne Dachert, born Gounelle.

50

Figure 3.1 The preservation of the entry form in the 1980s.

64

Figures 3.2 and 3.3 Assessments of the municipal housing commission (12–13 November 1930): housekeeping grades and observations.

72–73

Figure 3.4 Intentions ‘cast in bronze’. Figure 4.1 ‘Papa Dachert’.

86 104

xii Illustrations

Tables Table 3.1 Declared causes of tenants’ departures from Ungemach Gardens (1934–1938). Table 3.2 The fate of tenants threatened with the termination of their leasing contract during annual visits from 1926 to 1930.

69 74–75

Graphs Graph 4.1 Relative use of the terms ‘eugenics’, ‘birth control’, ‘social insurance’, ‘social classes’ and ‘demography’, in United Kingdom English from 1900 to 1960.

111

Graph 4.2 Relative use of the words natalité, assurances sociales, sécurité sociale, classes sociales, eugénique and démographie in French from 1900 to 1960.

111

Foreword Theodore M. Porter

S ‘Eugenics’ is almost always traced back to the work of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and then forward to programmes of forced sterilization and worse carried out by the Nazis. While episodes such as these are not easily forgotten (and must not be forgotten!), neither should we define away those less extreme or morally ambiguous practices that persisted up to our own time. The history of eugenics extends beyond what scholars have usually recognized, mainly because the forms it has assumed are so diverse. There are, at a minimum, troubling moral ambiguities bound up with any effort to improve the quality of populations by promoting the biological reproduction of particular human traits. Eugenics in its less brutal forms became a part of ordinary life, embraced by scientists, doctors, ministers, writers, politicians, administrators and reformers. Their ambitions and methods were widely depicted as fair and reasonable and as well suited to the needs even of those unfortunate individuals whose reproduction should be restricted for the sake of a healthy, prosperous population. Eugenics can be consigned to a benighted past only by averting our eyes from its most ordinary forms. Paul-André Rosental, known especially for his pioneering researches on the social history of demography, here addresses in a new way the anxieties and ambitions allied to twentieth-century reproductive politics. While the eugenic push for human biological improvement is central to this book, sterilization, whether voluntary or forced, scarcely comes into it. Its lead characters are not geneticists or biologists but planners, officials, teachers and psychologists. Eugenics in this study comes down to the identification of men and women, free of conspicuous defects, who were to be provided with a comfortable apartment in an attractive garden community on the condition that they bear and raise children. Such conditions, far from burdensome, were broadly consonant with reproductive

xiv Foreword

habits of the uncompelled. Unlike Galton, who insisted that the nation was endangered by a scarcity of outstanding statesmen, thinkers and scientists, here it was enough to bear a decent minimum of healthy, normal offspring. There was no insistence on brilliant achievements or of Stakhanovite reproductive efforts. Genetics was not the whole story. Heredity was to be allied to a healthy environment and sound upbringing. The biopolitical focus of this study, the ‘Ungemach Gardens’, was not a site of dramatic struggle, but a collection of quiet apartments. The residents were chosen based on a broadly eugenic point system, a system that combined biological assessments with behavioural incentives. It soon achieved the status of a model institution, and the reactions of its admirers, extending as far as California, lend a global aspect to this microhistorical investigation. But it was never a site of titanic ambition or Sturm und Drang. So quiet an institution, as Rosental points out, was of no special interest to the Nazis. In 1940, when Strasbourg was (again) folded into the German empire, they turned the buildings to other uses. Four years later, after Allied troops drove the German troops from Alsace, the eugenic utopia of Ungemach was restored without fanfare. It endured in this form for about four decades more. The point is not that its proprietors endorsed – or even that they were indifferent to – all the murders and forced sterilizations of the mentally ill, but that brutal interventions of this kind did not then appear relevant to a local initiative to promote healthy breeding. The perpetuation of this eugenic imperative in diverse forms in the decades to follow is a topic full of fascination. It is not as if the Ungemach community could be cut off from the profound economic and social changes of the postwar decades. For example, the rules against mothers working outside the home eventually had to be abandoned. By the time this experiment reached its end, eugenics had been subject to much bitter criticism. By then, however, it had already gone a long way towards reinventing itself as marital and psychological counselling, medical insurance systems and social practices tied to the measurement of ‘human capital’. As this book eloquently demonstrates, it is scarcely possible, in a society so besotted with genetics, to wall off the dreams of eugenics from psychological, educational and economic ideals. Though condemned now by almost everyone, eugenics, in its broader sense, lives on, and remains still a vital subject of research and reflection. Theodore M. Porter is distinguished professor of history at UCLA. His research has emphasized the history of science, especially the interactions of natural and social sciences and bureaucratic as well as scientific uses of data and statistics. His books include The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986);

Foreword xv

Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995); Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2005) and, most recently, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (2018), all at Princeton University Press.

Abbreviations

S ADBR Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin [Departmental archives of the Lower-Rhine] AES

American Eugenics Society

AMS Archives municipales de Strasbourg [Municipal archives of Strasbourg] AN

Archives nationales [French national archives]

BNF

Bibliothèque nationale de France [National Library of France]

CAC

Centre des archives contemporaines [French Centre for national contemporary archives]

CAFJU Conseil d’administration de la fondation ‘Jardins Ungemach’ [Board of the Ungemach Gardens Foundation] C.C.

Cheminements chinois [Chinese paths; typescript by Alfred Dachert]

CUS

Communauté urbaine de Strasbourg [Urban community of Strasbourg]

ER

Eugenics Review

FFEPH Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (‘Fondation Carrel’) [French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, ‘Carrel Foundation’] INED Institut national d’études démographiques [National Institute for Demographic Studies] INOP Institut National d’Orientation Professionnelle Institute for Vocational Counselling]

[National

IUSSP International Union for the Scientific Study of Population

Abbreviations xvii

MSPP Ministère de la Santé publique et de la Population [Ministry of Public Health and Population] SGF

Statistique générale de la France [General statistics of France]

VWW Vom Werden eines Werks [On the becoming of a work; typescript by Alfred Dachert].

Note The manuscripts Cheminements chinois [Chinese paths] and Vom Werden eines Werks [On the becoming of a work] are part of the personal archives of François Dachert that are now available at Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, Fonds Maurice Olender (Rosental, Destins de l’eugénisme, 2016).

Introduction

S Several years ago, while going through the archives that the director of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), François Héran, had just opened for historical research, my attention was drawn to a thick document folded several times. I opened it carefully. Short sentences. Figures. Graphs. A large poster gradually unfolded before me. It was designed to be viewed and read from a distance, or by a small crowd, and was clearly intended for a hygiene exhibition – I would later find out it was for the one that was held in Strasbourg in 1935. Its content, reproduced below (Figure 0.1), was surprising. Entitled ‘The Ungemach Gardens in Strasbourg’, it touted the ‘successful results’ achieved over the past eleven years by a garden city ‘built on a charming site at the outskirts of the city of Strasbourg’. The goal of this ‘creation with eugenic designs was to promote the development of valuable elements of society and to help them advance more quickly than others’, through the ‘deliberate selection of young households in good health’ who could rent a house in the city ‘at a low price while their family grew’. These results were quantified and compared. The garden city of Ungemach had a much higher birth rate than Strasbourg and France. Infant health, measured by the mortality rate for children under two, was ‘above the average’ for the city. As they grew, the children’s height and weight exceeded those of their French and German counterparts. Living in the garden city even improved the parents: their ‘level of orderliness and cleanliness’, which a commission rated annually on a scale of one to ten, had progressed from 7.7 to 9.5 since they had moved there. The data demonstrated the success of the ambitious mission entrusted to the city: to increase ‘the number of valuable elements in the society of tomorrow’ – already quite a task – and even more, to help ‘guide human evolution towards more rapid advancement’. I could have just scoffed or expressed outrage at this eugenic profession of faith. But for a historian, mockery mainly reflects the laziness of

2 A Human Garden

the living in understanding what have become the unclear rationales of the dead. As for indignation, after ironically labelling it ‘holy’, Michel Foucault prophetically warned that ‘experience shows that we can and should reject [its] theatrical role’:1 he thought it better to think and act. This cautionary note is all the more relevant since eugenics, from the very beginning and throughout its history, has been rebutted in other ways than hindsight claims to moral superiority.2 What bothered me about the document was, first of all, that I could not place it. What was this experiment? Why was its presentation to the general public included in the papers of one of the most diligent and creative demographers of the twentieth century, Louis Henry, who founded the discipline of historical demography in the 1950s? The interest of Alfred Sauvy, one of the great ‘modernizing experts’ of France during its postwar economic boom, deepened the mystery. In a letter dated 26 June 1951, the INED director assured the mayor of Strasbourg, Charles Frey (1888–1955), that his institute was following ‘with great interest the results of this interesting creation with eugenic purposes’.3 Five years earlier, in July 1946, one of Sauvy’s officials, Albert Michot, had submitted a flattering account of the city following a visit.4 This correspondence raised a new question. What did this explicit embrace of eugenics mean, six years after the end of the Second World War, in a country like France, which was thought to have remained steadfastly immune to such scientistic and anti-egalitarian ideology? What light does it shed on the work of an author like Sauvy who was then in the process of choosing the title Biologie sociale [Social biology] for the second volume of his magnum opus, Théorie générale de la population [General theory of population]?5 These strange ‘Ungemach Gardens’ had cut me loose from familiar moorings: a rare occurrence in historical research on contemporary France that was unsettling… and fascinating. Initial documentary research assured me that this was more than an anecdotal curiosity. The Ungemach Gardens, a small twelve-hectare garden city located in northeast Strasbourg’s Wacken neighbourhood, were an architectural pride of the city, for their green urbanism and their 140 little houses built shortly after 1920 in a nineteenth-century Alsatian style. They received sustained coverage in interwar architectural journals,6 and have been the subject of numerous and valuable works – research articles, theses and dissertations – by architectural and urban historians in Strasbourg and elsewhere.7 However, with regard to the garden city’s ideology and principles that Alfred Sauvy found so appealing, historiography was mostly silent, or exclusively focused on their pronatalist aspects. They were only seriously

Introduction 3

Figure 0.1. Performance of Ungemach Gardens (poster for the 1935 hygiene exhibition in Strasbourg). CAC 20010307 9 Louis Henry papers.

4 A Human Garden

and fully considered in four pages of the seminal book by the American William H. Schneider on French interwar eugenics,8 as well as two university theses that tried to relate the content of the experience to its urban form.9 An unfortunate amnesia! From their creation in the 1920s through the 1960s, the Ungemach Gardens were nationally and internationally renowned for what they were, that is, a place where a vigorous pronatalist and eugenic policy was being pursued. In 1925 Ungemach served as a showcase for Strasbourg during the visit of French Prime Minister Paul Painlevé. Besides the routine institutional visits it was one of the four sites selected by the Commissioner of the Republic in Strasbourg to receive him.10 Beginning in 1931, the founding journal of British eugenics, Eugenics Review, successively opened its columns to a presentation of the experiment and then of its ‘results’,11 before providing a full translation of the 1935 poster.12 Over the decade the journal included twelve additional references – articles, conference and book reviews and letters to the editor – expressing enthusiasm for this ‘first practical implementation of positive eugenics’, which authors and readers hoped would soon be replicated in the United Kingdom and expanded more broadly.13 In 1933 Paul Popenoe, a well-known popularizer of eugenics in the United States, paid a glowing tribute to Ungemach in the final edition of the most widely read textbook on the issue at the time, Applied Eugenics.14 Six years later, in his fiercely anti-republican pamphlet Pleins pouvoirs [Full powers], the famous writer Jean Giraudoux praised the ‘remarkable efforts undertaken by Strasbourg’ as the main exception to what he considered the unfortunate absence of ‘either an empirical or theoretical state doctrine on eugenics’ in France.15 In 1946 the Californian businessman Charles Matthias Goethe (1875–1966), a pioneer of nature conservation, patron of the University of Sacramento and committed eugenicist, focused on Ungemach Gardens, which he had just toured, in a book advocating for a kind of botanical eugenics.16 In the 1950s and 1960s INED requested annual population statistics from the garden city, which also received sympathetic attention from the Ministry of Public Health and Population. The experiment was started by a non-profit foundation, but the city of Strasbourg took over on 1 January 1950 and, as will be seen, continued to support it until the mid-1980s. By staying on the scientific and political radar for so long at both the national and international levels, the Ungemach experiment, despite its small size – or thanks to it, microhistory would argue – can help to delineate a phenomenon that is extremely difficult to grasp: French eugenics in the twentieth century. Just twenty years ago, the consensus was still that apart from the initiatives of a few zealots around 1900 and the

Introduction 5

introduction of a premarital medical examination by the Vichy regime, France had remained immune to eugenics.17 This idea of a national exception most often referred to conceptual considerations. Republicanism was seen as a safeguard against the non-egalitarian aspirations of this scientistic creed.18 French scientists’ embrace of neo-Lamarckism was not conducive to the acceptance of the Galtonian eugenics invented across the channel that primarily focused on hereditary transmission.19 Another factor, common to all the ‘Latin’ countries, was the Catholic Church’s opposition, which was formalized with the publication of the papal encyclical Casti Connubii on 31 December 1930. Leaving aside the Gospel’s laudatory account of the simple-minded, this aversion reflected one of the watchwords of political Catholicism during the interwar period: the emphasis on ‘Life’ with a capital L placed by pro-family associations went hand in hand with the rejection of eugenic tools such as sterilization and abortion. In England, the birthplace of eugenics, the famous Catholic author Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) had derided eugenics as a pagan ideology based on a cult of technology and of the state, and on its supporters’ impious assertion of a hierarchy of human beings.20 A second explanation given for France’s opposition to eugenics – an explanation mistakenly believed to automatically bolster the previous one – was the strength of pronatalism. In a country where fertility had started declining at the end of the Old Regime, that is, several decades before the rest of Europe, the conviction that the country’s power depended on its number of births started to spread in the 1860s in response to the Prussian military threat. On the eve, and especially in the aftermath of the First World War, it took hold in the political and administrative spheres and translated into a fledgling demographic policy. The common sense argument was that if France was pronatalist it could not be eugenic, too hastily setting population quantity against quality. As in many other countries,21 the 1980s saw the first challenges to this entrenched view. The Foucauldian exhortation to revisit the ideological genealogy and connotations of knowledge encouraged a critical reassessment of the prevailing heroic history of French public policies, especially on demographic matters. Two overlooked issues suddenly became controversial in the academic community, before being picked up by the media. Significantly, both relate to the criminal record of the Vichy regime, which was also put in the spotlight after a long period of inattention. The first concerns the policy of elimination through starvation to which the insane were allegedly subjected during the Occupation. In 1987 the physician Max Lafont denounced this ‘soft extermination’, tragically embodied in the figure of Camille Claudel, who starved to death in 1943 and was the hero of a 1988 movie by Bruno Nuytten.22

6 A Human Garden

The second controversy, which is not unrelated to the first, concerns the legacy of Alexis Carrel (1873–1944). This French surgeon left to pursue his career in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and received a Nobel Prize in 1912, making medical history with the advances he enabled in the critical area of transplants. His 1935 bestseller Man, the Unknown, a scientistic essay on the relations between nature and society, remained a library staple for ‘men of culture’ through the 1960s and was reprinted several times until the very end of the twentieth century. But as Carrel became an icon of the French New Right in the 1970s and ’80s, historiography started denouncing the eugenics of his sociobiological, deterministic and elitist thinking that was merciless towards the ‘weak’. Once again, the Vichy period was at the heart of the debate since the surgeon had returned to France during the Occupation and was entrusted by Marshal Pétain with the leadership of the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems (FFEPH). This major institute for research and studies popularly known as the ‘Carrel Foundation’ primarily focused on the relations between biology, economics and social sciences.23 And yet again there was both a historiographical and media aspect to the argument. Although some historians tried to put Carrel’s eugenics into perspective, the controversy led the Claude Bernard University in Lyon to rename its Alexis-Carrel medical school in 1996; many French streets were also renamed.24 In the 2000s, the first controversy abated while the second grew. The historian Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen conducted a thorough investigation of the ‘soft extermination’ and found that the excess mortality of the insane from starvation resulted more from exacerbated conditions of undernourishment in asylums during the Occupation than from a deliberate policy, in the broader context of a breakdown in relations between the families of the insane, doctors and psychiatric institutions.25 Meanwhile, evidence of Alexis Carrel’s ideology was confirmed.26 While he certainly made a significant contribution to science, the doctor from Lyon was part of the generation of Anglo-American scholars who started their careers at the beginning of the twentieth century and adopted an extreme deterministic conception of the transmission of hereditary characteristics. Historian Garland E. Allen described these scholars as an ‘older style eugenics movement’, in contrast to their younger counterparts, who shared many eugenic values but started questioning hereditary determinism in the 1920s.27 Another interesting point is that Carrel was also known to be a devout Catholic, challenging the notion that it is impossible to reconcile these two ideologies.28 This initial double focus on the Vichy regime was only natural. It echoed the most famous and darkest aspects of the history of eugenics,

Introduction 7

namely the way the movement unfolded in various states that practised forced sterilization in insane asylums – there was a thin line between compulsory sterilization by doctors and ‘voluntary’ sterilization consented to by patients and their family – and, of course, the mass extermination policies of Nazi Germany.29 Although the great historian Paul Weindling has shown that the eugenic path does not necessarily lead to Nazism,30 it is obvious that extermination ideology was closely based on eugenic arguments believed to be backed by science, and that its massive appeal resulted from the easy but devastating combination of these arguments with ways of thinking developed over what might be called the ‘racial century’ that began around 1850.31 Following this first critical review phase, over the past twenty years a series of works have undertaken the difficult task of extricating the vast body that eugenics represented in the twentieth century from its criminal uses. The task is difficult in several respects. First of all, other manifestations of eugenics that were retrospectively obscured are akin to a geological repository and require working through the archaeology of knowledge and policy. In an initial assessment of this extrication process made in 1998, the sinologist Frank Dikötter underscored its global nature: ‘soft approaches, which combined an emphasis on the environment with hereditarian explanations, were far more widespread than previously suspected … . Neo-Lamarckian notions were more important than strictly Mendelian explanations, an emphasis that supported a preventive approach to eugenics in which the environment had to be cleansed of all deleterious factors damaging racial health’ (bearing in mind that at the beginning of the twentieth century the semantic range of the word ‘race’ extended from outright racism to sanitary concerns about impacting the public health of a nation). As there is now mounting evidence of the importance of neo-Lamarckism in such diverse countries as Russia, Brazil, China and France between the two world wars, Dikötter continues, a radical reassessment of its scientific and political meanings seems seriously overdue. A fresh historical appraisal of the available material that included countries outside Europe might reveal that the hard Mendelian eugenics familiar from studies of Britain and Germany was not a dominant approach in many developing parts of the world.32 The Dutch historian rightly added that in order to understand the degree of support for eugenics in the interwar period, this reassessment required a shift away from simply focusing on the movement’s leaders towards studying its ‘anonymous supporters’ and its dissemination in popular culture.33

8 A Human Garden

This double change in emphasis had major implications. The idealist history of ideas created an analytical classification of the arguments involved – distinguishing between eugenics and social Darwinism for example34 – that was essential but not sufficient. Eugenics is a set of ideological discourses that originated in certain elites’ fear of being demographically overwhelmed by undesirable groups due to the latter’s higher fertility rates. These often-repetitive discourses were dramatic and sensationalist, even by today’s standards, and too easily provoke contemporary ‘repulsive fascination’.35 But it is harder, if one takes a step back from the tragic extremes of mass murder and forced sterilization, to pinpoint the actual role of eugenics in public and private action. The process requires carrying out the difficult task of tracing a social history of scientific and political ideas – or, to use the elegant and accurate expression of Jean-Claude Perrot, a concrete history of abstraction.36 A review of the literature is not enough. The dissemination of ideas needs to be tracked, as does their appropriation by people, environments and various institutions, their reformulation following exposure to other theoretical frameworks, and especially the reality check provided by their implementation. In so doing, ‘ideas’ no longer remain neatly contained in analytically organized drawers, but rather reveal their infinite plasticity and their ability to produce ‘rationally’ improbable arrangements. They become ‘malleable through time, space and the contingency of events’ to the extent that ‘even the most doctrinaire of ideologies still constitutes a potentially ephemeral internal coalition of ideas – its indeterminacy and pluralism cannot be overridden for too long’.37 The gap between formulated thought and emerging thought – I am transposing Bruno Latour’s famous dichotomy here38 – certainly applies to the history of political ideas in general. However, it is a particular challenge for eugenics. Since its emergence in the first two decades of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom, eugenics took distinct paths following different timelines in various countries. But in all cases, from the outset it met strong opposition that was equal parts knee-jerk and theoretical. The aversion to eugenics, its non-egalitarianism and its coercive thrust with regard to marriage and procreation is attributable to the entrenchment of political liberalism in the anthropology of contemporary Western societies. In countries like France, the United Kingdom and the United States, eugenicists deplored and denounced the mocking of their ideal in a number of texts: ‘The picture of society organized as a studfarm arouses disgust. It is sometimes feared that the Eugenic programme would involve the destruction of normal family life and the mutual affection upon which it is based. To favour the “successful types” it may be argued, would result in the evolution of hard, unlovely characters’.39

Introduction 9

This rejection may have been beneficial for civil society, but in retrospect has proven costly for the historian: depending on the country, era, environment and terms of expression, the history of doctrinaire eugenics appears at times to be a lot of talk, and at others, deliberate concealment. The best example of the latter during Vichy is the history of the Carrel Foundation. While it was free of the constraints of publicity that a parliamentary democracy and free press ordinarily entail, the Foundation was reluctant to display the combination of eugenics and heredity in the presentation of its programmes.40 An example of the consequent difficulty in understanding the contours of this subject is the political and scientific programme that was self-described as ‘Latin eugenics’ in the 1930s. This programme extended from Romania to Argentina, including France, Italy, Mexico and much of South America, and culminated in a meeting in Paris in 1937.41 It requires a shift in emphasis to more diffuse, more diverse and less sensational – but still structuring – ways of addressing the ‘quality of the population’.42 Analysis of Latin eugenics reveals ‘new’ social spaces, covering health, social, demographic and other applications, where eugenics was manifested in less spectacular ways: not just doctors and geneticists but also statisticians and economists; not just eugenic societies but also those focusing on biotypology; not just sterilizations but also academic guidance, occupational health, urbanism, marriage counselling, sexual education, prenatal care, sorting of foreign and internal migrants, treatment of ethnic minorities and so on.43 The difficulty here is to exhibit the subject without either hypostatizing or diluting it, to understand its coherence (in terms of doctrine as well as scholarly and expert networks) while observing its amalgamation and transformation in a vortex of racist, hygienist, nationalist, progressive, feminist and other aspirations. In some respects, this contrast between a coercive eugenics with high visibility and a more discreet preventive eugenics recalls the opposition between ‘negative’ or punitive eugenics oriented towards eliminating undesirables (through murder or sterilization, as well as disincentives to marriage and procreation) and ‘positive’ eugenics characterized by social hygiene measures. However, one should be wary of this ideal dichotomy, which was created by a follower of Francis Galton, the man who founded eugenics in 1883, or more precisely, who thus labelled and systematized a body of doctrines that had been developing throughout the nineteenth century.44 Be it ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, eugenics must be considered as a whole,45 initially conceived as one of the last retaliatory responses in the (not always latent) civil war that unfolded for over a century in the aftermath of the French Revolution.46 As a product of the growing authority of science, it represented an attempt at a reasoned argument against the

10 A Human Garden

principle of equality among citizens that progressively spread in liberal democracies during the nineteenth century, a time of arduous struggle for universal male suffrage and the dismantling of legal barriers to social mobility. A case in point is the argument of the Oxford philosopher Ferdinand Schiller (1864–1937), proponent of a ‘eugenic aristocracy’: the real argument for political equality is not that men are born equal, but that they are born so unequal in so many ways, and that society requires such a variety of services, that the only practicable form of political organization is to ignore their inequalities and to give votes to all, and then to trust to the intelligent few to manipulate or cajole the many into abstaining from fatal follies.47

This served as a basis for a wide variety of ideological uses. Just as eugenics might equally well promote ‘the improvement of the quality of the population’ or condemn its ‘degeneration’, it was conducive to both creating biologically based social hierarchies and advancing social reform projects. While eugenics most often served conservative and reactionary movements seeking to ‘scientifically’ legitimize the social order, it also helped to support progressive approaches seeking to ‘improve the quality’ of dominated populations, or even to challenge the social reproduction of elites with a hierarchy based on merit and the inherent potential of individuals. However, underlying these various appropriations is a deeper substrate that cannot be ignored: in all cases eugenics presupposes that people or groups are of different value, which is deemed measurable and, through a wide variety of means, improvable – or to the contrary, degradable to the point of violating ethical principles of preservation of life.48 Beyond the fact that it has proven to be a protean concept across a range of historical situations, eugenics arguably did not begin as a primarily biological theory but rather as a social theory, or even, as will be seen, a moral theory based on three axioms: (1) there is a difference in the quality of human beings; (2) this difference can be measured by certain scholars and experts; (3) it is subject to change at the scale of populations. One of the thrusts of this book will be to explore how theories and policies that implicitly or explicitly rank people came to be implemented and legitimized in a political democracy based on the principle of equality. This process will be complicated by the difficulty of determining the boundaries of eugenics as well as a challenge that one might call civic. To treat eugenics as a subject of history precludes both simple condemnation and blind euphemization. To avoid these two pitfalls, I will follow the ‘pragmatic’ and quasi-ethnographic approach used in many contemporary social science studies, starting with microhistory. Born

Introduction 11

of the historiography of the early modern era, microhistory has to my knowledge rarely been applied to twentieth-century mass politics, even though its recent application to the history of the Shoah has demonstrated its insightfulness.49 Despite the rich historiographical discussion of the 1990s,50 references to ‘microhistory’ and ‘games of scales’ are too often used to re-legitimize the monograph – a worthwhile but more restricted approach. Yet the two are quite different. Microhistory goes beyond the ‘grassroots’ by selecting both ‘exceptional and normal’ elements to observe that are often out of step with the most common social forms; understanding these elements requires and facilitates illuminating entire swathes of the society within which they operate. This constraint does not allow for the application of a preset model. In the present case it will lead me to focus more on the history of institutions and knowledge, including literature since the Ungemach Gardens project was largely written in the language of tragic theatre. The history of the eugenic garden city (and of its creator) will be the subject of one of this book’s three parts. It will to a large extent form my ‘field’, but not my subject: I will rather seek to build on its heuristic and one might say experimental interest. This interest does not only lie in the fact that the British followers of Galton saw the Ungemach Gardens as the first ‘practical’ realization of ‘positive’ eugenics. It also and primarily lies in a double paradox. First, while a German- and English-speaking businessman, Alfred Dachert, developed the concept of the Ungemach Gardens in the first two decades of the twentieth century in German Alsace, the project was actually implemented in France – except during the Second World War – with the support of national and municipal public authorities. The garden city’s history thus tests one of the boundaries of the history of eugenics, that is, the opposition between the ‘social hygienist’ Latin eugenics I briefly outlined and the more hereditarian basis of original eugenics, which took root in the United States and Northwestern Europe, spanning the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia. There were certainly different styles of national eugenics that portrayed themselves as such and distinguished themselves or even explicitly opposed each other,51 but historiography, especially when focusing on practices, points to the limitations of the dichotomy between a preventive and environmental Latin world and a hereditarian and punitive Nordic world.52 One of my goals will therefore be to figure out how the modus operandi of a residential area designed according to British eugenics principles was grasped, accepted and even endorsed by the French government. The issue is all the more relevant considering that the experiment began as a privately managed one in 1923, but had a long run under city

12 A Human Garden

management after the Second World War, with the support of the state in both cases. This brings us to the second paradox of the history of the Ungemach Gardens: for the most part – forty years – it unfolded after the collapse of the Third Reich, which one would have thought had completely discredited eugenics. My subject will gradually take form in the resolution of this double paradox. Transatlantic and Western European eugenics as well as, and perhaps especially, the expansion of public policies, the creation of social security, and more generally the conscious effort to remake society during the twentieth century, will shape this book’s scope of thought. I am obviously not claiming that I will exhaustively address such broad topics. My more modest goal is to attempt to use the history of a eugenic neighbourhood in Strasbourg as a means to raise a number of issues that haunt our history and cloud our perception of the present.

Notes  1. Michel Foucault, ‘Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme’, in Dits et écrits, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 1526–27 [orig. ed. 1984].  2. Franz Boas, ‘Eugenics’, The Scientific Monthly, 3, 5, 1916, pp. 471–78.  3. Strasbourg urban community archives [Arch. CUS], 269 W 64 and National archives, INED collection [French national institute for demographic studies], Louis Henry papers, 20010307/9.  4. Albert Michot, Rapport sur la fondation “Les Jardins Ungemach”, à Strasbourg, Paris, INED library archives, 1946, no 3071.  5. Alfred Sauvy, Théorie générale de la population, vol. 2, Biologie sociale, Paris, PUF, 1954.  6. Jean Porcher, ‘Les “Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, L’Architecte, 4, 1927, pp. 33–38; Stéphane Claude, ‘La “Cité-Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, Urbanisme, 1, 1932, pp. 182–85.  7. Jeanne Boulfroy, Le Problème de la ville moderne: la cité jardin, doctoral thesis supervised by Étienne de Groër, Institute of Urbanism at the University of Paris, 1940; Stéphane Jonas, ‘Les Jardins Ungemach à Strasbourg: une cité-jardin d’origine nataliste (1923– 1950)’, in Paulette Girard and Bruno Fayolle Lussac (eds), Cités, cités-jardins: une histoire européenne, Talence, MSHA publications, 1996, pp. 65–85; Jonas, ‘Les Jardins Ungemach: une cité-jardin patronale d’origine nataliste’, in L’Urbanisme à Strasbourg au XXe siècle. Actes des conférences organisées dans le cadre des 100 ans de la cité-jardin du Stockfeld, City of Strasbourg, 2010, pp. 50–64. Also see this Introduction, n. 9. I was not able to review the architecture thesis of Anne Staub, Cités-Jardins à Strasbourg, 1976, the first part of which is devoted to Ungemach garden city.  8. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: Eugenics and the Biological Regeneration of Twentieth-Century France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, here pp. 124–28. Also see Jean-Noël Missa and Charles Susanne (eds), De l’eugénisme d’État à l’eugénisme privé, Paris and Brussels, De Boeck Université, 1999, p. 17, n. 30.

Introduction 13

 9. Catherine Lavanant, La cité-jardin Ungemach à Strasbourg, 1923–1929, Master’s thesis in art history for the University of Strasbourg supervised by François Loyer, 1991, call number MAIT/1991/LAV at the University of Strasbourg and, more impressionistically, Gina Marie Greene in the fifth chapter of Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for Children during the Third Republic in France (1870-1940), doctoral thesis in architecture supervised by Edward Eigen, Princeton University, 2012.  10. Cf. ch. 1, n. 49.  11. Alfred Dachert, ‘Positive Eugenics in Practice: An Account of the First Positive Eugenic Experiment’, Eugenics Review [ER], 23, 1, 1931, pp. 15–18; Dachert, ‘Les Jardins Ungemach: Child Development’, ER, 23, 4, 1932, p. 336; Dachert, ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’, ER, 25, 2, 1933, p. 105.  12. ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’, ER, 27, 3, 1935, pp. 230–31.  13. R. Austin Freeman, ‘Segregation of the Fit: A Plea for Positive Eugenics’, ER, 23, 3, 1931, pp. 207–13; ‘Notes of the Quarter’, ER, 23, 1, 1931, pp. 3–6; Charles Wicksteed Armstrong, ‘Positive Eugenics in Practice’, ER, 23, 2, 1931, p. 188; Armstrong, ‘The Insufficiency of Education’, ER, 23, 4, 1932, pp. 316–17; R. Austin Freeman, ‘Social Decay and Eugenical Reform’, ER, 24, 1, 1932, pp. 47–49; ‘The Society’s Further Projects’, ER, 24, 1, 1932, pp. 12–13; ‘Notes of the Quarter’, ER, 24, 2, 1932, pp. 83–86; George Short, ‘Eugenics and Socialism’, ER, 24, 2, 1932, pp. 164–65; Charles Wicksteed Armstrong, ‘A Eugenic Colony Abroad: A Proposal for South America’, ER, 25, 2, 1933, pp. 91–97; J.H. Marshall, ‘A Scheme of Practical Eugenics’, ER, 30, 2, 1938, pp. 154–56; Charles Wicksteed Armstrong, ‘A Scheme of Practical Eugenics’, ER, 30, 3, 1938, p. 226; Armstrong, ‘Eugenic Garden City’, ER, 31, 1, 1939, p. 77.  14. Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics, New York, Macmillan, 1933 [orig. ed. 1918]. On the popularity of this book, see Will B. Provine, ‘Geneticists and the Biology of Race Crossing’, Science, 182, 4114, 1973, pp. 790–96, here p. 791.  15. Jean Giraudoux, Pleins pouvoirs, Paris, Gallimard, 1950 [orig. ed. 1939], pp. 33–34.  16. Charles M. Goethe, War Profits… and Better Babies, Sacramento, CA, Keystone Press, 1946.  17. See the historiographical overview provided by Anne Carol in the introduction to her Histoire de l’eugénisme en France, Paris, Seuil, 1998 (as well as chapter 13 on the history of the prenuptial certificate).  18. Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘L’introduction de l’eugénisme en France: du mot à l’idée’, Mots, 26, 1991, pp. 23–45.  19. Yvette Conry, L’Introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle, Paris, Vrin, 1974; Jacques Léonard, ‘Le premier congrès international d’eugénique (Londres, 1912) et ses conséquences françaises’, Histoire des sciences médicales, 17, 2, 1983, pp. 141–46.  20. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, London, Cassell, 1922.  21. Lene Koch, ‘Past Futures: On the Conceptual History of Eugenics – A Social Technology of the Past’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 18, 3–4, 2006, pp. 329–44. Major works created in this context include Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1985; Richard A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England 1877– 1930, Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1982. Among the major contemporary documentary resources, cf. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; Patrick Tort (ed.), Dictionnaire du darwinisme et de l’évolution, Paris, PUF, 1996. Also see the effective summary by Jakob Tanner, ‘Eugenics before 1945’, Journal of Modern European History, 10, 4, 2012, pp. 458–79.

14 A Human Garden

 22. Max Lafont, L’Extermination douce: la mort de 40 000 malades mentaux dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques en France, sous le régime de Vichy, Le Cellier (44), Éd. de l’AREFPPI, 1987.  23. Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945, Éd. Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1992; Paul-André Rosental, Population, the State, and National Grandeur: Demography as a Political Science in Modern France, Berne, Peter Lang, 2018, ch. 3 [orig. ed. 2003].  24. See Lucien Bonnafé and Patrick Tort, L’Homme, cet inconnu? Alexis Carrel, Jean-Marie Le Pen et les chambres à gaz, Paris, Syllepse, 1992.  25. Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, L’Hécatombe des fous: la famine dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques français sous l’Occupation, Paris, Aubier, 2007.  26. Andrés H. Reggiani, God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline, New York, Berghahn Books, 2007; Marie Jaisson and Éric Brian, ‘Les races dans l’espèce humaine’, in Maurice Halbwachs, Alfred Sauvy et al., Le Point de vue du nombre (1936), critical edition by both authors, Éd. de l’INED, 2005, pp. 25–51, here pp. 46–49.  27. Garland E. Allen, ‘The Misuse of Biological Hierarchies: The American Eugenics Movement, 1900–1940’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 5, 1983, pp. 105–28, here pp. 125–26.  28. Alexis Carrel’s spiritual writings include Prayer, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1947; The Voyage to Lourdes, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1950; Reflections on Life, New York, Hawthorn Books, 1952. For a broader review of the Catholic Church’s attitude towards eugenics (and marriage), see Étienne Lepicard, ‘Eugenics and Roman Catholicism. An Encyclical Letter in Context: Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930’, Science in Context, 11, 3–4, 1998, pp. 527–44 and, for detailed analyses of the content and limitations of accommodations between eugenicists and Catholics, see Sharon M. Leon, ‘“Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Pre-suppositions”: Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s’, Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences, 59, 1, 2004, pp. 3–49; Donald J. Dietrich, ‘Catholic Eugenics in Germany, 1920–1945: Hermann Muckermann, S. J. and Joseph Mayer’, Journal of Church & State, 34, 3, 1992, pp. 575–600; Britta McEwen, ‘Welfare and Eugenics: Julius Tandler’s Rassenhygienische Vision for Interwar Vienna’, Austrian History Yearbook, 41, 2010, pp. 170–90.  29. Ian Dowbiggin, The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; Paul A. Lombardo (ed.), A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2011; Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2008; Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 2005; Randall Hansen and Desmond King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Paul Weindling, ‘International Eugenics: Swedish Sterilization in Context’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 24, 2, 1999, pp. 179–97; Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘Esterilizadas en nombre de la salud pública: raza, inmigración y control reproductivo en California en el siglo XX’, Salud Colectiva, 2, 2, 2006, pp. 173–89.  30. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.  31. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the “Racial Century”: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, 36, 4, 2002, pp. 7–36. For a longer historical perspective, see Maurice Olender, Race and Erudition, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009.

Introduction 15

 32. Frank Dikötter, ‘Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics’, American Historical Review, 103, 2, 1998, pp. 467–78, here pp. 473–74.  33. Ibid., p. 475. On the dissemination of this eugenic culture, cf. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (eds), Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2006.  34. Unlike Galtonian eugenics in particular, Darwinism is not strictly hereditarian. Furthermore, the concept of ‘social Darwinism’ encompasses a cluster of theories that are Darwinian in name only, the tendency being to retain the Spencerian notion of ‘struggle for life’. Cf. Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Eugénisme ou décadence? L’exception française’, Ethnologie Française, 24, 1, 1994, pp. 81–103; Daniel Becquemont, ‘Une régression épistémologique: le “darwinisme social”’, Espaces Temps, 84–86, 2004, pp. 91–105.  35. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La Pratique de l’esprit humain: L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 153.  36. Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Éds de l’EHESS, 1992.  37. Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 132.  38. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987.  39. C.J. Hamilton, ‘The Relation of Eugenics to Economics’, ER, 3, 4, 1912, pp. 287–305, here p. 291. Among countless others, the sexologist Havelock Ellis recognized that forbidding a fraction of the population from marrying ‘was clearly an impracticable demand, scarcely to be allowed by social opinion …. The inevitable result was that eugenics was constantly misunderstood, ridiculed’ (Havelock Ellis, ‘Birth Control and Eugenics’, ER, 9, 1, 1917, pp. 32–41, here p. 35).  40. Cf. ch. 4, n. 56.  41. Premier congrès latin d’eugénique, Paris, 1er–3 août 1937, Paris, Masson, 1938.  42. Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2011; Andrés H. Reggiani, ‘Dépopulation, fascisme et eugénisme “latin” dans l’Argentine des années 1930’, Le Mouvement social, 1, 2010, pp. 7–26; as well as the (premature?) synthesis by Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.  43. Nancy L. Stepan, The ‘Hour of Eugenics’: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991; Julia Rodriguez, Civilizing Argentina: Science Medicine and the Modern State, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Belén Jiménez-Alonso, ‘Eugenics, Sexual Pedagogy and Social Change: Constructing the Responsible Subject of Governmentality in the Spanish Second Republic’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39, 2, 2008, pp. 247–54; Andrés Reggiani and Hernán González Bollo, ‘Dénatalité, “crise de la race” et politiques démographiques en Argentine (1920–1940)’, Vingtième Siècle, 95, 3, 2007, pp. 29–44; Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Nationalism, and Welfare in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920–1940’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 12, 4, 1999, pp. 369–97; Joel Outtes, ‘Disciplining Society through the City: The Genesis of City Planning in Brazil and Argentina (1894–1945)’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 22, 2, 2003, pp. 137–64; Yolanda Eraso, ‘Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81, 4, 2007, pp. 793–822; Marisa A. Miranda, ‘La biotipología en el pronatalismo argentino (1930–1983)’, Asclepio, 57,

16 A Human Garden

 44.

 45.

 46.  47.  48.  49. 50.

 51.  52.

1, 2005, pp. 189–218; Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–1960’, in Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003, pp. 187–210. Francis Galton created a definition of eugenics in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, London, Macmillan, 1883, p. 17, n. 1. For more on his specific contribution, see the critical review by John C. Waller, ‘Ideas of Heredity, Reproduction and Eugenics in Britain, 1800–1875’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science, 32c, 3, 2001, pp. 457–89 and Diane B. Paul and Benjamin Day, ‘John Stuart Mill, Innate Differences, and the Regulation of Reproduction’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, C39, 2008, pp. 222–31. ; Ted Porter, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018. The essayist Caleb W. Saleeby, in Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics, London, Cassell, 1909, p. 172, claims to have created the dichotomy between positive eugenics and negative eugenics that was ‘approved by Mr. Galton’. In his mind, ‘the two are complementary, and are both practiced by Nature: natural selection is one with natural rejection. To choose is to refuse’ [my emphasis]. Furet, François. The French Revolution: 1770–1814, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996; Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, New York, Pantheon Books, 1981. Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, ‘Eugenics as a Moral Ideal’, ER, 22, 2, 1930, pp. 103–9, here pp. 107–8. Also see Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, New York, H. Liveright, 1929. Richard Weikart, ‘Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859– 1920’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63, 2002, pp. 323–44, here p. 334. Tal Bruttmann et al. (eds), Pour une microhistoire de la Shoah, Paris, Seuil, coll. ‘Le Genre Humain’, 2012. Bernard Lepetit (ed.), Les Formes de l’expérience: une autre histoire sociale, Paris, Albin  Michel, 1995; Jacques Revel (ed.), Jeux d’échelles: la micro-analyse à l’expérience, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 1996; Revel, ‘L’histoire au ras du sol’, Preface in Giovanni Levi, Le Pouvoir au village, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, pp. i–xxxiii. Liliane Crips, ‘Les avatars d’une utopie scientiste en Allemagne: Eugen Fischer (1874– 1967) et l’“hygiène raciale”’, Le Mouvement social, 163, 1993, pp. 7–23 also shows how in Germany ‘“social hygiene” experts saw France as a basket case’ (p. 17). Cf., among many references, Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002; Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001; Ivan Crozier, ‘Havelock Ellis, Eugenicist’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39c, 2, 2008, pp. 187–94; Paul Weindling, ‘The “Sonderweg” of German Eugenics: Nationalism and Scientific Internationalism’, British Journal for the History of Science, 22, 1989, pp. 321–33.

Part I

The Intellectual and Political History of a Human Garden (1880s–1980s)

S Human laboratory, experiential landscape, breeding ground for the ‘elite class’ – this is how you should see the garden-city Ungemach. —Suzanne Herrenschmidt, speech at the awarding of Alfred Dachert with the Legion of Honor, Strasbourg, 11 December 1947

Chapter 1

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation

S A Socialist Paradise for the Middle Class On Sunday 5 October 1923, a new neighbourhood was publicly unveiled in Strasbourg – ‘Ungemach Gardens’, a subdivision of forty houses that was built in the northeastern part of the city, barely two kilometres away from the cathedral, on the Wacken lands that the military had liberated.1 The site was ‘crossed by a small river – the Aar – and the water and old trees gave the site a picturesque and relaxing feel’.2 In line with both the latest standards of comfort – running water, bathroom and laundry room – and the popularity of regional architecture at the time,3 ‘the detached houses, with their terracotta colour, large rooves, outside staircase and white shutters, resembled the houses of small Alsatian cities from 1830’.4 The crowds came. Two hundred and ninety-two households submitted applications during this first phase to rent out forty houses. Interest did not wane as one hundred additional houses were built in the following years. Granted, the city offered young ‘middle-class’ couples rents that were a quarter cheaper than those of the city of Strasbourg’s housing office, not to mention free benefits like the garden. At first glance, the Ungemach Foundation’s generous offer was among a raft of initiatives seeking to address the shortage and high cost of housing. The Great War’s destruction aside, Strasbourg saw its population triple during Germany’s annexation (1871–1919). Before the war, the reformist mayor Rudolf Schwander had seen through the creation

20 A Human Garden

of new, wider roads in the city, embellishment and improved sanitation of buildings.5 After the city’s return to France in 1918, Jacques Peirotes, the city’s first socialist mayor, increased housing aid. Over his sixteen years at the helm, he proved to be ‘the biggest builder of the century in Strasbourg’.6 After Paris and Lille, Strasbourg was the third French city to secure, under the law of 21 July 1922, the reclassification of four-fifths of the former fortified city – in this case a real estate holding of over five hundred hectares. The Cornudet law of 1919 directed each city to implement a development plan:7 while the reclaimed space was to be devoted to a ‘green belt’ non aedificandi,8 the municipality greenlighted the full array of the era’s social housing – low-rent housing known as Habitations à Bon Marché (HBM), allotments and garden-cities.9 Ungemach Gardens was among the latter. The mayor provided the land free of charge and built the roads. In return, the Ungemach Foundation committed to maintaining low rents and transferring the housing development property to the city on 1 January 1950.10 Initial rents, which tracked the municipal cost of living index, ranged between 2,760 and 3,200 F annually. The target market was the small middle class: at the time, the average monthly salary in France was 2,135 F.11 The Peirotes policy was favoured by a legal framework that was specific to the reintegrated French Alsace. Resulting from the Gemeindeordnung of 6 June 1895,12 it provided greater flexibility than national legislation13 and allowed the mayor to pursue broad economic and social interventionism.14 Social housing played a major role here. A generation before the institution of social security in 1945 would relegate it to playing second fiddle, social housing was heir to an era when the ‘social question’ was primarily an urban issue. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, concerns about containing the vices of the working class and regulating rural emigration to the cities and new industrial basins focused on housing policies. In contrast to the degrading assistance provided to the ‘destitute’, these policies were meant to help the ‘working poor’ build an independent and responsible life. This social policy choice was reflected in an 1894 law that offered access to affordable housing through ownership rather than tenancy, principally via municipal and private funding. The moderate socialist Peirotes represented the left wing of the reform network that had been developing and coordinating this policy since the 1890s. He was one of the figureheads of municipal socialism,15 wherein housing played a key role for redistributive and health purposes, as well as for pork-barrel politics. Held up to public obloquy by the communists for his ideological positioning to the right of his party, the French

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 21

Section of the Workers’ International, the socialist Peirotes was forced to seek a constituency beyond working-class voters.16 Just like the social democratic party across the Rhine,17 he turned to the ‘middle class’ that had become a vibrant force due to both the active political mobilization of artisans in Alsace,18 and the growing power of new worker categories: managerial staff in industry, skilled service workers, and women employed in new business sectors. These worker groups were akin to self-employed workers in terms of their standard of living, but differed in their work status, tax situation and right to social benefits.19 In the bilingual Alsace of the 1920s, housing policies also played an important role in transforming the plural expression ‘classes moyennes’ [middle classes] into the equivalent German singular ‘Mittelstand’ [middle class].20 In 1922 Peirotes created and presided over the City of Strasbourg’s Office of Low-Rent Housing,21 which enjoyed a remit that ‘only rivalled that of Paris and Lille’22 in France. He thus deepened a segmented and hierarchical housing policy, ranging from the elimination of slums to homeownership access. The Ungemach Foundation initiative crowned his strategy: it offered the middle class a highly valued proposition, a ‘garden city’. The principle of a garden city had been formalized by the British Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) in a book published in 1898, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and had spread throughout Europe and North America.23 As both a utopic and practical solution, the garden city was a response to problems raised by cities’ exploding populations, offering ‘the working-class elite’24 the possibility of accessing what was considered to be the most politically stabilizing form of housing: an individual house surrounded by a garden that, in addition to its contribution to the domestic economy, would channel the worker’s free time into virtuous activities.25 By 1910 the city of Strasbourg had incorporated the garden city into its collective ‘mid-tier’ rental programmes via the Stockfeld ‘suburbgarden’.26 At the end of Peirotes’ term, this garden was joined by the Alexandre Ribot (1930–1932) garden city, and then the Robertsau garden city, launched in 1934.27 Ungemach Gardens was part of this wave of city-supported initiatives, but it differed from the others in one respect: rather than provide access to homeownership, it offered residents rentals. This apparently minor difference might appear to be attributable to a ‘social’ mission, but it actually masks a very particular approach that went hand in hand with an unprecedented regulation of residents’ lives.

22 A Human Garden

The Selection Ungemach Gardens was not a social housing initiative like the others, although they regularly claimed to be so in order to ensure their continued existence. They were conceived and implemented as an experiment – as a human laboratory seeking to shape the ‘quality of the population’ via a scientific selection of its residents, who contractually committed to meeting childbearing objectives. The initial selection and obligation to procreate were intended to turn the garden city into a ‘breeding ground for elites’, and on a broader scale to test the hypothesis that natural selection mechanisms can be influenced by housing. The centrepiece of this enterprise was its ranking system for candidate households, built on the bedrock principle of selection. This term should be understood in a specific sense: it linked the scholarly concept of ‘natural selection’ popularized by Darwin with an administrative approach to ‘sorting’ and ‘classifying’ households applying for rentals. The Ungemach Foundation wanted to demonstrate that placing well-selected couples in suitable conditions enables the ‘domination of valued elements in the generation of tomorrow and allows these elements to overtake those of lesser value’.28 It is worth examining these selection criteria from the perspective of the applicants by comparing Eugène and Marthe Schumacher, who were selected when they first applied in 1927, and Jean and Marie Simon, who experienced three failures before they gained the right to live in the garden city.29 The two couples shared many traits. The women were both born in 1901 and identified themselves as housewives, which was typical of ‘middle-class’ households at the time. Eugène was born in 1897 and was an office worker at the time of application. His annual salary of 14,655 F was double the French average.30 Jean was four years younger and higher up in the services sector. In 1933, when he and his wife finally gained admission, his job as a customs comptroller was bringing in an annual salary of 20,000 F. This relatively high income penalized the Simons by placing them in the upper middle class. Based on a purportedly scientific approach, the application included fifteen questions and followed a precise methodology to measure what could be called the ‘potential fertility’ of households. First, how many children were they likely to have? The question was approached with an array of data points, starting with the applicants’ ages: husbands had a point removed for each year over thirty years of age; the threshold was lowered to twenty-five years of age for wives. The length of marriage was also taken into account on a sliding scale: young couples were awarded

Figure 1.1. The evaluation of the Schumacher couple. © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg. 99 MW 199.

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 23

24 A Human Garden

a bonus (six points if they were in their first year of marriage, four for second-year marriages, two for third-year marriages), whereas each year beginning with the fourth one resulted in a two-point deduction. Each child already brought into the world was awarded twenty points, but this total was divided by the length of marriage to measure what one might call the rhythm of descendant creation. Thus, the three Schumacher children, born within four years of marriage, provided fifteen points to their parents (that is, 3 times 20 divided by 4). One of the Foundation’s objectives was to minimize the uncertainty linked to the drivers of human procreation: the financial support provided to ‘quality households’ was to be repaid through a virtual guarantee that they would bring many descendants into the world. For this reason, each of the spouses’ living brothers and sisters yielded the applicants a bonus point. This award for what demographers prosaically call ‘useful births’, that is, the births of individuals who survive long enough to reach the age of reproduction, was based on the premise that fertility and life expectancy are both inheritable. This deterministic hypothesis is of a piece with the ‘original’ eugenics – the one that was established in England at the end of the nineteenth century; so was the idea that marriages later in life produce less robust children.31 For the same reasons, poor health was an eliminating factor in practice: fifty points (question 14) were removed if the couple provided a medical certificate, likely because they thought they would improve their odds by providing one. From the outset, this set apart the Foundation’s eugenics approach from the era’s social initiatives. The application then pivoted to intentions. Plans to hire help, house third parties or, for the wife, to practise a profession, were frowned upon, and resulted in applicants being docked fifty points. Herein lay the explanation for the Simon couple’s failure when they first applied in March 1926: ‘the woman works at the prefecture’, a Foundation employee tersely noted. Indeed, the experimentation paired with a clear social gender divide. The mother was expected to be devoted to her children in a complete (no professional activity), direct (no domestic help) and exclusive (no housing of third parties) way. These criteria were loosened at the margins after lessons were drawn from the first wave of rentals: a maid would be ‘tolerated’ for families with four or more children,32 as would be the presence of dependent grandparents in the home. The houses’ interior architecture reflected these criteria. As the local press boasted, the houses ‘were designed with a view to sparing the mother of the family, who must raise many children without the help of a housekeeper, any unnecessary exertion’. Specifically, ‘a laundry room, which also served as a bathroom, was placed next to the dining room so

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 25

Figure 1.2. Interior architecture of Ungemach houses. © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg. 843 W 607/4.

26 A Human Garden

that the mother could, without moving, simultaneously take care of her children, meal cooking and laundry’.33 Even more than panoptic will, this showed the era’s interest in the rationalization of domestic activities. Far from being limited to the Fordist factory, taylorization applied to homes,34 in a bid to minimize parents’ physical effort and ‘stress’. The respective treatment of the two parents was therefore not entirely asymmetrical. Indeed, the garden city first aimed to free the husband from ‘housing concerns’ by ensuring ‘a serene, healthy and calm environment’ to support his professional activity.35 Reflecting the era’s theories about ‘fatigue’ and the ‘human motor’,36 the expectation was that this environment would be conducive to higher professional productivity. But allowing the mother to ‘prepare dinner while also doing laundry without having to run around and without losing sight of her children’,37 and ensuring ‘maximum order for every effort’38 via numerous closets and storage, paradoxically reflected a recognition of her domestic work. During the interwar period, she was provided ‘home delivery of milk, bread, groceries and meat’ so that she would not have to bother ‘getting dressed to run errands’39 and expend energy on ‘useless and tiring movements, waits and chatter’.40 This is also why a kindergarten was built in the garden city in 1928. Protecting the parents’ serenity was a means to encourage them to bring many children into the world and raise them in the best conditions. What appears here is one of this book’s main themes. Eugenics was not just a biological theory. Maximizing the ‘quality’ of children involved taking into account psychological factors. The couples’ behaviour therefore constituted a major assessed element. The invitation to produce names of references (question 13), paired with guaranteed elimination (100-point deduction) in the event of inaccurate information (question 12), was a classical way to test the reliability of applicant couples. But ‘order and cleanliness’ were also verified (question 15). An ad hoc commission visited the homes of preselected applicants: it assessed the insides of homes and administered a ‘questionnaire’, to come up with a score between one and ten.41 A fifty-point deduction was applied for any ‘uncleanliness, disorder or bedbugs’, making them fatal flaws. The visiting commission worked with the disinfector Tschoeppé, who created a business in 1919 that still exists today. For reasons that remain unclear, it was the home visit that sank the Simon couple’s third application. While some of these selection practices were widespread at the time, the Ungemach experiment is an original and exceptional one because it drew on publicly declared eugenic principles that were widely supported

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 27

in France and abroad, and because it went on for decades while continuing to operate on the terms set in 1923. The questionnaire, the scale and the examination remained in place, as will be seen, until the 1980s. And these were just the first phase of the Ungemach experiment. Winners of the entrance examinations also had to meet conditions to remain in the garden city’s houses: cleanliness, behaviour, but also fertility, according to terms that would evolve throughout these six decades. Before going over these, it is important to understand the nature of the Foundation that created and administered Ungemach Gardens.

Private Action or Public Policy? The Ungemach Foundation was represented by two bodies: its Board of Directors, which guided the experiment, and the ‘review board’,42 which was responsible for selecting and inspecting renters. It was administered by an initially benevolent manager, Alfred Dachert (1875–1972), who was assisted by an employee beginning in 1924. The Board of Directors combined private interests and public powers in line with a classical approach in France under the Third Republic (1870–1940). The Foundation provided a platform for the industrial philanthropy behind the experiment. Its first president, Léon Ungemach (1844–1928), had transformed a small family colonial goods business founded in 1812 into a local food industry giant: the Société Alsacienne d’Alimentation [Alsatian food company].43 In 1904, the marriage of his daughter Suzanne to Fernand Herrenschmidt (1865–1938), the descendant of an established local industrial dynasty of tanners, capped this ascension. Since the Foundation’s statutes stipulated that the presidency had to be granted to one of the founder’s family members,44 Fernand presided over it from 1928 to 1938, followed by Suzanne until the transfer to the city in 1950. The president had triple voting rights, as well as a tie-breaking vote in the event of a draw.45 The vice-president Alfred Dachert enjoyed a double vote. Since the latter was an employee of the Ungemach business, it appears that Ungemach’s descendants, with their five votes, including a tie-breaking one, were theoretically assured a majority on the tenmember Board. They nonetheless had to contend with the municipality, and sometimes give ground on essential issues. Besides a law school dean and a ‘retired general living in Strasbourg’, the other administrators represented the public authorities. The state was on the Board via its representative, the Lower Rhine prefect, head of the county in which Strasbourg was located. The city had two representatives:

28 A Human Garden

the mayor and the city doctor (the Drs Belin and, beginning in 1937, Alfred Kuhn).46 The authorities’ participation was not formal. As for the state, as Commissioner-General of the Republic in Strasbourg, the distinguished politician Alexandre Millerand recognized Ungemach Gardens as a ‘public-interest institution’ in a decree of 22 July 1920. The Foundation also benefited from support at the top of the state during difficult negotiations with the military that allowed for military lands to gradually be reclaimed.47 In a letter of 23 May 1925, Paul Painlevé, Prime Minister and Minister of War, touted to the President of the Republic Gaston Doumergue this ‘creation of a garden city offering young households affordable health and wellbeing conditions favourable to the growth of their family’.48 Three months later, on 10 September, Ungemach Gardens was featured as one of only four sites for Painlevé to tour during his visit to Strasbourg.49 As a sign of their investment, the state and municipality participated in virtually all the interwar board meetings.50 They supported expanding the garden city, building one hundred additional houses in successive waves, and developing a school. At the end of the 1920s, the garden city included 132 households and 592 residents.51 The city and the state also each delegated an employee (respectively Mr Kraetz and Mr Arnold) to the ‘review commission’. This was a significant involvement. During the first rental wave it took eight days for the commission, led by Alfred Dachert, to visit the homes of the eightynine eligible applicants and select forty-seven winners.52 Two years later, in April 1925, the sixty-five completed houses drew applications from 663 families, of which ‘the 200 most interesting ones were visited by the commission’, with ninety-seven of them receiving ‘more special attention’.53 This participation in the selection rules out any ambiguity about authorities’ knowledge of the Foundation’s objectives. The state’s agent and municipal employee helped to deliver the ‘eugenic scores’, as well as the order and cleanliness scores according to the scale. These scores were transmitted to and discussed by the board to inform its ‘ranking’ of applicants. The review commission’s public agents also collaborated in the annual inspection of the garden city’s houses and the scoring of residents. This official involvement raises the question of the experiment’s ideological significance. Ungemach Gardens reflected a semi-public policy associating the state and the municipality with a Foundation. The policy was based on an explicit conception of the ‘population’s quantity and quality’ that scientifically made sense at that time, even though it was not universally accepted. It translated into standardized bureaucratic procedures that aimed to establish so-called ‘eugenic’ scores.

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 29

The scoring system was not public but the philosophy guiding it was regularly exposed in the local press and specialized bulletins. Vicepresident Dachert explained how, in order ‘to develop big families, … representing a true moral and physical gain for the country, … a questionnaire enabled determination of applicants’ “eugenic” value through the attribution of points’.54 The president of the Foundation, Suzanne Herrenschmidt, a prominent member of Strasbourg’s industrial jet set, did not hide that the garden city was ‘intended to serve a special category of middle-class families who beat the odds, commit to raising several children according to the traditions of probity and honour and with the habits of order and economy. These families provide our country with leading examples for the population. They form the pool from which great character, talent and even genius often emerge’.55 The local historiography has downplayed the role of public authorities in the experiment by reducing the latter to its pronatalist dimension.56 Can the extent of public authorities’ involvement in all of its ideological aspects be measured? During his term from 1929 to 1935, the mayor Charles Hueber, a dissident communist whose regionalism led him to join the national-socialist party during the Second World War,57 only participated in two of the Foundation’s six board meetings, and reduced their frequency from twice to once a year. He provides a contrast to the level of involvement implied by the attendance of his predecessor, the socialist Jacques Peirotes, and of his successor, the ‘left-wing republican’ Charles Frey (respectively 75 and 100 per cent meeting attendance). However, support from the latter two was far from absolute. Rather, it was the state representative, Henri Borromée, Lower Rhine prefect from 1922 to 1930, who steadfastly supported the Foundation. Among other things, he helped to elevate a contentious issue between the city and Foundation over the development costs of reclaimed military lands:58 Alfred Dachert’s son, François, confirmed to me Borromée’s goodwill towards Ungemach Gardens.59 By comparison, mayoral support was limited on issues requiring budgetary outlays or strong political support. Jacques Peirotes repeatedly refused to reimburse the Foundation for the garden city’s development expenses, and took two years to assign the necessary staff to open a school, in 1928.60 More importantly, the city dropped the ball on plans that had been made in 192761 to double the number of houses, and even develop a ‘twin city’ of two hundred houses62 with the help of a subsidy from the Ministry of Labour.63 Successive mayors stalled until the Second World War64 because they wanted to reserve the land north of the garden city for fairs and exhibitions. One issue gives a sense of where the city’s attitude towards the Ungemach experiment lay on the spectrum from benevolent neutrality

30 A Human Garden

to active support: the targeting of the populations involved in the experiment. The Foundation wanted to prioritize the lower middle class, to whom eugenics attributed socially valued qualities (a zeal for work and a sense of anticipation, sacrifice and frugality), at a time when statistics were showing that since the end of the nineteenth century this population had often been limiting itself to one child to better ensure upward mobility.65 Ungemach Gardens wanted to offer this ‘most sterile segment of the population – the office worker and public servant’66 – a more favourable environment to raise a larger number of children. The mayor Peirotes countered this reasoning with electoral clientelism. He saw Ungemach Gardens as filling a gap in the city’s social housing offering. The municipality and the Foundation agreed to exclude rentiers, who formed a significant social group in the 1920s: beyond 3,000 francs annually in real estate revenue, six points were deducted from households for each additional 1,000 F in revenue.67 But, not unrelated to major tensions in the era’s national politics,68 they disagreed on the optimal income level for selected households. The mayor imposed an upper threshold of 18,000 F annually, while the Foundation would have set it a few thousand francs lower. The difference corresponded exactly to the gap between the household of the customs controller Jean Simon, who lost two points for his thousands in additional income, and that of the little office worker Schumacher, who was selected on his first try. One of the interesting points about the history of Ungemach Gardens is the city of Strasbourg’s proactive encouragement of the Ungemach Foundation’s programme after the Second World War, when it became responsible for administering the Foundation. At this point though, the city’s relationship with the Foundation might best be described as a coalition of interests. We will now turn to how the interwar municipality accommodated an initiative that explicitly presented itself as a eugenic experiment meant to improve the population by favouring the ‘multiplication of the best’.

The Normality of the Guinea Pig While the Foundation primarily communicated Ungemach Gardens’ pronatalist dimension and health objectives, the fact that it did not hide the garden city’s eugenic designs raises questions about the significance of public authorities’ support, even if it was just partial. Affordable rentals aside, how to explain the acceptance of the draconian conditions and inspections to which households were subjected?

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 31

None of the interwar mayors really addressed this point. I will therefore attempt to delineate what I will call the acceptability of the experiment: to what extent was it acceptable at the time? The Ungemach experiment started at a time when forms of housing assistance had the most varied ideological purposes, ranging from pronatalism to family assistance, especially for large families, public health awareness with the fight against unsanitary housing, urban planning, and the ‘paternalism’ of employer policies. Observable throughout industrial Europe, this goal resonated strongly in Alsace, which in the nineteenth century became one of the cradles in France of employer policies to provide worker housing.69 After the Great War, the relative popularity of ‘pronatalism’ helped explain how Ungemach Gardens’ peculiar provisions were able to blend into a familiar whole. Equating power with birth rates, France’s pronatalism had developed in the 1860s in response to the Prussian military threat. Beginning in 1896, it was advanced by a lobby of great propagandistic efficiency – the National Alliance for French Population Growth. At the genesis of the Ungemach experiment, the hecatomb of the First World War had provided pronatalism with a critical boost, materialized in legislative measures adopted by parliament. In Strasbourg, Ungemach Gardens’ provisions could be assimilated with the municipal office’s HBM pronatalist and familialist initiatives: infant consultations, nurseries, childcare, birth bonuses, and reduced rent for large families.70 Even the garden city’s most inquisitorial aspects were related to these: besides the reduced rent for large families, the municipal office offered families with three or more children annual cleanliness bonuses of one hundred francs.71 The Ungemach Foundation even appeared to be highly liberal compared to private initiatives at the time. Parallel to businesses’ development of family allowance systems since the Great War, employer housing policies – accommodations for workers, homeownership assistance – helped to retain labour and slow employee turnover during the economic expansion of the 1920s.72 The link between rental contract and work contract produced great dependence on companies. The state sought to use legislation and public assistance to loosen ‘an interference that [workers] poorly tolerated and a source of animosity towards the employer’.73 Many socialist mayors also attempted to ‘free the workingclass population from the clutches of the employer’.74 The Ungemach Foundation transcended this ambiguity by not limiting benefits to just the employees of its president. The substance of its regulations was no more draconian than ‘conditions for the usage and upkeep of employer housing’.75 Thus, at a time

32 A Human Garden

when the integration of women in salaried work was frowned upon,76 the social housing of working-class households often anchored wives to ‘these domestic industries that … supplement household income’.77 Similarly, councillors and citizens could interpret the application criteria for Ungemach Gardens as the incarnation of omnipresent health awareness in interwar projects and achievements at the local level. The way in which the Foundation brought together public and private actors was also typical for the era. In Strasbourg, the Cooperative Society for Public Housing, founded in 1899 – then called the Gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft – created a supervisory board that brought together philanthropist funders and union representatives under the aegis of the city.78 That Ungemach Gardens was able to lay claim to municipal patronage is key. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, the city formed the ‘model or the laboratory for the whole political society’.79 Many local elected officials and professionals involved in municipal activities (architects, urbanists, hygienists, communal administrative managers) availed themselves of a ‘communal science’,80 which had models circulating in various ways throughout Europe and beyond.81 Combining unions, cooperative movements, consumer leagues and associations, its ideological credos ranged from reformism to communism and social Christianity, and its golden era spanned the twenty years that followed the formation in 1913 of the International Union of Cities.82 This science met many limitations, including the instrumentalization of a transnational technocratic discourse by politicians to suit their local interests.83 But for our purposes, it familiarized mayors, their administrations and to a certain extent their constituents with aspirations that jibed with those of Ungemach Gardens. As is often the case in France, Strasbourg was at the forefront here,84 not only because it was located in the area impacted by Germany, but also because its status as a border city sharpened its concern about preserving its rank in a transnational race towards social innovation. In 1923, the year of Ungemach Gardens’ launch, Peirotes presided over an international conference on urbanism and municipal hygiene attended by political heavyweights, prominent reformers, including the British pioneers of the garden city movement – Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) and Ebenezer Howard – and architects like Le Corbusier (1887–1965). Besides the organization of space, the goal of rationalizing municipal policies was a regeneration of the modern man, in the name of a ‘communal biology’.85 In 1911, the international exposition in Dresden drew five and a half million visitors,86 solidifying this meeting of communal science and hygienics. Like Ungemach Gardens, the municipalities used the language of experimentation and science. The lawyer Maxime Leroy spoke

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 33

of a plethora of ‘laboratories’ testing municipal science theories, while the technocrats of the ‘French turnaround’ discussed ‘a kind of laboratory of experiments to develop urban projects’,87 and the School of Advanced Urban Studies at the Sorbonne referred to an ‘urban laboratory where the many and complicated phenomena of life in a big modern city would be studied’.88 While the Chicago School’s work was developing across the Atlantic, the municipality as a whole could be considered, to use the expression of the 1900 socialist congress, as ‘a laboratory of decentralized economic life’.89 Applicants for rentals in Ungemach Gardens were all the more unlikely to see themselves as guinea pigs considering that housing was one of the shared features of these experiments. As social issues became increasingly salient, facilitated access to a private home was seen as having the power to produce ‘a complete transformation of the worker … He becomes conscious of his duties and reconciles with society’, transforms into ‘a family head worthy of this name, that is, moral and forwardlooking, feeling rooted and having authority over his own’.90 Initially, in the nineteenth century, this ‘moralization’ was associated with property, which the French Revolution established as a condition for developing a sense of responsibility and as a foundation of political citizenship. But less automatic analyses gradually emerged, taking into account the relationships between residents and the urban environment.91 This is where the rise of garden cities was rooted: in no longer treating ‘individual needs as such, but as necessities for relationships with the community’ by protecting it from the ‘defects of working-class neighbourhoods born of the spontaneous growth of cities: density, squalor, and ugliness’.92 For the residents of Ungemach Gardens, the obligation to maintain one’s house, verified through a regular inspection, also ensured respect for their living conditions. From a comparative perspective, these intrusive provisions were fully acceptable at the time when Ungemach Gardens opened its doors. They were of a piece with policies to rehabilitate unsanitary housing that were introduced in France in response to the cholera epidemic of 1849. Beginning the next year, a law passed in Paris authorized the inspection of the housing and ‘unhealthy habits of residents’ by health commissions, while conservatives denounced the instrumentalization of ‘health ideology by this force called the state’ to gain votes.93 Inspection and control were common practices in employer-provided housing. Railway companies implemented them in various ways: surveillance (regular visits to employees’ houses), incentives (awards for residents who best maintained their homes) and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, ‘archaic’ control. In the city of Migennes in Burgundy, when the ‘head of the warehouse

34 A Human Garden

met with his subordinates for their professional evaluation and scoring, a sister [from the Saint-Vincent of Paul congregation] was present [and] provided her critical assessment of the worker’s private life’.94 The selection of renters was no less rigorous. In 1931 in the city of Pax in Bagneux, ‘a high-end development’ in the southern suburbs of Paris, it was based on ‘solvency and morality criteria: nature of the job, number of children, household income, composition and rent of current housing, and examination of the applicant conducted by a social assistant. The factory superintendent also contacted colleagues at the big companies in the Paris region to assess the qualities of candidates’.95 Understanding the enablers of these forms of control requires knowledge of the scientistic ideology at the heart of the Ungemach experiment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French HBM society considered itself to be ‘at the vanguard of social research’ and saw the Social Museum, the centre of the reform movement, as a ‘temple to the cult of Social Science’.96 Henri Sellier, the famous socialist mayor of Suresnes, to the west of Paris,97 expected the objective laws of science to identify consensus solutions in the ‘interest of collective safeguarding’.98 Housing inspections also allowed for the study and ‘objective’ evaluation of the experiment’s results99 – exactly as Ungemach Gardens did. At Suresnes, social assistants filled out ‘a whole package of forms’ codifying the house’s characteristics and the quality of its upkeep in relation to households’ ‘hygiene practices’ (‘sobriety, intelligence, instruction, psychological state’), their sociability, solvency, and events that occurred in the family. Rationalization, experimentation, utilitarianism, control, evaluation of results with statistical indicators: taken separately, virtually all of the criteria and procedures deployed in the Ungemach project could be found in many prior or contemporary housing initiatives. It is because the Foundation was ‘of its time’ and within the scope of thinkable and observable enterprises that it was able to attract renters and be at least partially supported by successive municipal administrations. Historiography embraces the idea of ‘consent’ to explain individuals’ participation in binding policies (war mobilization, taxation).100 In this case, the notion of ‘acceptance’ appears to be more relevant: the city hall of Strasbourg contributed to the experiment while imposing its objectives on the Foundation, demonstrating that the idea was not so much to endorse, but rather to pursue one’s own objectives so long as the imposed constraint was not unacceptable. We will later examine how households dealt with the sometimes drastic conditions of residing in the garden city. For now, after analysing what made the terms of the experiment ‘acceptable’, it is important to understand its genesis and specificities.

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 35

Notes 1. Transcript of the Board meeting of the Ungemach Gardens Foundation, 23 September 1924. This source, which is available in the Municipal Archives of Strasbourg (MAS), Series Div I 427, will henceforth be abbreviated as CAFJU. 2. Germaine Kuhry-Bostetter, La lutte contre les taudis à Strasbourg, Paris, Vigot Frères, 1940. 3. Pier Paola Penzo, ‘L’urbanistica in Francia e l’Association générale des hygiénistes et techniciens municipaux, 1902–1919’, Storia Urbana, 75, 1997, pp. 23–45; Jean-Claude Vigato, ‘L’architecture régionaliste de 1900 à 1930’, Revue d’Alsace, 131, 2005, pp. 165–89. 4. Kuhry-Bostetter, La lutte contre les taudis. 5. Christoph Corneliszen, Stefan Fisch and Annette Maas, Grenzstadt Straßburg: Stadtplanung, kommunale Wohnungspolitik und Öffentlichkeit (1870–1940), St. Ingbert, Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 1997. 6. Stéphane Jonas, ‘Le bâtisseur’, in Jean-Claude Richez et al., Jacques Peirotes et le socialisme en Alsace, 1869-1935, Strasbourg, BF Editions, 1989, pp. 149–66, here pp. 149 and 152. On Jacques Peirotes, see the entries by Léon Strauss, in Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, Strasbourg, Fédération des sociétés d’histoire et d’archéologie d’Alsace, vol. 29, 1997, p. 2958 et seq; and in Encyclopédie de l’Alsace, Strasbourg, Éds Publitotal, vol. 10, 1985, pp. 5905–8. 7. Simona Talenti, ‘La legge Cornudet e la svolta urbanistica del 1919 in Francia’, Storia Urbana, 56, 1991, pp. 101–19. 8. Frédéric Eccard, ‘L’Alsace et la Lorraine sous le Commissariat général et après sa suppression’, Revue politique et parlementaire, 32, 125, 1925, pp. 197–237. 9. Jonas, ‘Le bâtisseur’, p. 157. 10. Source: Contrat entre la ville de Strasbourg, représentée par M. Jacques Peirotes, maire de Strasbourg …, et la Fondation ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’ représentée par son gérant, M.A. Dachert, MAS Div 6, 154 (803). 11. Source: ‘Die Cité Jardins Ungemach in Strassburg und ihre sozialen Vorteile’, L’écho des communes d’Alsace et de Lorraine, 12, 21, 1932, pp. 285–87. The estimate for the average salary in 1923 in France is drawn from Thomas Piketty, Les hauts revenus en France au XXe siècle, Paris, Hachette, 2001, Graph 1-8 (p. 116), http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ public/Grasset2001/Grasset2001.htm, accessed 15 February 2013. 12. Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1990. 13. Viviane Claude, ‘Le travail de la différence: Les cultures techniques municipales à Strasbourg entre la France et l’Allemagne 1870–1920’, Genèses, 37, 1999, pp. 114–34, here p. 117. 14. Stéphane Jonas, ‘La politique urbaine et du logement de Jacques Peirotes, députémaire socialiste de Strasbourg’, Revue des sciences sociales de la France de l’Est, 15, 1986– 1987, pp. 143–49. 15. Frédéric Moret (ed.), ‘Les socialistes et la ville, 1890–1914’, Cahiers Jaurès, 177–78, 3–4, 2005. 16. Léon Strauss, entries on Jacques Peirotes. 17. Christine Mengin, Guerre du toit et modernité architecturale: loger l’employé sous la république de Weimar, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007. 18. Bernard Zarca, L’Artisanat français: du métier traditionnel au groupe social, Paris, Économica, 1986; Steven M. Zdatny, Les artisans en France au XXe siècle, Paris, Belin, 1999.

36 A Human Garden

19. Nicolas Delalande, Les Batailles de l’impôt: Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours, Paris, Seuil, 2011. 20. Christophe Charle, ‘Les “classes moyennes” en France: Discours pluriel et histoire singulière (1870–2000)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 50, 4, 2003, pp. 108–34; Klaus-Peter Sick, ‘Deux formes de synthèse sociale en crise: Les classes moyennes patronales de la Troisième République à la lumière d’une comparaison franco-allemande’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 50, 4, 2003, pp. 135–54; Jean Ruhlmann, Ni Bourgeois ni prolétaires: La défense des classes moyennes en France au XXe siècle, Paris, Seuil, 2001. 21. Jean-Claude Richez and Patrick Schweitzer, ‘La ville moderne’, in Richez et al., Jacques Peirotes et le socialisme en Alsace, pp. 117–40, here p. 118. 22. Jonas, ‘La politique urbaine’, p. 146. 23. Peter G. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002 [orig. ed. 1988]. 24. Annie Fourcaut, ‘Loger la classe ouvrière en banlieue parisienne dans l’entre-deuxguerres: l’exemple de la Cité Pax à Bagneux’, in Susanna Magri and Christian Topalov (eds), Villes ouvrières, 1900–1950, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1989, pp. 143–53. 25. For more on the many political and anthropological virtues attributed to gardens, cf. Hermann Rudolph, ‘Les Jardins Schreber’, in É. François and H. Schulze (eds), Mémoires allemandes, Paris, Gallimard, 2007 [orig. ed. 2001], pp. 419–36; Florence Weber, L’honneur des jardiniers: Les potagers dans la France du XXe siècle, Paris, Belin, 1998; Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Lawn at War: 1941–61‘, in G. Teyssot (ed.), The American Lawn, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 134–153. 26. Stéphane Jonas, ‘La cité-jardin du Stockfeld: une réalisation d’économie sociale modèle du Strasbourg des années 1900’, in L’urbanisme à Strasbourg au XXe siècle: Actes des conférences organisées dans le cadre des 100 ans de la cité-jardin du Stockfeld, City of Strasbourg, 2010, pp. 28–43; Marie-Noëlle Denis, ‘La cité-jardin du Stockfeld’, Revue d’Alsace, 123, 1997, pp. 203–24. 27. Richez and Schweitzer, ‘La ville moderne’, pp. 126–28. 28. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Jeanne Boulfroy, 8 February 1939, MAS Div I 375. At the time, Jeanne Boulfroy was preparing her thesis on Le Problème de la ville moderne: la cité jardin. 29. Source: Les Jardins Ungemach, mimeograph, n.d., MAS Div I 427; Questionnaire to the head chef de famille ‘providing eugenic information’, MAS Div I 558 B. 30. Source: supra, n. 13. 31. Cf. Raymond Pearl, ‘The Possible Eugenic Bearing of Certain Experiments with Poultry’, ER, 2, 1, 1910, pp. 25–29; Edgar Schuster, ‘The First International Eugenics Congress’, ER, 4, 3, 1912, pp. 223–56; and the list of proposals created by the ‘Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene’ in ER, 15, 1, 1923, pp. 355–58, here p. 356. 32. CAFJU, 13 December 1924. 33. Alfred Dachert, ‘La Cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, La vie sociale en Alsace et en Lorraine, 7, 1926, pp. 107–10; Dachert, ‘La cité “Ungemach” à Strasbourg: Une œuvre pratique en faveur de la natalité’, L’animateur des temps nouveaux, 6 March 1931. 34. Cf. the best-sellers by Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, Page & company, 1913; and Frederick, Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home. A Correspondence Course on the Application of the Principles of Efficiency Engineering and Scientific Management to the Every Day Tasks of Housekeeping, Chicago, IL, American School of Home Economics, 1923. See Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2003; Jackie Clarke,

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 37

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy, New York, Berghahn Books, 2011; Vicky Long, ‘Industrial Homes, Domestic Factories: The Convergence of Public and Private Space in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 50, 2011, pp. 434–64. ‘Die Cité Jardins Ungemach in Strassburg und ihre sozialen Vorteile’, p. 287. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992. Les Jardins Ungemach, mimeograph, n.d., MAS Div. I 427. Michot, Rapport sur la Fondation ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’. Alfred Dachert, ‘La Cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, La vie sociale en Alsace et en Lorraine, p. 110. Michot, Rapport sur la Fondation ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’. For a comparison in France, see Hélène Frouard, ‘Tous propriétaires? Les débuts de l’accession sociale à la propriété’, Le Mouvement Social, 239, 2, 2012, pp. 113–28, here p. 123. CAFJU, 13 March 1937. Foundation documents also sometimes mention the ‘inspection commission’ and ‘visit commission’. Cf. the brochure Léon Ungemach, 1844–1928, Strasbourg, Impr. des Dernières nouvelles, 1928; and Freddy Sarg’s entry ‘Ungemach Charles-Léon (1844–1928)’, in Encyclopédie de l’Alsace, 1986, vol. 12, p. 7463. CAFJU, 3 November 1928. ‘Die Cité Jardins Ungemach in Strassburg und ihre sozialen Vorteile’. CAFJU, 13 March 1937. Cf. the letter of 12 May 1920 from General Humbert, military governor of Strasbourg, to the Commissioner-General of the Republic (coll. François Dachert). MAS Div. I 427. Source: Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin (ADBR) 121 AL 100. I discuss the exception of mayor Hueber from 1929 to 1935 below. Source: Comité de direction et statistiques (Direction and Statistics Committee), MAS Div I 403. CAFJU, 13 December 1924. CAFJU, 16 November 1925. Dachert, ‘La Cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, La vie sociale en Alsace et en Lorraine, pp. 109–10. Quoted by Kuhry-Bostetter, La lutte contre les taudis à Strasbourg, p. 47. ‘All the mayors of Strasbourg somewhat closed their eyes to the particular way in which the Foundation recruited the garden city’s residents …. Left unsaid were implicit criteria that might accurately be defined as follows: many children, good Christians, and good Alsatians. Rather than simply reflect manifestations of the eugenic ideas that were all the rage in German countries, Strasbourg displayed the new influence of the pronatalist views held by national HBM leaders’ (Jonas, ‘Le bâtisseur’, p. 166). Léon Strauss, Entry ‘Hueber Charles Louis’, Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, 1991, vol. 17, p. 1687 et seq; Michel Dreyfus, Claude Pennetier and Léon Strauss, ‘Hueber Charles’, entry of the maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr. CAFJU, 7 May 1927. Interview with François Dachert, 8 June 2007. CAFJU, 15 March 1933 and 15 February 1936. CAFJU, 19 February 1927. CAFJU, 3 November 1928. CAFJU, 2 February 1929.

38 A Human Garden

64. CAFJU, 15 February 1936, 13 March 1937 and 19 March 1938. 65. Cf. Arsène Dumont, Dépopulation et civilisation: Étude démographique, Paris, Economica, 1990 [orig. ed. 1890]. 66. Dachert, ‘La Cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, La vie sociale en Alsace et en Lorraine, pp. 107–110, here p. 110. 67. Les Jardins Ungemach, mimeograph, n.d., MAS Div I 427. 68. Hélène Frouard, Du coron au HLM: Patronat et logement social (1894–1953), Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008, p. 96. 69. Florence Ott, La Société industrielle de Mulhouse, 1826–1876: ses membres, son action, ses réseaux, Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999; Sandrine Kott, ‘Enjeux et significations d’une politique sociale, la Société industrielle de Mulhouse’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 4, 1987, pp.  640–59; Kott, ‘La Haute Alsace, une région modèle en matière d’habitat ouvrier 1853–1914’, Revue de l’Économie Sociale, 1, 1988, pp. 27–35. 70. Richez and Schweitzer, ‘La ville moderne’, p. 139. 71. Ibid., p. 138. 72. Frouard, Du coron au HLM, pp. 111–12. 73. Susanna Magri and Christian Topalov, ‘L’habitat du salarié moderne en France, Grande-Bretagne, Italie et aux États-Unis, 1910–1925’, in Yves Cohen and Rémi Baudouï (eds), Les chantiers de la paix sociale (1900–1940), Fontenay-aux-Roses, ENS Editions Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, 1995, pp. 223–53, here p. 243. 74. Rémi Lefebvre, ‘Le socialisme français soluble dans l’institution municipale? Forme partisane et emprise institutionnelle: Roubaix (1892–1983)’, Revue française de science politique, 54, 2, 2004, pp. 237–60, here p. 249. 75. Magri and Topalov, ‘L’habitat du salarié moderne’, p. 237. 76. Laura J. Frader, Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2008. 77. Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2002. 78. See Roland  Hatzenberger, Les membres de la société coopérative de logement populaire de Strasbourg 1900–1925: Promoteurs et bénéficiaires, Master’s thesis in history for the University of Strasbourg supervised by Jean-Luc Pinol, 1997, call number T616 MAIT/1997/HAT. 79. Jean-Pierre Gaudin, ‘La genèse de l’urbanisme de plan et la question de la modernisation politique’, Revue française de science politique, 39, 3, 1989, pp. 296–313; Gisela Mettele, ‘Burgher Cities on the Road to Civil Society: Germany 1780-1870’, in Friedrich Lenger (ed.), Towards an Urban Nation: Germany since 1780, Oxford, Berg, 2002, pp. 43–68; Oscar Gaspari, ‘Cities against States? Hopes, Dreams and Shortcomings of the European Municipal Movement, 1900–1960’, Contemporary European History, 4, 2002, pp. 597–621. 80. Renaud Payre, ‘The Science that Never Was: “Communal Science” in France, 1913– 1949’, Contemporary European History, 11, 4, 2002, pp. 529–47. 81. Helen Meller, ‘Philanthropy and Public Enterprise: International Exhibitions and the Modern Town Planning Movement 1889–1913’, Planning Perspectives, 10, 3, 1995, pp. 295–310; Viviane Claude, ‘Sanitary Engineering as a Path to Town-Planning, the Singular Role of the Association Générale des Hygiénistes et Techniciens Municipaux in France and the French-Speaking Countries, 1900–1920’, Planning Perspectives, 4, 1989, pp. 153–66. 82. Patrizia Dogliani, ‘European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Socialist Network’, Contemporary European History, 11, 4, 2002, pp. 573–96; Dogliani,

The Acceptance of a Eugenic Experimentation 39

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

Le socialisme municipal en France et en Europe de la Commune à la Grande Guerre, Nancy, Arbre Bleu eds, 2018. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Changing the City: Urban International Information and the Lyons Municipality, 1900–1940’, Planning Perspectives, 14, 1, 1997, pp. 19–48. ‘L’École pratique d’administration de Strasbourg’, Revue internationale des sciences administratives, 6, 1933, pp. 264–66. Payre, ‘The Science that Never Was’, p. 534. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics. Frouard, Du coron au HLM, p. 107. See Renaud Payre, Une science communale? Réseaux réformateurs et municipalité providence, Paris, CNRS Éds, 2007, p. 182; and, by comparison, Robert E. Park, ‘The City as a Social Laboratory’, in Thomas Vernor Smith and Leonard Dupee White (eds), Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1929, pp. 1–19. Katherine Burlen, ‘Henri Sellier et la doctrine de Suresnes: techniques du social et services urbains’, in Cohen and Baudouï, Les Chantiers de la paix sociale, p. 269. See also Dogliani, ‘European Municipalism’, p. 574. Roger-Henri Guerrand, ‘Jules Siegfried, La “Société Française des habitations à bon marché” et la loi du 30 novembre 1894’, in Colette Chambelland (ed.), Le Musée social en son temps, Paris, Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1998, pp. 157–73, here p. 161. Horne, A Social Laboratory. Magri and Topalov, ‘L’habitat du salarié moderne’, p. 231. Elsbeth Kalff, ‘Les plaintes pour l’insalubrité du logement à Paris (1850–1955), miroir de l’hygiénisation de la vie quotidienne’, in Patrice Bourdelais (ed.), Les hygiénistes: enjeux, modèles et pratiques, Paris, Belin, 2001, pp. 118–44, here pp. 123, 126 and 132. Georges Ribeill, ‘Politiques et pratiques sociales du logement dans les compagnies de chemins de fer’, in Magri and Topalov, Villes ouvrières, pp. 153–70, here pp. 160 and 166. Fourcaut, ‘Loger la classe ouvrière’, p. 146 (extracts). Horne, A Social Laboratory. Roger-Henri Guerrand and Christine Moissinac, Henri Sellier, urbaniste et réformateur social, Paris, La Découverte, 2005. Burlen, ‘Henri Sellier et la doctrine de Suresnes’, pp. 268 and 274. Magri and Topalov, ‘L’habitat du salarié moderne’, p. 245. Cf. Christophe Prochasson, 14–18: Retours d’expériences, Paris, Texto, 2008; and Delalande, Les Batailles de l’impôt.

Chapter 2

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen

S I was building a poem – a poem made of frame and stone. [Was ich baute war auch ein Poëm, ein Poëm aux Zimmerwerk und Stein allerdings.] —Alfred Dachert, Vom Werden eines Werks [On the becoming of a work], n.d., p. 204

A Fairy Tale Miracle ‘Eugenics captivated me. I dreamt of a garden city bearing its imprint. I then experienced a triple fairy tale miracle.’ Alfred Dachert thus presented the context of Ungemach Gardens’ creation in his intellectual and spiritual autobiography Vom Werden eines Werks: Ein Buch für Poete [On the becoming of a work: A book for poets] drafted at the end of his life, between the 1940s and 1960s.1 The businessman was not exaggerating his role. The coalescence of the elements in the Ungemach Gardens experiment was his work. Exceptional circumstances allowed him to uniquely combine scientism and aesthetics, theology and literature, and eugenics and demography. It so happens that human longevity – born in 1875, Dachert died at ninety-six in 1972 – lend this work great heuristic value: understanding it involves covering a two-century timespan, from the era of German romanticism to the twilight of the twentieth century. During the First World War – which was experienced from the German side here – the forty-year-old Alfred Dachert managed the ‘confectionary’

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen 41

division of Léon Ungemach’s Alsatian Food Company. Ungemach entrusted Dachert with the division on 1 April 1905, six years after the company had taken over Loriot confectionary from its founder.2 ‘Renowned even in the United States’,3 the brand featuring a bird delighted children until the 1960s, when the Perrier group bought it.4 Responsible for sugar supply, Dachert amassed a considerable stock at the beginning of the Great War for a vital reason: ‘if I ran out of [sugar], we would all be called to serve under a flag that was not our own’.5 Anticipating possible requisitions by the administration, he oversaw the creation of ‘a composition of crystallized sugar and glucose with a nondescript colour, smell, and appearance – a singular mixture that defied classification’.6 On 6 July 1918, Germany started experiencing greater shortages and took a series of measures that considerably increased the value of confectioners’ finished and semi-finished product stocks – the very ones whose volumes Dachert had artificially inflated. His 497 tons of sugar were suddenly valued at over 2.4 million marks, or the equivalent of $307,000 in 1918, or five million dollars in 2017 real prices, and 10.9 million dollars in real consumption value.7 Anticipating a devaluation of the mark, Dachert and his deputy Ernest E. Michel in extremis invested this sum in North American, South American and Chinese securities.8 Aware of the fact that they might be accused of war profiteering, Dachert and his boss sought political and legal cover in German through a letter to the governor of the Alsace-Lorraine Reichsland, Johann von Dallwitz: We cannot consider this sum as regular profit and therefore cannot appropriate it …. This is why we have decided to invest this sum in the public interest. If we make a profit, we will manage it separately and deploy it towards a chosen goal. But to ensure that our disinterested intention is not misunderstood, we are stating it in writing and placing this letter in safe hands.9

The German military collapse prevented the transmission of this letter. In an ironic twist, a year and a half later, on 7 January 1920, it was translated word for word into French and transmitted to the Commissioner-General of the Republic Alexandre Millerand. On 22 January, the latter authorized the foundation of Ungemach Gardens by the Alsatian Ungemach Food Company.10 Dachert immediately seized the opportunity provided by his war treasure. In a letter of 3 August 1918, he invited his boss to erect ‘quality housing’ (vollkommen) within an ‘Ungemach garden city’. A member of the Anti-Tuberculosis League, Léon Ungemach was partial to creating a sanatorium rather than a garden city. Dachert argued that the latter would be easier to supervise, simpler to manage than a place catering

42 A Human Garden

to the ill, cheaper to build and maintain, and supported with greater self-financing.11 Léon Ungemach was sensitive to the housing problem, given his firm’s social innovations in this area that had set the standard in Alsace,12 as well as his participation, since 1919, on the oversight committee of the Cooperative Society for People’s Housing in Strasbourg.13 The proposal to name the city after him struck a chord in a 74-year-old man whose son, Roger, had just been killed on the front. Léon Ungemach faced the threat of prosecution for war profiteering, not to mention blows to his image.14 As an icon to French patriots in German Alsace,15 he presided over the Strasbourg Chamber of Commerce and Industry after the reintegration with France and even, for a few weeks beginning on 1 December 1918, the municipal committee established by the government. To associate his name with a foundation promoting births and health was a genius move. Following its transformation into gold and securities, sugar transubstantiated into quality human material: ‘From war profits to better babies’, to use the title of the 1946 book by the Californian eugenicist Charles Matthias Goethe.16 A succession of obstacles nonetheless appeared in the confectioner’s way. The first were outlandish, and emerged from the whirlwind of the last weeks of war. The safe in which the securities were placed was the only one that survived the burglary of the factory that occurred on the night of 16–17 November 1918, during the short-lived ‘Strasbourg soviet’, when the red flag flew over the city. Dachert and his assistant then hid the loot under a pyramid of carton boxes.17 Most importantly, Dachert needed to maintain the Ungemach clan’s support. As soon as the threats of prosecution subsided, Léon Ungemach and especially his two sons-in-law who had joined the company’s management were tempted to place the 2.4 million gold marks back into the company’s coffers. In order to prevent ‘any substitution’,18 Dachert nonetheless succeeded in including in the Alsatian Food Company’s deed gift of 7 January 1920 to Ungemach Gardens an inventory of the securities added to the Foundation’s capital. Dachert’s determination created tension with Léon Ungemach’s influential family. In 1920, Ungemach’s son-in-law Fernand Herrenschmidt, who came from a powerful line of tanners, acceded to the presidency of the Strasbourg Chamber of Commerce, as had his father Alfred Herrenschmidt (1828–1917).19 Like Léon, they rubbed elbows with the greatest Alsatian industrials on the supervisory board of the Alsatian banking society, Sogenal.20 A strike within the industrial group was the last straw. On 6 October 1920, at age forty-five, Dachert was let go by his boss and ceded his position as director of the confectionery division of the Ungemach buildings

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen 43

to his faithful colleague Ernest E. Michel.21 He nevertheless remained manager of the young Ungemach Foundation,22 but this relational tie, which was typical of family capitalism, ended in 1921 due to a dramatic development: the sudden ruin of Léon Ungemach, following ‘unfortunate speculations’,23 placed the Alsatian Food Company under the authority of Sogenal and Fernand Herrenschmidt. Alfred Dachert had placed his trust in the latter’s hands to preside over the Foundation one day:24 he was probably close – as will be later seen – to Herrenschmidt’s spouse Suzanne, the daughter of Léon Ungemach. But Ungemach Gardens, then under construction, thwarted the expansion of Herrenschmidt’s tanneries, which were located next to it in the Wacken neighbourhood in northern Strasbourg. Fernand intended to sell some of his land to a viscose factory. Not only did this city-supported project deprive the Foundation of an area it had been promised, but is also meant that the area would be blanketed by hydrogen sulphide emissions – a death sentence for the garden city.25 Dachert was summoned to an Ungemach-Herrenschmidt family council, where his former employer, hostage to his son-in-law, requested that he endorse this plan. But the prospect of a chemical factory led the neighbourhood’s residents to mobilize. Dachert joined the battle. He collected feedback from mayors of French towns home to artificial silk factories and disseminated their responses to the prefect and municipal councillors; he visited the Swiss viscose factory of Emmenbrücke26 and put together ‘a voluminous brief’ on its toxicity. Finally, Dachert concluded: a public meeting was organized in the great hall of Aubette. Several interested parties spoke and some hydrogen sulphide was released to show the audience the kind of smell it should fear. A deputy mayor spoke on behalf of the city and the evening ended with violence, which gave the session unexpected prominence. The results of the assembly were telegraphed to the relevant ministries in Paris. Posters spread throughout the city showing an octopus with a skull head creeping over the city of Strasbourg.27

Alfred Dachert thus succeeded in getting their first two presidents to embrace the interest of Ungemach Gardens. The ‘triple fairy tale miracle’ included the opportunity of benefiting from a sum that was ‘much higher than the Nobel prize amount’. This assertion was no exaggeration.28 In the 1920s, research activity was still embryonic in France, and having such a budget to conduct a scholarly experiment was out of the norm. It allowed Dachert to think of himself as a scholar and act accordingly. The lease contract in particular was his work, and it is strictly speaking a work: ‘the result of a long study condensing many experiences, it is the Foundation’s central and most original piece’.29 It is Dachert who

44 A Human Garden

developed the application and assessment scale for the candidates;30 it is also Dachert who put together the terms of the contract between the Foundation and the city.31 What did the Ungemach experiment represent in the eyes of its creator? Why did Dachert immediately consider that there was no better possible use for the war treasure ‘than a eugenic garden city for selected young couples’?32

Darwin, China and the Confectioner Dachert thought of himself as a scholar in the nineteenth-century tradition whereby ‘non-experts’, often annuitants, created whole disciplines. While he was only appropriating the elements of science of his time, the interest of his ‘exceptionally normal’33 case is to grasp ‘from the bottom-up’ how eugenics projected throughout Western Europe. Just like studying the heresy of a heretic miller in the sixteenth century helps to reconstitute an era’s cultural elements,34 the case of Alfred Dachert allows for an analysis of the reach of his era’s eugenic culture among political, administrative and scholarly authorities. Dachert was a businessman, eugenicist and devout Lutheran; he wanted to be a poet, as was frequently the case in his milieu. Under the pseudonym Abel Ruffenach, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s he composed a German literary work35 of poem collections grouped under the title Singende Bilder [Singing images], an autobiographical volume focused on an event from his adolescence, Verklaerte Staetten [Transfigured places], a philosophical epistolary novel, Schloss Roog [Rogues’ castle], a historical drama, Die Wilsontragoedie [The tragedy of president Wilson] and, most importantly, a heptalogy entitled Der Sang des Werdens [The song of becoming] composed of seven plays with a strong eugenic bent.36 Only one part of the heptalogy was translated into and is available in French thanks to the cinematographic critic Léon Moussinac (1890–1964), a family friend, and especially Suzanne née Gounelle, whom Alfred Dachert married at the age of fifty, in April 1926. An absence of sources on Dachert’s private life makes it difficult to retrace Suzanne’s role in his projects, but it must have been prominent. Her studies at the École normale supérieure of Sèvres, which was part of the elite secondary education system, were exceptional for a woman of her generation. Dachert’s father-in-law from this marriage was a figurehead of social Protestantism in France – Élie Gounelle (1865–1950)37 – who edited the journal Le Christianisme social [Social Christianity].38

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The aforementioned semi-autobiographical and semi-aesthetic essay Vom Werden eines Werks elucidates the meaning with which the amateur writer endowed his work. Coherent and didactical, the work objectified Dachert’s imagination, if not cosmology; his way of combining aesthetical, ideological, epistemological and theological references. Indeed, a relatively prolific eugenic theatre scene existed in the English-speaking world at the time.39 The originality of Ungemach Gardens was to propose an initiative with a public dimension and an experiment that were both entirely conceived in a poetic form. Dachert himself was conscious of this uniqueness. It is during his trip to Asia, ‘in the biggest bookstore of Tokyo, Maruzen’,40 that he discovered the existence of practical applications of eugenics: falling upon Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson’s bestseller Applied Eugenics41 raised his hope of putting his poem into practice, which he saw as the ultimate success.42 This exceptional interlinkage between writing and collective action comes from Alfred Dachert’s pioneering status as an employee-writer, whose future development he clearly foresaw. In contrast with the myth of the cursed poet, Dachert’s work challenged the idea that there are no writers worthy of the name among accomplished and therefore financially self-sufficient businessmen. In his piece Saint-Elme [Saint Elm], the author presented himself in the mould of the industrialist Ernst Romann, ‘the prototype of a new kind of man: both poet and practitioner’.43

Figure 2.1. The broadcasting of the Alsatian Ibsen’s theater play, n.d. [1950s]. Private collection of François Dachert.

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Figure 2.2. Poster for the performance of Le Val l’Évêque in Paris in November 1921. Private collection of François Dachert.

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen 47

Interlinked but separate: Dachert the poet wanted to remain hidden. Waiving his author’s rights, he only revealed at the age of ninety-six that he was Abel Ruffenach during a meeting in front of television cameras with the Nobel Prize winner in physics Alfred Kastler.44 Under his pseudonym he experienced celebrity after seventy-five years, in the 1950s, as the ‘Alsatian Ibsen’, thanks to the radio broadcasting of his plays across Switzerland, Germany and Belgium, after the Parisian radio had aired several of Ruffenach’s plays [Ruffenachsche Stücke] with the participation of artists from the prestigious Comédie Française [French comedy].45 Until then, only Dachert’s determination had allowed him to maintain the pride, if not megalomania, of asserting he was a born poet46 who was sooner or later destined for recognition, be it posthumous.47 But in addition to rejected plays and difficulties getting published, the rare successes were often superficial. Performed in Paris in 1921 after its publication, Le Val l’Évêque [The Bishop Val] flopped.48 Published by Stock in 1948, probably thanks to a relationship,49 La Cathédrale ardente [The burning cathedral] and Le Moulin des Aulnes [The alder mill] are the only plays in the heptalogy that were recognized by a major publisher. This combination of anonymity and certainty of following a poet’s destiny probably stemmed from a foundational humiliation: the ‘deep wound’ that the young Alfred experienced when his high school classmates mocked his poems. ‘This lesson on the world’s attitude towards my poems stayed with me my whole life.’50 This frustration itself was linked to a double misfit situation. Born in 1875 in German Alsace, Dachert’s primary schooling occurred in German, and his high school curriculum took place in French at Reims. He did not have a written command of either, while his Alsatian accent, according to his son’s testimony to me, regionally pigeonholed him, which was very limiting in a centralizing France.51 The second chip on his shoulder was that his father Philippe, a bankrupt hosiery producer, was not able to fund higher studies for him. His baccalaureate placed Alfred at the top of the academic heap,52 but relegated him to the base of this heap: he started his career too educated to be satisfied with his lot, but not educated enough to have a shot at the top. Deprived of an inheritance and university education, he was condemned to salaried work. After he returned from (German) military service in 1895,53 his father placed him in the Ungemach conglomerate. A travelling salesman, Dachert successfully pursued intellectual and spiritual self-education. His clients were companies spread across Western Europe. ‘Between waiting rooms, train trips, and hotels’, he adopted a ‘work plan, aiming to discover the classics in literature and philosophy’.54 The young man’s trilingual culture, including English, rooted him in the

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German, French and British nineteenth century. He immersed himself in the classics of his era, as his unusual, dissonant social position placed him high enough in cultural and intellectual circles to access major contemporary works, but too low to embrace the avant-garde. Ibsen for theatre, Flaubert for his correspondence, and Goethe for his Conversations with Eckermann, constituted the most prominent figures in an eclectic pantheon. Through its references, aesthetic values, narrative themes and especially its very language, Dachert’s work, which identified with poetry, as was commonly the case among the elites of his generation,55 primarily appeared to be a time capsule of European romanticism in its most classical sense. It also manifested the pre-eminence, which was typical at the time, of literature as the cognitive basis for understanding the world.56 Living as a poet did not prevent Dachert from demonstrating his business acumen. Facilitated by his trilingualism, the business spread to the United States. On the eve of the First World War, his industrial confectionary employed ‘400 workers, without counting staff working from home’57 and delivered ‘200 wagons of candy per year’, yielding an annual revenue of 17 million francs.58 Benefiting since 1905 from a 15 per cent profit-sharing arrangement in addition to benefits,59 Dachert accumulated savings that would prove to be decisive in the following decades.

Figures 2.3 and 2.4. Portraits of Alfred Dachert as a businessman. Private collection of François Dachert.

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His business travels contributed to his self-education. In 1906, he was awed after a visit to Port Sunlight in Liverpool: Dachert sought to discover ‘all the garden cities of [his] era’ between Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Geneva, and in 1910 assisted the Inter-Allied Housing and Town Planning Congress of London.60 While he came across Darwin and his On the Origin of Species in 1899 in his readings, it is only during the Great War that he became familiar with the work of Francis Galton61 and established the intersection – foundational to the Ungemach experiment – between ‘problems of habitat and of human selection’.62 That his nascent eugenic convictions were catalysed by the shock of the First World War,63 and a garden city considered for the application of eugenics,64 were unsurprising at the time. Rather, what made the city unique was its implementation, with Dachert masterfully combining the ambition of a scholar with the determination and savoir-faire of a businessman. Beginning in the summer of 1918, he sketched out the experiment, using Stockfeld, the first garden city in Strasbourg, as a counter-model: ‘this marvelous instrument failed in its duty to serve the advancement of the human species. There I saw old maids, widows, and ordinary people who had been randomly selected’.65 By contrast, he explained in his letter of 3 August to Léon Ungemach, perfect homes offer the benefit of providing renters with healthy living conditions, naturally assuming that these are malleable renters. We must therefore select the renters as follows. Only young households that do not yet have vices (Laster) or pests (Ungeziefer) are malleable, and the most malleable are young newlyweds. These are the renters I would like to select, but we can only choose if we offer benefits.

All the terms of the future garden city experience were therefore in place in 1918: the selection through attractive conditions, the assessment of the quality and health of people, the focus on young couples, the desire to shape their behaviour; the pronatalist dimension appeared a little later.66 Léon Ungemach soon acceded to Dachert’s barely veiled request67 to voluntarily manage the Foundation alongside his business activities. At forty-four, Alfred Dachert may have felt that his life was a success. He had the human laboratory he had dreamt of. Twenty-five years of frenzied business activity had allowed him to overcome his family’s fall. His savings finally ensured him the fate to which he aspired: to live off a trust, as was the norm for young men of his background, with full freedom to think, create and act. This acquired freedom probably shaped the clashes he had with the Ungemach-Herrenschmidt family in 1920. Dachert could now risk resignation, and even find it to be an appealing option that would allow him to focus on the garden city full time and

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Figure 2.5. Suzanne Dachert, born Gounelle. Private collection of François Dachert.

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freely devote himself to his poetic activity, and to find relief in his release from ‘the terrible dilemmas caused by the fear of failure, the necessity of sin, and internal and external threats to the company’.68 In the immediate term, on 7 January 1921 he left for China. An ‘unexpected favour from destiny’ provided him with a sabbatical year: when he quit the Ungemach company, the entrepreneurs requested a year to prepare estimates before building the garden city.69 Why did Dachert devote this year to a trip to China? As was the case for some of the bourgeois elites of his era, fascination with East Asia had imbued his material world since childhood.70 Most importantly, beginning in 1904 he was initiated to the Chinese classics71 by Heinrich Mootz, an interpreter for the German administration who was passionate about Confucian thought.72 The businessman then went through ‘the whole Chinese section of the Landesbibliothek in Strasbourg’. The Chinese City by the Frenchman Georges-Eugène Simon (1829–1896), an 1885 bestseller that was republished seven times in six years, made him dream of a study trip devoted to the ‘economic, cultural, and political effects of ancestor worship’.73 We have mentioned the (amateur) scholar, (travelling) library, laboratory and experiments. Only one item is missing from these trappings of science: survey research. Dachert intended to pursue this in China, because the cult of ancestors, ‘which the whole planet will most need one day’, is ‘still fully alive there, [whereas] it is becoming extinct here’.74 From his reading of Simon, Dachert retained what would become his way of grasping eugenics: an obsession with symmetrical generational responsibility, from ascendants towards descendants and vice versa, from the past towards the future, and at the scale of eternity: According to the Chinese, humanity is a whole – a unit that the names of ancestors, the living, and posterity cannot break. The three times marking its existence – past, present, and future – cannot dissolve either the eternal solidarity or eternal interests …. It is not true that generations transitionally and incidentally follow one another in isolation; that they appear, suffer, and die without any link among them …. Generations show solidarity over space and time in both absolute and eternal terms. They are one and they are living, because if they died they would cease to be one and solidary.75

His long, semi-official mission in Asia,76 which he described in an original chronicle, Cheminements chinois [Chinese paths], would prove crucial to the development of the Ungemach experiment. Indeed, it is when he returned from his trip to the East, in February 1922, that he developed its centrepiece – the rental agreement.

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Admittedly, while following in the footsteps of Simon, he discovered to his horror the reality of prostitution as well as the infanticide of little girls, which his cult author had downplayed as he sought to overturn colonialist clichés about China.77 He had appreciated the apology of the ‘Chinese family’ as a source of harmony and economic dynamism. But he discovered a practice that sapped the energy of a Chinese people ‘constantly preoccupied about its dead …. They need to fund the extravagant fanfare of funerals, pay the hundreds of carriers parading ritual objects in funeral processions, rent a waiting room, and then a temporary burial space, etc. The procedures and spending never end’.78 The second disappointment was that ancestors were not equal in the face of death. In the domestic shrine, ‘every place has its price, like in the theatre. There are orchestra seats and nosebleed seats. The place occupied by the deceased’s tablet is determined by the sum paid by the branch of survivors’.79 But Dachert’s moral shock was also an anthropological shock that shaped his way of thinking about intergenerational ‘solidarity’. As one of the Chinese advisors from the consulate in France hammered,80 in Europe, a deserving man is rewarded with the ennoblement of his descendants. Here, ancestors are ennobled, which is much fairer. Because a man owes his success to his ancestors, who … forged his strong character via a strict education …. Did the individual decide to come into the world? Everything that he is and reveals comes from his ancestors …. One cannot reach for the stars if one has failed to ensure many descendants, if one has not transmitted to one’s children the duty to care for one’s ancestors, or if one has not, in the absence of children, cared to adopt one.

It matters not whether this speech, which Dachert reconstructed decades later, is apocryphal. It points to an obsession with intergenerational solidarity that must be understood in the initial sense of the term: not as assistance based on benevolence, but as interdependence that mutually binds people. This idea of an intergenerational chain is of a piece with eugenics. The hereditarian model of Weismann who claimed in 1892 ‘to have discovered the hidden substance of the hereditary material, the “germplasm” …, an immortal and immutable substance of which individuals were merely transitory carriers’,81 compounded the Galtonian tendency to cast the selection of a spouse as a fundamental act on which the quality of descendants would infinitely depend. As Charles Darwin’s son Leonard Darwin, the long-time president of the British Eugenics Society, later wrote, ‘we of this generation are absolutely responsible for the production of the next generation, and, therefore, of

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all mankind in the future; and to make every citizen realize this great racial responsibility in all things connected with marriage, to make him feel this as a deep-seated sentiment greatly affecting his actions, this is the eugenic ideal’.82 In this model, the value of ascendants and descendants is measured in terms of their fertility and prosperity. The successful ascendant gives birth to many quality children. Conversely, the latter’s trajectory objectifies the value of their ancestors. ‘Whether [my line] are good men or bad men will be determined by my conduct’, proclaimed a Ruffenachian hero,83 with the so-called value clearly defined by economic and demographic success.84 This schema could only appeal to someone like Alfred Dachert who was sidetracked by his father’s bankruptcy, which denied him access to university. It is dicey for a historian to explore the individual psyche, but while this crucial event and the linchpin of his destiny is only briefly mentioned in Vom Werden eines Werks, it is regularly sublimated in a tragic form in his fictional work. Thus, in the epistolary novel Schloss Roog, the pastor Johannes Willm forces his son Walter to give up his studies and succeed him as head of the parish. Without a knack for guiding souls, the young man goes astray and suffers a premature death.85 This tragic twist likely reflected a deep resentment that only appears circuitously in his work. The trajectory of Alfred’s father, Philippe, born in 1836, halted an intergenerational rise. It prevented the Dachert family, which originated from the Strasbourg milieu of small business owners, from entering the industrial bourgeoisie promised by the father’s precocious accession, at less than thirty years of age, to the ranks of hosiery producers.86 Unable to adapt to declining demand for his flagship product – hunting vests – Philippe was reduced to employment as a sales agent.87 He spent the second half of his life liquidating the goods (factory, buildings) that he had accumulated during the first half, entering into conflict with Alfred and his older sister Marguerite (1867–1947).88 Of interest here is the quasi-occultation of this seminal trauma: while he sometimes – shamefacedly – opened up about it to those close to him, during his life Alfred did not allow himself to literarily express this rancour over what he experienced as the moral failing of his father. Granted, his own principles made it difficult to express his contempt towards his father without devaluing himself: better to redeem his fall from grace through economic success to eschew the tragic fate of the figures in his plays. Similarly, the suppressed scorn towards a father with more aesthetic than business talent89 took the form of an absolute divide between the successful man and the failure. One of Dachert’s plays, inspired by Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), portrays an insurmountable conflict

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between two brothers: one experiences business success and has a sense of responsibility and hidden poetic genius, while the other combines professional ineptitude, narcissism and artistic mediocrity.90 A late German romantic who by necessity became an effective businessman, Alfred Dachert found in eugenics a way of sublimating resentment and internal conflict linked to the internalization of a strongly shaken paternal order. He thus joined a path that the history of science identified early: the attraction of eugenics for emerging professional elites that were both ambitious and fragile.91 The first eugenics – that of Galton – was determinist, biological and hereditary, allowing them to ruthlessly legitimize the categorization of people as either high- or low-value, and as figures of success or failure. What did Alfred Dachert retain from this? How did he appropriate a scholarly sensibility in vogue in his youth? Ungemach Gardens resulted from a work of literary symbolization for which the businessman laid the foundation around 1900. The wealth of materials in this regard provide insight into the development and implementation of his simultaneously aesthetic and scholarly, and political and theological fantasy.

The Bard of Eugenics and his Song of Becoming Dachert/Ruffenach started out as an orthodox disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The first plays in his heptalogy express the idea that reproduction is a trap for humans that dooms their descendants to an existence marked by a ‘will to live’. In Der Weinberg des Gerechten [Vineyard of the just], drafted around 1905, the rigorist Josua Morand is ‘baffled’ when his wife announces her pregnancy. His son is already ‘condemned to a whole life because he had a moment of weakness …. He will have descendants, maybe millions …. In a son you not only bring to life a human being, but also the son of your son and the sons of their sons, to infinity. Only one procreation and it is too late’.92 How was Dachert able to turn around this pessimistic vision of generational succession? While he bought into the Schopenhauer fad in his youth, the beginning of his professional life coincided with a serious moral crisis that brought him to the brink of depression because business activity exposed him to moral dilemmas on a daily basis.93 Not until the end of his life did he find the strength to confess to the inner turmoil caused by the ‘bond of sin’ (Sündszwang), and to admit that writing was a response and solution to it. This tension, ‘so terrifying that few have the courage and strength to squarely face it, pushed me to write tragedies’ (mich hat es zum Tragöden gemacht).94

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But it appears that eugenics also helped him to exit his reproductive nihilism via a conception that does not condemn the very principle of descendants, but rather distinguishes quality offspring from the rest. Conscious of language’s ability to shape reality by reformulating it, the businessman saw himself as the bard of eugenics, which would guide ‘humanity towards true self-confidence’.95 Here Dachert the scholar was in lockstep with Ruffenach the poet in the combination of anthropology, eugenics and liberal Protestantism. His plays drew on many key principles of eugenics. In a bid to establish the idea of a ‘duty towards posterity’96 by attributing to people as yet unborn the same rights as the living97 – eugenics is one of the first ideologies to focus on environmental conservation98 – the businessman repeated ad nauseam that it just takes one bad marriage choice to stain one’s progeny forever.99 For the chosen, the development via the cult of ancestors of a reciprocal solidarity between ancestors and progeny over the infinite timeframe of ‘millions of generations’100 makes the obligation to give life ‘the highest commandment from God’.101 This pronatalism reserved for the elites had a moral dimension, while the pronatalism of republican France at the time was decidedly statist. Dachert placed any sense of patriotism not in the service of the nation but of humanity, and the mission to ensure its rise (Aufstieg) and progress (Höherwerden).102 Here we see the connection between science, theology and utilitarianism that carries the ideological premises of the Ungemach Gardens experiment. Far from opposing Darwin’s teachings with those of the Bible, the principles of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism that were taught to Dachert in his youth, and were confirmed by his reading of the Bible in its historicist translation by Édouard Reuss (1804–1891),103 brought them together. Dachert retained that Creation was ‘written by God’s very own hand’,104 that it is a work in progress, and that this evolutionary process grants human beings a metaphysical role: short of being able to determine its endpoint, humans have the duty to accelerate its pace on the basis of science. This is the meaning of the book, as indicated in its very title, Der Sang des Werdens [Song of becoming]: to celebrate the cult of becoming, or Werden – ‘a wonderful German word that does not have an exact equivalent in other languages’.105 This ‘becoming’ is far from being limited to demographics. It includes both a spiritual component and an aspiration towards a greater hold over matter, as an avatar of the cult of economic growth that developed during this era.106 Population is not just defined as a demographic measure but as the foundation for spiritual sway: ‘the greater the number of men, the greater the matter dominated by intelligence’.107 At the heart

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of the dramaturgy of Dachert/Ruffenach is a form of will to power with Nietzschean undertones; a vision of numbers, progress and growth oriented towards the human being’s domination on the planet, veering into blasphemous territory: In the New Testament nobody has a job and nobody is married. Was Christ married? Was Saint John the Baptist married? Saint Paul and the Apostles? Widows and bachelors … And is there any more wretched a lot than in the Gospel? With all the sick, possessed, leprous, dropsy, arthritic, blind, and paralysed people? We were wrong to search for salvation in heaven instead of seeking it on Earth. We exacerbated misery instead of combating it. We should have preached action here. Yet we did the opposite. We proclaimed that work is a curse, that it is useless to worry about the future, that spinning and weaving is absurd, that providing one’s assets in alms is meritorious, and that it is better to be a beggar than a worker.108

The call for more births was not devolved to either the abstract figure of the state or the ‘reformist’ approach promoted by Dachert’s father-inlaw: Élie Gounelle, a pastor in working-class parishes, also interpreted the multiplication of loaves of bread as a parable for economic growth, but linked it to a ‘rational and equitable distribution to definitively abolish misery in all of humanity’.109 Rather, Dachert, who was familiar with employers’ social policies, sought to reconcile the language of ethics with that of utilitarianism. His first play, Le Vignoble du juste [Vineyard of the just], portrays an industrialist who combines his obligations towards society with the profit motive. ‘Our greed (Habsucht) creates the profit of another, our parsimony (Geiz) is the bread of the poor, and interest (Interesse) is fraternal love.’110 At Léon Ungemach’s funeral, Alfred Dachert paid a last tribute to his boss by calling him a ‘sower of life’.111 His work enshrines the role of captain of industry as a foster father for his workers and a driver of demographic growth. After describing how his family enabled a tenfold increase in the population residing in the valley where his factory is located, the business leader Simon Ihler, the hero of Le Val l’Évêque [The Bishop Val], which was written around 1910, thus theorizes his responsibility towards his employees. The true superman is a life giver, a man whose life is so prodigiously rich that it satisfies a great number of his fellow men …. Some reach the grave having brought only one life, and sometimes it’s a diminished and spoiled one. These are the poor servants. Others to whom this one life was entrusted bring back two or three lives, and sometimes ten or twelve; these are the good and faithful servants. But there are also people who through their life make life possible for hundreds, and still others who reach the grave surrounded by thousands

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of lives, and finally those who are long dead but from whose work masses are born every day. These are the true supermen.112

There is no question that Alfred Dachert saw himself as a ‘sower of life’. Ungemach Gardens, whose creation he had shepherded, was at the confluence of his eugenic credo and his talents as a Macher sanctioned by his Lutheran faith, and his personal aesthetic. ‘What I was building was also a poem – a poem made of woodwork and stone.’113 He saw the city as a stone poem – the eighth tragedy completing his Song of becoming. The exhumation of this hidden dimension completes my presentation of the garden city as urban policy: the considerations of the municipality and ‘boss’ Léon Ungemach, the perception of contemporaries, and primarily the populations involved in the experiment, must be connected to Alfred Dachert’s representation. The latter is in itself historically relevant: it enables understanding of what ‘eugenics’ meant in context at the height of its dissemination and legitimacy, that is, in the first decades of the twentieth century. The question now is to understand how such a concept was able to remain in place, unchanged, in the management of the garden city until the mid 1980s. The issue is not just puzzling because this period of time saw the de-legitimation of eugenics. When Ungemach Gardens was created at the beginning of the 1920s, Dachert, who was almost fifty, was an ‘offbeat’ man: a German speaker in an anti-German France; a Lutheran in a Catholic and republican country; an heir to a ‘liberal’ protestant theology that was in the process of changing; in the mould of a nineteenthcentury scientist in a Europe traumatized by the criminal use of scientific techniques during the First World War. Also not current was his work: its references, aesthetic values, narrative themes and especially language made it primarily appear as a time capsule of European romanticism.

Notes 1. Abel Ruffenach, Vom Werden eines Werks: Ein Buch für Poete, typescript, coll. François Dachert, n.d. [after 1961], 392 pp., here p. 109. I will henceforth refer to this volume with the abbreviation VWW. 2. Letter from Léon Ungemach to Alfred Dachert, 4 March 1905, coll. François Dachert. 3. Jean Christian, Entry ‘Alfred Dachert’, in Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, 1982, vol. 7, pp. 563 et seq; and letter from Alfred Dachert to Jeanne Boulfroy, 8 February 1939, ch. 1, n. 28. 4. Émilie Gesset, Les Menier et la chocolaterie de Noisiel, Archives départementales de Seine-et-Marne, http://www.martinpierre.fr/medias/files/dossier-menierpdf-12221585196501.pdf, accessed 22 July 2019.

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5. Alfred Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, mimeo, n.d., coll. François Dachert, p. 4. 6. Ibid., p. 7. 7. https://www.measuringworth.com/, accessed 21 August 2018. This is a simple estimate given inflation. 8. ‘Die “Cité-Ungemach”’, Nouveau Journal de Strasbourg, 21 September 1938. 9. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Léon Ungemach, 15 July 1918, coll. François Dachert. 10. Sources: letter from the Préfet du Bas-Rhin to Léon Ungemach, 8 January 1920; decree from the Commissioner-General of the Republic, 22 January 1920; letter from Alfred Dachert to Léon Ungemach, 9 February 1920 (coll. François Dachert).  11. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Léon Ungemach, 3 August 1918, coll. François Dachert. 12. Jean Daltroff, ‘Les Adler et Oppenheimer et leur entreprise de tannerie à Strasbourg et à Lingolsheim (1872–1920)’, Revue d’Alsace, 136, 2010, pp. 175–199, here p. 187. 13. Hatzenberger, Les Membres de la société coopérative de logement populaire, p. 48. 14. Richez et al., Jacques Peirotes et le socialisme en Alsace, p. 157. The first article of the donation act of 1920 is explicit: ‘the Alsatian Food Company, headquartered in Strasbourg, believes that fortuitous profits resulting from the war should not become the property of those who made them, but must be reinvested in the community’. 15. Cf. Suzanne Herrenschmidt [Ungemach’s daughter], Mémoires pour la petite histoire: Souvenirs d’une Strasbourgeoise, Strasbourg, Istra, 1973. This patriotism also holds true for the Herrenschmidt family, linked by marriage to the Ungemachs (Michel Hau and Nicolas Stoskopf, Les Dynasties alsaciennes, du XVIIe siècle à nos jours, Paris, Perrin, 2005). 16. Cf. the Introduction to this volume, Introduction, n. 15, and ch. 4. 17. Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, pp. 26–27. 18. Ibid., pp. 27–29. 19. Nicolas Gaugler, Fernand Herrenschmidt président de la chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Strasbourg, 1921 à 1938, Master’s thesis in history for the University of Strasbourg supervised by Michel Hau and Bernard Vogler, 1995, call number T515 MAIT/1995/ GAU. 20. Hubert Bonin, ‘Un modèle? La Sogenal, une banque régionale européenne (1881– 2001)’, in Michel Lescure and Alain Plessis (eds), Banques locales et banques régionales en Europe au XXe siècle, Paris, Albin Michel, 2004, pp. 390–410. 21. Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, pp. 30–31. 22. Letter from Ernest E. Michel to Léon Ungemach, 25 August 1920, coll. François Dachert. 23. Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, p. 34. 24. Ibid., p. 31. 25. On the toxicity of viscose, see Paul D. Blanc, Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2016. 26. Rudolf Danner, 50 Jahre Viscose Emmenbrücke, 1906–1956, Lucerne, Räber, 1956. 27. Alfred Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, p. 31. 28. In 1917, the Nobel Prize awarded 133,823 Swedish crowns (http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/about/amounts/), or the 2010 equivalent of $549,532 (http://fr.exchangerates.org/HistoricalRates/A/SEK/31-12-2010). In order of magnitude, the profit made from the sugar price increase appears to have secured the Ungemach Foundation a capital ten times the amount of the Nobel award. 29. ‘Discours prononcé par Mme Fernand Herrenschmidt à l’occasion de la réception dans l’ordre de la Légion d’honneur de M. Alfred Dachert’ [henceforth: Suzanne Herrenschmidt, ‘Discours du 11 décembre 1947’]. Source: MAS Div I 558 d. 30. CAFJU, 23 September 1924.

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen 59

31. Léon Ungemach, Note sur la question de la forme à donner au contrat que la ville devra passer avec la ‘Cité Ungemach’, MAS Div I 427. 32. VWW, p. 110. 33. Edoardo Grendi, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici, 35, 1977, pp. 506–20. 34. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [orig. ed. 1976]. See Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, California Italian Studies, 2, 1, 2011, pp. 1–24. 35. A comedy, Musique à rebours [Musical countdown], was drafted in French, and another, S’Berdele [The little Bertha], in Alsatian. 36. On the list and dating of Alfred Dachert’s works, see the appendix. 37. Cf. Jean Baubérot, Un christianisme profane? Royaume de Dieu, socialisme et modernité culturelle dans le périodique chrétien-social ‘L’Avant-garde’ (1899–1911), Paris, PUF, 1978; Klauspeter Blaser, ‘Élie Gounelle et Wilfred Monod, chefs de file français du socialisme chrétien’, Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique, 66, 2, 2000, pp. 73–82 ; Jacques Martin, Élie Gounelle, apôtre et instigateur du christianisme social, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999. 38. Alfred Dachert, ‘La cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, Christianisme social, 10–11, 1931, pp. 347–55. 39. Kimberly A.  Miller, Eugenics and American Theatre, 1912–1921, doctoral thesis supervised by John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Lawrence, KS, Department of Theatre and Film, 2005; Susan Cannon Harris, ‘More than a Morbid, Unhealthy Mind: Public Health and the Playboy Riots’, in Stephen Watt et al. (eds), A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 72–94; Nicholas Crawford, ‘Synge’s Playboy and the Eugenics of Language’, Modern Drama, 51, 4, 2008, pp. 482– 500; and, for a general background, Alison Sinclair, ‘Social Imaginaries: The Literature of Eugenics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39c, 2008, pp. 240–46. 40. VWW, p. 173. 41. Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics. See supra, Introduction, n. 12. 42. Abel Ruffenach, Schloss Roog, n.d. [ca 1970], p. 72. 43. Abel Ruffenach, Saint-Elme, Strasbourg, Association pour la conservation des écrits d’Abel Ruffenach, 1968, p. 117. 44. Jean-Paul Gunsett, ‘Hommage’, L’Écrivain d’Alsace et de Lorraine, 18, 1972, pp. 7–8. 45. VWW, p. 380. 46. ‘Who instilled me with this operating framework of thoughts and poetry?’ (Schloss Roog, p. 71). 47. ‘It is an advantage for an author to be a deceased author and to let the virtue of his writings speak for themselves.’ Abel Ruffenach, Au sujet d’un avant-propos, preface to La Cathédrale Ardente, Paris, Stock, 1948, pp. 7–11, here p. 9. 48. Interview with François Dachert, 21 September 2012. 49. Ibid. 50. VWW, p. 7. 51. Anne-Marie Thiesse, Écrire la France: Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Époque et la Libération, Paris, PUF, 1991. On Alsatians’ linguistic dilemma, see Jean Egen, Les Tilleuls de Lautenbach, Paris, Stock, 1979. 52. By age group, baccalaureate graduates represented around 2 per cent of the male population around 1900, and 1 per cent of the total population. Jean-Claude Chesnais, ‘La population des bacheliers en France: Estimation et projection jusqu’en 1995’, Population, 30, 3, 1975, pp. 527–50.

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53. Suzanne Herrenschmidt, ‘Discours du 11 décembre 1947’. Also see Alfred Dachert’s Legion of Honour dossier, Centre for Contemporary Archives 19800035/1148, Extract type 2, 31325/229.035. 54. VWW, p. 15. 55. ‘All the plays in my heptalogy are both plays and poems’ (VWW, p. 88). 56. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988 [orig. ed. 1985]. 57. Alfred Dachert, ‘Paroles prononcées le 3 novembre 1965 au Foyer de la jeune fille en réponse à Mme Herrenschmidt’, coll. François Dachert. 58. Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, p. 1. 59. Correspondence between Alfred Dachert and Léon Ungemach, 4, 12 and 15 March 1905, coll. François Dachert. 60. José Geraldo Simões Jr., ‘The Town Planning Conference: London 1910. International Exchanges in the Beginning of the Modern Urbanism’, 15th International Planning History Society Conference, Sao Paulo, 2012. 61. Suzanne Herrenschmidt, ‘Discours du 11 décembre 1947’. 62. ‘The worst thing about war is that it is anti-selective, because it decreases the stock of outstanding beings (Vorzüglichen) within humanity’, VWW, p. 94. 63. Paul Crook, ‘War as Genetic Disaster? The First World War Debate over the Eugenics of Warfare’, War & Society, 8, 1990, pp. 47–70; Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 64. Wolfgang Voigt, ‘The Garden City as Eugenic Utopia’, Planning Perspectives, 4, 3, 1989, pp.  295–312; Susan Currell, ‘Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: “Municipal Darwinism” and the (Anti) Cosmopolitan Utopia in the Early 20th Century’, Modernist Cultures, 5, 2, 2010, pp. 267–90; Patricia L. Garside, ‘“Unhealthy Areas”: Town Planning, Eugenics, and the Slums, 1890–1945’, Planning Perspectives, 3, 1988, pp. 24–46. 65. Dachert, ‘Positive Eugenics in Practice’, p. 15. 66. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Léon Ungemach, 11  November 1919, coll. François Dachert. 67. Letters from Alfred Dachert to Léon Ungemach, 15  July and 3  August 1918, coll. François Dachert. 68. VWW, p. 62. 69. VWW, p. 112. 70. In his childhood home, Dachert tells us, the twilight light ‘flickered on Chinese ebony furniture and dark lacquers, and slipped on the black silk carpets embroidered with Japanese birds …, a background of Asian vastness full of foreboding and anxiety’. Abel Ruffenach, Verklaerte Staetten, n.d. [ca 1910], 328 pp., here p. 20. 71. Dachert, L’Origine de la fondation Les Jardins Ungemach, p. 32. Also see Dachert, Cheminements chinois, Letters from China, 1921–1922, edited by François Dachert in 2012 [hereafter C.C.], p. 281. 72. VWW, pp. 32 and 96. Cf. Heinrich Mootz, Die chinesische Weltanschauung, dargestellt auf Grund der ethischen Staatslehre des Philosophen Mong dse, Strasbourg, Trübner, 1912; and on the author, George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 452 and 498. 73. VWW, pp. 96 and 112. 74. C.C., p. 195.

The Stone Poem of the Alsatian Ibsen 61

75. Eugène Simon, La Cité chinoise, Paris, Kimé, 1993 [orig. ed. 1885], pp. 30–31 and 102 respectively. 76. Dachert succeeded in having it accredited by the Ministry of Public Education as a ‘private study mission’ – a minimal formula for an experience that he nonetheless ranked among the ‘three miracles’ of these crucial years. Cf. Damiano Matasci, ‘Le système scolaire français et ses miroirs: Les missions pédagogiques entre comparaison internationale et circulation des savoirs (1842–1914)’, Histoire de l’éducation, 125, 2010, pp. 5–26. 77. C.C., p. 115. 78. Ibid., pp. 53 and 60. 79. Ibid., p. 50. 80. VWW, pp. 133 and 142. 81. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, p. 92. Cf. the American eugenicist Charles Davenport (1866–1944): ‘I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring’ (Oscar Riddle, Biographical Memoir of Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944, Washington, DC, National Academy of Sciences, 1949, p. 84). 82. Leonard Darwin, ‘The Eugenics Ideal’, ER, 5, 1913, pp. 2–9, here p. 6. 83. Abel Ruffenach, Le Val l’Évêque, Paris, Librairie française d’art et d’édition, 1920, p. 110. 84. Cf. the architect W.C. Marshall, ‘The Effect of Economic Conditions on the Birth-Rate’, ER, 5, 2, 1913, pp. 114–29, here p. 124: ‘what is the criterion of Eugenic worth? And to my reply, largely economic success …. In the long run, it is the best man, whether it be in the professions, in trade, or in the ranks of labour, who gets the most constant and best paid employment’. 85. Abel Ruffenach, Schloss Roog, p. 65. 86. Data are collected from MAS, Strasbourg Register of civil status documents, 1803– 1902, Births, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Dachert family. 87. Interview with François Dachert, 21 September 2012. 88. General inventory of the proceedings of the estate tax administration office of Strasbourg, ADBR 3 Q 27872, case file ‘Dachert, Philipp Heinrich, Fabrikant’; and interview with François Dachert, 21 September 2012. 89. Abel Ruffenach, Verklaerte Staetten, p. 26. 90. Abel Ruffenach, Le Val L’Évêque. 91. Eugenics attracted among ‘the “professionals”, the doctors, scientists, engineers, social workers, and so on, whose activity was legitimated with reference to their accredited possession of a body of knowledge, which was held to be of unique importance and access to which was strictly controlled. This group can be seen as intermediate between the manual working class, on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and aristocracy on the other, [… which] led it to develop and adhere to ideologies that … pointed to the social value of professional knowledge and skill as against the mere ownership of capital or land’. Donald MacKenzie, ‘Statistical Theory and Social Interests: A Case-Study’, Social Studies of Science, 8, 1, 1978, pp. 35–83, here p. 67. Also see Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984. 92. Abel Ruffenach, Der Weinberg des Gerechten, n.d. [ca 1905], pp. 37 and 91 respectively. 93. Alfred Dachert left in the archives bequeathed to his son François the letter of 4 March 1905 in which Léon Ungemach promoted him to head of the confectionary division. The increase in his profit-sharing had a secret consideration: the eviction of the

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94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

founder from whom Ungemach had bought back the business, Mr. Loriot. Source: coll. François Dachert. Abel Ruffenach, Schloss Roog, p. 8. VWW, p. 339. Leonard Darwin, ‘Roman Catholic Criticism of Eugenics, with Reply from the President’, ER, 12, 1, 1920, pp. 48–49. Arthur Dendy, ‘Evolution and the Future of the Human Race’, ER, 12, 4, 1921, pp. 266–78. Garland E. Allen, ‘“Culling the Herd”: Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the United States, 1900–1940’, Journal of the History of Biology, 46, 2013, pp. 31–72. Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915, Washington, DC, The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916. A first book devoted to this family in 1877 pointed to their unfavourable social conditions. Abel Ruffenach, Der Falkenwasen [The provost law], n.d. [ca 1910], 58 pp., here p. 50. Abel Ruffenach, Schloss Roog, p. 42. Abel Ruffenach, Saint-Elme, p. 65. Anthony J.  Steinhoff, The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870–1914, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2008. Abel Ruffenach, Schloss Roog, pp. 33 and 55. Ibid., p. 72. In German, this verb, which means ‘to become’, is an auxiliary for the future tense and the passive voice. Philipp Lepenies, The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016. Abel Ruffenach, Der Falkenwasen, p. 26. Abel Ruffenach, Le Val l’Evêque, p. 106 (extracts). Élie Gounelle, ‘La tâche du “christianisme social” en 1925’, Le Christianisme social, 1925, 1, pp. 1–12, here p. 12. Abel Ruffenach, Der Weinberg des Gerechten, p. 83. ‘Discours de M. Dachert, gérant des Jardins Ungemach’, reproduced in the brochure Léon Ungemach, 1844–1928, pp. 21–22, which underscores ‘the countless people who lived off the profit of his activity’. Abel Ruffenach, Le Val l’Évêque, pp. 145–46. ‘Was ich baute war auch ein Poëm, ein Poëm aux Zimmerwerk und Stein allerdings’, VWW, p. 204. Dachert is referring to the 1846 operetta by Austrian composer Franz von Suppé, Dichter und Bauer [Poet and peasant]: ‘this is how to describe me instead: “poet and builder”’.

Chapter 3

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? From the Reign of the ‘Dictator’ to the Republican Public Policy (1923–1984)

S There is no civilized nation where human life concerns play as minor and overlooked a role in national politics as in France …. It has no state doctrine on eugenics, be it empirical or theoretical; and the few special initiatives, like the remarkable one in Strasbourg, where a philanthropist created a modern republic, are ignored by our health services. —Jean Giraudoux, Pleins pouvoirs [Full powers], Paris, Gallimard, 1950 [orig. ed. 1939], pp. 33–34

On 10 August 1982, Strasbourg residents Mr and Mrs D. received a letter from Robert Bailliard, first deputy to the mayor, informing them that their ‘request for admission as renters in “Ungemach Gardens”’ had not been granted. The 38-year-old man and 33-year-old woman were rejected for failing to meet ‘the age conditions required for consideration to obtain a house in this garden city, as stipulated in the attached form’. What is remarkable is that the form, which the D. family had filled out as part of their application (Figure 3.1), had not been changed since its conception by Alfred Dachert sixty years earlier, save for the addition of a question that only compounded its significance: ‘Does the applicant commit to following the particular rules of the Ungemach Foundation?’ How was a eugenic experiment conceived in the aftermath of the First World War able to last until close to the end of the Cold War? How was it able to survive forty years after the fall of an ideology – Nazism – that

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Figure 3.1. The preservation of the entry form in the 1980s. © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg, MAS 269W50. In this chapter, residents’ surnames have been hidden in the documents produced after 1939.

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 65

had dealt a predictably final blow to eugenics by showing the world its criminal potential? These questions are all the more intriguing given that after the Vichy regime fell in 1944, France became a republic again, driven by values of universalism and equality that were hardly compatible with the eugenic assertion that people were of different value. In 1950, as had been planned at the outset, the Foundation ceded the administration of Ungemach Gardens to the city of Strasbourg: the garden city thus became a public policy – an official experiment. In this chapter we will study the conditions and challenges of this survival by gradually moving from local factors to the macrohistorical reach of the Ungemach experiment. Far from being linear, its longevity obscured a succession of crises, the most severe of which were the Second World War and the turmoil after Liberation. It endured thanks to a combination of various mechanisms: adaptation to institutional and legal transformations; dialectic between the political commitment of certain key actors and administrative constraints; preservation of the bureaucratic memory of experience; articulation between competing ideological frameworks; and, as we will see in the next parts of this book, great resonance between Alfred Dachert’s project and the legacy of eugenics in postwar Western world. But first, we will bring the residents of Ungemach out of the shadows, and highlight their specific role in the experiment’s continuity.

Selection as an Instrument of Governance The linchpin in the Ungemach experiment, as we saw in chapter 1, was the lease contract through which the Foundation imposed its ‘particular rules’ on residents. The work par excellence of Alfred Dachert, it formed the ‘“central piece” of the Foundation’1 because the initial ‘sorting’ of candidate households – the selection – was expected to simplify the garden city’s administration. Selection! This term established both the objective of the experiment (improve natural selection) and its method (select renters of value). At the time when Dachert was using the term, ‘selection’ was characteristic of mass administrations. Its use spread in France with conscription reform in 1872 and the beginning of mandatory education in 1882. The concentration camps invented in the twentieth century gave ‘selection’ a criminal content and meaning. But when Dachert conceived his form, this word was primarily being used in a new way to designate occupational selection – a technique that had spread from the United States and led France to create a National Institute for Vocational Counselling (INOP) in 1928.

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The ever-greater formalization of the social division of labour, the codification of professional qualifications, the development of technical education, and the obsession with best channelling labour in a country decimated by low fertility and war, spread the idea that a company’s management of the ‘human factor’ was first and foremost a matter of sorting new employees. For an accomplished businessman like Dachert, these new managerial methods organized around ‘selection’ resonated with eugenic convictions strengthened by the war. ‘It’s all about the selection’ (Selektion ist alles), he reasserted at the end of his life.2 Thus, he premised his whole experiment on the selection of renters. Identifying households worthy of ‘investment’ was both an intrinsic goal and good management practice. Dachert believed that managing the flow of entrants would suffice to achieve the garden city’s central goal: to expand a quality population. But the history of the garden city would show the limitations of this pretence. The operation of Ungemach Gardens ran up against a shifting population – a series of unexpected events, a chaotic aggregation of individual choices and attitudes that made demography ‘in action’3 an overflow resistant to management. As the American Alfred Lotka put it at the time, population dynamics must be understood as a combination of inflows and outflows.4 Regulating both conditioned Dachert’s daily activity. For starters, although it appeared to be the simplest part of the garden city’s population management, the ‘selection’ raised challenges. On 3 November 1928, Alfred Dachert submitted a problematic case to the Foundation’s board.5 A family with nine children had requested admission to the garden city. They had a high-level supporter: the widow of Léon Ungemach, who had passed away ten months earlier. However, the garden city was not made to host big families, but rather to generate quality children. Giving in to this request would distort its purpose by setting ‘a troublesome precedent for the city’s administration’, the mayor of Strasbourg Jacques Peirotes warned. This case reveals the main forces that weighed on the selection of renters. The first one was the overabundance of applicants given the attractiveness of the rents and living conditions. Constitutive of the experiment, it clearly involved a trade-off: the need to reject inadmissible but ‘delicate’ requests. Recommendations from local bigwigs would recur throughout the decades, as would counter-strategies deployed by its administrators: one of the Board’s main functions was to dilute the responsibility for these rejections. This is the backstory that Peirotes had in mind when he spoke of ‘setting a precedent’. As a good politician he knew that the recruitment

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of residents for Ungemach Gardens was challenging in a public arena where renters had learnt to collectively organize and often joined forces with voluntary organizations for large families.6 In fact, upon the garden city’s opening, the head of the union of tenant associations of Alsace and Lorraine had sent a letter urging the Board of the Foundation to consider requests ‘received from various backgrounds’, and to not exclude families that had already started having children.7 By mentioning that the garden city received municipal funding, he was implicitly reminding the mayor of his accountability duty. The application from the couple with nine children was not just a ‘sensitive’ case for charitable reasons. In the France of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘large family’ was a potent political figure. Around 1945, half of French children were born to a minority of large and very large families.8 Their cause was promoted by associations speaking on behalf of hundreds of thousands of members, children included. One of the leading associations, called The Largest Family, only accepted families with at least five children. Often religiously inspired and linked to the Catholic bourgeoisie, they were backed by powerful lobbies in parliament and valued life per se rather than as a condition of state power, thus initially distinguishing themselves from pronatalists.9 For them, no argument could legitimate birth control in the Anglo-American sense of the term.10 The question of whether Ungemach Gardens should welcome an already large family reflected a political choice that was raised at the state level: should the focus be on generating births (by directly incentivizing young couples) or helping the already born (by compensating and differentially incentivizing large families)? Alfred Dachert succeeded in convincing his partners – the Ungemach family, municipality and prefecture – to resolve this dilemma by fully embracing the first option. This initial success would play a key role in the endurance of the recruitment conditions set in 1923. The upholding of rigid selection procedures did not just result from a doctrinal adherence to experience, but also to managerial convenience: it created an effective sorting tool in a context of high demand. To curb the ‘disappointment of the growing number of rejected families’ – totalling six hundred in 1926! – the remedy was to ‘strictly and meticulously [follow] the rules to avoid angering the public’.11 But the fear of creating a precedent reflected a deeper concern, which Alfred Dachert carefully downplayed: the idea that the initial selection might ultimately be neither perfect nor sufficient, and that the Foundation would have to manage outflows. This constraint would weigh most heavily on the Foundation’s operations over the next decades.

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The Progeny Clause The outflow issue was the real blind spot in the garden city’s regulation. The issue stemmed from its very operating principle since the incentive to generate birth can only be applied to young households. But what I will call the ‘progeny clause’ was only implicitly mentioned in the second article of the lease agreement: the ‘reduced rent is only provided to tenants who fulfil the conditions of the deed of gift stipulating that the houses of Ungemach Gardens are meant for young households in good health who want to have children and raise them in a healthy and moral environment’. As much as it was forthcoming about its recruitment principles, the Foundation was vague about the fate of households that failed to fulfil their ‘desire to have children’ or who, at a certain age, ceased to be able to procreate. But there was no question that such households were undesirable. In private, Alfred Dachert compared the garden city’s houses to hospitals that should only be occupied ‘during a given period by those in need’.12 Yet ‘sometimes, albeit rarely, it so happened that promising families failed to develop. The Foundation replaced them with families from which it could expect more. Since the garden city was made for children, it was intolerable that it be occupied by families who could not or did not want to have any. Since the garden city has existed, that is, over the past seven years, only six interventions have been necessary’.13 What does ‘the Foundation replaced them’ mean and what did these six interventions involve? In 1934, Dachert presented to the Foundation’s Board a lacklustre demographic assessment (only nine births in 1933 – half as many as from 1926 to 1932 on average).14 He attributed this to the ‘general birth strike seen throughout the country’ as well as the economic crisis that had reduced households’ mobility. But ‘to maintain the average age of its residents our city needs around twenty moves per year’, lest the average age of families increase, and fertility decrease.15 The Dachert who claimed to be managing the birth micro-politics of ‘his’ garden city had discovered, slightly ahead of the first opinion polls in France, which focused on birth rate in 1939,16 that the pronatalist discourse on the country’s general interest carried little weight in the face of material constraints and of households’ prospects. It therefore made sense ‘to encourage families that no longer had young children in their home and could no longer enjoy the garden city’s advantages, to find an apartment and leave their home to young households in urgent need of one’.17 This resulted in case-by-case tinkering with the garden city’s population. In 1935 Alfred Dachert explained to the Board: ‘I interviewed two families whose children no longer live with them because they became

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 69

adults. They understood that since they were no longer in a position to benefit from the advantages of Ungemach Gardens they should no longer live there. Eight other families in the same circumstance readily agreed to leave. The resulting renewal lowered the average age of the garden city’s residents by around 14 months …. Following the replacement of these families the birth rate increased’.18 The Board, which included national and municipal representatives, helped Dachert to determine which families should leave. One can piece together from the minutes the combination of incentives, negotiations and pressure deployed by the Foundation to make the undesirables leave: the evasiveness of the sources reflects the awkwardness of the exercise. The latter only concerned a minority of renters, however. The households, which Dachert saw as guinea pigs, made independent choices. The vast majority of moves resulted from considerations that had nothing to do with the Foundation’s objectives, as attested by the inventory of causes for leaving Ungemach declared by tenants (Table 3.1). Of 101 departures from 1934 to 1938, seventy-eight, or three-quarters, were due to mundane factors related to urban mobility: moving outside of Strasbourg; seeking apartments with a better location in the city or a better size; reducing rent. Other equally typical rationales included the desire for homeownership and particular family or economic causes (‘bought a business and lives in the same house’, ‘lives with his/her mother’).19 But failure to meet the Foundation’s criteria (‘family only has one child’ or, most often, ‘family reaching the age limit’) was the second leading cause of departure, which is not insignificant given the oddity of this Table 3.1. Declared causes of tenants’ departures from Ungemach Gardens (1934–1938). 1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

Total

Move outside of Strasbourg

Declared causes of departure

7

7

8

6

4

32

Failure to meet Ungemach criteria

8

5

2

8

23

3

12

More expensive apartment

1

5

3

Less expensive apartment

2

2

5

Desire to be closer to the city

1

1

3

4

2

Ownership or independence

1

Other

1

Family

1

TOTAL

22

9 4 1

1 19

27

Source: © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg, 99 MW 171.

9

9

1

9

3

4

1

3

24

101

70 A Human Garden

factor. The human gardener Dachert had to cut the dead branches in close to a quarter of cases. For this purpose, the residents of Ungemach Gardens were controlled, inspected and logged by a ‘municipal housing commission’. The documents it produced during the interwar period numbered hundreds of pages. These included a census of residents per house with notes on their demographic changes (births, deaths and moves), as well as the assessment from annual visits to which all households were subject. The assessment was both qualitative (observations about their behaviour and home and lawn maintenance) and quantitative (awarding of ‘housekeeping grades’ ranging from 1 to 10). Children’s weights and heights were recorded in the kindergarten located at the heart of the garden city. For the period 1928–1932 the commission even documented whether each household had put out a flag during the national holiday on 14 July: the patriotic spirit of the garden city’s various streets was assessed on this basis. These data were the subject of frenzied statistical processing. Alfred Dachert posted residents’ metrics in his office as one would display artwork, the crown jewel being the comparison between the garden city’s birth rate and that of the French nation.20 As was the case for many of the era’s bio-political experiments, these data were used to disseminate the results of Ungemach Gardens’ human laboratory at expositions like the one in Zurich in 1933 (garden architecture) and in Strasbourg in 1935 (health; see the poster reproduced in the Introduction [Figure 0.1]). The quantitative hyperactivity (and pedantry) was also a means for the businessman to impress the Board. Finally, it helped manage flows, as demonstrated by the hard line taken after the fall in birth rates in 1933, and by the case-by-case tracking of residents. The linchpin of this control was the list drawn up by the municipal housing commission after its annual inspections, which were conducted on an unannounced date towards the end of the month of October. The commission graded each household on housekeeping and transcribed any comments provided orally. These assessments primarily concerned compliance with rental commitments: the requirement to mow the lawn seven times a year (article 6); the prohibition on keeping chickens, ducks, fowl, goats and pigs (article 14), on chopping wood in the kitchen (article 9), on stacking manure in the gardens (article 6), and so on. There were no limits to the intrusion into tenants’ private life because renters had agreed ‘to tolerate the inspection of their home by the Foundation’s manager or steward in their periodic rounds throughout the garden city’ (article 11). In return, it ensured a regulation of collective life designed to minimize conflict

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 71

with neighbours (aesthetic harmonization of gardens, regulation of noise pollution). A ‘conciliation commission’ even arbitrated conflicts between neighbours that sometimes involved moving one of the two to another house in the garden city. These provisions were not unique in collective housing at the time. But three types of major violations of ‘reproductive’ objectives were specific to the Ungemach experiment. The first one concerned the wife’s activity: ‘lady must stop working as a teacher’; ‘the wife works outside the home’; ‘the wife works for the railway company and is not taking care of her household’. The second one, always carefully worded and question marked, concerned cases of ‘suspected’ cohabitation (with a brother, a grandmother, etc.). The third and most frequent violation was a couple’s insufficient fertility: ‘the commission provides a one-year deadline for a baby to be born, or else the [leasing agreement] will need to be broken’, ‘the commission would like this family to not remain childless’, ‘the house will need to be forfeited if the family only has one child’. The criticism even incorporated the sometimes-brief period that had elapsed since the couple’s formation (observation of 29 October 1928: ‘no child, married since October 1927’). Another recurring parameter was the age – deemed too high – of the youngest: ‘one five-year-old child’; ‘one child who is five and two months; the household was verbally informed that they would automatically lose the house if the child turned six and remained an only child’; and even ‘a three-and-a-half-year-old child. Comment was provided verbally’. Sometimes the household’s reaction to the given warning was noted. Thus, a family to which the commission had ‘expressed [its] desire to grow’ argued that the wife ‘was sick and needed surgery soon’. Another, whose only child had reached the age of ‘five years and seven months’, had ‘announced the upcoming birth of a second child’. Could someone really be forced to leave a house due to insufficient fertility? The answer to this question was systematically affirmative. After annual visits in 1926–1930 – the years with the most detailed notes – twenty-two households were given notice. Within a year, the Me. family left the Foundation because they had subleased their house, as did two of the three couples with a working wife (El., Jo.) – the third one (Hi.) stayed for three years. Most of the households given notice (eighteen, or 80 per cent of the total) were cited for insufficient fertility: five had no children and thirteen had just one. All of them left the garden city within two years. For those who agreed to become compliant by procreating, the only leeway was to secure an extension of up to three or four years (Wi., Ri.), most likely assuming they convinced Dachert of their goodwill.21

72 A Human Garden

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 73

Figures 3.2 and 3.3. Assessments of the municipal housing commission (12–13 November 1930): housekeeping grades (left) and observations (right). © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg, 99 MW 171.

74 A Human Garden

Table 3.2. The fate of tenants threatened with the termination of their leasing contract during annual visits from 1926 to 1930. Name (two Year of initial notice letters)

Type of notice

Year of departure

Number of children upon departure

Cr.

1926

One year if remains childless

1928

No children

Pé.

1926 and 1927

If remain with one child

Sp.

1926

If remain with one child

Wi.

1926

If remain with one child

El.

1926

Wife works

1926

Hi.

1926

Wife works

1930

Be.

1927 and 1928

If remain with one child

Br.

1927

If remain with one child

1929

One child

Ga.

1927

If remain with one child

1929

One child

Gr.

1927

If remain with one child

1928

One child

Ru.

1927

Verbal comments [one child]

1929

One child

Si.

1927 and 1928

Verbal comments [one five-year-old child in 1928]

1929

One child

Wü.

1927

Verbal comments [one child]

1931

One child

Me.

1929

Subleasing

1929

Two children

Loh.

1928

Childless

Ri.

1928

Childless

1931

Jo.

1928

Lady must stop working as a teacher

1929

Le.

1928

Announces upcoming second birth

A second child was born in 1930 1927

One child A second child was born in 1930 Two children A second child was born in 1929

One child in 1931 One child

Had a second child in 1929

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 75

Fi.

1930

Childless. One-year grace period

1931

Fr.

1930

Termination if remains with one child on 31 December 1931

1931

One child

Mu.

1930

Childless. One-year grace period

1931

Childless

Per.

1930

Termination if remains with one child on 31 December 1931

1931

One child

Legend: Surnames in regular font: left Ungemach Gardens as of 31 December 1931. Surnames in italics: still residents as of 31 December 1931. Underlined surnames: received two notices. Source: Table created by the author on the basis of © Municipal Archives in Strasbourg, 99 MW 171.

The Foundation ultimately strictly applied the procreation requirement, but in more limited terms than originally planned. While it was not able to systematically ensure the formation of the large families it aspired to create, it made the couples leave who were deemed too infertile. Once the experiment was running, the objective became limited to generating the birth of at least one additional child, as if the establishment of statistics required feeding the annual stock of newborns: in a classical development, the performance indicator became the performance itself. Remarkably, the link between the visit, residence and births was systematic: people given notice had to either procreate or leave.

The ‘Dictator’ and the Crisis of the 1930s How did households react to the pressure exercised by the Foundation regarding their fertility? During the first ten years, the only observable opposition was a satirical letter published on 22 September 1929 in the newspaper La République. A household described its failure to procreate despite its best efforts (changing bedrooms, going on vacation, asking for advice from the family, priest and pastor).22 Behind its ‘humour’, this document attested to the double face of French pronatalism: the enduring political consensus that it generated did not prevent the contempt

76 A Human Garden

of medical and demographic elites towards couples deemed incapable of controlling their fertility,23 who experienced mockery in their daily lives.24 Despite being in line with national population policies of the second third of the twentieth century, Ungemach city was throughout this period lampooned as a ‘breeding farm’. In the mid 1930s, relations with residents became strained. Extra rents that Dachert imposed on the least fertile couples beginning in 1930 did not suffice to boost births. The businessman increasingly manically monitored the evolution in the age of tenants.25 He feared the encroachment by couples too old to continue procreating. From 1931 to 1937, the average age of women increased from thirty-three years and seven months to thirty-six years and one month. One per cent of wives were over forty-five in 1928, 3.7 per cent in 1930, and over 8 per cent at the end of the decade. Widows even started appearing beginning in 1935. The ensuing hard line provoked the first collective resistance in the history of Ungemach Gardens. Beginning in 1934, Dachert stacked the roles of vice-president and administrator of the garden city by becoming an employee of the Foundation.26 The economic crisis got the better of his annuity. With a more continuous presence, the exercise of his authority, accentuated by his seniority in relation to the age of residents, became even more visible: Alfred Dachert ‘walked the garden city all day. He monitored everything. Unclean basement tiles would elicit a letter from him’.27 With the Board’s agreement, Dachert started giving notice to couples who had ceased to procreate by using the age of their youngest child as the criterion and gradually decreasing this threshold. From 1931 to 1939, all twenty couples whose youngest child in 1931 had the highest age (then between seven and sixteen) left the garden city. By comparison, the turnover rate was only 55 per cent in a control sample drawn randomly. However, there was no difference in the fate of couples that gave birth to two children versus three or more children. The criterion was not fertility, but rather the age of the youngest child. The pressure placed on this group was highest between 1934 and 1936: these three years concentrated 70 per cent of the departures of households with the oldest youngest children. And residents had no body to negotiate with management. Dachert heeded the warnings from a manager at the time: ‘nothing is more difficult than dealing with renters …. So few people have enough resolve to oppose their will to that of someone else who does not want to do what is asked of him/her, and to truly win’.28 This refusal to collectively organize renters also resulted from the fact that Ungemach Gardens, contrary to the Green Path garden

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 77

city in Reims [Chemin Vert] that most resembled it because of its pronatalism,29 entirely reduced them to their role as procreators. The only collective infrastructures (kindergarten and provisioning by truck) were linked to maternity. This makes the petition that residents sent on 11 January 1936 to the deputy mayor of Strasbourg Charles Frey all the more interesting. It referred to ‘this Mister Vice-President’ as a ‘dictator’ who ‘had the guts to gather tenants’ signatures for a request on his behalf to obtain the “Legion of Honour”’.30 At issue was the interpretation of article 2 of the lease agreement, which stipulated that the garden city was reserved for ‘young households in good health’. The document revealed that new residents were not informed of the conditions for staying on the grounds: ‘when tenants sign the lease agreement, there is no mention of the fact that they will need to leave their house as soon as their child reaches a certain age’. The inculcation and acceptance of this principle occurred gradually, as renters discovered the fate of residents forced to move when their children grew. The key point is that the protesters were not challenging the principle of evicting households whose youngest child had reached a certain age: ‘we could understand this’. The cause of the revolt lay in its terms: the lowering of this age to around ten. What they were requesting was to be able to stay until their last child turned sixteen. In other words, the residents’ collective protest did not question the general philosophy of Ungemach Gardens. We can thus piece together all the conditions regulating the Ungemach experiment during the interwar period. The annual visit of the municipal commission was a means to individually pressure young couples: if they were given notice, they needed to move or procreate. But the more time passed, the more residents’ aging raised the delicate question of making tenants move who had kept their procreative promises. To this end, the Foundation conditioned the extension of households’ residency to the age of their youngest child. The ensuing protest questioned the terms of the garden city’s demographic regulation, but not its principle. In learning by doing, Alfred Dachert adopted a criterion to regulate outflows that residents followed. This criterion became a rule when the experiment was municipalized in 1950. In the interim, the war and then the Liberation thrust the interaction between the Foundation and households into a chaotic situation, wherein the policy’s harshness intersected with the appearance of national tenancy legislation.

78 A Human Garden

The Litmus Tests of the 1940s (1) – The Occupation (1940–1945) More than any other period, the 1940s brought to the fore the question of whether Alfred Dachert’s post-First World War experiment was sustainable. Political factors played a central role but did not unfold according to predictable ideological determinations. Paradoxically, Nazi and eugenic Germany – the occupying power in Alsace – showed little interest in the purpose of Ungemach Gardens, which ended up being in line with the French Republic’s priorities in the years after Liberation. Over this period, the foundational principle of Ungemach Gardens – the selection of its residents – was shaken by particularly intense and dramatic population upheavals. At sixty-four, Alfred Dachert was directly affected. Following the declaration of war in September 1939 and the evacuation of Strasbourg’s whole population, he sought refuge with his wife and children in Nîmes, in Southern France – a Protestant region from which his wife hailed. After attempting to find forest work to employ young Alsatian refugees, he spent the rest of the war in wearisome inactivity that led him to start writing the biography of his work.31 From the garden city’s perspective, we can seize as a whole the decade spanning the declaration of war and evacuation of Strasbourg in September 1939, the German occupation that was in effect an annexation,32 the liberation of the city in November 1944, the commotion of the ensuing years, and the garden city’s transfer from the Foundation to the city in 1950. The succession of political and administrative regimes represented a continuous phase of turmoil for Ungemach Gardens. In 1949, when a tenant came to express his gratitude to Alfred Dachert, the latter – a resilient man – confided being anxious about getting ‘battered from all sides by people trying to ruin the principle of the garden city and ensure that its rules will be changed upon its transfer to the city. You understand that I’m engaged in a life-and-death struggle to save our work’.33 Meanwhile, on 13 April 1945, after returning to Strasbourg just before turning seventy, Alfred Dachert sent a flyer to Ungemach Garden residents indicating that the return to a French and republican normality meant that the experiment would resume. During the war, the Foundation was renamed Stiftung ‘Gartenstadt Ungemach’ as part of a systematic Germanization of institution names, proper names and surnames in Alsace, and was placed under the aegis of the Öffentliche Volkswohnungsbauanstalt der Stadt Straβburg, that is, the municipal office for housing matters. Its administration was entrusted to the architect who had been associated with the garden city’s construction twenty years earlier: Jean Sorg (1896–1973), who became Johann Sorg.34

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 79

Indifferent to the garden city’s ideological underpinnings, the occupier used the attractive living conditions to house loyal pro-Nazi Germans and Alsatians. The collective rules, especially the prohibition on raising animals and the maintenance rules for houses and gardens, were flouted.35 Demographic objectives were abandoned. From 1939 to 1947, the first possible point of comparison, the number of households without children grew from zero to twenty-five, and the share of youngest children aged fifteen or over increased tenfold from 0.73 per cent to 7.1 per cent. While the German administration formally maintained the recruitment questionnaire for some of the new tenants, the eligibility criteria – the linchpin of the experiment – loosened. At a time of housing shortages, they flexibly and vaguely aimed for a match between the number of available rooms and household needs. A list of tenants from 1942 shows the magnitude of the demographic transformations wrought by the war.36 The household turnover was massive: 40 per cent of households (51 out of 128) had arrived during the Occupation. After the Liberation, close to 80 per cent of these recent arrivals disappeared without leaving a trace. This volatility was consistent with Alfred Dachert’s observation in 1945 that a demographic degradation had been compounded by an ideological contamination with the entry of many Nazi officials among the undesirable renters. Thus, the unfortunate family of Jeanne and Theodore Deiss, which had lived in the garden city since 1928, gave way on 13 October 1943 to ‘Germans by the name of Lapp’ in order to be ‘transplanted’ (umgesiedelt). This sanction usually hit families who were deemed suspicious,37 or were collectively expiating the behaviour of one of their members – often a son who had sought to escape the Wehrmacht draft imposed in Alsace since 25 August 1942.38 Foundation sources do not show whether other renters were victims of such punitive measures, such as the residents of a house repurposed as the local headquarters for the air force. But between the evacuees of 1939 who chose to remain ‘in the country’s interior’ or were rejected upon their return, and the people expelled by the occupying authorities,39 the many house vacancies constituted a boon for the settlement of Germans and active supporters of the Reich. Liberation documents detail the presence of Germans settled in the garden city. At 7 rue des Muguets ‘was the furniture of a German national by the name of Haendel’;40 the former occupants of the house granted in March 1945 to Arthur Kuhn had ‘quickly crossed the Rhine at the time of the debacle’.41 Litigation files also mentioned Alsatian collaborators: ‘as a favour, the German authorities placed Mrs Z. in the garden city’;42 Alfred M., ‘an embittered Nazi, had distinguished himself under Hitler’s regime

80 A Human Garden

and was fired from the SNCF [French national railroad company]. His wife had a prominent position in a German programme’.43 Such serious accusations were undoubtedly not made lightly in matters that, after Liberation, often led to litigation. But the distinction between good and bad citizens was not always clear given the ‘hooks’ skilfully set up by the occupier to gradually enlist and Nazify part of the Alsatian population through their more or less spontaneous and more or less forced integration into a network of associations and functions managed by the National-Socialist party. Historians have clearly laid bare this process,44 as summed up in an account from former representative Henri Meck (1897–1966): By 1940, the Germans had established a network of political organizations. They started out carefully, almost innocuously. For example, the Elsässische Hilfsdienst (an emergency service for Alsatians) was in charge of repatriating evacuees. A few months later, this service transformed into a Nazi programme. And so hundreds of people were compromised. The coercion increased. People were required to be part of the Hitler youth to enter a secondary school. Agglomerations were divided into neighbourhoods placed under the supervision of a Zellenleiter (cell leader) …. The incorporation by force in 1942 … had been preceded by preparatory measures: mandatory labour service, placement with the anti-aircraft defence, etc. The sanctions for people who tried to evade these constraints ranged from the death penalty to deportation, not to mention concentration camps and prison. If a runaway could not be located the authorities went after the person’s family.45

One of the mentioned activities – participation in anti-aircraft defence – involved many residents of Ungemach Gardens. And garden city residents who approached the German authorities about maintenance issues (like the threat of falling branches) often assumed ‘volunteer’ functions. It is unlikely that the distinction between people who arrived before and during the war created a clear picture of patriots and collaborators. Upon Liberation, before pardons and amnesties imposed ‘the law of oblivion and silence’,46 the accusation of collaboration – so long as it was substantiated by the social control resulting from the close tabs kept on each resident by his/her neighbours – helped to drive out renters occupying homes that were reclaimed by the evacuees of 1939, or that would better suit young households seeking adequate housing. The problem was obviously not limited to Ungemach Gardens: the political de-legitimization of rivals in Strasbourg’s housing market was widespread in complaints lodged with the authorities by 1939 evacuees seeking to reclaim their prewar homes, or the homeless seeking a roof. But for the Foundation, highlighting the political turpitude of undesirable

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 81

residents from the war period provided a means to address the chaos of population flows and needs, and of the legal revolutions of the decade.

The Litmus Tests of the 1940s (2) – The Law and Rights (1945–1950) On 11 December 1947, Suzanne Herrenschmidt, the third and last president of the Ungemach Foundation, gave a speech honouring Alfred Dachert’s award of a knighthood under the Légion d’Honneur, one of the highest French distinctions; he was the selection of the Ministry for Public Health and Population.47 Obtaining this distinction as vice-president and manager of the Foundation undoubtedly brought some relief to the garden city’s creator, who since his return from exile had been beset by all kinds of threats to the continuation of his work. The Foundation, and its surrounding environment in Strasbourg and Alsace, experienced both human and legal chaos. ‘Those expelled in 1940 came back to find their homes occupied, sometimes by a war victim. They would learn that their furniture had been sold by the Germans. The refrigerator was at so-and-so’s house, because the neighbours had noted the name of the buyers. But what if a war victim had purchased the bed? These were impossible situations that compensation could not resolve’, prefect Paira soberly noted.48 While helping tenants who had been moved to ‘the French interior’ in 1939 to reclaim their goods49 and overcome post-Liberation hardships,50 Dachert worked to resettle them in the garden city. In theory they had the right to return to their homes. But enforcement of this right required legal action that most were hesitant to pursue, even if that meant waiting for another house to become free. At the end of 1947, close to a quarter of the garden city’s ‘veterans’ (exactly twenty out of eighty-three) faced these difficulties. The effects of the housing crisis in the immediate postwar era compounded these tensions between old and new occupants, with many war victims placed in precarious living conditions as they awaited housing. In the two years that followed the Liberation, the Foundation was caught in a web of at times insistent recommendations made by various municipal or departmental health and social service bodies on behalf of households in distress. Alfred Dachert de facto played the role of a public agent relaying the priorities set by prefectoral and local authorities, as he had done at the end of the 1930s with the vaccination of schoolchildren and the planning of children’s evacuations in anticipation of war.

82 A Human Garden

The trove of archives documenting the trajectories of tenants and applicants, their residential requests, their administrative and associational backers, and their legal strategies, provides a detailed picture of the major change that occurred in the 1940s in relations between the Foundation and its tenants. The traditional form of the plea, which sought to sensitize Dachert’s wielding of discretionary power by depicting a desperate socio-health situation, was mixed with the invocation of rights. In an a priori paradoxical way, the 1940s marked the garden city’s integration into a political citizenship regime. While this change only took effect after 1945, it resulted from a series of laws and decrees that mainly dated from the war period. Until then, on the basis of freedoms offered under Alsatian law for foundations and under the French legal tenancy regime, which basically followed contract law, the Ungemach Foundation had to a large extent been Alfred Dachert’s creature. But after Liberation, the garden city’s residents seized on the legal revolution that rent regulation had undergone since the 1930s: the extreme vulnerability of populations, buffeted by the uprooting and tragedy of war and torn by ideological resentments, led to a strengthening of tenants’ legal status. This development occurred at a time when the Foundation was in a precarious financial situation. It had benefited from a fifteen-year legal exemption from real estate taxes for building new homes.51 The end of this advantage in 1938 upended its economic model. While he had announced a decrease in rents after the Liberation, Dachert was instead forced to increase them, first in 194652 and then on 25 February 1948, with a close to 60 per cent price hike. In a revolutionary development in the history of the Foundation, this second increase led to a meeting of eighty-four garden city renters on 1 March.53 The immediate and massive protest (60 per cent of resident households gathered) invoked the law for the first time: a law of 27 December 1947 placed a ceiling on rent increases. The mutineers also challenged the imputation of real estate taxes, from which the Foundation was no longer exempt: they asked that the Foundation wait to see what measures would be included in the housing law that parliament was considering – the future ‘law of 1948’, which is still famous today in France, and which was finally adopted on 1 September.54 Twenty-two tenants took the Foundation to court. They were represented by the case of one of them – François Holder, a foreman in a tobacco factory,55 in whose favour the district court ruled on 24 February 1949.56 In addition to costs and expenses, the Foundation was sentenced to reimburse the group of tenants for rent overpayments since 1 April 1945, that is, 180,000 francs in 1951 (equivalent to around $517,000 in January 2019).57

Guinea Pigs or Citizens? 83

Most importantly, the ruling invalidated the Foundation’s mechanism for setting new rents.58 The Foundation argued that on the reference date of 1 September 1939 it had been offering rents that were 25 per cent lower than the market price in Strasbourg, and an even greater discount resulting from savings on the garden city’s maintenance costs, revenue drawn from its financial holdings, and its real estate tax exemption. Since these latter three ‘bonus’ sources had disappeared with the war and the new tax regime, the Foundation had deemed it legitimate to re-evaluate the Holder family’s rent, and only retain the 25 per cent discount on what it called the ‘normal rent’ in the city.59 But the court refused to follow this reasoning, and what is more, reassessed rents in Strasbourg on the basis of an appraisal requested from the municipal housing office. Worse still, it invalidated the notion of ‘normal rent’. Casting it as a means to artificially inflate the discount offered to renters, it ruthlessly labelled it a ‘fictional rent’, eliciting ‘deep shock’ from the Board.60 Ungemach Gardens’ legal defeat was so complete that it did not appeal. The major novelty introduced by the ruling was to subject the Foundation to national rent rules. These had long followed the general principles of contract law and ‘were not subject to any regulation’.61 Granted, since the First World War various legal measures that were more or less strict from year to year had started regulating rents to the benefit of tenants. But housing built after 1914, including Ungemach Gardens, was not subject to these controls.62 This is where the Second World War marks a break. A decree of 26 September 1939 and a law of 28 February 1941 (and subsequently a law of 27 December 1947) extended the rent measures to these ‘new’ buildings: these are the legal measures that François Holder successfully mobilized.63 This new regulation changed the balance of power between the Foundation and residents, among whom the information about this legislation spread. The resident at the origin of the 1948 challenge, Georges Liebhard, a technician who was born in 1903 and had six children, was a familialist activist. Drawing on legal arguments made by his association,64 he sought to replace the discretionary system that had since the beginning dictated relations between the Foundation and its tenants, with a ‘common law’ regime. ‘These days no owner is free to do as he pleases and must abide by the government’s directives’, lamented Alfred Dachert.65 This reassessment initially did not extend to the ‘bio-political’ measures in the Ungemach leasing contract. Holder’s lawyer, Vincent Meyer, had simply mentioned without making it a charge: ‘the court very well knows [that] if a young couple does not have enough children, or if for

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any reason the number of children in the home decreases, the family is mercilessly kicked out’.66 However, the Foundation’s position was increasingly precarious: Alfred Dachert realized this within the first months following the Liberation. After failing to convince a recently settled renter, Edmond K., to return his house to its prewar occupants, he wrote in big letters on his convocation letter, as if moved by impotent rage: ‘M.K. will not leave and wants to risk a lawsuit’.67 Even when pleading the case of large families, which was especially sensitive in the context of the Liberation, and when attempting to intimidate undesirable renters, the ways his deadlines were pushed back from one letter to the next indicated that the pressure to free homes could never be taken for granted, even in indefensible cases given the housing shortage, such as the case of a widow without children who remained in her home despite several warnings.68 Rather, restoring the Foundation’s operations involved a long and delicate effort of convincing the affected households – a painful process whose outcome was always uncertain. Legal disputes with residents grew. Granted, the latter did not coalesce because case-by-case negotiations predominated: the adjustment of housing to household size was an official priority after Liberation, likely dampening the prospects for collective mobilizations.69 But while they remained individual, these processes were crucial because they pertained to the Foundation’s raison d’être. Complaints emanating from couples deemed insufficiently fertile and aged households created a frontal collision between two legal eras: the one that had ended with the interwar period, wherein leasing contract clauses sufficed to push out couples that had become undesirable; and the one that opened in the 1940s with the application of common law rules to the Foundation. The question was which of the two should prevail: the legal assurances offered to renters on security of tenure or Ungemach Gardens’ specific provisions? The lawyer for Ungemach Gardens, Henri Degand, played up the experiment’s survival by focusing the various trials on wayward tenants’ conscious violation of procreation requirements. In February 1948, the Krauss household thus lost its case at the initial hearing because the district court considered that having had ‘only one child in the rented house, after ten years of marriage …, they had not met the Foundation’s essential goal and had not respected the terms of their lease’, since the rental agreement ‘expressly stated that … residence in the garden city was intended for young couples who wanted to have children’.70 Mr Degand did not just emphasize the formal provisions of the Ungemach Foundation’s deed of gift. The documents produced during the various proceedings (court rulings as well as the arguments the

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lawyer submitted to Alfred Dachert) indicate that he explicitly asserted the experiment’s political purpose to the courts. A subpoena to vacate issued to the Chevalier household and presented to the civil section of the district court on 3 November 1949 stated that the Foundation has a specifically national goal aiming to rebuild the part of the population that suffered most from the war of 1914/18, that is, the healthiest, most vigorous, and most energetic part; this effort has eugenic goals, as clearly stated in article 7 of the deed of gift, which says: ‘The Foundation intends to help young couples in good health who want to have children and raise them under good health and moral conditions’.71

This formulation, which was reused in other documents, visibly gained traction. Requests to vacate ‘improperly occupied homes were all resolved in the courts, which ruled that the tenants had acted in bad faith and had therefore lost the right to security of tenure’.72 The failure of one of these proceedings – that of the Krauss household – would set a precedent for decades. After losing in the district court, the couple appealed in the civil court of Strasbourg and, after another defeat, the case was brought to the French Court of Cassation. The ruling that the latter issued on 20 December 1949 was decisive. It rendered nugatory the other proceedings underway73 and upheld the Foundation’s principles.74 The date is noteworthy: just twelve days before authority over Ungemach Gardens was transferred to the city of Strasbourg. Perhaps city hall pressed for the issuance of a clear legal opinion before taking over Ungemach Gardens. Another important factor was likely pressure from the influential Suzanne Herrenschmidt, the last president of the Ungemach Foundation, who worked behind the scenes to influence municipal and prefectoral authorities.75 In any event, the ruling from the Court of Cassation closed the challenging decade of the 1940s with a surprising reversal. After the proceedings that had threatened the continuity of the Ungemach experiment, its political foundations solidified: the garden city had slipped from the grip of housing law and was provided with a special status that theoretically allowed it to maintain the selection and expulsion of renters. However, these ten terrible years financially weakened Ungemach Gardens. The Holder trial had revealed that its economic model had ceased to be viable. The Foundation’s war treasure, resulting from the appreciation of its sugar stock from the First World War, had been eroded by the monetary and financial crisis since the 1930s. According to Dachert’s estimates, by 1949 it only allowed for a 7.75 per cent discount off the ‘normal rent’. At the same time, the garden city’s maintenance

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costs, on which the Foundation had been saving, shot up: they had ‘considerably surpassed total rents from the garden city’.76 The past quarter of a century had also diminished the garden city’s comfort and attractiveness. Holder’s lawyer thus described it in 1948: his client’s house had ‘no attics, no central heating. Its “bathroom” is just a laundry room next to the kitchen, with a terrazzo tub one could just as well use to feed pigs as to bathe a dog or kid’.77 All these financial needs were occurring at an unfortunate time when the garden city was being transferred to the city. Would it receive financial support from city hall, and if so, on what grounds? The survival of the Ungemach experiment had become a political question. On 1 January 1950 – the date when the city of Strasbourg took over its management – there was no confusion about its goals. While it had lent itself to several interpretations in the 1920s, after five years of legal wrangling there was no more ambiguity. The Court of Cassation’s ruling confirmed both the garden city’s contribution to the cause of ‘large families’, which was thriving after Liberation, and its ‘eugenic goals’. Figure 3.4. Intentions ‘cast in bronze’. Translation: ‘The Ungemach Gardens Foundation is designed to help healthy young couples who desire to have children and to raise them in quality conditions of hygiene and morality’. Photograph by the author.

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It is therefore with full awareness that the municipality endorsed and perpetuated the Foundation’s principles and procedures. After these five years of effort, Alfred Dachert’s poetic-theological-scientific dream was enshrined. His stone poem was ‘municipalized’ and collectively recognized: it transformed into a public policy. The garden city’s eugenic dimension did not disappear with the defeat of Nazism. It was upheld by political, administrative and judicial elites. Even symbolically, on 9 July 1951 the municipal council ‘decided that the Founder’s intentions should be cast in bronze and placed at the centre of the garden city, in the form of a monument honouring Mr Léon Ungemach’.78 Understanding this formalization and solidification at the beginning of the 1950s requires switching lenses: the history of Ungemach Gardens calls for an analysis of the legacy of eugenics in postwar France and, more generally, democratic societies.

Bureaucracy, Loyalty, Membership – The Municipalization of Ungemach Gardens (1950–1985) The Ungemach Foundation’s rules survived until the mid 1980s. This endurance is the big question of this book. Given the fall of Nazism in 1945, one would have expected an immediate and definitive de-legitimization of eugenics, especially in a country like France, with the return of a republican regime based on universal principles. The question is all the more piercing given that on 1 January 1950, as had been planned at the outset, the Strasbourg city hall’s housing department started managing the garden city.79 Despite his official retirement in 1948,80 at seventy-three, Alfred Dachert thus saw his principles formalized after the war, through public policy. Solving this enigma requires connecting the local, national and global levels. Let us go back to the rules imposed on residents. Until the mid 1980s, as was the case during the Dachert era, the selection involved an inspection of applicants’ homes81 and a medical certificate of good health. Households including a sick or handicapped parent or child were ruthlessly eliminated.82 To this end, the municipal administration continued to use the form that Alfred Dachert had created in the 1920s for eugenic purposes. Wives were expected to be ‘of good morals’ and to have no profession, although working wives eventually came to be tolerated.83 The household could not house anyone other than its children. The age criteria remained and were even more strictly defined: beginning in 1961, a couple’s oldest spouse had to be under twenty-five years of age if the couple had one

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child, twenty-seven if the couple had two, and thirty if it had three or more (these limits were respectively pushed back by one, three and five years if the incoming household could offer the outgoing one housing in exchange). Housing release criteria also remained in place. They became stricter and more systematic following the municipal council’s decision of 9 July 1951. The city council would now ‘discharge’ couples without children after two years of marriage, or parents of an only child who was five, of two children once the youngest turned ten, or of three or more children once the youngest turned twenty-one.84 Couples nonetheless had the right to transfer their lease to one of their children ‘meeting the Foundation’s criteria’: the municipal council thus instituted a clause that translated Alfred Dachert’s eugenic belief in the transmission of reproductive qualities from parents to children. In the ensuing four decades, successive Strasbourg housing officials used both moral – by inviting wayward tenants to exchange houses with young Strasbourg couples seeking to start a family – and material pressure. Continuing Alfred Dachert’s policy, they removed the 25 per cent rental discount and free garden access from couples in violation of the rules.85 What was the significance of maintaining and strengthening the legal framework inherited from the Foundation? It may have resulted from a legal obligation. In 1956, mayor Charles Altorffer (1881–1960) retorted to the Lower-Rhine prefect André-Marie Trémeaud (1903–1993), who supported the application of the father of a large household: The Ungemach homes are not available to people who are simply looking for housing. According to the deed of gift, the houses are intended for young couples who want to have children and raise them under good health and moral conditions. By accepting the bequest whereby the garden city became its property in 1950 the city committed to maintaining the character of the work.86

But the Court of Cassation’s 1949 ruling did not automatically mean that this legal framework would prevail. Indeed, its principles clashed with two other norm systems. The first one was national (1948 law on housing) and the second one was municipal: in December 1949, the city hall’s legal division had established that ‘the Foundation’s estate should be administered under the same conditions as all other city property’.87 Maintaining the initial normative framework was partly instrumental: it allowed city hall to have control over the selection of residents. The garden city was now part of its stately property holdings. Urbanization and transportation development had made Ungemach Gardens even more

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desirable. Its location had been a peripheral strip in the 1920s, but was now in the immediate vicinity of the city centre. Interpersonal networks and powerful associations representing renters and large families provided information on house vacancies and on the profile of selected residents that spread throughout Strasbourg. This pressure was even greater within Ungemach Gardens, where the social control of each resident was ensured through his/her neighbours.88 In the context of France’s persistent housing shortage, adjusting the number of household members to the structure of a home was a norm that was formalized by the notion of ‘best familial use’ included in the 1948 tenancy law.89 The garden city faced the threat of being ‘captured’ by large families, or by the protégés of local dignitaries. A former professional soccer player at the Strasbourg Racing Club, the pupil of an honorary university president, clients of municipal representatives and even of the deputy: city hall rejected all the applications that derogated from the rules to avoid setting a precedent. But while the preservation and even strengthening of strict principles inherited from the Foundation instrumentally served the city of Strasbourg, to what extent did they also result from a political and ideological choice on its part? Such a choice undoubtedly played a role. Its expectations are hard to specify because no city mayor ever had to doctrinally address the experiment. But they can be gleaned from the internal administrative notes of Ungemach Gardens. Until the 1980s these repeatedly stated that the garden city’s rental rules ‘did not fall under common law’90 and that ‘the allotment of these homes was subject to a special regime’, as the deputy mayor in charge of the housing department, Robert Bailliard (1915–1984), stated to the powerful Gaullist member of parliament André Bord (1922–2013) in 1965.91 ‘The Foundation’ appeared as an ever-present actor, even though it had been legally dissolved since the 1950 transfer. Equally remarkable was the regular mention of the experiment’s long history. The only part that was glossed over, to the benefit of the more renowned Léon Ungemach, was the role played by Alfred Dachert, who was still alive at the time. It was for his role as an administrator, but not as a creator, that a garden city square was named after the former vice-president. The garden city’s eugenic mission persistently survived in the memory of the administrative services. A 1957 publication stated that the selection form aimed to identify ‘the “eugenically beneficial” qualities of applicants’ because the ‘garden city is not about welcoming renters seeking housing, but rather young couples who can be expected to produce a progeny of interest’.92 In 1968, after rejecting a couple because the wife worked, Robert Bailliard reiterated that ‘the city had to honour Mr

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Ungemach’s wish to continue managing this longstanding Foundation by maintaining its eugenic character’.93 The head of the housing department presented this measure as a constraint but there is no question that he played a key role in the Ungemach experiment’s survival from the 1960s to the 1980s. Beginning in October 1960, shortly after he became head of the housing department, Bailliard attempted to push out households that had become undesirable, just as Alfred Dachert had in the interwar period.94 Bailliard’s determination was such that he overrode the opinion of the head of the legal department on the legality of this policy.95 Despite their advanced age, Suzanne Herrenschmidt and Alfred Dachert himself supported the effort behind the scenes.96 The two octogenarians were undoubtedly reacting to the aging of Ungemach Gardens’ population (the number of households failing to abide by the rules tripled during the 1950s and reached thirty-four in 196197), but an obvious connivance also existed between Robert Bailliard and the last president of the Ungemach Foundation.98 Admittedly, the deputy failed to bend municipal policy on this point: Pierre Pflimlin (1907–2000), who was elected mayor in 1959, agreed to send stern circular letters to undesirable households, but he pursued his predecessors’ policy of reaching amicable arrangements.99 This aside, it is obvious that throughout his leadership of the housing department, Bailliard acted as the punctilious guardian of the Ungemach experiment.100 The experiment’s survival is partly attributable to his long tenure as head of the housing department: it is only in the months after his death, in 1984, that the admission and control criteria for the garden city’s residents were finally loosened. During this whole period, Bailliard was able to ensure the experiment’s survival by capitalizing on his political power: a local Gaullist leader, his loyalty to the Christian Democrat Pierre Pflimlin helped the latter to remain the leader of Strasbourg from 1959 to 1983.101 This great mayor of the postwar era, who was also a national political figure, had initially distanced himself from the norms of Ungemach Gardens. At the end of his term, in the 1980s, his reaction to an application (that was ultimately rejected) requesting housing in the garden city by a household with a handicapped daughter shows that the mayor was not a doctrinal supporter of the terms that Alfred Dachert had defined sixty years earlier.102 In his annotations, Pierre Pflimlin did not hide his irritation with Ungemach Gardens’ admission criteria, which he revisited on this occasion. ‘And the husband? Doesn’t he need to have good morals?’ The prohibition on housing anyone besides children shocked this Catholic: ‘pushes for the eviction of the elderly. Is likely to foster egotism in the household’. He considered the ban on women’s work to

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be ‘surprising’, even though the condition was no longer mandatory. This spontaneous reaction, and the fact that Pflimlin would have liked to derogate from the garden city’s rules to welcome the handicapped girl, illustrate the evolution of sensibilities that had occurred since the 1960s. Robert Bailliard and a handful of officials in his department who still believed in the project carried the experiment through its last fifteen to twenty years. Local factors thus prevailed in the experiment’s last chapter. But initially, at the beginning of the 1960s, Bailliard himself drew on a broader legitimacy to sustain the project – the Ungemach experiment’s real scientific and political topicality, which peaked in the twenty years that followed the Liberation in 1945. During this key period, a connection between the aforementioned local factors, and national and transnational factors, explains the survival of Alfred Dachert’s project. The idiosyncrasy of the ‘bard of eugenics’ thus serves as a magnifying mirror for long-neglected macrohistorical questions: how was eugenics reconfigured in France after the Second World War; how did it help to redefine knowledge mobilized in the development of public policy, and especially social policies? These are the questions to which we will now turn.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Suzanne Herrenschmidt, ‘Discours du 11 décembre 1947’. VWW, p. 330. To transpose Bruno Latour’s title, Science in Action. Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985; Jacques Véron, ‘Alfred J. Lotka and the Mathematics of Population’, Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics, 4, 1, 2008 [online journal]. CAFJU, 3 November 1928. Hélène Frouard, ‘À l’ombre des familles nombreuses: les politiques françaises du logement au X X e siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 57, 2, 2010, pp. 115–31. Letter from Paul Maurer to ‘Monsieur Arbogast, member of the committee’, 20 December 1924, MAS Div I 427. Paul Vincent, ‘Le rôle des familles nombreuses dans le renouvellement des générations’, Population, 1, 1, 1946, pp. 148–54. Virginie de Luca Barrusse, Les Familles nombreuses en France: une question démographique, un enjeu politique (1880–1940), Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008. On the nuance between contrôle des naissances in French and ‘birth control’ in English, see INED [Alfred Sauvy], ‘La limitation des naissances en France’, Population, 11, 2, 1956, pp. 209–34. Alfred Dachert, CAFJU, 24 July 1926. Goethe, War Profits, p. 9.

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13. Dachert, ‘La Cité “Les Jardins Ungemach” à Strasbourg’, La vie sociale en Alsace et en Lorraine, p. 110; ‘Die Cité Jardins Ungemach in Strassburg und ihre sozialen Vorteile’, p. 286. 14. Sources: Statistics of births, MAS Div I 403, and CAFJU, 19 March 1934. 15. Ibid. 16. Marie-Monique Huss, ‘Pronatalism in the Interwar Period in France’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 1, 1990, pp. 39–68. 17. CAFJU, 19 March 1934. 18. CAFJU, 9 March 1935. 19. Ibid. 20. Goethe, War Profits, p. 15. 21. This dynamic is confirmed by CAFJU, 19 March 1938. 22. Source: MAS Div I 427. 23. Paul-André Rosental, ‘Familles “nombreuses” et familles “normales”: un regard historique (1900–1950)’, Informations sociales, 115, 3, 2004, pp. 44–57. 24. Cf. Cyrille Jean, Du birth-control à la liberté de l’avortement: luttes et acteurs du Mouvement français pour le planning familial (1956–1975), Master’s thesis in history supervised by Paul-André Rosental, Sciences Po, Paris, 2010; as well as the testimonies collected by the TV news programme Faire Face, 13  October 1960, https://www.ina.fr/video/ CPF86614334/le-controle-des-naissances-video.html, accessed 23 January 2019. 25. Statistics of births and document Population des Jardins Ungemach, in CAFJU, MAS Div I 403. 26. Sources: CAFJU, 15 March 1933 and 19 March 1934; and VWW, p. 26. 27. Former resident Jean-Pierre Inninger’s testimony quoted by Samuel Guibout, ‘Ungemach, la cité-jardin où poussaient les enfants’, News d’Ill, January 1998, pp. 25–27. 28. Magri and Topalov, ‘L’habitat du salarié moderne’, pp. 236–37. 29. Delphine Henry, Chemin vert: L’œuvre d’éducation populaire dans une cité-jardin emblématique, Reims, 1919–1939, Reims, Centre régional de documentation pédagogique de Champagne-Ardenne, 2002, p. 79. 30. Source: MAS Div I 427. 31. VWW, pp. 328–32 and 351–68. Cf. Olivier Forcade et al. (eds), Exils intérieurs: Les évacuations à la frontière franco-allemande (1939–1940), Paris, PUPS, 2017. 32. Eugène Schaeffer, L’Alsace et la Lorraine (1940–1945): leur occupation en droit et en fait, Libraire générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1953, p. 60 et seq; Lothar Kettenacker, La Politique de nazification en Alsace, published in two volumes by Saisons d’Alsace, 23, 65 and 68, 1978 [orig. ed. 1973], here vol. 1, p. 53 et seq. 33. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Gabriel Foëx, 8 January 1949, MAS Div I 558a. 34. Schaeffer, L’Alsace et la Lorraine, pp. 89–90; Kettenacker, La Politique de nazification en Alsace, vol. 2, p. 47 et seq. 35. Circular # 21, 16 October 1947, MAS Div I 558d. 36. Heberolle über die Soll-Miete des Jahres 1942, MAS Div I 558. 37. Fernand L’Huillier, Libération de l’Alsace, Paris, Hachette, 1975, p. 24; Schaeffer, L’Alsace et la Lorraine, pp. 103–5. 38. L’Huillier, Libération de l’Alsace, p. 19 et seq; Isabel Heinemann, ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas, Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2003, p. 318 et seq. 39. According to Pierre Rigoulot, L’Alsace-Lorraine pendant la guerre 1939–1945, Paris, PUF, 1997, p. 32, sixty thousand Alsatians remained in ‘Inner France’, while fifty thousand were repelled, and forty-five thousand expelled, by the Germans. 40. Letter from Alfred Dachert to the Sequestration Office, 26 April 1945, MAS Div I 558c.

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Letter from Arthur Kuhn to the Foundation Board, 18 July 1945, MAS Div I 558c. Letter from Alfred Dachert to the prefect of Bas-Rhin, 13 July 1946, MAS Div I 558a. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Henri Degand, 28 May 1948, MAS Div I 558c. Julien Fuchs, Toujours prêts! Scoutismes et mouvements de jeunesse en Alsace 1918–1970, Strasbourg, La Nuée bleue, 2007; Elizabeth Vlossak, Marianne or Germania? Nationalizing Women in Alsace, 1870–1946, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. 45. Henri Meck quoted by René Paira, Affaires d’Alsace: souvenirs d’un préfet alsacien, Strasbourg, La Nuée bleue, 1990, p. 156. 46. Paira, Affaires d’Alsace, p. 193, who refers to the laws of 28 August 1947 and 5 January 1951. 47. Suzanne Herrenschmidt, ‘Discours du 11 décembre 1947’. 48. Paira, Affaires d’Alsace, p. 178. Cf. also Jean-Marc Dreyfus, ‘Une spoliation régionale: la confiscation du mobilier juif en Alsace annexée’, Les Cahiers du judaïsme, 27, 2009, pp. 96–103. 49. Which sometimes lasted for years, cf. ADBR 1918 W 341 3882, 3889, 3890 and W 342 3893. 50. See the letter that Alfred Dachert wrote to Geoffroy Haessig on 23 January 1947 (MAS Div I 558d): ‘we are thinking about celebrating the arrival of your seventh child with a useful present. Our installer told us that we could make you happiest by replacing your broken toilet bowl’. 51. Simone Morio, Le Contrôle des loyers en France (1914–1948): Documents pour l’étude comparative des politiques du logement, Paris, Centre de Sociologie Urbaine, 1976, p. 13. 52. Circular letter, 6 July 1946, MAS Div I 558d. 53. Motion adoptée par les locataires de la fondation Ungemach dans leur réunion du 1er mars 1948, MAS Div I 558b, Georges Liebhard file. The document does not mention where the meeting took place. 54. Danièle Voldman, Locataires et propriétaires: Une histoire française XVIIIe–XXIe siècle, Paris, Payot, 2016, ch. 9. 55. Affaires concernant la fondation ‘Les Jardins Ungemach’, Report to the main commissions, Municipality of Strasbourg, 9 February 1950, MAS Div I 1260 G 10/1. 56. Débats du conseil municipal de la ville de Strasbourg en 1951, 76th session, 9 July 1951, Strasbourg, Imprimerie alsacienne, p. 212. 57. Ibid. The equivalence between 1951 French francs and 2019 dollars is based on http:// www.insee.fr/fr and https://euro-dollar.eu/, accessed January 2019. 58. Jugement du tribunal cantonal prononcé en audience publique le 24  février 1949 [Holder against Ungemach Gardens Foundation], MAS Div I 558d. 59. Henri Degand [lawyer of the Ungemach Foundation], Jugement dans l’affaire Holder, mimeo, Strasbourg, 8 February 1949, MAS Div I 558d. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Hélène Michel, La Cause des propriétaires: État et propriété en France, fin X I X e–X X e siècle, Paris, Belin, 2006, pp. 52–55. 63. See Morio, Le Contrôle des loyers, pp. 22–23, 45–51, 101–4, 131–32; and Voldman, Locataires et propriétaires, ch. 9. 64. Association générale des familles, Section du Wacken, Communication aux membres habitant la cité Ungemach, mimeo, 12 March 1949, MAS Div I 558b. 65. Letter from Alfred Dachert to René Le Mouroux, 7 May 1947, MAS Div I 558a. 66. Vincent Meyer, Mémoire au tribunal cantonal de Strasbourg, 19 October 1948, MAS Div I 558d [my emphasis].

41. 42. 43. 44.

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67. MAS Div I 558d, 13 August 1945. The couple does remain in the garden city and gives birth to a child in April 1948. 68. Cf. the letters from Alfred Dachert to the surviving spouse of the Jacob household, 22 June and 29 December 1949, MAS Div I 558c. 69. Frédérique Boucher, ‘Abriter vaille que vaille, se loger coûte que coûte: Les planificateurs et le logement (1942–1952)’, Cahiers de l’institut d’histoire du temps présent, 5, 1987, pp. 119–41. 70. Court of cassation, Civil Chamber, Social section, Krauss against Ungemach Gardens Foundation, 20 December 1949, MAS Div I 558d. 71. Henri Degand, Assignation en évacuation contre Mr Ferdinand Chevallier [sic] présentée à la section civile du Tribunal cantonal, 3 November 1949, MAS Div I 1260 G10/2. 72. Henri Degand, Demande en déchéance du droit au maintien dans les lieux loués contre Mr Ferdinand Chevalier, mai 1950, AMS Div I 558d. 73. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Henri Degand, 16 November 1949, MAS Div I 558a. 74. Krauss against Ungemach Gardens Foundation, 20 December 1949, MAS Div I 558d. 75. Letter from René Paira, prefect of Bas-Rhin, to Charles Frey, mayor of Strasbourg, 29 November 1949, MAS Div I 1259 G II/3. 76. Henri Degand, Jugement dans l’affaire Holder. 77. Vincent Meyer, Mémoire au tribunal cantonal de Strasbourg. 78. Letter from Pierre Pflimlin to Alfred Dachert, 25 February 1964, coll. François Dachert. 79. The official name of this department is ‘Management of City and Foundations Real Estate’. 80. CAFJU, 4 May 1948, MAS Div I 1259 G 4/1. 81. See for instance the 22 June 1960 circular letter to the families who apply for a pavilion in Ungemach Gardens (MAS Div I 1259 3/4). 82. Note from Robert Bailliard to Pierre Pflimlin, 7 March 1968, MAS Div I 1261 472-01/4. 83. Cf. the Note on the Ku.-Ot. application from Robert Bailliard to Pierre Pflimlin, 3 April 1984: age requirements aside, ‘the chances of acceptance, in relation to other prenotified applicants, would be minimal. Indeed, first the spouse has a job and second, and most importantly, the family only has one child’ (MAS 269W50). 84. As evidenced, among many other mailings, by the letters sent by registered mail with acknowledgement of receipt from René Radius to Paul Gr. on 19 May 1956 (MAS 269W75); and from Robert Bailliard to Émile A. on 9 January 1970 (MAS 269W74) and to the Gu. couple on 22 February 1980 (MAS 269W69). 85. The district court’s ruling in favour of the Holder couple in 1949 had invalidated the distinction between a ‘normal’ rent and a ‘reduced’ rent. But the compromise that was ultimately reached between city hall and renters represented by the Holders re-established it in practice. Housing department, Fondation Ungemach: procès en cours, 12 June 1950 (note) and 8 August 1950 (transaction), MAS Div I 1260 G 10/1. 86. Letter from Charles Émile Altorffer to the prefect of Bas-Rhin, 9 May 1956, MAS Div I 1259 G 4/2. Underscoring in the original document. 87. Note from Kien (legal department) to the mayor of Strasbourg Charles Frey, 13 December 1949, MAS Div I 1259 G 2/3. 88. Cf. this anecdote shared by a resident who grew up in the garden city: ‘I once forgot to greet a neighbourhood resident. As soon as I got home, my mother severely reprimanded me’ (Guibout, ‘Ungemach, la cité-jardin où poussaient les enfants’, p. 26). 89. Axel Pohn-Weidinger, ‘Une statistique de l’intimité: La catégorie du “logement surpeuplé” entre statistique et droit (1936–1962)’, Genèses, 92, 3, 2013, pp. 102–26. 90. Letter from the mayor of Strasbourg to Charles An., 2 April 1955, MAS 269W68. 91. MAS Div I 1261 472-01/4, 5 March 1965.

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92. ‘La Fondation: “Cité Jardins Ungemach”’, in Compte rendu de l’administration de la ville de Strasbourg, 1945–1955, Strasbourg, Office municipal de statistique, 1957, vol.  1, pp. 402–4. See also Note concernant l’attribution des pavillons de la cité Ungemach, 29 April 1955, MAS Div I 1259 G 2/1. 93. Letter from Robert Bailliard to Pierre Pflimlin, 7 August 1968, AMS Div I 1261 472-01/4. 94. Note from Robert Bailliard to Daniel Adam, 7 October 1960, MAS Div I 1261 472-01/4. 95. Note from Daniel Adam to Robert Bailliard, 22 November 1960, MAS Div I 1261 472-01/4. 96. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Pierre Pflimlin, 3 December 1963, coll. François Dachert; and interview with François Dachert, 26 April 2014. 97. Sources: Minutes from the Ungemach Gardens Municipal Consultative Commission, MAS Div I 1259 G 2/1; and lists of releases, MAS Div I 1259 G II/2. 98. Robert Bailliard, Note du 27  novembre 1961 au service du contentieux, concernant la demande d’échange présentée par un locataire de la cité Ungemach avec un candidat ne remplissant pas les conditions de la Fondation, MAS Div I 1261 472-01/4; Bailliard, Note du 12 janvier 1962, ibid. 99. Letter from Pierre Pflimlin to Alfred Dachert, 17 January 1964, coll. François Dachert; and MAS DIV I 1261 472-01/4. 100. ‘Out of respect for the generous intentions of his father, I had assured Mrs Herrenschmidt that I would ensure observation … of the rules governing the selection of rental applicants’, he declared during the 28 April 1961 meeting of the Ungemach Gardens Municipal Consultative Commission (Bailliard, Note du 12 janvier 1962). 101. Cf. Pierre Pflimlin, Itinéraires d’un Européen, Strasbourg, La Nuée bleue, 1989, p. 229, and the documents stored in the Pierre Pflimlin archives, MAS 9Z 64, 65 and 629. 102. Source: MAS 269W50.

Part II

Eugenics, Biopolitics and Welfare in a Transatlantic Perspective (1914–1968)

S Eugenics is of a piece with social policy. —Jacques Doublet [director of the French social security], ‘Population et Eugénisme’ [Population and eugenics], Pour la Vie. Revue d’études familiales [For life. Journal of family studies], 46, 1, 1952, p. 31

From the 1920s to the 1960s, the local Ungemach Gardens experiment was connected to national and international public policies, as well as their underlying knowledge base. Here we will study the nature and the dynamic of this connection. To what extent can a micro-social observation be leveraged? What light does the ‘exceptional’, that is, rare and forgotten phenomena, shed on the ‘normal’, that is, historical phenomena that are easily recognizable and well remembered? In this case, our microhistorical approach involves simultaneously addressing three interconnected issues: the repurposing of eugenics after the fall of Nazism in 1945; the position of non-British and non-Galtonian eugenics in this international intellectual current; and the relationship between eugenics and public policies in post-Second World War parliamentary democracies. In a paradoxical way, Ungemach politically peaked neither before nor during, but after the Second World War. In newly democratic France, as in many countries in Europe and North America, eugenic culture did not vanish; rather, it blossomed in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. This period saw the fulfilment of the ‘French selectionist model’ conceived during the Great War.

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During the First World War, grief over the massacre or serious injury of almost two million young and strong men compounded pre-existing anxiety about France’s low birth rate, which developed prematurely in the nineteenth century. For French elites, the only way to recover from the war was to compensate for the insufficient number of men through their optimal allocation in the country’s institutions. Selection became the key word. In order to optimize human flows to schools, companies, sports teams and elite army units, applied sciences undertook the codification and statistical processing of physiological, psychological and intellectual qualities. This transversal motto – selection – was shared by politicians, senior officials and scientists, and was expanded to encompass access to life. Even the most progressive scholars dreamt of using the new science of sexology to discourage unfit couples from giving birth, and to foster ‘healthy and fertile stocks’, that is, parents considered most capable of giving birth and educating high-quality offspring. This priority exactly coincided with Ungemach Gardens’ focus, and explains why the garden city attracted so much support from national political, administrative and scientific authorities, from the interwar period to the 1960s. More local factors explain why the experiment survived until the mid 1980s. The ‘selectionist’ model was widespread and inspired various French public policy areas. Eugenics is often associated with (and reduced to) sterilization, but it actually related to a range of policies, including occupational medicine, treatment of young delinquents, vocational guidance, immigration programmes and school reforms. In the 1930s and ’40s, a transnational dynamic intensified this trend. The so-called ‘reform eugenics’, conceived in the United States by Frederick Osborn and a new generation of scholars involved in genetics, biology, psychology and demography, crossed the Atlantic via international conferences and publications. French scholars reappropriated this model under the expression ‘qualitative demography’, whose explicit goal was to ‘improve the population’. During the Second World War and the German occupation, the Vichy regime, which was founded on a socio-biological interpretation of the world, implemented this model in new institutions devoted to research and expertise. Despite claims to the contrary, the Liberation period did not really break with this model: the creation of the French social security in 1945 was interpreted as the triumph of qualitative demography and the quest to ‘improve the population’. Around 1950, scientific experts noted the unprecedented expansion of a ‘eugenic culture’ that permeated all aspects of public policy. In 1952, the director of social security, Jacques Doublet, published a thirty-page article claiming that social policies – the pride of the new French Republic – were about eugenics.

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‘Qualitative demography’ was more than an ambitious programme that inspired state intervention in various sectors and remained legitimate until the political turmoil of 1968. Although it contributed to the postwar period’s vigorous ‘modernization policies’, it also led to a subtle humanization of French biopolitical priorities. On the one hand, the ‘selectionist’ model, inspired by a holistic conception, aimed to improve ‘national efficiency’ through some kind of collective maximization of ‘human capital’ – a nineteenth-century notion that took firm root in the 1950s. On the other hand, after the war it combined with a concern for social justice and social protection (Sécurité sociale), and with growing respect for personal feelings. This new alliance was also a product of the American ‘reform eugenics’ of the 1930s, which was closely tied to the New Deal and aimed to provide more ‘economic security’ and wellbeing to the middle class.

Chapter 4

From Micro- to Macro-History Ungemach Gardens and the Survival of Eugenics in France after 1945

S Do not let the apparent decline of eugenic science, or rather of its favour, fool you. In other forms, and maybe under other names, it will probably give rise to the liveliest and profoundest debates in tomorrow’s society. —Alfred Sauvy, Preface to Jean Sutter, L’Eugénique: problèmes, méthodes, résultats [Eugenics: problems, methods, results], Paris, PUF, 1950, p. 10

To ensure the Ungemach experiment’s survival at the beginning of the 1960s, when the Strasbourg municipality was questioning its legal viability, deputy mayor Robert Bailliard notably emphasized that ‘the international press, especially the English one, as well as the central authorities, were interested in the work and had all praised the founder’s original and social idea. The English press, which is particularly attached to singlefamily housing, has unremittingly considered the City and the selection of its tenants as guarantors of a generation healthy in body and spirit’. Bailliard then mentioned the Ministry of Public Health and Population’s visit to Ungemach Gardens on 14 April 1961. Its representative, François Bruntz, head of the first office of the directorate general for population, ‘could only express regret that current circumstances had forced builders to abandon this type of construction in favour of large complexes’.1 This appeal to an external source of academic and political legitimacy raises a key question that marks the final inflection of this book – and which is actually its raison d’être. Robert Bailliard could, without

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exaggeration, assert that ‘the central authorities were interested in the work and had all praised the founder’s original and social idea’. The 1961 visit by the Ministry of Public Health and Population’s representative was motivated by an informed interest in the Ungemach experiment’s operations. The latter had ‘been flagged to the ministerial authority as an interesting project, not only with regard to its conception of housing units and collective infrastructure, but also to the selection of residents’.2 Similarly, after their 1963 meeting, Alfred Dachert wrote to Strasbourg mayor Pierre Pflimlin that Ungemach Gardens was recognized as ‘an experimental field. It has inspired many publications and visitors from all over the world coming to see and draw on its example’.3 While this international scholarly interest most intensely manifested itself in the 1930s, support from French public authorities culminated in the 1950s and 1960s. In the crucial year of 1962, when the mayor of Strasbourg, at the request of Robert Bailliard, de facto extended the Ungemach experiment by two decades, the garden city was in line with the evolution of knowledge involved in the development of French population policies. As mentioned previously, it was conceived within the ‘classical’ framework of the hereditarian and deterministic British eugenics of the beginning of the twentieth century. What is surprising, and what gives the local case of the Ungemach Gardens experiment its macrohistorical relevance, is that the experiment was admissible through the thought and action patterns of eugenics à la française as it had evolved since the interwar period. Its analysis is therefore relevant to examining the considerable post-Second World War development of French demographic, health and more generally ‘biopolitical’ public policies. To show this, we will take a double journey. The first is a journey in time through the decades between the 1930s and 1960s, when the fate of the Ungemach experiment was decided, and, globally, eugenics was reconfigured. The second is a journey between knowledge and administration that will retrace how the operating principle of Ungemach Gardens was scientifically interpreted after the war in these environments, and why it was encouraged both as a pioneering experiment and as a complement to the era’s socio-demographic policies.

Ungemach Gardens, a Model Experiment for British and American Eugenics In the 1930s, aside from sporadic signs across the Rhine,4 it is in Britain and the United States that the experiment elicited the greatest reactions. The mother journal of British eugenics, Eugenics Review, was enthusiastic

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about Ungemach Gardens as a pioneering and unique creation of what it considered to be a ‘positive and practical’ eugenics. The garden city also caught the attention of the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), which was established in 1936 at the initiative of the Eugenics Society in response to the decline in the British birth rate, and which became part of the London School of Economics just before the Second World War. One of its members, the sociologist Pearl Moshinsky,5 then came into contact with Alfred Dachert.6 Interest in the garden city became less intense but continued in the United Kingdom after the Second World War, in the form of new appearances in Eugenics Review,7 of new articles in popular magazines,8 and of more atypical initiatives like British participants’ visit to a biology summer school.9 The Ungemach Gardens experiment was of strategic value for eugenicists across the Channel: they saw it as a response to the most humiliating criticism and mockery of their cause, as the editors of Eugenics Review recognized in 1931: A ‘human stud-farm’, ‘the methods of the stockyard’ are two of the terms most often used to express disgust at eugenic aims, contempt of the possibility of fulfilling them. It is therefore interesting to announce … that just such a human stud-farm, which adopts the methods of the animal breeder, has now been in existence for seven years and promises to grow and flourish still further. It has been founded and run, moreover, without any of that gross materialism or of those methods of bureaucratic tyranny which are so repugnant to Mr G.K. Chesterton [the famous British polemicist, and black sheep of the Galtonians] and which are really so foreign to practical eugenics …. We can congratulate Monsieur Dachert on having brought to eugenics just that simple, inspiring appeal which it has hitherto lacked. And he, again like Galton, lays particular emphasis on the need for such an emotional – a religious – quality if eugenics is to become a social force. It is true that a succession of negative eugenic measures would bring about positive progress, and that some such policy is essential to racial health. But the prevention of amentia and the similar themes which have hitherto constituted practically the whole of serious eugenics, certainly lack that direct appeal which Galton demanded and which the Jardins Ungemach are striving to realize – the ideal of breeding a better man.10

This is also the aspect of the experiment that the Californian Charles Goethe emphasized in the book he devoted to the garden city in 1946, when he returned from a visit he had been planning since before the war. Alfred Dachert, renamed ‘Papa Dachert’, is depicted as an avuncular wise elder whose pioneering intuition served a flock of children for whom he was a benevolent guardian.11 This approach, in which the author partially

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Figure 4.1. ‘Papa Dachert’. Private collection of François Dachert.

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recognized himself,12 was part of a strand of eugenics-with-a-human-face that was especially mass marketed in the United States. Beyond cinema,13 the better baby contests first organized at the beginning of the twentieth century at large popular gatherings like fairs exemplified and disseminated eugenics throughout society, notably through an intensive use of agricultural and breeding metaphors in rural states.14 These receded in the 1920s, giving way to fitter baby contests in the same vein.15 The small book that Charles Goethe devoted to Ungemach tellingly has the expression better babies in its title. This rich philanthropist, who was well established in American eugenic and genetic circles,16 drafted it in his habitual style: a colloquial language with many impactful phrases, accompanied by poetry excerpts and copious illustrations, drawing on exotic materials from the constant world travels of the author and his wife.17 Another advocate of the Ungemach experiment was the great American popularizer of eugenics, Paul Popenoe. The last version of his textbook on ‘applied eugenics’, which was republished several times in the 1920s,18 celebrated the garden city. On 5 July 1934, Alfred Dachert sent a letter informing all the garden city’s committee members that the ‘indispensable book on Applied Eugenics by Popenoe and Johnson with Macmillan in New York, in its last edition, devotes a few very flattering pages to Ungemach Gardens. The American press keeps publishing very laudatory – excessively laudatory – articles about our work’. Alfred Dachert’s pride from this is all the more understandable given that his reading of the first edition of this treatise twelve years earlier had been a major source of inspiration for him.19 But appearances are misleading. This warm eugenics, which overtook the popular press and earned Ungemach Gardens two reports in the New York Times,20 in regional newspapers21 and in popular magazines,22 was in both cases promoted by admirers of Nazi Germany’s sterilization programmes. Although the University of Sacramento honoured Charles Goethe with a ‘national day of recognition’ in 1965, when he turned ninety – an official tribute that involved President Lyndon Johnson – Goethe was soon knocked off his pedestal by the dissenting generation of American students who cast him as ‘doctor Strangelove’ for his embrace of the ‘Nordic race’s’ supremacy and hostility to Blacks, Jews and Catholics. All the achievements – especially the university ones – that were named after him as a patron were renamed in the following decades.23 Paul Popenoe, whom Goethe had got to know at the Human Betterment Foundation and other forums for Californian and American eugenics, also experienced a ‘deconstruction’ later, in the form of academic research that exposed his dark side.24 These two sides of the story

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confirm the need for caution when considering the opposition between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenics. The Ungemach experiment also, and most importantly, tested the impermeability of the boundaries often drawn between national conceptions of eugenics: while this scientistic sensibility spread worldwide, its tone continuously changed across eras and countries. It is easy to understand how the goal of Ungemach Gardens was ‘recognized’ in the United Kingdom and United States, because it was directly rooted in Galtonian eugenics. But its resonance and official support are doubly surprising in France, where eugenics was considered marginal and confused with hygienism. The Ungemach case thus sheds light on the transnational circulation of values and patterns of eugenic thought, their changes over time, their reinterpretation on both sides of the Atlantic and their interpenetration with public policies.

French Demography Enters the Picture On 24 October 1945, a few months after Liberation, General de Gaulle’s provisional government created a National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). Less than a year later, from 19 to 24 July 1946, Albert Michot, who led INED’s demographic economics department, conducted a mission to Strasbourg that naturally led him to visit the garden city and meet with Alfred Dachert. His report was glowing.25 He gathered from the visit a ‘sense of calm and rest sought by its creator. Order and cleanliness reign in the garden city. One cannot help but be struck by the look and bearing of its many resident children’, who appear to be ‘blooming’. Meanwhile, Alfred Dachert was described as an ‘extremely modest and very learned French man of remarkable dignity (he was forced to flee the Germans and stay in hiding) who committed to the experiment with devotion, faith, and science’. Michot unreservedly subscribed to the expectations and terms of the experiment, starting with both the ‘eugenic’ and ‘experimental’ objective of the garden city, and its concern with helping the nation’s ‘healthiest, strongest, and most moral [people] settle in the best possible housing conditions’ and ‘facilitating the fulfilment of families with guaranteed health and moral values’. He noted that ‘the choice is based on the idea of selection’; that couples were ‘removed to make room for others’ if ‘after a given timeframe (a very generous one), they were not able to create the family they had hoped for … – an extremely rare situation’. Michot, probably directly relaying the presentation that Alfred Dachert made to him, even went to the trouble of dismissing the

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misunderstandings and criticisms to which the garden city might be subject. The latter ‘does not belong to the Ungemach family and was not meant to house the company’s workers …; it’s an experiment from which the whole nation should benefit. It is not to be scorned as a “paternalistic” project’. The INED representative also distanced the experiment from the usual stigma of eugenics: This garden city has been called a ‘breeding ground’ or less kindly, a ‘stud farm’. Nothing could be further from the truth than these two objections, which … reflect a contradiction. A ‘breeding ground’ is exactly the opposite of a selection. The idea is not to encourage the procreation of many children at all costs; rather, it is to help the procreation of families with a number of children such that the French population might renew itself and grow. The goal is both a certain number and quality of people.

Finally, the INED representative’s report included the garden city’s quantitative ‘results’ obtained from Alfred Dachert. The birth rate, mortality and health (indexed by weight and height to a given age and gender) were, as usual, compared against those of Strasbourg, France and Germany, and their superiority was measured in percentages. The author drew on his authority as an expert to dismiss the objection that these good results were more attributable to the pre-selection of households than the specific effect of the environment created by Dachert. It is likely that Albert Michot, as secretary general of the ‘family housing’ section of the Global Congress on the Family and Population of 1947 in Paris – a meeting of European and North American familialist leaders – helped to secure Alfred Dachert’s participation.26 It is unclear how INED director Alfred Sauvy reacted to the report. But five years later, in 1951, when Alfred Dachert contacted him before a planned trip to Paris, he left no doubt about the philosophy of Ungemach Gardens27 as a ‘eugenically oriented enterprise’ likely to appeal to ‘anyone interested in the issue of qualitative repopulation’. We will soon see the importance of this adjective that Alfred Dachert highlighted in his letter and reused in another letter a month later when mentioning an unprecedented ‘experiment in qualitative settlement’. While we do not know whether he ultimately met with Dachert, eight days later Alfred Sauvy expressed to the mayor of Strasbourg, Charles Frey, his ‘great interest [in] the results of this interesting project with eugenic intentions’ and his desire to be kept apprised of its ‘achievements’. He was especially interested in ‘information on infant mortality’ in the garden city. He agreed with the head of the Strasbourg housing department, René Radius, to annual data sharing, extolled the experiment to

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foreign correspondents,28 and entrusted its monitoring to one of INED’s most promising demographers, Louis Henry (1911–1991).29 INED’s involvement in the Ungemach experiment, which lasted until the 1960s,30 was declared in 1951, barely one year after the Court of Cassation had endorsed the goals of Ungemach Gardens by accepting the garden city’s particular tenancy regime. INED’s intervention was also concurrent to support for the Ungemach experiment from Strasbourg’s city hall, which had decided to keep the experiment’s conditions in place rather than overturn them. What in France at the beginning of the 1950s, similarly to the United States,31 might explain public authorities’ benevolent attitude towards Ungemach Gardens? The question is all the more important given that it is both academic and political. At the time, INED was not conceived as a research organization, but rather as a kind of think tank meant to inform the action of its supervising authority, the Ministry of Public Health and Population.32 Its founding decree assigned it the goal of studying ‘all the material and moral means likely to contribute to the quantitative growth and qualitative improvement of the population’.33 The interest of its director Alfred Sauvy, probably the most important French population scholar of the twentieth century – a man whose official goal was to serve his country’s public policies – immediately raises the question of the extent to which eugenics was considered a relevant state instrument after the Second World War. This curiosity may seem surprising. One would think that eugenics had been buried under the ruins of Nazism. But it is not until the 1970s that it was rejected wholesale as an inherently dangerous ideology, and not until the 1980s that its association with Nazism became a thought reflex. At the time that the Ungemach experiment caught Sauvy’s interest, the scholarly world was seeking to purify the concept, that is, to distinguish between the bad eugenics associated with Nazi crimes, and good eugenics that could be useful to improving societies. Thus, on 21 April 1947, in the constituent assembly of the young Italian Republic, MP Aldo Spallicci proposed, on behalf of the interparty group of doctors ‘from the far right to the far left’, to expunge ‘the apostolate of eugenics’ [sic] of its applications that were unworthy of Latin civilization – mass assassinations in the name of euthanasia, forced sterilizations – to define its role in fighting chronic diseases.34 The terms and timeline of this aggiornamento, that is, this sorting of the wheat from the chaff, have been well documented in the case of Scandinavia.35 They are transposable to many European countries in the postwar era. In England, the way the Eugenics Society promoted the notion of ‘problem family’ in the 1950s is a good example: this designation

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was assessed by the Welfare State and its social workers – an emerging and quickly growing profession at the time. But it was just a reformulation of the notions of ‘social problem group’ and ‘subnormal group’ inherited from eugenics.36 How did France fit in this movement to recast eugenics in ‘legitimate’ terms, formats and projects?

Searching for ‘Healthy and Fertile Stocks’ Over the past twenty years, a series of historical research covering the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the German Occupation in the 1940s has brought to light a form of eugenics à la française – an essentially preventative eugenics with a strong social hygiene streak and a focus on the ‘environmental’ rather than innate determinants of human character and behaviour.37 Its origin has been traced to the medical world – more specifically, a line of obstetricians, child care workers and paediatricians, beginning with Adolphe Pinard (1844–1934), and including physiologists like Charles Richet (1850–1935) and psychiatrists like Édouard Toulouse (1865–1947), with significant extensions to the fields of sexology and criminology.38 It is also a ‘medical’ approach that shaped the perspective of the rare authors who seriously considered post-1945 French eugenics.39 Historians’ growing attention to what was called a ‘Latin eugenics’ model in the 1930s has resulted in the partial connection of features of French eugenics to a transnational alternative to the original Galtonian model. The combination of ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ theories that was a priori illogical in British ‘Malthusian’ eugenics was essential to Italian, Argentinian and – as William H. Schneider underscored by entitling his book Quality and Quantity – French eugenics.40 The reference to Latin eugenics also involves a broader scope that goes beyond the medical field to include groups interested in eugenics. A case in point, again in Italy and Argentina, is the role of bio-typology: various professions interested in selection mobilized this science purporting to classify human types for both professional and academic purposes.41 In the case of France, which had long been concerned about falling birth rates, population statisticians legitimated the combination of quantity and quality by claiming, on the basis of examples drawn from competitive sports, that due to ‘the law of greater numbers’ and ‘creative pressure’, the share of valuable individuals is higher in a large population due to more intensive competition.42 While it recasts the history of eugenics, this reference to a Latin specificity does not resolve all the issues with eugenics. In doctrinal terms, German racial hygiene also reconciled numbers and quality from a racist

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approach that sought to increase the fertility of the ‘human races’ deemed superior. Another limitation is that the distinction between a Protestantleaning eugenics of Anglo-American, Germanic and Scandinavian inspiration, and a Latin and Catholic-leaning eugenics, assumes a hermetic circulation of concepts and practices in these two worlds. But Ungemach Gardens was a French experiment derived from the British and German eugenics of the beginning of the twentieth century, and it remained acceptable in a national context and timeframe (postwar France) that was a priori far removed from its premises. Finally, the third reservation is that positing a Latin model as a counterbalance of sorts to its Anglo-Saxon equivalent papers over the unequal dissemination of eugenics across countries. The ‘reprocessing’ in the aftermath of the Second World War further complicates this problem, while the endurance of the Ungemach experiment calls for and requires a questioning of its political and academic role in postwar France. The contemporary development of extensive bodies of digital texts enables an approximate assessment of the relative importance of the term ‘eugenics’ in debates of the past. While it does not list all legally deposited books, the Ngram application provides a means to statistically query the already considerable database of texts fully digitized by Google.43 Within these limitations, we can compare references to eugenics in two states that are a priori as dissimilar as France and the United Kingdom over a wide timeframe (1900–1960) straddling the Second World War, and further compare the use of the vocabulary of ‘eugenics’ with that of other key themes from social and demographic policies: respectively, in France and in the United Kingdom, ‘natalité’ and birth control; ‘démographie’ and demography; ‘assurances sociales’ and social insurance; and ‘classes sociales’ and social classes. The result of the analysis is visualized in Graphs 4.1 (for the United Kingdom) and 4.2 (for France). It offers a confirmation rather than a surprise. The reference to eugenics is in the first case relatively commensurate with that of the major political issues connected to it: eugenics is approximately even with social (social classes, social insurance)44 and demographic (birth control, demography) issues. The contrast is striking with France, where eugénisme (eugenism) – or rather eugénique (eugenics), the generally preferred term – appears marginal in these major areas of action. In the United Kingdom eugenics was the bio-political issue until the mid 1920s, when the debate over birth control overtook it. The situation was very different in France, where anxiety over the birth rate was pre-eminent over the whole period, even in relation to social issues. The lexicometric contrast between the two sides of the Channel is all the more

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Graph 4.1. Relative use of the terms ‘eugenics’, ‘birth control’, ‘social insurance’, ‘social classes’ and ‘demography’, in United Kingdom English from 1900 to 1960. Graph created by the author. Source: Body of works digitized by Google Books (Ngram application).

Graph 4.2. Relative use of the words natalité, assurances sociales, sécurité sociale, classes sociales, eugénique and démographie in French from 1900 to 1960. Graph created by the author. Source: Body of works digitized by Google Books (Ngram application).

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striking given that the count for the word ‘eugénique’ includes its use as both a noun and adjective. Strictly speaking, uses of the qualifier eugenic would need to be added to those of eugenics45 to be equivalent. However, there is some similarity between the respective temporal evolutions of the two countries’ lexicon, with an uneven progression in the use of the terms eugenics and ‘eugénique’ from the end of the 1900s to the mid 1920s, followed by a stagnation until the beginning of the Second World War. Use of the term then declined, partly due to the effect of revulsion towards Nazism. But should we be nominalist and only qualify an idea or policy as eugenic if it claims to be so? This classical problem is particularly an issue here because of the combined effect of postwar taboo and a scientific development that we will come back to: the extension of eugenics to a very broad, ‘qualitative’ approach to population issues that started in the 1930s and flourished in the 1950s. This repurposing, dissemination and dilution of eugenics was well presented by a young historian who gradually came to demographics through the geography of populations.46 A graduate of the French École Normale Supérieure who was in the process of being elected to the Collège de France (he would be in 1952), Louis Chevalier (1911–2001) had been a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques for five years when he published, in 1951, a demographic treatise that devoted a section to the transformation underway in eugenics: This new boom in qualitative studies is much more powerful and ambitious than that of Galton and his school. This boom is so ambitious and covers such a diverse range of disciplines that we can now consider eugenics to be much more of a concern and a frame of mind of various disciplines than as an independent discipline. The truth is there is no eugenics; there is a eugenic mentality that penetrates the different qualitative, biological, and sociological disciplines.47

These comments are informed and worth clarifying. At the time, Louis Chevalier was one of the most visible scientific figures in France and abroad in the young developing science of demography. He also shaped public policy: an INED employee, he was entrusted by Alfred Sauvy with consulting projects on colonial and migration policies.48 How to explain this a priori paradoxical efflorescence of postwar eugenics? Few books have been devoted to this subject since Liberation. One account is a reference: L’Eugénique, published by Jean Sutter (1910–1970) in 1950.49 The book attempts to strip eugenic theories of their ‘excesses’ and synthesize them to enable their legitimate use for scholarly reflection and public policies. The publication of this book had strong institutional

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backing. A doctor by training, Sutter worked at INED, which we now know was involved in governmental policymaking. Alfred Sauvy strongly pressured Sutter to complete the book, to the point of decreasing his salary because he was late in submitting the manuscript.50 The publication of L’Eugénique begs the question of why, five years after the end of the war, it was deemed necessary by the director of INED. As already mentioned, the institute’s official mission was to contribute to ‘the quantitative growth and qualitative improvement of the population’. Reconciling numbers and value was an aspiration almost as old as French pronatalism. Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, demographers created the notion of ‘normal fertility’ combining a consistently high birth rate51 with a regularly reiterated call for more ‘strong children born of healthy parents’.52 From this perspective, French pronatalism was not at odds with British eugenics: rather than increase the number of excessively prolific families, which would be seen as ‘dysgenic’ across the Channel, it sought a high average birth rate and a reduction in the number of couples who were not very fertile. Alfred Sauvy joined a tradition that traced back to French paediatricians from the beginning of the twentieth century by denouncing ‘the only-child household, which is so common today, [as] an anti-physiological anomaly afflicting parents and children. The child’s egocentrism, combined with excessive parental emotiveness, constitutes a very defective psychological complex’.53 At the same time, he deplored in almost equally strong terms as Galtonians: [that] a reverse selection is unfolding between families …. Taken to an extreme, the defective family, consisting of mental retards, with absolutely no care for the future and insensitive to persuasion, would continue to abundantly reproduce. The average quality would obviously suffer from this reverse selection, not only for individuals but also for social and ethnic groups. The insane would multiply, but not the genius Malthusians. This risk has been denounced – often excessively so – by many authors.54

A half-century old, this programme was placed at the heart of INED’s organizational chart. The ‘Population’ department, devoted to demography and populated by engineers who were graduates of Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious French engineering school, was assisted by a department called ‘Relationships between population numbers and quality’, entrusted to Dr Sutter. But this institutional recognition was not new. It is under Vichy, within the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems (FFEPH), or ‘Carrel Foundation’, that this grouping materialized for the first time. Like INED, the Foundation was entrusted

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with ‘the study of all aspects of measures most apt to maintain, improve, and develop the French population in all its activities’.55 What to make of this continuity of objectives between a foundation personally backed by Marshal Pétain and an institute created after Liberation under the aegis of General de Gaulle? In its first years, INED (the institute still exists today) was a small institute focused on population. Around half of its research staff (around thirty people) came from the Carrel Foundation. The latter was a vast general-purpose institution (over six hundred people) focused on social biology and political economy. It notably included a population department whose core consisted of a small demographics group of two to three researchers led by Paul Vincent and a team called ‘Biology of lineage’ headed by the physical anthropology expert – and racialist – Robert Gessain (1907–1986). Here already, the combination of quantity and quality structured the approach to population. Several months after Liberation, in March 1945, Paul Vincent and Robert Gessain drafted for the Carrel Foundation’s Cahiers a joint article that sought to be an overview, programme and recommendation for public action. The article’s conclusions included a call to implement a eugenic policy, albeit a moderate one whose terms are worth examining: Strictly speaking, eugenic laws (that is, ones tackling hereditary defects) applied in several nations – United States (since 1907), Germany, Switzerland (Canton de Vaud), etc. – have yielded experiences that demographics should very closely follow. But it does not look like France currently needs to go for this eugenic therapy. It first needs to make up for its lag in relation to most civilized countries. It must implement a social hygiene that delivers its inhabitants from the defects that originate in living conditions: alcoholism, syphilis, and tuberculosis, will be overcome by ventilated housing, physical exercise, a good diet, and the combination of all adaptive faculties. The public must also come to understand that its current lifestyle is detrimental to the virtues it was given at birth. It will then be ready to recognize the truth that it can foster the development of its virtues through true eugenics, which is nothing more than an effort to best develop the qualities of human beings.56

This excerpt provides a snapshot of the whole timeline of Ungemach Gardens. While the garden city was rooted in the French hygienic, preventative and environmental eugenics of the interwar period, it embraced an interpretation – whose development in the 1950s I will go over – that re-evaluated the individual’s perspective in relation to that of the nation: the general interest, frequently invoked as a political ideal at the time, paired with the promotion of self-actualization. The use of the word ‘qualities’ was the linchpin of this reversal of perspective. Here it was

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not used to rank people, as was common in eugenics, so much as to value what could be called their potential. No less remarkable is the text’s political ambiguity. On the one hand, while it was published in March 1945, the way it downplays the ‘experiments’ of German eugenics sounds like denial. On the other, the article refrains from treating eugenics as a unit: while its hereditarian vision is not expressly rejected, it is addressed with great caution. This contrasted ideological tone comes from the ecumenical aspect of a text jointly written by Robert Gessain, who was politically conservative on population and immigration, and the communist Paul Vincent. But even under Vichy and in a foundation led by a doctor, Alexis Carrel, who had been shaped by the American racist eugenics of the beginning of the twentieth century, hereditarianism was taboo. In September 1942, the Carrel Foundation had deemed it ‘inadvisable’57 to create a ‘genetics and eugenics’ team. In various documents presenting the ‘Biology of lineage’ team, use of the words ‘Genetics’, ‘Eugenics’ and ‘Heredity’ was erratic and vague. The most consistent expression was ‘Research on stocks’. A report to Marshall Pétain of 20 May 1943 proposed a ‘census of healthy stocks in France, and of fertile and professionally skilful families’.58 A brochure presenting the Carrel Foundation helps to specify what this enigmatic designation meant:59 The ‘Biology of lineage’ team is undertaking a ‘survey on the quality of the children of large families, on their mortality, and on their optimal number by identifying the family’s social position [and] the parts of France home to the quantitatively best families. The idea is, first, to locate the genetically sound stocks and then to help these stocks propagate. It would do little good to increase the birth rate if population growth is occurring because of the fertility of defective elements. However, it appears that the way family allocations are provided today is far from conducive to the propagation of the best stocks. The bio-sociology department broached the study of means likely to increase the birth rate among biological groups of superior quality’.

By aiming for both the maximization of ‘genetically well constituted stock’ (my emphasis) and the minimization of the ‘fertility [of] defective elements’, the author of this passage – most likely Robert Gessain – was taking up the Galtonian eugenic project literally. Even during Vichy, this position was too extreme. Robert Gessain was a doctor by training versed in the physiological determinism of human behaviours inspired by Henri Vallois’ physical anthropology model. Despite his pursuit of an illustrious career, involving his leadership of the Museum of Man and a stamp featuring him by the postal administration of French Austral and Antarctic lands, Gessain’s hereditarianism and racialism were not admissible in

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the French republican and scholarly culture. Gessain was not far from claiming the existence of a French race: ‘our people is [not] just a bastard assemblage without any ethnic specificity. In reality, there aren’t that many major races living on our territory. Even a simple observer would in most cases recognize them as being “from our homeland”’.60 He called for a ‘qualitative’ selection of foreign immigrants that would take into account ‘the genetic and hereditary racial perspective’.61 This led to his quick resignation – in May 1947 – from the young INED. However, the quest, without any additional specification, to identify and promote ‘healthy and fertile stocks’ was absolutely consensual in mid-twentieth-century France. This goal brought together pronatalists and hygienists across the political spectrum, including ‘hard’ eugenicists like Gessain. As mentioned, the communist demographer Paul Vincent is a case in point. In 1943, in an effort to observe an ‘extreme’ population, he undertook the study of over fourteen thousand households who had applied for the Cognacq-Jay award implemented in the aftermath of the First World War to assist the parents of very large families. Paul Vincent’s idea was to untangle the physiological and social factors guiding these particularly fertile ‘stocks’ (generally more than ten children). The survey yielded a book whose introduction confirmed the picture that Louis Chevalier had drawn ten years earlier. Working on ‘healthy and fertile stocks’ involved, for Paul Vincent: a vast research plan that went far beyond the strict field of ‘demographics’ and extended to the areas of more or less related disciplines such as, for example, genetics, physiology, nutrition, sociology, etc. …. Its goal was to determine the factors likely to influence the quantity and quality (physical, intellectual, and moral) of the French population, and to specify the terms and magnitude of their action, in order to establish a substantial demographic policy on solid scientific ground.62

This first excursion into the area of population sciences and policies sheds light on national authorities’ rationale for supporting the Ungemach Gardens experiment in the two postwar decades (before local factors specific to Strasbourg came into play). The notion of ‘healthy and fertile stocks’ condensed the goal of pronatalism à la française, which, contrary to common belief, combined population numbers and value. This ideal forged at the beginning of the twentieth century was enshrined in the 1940s in the Carrel Foundation, and then in INED. Promoting the development of prolific, ‘quality’ lineages was a consensual goal that transcended the era’s conflicts between ‘hereditarians’ and ‘environmentalists’. It explained the interest of political, administrative

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and scholarly authorities in the Strasbourg experiment. Its fulfilment in the 1950s and 1960s exactly corresponds to the dates of the difficult periods that Ungemach Gardens had to overcome, and to the key support that the garden city was able to consistently find among state, municipal and legal authorities. Conceived by the improbable Alfred Dachert in the aftermath of the First World War, the experiment’s topicality then peaked – exactly in the same way that Abel Ruffenach’s plays finally experienced success via radio broadcasting. The local case of Ungemach Gardens thus allows us to exhume a simultaneously macropolitical and scholarly norm. I will now study its genesis by showing how it was rooted in the eugenics of the 1930s. To this end, we will step outside of France and adopt a transatlantic perspective.

Notes 1. Bailliard, Note du 12 janvier 1962. 2. Letter from the prefect of Bas-Rhin to the mayor of Strasbourg, 9 March 1961, MAS Div I 1260 UG 9/8. 3. Letter from Alfred Dachert to Pierre Pflimlin, 3 December 1963, coll. François Dachert. 4. On 17 March 1931, a journalist from the publishing house Ullstein-Verlag in Berlin, Ruth Blum, considered reporting on the garden city ‘in the general international press’. Source: MAS Div I 427. 5. Pearl Moshinsky has in particular authored ‘The Correlation between Fertility and Intelligence within Social Classes’, Sociological Review, 31, 2, 1939, pp. 144–65. 6. Letter from Pearl Moshinsky to Alfred Dachert, 27 March 1939, MAS Div I 375. 7. J. Hay Marshall, ‘Positive Eugenics: A Proposal’, ER, 39, 2, 1947, pp. 78–79; Charles Wicksteed Armstrong, ‘Racial Survival’, ER, 53, 3, 1961, pp. 177–78; ‘Notes of the Quarter’, ER, 55, 2, 1963, pp. 65–70. 8. Pamela Cheesmond, ‘House to Let: Children Wanted’, Illustrated, 21 June 1952, pp. 20–21. 9. Letter from the secretary of the British Social Biology Council to the manager of the Ungemach Gardens, Heinrich, 25 August 1952, MAS Div I 1260 G7/3. 10. ‘Notes of the Quarter’, ER, 23, 3–4, 1931, pp. 3–6. 11. Goethe, War Profits. 12. There is no correspondence between the two men in the Charles Goethe archives at the California State University Library of Sacramento. But there is an undated letter from Alfred Dachert to Charles Goethe glued to the first page of the copy of War Profits… and Better Babies preserved by this library. Dachert claims to recognize himself in the moniker ‘Papa’: ‘many children came into being in my garden city because their parents felt secure. I am actually the indirect father of many children’. 13. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. 14. Annette K. Vance Dorey, Better Baby Contests: The Scientific Quest for Perfect Childhood Health in the Early Twentieth Century, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 1999; Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘Making Better Babies: Public Health and Race Betterment in Indiana, 1920– 1935’, American Journal of Public Health, 92, 5, 2002, pp. 742–52; Meghan Crnic, ‘Better

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Babies: Social Engineering for “a Better Nation, a Better World”’, Endeavour, 33, 2009, pp. 13–18. 15. Steven Selden, ‘Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival Resources and the History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1908–1930’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 149, 2005, pp. 199–225. 16. Allen, ‘Culling the Herd’. 17. Charles Matthias Goethe, Geogardening, Sacramento, CA, Keystone Press, 1948. 18. See the Introduction to this volume, n. 13. 19. Source: MAS Div I 427. 20. ‘The Garden Village Built for Children’, New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, 21 February 1931, p. 13; Lansing Warren, ‘Success Has Come to Eugenic Village’, New York Times, 27 September 1931, E4. Greene, Children in Glass Houses, ch. 5, studies the reception of the Ungemach experiment in the American and French press of the interwar period. 21. ‘Eugenic Village Promises Success, Inhabitants Say: Couples Must Have Babies’, The Milwaukee Journal, 15 October 1931, pp. 1–2. 22. Ellsworth Huntington et al., ‘Wanted: Better Babies. How Shall We Get Them?’, People, April 1931, pp. 46–49. 23. Allen, ‘Culling the Herd’. See also Tony Platt, ‘What’s in a Name? Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University’, Report to the California State University of Sacramento, Division of Social Work, 2004; William Schoenl and Danielle Peck, ‘Advertising Eugenics: Charles M. Goethe’s Campaign to Improve the Race’, Endeavour, 34, 2, 2010, pp. 75–80. 24. Molly Ladd-Taylor, ‘Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe’, Gender & History, 13, 2, 2001, pp. 298–327. 25. Albert Michot, Rapport sur la fondation “Les Jardins Ungemach”, à Strasbourg, Paris, INED library archives, 1946, no 3071, pp. 2–3. Quotes from the next three paragraphs stem from this source. 26. Proceedings from the Board of the Ungemach Garden Foundation, 4 May 1948, MAS Div I 1259 G 4/1. The paper was not included in the two-volume proceedings of the conference, which, due to the lack of paper after the war, were circumscribed to the main institutional actors (Travaux du Congrès mondial de la famille et de la population de 1947, 2 vols, Paris, UNAF, 1948 and 1949). 27. Letters from Alfred Dachert to Alfred Sauvy, 18  June 1951 and 17  July 1951, Louis Henry papers, CAC 20010307/9. 28. Cf. the letter from Alfred Sauvy to Max Drechsel, head of the Institut de recherches économiques du Hainaut in Mons (Belgium), 28 August 1951, Louis Henry papers, CAC 20010307/9. 29. Paul-André Rosental, ‘The Novelty of an Old Genre: Louis Henry and the Founding of Historical Demography’, Population-E, 1, 2003, pp. 97–129. 30. The Strasbourg city hall’s hygiene service established the annual tally of births and deaths of garden city children in 1971 for the last time. But the transmission to INED via the service of the Domain had ended ‘some time ago’ and ‘no more requests were made’. Source: note 01-37, 1972, Arch. Cont., CUS 217 W 11, Strasbourg. 31. Kline, Building a Better Race. 32. From now on, except when specified otherwise, any reference I make to the history of INED and of the Carrel Foundation relies on Rosental, Population, the State, and National Grandeur, and Rosental, ‘Le premier monde de la recherche: la gestion du personnel par Alfred Sauvy dans l’INED des années 1950’, Genèses, 51, 2003, pp. 128–46. 33. Ordinance 45-2499, 24 October 1945, art. 2, Journal Officiel, 25 October 1945, p. 6896.

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34. Aldo Spallicci, Igiene ed eugenetica in Repubblica, Rome, Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati, 1947. 35. Koch, ‘Past Futures’. 36. John Welshman, ‘In Search of the “Problem Family”: Public Health and Social Work in England and Wales, 1940–70’, Social History of Medicine, 9, 1996, pp. 447–65. 37. In addition to the references given in the book’s introduction, see Antonello La Vergata, ‘Lamarckisme et solidarité’, Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia, 48, 1, 1996, pp. 273–88. 38. Nadine Lefaucheur, ‘La Puériculture d’Adolphe Pinard, une voie française de l’eugénisme’, in Ginette Raimbault and Michel Manciaux (eds), Enfance menacée, Paris, Éds de l’INSERM, 1992, pp. 19–43; Anne-Laure Simmonot, Hygiénisme et eugénisme au X X e siècle à travers la psychiatrie française, Paris, Seli Arslan, 1999; Michel Huteau, Psychologie, psychiatrie et société sous la Troisième république: La biocratie d’Édouard Toulouse (1865–1947), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002; Alain Drouard, ‘Biocratie, eugénisme et sexologie dans l’œuvre d’Édouard Toulouse’, Sexologies, 16, 3, 2007, pp. 203–11; Sylvie Chaperon, ‘La sexologie française contemporaine: un premier bilan historiographique’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 17, 2, 2007, pp. 7–22; Martine Kaluszynski, La République à l’épreuve du crime, Paris, LGDJ, 2002; Jean-Jacques Yvorel, ‘L’Université et l’enfance délinquante: 1939–1945’, Revue d’histoire de l’enfance ‘irrégulière’, 3, 2000, pp. 137–57. 39. Jean-Paul Gaudillière, ‘Le syndrome nataliste: hérédité, médecine et eugénisme en France et en Grande-Bretagne, 1920–1965’, in Jean Gayon and Daniel Jacobi (eds), L’Éternel Retour de l’eugénisme, Paris, PUF, 2006, pp. 177–99; and Gaudillière, ‘Reframing Pathological Heredity: Pedigrees, Molecules, and Genetic Counseling in Postwar France’, Alter. European Journal of Disability Research, 5, 2011, pp. 7–15. 40. See the Introduction to this volume, n. 6. 41. Ibid., n. 41–42. 42. Alfred Sauvy, Richesse et population, Paris, Payot, 1943, p. 78. 43. Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, Science, 331, 6014, 2011, pp. 176–82. 44. Measuring the relative frequency of assurances sociales and social insurance provides a deeper temporal perspective than Welfare State and sécurité sociale, which become popular in the 1940s. 45. Eugenic is used less often than eugenics, but its use is relatively equivalent to the latter from a statistical perspective. I therefore did not see the need to visualize it on this graph. 46. Paul-André Rosental and Isabelle Couzon, ‘Le Paris dangereux de Louis Chevalier: un projet d’histoire utile’, in Bernard Lepetit and Christian Topalov (eds), La Ville des sciences sociales, Paris, Belin, 2001, pp. 191–226. 47. Louis Chevalier, Démographie générale, Paris, Dalloz, 1951, p. 153. 48. Louis Chevalier, Le Problème démographique nord-africain, Paris, PUF, 1947; Chevalier, Madagascar: populations et ressources, Paris, PUF, 1952. 49. Jean Sutter, L’Eugénique: problèmes, méthodes, résultats, Paris, PUF, 1950. 50. INED Archives, Direction papers, Decision # 180, 7 August 1947. 51. Rosental, ‘Familles “nombreuses” et familles “normales”. 52. Patrick Zylberman, ‘Les damnés de la démocratie puritaine: stérilisations en Scandinavie, 1929–1977’, Le Mouvement social, 187, 1999, pp. 99–125, here p. 111; Taguieff, ‘Eugénisme ou décadence?’, p. 93. 53. Alfred Sauvy, Bien-être et population, Paris, Éditions sociales françaises, 1945, p. 141.

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54. Alfred Sauvy, ‘Le malthusianisme anglo-saxon’, Population, 2, 2, 1947, pp. 221–42, here p. 224. 55. Law of 14 January 1942, article 1 (see Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, p. 338). 56. Robert Gessain and Paul Vincent, ‘Quelques aspects quantitatifs et qualitatifs de la population française’, in Cahiers de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains, vol. 3, Paris, Librairie de Médicis, 1945, pp. 19–32, here pp. 29–30. 57. Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, p. 419. 58. Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, p. 387. 59. FFEPH, Ce qu’est la Fondation. Ce qu’elle fait, Cahiers de la Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains, 1, Paris, PUF, 1943, p. 21. 60. Robert Gessain, ‘Politique médicale des migrations humaines: Assimilation des allogènes’, Connaître. Cahiers de l’humanisme médical, 2, 1945, pp. 47–54, here p. 51. 61. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 62. Paul Vincent, Recherches sur la fécondité biologique: Étude d’un groupe de familles nombreuses, Paris, PUF, 1961, p. 1.

Chapter 5

Stamping out Racism and Reforming Eugenics A Transatlantic History of Qualitative Demography

S One of the reasons for the centrality of the notion of ‘healthy and fertile stocks’ in French population science in the decades spanning the 1940s and 1950s is that while it aligned with longstanding pronatalism, it also intersected with a new model that was simultaneously developing: ‘qualitative demographics’.1 The development of this field was part of an effort to ideologically repurpose eugenics. Its very formulation expressed this: ‘quality’ is a key word in eugenics, which seeks to attribute different values to individuals and groups. Talk of ‘qualitative demographics’ embraced this approach while softening it. It involved a transition from rankings of hereditary ‘qualities’ to a neutral approach intending to be objective. As the anthropologist Robert Gessain put it, the word ‘quality’ can carry a value judgement, whereas ‘what we mean by qualitative characteristics are ones that are not quantifiable or measurable, and whose variations cannot be expressed in mathematical language’.2 Qualitative demographics thus complemented quantitative demographics. ‘Qualitative demographics’ is the academic framework in which the Ungemach experiment was conceived and promoted in France in the first twenty postwar years. As Alfred Dachert had wanted, beginning in the 1920s qualitative demographics sought to shape populations and, as Alfred Sauvy put it, to have an ‘effect on characteristics …. Appropriate action could likely change many physical and mental characteristics in a determined way that would be deemed positive. [… In this respect],

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projects to improve the human race pave the way for qualitative demographics’.3

‘Qualitative Demography’ as a French Appropriation of American ‘Reform Eugenics’ To preserve eugenics while humanizing it and stripping it of its excesses; to expunge biology and social sciences of any reference to racism: after the fall of Nazism, this effort was promoted by global forums reconstituted with the creation of the United Nations. From the outset, in 1946 UNESCO undertook an antiracism campaign that led to the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay on Race and History.4 Population science had a role to play. On 1 August 1949, UNESCO officially called on the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), which was meeting in Geneva, to ‘eradicate what is commonly referred to as racial prejudice’.5 Significantly, the next day the learned society unanimously passed a motion on qualitative demography. Studies of qualitative aspects of the population have been and remain tainted by classist and racist prejudices. The word race in particular has often been used in a non-scientific way, contributing to the dissemination of prejudices in this area, and fuelling political conflicts. The qualitative aspects of population, especially regarding reproduction and migration, must be scientifically studied. Such studies require the development and application of strictly objective methods. It is only through these methods that science will be able to advance, and it is only through this scientific research that the distortions of traditional prejudices and ignorance can be brought to light and defeated.6

There was an urgent need to define the boundary between the admissible and the inadmissible. As Elazar Barkan has shown, the political defeat of eugenics through that of Nazism preceded the completion of its scientific rejection.7 A whole academic generation had to force itself to overturn its reflection by identifying the racialist thought patterns that had become illegitimate.8 While everyone understood that the taboo pertained to the connection between biology and social sciences, nobody knew exactly where to draw the boundary separating the two, which required work at the intersection of these notions. In this context, social biology became a strategic front. In 1952 Alfred Sauvy chose the title Social Biology for the second volume of his General Theory of Population9 and cast it as the ‘ultimate goal of demography’,10 going so far as to speak of ‘economic biology’ to analyse the effects of inflation in the long run.11 While Paul Vincent used

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the expression ‘biological fertility’ in the title of his 1961 book on large families, his close colleague Louis Henry forged the concept of ‘natural fertility’ in the 1950s: for both men, the idea was to determine how many children could be birthed by women who were not using contraception – an issue directly transposed from American demography of 1930s.12 Meanwhile, in his demographic treatise of 1951, the historian Louis Chevalier mentioned the ‘various qualitative, biological, and sociological disciplines’. Seven years later, his book Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes promoted a ‘biological history’ model.13 Ironically, the book would become a classic as a pioneer in social history – a misunderstanding that confirms that this probing between the social sciences and biology was specific to the postwar intellectual and political context and became opaque later.14 It is precisely this combination that I will seek to objectify by using the reception of the Ungemach experiment as a starting point to reconstitute a scientific culture, the memory of which has blurred since the 1960s. But this effort did not start in 1945. Challenges to ‘old-style’ eugenics began in the 1920s.15 One of its sources was the rise of a new science – genetics – pioneered by the American Thomas H. Morgan (1866–1945), who in 1915 started dismissing Galtonian theories about heredity as archaic naïvetés.16 At the same time, eugenic interest in differential fertility according to social and racial groups generated a spate of empirical studies funded by major foundations. By attributing the over-fertility of poor populations to their limited or imperfect practice of birth control, rather than to their ‘biological constitution’, their findings also undermined the foundations of eugenics. The population biologist Raymond Pearl (1879–1940) was one of the first to embrace critical eugenics.17 A generation of American eugenicists starting their academic careers after the First World War would pursue this questioning of hereditarian determinism and its attendant racism. They sought to reform eugenics by acting within its learned societies (like the American Eugenics Society) and its foundations (like the Human Betterment Foundation), while becoming involved in a booming field: population studies. This area of reflection was boosted by pressure from birth control activists whose leader, Margaret Sanger (1876–1966), brought about the first World Population Conference, which was held in Geneva in 1927.18 Another development that fostered the demographic approach was the geopolitical tension in Europe and East Asia arising from powers that legitimated their expansionist policies by claiming to be ‘overpopulated’.19 By the end of the 1920s, American population scholars had identified the risks of global war stemming from German, Italian and Japanese policies.

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At the origin of the reformulation of eugenics was one of the most influential figures that the world of American population scholars produced: Frederick Osborn (1889–1981). Born into a family of rich industrialists, and retired from a career in finance before the age of forty, Osborn made a fortune on the eve of the 1929 crash, and then threw himself into the American Eugenics Society. Repelled by the racism of the ‘first generation’ to which his uncle had belonged – the palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), who named the tyrannosaurus and was also a ‘fierce Aryan supporter of immigration quotas by national origin’ – Frederick Osborn mobilized his social capital and diplomatic genius as a ‘statesman of demography’.20 During the interwar period, when major foundations guided the development of the social sciences, Osborn held strategic positions as advisor or trustee at the Carnegie Endowment, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Milbank Memorial Fund, and Social Science Research Council. As a board member, like his father, of Princeton University, he pushed for the creation of the university’s Office of Population Research.21 During the war, Osborn successfully managed the American army’s information and education service. After being appointed general, he placed the quantitative sociologist Samuel Stouffer at the helm of his Research Branch, which funded the renowned The American Soldier study.22 After 1945, Osborn notably played a key role in the organization of population sciences and policies at the United Nations. These transnational forums, linked to powerful non-governmental organizations, gave rise to the massive fertility reduction policy in developing countries beginning at the end of the 1950s.23 Osborn thus globally projected the narrative that he had tested in the 1930s with regard to the poor in the United States: not to delegitimize their right to reproduce on eugenic (their purported hereditary quality) or racist grounds, but rather to encourage a fertility adjusted to their economic and cultural capacity to help their children reach their full potential in terms of personal development. This era was a turning point in the transnational history of eugenics. Until then, the eugenic movement had been wary of any alliance with the birth control movement, fearing that incentives to reduce fertility would accentuate the biological degeneration of populations: ‘eugenic households’ would be more aware of birth control, while ‘dysgenic’ ones would maintain high levels of fertility. Osborn pursued a strategic reversal whereby the alliance with birth control would involve educating households considered to be of low value about contraception. The idea was not to stigmatize these households, but rather appeal to their ability to understand their interest and that of their descendants.24

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His claim was that adjusting the fertility of parents to match their material, intellectual and moral resources would enable the achievement of ‘a high general level of intelligence’, and thereby satisfy people ‘aspiring to self-government and to freer and larger life’.25 Osborn extended the liberal ideal as it was defined by John Stuart Mill, a proponent of strict self-regulation of fertility by parents according to their capacity to raise their children towards an ideal of independence and fulfilment.26 Osborn laid out this strategy in a 1934 book, Dynamics of Population, written with the demographer Frank Lorimer (1894–1985).27 Its keywords – ‘social eugenics’, ‘social demography’ and ‘qualitative aspects of population trends’ – spread in international scholarly circles. These are the model and expressions that the French would adapt under the term ‘qualitative demography’. It is possible to retrace how Osborn’s American Reform Eugenics connected with the specific features of French eugenics in the 1930s to produce the scientific framework that secured the support of national elites for the Ungemach experiment from the 1940s to the 1960s. The connection was made in 1937 during the international population conference in Paris. This major event, an avatar of the international exhibition organized in the French capital at the time, was sponsored by the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP), a scholarly society that was organized into national sections before the war and that suffered from the nationalist tensions of the 1930s. In the midst of Nazism’s rise to power, this confrontation reached its peak during the Paris Congress, which was sizable for the era (eight sessions, each of which was substantial enough to yield a volume of proceedings),28 and more specifically during the eighth session. The session was significantly entitled ‘Qualitative population problems’. The adjective ‘qualitative’ was carefully negotiated. It was acceptable to the Nazi delegates while it eschewed any recognition of race as a scientific subject, as the population congress in Berlin had done two years earlier via its session on ‘demographic biology and racial hygiene’. At the same time, it clearly marked an area of confrontation, as did the participation of the great Franz Boas (1858–1942) who, just shy of turning eighty, crossed the Atlantic to counter the racial explanation of differences between peoples with his cultural anthropology model.29 The skilful Frederick Osborn probably had a say in this delicate compromise around ‘quality’. Indeed, he presided over the American delegation at the congress, as well as the eighth session. Osborn was thus able to internationally project the approach he pursued in the United States to convert the ‘racial question’ into a reflection on ‘quality’.30

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This watchword of ‘quality’ suited the French organizers of the congress. As an antiracist notion, it was included in a grouping on ‘Races and racism’ led by the most prestigious scholarly figures of the era: the anthropologist Paul Rivet (1876–1958), co-founder in 1934 of a watchdog committee of antifascist intellectuals, the sociologist Célestin Bouglé, who led the École Normale Supérieure, the influential physiologist Henri Laugier, to whom I will return, the Sorbonne historian Georges Lefebvre, and the great jurist Georges Scelle.31 A motley international collection of twenty-eight communications and a report were issued on ‘quality’. Many covered – to either endorse or challenge – the importance of the racial factor on behaviour. While the seven other sessions mostly gathered demographers, statisticians and biologists, the ‘qualitative factors’ session attracted anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, doctors, psychologists and even psychiatrists. But one of its most important disciplinary blocks, with a total of five presentations plus the session’s only report, surprisingly pertained to only one discipline (biotypology) and one field of application (the science of work). This group, two-thirds of whom were French, requires an explanation. What justified connecting the science of work to population knowledge in France, and more specifically to the role attributed to the population’s ‘quality’?

A Culture of Triage – French Eugenics as Selective Eugenics ‘If human yield doubled, it would be as if each individual had to be counted as two; quality would compensate for quantity and the optimum population would be reduced by half.’32 This lapidary phrase from Alfred Sauvy contains the whole conception of the qualitative demography model in 1930s France. This reference to ‘yield’ resulted from a broad approach that considered population from the triple angle of its demography, productivity and what could be called its maintenance cost. In this configuration, the science of work plays a central role, with several interconnections to population sciences and, more generally, biopolitics. This academic configuration is key to understanding the intellectual framework in which Ungemach Gardens was perceived after the war, and the legitimacy it enjoyed. The milieu involved in this field was professionally and institutionally diverse, and the heir to models (physiology of labour, psychotechnique, industrial medicine) in place since the end of the nineteenth century. During the 1930s it was structured around the intersection of mathematical, biometric and biotypological tools that aimed to scientifically match

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job openings with the physiological, psychological and intellectual dispositions – the qualities – of job seekers. Primarily intended for salaried workers as well as young people in educational and professional training, and secondarily for servicepeople33 and sportspeople,34 this current permeated booming fields – academic and vocational guidance, technical training and professional training – that became increasingly economically and politically relevant. This technical knowledge supported the expansion of salaried work and its segmentation as jobs were increasingly codified as a result of modern methods of industrial organization. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, they became even more relevant due to the development of mass unemployment, and to the enigma this represented for contemporaries, as some jobs had no takers.35 The world of occupational sciences was structured around several institutional centres like the National Institute for Vocational Counselling (INOP), created in 1928; the occupational psychology and physiology chairs at the National Conservatory of Industrial Arts and Crafts (CNAM); the Institute for Psychology at the University of Paris and, with Henri Piéron, at the Collège of France; company laboratories; and, at the end of the 1930s, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).36 It fostered journals like Biotypologie [Biotypology] in 1932 and, a year later at CNAM, Le Travail Humain [Human work], which significantly described its scope as ‘physiology of labor and psychotechnique, human biometrics and biotypology, vocational guidance and selection, mental hygiene and occupational diseases, and physical education and sports’.37 It spread internationally, with a prime forum of exchange in the ‘Latin eugenics’ space, especially in South America,38 and a central institution in fascist Italy: the Nicola Pende (1880–1970) endocrinology clinic in Gènes.39 One man provides a gateway to reconstituting this scholarly landscape: the physiologist Henri Laugier (1888–1973) who, mutatis mutandis, is Frederick Osborn’s French counterpart. Recognizing in late life that he had only (like Osborn) been ‘a second-rate scholar’,40 Laugier was also a great scientific politician who was both an efficient organizer and a well-connected operator in ‘strategic’ decision-making arenas.41 In 1939 he became general director of the CNRS, which had just been created, and he ended his career, after 1945, as UN deputy secretary general and UNESCO executive committee member, after working from Montreal to help scholars slip out of France during the Second World War.42 This international stature strengthens the parallel with Osborn – a parallel that extends into the scientific sphere. Like his American counterpart, Laugier helped to develop quantitative social sciences, based on the measurement of human qualities through biotypology. Like Osborn, Laugier espoused a moderate progressiveness that, in its French version,

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made him a figure of republican, secular, freemason and rationalist science. A former socialist activist as a student, he pushed for the democratization of schools and universities in the 1920s. He was highly aware of the Nazi threat and endorsed the antifascist and antiracist movements from their inception, as attested by his presence on the ‘Races and racism’ steering committee. Again, like Osborn, the progressive and optimistic Laugier, who believed in the betterment of societies through correctly deployed science, included eugenics within the scope of the discipline he tirelessly promoted: biotypology. The statutes of the biotypology society of Paris – largely his creation – defined this field as the ‘scientific study of human types via the identification of correlations between morphological, physiological, psychological, and psychiatric characteristics, and the application of these data to various areas of human activity: eugenics, pathology, psychiatry, pedagogy, vocational guidance and selection, rational organization of human work, and criminal prophylaxis’.43 His dream to create a biotypological booklet, an ‘actual biological identity card’ informed by regularly updated biometric exams ‘guiding the child, teenager, and adult throughout their life and in all forms of activity’,44 was one of the most frequently mentioned projects in international eugenic circles. In France, this reference to eugenics was fuelled by a demographic argument dating back to the First World War carnage that left a million and a half dead, and was maintained by the low interwar birth rate. Julien Fontègne, general inspector for technical education and cofounder, with Laugier, of INOP, succinctly summed it up: ‘produce as much and as well as possible with few subjects’.45 Science of work was the first to be concerned by this reasoning, which developed during the First World War in connection with the ‘rehabilitation’ of the disabled and severely wounded.46 The ravages of war (a million veterans received long-term disability pensions)47 exacerbated the pre-existing belief that France was behind on the new methods of industrial organization, especially with regard to vocational training.48 In 1935, ‘guiding and re-educating the war-disabled’ remained the primary objective that Fontègne assigned to biotypology. The latter was also supposed to help ‘select workers across all categories; best use the talented and the abnormal; adapt female work to women’s special aptitudes; find satisfactory solutions to the problem of comprehensive schools; soon consider judicious methods to re-educate and readapt the unemployed and work-injured’.49 This list effectively condenses the major issues of the science of work during the interwar period – issues among which we will assess the role of the eugenic problem of the ‘talented and abnormal’ that Fontègne mentions.

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Here again, Laugier is an excellent guide. As a student, he followed the teaching of physiologist Charles Richet (1850–1935), whose pioneering role I mentioned with regard to France’s acclimatization to eugenics. After the war, he worked with psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse, who was famous for envisioning a ‘biocratic’ regulation of society, wherein the biological evaluation of people’s qualities would enable the resolution of social problems. In 1931, Laugier, along with Toulouse, served as a founding member of the Association for Sexology Studies.50 The latter called for ‘scientific birth control’, whose two facets mirrored those across the Atlantic: to encourage contraception – at a time when spreading information about it in France was liable to prosecution – and, representing a typically eugenic goal, to eliminate both the risks in couple formation and the reproduction of the ‘abnormal’. Here sexology is not to be understood in its contemporary meaning of a science devoted to individual fulfilment, but rather as an ‘organic’ programme aiming, in Toulouse’s words, to contain ‘the number of disabled individuals who are born and then become burdens to society’. The psychiatrist then compiled its subjects: ‘improvement of the race through eugenics; transmission of inherited conditions and psychological and professional aptitudes; birth control and sterilization of the most dangerous abnormal people; sexual education and continence; determination of the sexual value of an individual and sexual behaviour anomalies; overpopulation; relations between sexual instinct and combative instinct; puberty process and early detection of retardation; biosexological types; biological value of women; various forms of union; prostitution; social inferiority of women according to their sexual states, etc.’.51 This crusade was backed by the former Minister of Labour and Hygiene from the cartel of left-wing parties, Justin Godart, who in 1929 created the ‘Social party for public health’ with Édouard Toulouse; by Léon Jouhaux, secretary general of the Confédération générale du travail; and by the pronatalist and pro-family industrialist André Michelin. The sexology movement explicitly combined quantity (demographic issues) and quality (psychological and professional aptitudes). This connection sealed Laugier’s involvement in the Scientific Sexology Society created in 1932 as an offshoot of the eponymous association. Far from being isolating, this involvement was steeped in the very republican environment of French psychotechnique and biotypology. Nobody saw any ideological contradiction here. Even the great Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the representative par excellence of a ‘social’ (rather than biological) approach to population, was a member of the Association for Sexology Studies and referred to eugenics:

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one can be a neo-Malthusian without being a eugenicist, but can one be a eugenicist without recognizing that society has the right to limit and even terminate births, at least in some cases? Parents with sick, infirm, retarded, or severely mentally ill descendants will feel that they have an obligation to abstain from procreation, and even consider it to be in the interest of those who may have lived to remain unborn. But this sense of obligation would be greatly strengthened if they also knew that society approves, encourages, and even wants to force them to do so, and if contraceptive practices are also accepted and even incentivized in such cases! A hundred years ago it was a means to fight misery. Tomorrow, it may be the most effective way to ensure the improvement and advancement of the species.52

I highlighted these last words – ‘advancement of the species’ – because they are exactly identical to the ones Alfred Dachert used to describe the ultimate objective of Ungemach Gardens. They connect two otherwise opposite interpretations: on the one hand, Halbwachs’ social morphology programme combating the naturalization of social phenomena;53 and on the other, Dachert’s project, which directly matured into Galtonian eugenics. Similarly, the involvement in ‘sexology’ of the major figures in vocational and educational guidance established the relationship between the concern with optimizing the placement of people in educational tracks and jobs, and minimizing the number of undesirable births. This link confirmed that in France, as elsewhere – Alfred Dachert was demonstrating this in his plays at the time – positive eugenics could not be absolutely dissociated from negative eugenics.

A Selective Biopolitical Model, Compatible with the Republic’s Ideals ‘It would be equally dangerous to target a number without the selection as to seek quality without a number’, Toulouse asserted in 1932.54 The notion of ‘selection’, to which Richet had devoted one of the classic works on French eugenics,55 is the linchpin of this interlinkage. At play here is a vast academic and political culture of triage extending to techniques for evaluating people, and spilling over to public action and new work organization methods used in businesses. While French eugenics is typically considered to have been strictly ‘positive’, and is often confused with social hygienism, it is actually the centrality of the notion of selection – a term that circulated in the most diverse social worlds, scholarly models and political projects – that characterized French interwar eugenics. The significance of Julien Fontègne’s list is fully apparent here. In all the listed areas, selection represented an expanding ‘market’ over which

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academic models competed. Crosscutting and closely linked to a eugenic understanding of the world, the principle of selection established the acceptability of the Ungemach experiment in France. Alfred Dachert was probably conscious of this when he made selection the banner of his project, not out of opportunism, but rather out of a justified conviction of being in tune with the concerns of his time. However, I do not intend to depict interwar France in eugenic terms. The comparison between Laugier and Osborn remains relevant here. For the American, the reference to eugenics was central, explicit and omnipresent. He devoted a whole book to the subject,56 and it is within eugenic models and forums that Osborn conceived his fight against racism and advocacy for a new human fertility policy. The situation in France was in no way comparable. Eugenics was at the basis of a diffuse scientific and administrative culture that shaped several sectors of public and managerial action around the principle of selection. Far from being exclusive, this culture mixed with other frameworks (social, humanitarian and medical, for example) to various extents, depending on the contexts and actors.57 It could also – like AngloAmerican eugenics – involve a wide range of ideological contents, from conservatism emphasizing sociobiological rather than social policies, as was the case with the Carrel Foundation under Vichy, to the communist progressivism of J.M. Lahy, a psychotechnician whose model would be supplanted by Laugier’s biotypology.58 The latter is worth studying because its ‘republican’ aspect (that is, liberal in the American sense) would prevail after 1945 and provide a framework for the perception of the Ungemach Gardens experiment. Like eugenics à la Osborn, biotypology à la Laugier started by elucidating the links between biology and psychology. It was directly rooted in the ‘biocratic’ project of its inspirer Édouard Toulouse, who aimed for a holistic consideration of the human being; the adjective brought together myriad scientific projects from the 1930s and also reflected a rejection of excessive specialization in the medical and psychiatric fields. The idea of a ‘narrow interdependence between the different functions of living organisms, all contributing, to various degrees, to defining the biological and psychological personality of individuals’,59 broke with the approaches – physical anthropology and Italian-style biotypology – that classified ‘individuals according to just one feature (cranial index, for example) or one group of features (morphological, physiological or psychotechnical)’. Biotypology ‘à la Laugier’ was primarily based on a detailed breakdown of situations – and notably work situations – into relevant variables to characterize the actions involved, and the qualities and skills they required. This quasi-ethnographic observation stage marked a departure

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from the standardized psychological tests preferred by American authors – beginning with Osborn. The ‘biotypological profile’ of each subject, materialized in forms describing three central dimensions (physiological, intellectual and moral), included parameters as varied as: Chest girth, blood pressure, rectal temperature, respiratory capacity, the handgrip, lumbar traction, stippling speed, [data derived from] neuromuscular tests, sensory tests (acuity auditory, and visual), attention tests (identification of forms, number and letter cross outs), memory tests (memory of unrelated words, concrete and observational memory, logical memory – paired words), intelligence tests (representation of shapes and sizes, comprehension of technical mechanisms, judgement and reasoning on verbal data, academic efficiency).60

This impressively holistic approach, which Louis Chevalier would cite in 1951 as emblematic of qualitative demography,61 was the basis, Laugier said, of a ‘kind of distillation of particular types of individuals and subgroups’.62 Biotypology established itself as ‘the science of human individuality’,63 seeking to differentiate people, at least in terms of their aptitudes, in order to ‘determine the optimal conditions for the operation of this motor, infinitely more complicated and delicate than any other: the human motor’.64 Biotypology à la Laugier no longer aimed to rank people, as did eugenics, but rather to establish the uniqueness of their profile in order to determine their distinctive qualities. The ‘selection’ was no longer reduced to an authoritarian elimination process, but rather embraced the idea of guidance: the maximization of labour effectiveness and support for personal fulfilment at work were now linked, even if the idea of a pre-elimination according to the needs of organizations remained.65 The second use of republican biotypology was to challenge the racist classifications and rankings of human groups. The one who demonstrated this was the great mathematician of French psychotechnique, Dagmar Weinberg (1897–1946). This Russian Jew had studied in Germany and developed, in her thesis in France, a mathematical classification technique – tétronage66 – that is today considered a step in the history of the development of factor analysis. Weinberg, who participated in the ‘Races and racism’ scholarly network, was selected to provide the report of the famous eighth session of the 1937 Paris Congress. Indeed, she was considered most capable of countering the representatives of the Third Reich with a scientific demonstration of the conceit of racial classifications. Based on precise and numerous personal data, biotypology substituted ex ante pre-categorizations of racism with ‘better classification elements [ex post] that better met the requirements of a scientific classification’.67

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Biotypology ‘à la Laugier’ ran up against the Italian-style biotypology developed by the neurologist Nicola Pende. While the latter sought to identify morphological traits enabling an a priori grouping of people to determine their assumed dispositions, the former endeavoured to objectify personal potentialities to reconcile the selection objective sought by the major twentieth-century organizations (school, army, businesses, sport, etc.) with a humanist desire to help guide people. As we will see in the third part of this book, this same desire to combine a respect for individuals with the quest for collective efficiency and power appeared in American Reform Eugenics. We will see how this model established itself in France from the 1940s to the 1960s. During an era marked by the fall of Nazism, it was at the basis of Ungemach Gardens’ admissibility – and even attractiveness – for academic, political, administrative and legal elites. By targeting the small middle classes, Alfred Dachert’s experiment was especially virtuous in their eyes because it overcame an obstacle that bedevilled interwar biometrics. When the inspector general Julien Fontègne spoke of the ‘talented and the abnormal’, he was not just opposing a ‘desirable’ population to an ‘undesirable’ one. He was implicitly grouping them in a common category – that of the statistically marginal – by extracting them from the ‘average’ population. But society’s central mass, which was expanding at the beginning of the twentieth century, was problematic for biometrics: while it encompassed the vast majority of individuals, the observations describing it were difficult to use because they were not very specific. Working with differentials, biotypologists needed to ‘calibrate against normal individuals and groups’.68 The body of the statistical distribution of individual traits, which generally resembles Gauss’s famous ‘bell’ curve, certainly allowed them to describe the extremes, but it remained impenetrable itself. Cases ‘around the average … may resemble one another from a purely quantitative perspective, but they actually hide significant differences as soon as one proceeds to in-depth individual examinations’, Eugène Schreider lamented.69 Biotypologists sought to defuse the criticism by claiming that in practice ‘a certain number of average functions exist for which individuals with average aptitudes are, at first approximation, interchangeable’.70 But their model struggled with the growing importance and diversity of service and managerial jobs. It is not just for ideological reasons that eugenics emphasized the ‘monsters’: the discourse on the ‘abnormal and the talented’ was all the more excessive in that it referred to populations that psychotechnical, biotypological, morphological and other measurements made easily visible.

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One of the ways to understand both the enthusiasm for Ungemach Gardens on the part of British Galtonians and the support from experts and authorities in France is that Alfred Dachert found a solution by actually targeting these ‘average’, ‘normal’ populations that were neither pre-eminent nor deviant.71 He thus helped give a ‘human face’ to a tool – triage – that was the real heart of French eugenics: to rationally regulate flows through applied sciences bringing biology and psychology together in various ways in the name of an integrated vision of people, and availing itself of humanism for this reason. Having described the development of this paradigm during the interwar period, we will now examine its institutional crystallization during Vichy, its postwar preservation, and its dismantlement.

Notes 1. One of the only scholars who has studied ‘qualitative demography’ is Laurent Thévenot, ‘La politique des statistiques: les origines sociales des enquêtes de mobilité sociale’, Annales ESC, 45, 6, 1990, pp. 1275–300, with whom I converge on several points. 2. Robert Gessain, ‘Anthropologie et démographie: Aperçus sur une recherche du qualitatif’, Population, 3, 4, 1948, pp. 485–500, here p. 496. 3. Alfred Sauvy, Théorie générale de la population, t. 2, Biologie sociale, pp. 334–335. 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, Paris, UNESCO, 1952. 5. Proceedings of the IUSSP administrative assembly, Geneva, 29 August–2 September 1949, Archives of the Musée de l’Homme (Paris), Paul Rivet papers, 2AP1 B11c. 6. Proceedings of the IUSSP administrative assembly, Geneva, 29 August–2 September 1949, Archives of the Musée de l’Homme (Paris), Paul Rivet papers, 2AP1 B11c. 7. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 8. Paul Duedahl, ‘Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History’, Journal of World History, 1, 2011, pp.  101–33; Michelle Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public’, American Historical Review, 5, 2007, pp. 1386–413. 9. Sauvy, Théorie générale de la population, vol. 2. 10. Roger Peltier, ‘L’Institut national d’études démographiques’, Population, 4, 1, 1949, pp. 9–38 (here p. 11). 11. Alfred Sauvy, ‘Biologie économique: L’impôt sur la monnaie’, Revue économique, 1950, 1, 3, pp. 387–93. 12. Raymond Pearl, ‘Potential and Actual Reproductive Performance’, Human Biology, 8, 1936, pp. 508–30. 13. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, New York, Howard Fertig, 1973 [orig. ed. 1958]. 14. Rosental and Couzon, ‘Le Paris dangereux de Louis Chevalier’. 15. Cf. the Introduction to this volume, n. 27. 16. Thomas Hunt Morgan, Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, New York, H. Holt, 1915. On the United Kingdom, see Marianne Sommer, ‘Biology as a Technology of Social Justice

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in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 39, 4, 2014, pp. 561–86. 17. Edmund Ramsden, ‘Carving Up Population Science: Eugenics, Demography and the Controversy over the “Biological Law” of Population Growth’, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2002, pp. 857–99. 18. Margaret Sanger (ed.), Proceedings of the World Population Conference, Geneva and London, Edward Arnold, 1927. 19. Warren Thompson, Danger Spots in World Population, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1929. 20. Both quotations come from Frank W. Notestein, ‘Frederick Osborn, Demography’s Statesman on His Eightieth Spring’, Population Index, 35, 4, 1969, pp. 367–71. 21. In the next two paragraphs, I rely on Edmund Ramsden, ‘Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States’, Population and Development Review, 29, 4, 2003, pp. 547–93. See also Frank W. Notestein, ‘Reminiscences: The Role of Foundations, the Population Association of America, Princeton University and the United Nations in Fostering American Interest in Population Problems’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 49, 4, 1971, pp. 67–85; Notestein, ‘Demography in the United States: A Partial Account of the Development of the Field’, Population and Development Review, 8, 4, 1982, pp. 651– 87; Frank Lorimer, ‘The New Outlook in Eugenics’, Biodemography and Social Biology, 11, 3, 1964, pp. 125–26. 22. Libby Schweber, ‘Wartime Research and the Quantification of American Sociology: The View from “the American Soldier”’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 6, 1, 2002, pp. 65–94. 23. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2008. 24. Frederick Osborn, ‘Measures of Quality in the Study of Population’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 188, 1936, pp. 194–204; Osborn, ‘The Application of Measures to Quality’, in Congrès international de la population, Paris, 1937. Vol.  8, Problèmes qualitatifs de la population, Paris, Hermann, pp. 117–22; and Osborn, ‘Qualitative Aspects of Population Control: Eugenics and Euthenics’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 25, 1960, pp. 406–25. For a general framing, see Ramsden, ‘Social Demography and Eugenics’, pp. 559–63; Ramsden, ‘Eugenics from the New Deal to the Great Society: Genetic Demography and Relations between Social and Biological Scientists of Population’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39c, 2008, pp. 391– 406; Ramsden, ‘Confronting the Stigma of Eugenics: Genetics, Demography and the Problems of Population’, Social Studies of Science, 39, 2009, pp. 853–84. 25. Frank Lorimer and Frederick Osborn, Dynamics of Population: Social and Biological Significance of Changing Birth Rates in the United States, New York, MacMillan, 1934, p. 113. 26. Paul and Day, ‘John Stuart Mill’, p. 229 et seq. 27. Lorimer and Osborn, Dynamics of Population. 28. Congrès international de la population, Paris, 1937, Paris, Hermann, 8 vols, 1938–1939. 29. Frank Lorimer, ‘The Role of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population’, Memorial Fund Quarterly, 49, 4, 1971, pp. 86–94; Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race:  The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 30. Stefan Kühl, Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 81. 31. Régis Meyran, ‘Races et Racisme: les ambiguïtés de l’antiracisme chez les anthropologues de l’entre-deux-guerres’, Gradhiva, 27, 2000, pp. 63–76. 32. Sauvy, Richesse et population, p. 77.

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33. G.A. Hugonot, La Sélection et la spécialisation du contingent: Essai sur l’adaptation à l’armée des méthodes psychotechniques et biotypologiques, Paris, Impr. nationale, 1937. 34. Henri Piéron, ‘Rapport sur la fiche d’examen psychologique des sportifs’, Biotypologie, 3, 1, 1935, pp. 1–7. 35. Thomas Le Bianic, ‘Des tests pour les chômeurs: la psychotechnique au ministère du Travail, des années 1930 aux années 1950’, Bulletin de psychologie, 61, 4, 2008, pp. 357–66. 36. François Vatin, ‘Les “sciences du travail”: une tentative de résolution positiviste de la question sociale (1890–1914)’, Bulletin de psychologie, 61, 4, 2008, pp. 331–40. 37. William H.  Schneider, ‘The Scientific Study of Labor in Interwar France’, French Historical Studies, 17, 2, 1991, pp. 410–46. 38. Victoria Haidar, ‘“Todo hombre en su justo lugar”: la “solución” biotipológica al conflicto entre productividad y salud (Argentina, 1930–1955)’, Salud Colectiva, 7, 3, 2011, pp. 317–32; Gustavo Vallejo, ‘El ojo del poder en el espacio del saber: Los institutos de biotipología’, Asclepio, 56, 1, 2004, pp. 219–44; Marisa A. Miranda, ‘La antorcha de Cupido: eugenesia, biotipología y eugamia en Argentina, 1930-1970’, Asclepio, 55, 2, 2003, pp. 231–55; Ana Carolina Vimieiro-Gomes, ‘A emergência da biotipologia no Brasil: medir e classificar a morfologia, a fisiologia e o temperament do brasileiro na década de 1930’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, 7, 3, 2012, pp. 705–19. 39. Emmanuel Betta, ‘Nicola Pende’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Rome, 2015, 82, pp. 207–11; Cassata, Building the New Man. Pende was translated in French as early as 1925 (La Biotypologie humaine: Science de l’individualité, Paris, Maloine). 40. William H. Schneider, ‘Henri Laugier: The Science of Work and the Workings of Science in France, 1920–1940’, Cahiers pour l’histoire du CNRS, 5, 1989, pp. 7–34. In this chapter I use several elements of this article, on the links between Henri Laugier and Charles Richet, Édouard Toulouse, Henri Piéron and J.M. Lahy. 41. Michel Trebitsch, ‘Les réseaux scientifiques: Henri Laugier en politique avant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (1918–1939)’, in Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac and JeanFrançois Picard (eds), Henri Laugier en son siècle, Cahiers pour l’histoire de la recherche, Paris, CNRS Éds, 1995, pp. 23–45. 42. Chantal Morelle and Pierre Jakob, Henri Laugier: Un esprit sans frontières, Paris, LGDJ, and Brussels, Bruylant, 1997. 43. Henri Laugier, ‘Programme général de recherches sur les mesures et épreuves biologiques permettant de définir les états de sous-nutrition’, Le Travail Humain, 4, 4, 1936, p. 428 [my emphasis]. 44. Henri Laugier, Édouard Toulouse and Dagmar Weinberg, Communication au Congrès international de l’Éducation nouvelle (Nice, 1932) cited in Huteau, Psychologie, psychiatrie et société, p. 139. 45. Julien Fontègne, ‘De quelques problèmes actuels de l’orientation professionnelle et de l’apprentissage’, Le Travail Humain, 3, 4, 1935, pp. 453–76, here p. 458. 46. Damien de Blic, ‘De la Fédération des mutilés du travail à la Fédération nationale des accidentés du travail et des handicapés’, Revue française des affaires sociales, 2, 2–3, 2008, pp. 119–40; Pierre Romien, ‘À l’origine de la réinsertion professionnelle des personnes handicapées: la prise en charge des invalides de guerre’, Revue française des affaires sociales, 2, 2, 2005, pp. 229–47. 47. Jay Winter, ‘Victimes de la guerre: morts, blessés et invalides’, in Stéphane AudoinRouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, vol. 2, Paris, Perrin, 2012, pp. 715–28. 48. Michel Huteau and Jacques Lautrey, ‘Les origines et la naissance du mouvement d’orientation’, L’Orientation scolaire et professionnelle, 1979, 1, pp. 3–43.

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49. Fontègne, ‘De quelques problèmes actuels’, p. 458. 50. On all these points, see Schneider, ‘Henri Laugier: The Science of Work’. 51. Quotations from Toulouse in Drouard, ‘Biocratie, eugénisme et sexologie’, pp. 208–9. 52. Maurice Halbwachs (1934) quoted by Rémi Lenoir, ‘Halbwachs: démographie ou morphologie sociale?’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 42, 129, 2004, pp. 199–218, here p. 217. 53. Cf. Maurice Halbwachs, ‘Recherches statistiques sur la détermination du sexe à la naissance’, Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris, 5, 1933, pp. 164–91. 54. Quoted by Drouard, ‘Biocratie, eugénisme et sexologie’, p. 209 [my emphasis]. 55. Charles Richet, La Sélection humaine, Paris, Alcan, 1919. 56. Frederick Osborn, Preface to Eugenics, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1940. 57. Compare with John Welshman, ‘Eugenics and Public Health in Britain, 1900–1940: Scenes from Provincial Life’, Urban History, 24, 1997, pp. 56–75, who analyses the mix between eugenics and social reformism, feminism and others in interwar Leicester. 58. Marcel Turbiaux, ‘J.-M. Lahy (1872–1943) et l’orientation professionnelle’, Bulletin de Psychologie, 482, 2, 2006, pp. 217–35. 59. Henri Laugier and Dagmar Weinberg, ‘Le laboratoire du travail des chemins de fer de l’État’, Le travail humain, 3, 1936, pp. 260–61. 60. Henri Laugier, Dagmar Weinberg and L. Cassin, ‘Enquête sur les caractères biotypologiques des enfants en relation avec les conditions de vie des familles’, Biotypologie, 7, 1, 1938, pp. 28–29. 61. Chevalier, Démographie générale, p. 145. 62. Laugier, ‘Programme général de recherches sur les mesures et épreuves biologiques permettant de définir les états de sous-nutrition’, p. 429. 63. Piéron, ‘Rapport sur la fiche’, p. 2. 64. Cf. the programmatic opening by J.M. Lahy and Henri Laugier in Le Travail Humain, 1, 1, 1933, pp. 1–2. 65. Laugier and Weinberg, ‘Le laboratoire du travail des chemins de fer’, p. 258. 66. Dagmar Weinberg, Méthodes d’unification des mesures en biométrie et biotypologie: le tétronage, Paris, Hermann, 1937. On Weinberg, see Paul-André Rosental, ‘Sélection et valeur humaine: deux lectures républicaines, 1937–1944’, Incidence, 12, 2016, pp. 109–24. 67. Dagmar Weinberg, ‘La biométrie différentielle et la biotypologie comme méthodes pour la classification des individus et des groupes’, in Congrès international de la population, Paris, 1937. Vol. 8, Problèmes qualitatifs de la population, Paris, Hermann, pp. 237–250, here pp. 247–48. 68. Henri Laugier, ‘Programme général de recherches’, p. 430. 69. Eugène Schreider, review of Giacinto Viola, La costituzione individuale, Biotypologie, 3, 2, 1935, pp. 84–87, here p. 86. 70. Laugier and Weinberg, ‘Le laboratoire du travail des chemins de fer’, p. 258. 71. Richet, La Sélection humaine, in his quest to ‘improve the human species’ (p. 33), distinguishes between indispensable virtues and brilliant virtues. The former ‘can be boiled down to one word: this is normality: the generators [sic] do not deviate much from the human type’s general average – not too big, not too small, no physical infirmities. The hunchbacked, the crippled, and the retarded must be kept away, as should be those whose ugliness surpasses the average of very ugly people’ (p. 47).

Chapter 6

Qualitative Demography, Reform Eugenics and Social Policies in 1950s France

S The major feature of the twentieth century – its historical originality – is the advent of ‘experimental’ and ‘fabricated’ societies …. Today’s nations are experimental, in the sense that they are created by a team of leaders, according to a deliberate technique. Unfortunately, humanity’s first efforts in deploying this social technique have not been particularly successful thus far. —Raymond Ruyer, ‘Une législation eugéniste’ [Eugenic legislation], Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale [Journal of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy], 44, 1937, p. 659

The Institution of ‘Qualitative Demography’ ‘Qualitative demography’, a French adaptation of American Reform Eugenics, did not just remain a theoretical model. In the 1950s, as the Republic became increasingly heavily involved in social and health issues with the creation of the French social security system in 1945, qualitative demography formed a category of administrative action that politicians and senior officials understood. This was evidenced, in June 1955, by the reaction of Léopold-Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), then State Secretary to the Presidency of the Council – a pre-eminent function in the government administration – to the report that the High Committee on Population and Family submitted to him ‘on the demographic situation and outlook’ in mainland France.1

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The future president of Senegal noted that ‘population size and quality’ are not just factors in ‘the strength and grandeur of a nation, but the sine qua non condition of its economic expansion’. He commended the authors, including INED demographers Jean Bourgeois-Pichat and Louis Henry, for ‘strongly emphasizing that the issue’s quantitative aspect was only a secondary one, and that the first and foremost goal should be quality, which is furthermore the principal factor of quantity’. This quality referred to a series of measures to take in the areas of ‘educational, social, and medical-social action’, including the ‘fight against certain afflictions like tuberculosis and cancer, [and] especially the fight against alcoholism’. They extended to the colonial empire’s ‘underdeveloped territories, with steadily rising populations’, Senghor concluded, ‘where the qualitative aspect is even more important than it is on the mainland. A realistic and efficient economic and social policy cannot be developed there without precise information on the population’s development and its health, education, living standards, and occupational distribution’.2 This cognitive and political acceptance of qualitative demography was enabled by its foothold in the growing number of research institutions formed since the late 1930s to ‘enlighten action’, as Alfred Sauvy put it. The Carrel Foundation, which operated from the summer of 1942 to the beginning of 1945 and was tasked with ‘supporting, improving, and developing the French population in all its activities’,3 represented a turning point here. Symbolic of the combination of eugenics and utilitarianism mentioned in the previous chapter, the foundation included a ‘biotypology’ department led by the distinguished economist François Perroux.4 A biotypology department of Italian inspiration, in line with Pende rather than Laugier’s more progressive model, analysed ‘qualities’ through people’s morphological characteristics.5 The ‘work’ department encompassed a large ‘Biology of professions’ team that included dozens of occupational doctors. Their specialty, which emerged in the 1930s, emphasized professional selection and the prevention of work accidents and diseases by seeking ‘an optimal yield to minimize human deterioration, in order to harmonize inert and living elements of production’.6 Carrel Foundation teams devoted to sleep, nutrition and housing also sought to optimize energy exchanges between human beings and their environment. The idea was to link a managerial logic of productivity maximization to a ‘biopolitical’ logic of health protection via the supervision of bodies. Once again, selection was the keyword. The medical exams at the heart of occupational medicine served to adjust employees’ physiological, intellectual and psychological aptitudes to their job placement.

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Remarkably, Liberation did not challenge the centrality of the link between social biology and economics in any way. The republican scholars who, in 1944, started fighting over the spoils of the Carrel Foundation – its buildings and some of its teams – proposed projects that, in different forms, rechannelled the predominant configuration at the 1937 international population conference, centred around qualitative demography. Meanwhile, in applied psychology, a politically powerful team brought together Henri Laugier, who went to Algiers in 1943 to join the provisional government of the French Republic led by General de Gaulle, and two professors at the College of France: Henri Piéron and Henri Wallon. The latter brought the support of the French Communist Party, which was part of the government at the time. While it was more ideologically progressive, their project to create a ‘Centre for studies and research on human problems’ reclaimed the same components as the Carrel Foundation. Based on ‘the complete knowledge of man, in all his anthropological, physiological, psychological, medical, and social aspects’, it covered ‘applications for public health, preventive hygiene, national education, work organization, eugenics, and population problems, both national and international, etc.’ and addressed ‘the differential psychology of aptitudes and characters according to age, social environment, and biological and pathological history’, as well as ‘medical and statistical research on population problems’ and typically eugenic fields (‘mental hygiene, criminal prophylaxis, delinquency’), often going further than the FFEPH in the formulation of a biological and hereditarian essentialism (‘Human types, temperaments, predisposition’, ‘Hereditarian transmission of characters and environmental influence’).7 A rival project, which would ultimately overtake the former through General de Gaulle’s personal decision in October 1945, was the creation of a National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). The institute was backed by Alfred Sauvy, and most importantly Robert Debré, a prominent medical expert whose personal political connections in the Liberation government extended to the Communist Party and were strengthened by the legitimacy acquired in the Resistance by his son Michel, a state councillor who had become close to General de Gaulle. The complicity between the two men is yet another illustration of the proximity between Robert Debré’s specialty – paediatrics – and population sciences. The jostling over the Carrel Foundation’s legacy unfolded between two interpretations of the vast scholarly world that had formed in the 1930s around the key themes of ‘qualitative demography’, ‘social biology’ and ‘human problems’. Once appointed to the helm of INED,

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Alfred Sauvy bolstered his ‘Demography’ team with the addition of a ‘Section on the study of relationships between population size and quality’ entrusted to the aforementioned doctor Jean Sutter, who was immediately tasked with writing a book about eugenics. This section included ‘biotypology, eugenics, genetics, and psychiatry’ and essentially covered most topics under the remit of eugenics and qualitative demography. To the great displeasure of Alfred Sauvy,8 INED was stripped of the FFEPH’s ‘housing’ department, which studied the effect of the interior layout on residents’ sleep quality and ‘deterioration’, as well as the many teams focused on work. The INED director somewhat remedied this by bringing Henri Laugier onto his institute’s ‘technical committee’ – a scientific board including key administrative and academic figures who provided a link with government policy. Sauvy’s attachment to a conception of ‘population’ stretching, with eugenics, to its biological, health and managerial acceptation, is apparent in his magnum opus, Théorie générale de la population [General theory of population], which includes a first volume entitled Économie et population [Economics and population] and a second one called Biologie sociale [Social biology], as mentioned earlier. Sauvy and Debré, co-authors in 1946 of a programme-book,9 envisioned weakening the hold of the Ministry of Economics through the creation of a large Ministry of Public Health and Population covering ‘all the country’s human problems’. An expanded INED covering social hygiene issues would have served as its think tank. From an institutional perspective, the institute’s refocus on a more limited definition of population constituted a failure of sorts. By dissociating the combination of population sciences and biotypology that was prevalent at the 1937 congress, over time it condemned the ‘qualitative demography’ model. Indeed, the expansion of public policies into the ‘biopolitical’ field after the Second World War went hand in hand with their specialization and fragmentation from one ministry to the next. In two decades, qualitative demography’s ambitious combination would thus become illegible, as it paradoxically became a victim of its success. The Ungemach experiment serves as an archaeological trace here: understanding elites’ support for the project after the fall of Nazism leads to a step-by-step uncovering and reconstitution of this buried paradigm. Before addressing keys to understanding the contemporary world in the last part of the book, I must retrace the importance of qualitative demography for public action in post-1945 France. The analysis of a programmatic text from one of the era’s most influential senior officials will allow us to do just that.

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Social Security as a Eugenic Institution – an Authorized Interpretation In 1952, Jacques Doublet (1907–1984), in his capacity as Master of Requests on the Council of State, published a long article entitled ‘Population and Eugenics’ in the family policy journal Pour la Vie [For life].10 It was the text of a paper he had delivered to the Semaines sociales de France [French social weeks] conference11 in Montpellier in July 1951, an annual gathering that for nearly fifty years was a major discussion forum for Social Catholics.12 Doublet’s article is much less known now than Jean Sutter’s book published two years earlier.13 However, its political significance is much greater. The value of its interpretation of postwar policy on demographic, public health and labour issues lies in the position held by its author when it was published. In October 1951, between the conference and the publication of the article, Doublet succeeded Pierre Laroque as head of the recently established social security system. This promotion fairly recognized the pre-eminent position that Doublet had achieved among the experts designing and overseeing social and demographic policy. In 1939, he was appointed general secretary of the recently created High Committee on Population, the major administrative body devoted to population policy.14 He took up this mission with a pronatalist fervour that would later earn him the position of honorary president of the Alliance Nationale, the main lobby for the cause. After disagreements with Vichy’s Peasant Corporation, where he served as representative of the Ministry of Agriculture, he moved back to the Council of State and provided the Carrel Foundation with his expertise on family legislation. His appointment to INED’s ‘technical committee’ upon its creation in 1945 confirmed his position in the network of men, including his mentors Adolphe Landry and Pierre Laroque, who attempted to bring together social, demographic and family policy. Doublet’s career, convictions and contacts gave him extensive exposure to population issues in the broadest sense, and he used his skills as a doctor of law to express his scientific opinions in memoranda and essays published in specialist journals, embracing a strongly comparative dimension.15 His paper on ‘Population and Eugenics’, published in 1952, is no doubt Doublet’s fullest presentation of the principles that guided his action. The title is no misnomer. He drew on the scientism of the principles of ‘classical’ eugenics formulated in early twentieth-century Britain to argue for the deliberate management by the social community of its biological characteristics. Unsurprisingly, Doublet, the very model of an interventionist French senior civil servant of the second third of the twentieth century, believed the central government should be entrusted with population

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making. He based this policy – which he saw not only as a programme but as an existing reality – on value judgements establishing a hierarchy among human beings, constantly contrasting the ‘evolved’ and ‘healthy’ with the ‘defective’, ‘abnormal’ and other ‘refuse’ (déchets)16 – a term from the beginning of the twentieth century whose use spread during the First World War to designate disabled and mutilated soldiers. Doublet agreed with Galton on what arguably forms the crux of eugenics, that is, the aspiration for a procreation policy regulating population flows according to their supposed quality. Speaking of ‘human refuse’, Doublet noted: ‘since these people are reproducing, in the absence of action, the harm risks spreading and growing …. Limiting the reproduction of population segments with very low intelligence or sociability may be highly desirable. We thus come to the need for the aforementioned birth control methods, which can naturally be used for eugenic ends’. However, the author noted that at the other end of the social spectrum, ‘neo-Malthusianism has mostly borne fruit among the most advanced populations and spread to affluent populations whose children likely receive care and education in the best conditions, which obviously contradicts its intended goals’. Hence the call, in the middle of the twentieth century, to take action against the dysgenic circulation of social groups that had been denounced by Galton and Pareto in their time: a prerogative of elites, birth control condemned them to a gradual dilution among the massive offspring of the lower classes, who were more fertile but of lesser ‘quality’. Like many eugenicists, Doublet believed that health and social policies which ignored ‘quality’ would only accentuate the population’s degradation: ‘natural selection has been limited by the successful efforts of legislators and governments to protect weak people and to stop epidemics: social legislation and health measures have blunted the effects of natural action’. He provided a distinctly eugenic interpretation of social policy. For example, on housing matters, which he associated with the fight against tuberculosis, and especially alcoholism – one of Alfred Sauvy’s favourite themes17 – Doublet favoured action like the ‘elimination of slums and young household formation [among] eugenic measures’. The message contained in the article is explicit: since ‘social legislation [and] health measures [have] obstructed the effects of natural action’, it is important that the central government’s ‘biopolitical’ intervention be guided by eugenic principles, for both holistic and utilitarian considerations: the existence of “human refuse” places a heavy burden on society…; could not the resources devoted to maintaining this category of people be used for more useful social ends?’. In addition to this utilitarian goal, eugenics needed, ‘in order to be effective, … to encompass

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wellbeing and health’, hence the article’s central assertion: ‘eugenics is of a piece with effective social policy’, as seen in the example of the United Kingdom’s family allowance system. The new head of social security surely embraced the report on Great Britain’s population policy published some time earlier by the influential think tank on ‘Political and Economic Planning’,18 led by the brothers Julian and Aldous Huxley and well known in expert circles in France.19 Doublet’s text is entirely in keeping with the classical acceptation of eugenics, softened in light of the scientific evolutions that had occurred over the past half-century. Indeed, the author took note of the reconsideration of the hereditarian determinism at the basis of Galtonian theories. His formulation of this provides a good summary of the genetic culture of his era: The contradictory nature of the research undertaken on human reproduction and hereditary transmission attests to great uncertainty about the notion of heredity. All the measures taken in Nazi Germany and to a lesser degree in Japan, are rooted in a belief in the pre-eminence of hereditary factors. But geneticists do not agree on the respective importance of hereditary characteristics and of environmental influence in the constitution of personality. The different factors are hard to isolate …. Moreover, unpredictable transformations can occur in the field of heredity; the extraordinary number of possible combinations of hereditary genes leads to the assertion that, first, we can absolutely not predict with certainty that an unfortunate feature will not reappear, even in healthy lineages, and second, even pathological lineages might suddenly produce a healthy subject. Under these circumstances, the effects of sterilization are paltry.

On these essential points, the prevailing vision at the beginning of the century of a systematic and deterministic transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next was invalidated, as was the theory that had founded the Ungemach Gardens experiment. But while the ‘reappearance of an unfortunate feature’ from one generation to the next could no longer be taken for granted, as it was in Alfred Dachert’s plays, it gave way to a diffuse anxiety vis-à-vis a genetic heritage whose effects were uncontrollable. Doublet embraced a new conception of hereditary risk: adopting a position that was identical to that of postwar ‘repentant’ hereditarians, the new head of social security considered that ‘hereditary defects and the congenital constitutional state remained paramount. Care will never transform a healthy and capable man into a poorly built and untalented child’. On this crucial point, Doublet expressed what I term ‘genetic doubt’, to which I will return. In the 1950s he hovered over all the empirical social

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sciences, raising issues about determining ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’ causalities. It is significant that INED director Alfred Sauvy asked – in vain – his technical committee for the creation of a genetic department that would have helped him get better bearings in this major debate of the era. The commonality of views between Doublet and Sauvy is more generally apparent in their shared insistence on linking quantity and quality in light of considerations that paediatricians and demographers had been evoking for a generation. Doublet thus adopted Robert Debré’s analyses by asserting that: to develop, [the] child needs both parents and, as sociologists, doctors, and educators have frequently noted, brothers and sisters. The only child’s situation is dangerous for the couple and for the child, who then has too much contact with adults. Children have a world that only other children can penetrate, and this ‘brotherhood’ is a prerequisite to their development and preparation for life.

Similarly, at the macroscopic level this time, Doublet shared Sauvy’s conviction that ‘a decrease in population size does not necessarily lead to an increase in its quality’: this connection only heightened the urgency of a consequential eugenic policy. Doublet’s recommendations fit with the epistemological framework that I have described thus far. Indeed, they drew on the culture of triage, adapted to the diversity of the populations to be regulated. While the new director of social security counted on ‘new methods’ for educational guidance, he entrusted psychotechnique, ‘mostly developed in the United States’, with helping each worker to find ‘the job best matching his state and qualities, which requires a study of the machine’s rhythm, in accordance with work medicine’. He added the ‘rehabilitation and re-adaptation of the handicapped, which is not yet widespread in our country’, and which he saw as ‘primarily a positive type of eugenics … beneficial to both the individual and society, and currently providing great results in the United States’. This is a now-familiar setup, wherein individuals deemed to be abnormal are filtered out to be treated separately, while psychotechnique and occupational medicine – promising a ‘biological orientation of labour’– are used to place ‘normal’ people in the production apparatus. Doublet’s aspiration for a preventive medicine that would ‘monitor’ (the verb appears twice in a few lines) people’s health throughout their life, and more specifically beginning with their ‘first factory job’, intersects with my previous comments on social medicine.20 I decided to reproduce Jacques Doublet’s reasoning, because its overall architecture, and each of the elements it contains, closely correspond to

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the political, administrative and academic landscape that I reconstituted to understand the reception of the Ungemach experiment in the decades preceding and following the Second World War. The points I focused on – the emergence of ‘quality’ as a scholarly subject, the scientific relationships between population sciences and occupational sciences, selection and triage measures, reconversions of eugenics and hereditarianism and so on – were both corroborated by the head of social security and integrated into a general model that, given the author’s prominent function at the time of the text’s publication, was the broadest imaginable. As Doublet himself suggested in the opening sentence of his text, the process he described was none other than the deliberate fabrication of society by itself – a new fact that he might have claimed to be a civilizational breakthrough: ‘constant progress in the sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the substitution of empirical methods with rules that experience seems to confirm have led men to think that their development could to a certain extent be controlled, if not directed, by themselves’. Once more, he was just replaying a traditional eugenic theme here. Doublet’s text thus confirms, without oversimplification, the framework to which French eugenics contributed: a ‘qualitative’ approach expressly linked to a pronatalist and populationist concern permeating both the medical world in a broad sense and public action in terms of demography, family and public health, as well as housing, work, and educational and vocational guidance. In a nutshell, this raises the whole question of the rationalization of the individual environment in both the private (family, births, housing) and professional (training, orientation, activity) spheres, or at the intersection of the two (nutrition), in consideration of its effects on health and productivity. This systematic quest for value extended to measures akin to those implemented by Alfred Dachert. In 1939, when the Family Code was implemented, the payment of family allocations to one-child households already assumed that the child had been born within two years of marriage.21 After Liberation, when assistance to families represented close to half of social security distributions, Pierre Laroque justified that the maternity allocation scale favour the second and third child in order to ‘encourage families to quickly have children, the idea being that the children of young families are naturally healthier and stronger children who are raised in better conditions’.22 In sum, Doublet’s 1952 article expressed what eugenics represented for French socio-demographic and health policies: a normative base shared by a proactive and diverse ‘epistemic community’, which included doctors (paediatricians, gynaecologists, psychiatrists, occupational doctors

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and school doctors) as well as demographers and psychologists, administrators and politicians, experts in educational and vocational guidance, and some birth control activists. Its formulation is invaluable because, as mentioned, state regulation of increasingly large and varied postwar human flows would soon dilute this scientific and administrative culture by spreading its fields of application across ministries.

Humanizing Eugenics through Social Psychology? Let me pause at this point to ask whether we should consider that Jacques Doublet, as the head of social security, provided the definitive interpretation of the founding of this institution symbolic of the rise of the French Welfare State. There is no question that the history is far more complex, involving national and local political representatives and socio-health professions, as well as social actors – employee and employer unions and mutual insurance companies.23 Even if one only considers the specific role of senior officials who, like Doublet, had been involved in the expanding sector of social policies since the 1930s, it is apparent that the emergence of social security in 1945 primarily resulted from an interwar merging of social policies, family policies and birth policies. This reduction of social security to a eugenic institution, through a significant distortion of its history, is attributable to Doublet’s particular position among the administrative elites. The new head of social security was less exclusively pronatalist and republican than Michel Debré, and less ‘social’ than Pierre Laroque. A man of order who, after beginning his career in the Ministry of the Interior’s foreign service, became alarmed about postwar demographic developments in the colonial empire and especially Algeria, the patriot Doublet first and foremost presented himself as a believer committed to the defence of the ‘continuity of Christianity’. Far removed from the classical oppositions of the cultural war opposing church and state for a large part of the Third Republic, the new head of social security symbolized the alliance between state pronatalism and religious familialism that developed in the aftermath of the First World War around fertility policies. His presentation at the ‘Social weeks’ conference in 1951 occurred in a particular context, when church-affiliated and conservative-leaning organizations – Christian family associations and unions – were placing biopolitical issues highest on their agendas. These were the first years of the baby boom, which started during the Second World War. At the time, it was unclear whether this unexpected increase in the birth rate was sustainable: Alfred Sauvy himself did not recognize its existence until 1956.

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As a member of INED’s technical committee and a first-hand expert in demographic research, Doublet could not ignore that a share (about a third, it would later be estimated) of these births were unwanted: they resulted from ‘contraception failures’, ironically called ‘Ogino babies’ at the time, named after the famous and very risky contraception method based on the assumption that women could track their more or less fertile periods. The awareness, as vague as it may have been, that the high birth rate was occurring partly against the will of couples gnawed at demographers, and especially Catholic demographers: could one accept that the fertility threshold deemed desirable for the nation was being achieved at this cost to households? The growing expression of the unhappiness from couples unable to control their fertility soon gave rise, under the leadership of gynaecologists like Jean Dalsace (1893–1970), Marie-Andrée Lagroua-Weill-Hallé (1916–1994) and Pierre Simon (1925–2008), to the reconstitution of a neo-Malthusian group that formed the La Maternité heureuse24 [Happy motherhood] association in 1956. The association fought against the 1920 prohibition on ‘propaganda’ (and therefore information) on contraception, and advocated for ‘painless birth’.25 At the time of Jacques Doublet’s communication, this opposition had not yet come together, but the international pressure he conveyed in his text shows he feared the emergence of a movement promoting birth planning in France. This was his motivation for presenting social policies as highly eugenic. Between the absolute evil that birth control represented for him, from both a moral and public policy perspective, and the potential but manageable danger that eugenics represented, there was no contest. All that was needed was simply to rework eugenics in a more democratic and human way – a ‘reform’, as proposed fifteen years earlier by Frederick Osborn, whom Doublet quoted twice in his 1952 article. This tamed eugenics would have to conform to both church teachings and republican principles, based on citizen consent. ‘This state action is based on the goodwill of all …. These collective efforts … are bound to fail if they are not paired with an effort to highlight each individual’s personality.’ On biopolitical matters, Doublet pushed for citizen agency by asserting that ‘the head of the family cannot be considered a passive subject on whom all action becomes possible’. This position was accompanied by a softening of sorts towards the ‘abnormal and deficient’, who were deserving of ‘society’s care’. ‘The abnormal, retarded, or delinquent child’ was to receive an ‘appropriate’ education aiming to ‘instil the desire to have a role in society’, that would be dispensed via ‘special institutions or classes’. Similarly, ‘long considered to be a dangerous person, the madman or

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the neurotic person becomes the subject of a patient study. The practice of electroshock and the use of psychoanalysis can help reintegrate these people in everyday life’. This condescending attention would today be considered tepid and even hurtful. But rather than retrospectively judge, it is important to understand its underlying scholarly evolutions and attendant consequences. Let us go back a generation. In the world of the ‘social sciences of quality’ that took shape in the 1930s, the disciplinary centre of gravity was located between physiology and applied psychology, with the latter having sought, since the beginning of the century, to extricate itself from philosophy to instead observe ‘behaviours’ and ‘aptitudes’. The social sciences associated with this constellation – from physical anthropology to analytical demography – were often themselves partly linked to biology. Two developments ushered by the fall of Nazism, and imported and adapted from the United States, changed this configuration after the Second World War. The first was the rise of survey research, that is, ad hoc quantitative surveys that were independent of the hitherto predominant national censuses, and that covered many areas. Of course, one should be sceptical of any explanation based on the raw strength of results, which in the social sciences, as in all sciences, are never developed or interpreted outside of a pre-existing cognitive framework: at the beginning of the century, did eugenics not base its theory on the reconstitution of genealogies intended to establish the deterministic transmission of hereditary troubles? However, the positivist epistemology that shaped most of these surveys, their often applied vocation and the way their authors altered their hypotheses as the results accumulated point to the idea that research conducted from a biologizing perspective led to the collective emphasis on the importance of social factors and, more tentatively, of situations.26 As was the case for the fertility of American couples studied in the 1930s by Raymond Pearl and Frank Notestein, we will see below how quantitative research on pupils’ success in 1950s INED that had been conceived from a biologizing perspective conveyed the importance of social factors and conditions of existence. The second transformation concerned the credence lent to hereditarian explanations. With the institution of genetics in France after the Second World War, the expressions ‘genetic dispositions’ and ‘genetic predispositions’ emerged in the 1950s. They designated a complex web of causalities, which differed from one geneticist to the next, but in all cases invalidated determinism and reductionism. The geneticist Raymond Turpin (1895–1988), a professor of therapeutics and department head at the Trousseau children’s hospital in Paris, and author in 1951 of a textbook tellingly entitled L’Hérédité des prédispositions morbides [The heredity

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of morbid predispositions], probably provided the most integrated formulation of heredity. He devoted his ‘progenesis’ model to the joint study of ‘“constitutive” factors and “environmental” factors contributing to human reproduction from the formation of gametes to child life, by way of embryonic development’. Turpin combined hereditarian and non-hereditarian factors by taking into account both physiological data about the mother (diseases, age at the beginning of the pregnancy) and her health and nutrition.27 The combination of these two changes upended the construction of the causality of social behaviours. In response to what I referred to as ‘genetic doubt’ and the unexpected importance of social factors, it became difficult to order and rank the causes. A solution provided in France by empirical sociology consisted, once again, of transposing an American model – that of social psychology. Its importer, Jean Stoetzel (1910–1987), became one of the leading figures in sociology on this basis.28 At INED he started conducting surveys on academic achievement that captured the epistemological evolution underway and its political consequences. It is fascinating to observe the extent to which this research area demarcated the reform and reconversion of eugenics in the second third of the 1930s. INED’s interest in the issue was a prewar legacy. In 1936, at the initiative of the Minister of Public Health of the Popular Front, Henri Sellier, who was very influenced by eugenics, a project on ‘deficient children’ was conceived. An inter-ministerial committee presided over by the (then socialist) psychologist Henri Wallon assigned it an objective that was typical of the French ‘selective paradigm’: to identify children ‘ill-adapted to normal schooling, in order to establish a master plan for special education institutions’.29 During the Occupation the survey was conducted within the Carrel Foundation, and was then continued through INED,30 where it soon intersected with more general concerns about school enrolments. The idea was to ‘provide for the needs of an economy increasingly demanding that individuals have higher degrees’31 while avoiding the overcrowding that would result, Alfred Sauvy feared, from a too sudden opening of access to secondary education, which was still only open to a minority of students, because of a supposed lack of executive positions on the job market. The sociologist Alain Girard (1914–1996), who would soon replace Stoetzel after the latter was elected professor at the Sorbonne, drew on a longstanding eugenic category to verify that the ‘talented’ children were the ones who had access to secondary education. That the likelihood of being a good student considerably changed according to the social origin of the parents was a moot point; what mattered was ensuring that the school knew how to identify and guide valued youth. The sociologist

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verified that students who were authorized to pursue secondary education matched those who were getting the highest grades on the intelligence tests they completed as part of the survey. He thus established that school was both fair and effective – that is ‘fully assumed its role, which was not only to instruct, but also to select and guide’.32 However, like his counterparts, Girard got stuck on the ‘genetic doubt’. On the one hand he embraced eugenics. Again in 1961, in a synthesis on the sociology of social success, he aligned with the Galtonian focus on ‘the heredity of genius’.33 Were the factors conditioning aptitudes ‘hereditary or innate, or rather purely acquired? …. These problems formed the backdrop for the analysis’, knowing that ultimately ‘no element can end the debates by adopting one point of view instead of another’.34 On the other hand, Girard no longer felt there was a scientific basis for reducing the ‘value’ of students to a hereditarian determinism. Besides, INED research deconstructed biological evidence by showing ‘the small differences that appear between the intellectual level of girls and that of boys’.35 It pointed to the fate of young girls from large families of modest means who had to give up school and enter the workforce in order to devote themselves to ‘helping their mothers’. It attributed the onset of ‘speech troubles and stuttering’ to thwarting left-handed students.36 It invalidated eugenic clichés about twins, by showing that their relatively average performance on intelligence tests resulted from their statistically frequent membership in large families from disadvantaged areas.37 It indicated that the academic results of immigrant children were comparable, if not slightly superior, to those of natives for any given social class of origin.38 But Girard applied the same doubt to social factors as to genetics. When the data he assembled showed that barely a tenth of children of blue-collar worker or farmer parents had more than a primary education, he refused to solely attribute this to social factors. The social psychological approach allowed him to stake a position of academic ‘moderation’ that was also a political ‘moderation’. In the name of epistemological indetermination, Girard did not choose. He merely observed with satisfaction that the biologically ‘talented’ children from the working classes acceded to secondary schooling, and imputed their success to psycho-sociological factors linked to the motivation of their parents, or themselves, for educational achievement. Stoetzel and Girard acted as reformists. The effort may retrospectively appear to have been modest, but it deeply changed the prewar academic configuration. Helped by the institutionalization of non-reductionist genetics, they introduced sociology into the disciplinary interaction and tension that, until then, had principally unfolded at the intersection of

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physiology and applied psychology. The reference to ‘dispositions’ and ‘predispositions’ marked a reconceptualization, where reasoning in terms of aptitudes, which dated back to the interwar period, took a backseat to reasoning in terms of attitudes.39 Alain Girard would thus sum it up decades later: ‘a general representation of the world and things and values learned within a particular environment, whether they are accepted or rejected, dispose people to react to events in a determined way and to issue opinions on them that are consistent with their specific attitude, which they express in verbal form. These opinions, like the intellectual quotient, can be measured’.40 A decade later, two young scholars who would become major sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, would make a complete break with Girardian reformism. Their successive books, Les Héritiers in 1964 and La Reproduction in 1970,41 did not cite Girard and Stoetzel, but picked up on their argument on social inequalities in access to education42 to build a model that was exactly symmetrical to theirs. By attributing academic achievement to the propensity to subject oneself to the cultural arbitrariness transmitted by school and interiorize one’s chances of success, Bourdieu and Passeron literally made all the components of the Girardian paradigm stand on their head.43 They stripped the educational paths study of any genetic and psychological dimension to exclusively anchor it to sociology. From this perspective, La Reproduction can be considered an essential landmark and tool in the eradication of eugenics in French social sciences. This dimension explicitly comes to the fore in Bourdieu and Passeron’s criticism of the function of sociodicy of formally irreproachable tests claiming to measure subjects’ aptitude for job positions at a given point in time while forgetting that this aptitude, however early it is tested, is the product of socially qualified learning, and that the most predictive measurements are precisely the least neutral ones socially. In fact, nothing less than the neo-Paretian utopia of a society protected against the ‘circulation of the elites’ and the ‘revolt of the masses’ can be read between the lines,

a utopia whose demoralizing effects they then describe regarding ‘members of the “lower classes”, forced to convince themselves, like the deltas in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that they are the lowest of the low and happy to be so’.44 The sociology of Bourdieu and Passeron was both a particularly developed model of social sciences’ liberation from biology, and a beacon among the 1960s movements that brought an end, at the international

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level, to the scholarly world I described in the preceding chapters. I already noted the fate of Charles Goethe, who was honoured in 1965 by the president of the United States just before his eugenic past was dug up amid student protests. But this was just a marker in a more general movement. Annals of Eugenics, a journal of the University of London’s Galton Laboratory, had in 1954 changed its name to Annals of Human Genetics. In 1969, the respective journals of the British (Eugenics Review) and American (Eugenics Quarterly) eugenics societies were renamed Journal of Biosocial Science and Social Biology. The conversion of ‘eugenic councils’ into ‘genetic councils’ also occurred across the world in the 1950s and 1960s. In France this started with the ‘Sick children’ service at Necker hospital, where Maurice Lamy became the first clinical genetics chair.45 Not to mention the parallel movements that other disciplinary sectors like psychiatry experienced in the 1970s. Generally speaking, it was the start of a new period in which efforts to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eugenics that had prevailed since the end of the Second World War gave way to a full and absolute rejection. But going back to the 1950s and reviving the reasoning of Stoetzel, Girard, Doublet and Sauvy helps to uncover the strength of a buried partner in the following decades: applied psychology. This discipline, in various forms depending on the period, is closely entwined with the history of eugenics, which, contrary to what we have retained today, is not just a biological theory but also, if not primarily, a moral theory. Some of the specialties, approaches, categories and professions associated with this vast academic archipelago that we designate under the term ‘psychology’ have been its travel companions from the outset. While not necessarily most visible, they have ensured a form of continuity that underlies the constantly renewed relevance of eugenics. I will endeavour in the last part of this book to restitute their signposts.

Notes 1. La Population française. Rapport du Haut Comité consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, vol. 1, France métropolitaine, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1955. 2. Source: Archives of the Haut Conseil de la Population et de la Famille [High Council on Population and Family], CAC 860269/1. 3. Cf. supra, ch. 4, n. 54. 4. Jean-Jacques Gillon, ‘La Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains’, in Raymond Boudon, François Bourricaud and Alain Girard (eds), Science et théorie de l’opinion publique: Hommage à Jean Stoetzel, Paris, Retz, 1981, pp. 257–68, here p. 262.

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5. Organisation du travail. Travaux en cours. Vie intérieure de la Fondation, FFEPH, Report of the scientific documentation, 1945, p. 6 (Source: Henri Piéron papers, French National Archives, AN 520 AP 13). 6. FFEPH, Ce qu’est la Fondation. Ce qu’elle fait, p. 42. 7. Source: Henri Piéron papers, AN 520 AP 13 [my emphasis]. 8. Alain Drouard, ‘La création de l’INED’, Population, 47, 6, 1992, pp. 1453–66, here p. 1464. 9. Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy, Des Français pour la France (Le problème de la population), Paris, Gallimard, 1946. 10. Jacques Doublet, ‘Population et Eugénisme’, Pour la Vie. Revue d’études familiales, 46, 1, 1952, pp. 3–34. 11. Santé et société: Les découvertes biologiques et la médecine au service de l’homme, Semaines sociales de France, Montpellier, 17–23 July 1951, Paris, Librairie Gabalda. 12. Jean-Dominique Durand (ed.), Les semaines sociales de France: Cent ans d’engagement social des Catholiques français, 1904–2004, Paris, Parole et Silence, 2006. 13. Sutter, L’Eugénique: problèmes, méthodes, résultats. 14. Rosental, Population, the State, and National Grandeur, ch. 1 and 2. 15. To cite only his articles in INED’s journal, Population, cf. ‘Famille et personnes à charge’ (2, 1949, pp. 354–55); ‘Des lois dans leurs rapports avec la population’ (1, 1949, pp. 39–56); ‘La sécurité sociale et les frontières: formation d’un droit international’ (2, 1955, pp. 263–76). In 1937, Jacques Doublet had devoted his doctoral law thesis from the University of Paris to the Front du travail allemand [German work front]. The thesis was published under this title by Hartmann, Paris. 16. Unless otherwise noted, all the quotes attributed to Jacques Doublet in this chapter are excerpted from this article (cf. note 10). 17. Luc Berlivet, ‘Les démographes et l’alcoolisme: du “fléau social” au “risque de santé”’, Vingtième Siècle, 95, 3, 2007, pp. 93–113. 18. See Population Policy in Great Britain, London, Political and Economic Planning, 1948. The institute, created in 1931, played a significant role in the debates on the Welfare State. 19. Jean Daric, ‘La politique de population en Grande-Bretagne’, Population, 3, 3, 1948, pp. 564–67. 20. Peter Weingart, ‘The Thin Line between Eugenics and Preventive Medicine’, in Norbert Finzch and Dietmar Schirmer (eds), Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 397–412. 21. Cicely Watson, ‘Population Policy in France: Family Allowances and Other Benefits (I)’, Population Studies, 7, 3, 1953, pp. 263–86, here p. 273. 22. Pierre Laroque, ‘Famille et sécurité sociale’, Revue française du travail, 19, 10, 1947, pp. 829–45, here p. 838. 23. Henri Hatzfeld, Du paupérisme à la Sécurité sociale, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1989 [orig. ed. 1971]; Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; Paul V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–1947, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Michel Dreyfus et al. (eds), Se protéger, être protégé: une histoire des assurances sociales en France, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006; Eric Jabbari, Pierre Laroque and the Welfare State in Postwar France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. 24. Pierre Simon, De la vie avant toute chose, Paris, Mazarine, 1979, p. 91 et seq. 25. Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Les Lois de l’amour: les politiques de la sexualité en France, 1950–2002, Paris, Payot, 2002.

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26. See Michel Bozon and François Héran, La Formation du couple, Paris, La Découverte, 2006. 27. Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Inventer la biomédecine, Paris, La Découverte, 2002, ch. 5. See also Raymond Turpin, L’Hérédité des prédispositions morbides, Paris, Gallimard, 1951; and Turpin, La Progénèse, facteurs préconceptionnels du développement de l’enfant, Paris, Masson, 1955. 28. Paul-André Rosental, ‘Jean Stoetzel, Demography and Public Opinion’, Population-E, 61, 1, 2006, pp. 29–40. 29. Paul Clerc and Pierre Benedetto (eds), Enquête nationale sur le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire, vol. 1, Paris, PUF, coll. ‘Les cahiers de l’Ined’, 1969, p. 3. 30. Le Niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire, vol. 1, Enquête nationale dans l’enseignement primaire, 1950, p. 11. 31. Alain Girard, La Réussite sociale en France, Paris, PUF, 1967, p. 23. 32. Alain Girard, ‘Enquête nationale sur la sélection et l’orientation des enfants d’âge scolaire’, Population, 9, 4, 1954, pp. 597–634, here p. 633. 33. Girard, La Réussite sociale en France, p. 24. 34. Jean Stoetzel and Alain Girard, ‘Une enquête nationale sur le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire’, Population, 5, 3, 1950, pp. 567–76. 35. Ibid., p. 571. 36. Hélène Bergues, ‘La droiterie-gaucherie et les troubles de la parole’, in Le Niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire, vol. 2, 1954, pp. 187–222. 37. Léon Tabah and Jean Sutter, ‘Le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’une même famille’, in Le Niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire, vol. 2, 1954, pp. 97–186, here pp. 139–58. 38. Alain Girard and Paul Clerc, ‘Nouvelles données sur l’orientation scolaire au moment de l’entrée en sixième’, Population, 19, 5, 1964, pp. 829–72, here p. 865 et seq. 39. I borrow this dichotomy from Olivier Martin and Patricia Vannier, ‘La sociologie française après 1945: places et rôles des méthodes issues de la psychologie’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 6, 1, 2002, p. 112. 40. Alain Girard, ‘Nécrologie de Jean Stoetzel (1910–1987)’, Revue française de sociologie, 28, 2, 1987, pp. 201–11, here p. 202 [my emphasis]. 41. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979 [orig. ed. 1964]; Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London, Sage Publications, 1977 [orig. ed. 1970]. 42. Philippe Masson, ‘La fabrication des Héritiers’, Revue française de sociologie, 42, 3, 2001, pp.  477–507; Masson, ‘Premières réceptions et diffusions des Héritiers (1964–1973)’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 13, 2, 2005, pp. 69–98, here pp. 75–77. 43. Ibid. 44. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, pp. 201–2 [my emphasis]. 45. Jean-Paul Gaudillière, ‘Reframing Pathological Heredity: Pedigrees, Molecules, and Genetic Counseling in Postwar France’, Alter. European Journal of Disability Research, 5, 2011, p. 7–15; here p. 12. For the West German case, see Anne Cottebrune, ‘Eugenische Konzepte in der westdeutschen Humangenetik, 1945–1980’, Journal of Modern European History, 10, 4, 2012, p. 500–518 and Id., ‘The Emergence of Genetic Counselling in the Federal Republic of Germany: Continuity and Change in the Narratives of Human Geneticists, c. 1968–80’, in Bernd Gausemeier, Staffan Müller-Wille and Edmund Ramsden (ed.), Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2013, p. 193–204.

Part III

Eugenics and Developmental Psychology A Neglected Legacy

S Understanding the long survival of the Ungemach experiment requires uncovering the role of psychology in eugenics, and the redefinition of this role in American Reform Eugenics. This leads to a rethinking of a key element of contemporary popular culture: developmental psychology. Lay knowledge in this field, which promotes self-fulfilment for oneself and for one’s children, is closely intertwined with eugenics, the question being to understand what exactly ‘intertwined’ means. While social critique has been encouraging scepticism of sociobiological claims to govern social and educational policies since the 1970s, I will re-evaluate here the legacy of eugenics in this central aspect of contemporary ‘anthropology of the self’, which is often paired with self-exploitation, without reducing so complex an issue to a simplistic denunciation. Eugenics at its foundation was not just about biology and genetics. From the very start, eugenics was also a psychological science that drew on strong moral values and hierarchies. At the height of its influence in the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics strongly overlapped with various branches of applied psychology, especially in England and the United States. For instance, it played a central role in the emergence of marriage counselling in the 1920s, when eugenicists realized that it was more realistic to help ‘fit couples’ to avoid divorce than to dictate to young couples whether or not they should marry. It also helped to transform relationships between parents and children, in the sense of encouraging greater openness from the former towards the latter. Throughout its history in democratic countries, eugenics embraced an organic approach,

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centred around national or racial ‘quality’, with a liberal focus on individual fulfilment. Eugenics was about ‘improving’ both populations and individuals. This context fostered the ideal (and duty) of ‘modern’, ‘responsible’ parents contributing to the complete self-fulfilment of their children. The 1930s American Reform Eugenics systematized this idea, and contributed to its endurance through to the 1960s, one generation after its association with Nazi criminal policies.

Chapter 7

Eugenics as a Moral Theory (1) The Theory of Human Capital

S In March 1979, in his lecture at the College of France devoted to the birth of biopolitics, Michel Foucault addressed the economic concept of human capital. He attributed its emergence to a contemporary, the future Nobel Prize winner in economics Gary Becker, seeing it as ‘an extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic’.1 Foucault quickly traced its genealogy back to Théodore Schulz and Jacob Mincer at the end of the 1950s,2 and warned his readers of its dangers. In the eyes of its proponents, human capital consisted of: innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let’s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing.3

This brief passage, formulated in an almost familiar style, raises several of the issues I will discuss in this chapter. Foucault acknowledged the resurgence of eugenics – an emerging anxiety in the United States at the time.4 He saw ‘human capital’ as a recent and, one might say, virgin

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concept. Its eugenic potential was not linked to its history, but rather resulted from the way it was built. According to Foucault, it was based on an unprecedented assimilation of: the worker’s skill [to] a machine … which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result. We should think of the skill that is united with the worker as, in a way, the side through which the worker is a machine, but a machine understood in the positive sense, since it is a machine that produces an earnings stream.5

In other words, it is because it contains a biological dimension that this definition is sensible. It confers a differential value to ‘genetic endowments’ and constrains reproduction strategies. ‘If you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves’ as well.6 I will gradually come back to the components of Foucault’s reasoning. For now, it is important to note that for Foucault, as for Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in the preceding chapter, the intrusion – even just a potential one – of biology in the definition of people’s value automatically raised a red flag. This attitude, which was pioneering at the time, has helped to give today’s citizens a precious lucidity: it is an attitude that refuses to grant biotechnical tools any scientistic legitimacy, while asserting that anything related to the body, sexuality, procreation and other vital dimensions is as much a carrier of subtle symbolic arrangements as of a nature that might be shaped and improved.7 However, this caution raises a well-known difficulty, which is the imprecision of its dosage. Given that any application of biotechniques is supposed to automatically be alarming, how to ethically distinguish between an embryonic manipulation to prevent a serious, painful and disabling disease that might not be treated with a classical medical procedure, and an innovation that would harm ‘the programmed person, [who] being no longer certain about the contingency of the natural roots of her life history, may feel the lack of a mental precondition for coping with the moral expectation to take, even if only in retrospect, the sole responsibility for her own life’?8 Another complication is that the terms of this debate are contingent on the historical context. While Jürgen Habermas, on the eve of the twenty-first century, incriminated ‘the “designer” [who], acting according to his own preferences, assumes an irrevocable

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role in determining the contours of the life history and identity of another person, while remaining unable to assume even her counterfactual assent’,9 the American psychologist Gladys C. Schwesinger, in alignment with Frederick Osborn, had sixty years earlier argued almost the exact opposite: from her perspective, what mattered were ‘the rights of the next generation; the rights of all children to normal chances of development; the right to be born to parents who will take care of them adequately and wisely; the right to be born without a defect or hereditary anomaly’.10 These different positions share a common feature, however: they all focus on the boundary between biology and social sciences. As we have seen, until the 1950s, government knowledge applied to the most diverse areas (management of education and migration flows, vocational guidance, etc.) emphasized and intertwined biology and psychology. What I would like to analyse in this chapter is what wariness about eugenics becomes when the critical stance also encompasses applied psychology, and more specifically developmental psychology, understood as both an academic discipline and as lay knowledge that normatively distributes qualities and defects associated with human beings.

Eugenics as a Moral Science Today eugenics is seen as a sociobiology, that is, as a project of applied social biology, or of biological engineering. But it is at least as much a moral philosophy – both a descriptive and performative theory of human qualities and value. To provide a concrete idea of the importance of long filiations, we can go back to the 1952 article by the head of French social security, Jacques Doublet, discussed in the previous chapter on the links between eugenics and social policies. The author did not just refer to a biological hierarchy between more or less ‘talented’ human beings. As was the case for the original eugenics, he enhanced this ‘natural’ gradation with a moral one by considering that the subjects most likely and able to limit their fertility are both best endowed constitutionally and most provident. Here he restored the backbone of ‘classical’ eugenic reasoning. The observation is not just descriptive but also performative. By calling for people to be responsible, Doublet was perpetuating the saying of Galton himself: his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development ‘suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty’ in the sense of ‘a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity … as an endeavour to further evolution’.11 In light of his guidance, for example, his followers considered that divorce, which was legalized in 1923 for women in England, should

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increase the spouses’ sense of responsibility, without which the marriage, transformed into a simple ‘trial trip’, would dissuade the most provident couples from creating progeny.12 This responsibility required education on reproductive choices, as signalled in the name of the Galtonian movement created in 1907: the Eugenics Education Society. At the end of the nineteenth century this moralism could be understood from a class perspective: it was fuelled by a mix of arrogance and frustration from the professional elites, which were growing but struggling to accede to truly influential positions in British society. The vice-president of the Eugenics Education Society, James Barr (1849–1938), a professor of clinical medicine at the University of Liverpool and a fierce eugenicist who would be elected president of the British Medical Association five years later, expressed this well when, at a conference in 1907, he called on his countrymen to forge ‘a healthy, strong, sound, vigorous, well-developed, temperate, active, athletic, adventurous, brave, bold, brisk, busy, courageous, chivalrous, daring, defiant, energetic, absolutely fearless, quick, strenuous, animated, attractive, sportive, frolicsome, gallant, gay, jovial, lively, manly, merry, obedient, dexterous, enterprising, intellectual, alert, assiduous, confident, diligent, resolute, reliant, skilful, undaunted, valiant, benevolent, courtly, moral, polite, magnanimous, refined, stately, valorous, virtuous … and God-fearing race’.13 But this sociological determinism, which reflected Alfred Dachert’s profile, falls short of accounting for the importance of morality in eugenics. Understanding its importance requires knowledge of the novelties that the latter introduced. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as illustrated by the success of Malthus’s model, the dominant vision was already one of a natural order organized around a struggle for existence, which was not, however, seen in terms of evolution. It was understood in the framework of a ‘natural theology’ that saw, in the order thus established, the manifestation of divine power, foresight and goodness, and thus of a static equilibrium. The competition unfolded between species; its effects were the regulation and conservation of the natural and social order. More specifically with regard to human beings, it had a positive effect by guarding them from indolence, but it did not transform them. The mid nineteenth century saw the emergence of dynamic models in which individuals transformed themselves (Spencer), and then with Darwin, who drew attention to their internal competition, transformed the species. The shattering of the stable order evoked by natural theology raised the question of the generation of the human spirit and of its values: it now had to be accepted and explained that they resulted from a natural history rather than a divine arrangement, while maintaining the legitimacy of the attendant human morality and social order.14

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The many determinations at play in the genesis of eugenics reflect the consequences of this cognitive, political and moral disruption apparent in the reception of the works by Spencer, Darwin and Wallace. A momentous text by William R. Greg (1809–1881) at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy and political economy is one of its most revealing expressions. In a brief article on the adverse effects of evolution, Greg was one of the first to state the infamous theory that society’s actions to ensure the survival of the weak thwart natural selection.15 Greg rejected Wallace’s idea that within human societies evolution had favoured intellectual rather than physical superiority. Collectively, for both the species and organized groups, the use of mental functions enabled – to use a contemporary vocabulary – the transformation of an autoplastic adaptation process (physiological transformation of the human being) into an alloplastic process (transformation of the environment). Moral and intellectual qualities were inseparable here; together, they contributed to this emancipation from natural constraints: Capacity for acting in concert, for protection and for the acquisition of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredations upon our fellows; the decrease of the combative and destructive propensities; self-restraint in present appetites; and that intelligent foresight which prepares for the future, are all qualities that from their earliest appearance must have been for the benefit of each community, and would, therefore, have become the subjects of ‘natural selection’.

While it is virtuous at the collective level, this circle falls apart if one considers the internal organization of human communities. While social bodies benefit the group, by countering the effect of natural selection they do not benefit ‘the strongest, the healthiest, the most perfectly organized. It is not men of the finest physique, the largest brain, the most developed intelligence, that are “favoured” and successful “in the struggle for existence” – that survive, that rise to the surface, that “natural selection” makes the parents of future generations, the continuators of a picked and perfected race’. The social bodies whose negative effects Greg criticized were not just those related to assistance and charity; they extended to more unexpected measures like inheritance rules. When the author described the consequences of disturbing natural selection in terms of class, the victims were the middle classes, which ‘form the energetic, reliable, improving element of the population, those who wish to rise and do not choose to sink, those in a word who are the true strength and wealth and dignity of nations – it is these who abstain from marriage or postpone it’. By

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contrast, the two extreme classes would proliferate, while suffering from ‘opposite disadvantages’: ‘The physique and the morale of both the extreme classes are imperfect and impaired. The physique of the rich is injured by indulgence and excess – that of the poor by privation and want. The morale of the former has never been duly called forth by the necessity for exertion and self-denial; that of the latter has never been cultivated by training and instruction’. Given the magnitude of what was at stake, Darwin himself, twelve years after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, took a stand in 1871 in The Descent of Man. Following Greg, whom he quoted four times, and rooting morality in altruism, he studied the latter’s development as a favourable factor in ‘community selection’ – a quality that gives the human groups who practise it a critical advantage over their rivals, and that is hereditary. He shared the essayist’s judgement on the adverse effects of protecting the weak, but he offered a more optimistic interpretation by positing that social differentials in marriage and death would correct the distortions: We civilised men, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment …. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man …. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature …. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.16

By contrast, the strong moral aspect of eugenics was heightened by its founding paradox: the reproductive pedagogy promoted by Galton stumbled over the fact that couples whose progeny was deemed least desirable were also those considered least educable. This is the paradox that led many eugenicists to push for the sterilization of the improvident. More broadly, it led to the embrace of an authoritarian or technocratic

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vision wherein enlightened elites would guide the inferior classes through persuasion and coercion. The importance of morality in eugenics can also be understood in a political and academic context. It corresponds to a state of knowledge wherein the disciplinary divisions we are familiar with were just taking shape in universities: biology, psychology, sociology, moral philosophy and theology were still largely impossible to untangle. The development of a moral approach was all the more important given that many eugenicists rejected the hold of Christianity and sought to replace it with a value system based on science and a responsibility towards future generations. The science historian Ted Porter describes how this context shaped the intellectual training and career of the statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who in 1911 was appointed to the eugenics chair created with a bequest from Francis Galton.17 Both Galton and then Pearson were the pioneers of an applied psychology based on the development of tests and tools to measure the value of people.

Eugenics and National Efficiency This frequent but unsystematic overlap between eugenics and biometrics at the beginning of the twentieth century should be understood in connection with a widespread aspiration to rationalize existence and society, which it supported and of which it was a product. Ungemach Gardens is a case in point, involving the transposition to the domestic space and work of the rational organization of factories and industrial activity, in order to serve the wellbeing of spouses. The shrewd and worldly Alfred Dachert thus bestowed his creation with the techniques and reasoning that he had seen in action during his business trips to the United States and United Kingdom. National efficiency was the watchword during this period, with ‘efficiency’ being sought for both businesses and countries.18 The goal was to restructure all aspects of human activity and existence well beyond what is typically involved in ‘Taylorism’ and the ‘scientific organization of work’. Eugenics fuelled this objective while simultaneously drawing legitimation and a large scope for expansion from it.19 In the United States the Children’s Bureau, created in 1912 within the Ministry of Commerce and Work, thus started publishing reports on infant mortality, birth records and child labour in order to contribute to social legislation on the matter. Its mission was to ‘foster the wellbeing of children so that they might become better adult workers’, and as explicitly stated in 1919 by the head of labour statistics:

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Shall we nurture our babies, bring them to maturity, for the purpose of creating the most efficient labor force? Shall we follow the efficiency managers and the scientific experts in laying down the principle that the education of the child must be the education that will make him the most efficient producer? … It is at once apparent that child welfare is largely economic. If parents acted rationally, they would raise their children to be the most efficient producers and attain the fullest possible development, but since they often did not, the Children’s Bureau had to make it their mission.20

Granted, these claims partly resulted from rhetorical opportunism. In the early twentieth century, the references to eugenics on the one hand, and to rationalization on the other, mutually reinforced each other. But reducing their interlinkage to a circumstantial effect neglects the reasons for the dissemination of eugenics. This multifaceted political-scholarly doctrine combined the fear of degeneration with the aspiration to a ‘policy of the future’ envisioned over the very long term. At a time when areas of state action were growing – a trend that the First World War only exacerbated – as were the numbers of professionals devoted to them, eugenics was one of the first doctrines claiming to deploy science to anticipate, shape and change the future. There was no talk of planning, let alone futurology yet.21 Absent true rivals and given its crosscutting nature, eugenics could lay claim to an unlimited scope. Its consideration as the ideology par excellence of control over the future is reflected in the pioneering emphasis it placed, for example, on nature conservation, via the willingness to anticipate and regulate, at the collective level, major problems that the individual would not be able to recognize with foresight, or to successfully tackle.22 I just used and highlighted the word ‘control’: let us comparatively assess the striking distance between Darwin and Galton in their ways of considering human fertility. While both men were close in generation (only thirteen years apart), in this area23 Darwin appeared as a contemporary of Malthus, who was born forty-three years earlier. The mechanisms that the former put forth in The Descent of Man to account for the nonproliferation of the poorest populations in industrialized nations remain entirely consistent with the latter’s model. Like Malthus, Darwin spoke of a ‘check’ on them. He essentially saw regulation effectively occurring via marriage (more difficult for the poor and weak to access) and mortality: The primary or fundamental check to the continued increase of man is the difficulty of gaining subsistence and of living in comfort. We may infer that this is the case from what we see, for instance, in the United States, where subsistence is easy and there is plenty of room …. With civilised nations the above primary check acts chiefly by restraining marriages. The greater death-rate of infants in

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the poorest classes is also very important; as well as the greater mortality at all ages, and from various diseases, of the inhabitants of crowded and miserable houses. The effects of severe epidemics and wars are soon counterbalanced, and more than counterbalanced, in nations placed under favourable conditions. Emigration also comes in aid as a temporary check.24

The word control, which Galton preferred, as he was partial to intervening in population matters, does not appear in Darwin’s work in a demographic sense – he only used it to refer to ‘control by reason’, ‘control of thoughts’, ‘controlled breeding’ and ‘control of natural selection’. Similarly, fertility was crucial to Galton, but secondary for Darwin, who addressed it as a biological pattern. He thus postulated that civilized humans are more fertile than savages,25 and that, according to the medical observations of one of his teachers, Andrew Duncan, young couples had a greater and stronger progeny. Darwin believed this would result in a proliferation of the lower social classes, who marry and procreate early, but the eugenic aspect of the observation drew on Galton and Greg. A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly urged by Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton, namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shown by Dr. Duncan, they produce many more children. The children, moreover, that are born by mothers during the prime of life are heavier and larger, and therefore probably more vigorous, than those born at other periods. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.26

Otherwise, the game of biological constants was considered to suffice for regulating the human species. The idea of proactive intervention was not relevant for Darwin, whose goal was to identify the mechanisms through which his natural selection model extended to the human species. Here appears the divide with Galton, whose concern with guiding or rather redirecting the future stemmed from his conviction that he was witnessing an anthropological revolution, and that its consequences needed to be averted. Its first pillar was the gradual dissemination, during the nineteenth century, of fertility-limiting practices that were sufficiently widespread to have ultimately constrained the birth rate nationally.27 The specificity and the novelty of eugenics was that it took

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stock of this (relative) reproductive control by couples and offered biopolitical engineering as a means to prevent its adverse effects and channel its consequences.28 On this point, eugenics was of a piece with French pronatalism – the two were exactly contemporary – but incorporated it into a broader framework organized around the succession of generations, as were Alfred Dachert’s plays. Indeed, eugenics was a reaction to the evolution of practices and of legislation. Here the latter is meant in a broad sense, ranging from divorce, as mentioned earlier, to the income tax that was gradually implemented in nineteenth-century England despite recurring political disputes.29 At the heart of the reasoning was the effect on the progeny’s quality of the establishment of the very first – and modest – social laws concerning child and then women’s labour. The best-known argument – that the protection of the weakest would distort natural selection – is the one outlined by Greg: Alfred Dachert himself refined it in 1931 in the columns of Eugenics Review.30 I will now tackle the issue from another angle, by observing how eugenicists built on the implementation of social laws to develop the notion of a ‘child’s economic value’. Age and work time limits for child labour, which became increasingly restrictive in the United Kingdom beginning with the Workshop Act of 1867, and were coupled with compulsory education beginning in 1876 and especially 1880, constituted a civilizational turning point for them. Suddenly, they observed, children from modest backgrounds who had served as easily deployable economic resources became a cost. This transformation led to a real revolution in the domestic economy, which remained central in the nineteenth-century political economy. The only way to make up for this was, for the most farsighted and frugal members of the popular classes – that is, the low-income but deserving workers for whom Alfred Dachert had originally intended his Gardens – to limit their fertility. The decrease in the birth rate reflected a phenomenon that was both quantitative and qualitative: only the most reckless maintained a prolific fertility, which led to a relative decrease in the ‘value’ of the birthed generations. Meanwhile, the emergence of protection for adult workers resulting from the pressure of unions and the workers movement was seen as having a doubly adverse effect. The regulation of work time and the appearance of negotiated salary levels increased the cost of labour. The laws that, beginning with the Employers Liability Act of 1880 in the United Kingdom, indemnified work accidents in a growing number of industry branches and of employment statuses exacerbated the importance of assumed intellectual and moral qualities with respect to hiring. At a time

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when mechanization increased the risk of accidents, workers had to be not only more productive, but also more careful and provident.31 All in all, never had the intensity of the moral, intellectual and physical qualities (ranked in this descending order)32 required of workers been so high, and never had it been so costly for parents to ensure for their children. A scissor effect thus ripped through the lower-income and provident classes. This is the thinking that Karl Pearson, upon acceding to his chair and the authority it gave him within the eugenic movement, somewhat formalized in 1909: The child is economically a commodity and like any other ware is produced to meet the demand. For the great bulk of the population whose wages extend but little beyond subsistence, the child will be produced or not according as it has economic value. If we can give the child economic value, the birthrate will rise; if we can differentiate between the economic values of good and bad parentage, if we can make the possession of healthy, sound children a greater economic asset than the possession of feeble offspring, then we have for the mass of the people solved the problem of practical eugenics.33

By concluding that ‘the economic value of the child will in the long run govern its production’,34 the statistician was connecting eugenics and political economy. The expression he used (‘economic value of the child’) had then just started to flourish in the United States. It echoed other notions that were developing at the same time. The British and Americans spoke of a ‘human factor’ from a perspective primarily focused on business management. France saw the dissemination of the expression with which the ‘child’s economic value’ would gradually blend: that of ‘human capital’. The Saint-Simonian Charles Duveyrier (1803–1866) used it in this sense in 1865, regretting that: human capital, the child, when he is born, his intelligence, the germ of his productive faculties, developed by education, would become sources of wealth as fruitful as the vine, the meadow, or the field owned by his father; the child … finds in his family many caresses, care, and affection, but he does not find an intelligent owner of his intellectual wealth, of his aptitude, or his talents …. The development of this human capital … requires the establishment in France of a complete system of education and professional credit.35

Henri Baudrillart (1821–1892) had several years earlier helped to disseminate this concept by using it in his famous Manuel d’économie politique [Political economy textbook], in a way that I must quote, as it so closely reflects the history I have recounted:

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Instead of considering human individuals as perfectible capital, [Malthus] appears to only see them as purely numerical units, given his preoccupation with the issue of quantity to the point of almost forgetting the issue of quality with respect to population. We believe that any attempt made to establish a relationship offering some fixity between the number of men and the quantity of means of existence is a pipe dream. The industry is only as good as the man. Where the human capital is mediocre, that is, in countries where the physical, intellectual, and moral man is so to speak atrophied, or where human faculties get lost in unproductive outlets, Malthus’s assertion applies once again. Where this capital is flourishing and fertile, it does not apply.36

The economist Alfred de Foville (1842–1913), interested in the measurement of ‘national wealth’, gave the concept renewed notoriety and relevance when he referred to it during the 1903 Congress of the International Statistical Institute in Berlin. At a time when mechanization was shaking the world of political economy, de Foville significantly defined ‘human capital’ as ‘economically speaking, what the human machine is worth as an agent of production and source of revenue’.37 The development of life insurance also helped carry this concept. The child’s economic value and cost, and especially the investment in human capital, durably intermeshed. Like Duveyrier, a number of British eugenicists considered that the issue encompassed the development of education. In a world where academic trajectories were, so to speak, statutorily dictated by social origin, this reflection stirred debates about technical and professional training at the turn of the twentieth century.38 Around fifty years later, in post-Liberation France, the reference to human capital, as we have seen, was invoked by Alfred Sauvy in the context of inter-ministerial struggles over the anchoring of social security. Its medical translation appeared at the same time, in the way the child psychiatrist Georges Heuyer defined the objectives of the survey on deficient children that he had been seeking to do since the 1930s: ‘conduct an evaluation of the active capital of school-age children, as well as the valorization of recoverable liabilities, while appreciating the importance of waste …. To determine the value of human capital is to provide an overview of all the levels, from the lowest to the highest, and as a result, identify both the gifted and the defective’.39 Readily using the term ‘maximum social yield’, he saw in ‘the social utility of individuals, the criterion of their eugenic value’ by considering that ‘this utility has meaning in a national context’. While he thought he was discussing the birth of the concept, Michel Foucault was in 1979 actually only picking up on a thread that had been running, or rather interweaving, for close to a century. The concept of

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human capital that had arisen prior tied into both early twentieth-century eugenics and the economic context – mechanization and particularly the beginning of the rationalization of work – from which it emerged. Of interest here is not that the philosopher, for once, provided a garbled genealogy of a concept, but rather that in misinterpreting its genesis he immediately conferred it with a possible eugenic connotation, in line with one of its main uses over the past century and a half. A key moment in this history was the publication, in 1981, of the Treatise on the Family by Gary Becker, founder of family microeconomics.40 The future Nobel Prize winner in economics picked up on several lines of thought of Galton and Pearson on the heritability of fertility: the links between child costs and yield on the one hand and fertility levels on the other, and therefore the inverse relationship between quantity and ‘quality’. Neither of the two eugenicists was quoted, but Becker explicitly mentioned Darwin, albeit without a specific reference. It cannot be excluded that he may have been inspired by an approximate ‘social Darwinist’ reference – this would not be unlikely given the training he received in economics, a discipline that sometimes bears a somewhat instrumental relationship with history.41 Barely twenty years later, the Chicago economist Casey Mulligan would look into the analogies between Galton and Becker, comparing their models for the transmission of inequalities in human capital without raising the question of a possible filiation.42 Becker’s amnesia and Mulligan’s absence of curiosity are worth exploring because they are not isolated. Fields far removed from theirs involve the same mechanisms of a ‘resurgence’ of eugenic and socio-Darwinian concepts. But these mechanisms are misunderstood because the filiations on which they are based have ceased to be apparent. The archaeology of these diffuse layers of eugenics, scattered and intermixed with other inputs, is even more complex when it touches themes that are even less naturally related to this movement. Yet perhaps this is where its unearthing is scientifically and civically most relevant. We will complete the path we have been exploring by going back to the sources of what is probably one of the most influential currents today in construction of the self: psychological ‘personal development’ theories.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977– 1978, London, Picador, 2009 [orig. ed. 2004], p. 219. 2. Ibid., p. 220.

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3. Ibid., p. 227. 4. Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1976. 5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, London, Picador, 2010 [orig. ed. 2004], p. 224. 6. Ibid., p. 234. 7. Maurice Godelier, Au fondement des sociétés humaines: ce que nous apprend l’anthropologie, Paris, Albin Michel, 2007. 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Cambridge, Polity, 2003 [orig. ed. 2001], p. 82. 9. Ibid., p. 87. 10. Gladys C. Schwesinger, ‘The Role of Psychology in Eugenics’, Journal of Heredity, 32, 1941, pp. 319–24, here p. 322. 11. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 220. 12. Charles F. Down, ‘The Matrimonial Causes Bill’, ER, 10, 1, 1918, p. 44. 13. Quoted by Dorothy Porter, Health Citizenship: Essays in Social Medicine and Biomedical Politics, Berkeley, CA, University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2011, p. 93. 14. Sharon Kingsland, ‘Evolution and Debates over Human Progress from Darwin to Sociobiology’, Population and Development Review, 14, 1988, pp. 167–98. 15. William R. Greg, ‘On the Failure of “Natural Selection” in the Case of Man’, Fraser’s Magazine, 1868, pp. 353–62 (quotations in the next three paragraphs are extracted from this paper). 16. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, John Murray, 1871, vol. 1, pp. 168–69. 17. Ted Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2004. 18. Dorothy Porter, Health Citizenship. 19. Kenneth M. Weiss and Brian W. Lambert, ‘When the Time Seems Ripe: Eugenics, the Annals, and the Subtle Persistence of Typological Thinking’, Annals of Human Genetics, 75, 3, 2011, pp. 334–43; Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. See also Arnold White, ‘Eugenics and National Efficiency’, ER, 1909, 1, 2, pp. 105–11; R.A. Fisher, ‘Some Hopes of a Eugenist’, ER, 5, 4, 1914, pp. 309–15. 20. Royal Meeker, quoted by Crnic, ‘Better Babies’, pp. 15–16 [extracts]. 21. Jenny Anderson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018. 22. Allen, ‘Culling the Herd’, pp. 35–36; Gray Brechin, ‘Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies. Eugenics, and the US Conservation Movement’, Antipode, 28, 1996, pp. 229–45. 23. I will not get into the dense debate over the role of readings of Malthus in the genesis of the natural selection model. Among others, see Silvan S. Schweber, ‘The Origin of the Origin Revisited’, Journal of the History of Biology, 10, 1977, pp. 229–316; Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 85–86. 24. Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 1, pp. 131–32. See also p. 169: ‘We must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage’.

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25. Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 1, pp. 132–33. 26. Ibid., pp. 173–74. 27. E.A.  Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Noël Bonneuil, Transformation of the French Demographic Landscape, 1806–1906, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997. 28. ‘The Eugenist recognises that selection is essential to the progressive improvement of the human race, but he seeks to substitute a selective birth-rate for the selective deathrate which has been the cruel instrument used by nature. Anything therefore which affects the birth-rate in a way which is, or may be made, selective, affects Eugenics’ (Marshall, ‘The Effect of Economic Conditions’, p. 115). 29. Ibid., pp. 125–28. 30. ‘Among the many criticisms which disturb this new science there is one which constantly crops up, and which declares that eugenics must be opposed to charity. But, as I understood, the day is now passed of indiscriminate “cash down” charity, and we are entering upon an era of a charity which takes a longer view. And what else is eugenics if it be not just that far-sighted charity’ (Dachert, ‘Positive Eugenics in Practice’, p. 16). 31. Ernest J. Lidbetter, ‘Nature and Nurture: A Study in Conditions’, Eugenics Review, 4, 1912, pp. 54–73, here p. 63. 32. Darwin, ‘Roman Catholic Criticism of Eugenics’, p. 48. See also Michael Freeden, ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity’, The Historical Journal, 22, 3, 1979, pp. 645–71, here p. 650. For Alfred Sauvy in France, ‘above physical qualities, and above even intellectual qualities, are questions of character’ (Théorie générale de la Population, vol. 2, Biologie sociale, p. 345). 33. Karl Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics, London, Dulau, 1912 [orig. ed. 1909], pp. 22–23. 34. Ibid., p. 22. 35. Charles Duveyrier, La Civilisation et la démocratie française: deux conférences suivies d’un projet de fondation d’institut de progrès social, Paris, Aux bureaux de l’encyclopédie, 1865. 36. Henri Joseph Léon Baudrillart, Manuel d’économie politique, Paris, Guillaumin, 1857, pp. 426–27 [original emphasis]. 37. Fernand Faure, ‘Alfred de Foville’, Journal de la société statistique de Paris, 54, 1913, pp. 551–81, here p. 573. 38. Marshall, ‘The Effect of Economic Conditions’, pp. 128–29. 39. Georges Heuyer, ‘Le recensement des enfants déficients en France’, in Le Niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire, vol. 1, 1950, pp. 13–30, here pp. 20–21. 40. Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981, here p. 95 et seq. 41. Alan Burton-Jones and J.-C. Spender (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. 42. Casey B. Mulligan, ‘Galton versus the Human Capital Approach to Inheritance’, Journal of Political Economy, 107, S6, 1999, pp. S184–S224.

Chapter 8

Eugenics as a Moral Theory (2) At the Sources of ‘Personal Development’

S As Foucault assumed, it was logical to suspect links between human capital and eugenics since the latter, as a sociobiology, is a theory of the differential value of individuals and populations. This connection played a key role in the great ideological flexibility of eugenics. It immediately ensured its cataclysmic association with ideologies of national or racial power, based on a holism that expressly sacrificed the individual for the supposed interest of the collective body.1 It also enabled – the historiography has belatedly but abundantly documented this – a dense interaction between eugenics and social democracy or, more broadly, the rise of comprehensive national social protection systems. The link goes back to Darwin himself. As mentioned earlier, he saw the implementation of mutual aid policies as both evidence and a condition of the evolution of civilizations. This line of thinking has had a rich posterity, particularly (but not exclusively) in France. Léon Bourgeois himself, one of the great political and academic figures, alongside Émile Durkheim, in the advent of ‘solidarity’ socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, did not hesitate to draw on it to provide scientific legitimacy to his theories conducive to the development of social policies: It is through the relentless exercise of functions that develop bodies, by the courageous adaptation of bodies to environmental conditions, that the individual develops and perfects himself; it is through the suppression of the weakest and the survival and reproduction of the strongest that the species’ useful qualities are set, and that its constituent beings evolve towards an

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ever-superior form …. The laws of the species – laws of heredity, adaptation, selection, integration, and disintegration – are but various aspects of the same general law of reciprocal dependence, that is, of solidarity, of the elements of universal life.2

The integration between eugenics and social policies, the French manifestations of which we studied with Jacques Doublet, was particularly close in the United Kingdom, the Germanic world and Scandinavia, with extensions to Central Europe.3 Historiography has adumbrated and analysed the grey areas of this deployment of eugenics to serve national efficiency: the establishment, in the name of the collective interest, of hierarchies linked to an assumed social value, leading to a discriminatory treatment of poorly assessed individuals and groups that had implications as grave as sterilization – although accounts have not always successfully avoided simplifications consisting of Orwellian presentations.4 Many historical works depict a more complex landscape of efforts to create a social citizenship based on individual responsibility and to develop, as German social democrats put it, an authentic ‘human economy’ (Menschenökonomie).5 Here it is important to grasp the more general role that eugenics played in twentieth-century liberal democracies – in both the political and economic sense of the adjective. Less spectacular and more diffuse, this history presents difficulties that Edward Ross Dickinson laid bare in a foundational article in 2004.6 Many of these are apparent in the history of Ungemach Gardens, where an explicit and structured eugenic programme, supported by national and local elites, was (often to its benefit) appropriated by various projects formulated in multiple and shifting spheres (political, scientific, administrative and judiciary). As is the case for social democracies, the link between eugenics and liberalism is both economic and political. It concerns, as we saw with human capital, individuals’ ‘market value’ as well as their legitimate recognition as political subjects worthy of electoral representation. I already mentioned how eugenics is partly rooted in the long opposition to universal suffrage, which marked the political history of nineteenth-century Europe: a good illustration was John Stuart Mill’s projects to weight votes according to citizens’ level of education, embracing the role of educational policies to stabilize the hierarchy of social classes.7 But we also saw many instances of eugenicists claiming to improve and expand life and thus contribute to people’s self-fulfilment. Representative of this claim – and surprisingly familiar to contemporary ears – is the call by Alexis Carrel, an extreme eugenicist, for parents to raise their children ‘in such a way that their hereditary potentialities optimally develop’, since ‘life consists

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in the fullness of all the organic and mental activities of our body …. To perfectly do one’s job as a man, all of one’s organic, intellectual, and spiritual potentialities must be developed …. The raison d’être of society is to ensure that these needs are met’.8 This regularly reiterated claim by eugenics to be fighting for both individual and collective wellbeing is worth analysing by exploring the extent to which it may have contributed to the development of current psychological norms. We have observed (chapter 5) how the republican milieus of applied psychology à la française were embedded in a biotypological approach derived from eugenics, but had eschewed measurement of the physiological, intellectual and moral aptitudes of different human groups, to focus instead on their inter-individual diversity and distribution. A parallel development occurred in the United States, where Frederick Osborn sought to reform eugenics by explicitly drawing on both demography and psychology. In the latter field his reference was Gladys Schwesinger (1893–1964), his colleague in the 1930s at the American Museum of Natural History, where she was assigned to the Eugenics Research Laboratory.9 The book that she published in 1933, Heredity and Environment, was pioneering in its emphasis, through biometrics, on the importance of socioeconomic conditions on the development of intelligence.10 Built as a critical synthesis, it examined the methods and results accumulated by the many psychological and intellectual tests that had been conducted since the First World War, when armed mobilization led to their first large-scale application (over 1.7 million Army Intelligence Examinations were administered).11 Since the war, intelligence tests have been refined and improved and called by other names, such as scholastic aptitude, mental alertness, and so forth, and many thousands of tests have been applied to children in schools, institutions, clinics, and hospitals; to college students; to workers in business and industry, and, more recently, to adults in the several decades beyond maturity.12

In her book, Gladys Schwesinger turned scientism against itself. Military tests had served to rank the ‘races’ and nations of immigration in the United States, thus contributing to the establishment of quotas by nationality in the 1920s.13 Attacking their claim to rational objectivity, Schwesinger highlighted the imprecision of their definitions, methods, and therefore conclusions, while also taking a swipe at psychologists for creating more of these tests in order to name them after themselves. She thus deconstructed the results obtained by classical eugenic experiments – comparisons between identical twins, or between orphan brothers and sisters raised in different environments – by showing side by side the

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excessively black and white conclusions of hereditarians on the one hand, and environmentalists on the other. Schwesinger’s book was all the more effective that it went beyond a deconstruction. It identified patterns by looking at populations evolving in comparable living conditions: it was only by neutralizing the effect of the environment, she reasoned, that the significance of hereditary endowments might be assessed. The trends identified on this basis did generally reflect the social hierarchy, but the inter-individual diversity within groups was practically as great as it was in society as a whole. In other words, the tests could be used to establish the aptitude of a person but not to rank populations, and certainly not on a racial basis. What Frederick Osborn retained from Schwesinger’s synthesis in his book Preface to Eugenics, published in 1940, were her conclusions on the relative importance of heredity and of the environment. These were very close to the conclusions that Doublet would formulate ten years later: heredity set the maximum and minimum thresholds of the development potential for individual qualities, but within this biological constraint action on the environment was key. No group discrimination could be rationally legitimized; racism was only based on ‘emotional biases’.14 However, for a minority of meagrely endowed individuals, incentivizing sterilization was desirable both to minimize the burdens on society and to support the right of their potential children to have parents who were not feeble-minded. While establishing that the state should position itself to serve individuals’ wellbeing rather than the reverse,15 Osborn – still in 1940 – endorsed the sterilization laws adopted by certain American states.16 The omissions in his Preface to Eugenics, especially with regard to forced sterilization, are of a piece with accusations later made against him for supporting Nazi policies to sterilize the defective, at least before the Second World War.17 For the large mass of individuals deemed worthy of reproduction, the state was to increase the educational and cultural resources available in their living environment. This improvement of the environment was inseparable from a fertility policy to disseminate and optimize birth control techniques. The heart of Osborn’s strategy consisted of a strong alliance with movements supporting access to contraception. The goal was not just to reduce the birth rate of the less gifted. Transposed from the Swedish concept of ‘responsible parenthood’, the objective was that each couple be in a position to reach a level of fertility corresponding to their ability to transmit a quality endowment to their children: Responsible parents will have more wanted children whose background and environment should make for an improvement in the quality of each generation. Such, at least, is the hope of these people who have embarked on a new

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social policy, courageous for its long-term view, democratic in its approach, and rational and humanitarian in its methods.18

Osborn even produced a statistical table establishing the optimal distribution of fertility in the United States, by setting the shares of households by number of children. It included six classes ranging from couples without children to families with five or more children. The distribution had to be balanced, with each class representing a percentage varying from 15 to 19 per cent depending on the case.19 To present this evolution as well as its ambiguities – since the goal was to strengthen eugenics by scientifically and ideologically renewing it – we can refer to the concise and dense assessment programme drawn up by one of Osborn’s most prominent protégés, the demographer Frank Notestein (1902–1983). Notestein was emblematic of the contingent of young researchers trained in the 1920s in the quantitative social sciences developed in American universities, who were starting their careers in a new field surrounding population. This new guard developed and reformed from the inside a eugenic doctrine that had until then served as a bastion of the medical profession. After receiving his PhD in social statistics from Cornell University, Notestein was first hired in 1928 by the Milbank Memorial Fund, where he was oriented towards population sciences. In 1936, he became the first director of the Office of Population Research, which Princeton University had just created at the instigation of Frederick Osborn. This position made him a central figure in American and international population circles.20 Three years later, in the journal of the American Genetic Association, Journal of Heredity, he published a major article that took stock, on the basis of empirical surveys, of the demographic and ‘qualitative’ significance of fertility control in households.21 In line with traditional eugenics, Notestein considered this control to be minimal in low-income social environments. But he did not see any evidence of this resulting in genetic ‘damage’. Rather, the problem was that the most fertile families had incomes that were ‘insufficient to ensure their children’s proper health and educational development’, especially since they resided in areas ‘with too few resources to provide adequate educational structures and broaden the cultural exposure of their residents’. Means to voluntarily limit procreation, the demographer continued, ‘are mainly available in relatively well-off urban communities. This is unacceptable in a democratic society’. Notestein then praised the birth control movement for its action in ‘poor rural zones, especially in the South, whose population needs dependable, simple, cheap, and effective contraceptives for all social classes’. The American Eugenics Society could only endorse such an action since ‘it is only when such contraception

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methods will be accessible to the whole population that genetically inferior people will be able to limit their fertility and that a constructive eugenic program will become possible’.22 Notestein’s synthesis is remarkable for reinventing eugenics while maintaining its foundations: he cast as scientific fantasy the warning that Galton had issued at the end of the nineteenth century regarding the purportedly excessive reproduction of the ungifted, but then concluded with a genetic ranking of people. Granted, one of the text’s objectives was to support the strategic turning point that Osborn had called for: to bring the American Eugenics Society around to birth control, even though many American and British eugenicists had, since the beginning of the century, feared that birth control would in practice exacerbate the declining birth rate of the upper classes. The political positioning of the text was clever. Far from denouncing democracy for its egalitarianism, it is in the name of democracy that it called for reducing the fertility of the poorest. Notestein transformed a biological problem into a social, health, educational and cultural one. Children from poor populations were considered problematic not because their ‘genetic’ (no longer ‘hereditarian’) constitution was inferior, but because their parents, for lack of means, could not raise them in a way that would bring their inherent qualities to fruition. Economic precariousness was compounded by isolation in the ‘rural communities of the South’ – an expression that discreetly reformulated the racial question: the racist trope of the inferiority of American Blacks was redeployed as a dispassionate socio-demographic observation. Notestein’s article was key, lending his legitimacy as a demographer to the agenda promoted by Osborn. For this liberal patrician close to President Roosevelt, the idea was to connect eugenics, birth control and applied psychology, as well as state intervention in the context of the New Deal, to help parents enable their children to reach their full ‘cultural intellectual’23 development. Osborn was thus part of a lineage of progressive American liberalism that had since the end of the nineteenth century promoted the importance of environmental factors (termed ‘ecological’ since the end of the 1920s at the University of Chicago) for the fruition of the human being’s potentialities.24 Individual fulfilment and national efficiency were directly linked here: for Osborn, Notestein and their peers, exactly matching the fertility of parents with their material and cultural resources, including the environment, would guarantee a ‘high level of general intelligence for society’.25 Osborn, whose support for birth control initiatives nationally and internationally strongly influenced US population policies in the mid twentieth century, incorporated many ‘psycho-sociological’ considerations

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in his model. To re-evaluate the role that American society granted to young people at the time, he drew on the observations of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead showing the extent to which education is a plastic process moulded by its cultural and social contexts. But in her study of adolescence on Samoa islands, Mead, a follower of Franz Boas, had undermined eugenics by showing that this stage of life was far from being controlled by purely biological determinations; rather, it unfolded under conditions that varied according to the human cultures.26 It would be misleading, however, to reduce Osborn’s syncretism to a synthesis between, on the one hand, biologizing eugenic references, such as works on the sterilization of the insane by the Nazi psychiatrist Ernest Rüdin, whose presentation had been one of the disputed points at the 1937 International Population Congress in Paris, and on the other, ‘liberal’ socio-anthropological references. In the bases of his doctrine – like the plasticity attributed to people throughout their lifecycle or the importance of the affective framework parents provide to their children – Osborn recorded a series of results from applied psychology in which eugenics played a major role. At the turn of the twentieth century, all of American psychology was engaged in a controversy over the existence of an ‘instinct’, considered as a stable matrix of innate dispositions shaping people’s thoughts and actions. Significantly, the hypothesis was inspired by a remark from Darwin: An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.27

But its unobservable aspect, which exposed psychology to the risk of being brought back to its philosophical roots, ultimately brought about its demise. Gladys Schwesinger’s 1933 synthesis was both an indicator and pillar of the development underway of an alternative model that granted a greater role to the dynamic of personality. Indeed, the psychologist did not just decouple membership in a given human group from ‘individual qualities’. She also deconstructed the latter by examining the use that people made of their aptitudes – a use involving attitudes and character traits that are difficult to measure. ‘For two structurally identical persons’, she wrote in 1942, there is still an element of choice and decision which can operate to determine conduct and behavior manifestations …. This element of choice may be set down as a non-hereditary factor if you will, but it needs not ipso facto be

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attributed to the environment. It is something that comes from within the individual, and as such may be influenced equally by whatever goes to shape that individual within himself. Consistency needs no more be a characteristic of intra-twin mates at a given moment – howsoever identical – than of a single individual at different moments. A one hundred percent predictability of behavior is not a legitimate expectation for either.28

In other words, Schwesinger’s psychology did not just mark a break with the Galtonian effort to validate hierarchies among populations through biometrics. By indicating the limits of the fragmentation in individual aptitudes, she contributed to the development of the psychology of personality that was coming together at the time, after having initially focused on cases deemed pathological.29 The orientation of this new specialty was inseparable from the political context in which it formed. In Nazi Germany, personality was understood as an essentialist notion guided by hereditary determinations.30 In the United States, the psychology of personality au contraire embraced plasticity by emphasizing the interaction between dispositions and situations: the approach that would shape postwar American social sciences, and whose transposition I analysed in the French context, was in place. The end of the ‘debate over instinct’ and the growing interest in a psychology of ‘normal’ personality fostered the rise in the 1920s of a current that also crossed with the history of eugenics: developmental psychology, which intended to both observe and help transform individuals over their lifetime. Its theoretical foundations were directly and explicitly rooted in the natural evolution model. One of its leading figures in the United States, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), who would retrospectively be named ‘the Darwin of the mind’, transposed the theory of evolution of the species to the individual. An idea permeating many works at the time, including those of Freud and Jung, was that ontogeny synthesizes phylogeny, that is, that the human growth process from the embryo is a small-scale replication of the natural history of the human species.31 The application of this framework to the child’s maturation process by one of Hall’s students, Arnold Gesell (1880–1961), illustrates the cross-pollination between developmental psychology and eugenics that unfolded in the first half of the twentieth century. Gesell’s work is of great historical importance, given the extent to which this psychologist and paediatrician dominated his discipline and was closely linked to early twentieth-century American childhood policies, whose importance I have already mentioned.32 While Gesell’s influence peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, his detailed observations of evolution in the first years of a child’s life form the empirical basis on which many

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child psychology theories have developed, and incidentally a series of practical recommendations for parents that are still in circulation. In the 1990s still, Gesell’s work baffled psychologists. In the absence of historical context, they were not able to consider it anything but a ‘paradox’ that he saw a key role for both heredity and the environment, for which he simultaneously created a rigid and universal child development framework, and the possibility of acting on it.33 The aporia that the internal analysis of Gesell’s work yields underscores the difficulty of thinking about the history of eugenics in psychology. The son of a Wisconsin-settled German immigrant whose social and progressive spirit he carried, Gesell started his academic career at the height of the influence of hereditarian eugenics. Like other students of Hall, he embraced this approach and published in 1913 a brief monograph showing the importance of ‘dysgenic’ populations in the village where he was raised.34 Gesell then pushed for a selective psycho-pedagogy in which the ‘simpleminded’ on which he particularly focused would be channelled to specialized institutions. He likened primary school to the immigrant selection centre of Ellis Island in New York, ‘through which our future citizens pass, native as well as alien, normal as well as delinquent and defective. While the public school cannot deport, but must accept its defectives, it can do the next best thing: that is, it can recognize, classify [and] register all types of human material which pass its threshold’.35 While he remained a member, until the end of the 1930s, of the American Eugenics Society, which was created in 1922, Gesell considered the challenges levelled against this movement by geneticist Thomas H. Morgan.36 His intellectual path was essentially identical to the one that Osborn sought to introduce to American eugenics: it remained steeped in a biologizing determinism and concern with best managing the hierarchy of people’s values, but it rejected racism37 and gradually promoted the importance of acting on the environment. A case in point is the evolution of his perspective on the ‘simpleminded’: while he continued to label them in this way, Gesell recommended in the 1930s that they be educated in unsegregated institutions but with adapted pedagogies. While maintaining his unique model of the child’s stages of development (which, it should be recalled, enabled the scientific legitimation of universalist values), he started a close collaboration with the anthropologist Margaret Mead – one that has puzzled authors who cannot place it in the long history of eugenics and its transformations.38 At the intersection of a Darwinian epistemology and a progressive ideology, the eugenic hereditarian context at the beginning of the twentieth century, followed by its revision in the 1930s, led Gesell to evolve from thinking uniformly about the development cycle of individuals, to

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granting it a certain plasticity. In a way that was complementary to Gladys Schwesinger, he thus contributed to the rise of developmental psychology, which went from primarily focusing on the study of the first years of human life, to gradually focusing on other stages like adolescence and, in the 1930s, old age.39 Thus, across biometrics, the debate over instincts and therefore the problem of personality, and now developmental psychology, the reference to Darwinism and/or eugenics was omnipresent, either to support it (as in the case of Hall, who saw eugenics as a ‘legitimate reinterpretation of our Christianity’40) or reform it (with Schwesinger, who covered Osborn on the psychology side). The attempt to integrate a dynamic dimension in the analysis of personality was crucial to establishing the new role attributed to the environment, understood both as a general living environment likely to be shaped by public action, and as a configuration of interpersonal exchanges starting within the domestic space. Gradually, eugenics became ‘the science of being a good parent’: this phrase, which was initially understood in the hereditarian sense (the art of choosing the right spouse), increasingly referred to the capacity to raise one’s children in good conditions.41 Gesell contributed to this by showing how traits acquired by the human species during its competition for survival (jealousy among siblings, for example) could and should be regulated by parents.42 The space thus created for the psychology of interpersonal relations was quickly filled with eugenics, as shown by the repurposing of Paul Popenoe (1888–1979).43 This great popularizer, whose interwar bestseller I have mentioned – Applied Eugenics, which had inspired Alfred Dachert – was one of the first eugenicists to bring the new psychological theories of his era to bear on fears raised by the liberalization of divorce. The defence of the ‘quality of the race’ was no longer just about sensitizing individuals to their choice of spouse; it also involved ensuring that well-paired couples did not dissolve. Popenoe successfully devoted himself to this cause beginning in the mid 1920s, when he published his first two books on the issue.44 His success was such that he founded in 1930 the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), the first marriage counselling organization in the United States, which tellingly received funding from the eugenic Human Betterment Foundation. Several books and the journal Marriage and Family Living followed in the next years, earning Popenoe the eloquent moniker ‘Mister Marriage’. Popenoe’s path is all the more revealing for bringing together the two extremes of American eugenics. The same man who supported Nazi sterilization policies and believed in the inferiority of Blacks and immigrants in terms of intelligence, who held to the traditional distribution of gender roles and opposed the ‘sexual revolution’ at the end of his life, combined

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his recommendations with those of liberal psychologists, by promoting the modernization of relations within couples, a new way of communicating, greater involvement of the father in household life and child education, and greater spousal focus on the woman’s sexual fulfilment. Popenoe was particularly attuned to the needs of households, and especially wives. In addition to advising individuals, his institute – the AIFR – trained mediators, teachers and clerics, who spread his recommendations. This activity quickly experienced the transformation that ‘eugenic clinics’, the majority of which were private initiatives, had been undergoing across the world since the 1920s.45 In the United Kingdom, prenuptial consultation offices dropped their first mandate, which was to ‘prevent bad marriages’, to instead focus on helping women to avoid undesirable pregnancies. ‘Under the pressure of their clients’, these clinics evolved in the same direction as in Germany. ‘The spirit is clearly feminist: there is no mention of the husband. It appears that there is no interest in establishing a relationship with him, to either consult with him or act on him; defending his wife against him, and providing the woman with the means to escape the consequences of his incontinence – that’s what it’s about’.46 Initially created to help future spouses identify their hereditary risks, these structures adapted to a female demand for advice on contraception and marriage troubles. Eugenics thus came to take into account, accept and facilitate two major evolutions: the desire for birth control on the one hand, and the psychologization of interpersonal relations on the other. This movement was essentially universal, at least in industrialized countries.47 It reached France in the 1950s, with a twenty-year lag that reflected the enduring gap between birth control supporters and opponents. In theory, eugenics could have provided a bridge between these two enemy camps, given the extent to which its objectives transcended their dividing line. For example, the gynaecologist Jean Dalsace (1893–1970) linked the interwar neo-Malthusian milieu, where he was involved in the French Eugenics Society and in the rise of sexology, to 1960s family planning, whose movement he presided over in the last years of his life. As a typical representative of the communist doctors who opposed the party for its pronatalism, this former resistant proposed in 1947 the creation of a National Institute of Eugenics and Genetics, which he foresaw serving in a prophylactic role. He expanded the prenuptial examination to ‘a true biotypological examination with a study of ancestors and relatives’, and used genealogy to ‘establish individual and family health books’ aimed at detecting hereditary illnesses. This ‘active eugenics whose agenda is currently impossible and dangerous, as proven by the experience of certain countries like Hitler’s Germany’, would be based on the ‘federalization of

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infrastructure to improve the human species – hospitals, maternity units, legal medical institutes, and a National Office of Public Hygiene’.48 A few years later the gynaecologist Marie-Andrée Lagroua-WeillHallé, in a 1955 communication to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, described as ‘eugenic centres’ places ‘where young couples could ask for advice of a psychological and moral nature, as well as on family planning and sterility and fertility problems’.49 Similarly to the eugenic clinics that were created before the war, they would combine contraception counselling and genetic counselling on the risk of transmitting hereditary diseases. Marie-Andrée Lagroua-Weill-Hallé and her colleague Pierre Simon shared a humanist and psychologizing perspective: to help women and couples avoid distress caused by the birth of undesired children. The assessment of genetic risks was key at a time when this could only be done before procreation (not during gestation).50 We have observed how in the 1950s the harm caused to couples by French legislation on contraception was seized by the psychologization of individual relationships. Pierre Simon connected this concern to the constitution, in the second third of the twentieth century, of broad social protection systems. The first two objectives he assigned to birth control were: the preservation of genetic heritage, the property of all humans, be they French, European, or citizens of the world, for whom we are accountable for the present and responsible for the future. Blocking the transmission of known and transmissible hereditary defects is a duty of the species. The second role is the qualitative management of life: health has become a collective property. We pay into social security for the quality of life and health of the collectivity. Everyone is in solidarity with all.51

As we have seen, the agenda of this great proponent of birth control was surprisingly close to the ideals of Jacques Doublet, a fierce opponent of contraception. The irreducible aspect of the opposition between these two camps in the 1950s obscured the influence of the eugenic considerations that drove both. This way of combining a focus on individual psychology with concern for the greater interest of society was by no means a French specificity. Mutatis mutandis, the interlinkage across the Atlantic between the psychology of personal development and the development of a welfare system was also cemented by the ‘reformed’ eugenics of the second third of the twentieth century. This academic and political configuration fostered – among other sources – contemporary norms of individual fulfilment, autonomy and performance. I will conclude with an examination of the resulting contemporary psychological ideals.

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Notes 1. Peter Weingart, ‘Science and Political Culture: Eugenics in Comparative Perspective’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 24, 1999, pp. 163–77, here p. 167. 2. Léon Bourgeois, quoted by La Vergata, ‘Lamarckisme et solidarité’, p. 276. 3. Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1995. 4. Alberto Spektorowski and Liza Ireni-Saban, ‘From “Race Hygiene” to “NationalProductivist Hygiene”’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 16, 2011, pp. 169–93. 5. Cornelie Usborne, ‘Rhetoric and Resistance: Rationalization of Reproduction in Weimar Germany’, Social Politics, 4, 1997, pp. 65–89. 6. Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about “Modernity”’, Central European History, 37, 1, 2004, pp. 1–48. 7. Paul B. Kern, ‘Universal Suffrage without Democracy: Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill’, The Review of Politics, 34, 3, 1972, pp. 306–22, here p. 315. 8. Carrel, Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie, pp. 141 and 185–86. 9. Thomas Fleming and David Conway, ‘Setting Standards in the West: C. B. Conway, Science, and School Reform in British Columbia, 1938–1974’, Canadian Journal of Education, 21, 3, 1996, pp. 294–317, here p. 313. 10. Ashley Montagu, ‘Sociogenic Brain Damage’, American Anthropologist, 74, 5, 1972, pp. 1045–61, here p. 1054, commenting on Gladys C. Schwesinger, Heredity and Environment: Studies in the Genesis of Psychological Characteristics, New York, Macmillan, 1933. 11. Clarence S. Yoakum and Robert M. Yerkes, Army Mental Tests, New York, H. Holt, 1920, p. 12. 12. Osborn, ‘Measures of Quality in the Study of Population’, p. 198. 13. Michael M. Sokal (ed.), Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1930, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1987; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, New York, Norton, 1996 [orig. ed. 1981], p. 222 et seq; Graham Richards, Race, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 124 et seq. 14. Osborn, Preface to Eugenics, p. 78. 15. Ibid., p. 294. 16. ‘The inexcusable process of allowing feeble-minded persons, when they leave an institution or training school, to reproduce their kind, is on the way to being checked in a number of states in which such persons may be sterilized prior to their release from the institution’ (ibid., p. 31). 17. Thus Osborn predicted that with the advancement in genetic counselling, patients’ voluntary sterilizations would increase, implying that forced sterilizations should continue (ibid., p. 33). See his critics by Barry Mehler, ‘Eliminating the Inferior: American and Nazi Sterilization Programs’, Science for the People, 6, 1987, pp. 14–18. 18. Osborn, Preface to Eugenics, p. 181. 19. Ibid., table 38, p. 205. Gladys C. Schwesinger produced a comparable but non-quantified reflection (‘The Role of Psychology in Eugenics’, p. 323). 20. Dennis Hodgson, ‘Frank W. Notestein’, in Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (eds), Encyclopedia of Population, New York, Macmillan Reference, 2003, vol. 2, pp. 696–98. 21. Frank W. Notestein, ‘Some Implications of Current Demographic Trends for Birth Control and Eugenics’, Journal of Heredity, 30, 3, 1939, pp. 121–26. 22. Ibid., p. 123, for all the quotations in this paragraph [my emphasis]. 23. Ramsden, ‘Social Demography and Eugenics’, pp. 559–63; Ramsden, ‘Eugenics from the New Deal’; Ramsden, ‘Confronting the Stigma of Eugenics’.

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24. Daniel Cefaï, ‘Le naturalisme dans la sociologie américaine au tournant du siècle: La genèse de la perspective de l’École de Chicago’, Revue du Mauss, 17, 1, 2001, pp. 261–74. 25. Lorimer and Osborn, Dynamics of Population, p. 113. 26. See Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa; a Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, New York, W. Morrow, 1928 and its critics by Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983. 27. Charles Darwin, quoted by Simon Hampton, ‘The Instinct Debate and the Standard Social Science Model’, Psychology, Evolution & Gender, 6, 1, 2004, pp. 15–44. 28. Gladys C. Schwesinger, ‘Twins and the Study of Delinquency’, The Journal of Heredity, 33, 1, 1942, pp. 18–20 [my emphasis]. 29. Ross Stagner, Psychology of Personality, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1937; Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, New York, H. Holt, 1937; Henry A. Murray et al., Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1938. 30. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945, Dordrecht, Springer, 2008, p. 194. 31. On Hall, psychology and psychoanalysis, see Frank Marchese, ‘The Place of Eugenics in Arnold Gesell’s Maturation Theory of Child Development’, Canadian Psychology, 36, 2, 1995, pp. 89–114, here pp. 92–95. On the theory of the summary, cf. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phytogeny, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977. 32. Thomas C. Dalton, ‘Arnold Gesell and the Maturation Controversy’, Integrative Physiological & Behavioral Science, 40, 4, 2005, pp. 182–204; Jerry Aldridge and Renitta Goldman, Current Issues and Trends in Education, Boston, MA, Allyn and Bacon, 2007, pp. 96–99. 33. Esther Thelen and Karen E. Adolph, ‘Arnold L. Gesell: The Paradox of Nature and Nurture’, Developmental Psychology, 28, 3, 1992, pp. 368–80. 34. Arnold L. Gesell, ‘The Village of a Thousand Souls’, The American Magazine, 74, 1913, pp. 11–16. 35. Arnold Gesell, quoted by Ben Harris, ‘Arnold Gesell’s Progressive Vision: Child Hygiene, Socialism and Eugenics’, History of Psychology, 14, 3, 2011, pp. 311–34, here p. 320. 36. Ibid., as well as Marchese, ‘The Place of Eugenics’. 37. Fredric Weizmann, ‘From the “Village of a Thousand Souls” to “Race Crossing in Jamaica”: Arnold Gesell, Eugenics and Child Development’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 46, 3, 2010, pp. 263–75. 38. Marchese, ‘The Place of Eugenics’, pp. 98 and 105–7. 39. Walter R. Miles, ‘Measures of Certain Human Abilities throughout the Lifespan’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 17, 1931, pp. 627–33; Miles, ‘Age and Human Ability’, Psychological Review, 44, 1933, pp. 99–123. 40. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 38. 41. Pernick, ‘The Black Stork’, p. 53. 42. Harris, ‘Arnold Gesell’s Progressive Vision’, p. 316. 43. I borrow the information contained in the next two paragraphs from the major article by Molly Ladd-Taylor, ‘Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA’, p. 313. 44. Paul Popenoe, Modern Marriage: A Handbook, New York, Macmillan, 1925; and Popenoe, The Conservation of the Family, Baltimore, MD, The Williams & Wilkins company, 1926.

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45. Usborne, ‘Rhetoric and Resistance’, p. 72, describes the scant success of eugenic clinics set up by the Prussian ministry of hygiene in the 1920s, in contrast to the infrastructures of the Bund für Mutterschütz, which provided birth control counselling. See also Ross Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy’, p. 14. 46. Édouard Jordan, Eugénisme et morale, Paris, Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1931, p. 25. 47. Natalia Gerodetti, ‘Eugenic Family Politics and Social Democrats: “Positive” Eugenics and Marriage Advice Bureaus’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 19, 2006, pp. 217–44; and Gerodetti, ‘Rational Subjects, Marriage Counselling and the Conundrums of Eugenics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39, 2008, pp. 255–62. 48. Jean Dalsace, ‘Projet d’un Institut national d’eugénique et de génétique’, 5th Congrès international pour l’examen des problèmes médico-sociaux de prophylaxie prématrimoniale [International Congress on Medical and Social Problems of Early Matrimonial Prophylaxis], 20–21 September 1947, Milan. 49. Janine Mossuz, ‘La régulation des naissances: les aspects politiques du débat’, Revue française de science politique, 16, 5, 1966, pp. 913–39, here p. 913. 50. Marie-Andrée Lagroua-Weill-Hallé, L’Enfant-accident: Avortement ou birth-control, Paris, Société des éditions modernes, 1961. 51. Simon, De la vie avant toute chose, p. 96.

Conclusion

S This book has shown that in the midst of the twentieth century, when eugenics was still acceptable, albeit already on the defensive scientifically, it closely interweaved with four main areas of application of developmental psychology. It was involved in scholarly reflection and political projects seeking to expand the individual’s social value (contribution to welfare systems), economic market value (interactions with human capital theory), relational value (new attitudes and responsibilities as a spouse and parent) and autonomy (government of self ideal). When, in the 1960s, in line with Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, the social sciences cut the cord with biology, they did not appreciate that the latter had over the past century closely intertwined with applied psychology. Significantly, this intersection, which until the 1950s remained central to thinking about society, was struck by the thunderbolt of the ‘IQ controversy’, wherein academic psychologists attributed the low educational achievement of African Americans to genetic factors1 – a resurgence all the more alarming given that eugenics no longer had the same meaning as it did in Galton’s time. Not only had it contributed to genocides in the interim, but it also drew on a one-sided interpretation of genetic theories that were increasingly qualifying their explanations of inter-individual differences, and on a thoroughly invalidated racist ‘theory’ that was increasingly appearing to be a metaphysical construct impervious to facts.2 While sociobiology and its imperialist claims had been receiving all the attention and criticisms since the 1970s, the eugenic filiation – after a significant overhaul – continued through the evolution of developmental psychology. Michel Foucault, the symbol par excellence of wariness about the biologization of society, did not trace back this history of the ‘government of self’ and others. However, the latter continues to unfold today, both in a scientific form, where the return of epigenetics has led it to rejoin the evolutionary psychology from which it emerged, and in the form of the small treatises on personal development that have proliferated as

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psychological and psychoanalytical language has spread globally since the 1950s. By spotlighting the boundary with biology, the social sciences obscured the huge area in which eugenics had been operating: applied psychology. This archaeology in no way means that eugenics acted as a masked ideology behind psychology’s establishment of the norms by which contemporary behaviour is assessed. This risk of simplification is actually the root of the problem and should be eliminated. Indeed, on the one hand, eugenic concepts hybridized with the many political and scientific frameworks they came across, making it more difficult to keep track of them; and on the other hand, their segmentation blurred the perception of the broader setting from which they had emerged. The ideological plasticity that constitutes one of the major features of eugenics further clouds the problem. For example, I showed that the association between eugenics and social protection was very limited and was part of a much broader and composite reform project. However, conservative and libertarian political forces today have seized on this association in their efforts to dismantle the welfare state,3 as if the simple observation of this filiation sufficed to delegitimize its principle. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, for the so-called radical left, the connection with eugenics informs what I have called a truly ‘Orwellian’ interpretation of social security, the disgraced symbol of social democracy. By contrast, a properly ‘historical’ history of eugenics cannot shy away from the complexity of its uses, appropriations and reconfigurations. It cannot deliver immediate, concise and clear-cut messages; extreme cases aside, it cannot determine in absolute terms what is good and evil today. However, it is essential to bioethical debates because it can shift their terms and reveal the cognitive loops in which actors get caught. Yet the role currently accorded to historical research in bioethical debates over medical action on embryos is paradoxical: it is currently deployed as an argument of authority but not as an instrument of knowledge. On the one hand, history provides the definitive argument since the established association between eugenics and Hitler’s extermination policies is the irreducible objection used against new medical applications, even when they are ‘simply’ therapeutic. On the other hand, it is accessory in an area dominated, aside from lobby groups, by doctors, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists and psychoanalysts, under the observation of sociologists and political scientists. In this field as in many others, the reductio ad hitlerum is enough to end the discussion. This reflex is both lazy and politically counterproductive. It points to a society that has become incapable of thinking about evil metaphysically, and therefore seeks its embodiment in a human form,

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which is then trotted out on any subject and outside of any context.4 This poor approach is ironic in its circular aspect. One of the earliest and most profound critiques of eugenics is the one mentioned in the introduction that the anthropologist Franz Boas produced in 1916: he denounced not only its biologism but also its claim to eliminate suffering by controlling human emotions and passions through reason; little did he know that a century later Western societies would take up these objectives while staking an anti-eugenic position.5 Let us therefore embrace history, and even macrohistory, to present the lessons of this book. Considered broadly, eugenics was one of the very last scholarly models to have been conceived during a period – the nineteenth century – when these did not have a disciplinary but rather a total vocation. Like the psychology of Herbert Spencer, the sociology of Auguste Comte, the demography of Achille Guillard and Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, the natural history of Darwin before him (and the sociology of Durkheim right after), the eugenics of Galton was not defined as a science but rather as the science. Its relatively long survival despite the setbacks it encountered means that it gradually faced the emergence of institutionalized disciplines, specialized in their current form in the world of academic research. The ‘interweaving’ I mentioned, and the ‘resonance’ between eugenics on the one hand, and psychology or political economy on the other, resulted from this asymmetry between scientific models from different ages. Considered from the perspective of early twentieth-century scholars, the developing disciplinary fields intersected with a ‘crosscutting’ model. This is not a retrospective reconstruction: one of the most radical eugenicists, Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943), director of the Eugenics Record Office in the United States, considered that this ‘newly-organised science made into an effective and harmonious unit for studying and directing race-fortunes’ needed to connect knowledge on ‘heredity, individual and social conduct, vocational and educational fitting, anthropology, law, psychology, psychiatry, institutional control, migration, mate-selection, differential fecundity and survival, biography, genealogy, and history’.6 Student assessments, measurement of the intelligence of conscripts, labour orientation, immigrant selection: the intersections were all the more remarkable given that eugenics, as an applied science (which was also new), tackled empirical subjects that were often linked to emerging public policies. The intellectual, political and, as it were, practical history of eugenics was not just one of multiple interactions with various disciplines, most frequently biology, physiology and psychology; these interactions involved subjects eugenics sought to claim from these other disciplines, or to shape with them.

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For the sake of clarity, I have thus far used the somewhat literary term of ‘interweaving’ to describe these meetings. But the term ‘ligature’ appears more befitting to designate a process in which eugenics seized on disparate subjects, each time creating knots that were tight enough to remain inextricable in both senses of the term: as resistant ties and as sufficiently complex interlacing that the origin becomes difficult to trace. This notion of a ‘ligature’ is not meant to be a catch-all concept designating any encounter between different scientific approaches. In a historical sociological approach, I use it as an instrument with a precise definition linked to the particular reception of eugenics both at its time and retrospectively. It does not designate an area, thematic field or method, but rather multiple and disparate interventions located in different parts of the political and academic landscape. Aside from the specific domain of sociobiology, it is therefore in the form of ligatures, rather than as a coherent body, that eugenics understood as a moral theory played a role in shaping the norms offered to individuals in the contemporary world to gauge their value. In the academic sphere, its legacy can be found in a variety of disciplines that, as was the case around fifteen years ago with Arnold Gesell for child psychology, belatedly discovered that they could not understand their history and analytical tools without referring to ‘the quiet presence of the eugenic legacy’.7 In the United States, some university textbooks on applied psychology devote a section to its eugenic roots, and even compare the current state of the discipline with its propositions from the days of Galton. These exercises emphasize the differences, reflecting a concern with clearing psychology of any eugenic roots. But they fail to reflect on what the very comparability of the categories means, and more importantly to retrace the processes that led from the starting point to the current state of knowledge.8 It is important to note that this necessary genealogical work does not boil down to a campaign of denunciation. The psychology historian Graham Richards has shown that in response to the resurgence of racism during the ‘IQ controversy’ in the 1970s, his discipline took an excessively one-sided and finalist approach to the interwar ‘psychology of race’ by neglecting internal challenges to it that were barely visible in relation to today’s criteria and values, but were key to the gradual transition from an analysis of ‘racial differences’ to an analysis of discrimination.9 Eugenics left active traces in the area of behavioural norms set for contemporary individuals, who are expected to bring the best out of themselves. This aspiration to intensive self-exploitation has been abundantly discussed in sociology,10 but its intelligibility is not just embedded in the ideologies of today; it is also the fruit of Reform Eugenics and of

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‘the eugenics with a human face’ that developed during the New Deal era and after the Second World War by connecting the values of personal development with those of ambitious social regulation. This genealogy has been overlooked by the exclusive focus on successive sociobiological threats that have emerged over the past half-century. A few decades later, anxiety over the potential developments of genetic technologies is not just based on the fear of seeing them deployed in the totalitarian and discriminatory ways eugenics were used in the twentieth century. It also stems from the widespread perception that these techniques can help, or at least promise to help conform with our societies’ norms. Contemporary bioethical debates are difficult to settle largely because they are prisoners of this circularity: the moral norms driving them partially result from the eugenics that has been marked for eradication. Just like eugenics did not disappear in 1945, and even continued to flourish in many emerging countries,11 its roots and legacy in liberal societies were not completely analysed in the 1970s, and haven’t been since then. While the social sciences sought to end the political imperialism of sociobiology at the time, eugenics continued, through the ligatures it created, to permeate developmental psychology. The reason contemporary bioethical debates are so difficult to settle is that we strive to prevent any risk of eugenics, while some of our structuring norms are permeated with eugenics. Eugenics is not a ‘ghost’ floating in the air.12 Rather than take a position of moral superiority or even purity, only a return to history will enable the identification and disentanglement of the ligatures through which eugenics continues to imprint our guiding values.

Notes 1. James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2014, p. 48 et seq. Also see the resurgence of this debate in the 1990s after the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, New York, Free Press, 1994. 2. Olender, Race and Erudition. 3. Dennis Sewell, ‘How Eugenics Poisoned the Welfare State’, The Spectator, 23 November 2009. 4. Here I join the analytical clarification efforts of the historian David Feldman, SubReport Commissioned to Assist the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London, 1 January 2015. 5. Franz Boas, ‘Eugenics’, The Scientific Monthly, 3, 5, 1916, pp. 471–78.

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6. Harry H. Laughlin, ‘The Relation of Eugenics to Other Sciences’, ER, 11, 2, 1919, pp. 53–64, here p. 53. 7. David Pilgrim, ‘The Eugenic Legacy in Psychology and Psychiatry’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 54, 2008, pp. 272–84, here p. 280. 8. Glenn Geher, Evolutionary Psychology 101, New York, Springer, 2014, table 9.1, pp. 180–81. 9. Richards, Race, Racism and Psychology; Richards, ‘Reconceptualizing the History of Race Psychology: Thomas Russell Garth (1872–1939) and How He Changed His Mind’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 34, 1, 1998, pp. 15–32. 10. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York, Norton, 1998. 11. Dorothy C.  Wertz, ‘Eugenics Is Alive and Well: A Survey of Genetic Professionals around the World’, Science in Context, 11, 3–4, 1998, pp. 493–510, established that in English-speaking industrialized countries the geneticists involved in counselling after a prenatal diagnosis respect the principle of neutrality to which they are held, whereas eugenics permeate the practices of their colleagues in emerging countries in Asia and Eastern Europe. 12. Amy Dockser Marcus, ‘Scientists Confront the Ghost of Eugenics’, The Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2018.

Epilogue

Forgetting Eugenics Back to the Ungemach Gardens

S In 2016, five months after the publication of the French version of this book, the city of Strasbourg’s monthly magazine published an article on Ungemach Gardens entitled ‘The Moral City’.1 While the article deliberately ignored a book that had been published by one of the two largest publishers in France, and had been the subject in March of a public presentation at the Kléber bookstore, an intellectual pillar of the city, and of television shows on the France 3-Alsace channel, the article recognized the polemics it had sparked locally: ‘while eugenic claims are far from settled, nobody challenges that the garden city was hygienist and pronatalist’. This deliberate willingness to deny history continued a longstanding tradition, although it was nuanced by the admission that the garden city had been pronatalist and ‘hygienist’ – a term often used in French to refer to eugenics. Until then, official presentations of the garden city had depicted it more as ‘social housing’: The Strasbourg industrialist Léon Ungemach had one hundred and forty houses built ‘meant to recall those of small Alsatian cities from 1830’ on 11 hectares provided by the city. The development presented itself in the form of a pleasant social habitat, thanks to the savoir-faire that governed its composition.2

These forms of denial are logical. While pedagogical websites were able to get into the details and provide an account that aligned with the actual history of the garden city,3 it would understandably be scandalous and incomprehensible from a contemporary perspective that the city

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hall of Strasbourg admit how ‘its’ garden city publicly presented itself through the postwar era: a ‘work with eugenic goals’ that aimed to ‘foster the development of the precious elements of society and help them progress more quickly than the rest’ in order to help ‘guide human evolution towards a more rapid ascent’.4 Recognizing this history would be all the more sensitive given that, as I showed in the first part of this book, the terms of the experiment remained in place in the city’s housing department until the 1980s, with full knowledge of its foundations. It is not until 1985 that the selection form created by Alfred Dachert in the 1920s was jettisoned. But even beyond, some of the initial project’s characteristics remained in place until the end of the twentieth century, such as the age and number of children of applicant households set in 1961, and the 25 per cent rental discount for those who respected the thresholds for fertility and the age of the youngest established in 1951. While the wife’s unemployment – a Foundation legacy – ceased to be required, it remained a reference: in 1994, close to half of the working-age female residents of Ungemach Gardens were out of the job market,5 while female activity rate in France was close to 80 per cent at the time.6 In the 1990s, the garden city’s new administrators were partly informed of the history of the experiment, even though its management had changed hands: while the city remained the owner of the real estate, a semi-public company in which the urban community of Strasbourg was a shareholder, Habitation Moderne, was granted a contract on 1 September 1993 covering the service charges and management of the houses. In the ensuing years, it availed itself of the functional aspect of the longstanding criteria, which as in the past enabled a rapid selection among numerous applications and created a pipeline for the kindergarten.7 The residents, now part of an association, also demanded that the criteria remain in place, to ensure selective social recruitment.8 The rehabilitation operation that Habitation Moderne launched beginning in 1997 ultimately erased the last principles of the 1920s experiment, particularly the 25 per cent bonus for households compliant with the 1951 criteria. Its replacement by housing assistance to which French residents are eligible on the basis of a means test provided the garden city with a social dimension. But even after 2000, it appears that the administrative memory of the experiment has left some traces, as households with three or more children are given preference, regardless of the parental age. It is significant that at the end of a dilution process initiated around 1985, all that remains of the original experiment is the ‘large family’ category, which continues to remain acceptable today. Like a decantation, the change made around 2000 stripped the history of Ungemach Gardens

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of everything that was specific to twentieth-century administrative and academic developments.9 Here again, one last time, Ungemach Gardens constitutes a trace of a buried content. The deliberate forgetting of its genesis, now completely unacceptable in light of its (anachronistic) association with Nazism in the collective imagination, helps us to visualize the difficulty of thinking about eugenics’ role in the contemporary world. Visualize… The verb is not just a metaphor. When I went to Strasbourg in March 2016 at the invitation of regional television, I visited the municipal archives, which had kindly unearthed for me a big painting made in the 1930s by the local artist Dorette Muller (1894–1975). Entitled Ungemach Gardens, this picture, which is reproduced as the cover of the book, contrasted two representations of childhood. On the left, a girl and two boys looking sickly and hunched pose sadly in front of a dark street. On the right, two boys and two girls looking sportive and happy glow under a shining sun, with two Ungemach Gardens houses and its gardens in the background. A legend accompanies the illustrations. On the left, it indicates ‘a generation that does not observe the laws of eugenics endows the next generation with few, puny, and untalented children’. On the right, ‘a generation that observes the laws of eugenics endows the next generation with many, talented, and strong children’. The painting had long hung, the archivists told me, in the city hall of Strasbourg, outside the office of the secretary general.

Notes 1. Stéphanie Peurière, ‘La cité morale’, Strasbourg Magazine, June 2016, p. 29. 2. See http://fr.topic-topos.com/cite-jardin-ungemach-strasbourg (accessed 23  October 2015) [my emphasis]. See also http://leblogdelaville.canalblog.com/archives/2011/04/13/20883088.html# (accessed 24 July 2019). 3. The website http://www.classes.ch/pages/Strasbourg_CiteJardin_UNGEMACH3422573.html proposed to students, through the mediation of the history of the garden city, a reflection on eugenics. Accessed on 23 October 2015, it is no longer active today. 4. See Introduction, Fig. 0.1. 5. Source: Habitation Moderne, Réhabilitation de la cité Ungemach: Strasbourg-Wacken, n.d. [1994 or 1995], p. 8. 6. Cédric Afsa Essafi and Sophie Buffeteau, ‘L’activité féminine en France: quelles évolutions récentes, quelles tendances pour l’avenir?’, Économie et Statistique, 398–399, 2006, pp. 85–97. 7. See in Guibout, ‘Ungemach, la cité-jardin où poussaient les enfants’, the testimony by Bernard Stoeckel, who was an official in charge of allocating municipal housing in the second half of the 1980s. 8. Virginie Anquetin, La Construction électorale des politiques municipales: Travail politique de conquête et de gestion d’une capitale régionale (Strasbourg 1973–2001), doctoral thesis

198 Epilogue

in political science supervised by Renaud Dorandeu, University of Strasbourg, 2011, p. 547. 9. An interview conducted on 29 September 2003 by Mathieu Arbogast with Bernard Stoeckel for Habitation Moderne sums up this position well. The reasons justifying the choice of households with three children were the size of houses, the presence of the kindergarten, ‘and also because this was the first goal … But some things are no longer possible. When I say the age conditions especially, I started thinking that we would never get there – the houses would remain empty if we applied the criteria’.

Appendix Works by Abel Ruffenach, Pseudonym of Alfred Dachert

S Heptalogy: Der Sang des Werdens [The song of becoming] Published (French title) Le Val l’Évêque [The Bishop Val], Paris, Librairie française d’art et d’édition, 1920. La Cathédrale Ardente [The ardent cathedral], Paris, Stock, 1948. Le Moulin des Aulnes [The alder mill], Paris, Stock, 1948. Saint-Elme [Saint Elm], Strasbourg, Association pour la conservation des écrits d’Abel Ruffenach, 1968. Unpublished (original German title) Der Weinberg des Gerechten [The vineyard of the just], n.d. [ca 1905], 104 pp., available at the Médiathèque André-Malraux in Strasbourg (MAMS). Der Falkenwasen [The provost law], n.d. [ca 1910], 58 pp., available at the Bibliothèque nationale universitaire de Strasbourg (BNUS) and at the MAMS. Haus Heydenreich [The Heydenreich house], 1939, 132 pp., available at the BNUS and at the MAMS.

Other Works Die Wilsontragoedie [The Wilson tragedy], n.d. [1940–1945], 144 pp., available at the BNUS. S’Berdele [in Alsatian] [in English Little Bertha], Strasbourg, 1971, Imprimerie Muh-Le Roux.

200 Appendix

Musique à rebours [Musical countdown] n.d. [1950s], available at the BNUS. Verklaerte Staetten [Transfigured places], n.d. [ca 1910], 328 pp., available at the MAMS. Cheminements chinois, abbrev. C.C. [Chinese paths], Letters from China, 1921–1922, edited by François Dachert in 2012, available at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France. Schloss Roog [Roog Castle], n.d. [ca 1970], 72 pp., available at the BNUS. Vom Werden eines Werks: Ein Buch für Poete, abbrev. VWW [On the becoming of a work: a book for poets], n.d. [ca 1940–ca 1960s], 392 pp., available at IMEC. Singende Bilder [Singing images], poetry collection [ca 1900] available at the BNUS and at the MAMS. It includes two volumes: Die heiligen Triebe [Saint volitions]. Die Tausend Weiten [Faraway thousands].

Archival Sources

S French Centre for Contemporary Archives, Pierrefitte, France Haut Conseil de la Population et de la Famille [High Council on Population and Family] 860269/1. National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) [Institut national d’études démographiques] 20000061 11-23 Direction papers, Decisions. 20010307 9 Louis Henry papers. Légion d’Honneur [Legion of Honour] 19800035/1148, Extract type 2, 31325/229.035 Alfred Dachert’s dossier.

Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin [Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin, ADBR], Strasbourg, France 121 AL 100 Visit of the French President of Council Paul Painlevé to Strasbourg. 1918 W 341 3882, 3889, 3890 and W 342 3893: Recuperation of goods stolen during the German Occupation period. 3Q 27872, Estate tax administration office of Strasbourg, Case file ‘Dachert, Philipp Heinrich, Fabrikant’.

Strasbourg Urban Community Archives [Communauté urbaine de Strasbourg, CUS], Strasbourg, France 217 W 11 Correspondence of the Strasbourg city hall’s hygiene service. 269 W 64 Correspondence of Charles Frey, mayor of Strasbourg.

202 Archival Sources

Municipal Archives of Strasbourg [Archives Municipales de Strasbourg, MAS], Strasbourg, France Archives of the Department ‘Management of City and Foundations Real Estate’ [Division ‘Gestion du patrimoine immobilier (Ville et Fondations)’, Div I] Div I 427 Transcript of the Board meeting of the Ungemach Gardens Foundation. Other: Div I, Boxes 375, 403, 558a to 558d, 1259 G, 1260 G, 1261 472-01; Div 6, Box 154. 269W, Boxes 50, 68, 69, 74, 75. Register of civil status documents, 1803–1902, Births, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Dachert family.

Personal archives Henri Piéron papers, French National Archives, AN 520 AP 13. Pierre Pflimlin papers, Municipal Archives of Strasbourg, 9Z 64, 65 and 629. Paul Rivet papers, Musée de l’Homme (Paris), 2AP1 B11c.

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Index of Names

S Bailliard, Robert, 63, 89–91, 94–5, 101–2, 117 Barr, James, 162 Becker, Gary S., 159, 171, 173 Boas, Franz, 12, 125, 180, 191, 193 Bord, André, 89 Borromée, Henri, 29 Bouglé, Célestin, 126 Bourdieu, Pierre, 152, 155, 160, 189 Bourgeois, Léon, 174, 186 Bourgeois-Pichat, Jean, 139 Carrel, Alexis, 6, 14, 115, 175, 186 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 5, 13, 103 Chevalier, Louis, 112, 116, 119, 123, 132, 134, 137 Dachert, Alfred and China, 51–3 as the designer and manager of the Ungemach Gardens, 11, 27–9, 41–4, 49, 57, 63, 65–71, 76–9, 81–5, 87–91, 102–7, 117, 121, 130–1, 134, 144, 146, 162, 165, 168, 183, 196 family background and occupational trajectory, 40–1, 47–50, 53–4 as a poet, 13, 40, 44–8, 54–7, 117, 130, 168 writings, 199–200, 204 Dachert, Suzanne née Gounelle, 44, 50 Dallwitz, Johann von, 41 Dalsace, Jean, 148, 184, 188 Darwin, Charles, 22, 44, 49, 52, 55, 162–4, 166–7, 171–4, 180–1, 187, 191 Darwin, Leonard, 52, 61–2 Davenport, Charles Benedict, 61 De Gaulle, Charles, 106, 114, 140 Debré, Michel, 147

Debré, Robert, 140–1, 145, 154 Doublet, Jacques, 97–8, 142–8, 153–4, 161, 175, 177, 185 Durkheim, Émile, 174, 191 Ellis, Havelock, 15–6 Fontègne, Julien, 128, 130, 133, 136–7 Foucault, Michel, 2, 12, 159–60, 170–2, 174, 189 Frederick, Christine, 36 Frey, Charles, 2, 29, 77, 94, 107 Galton, Francis, 103, 112, 143, 153, 161, 164–7, 171–3, 179, 189, 191–2 Gesell, Arnold L., 181–3, 187, 192 Gessain, Robert, 114–6, 120–1 Girard, Alain, 150–3, 155 Giraudoux, Jean, 4, 13, 63 Godart, Justin, 129 Goethe, Charles Matthias, 4, 13, 42, 91–2, 103, 105, 117–8, 153 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48 Gounelle, Élie, 44, 56, 59, 62 Greg, William R., 163–4, 167–8, 172 Habermas, Jürgen, 160, 172 Halbwachs, Maurice, 129–30, 137 Hall, G. Stanley, 181 Henry, Louis, 2, 12, 108, 118, 123, 139, 201 Herrenschmidt, Alfred, 42 Herrenschmidt, Fernand, 27, 42–3 Herrenschmidt, Suzanne née Ungemach, 17, 27, 29, 43, 58, 60, 81, 85, 90–1, 93, 95 Heuyer, Georges, 170, 173 Howard, Ebenezer, 21, 32

226 Index of Names

Hueber, Charles, 29, 37 Huxley, Aldous, 144, 152 Huxley, Julian, 144 Ibsen, Henrik, 45, 47–8, 53 Lagroua-Weill-Hallé, Marie-Andrée, 148, 185, 188 Lamy, Maurice, 153 Laroque, Pierre, 142, 146–7, 154 Laugier, Henri, 126–9, 131–3, 136–7, 139–41 Lefebvre, Georges, 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 122, 134 Lorimer, Frank, 125, 135, 187 Lotka, Alfred, 66, 91 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 162, 166, 170, 172 Mead, Margaret, 180, 182, 187 Meck, Henri, 80, 93 Mill, John Stuart, 16, 125.135, 175, 186 Millerand, Alexandre, 28, 41 Mootz, Heinrich, 51, 60 Morgan, Thomas H., 123, 134, 137, 182 Moshinsky, Pearl, 103, 117 Moussinac, Léon, 44 Muller, Dorette, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53 Notestein, Frank, 135, 149, 178–9, 186 Osborn, Frederick, 98, 124–5, 127–8, 131–2, 135, 137, 148, 161, 176–80, 182–3, 186–7 Osborn , Henry Fairfield, 124 Painlevé, Paul, 4, 28 Paira, René, 81, 93–4 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 152, 155, 160, 189 Pearl, Raymond, 36, 123, 134, 149 Pearson, Karl, 165, 169, 171–3 Peirotes, Jacques, 20–1, 29–30, 32, 35–6, 58, 66 Pende, Nicola, 127, 133, 136, 139

Pétain, Philippe, 6, 114–5 Pflimlin, Pierre, 90–1, 94–5, 102, 117, 202 Piéron, Henri, 126, 136–7, 140, 154 Pinard, Adolphe, 109, 119 Popenoe, Paul, 4, 13, 45, 59, 105, 118, 183–4, 187 Richet, Charles, 109, 129–30, 136–7 Rivet, Paul, 126, 134 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 179 Rüdin, Ernst, 180 Ruffenach, Abel. See Dachert, Alfred Sahlins, Marshall, 172 Sanger, Margaret, 123, 180 Sauvy, Alfred, 2, 12, 91, 101, 107–8, 112–3, 118–9, 121–2, 126, 135–5, 139–41, 143, 145, 147, 150, 153–4, 170, 173 Scelle, Georges, 126 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 54 Schwesinger, Gladys C., 161, 172, 176–7, 180–1, 183, 186–7 Sellier, Henri, 34, 39, 150 Senghor, Léopold-Sédar, 138–9 Simon, Pierre, 148, 154, 185 Spencer, Herbert, 162–3, 191 Stoetzel, Jean, 150–3, 155 Sutter, Jean, 101, 112–3, 119, 141–2, 154–5 Tabah, Léon, 155 Toulouse, Édouard, 109, 119, 129–31, 136–7 Turpin, Raymond, 149–50, 155 Ungemach, Léon, 27, 37, 41–43, 49, 56–62, 66, 87, 90, 195 Vallois, Henri, 115 Vincent, Paul, 91, 114–6, 120, 122 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 163 Wallon, Henri, 140, 150 Weinberg, Dagmar, 132, 136–7 Weismann, August, 52

Index of Subjects and Institutions

S abortion, 5 alcoholism, 114, 139, 143 American army’s information and education service, 124 American Genetic Association, 178 American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), 183–4 aptitudes and dispositions, 127–9, 132–3, 139–40, 149–52, 169, 176–7, 180–1 army, military, 19, 27–9, 37, 47, 98, 124, 133, 176 asylums. See insane babies, 42, 105, 148, 166 Bell curve, 133 biocracy, 129, 131 bioethics, 190, 193 biology, 10, 26, 32, 54, 98, 103, 112, 114–5, 122–6, 128–9, 131, 134, 139–42, 145, 149, 151–3, 157, 159–61, 165, 167, 177, 179–80, 182, 189–93. See also social biology and sociobiology biometrics, 126–8, 133, 165, 176, 181, 183 biotypology, 9, 126–9, 131–133, 139, 141, 176, 184 birth control, 67, 110–1, 123–4, 129, 143, 147–8, 177–9, 184–5 Carnegie Endowment, 124 catholicism, 5, 6, 14, 56–7, 67, 90, 105, 110, 142, 147–8 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 127 children as a commodity, 160, 165–6, 168–71 children’s fulfillment as a eugenic ideal, 124–5, 145, 158, 161, 175–83

Children’s Bureau (USA), 165–6 Christianity, 32, 37, 56, 90, 147, 165, 183 Cognacq-Jay award, 116 Collège de France, 127, 140, 159 communism, 20, 29, 32, 115–6, 131, 140, 184 concrete history of abstraction, 8 confectionary. See sugar Conservatoire National des Arts-et-Métiers (CNAM), 127 contraception. See birth control cult of ancestors, 51–3, 55 death, 52–3, 70, 164, 166, 173 degeneration, 10, 124, 166 delinquency and criminality, 98, 128, 140, 148, 182 demography (as science and policy), 2, 41, 66, 98, 176, 191, 102, 106, 108, 110–4, 116, 122–6, 128–9, 138–9, 141–2, 145–9, 167, 176, 178–9, 191. See also qualitative demography divorce, 157, 161, 168, 183 dysgenic (incl. ‘deficient’, ‘defective’, ‘refuse’, ‘subnormal’), 109, 113, 115, 124, 143, 148, 170, 177, 182 École Normale Supérieure, 44, 126 École Polytechnique, 113 environmental conservation, 4, 55, 162, 166 equality/inequalities, 10, 52, 65, 152, 171 eugenics American ‘Reform Eugenics’, 98–9, 122–6, 133, 138, 148, 150, 157–8, 176–9, 183, 185, 192 eugenics-with-a-human-face, 105, 134, 148, 193

228 Index of Subjects and Institutions

in France and liberal democracies after the collapse of Nazism, 12, 30, 44, 57, 65, 87, 91, 98, 102, 107, 109, 112–5, 121–123, 142–153, 175–80, 189–93 (also see American ‘Reform eugenics’, French selectionist model, and qualitative demography) international diffusion and national diversity, 11, 98, 106, 109–12, 131, 138, 142–3, 176 Latin Eugenics, 9, 11, 109, 127 limits of the opposition between negative and positive, 4, 9–11, 103, 105–6, 109–110, 177–8 mockery and critics of, 4–5, 8, 76, 103, 107, 115, 191 as a moral, psychological theory, 26, 157–8, 161–5, 169, 174–7, 180–5, 189–93 and the rise of fertility control, 166–71, 178–180, 184–5 and the rise of social legislation, 168–74 value(s), 22, 29–30, 53–4, 65, 106, 113, 115–16, 121, 124, 129, 143, 146, 150–1, 157, 160–2, 165, 168, 170, 174–5, 182, 189, 192 and World War I, 49, 98, 128, 143, 166, 176 Eugenics Societies American, 123–4, 178–9, 182 British, 52, 103, 108, 162 French, 184 evil, 190 exhibitions, 1, 3, 29, 125 experiment, experimentation, 2, 4, 11, 17, 22, 24, 26–34, 40, 43–5, 49, 51, 55, 57, 63, 65–7, 70–1, 75, 77–9, 84–6, 89–91, 97–8, 101–3, 105–8, 110, 114–8, 121, 123, 125, 131, 133, 138, 141, 144, 157, 176, 196 families (as political force and social issue), 5, 29, 31, 67, 83–4, 86, 89, 107–8, 113, 115–6, 129, 142, 144, 146–7, 151, 178, 196 family planning. See birth control female work, 22, 24–6, 32, 71, 74, 87, 89–90, 128, 151, 168, 196 feminism, 9, 184 fertility as a eugenic concern, 5, 8, 24, 27, 53, 66, 76, 110, 113, 115, 123–5, 131, 147–9, 161, 166–8, 171, 177–9, 185 freemasons, 128 French Foundation for the Study of Human

Problems (FFEPH, ‘Carrel Foundation’), 6, 9, 113–7, 131, 139–40, 142, 150 French republican values, 4–5, 55, 57, 63, 65, 78, 87, 98, 116, 128–32, 138, 140, 147–8, 176 Garden city movement, 21, 32, 49 generations (transmission of, succession of, responsibility towards), 22, 51–2, 54–5, 61, 101, 144, 160–1, 163, 165, 167–8, 177, 185, 197 genetics, 9, 98, 105, 115–6, 123, 126, 141, 144–5, 149–53, 157, 160, 178–9, 182, 184–5, 189–90 genius (heredity of), 29, 54, 113, 151 germplasm, 52, 61 guidance educational, 9, 127, 130, 145–7, 191 vocational, 65, 98, 127–8, 130, 132, 146–7, 161, 191 gynaecology, 146, 148, 184–5 handicaps, 56, 87, 90–1, 128, 143, 145 heredity, 5–7, 9, 11, 52, 54, 102, 114–6, 121, 123–4, 140, 144, 146, 149–51, 159–61, 164, 174–85, 191 High Committee on Population and Family (France), 138, 142 hospitals and clinics, 68, 127, 149, 153, 176, 184–5 human capital, 99, 159–60, 169–71, 174–5, 189 factor, 66, 169 laboratory, 17, 22, 49, 51, 70 motor/machine, 26, 132, 170 species advancement/evolution/improvement, 1, 49, 55, 65, 122, 130, 137, 161–3, 173, 177, 181, 185, 196 Human Betterment Foundation, 105, 123, 183 insane, 5–7, 123, 164, 180 instinct, 129, 164, 180–1, 183 Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), 1–2, 4, 106–8, 112–114, 116, 139–41, 145, 149–51 International Union of Cities, 32 International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 122, 125 IQ, 189, 192

Index of Subjects and Institutions 229

Jews, 105, 132 life as a philosophical and political issue, 5, 10, 20, 34, 54–7, 63, 67, 98, 125, 145, 149, 160–1, 164, 175, 180, 183, 185 London School of Economics, 103 Lutheranism. See Protestantism malthusianism and neo-malthusianism, 109, 113, 130, 143, 148, 184 marriage, 8–9, 162, 164 counselling, 9, 157, 183–4 eugenics and selection of the spouse, 52–3, 55, 160, 162, 183–4, 189 middle class, 19–22, 29–30, 99, 133, 163 migrants and migration, 9, 20, 98, 112, 115–6, 122, 124, 151, 161, 167, 176, 182–3, 191 Milbank Memorial Fund, 124, 178 ministries Public Health and Population (France), 4, 81, 101–2, 108, 141 other, 29, 76, 141–2, 147 Musée Social, 34 National Alliance for French Population Growth, 31, 142 national efficiency, 99, 165, 175, 179 National Institute for Vocational Counselling (INOP) (France), 65, 127–8 nazism, 7, 29, 63, 78–80, 87, 97, 105, 108, 112, 122, 125, 128, 133, 141, 144, 149, 158, 177, 180–1, 183, 197 New Deal, 99, 179, 193 normality/abnormality, 8, 11, 109, 128–9, 133–4, 137, 143, 145, 148, 150, 161, 181–2 occupational health, 9, 98, 126–7, 139, 145–6 Office of Population Research, 124, 178 office workers, 21–22, 30, 47, 176 paediatrics, 109, 113, 140, 145–6, 181 parents, 1, 24, 26, 88, 98, 113, 116, 125, 130, 145, 150–1, 157–8, 169, 182–3. See also responsible parenthood paternalism, 31, 33–4, 56, 107 personality (psychological theories of), 131, 144, 148, 180–1, 183 physiology, 98, 109, 113, 115–6, 126–9, 131–2, 139–40, 149–50, 152, 163, 176, 191

population improvement, 9–10, 30, 98, 108, 113–4, 129, 177 procreation, 8–9, 22, 24, 54, 68, 71, 75–7, 84, 107, 130, 143, 160, 167, 178, 185 productivity, 26, 126, 139, 146, 169–70 pronatalism, 5, 30–1, 55, 67–8, 75, 77, 113, 116, 121, 129, 142, 146–7, 168, 184, 195 Protestantism, 44, 55, 56–7, 78, 110 psychiatry, 6, 109, 126, 128–9, 131, 141, 146, 153, 170, 180, 191 psychoanalysis, 149, 190 psychology, 26, 98, 113, 126–9, 131, 134, 139–40, 147, 150, 152, 153, 157, 160–1, 165, 176, 180–5, 189–92 applied, 140, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165, 176, 179–80, 189–90, 192 developmental, 157, 161, 171, 181–3, 185, 189, 193 tests, 132, 151–2, 165, 176–7 psychotechnique, 126–7, 129, 131–3, 145 qualitative demography, 98–9, 121–3, 125–6, 129, 132, 138–41 race, racism, 7, 105, 110, 116, 122–9, 131–2, 162–3, 176–7, 182, 192 regeneration, 32 rehabilitation, 128, 145 rental contract and legislation, 31, 43–4, 65, 68, 77, 82–4, 88, 196 responsible parenthood, 158, 161–2, 166, 175, 177, 179–80, 189. See also generations Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, 124 romanticism, 40, 48, 54, 57 school, 28–9, 47, 80, 98, 133, 147, 150–2, 170, 182 selection, 1, 22, 26, 34, 49, 65, 98, 109, 130, 143, 161–3, 181, 196. See also marriage and eugenics, 49, 52, 66, 89, 106–7, 113, 116, 163–4, 167–8, 175, 182–34, 191 French selectionist model, 97–9, 126–134, 139, 146. See also qualititative demography sexology, 98, 109, 129–30, 184 sexuality, 9, 129, 160, 183–4 slums, 21, 143 social biology, 2, 114, 122, 140–1, 153, 161

230 Index of Subjects and Institutions

classes and groups, 30, 110–111, 113, 123, 143, 151, 167, 175, 178 Darwinism, 8, 15, 171 democracy, 175, 190 differential fertility, 123, 191 (see also birth control) division of labour, 66 housing, 20, 22, 30–2, 34, 195 hygiene and medicine, 9, 11, 16, 109, 114, 130, 141, 145 (see also exhibitions) insurance, 110–111 issues, question, problems, 20, 33, 110, 129, 138, 179 mobility/success, 10, 30, 52–4, 61, 149, 151–2, 163 order and hierarchy, 10, 162, 177 policy, 20, 56, 91, 97–8, 110, 131, 138–9, 142–4, 147–8, 157, 161, 175, 178 security, 12, 20, 97–9, 138, 142, 144–7, 161, 170, 185, 190 social psychology/psycho-sociology, 147, 150–1, 179 social workers, 34, 91, 109 Social Science Research Council, 124 socialism, socialist, 19–21, 29, 31, 33–34, 128, 150, 174 sociobiology, 6, 115, 131, 157, 161, 174, 189, 192–3 sociology and social sciences, 6, 103, 112, 116, 122–4, 126–7, 129, 145, 149, 150–2, 160–2, 165, 178, 181, 189–93 sport, 98, 109, 127, 133, 162, 19 spouses (relation between), 90, 165, 183–4, 189. See also female work statistics, 4, 9, 30, 34, 70, 75, 98, 109, 126, 133, 140, 151, 165, 169–70, 178 sterility, 30, 75, 185 sterilization, 5, 7–9, 98, 105, 108, 129, 144, 164, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186 Strasbourg Chamber of Commerce, 42

Cooperative Society for Public Housing, 32, 42 Racing Club, 89 stress, 26 suffering, 51, 53, 191 syphilis, 114 sugar, 40–2, 48, 58, 61, 85 taylorization, 26, 165 tuberculosis, 41, 114, 139, 143 twins, 151, 176 Unesco, 122, 127 United Nations, 122, 124 universal suffrage, 10, 175 universal values, 65, 87, 175, 182 Universities Chicago, 179 Cornell, 178 Liverpool, 162 London, 153 Lyon, 6 Paris, 127 Princeton, 124, 178 Sacramento, 4, 105 Strasbourg, 89 urbanism and ‘municipal science’, 2, 4, 9, 20, 31–3, 57, 88–9 utilitarianism, 34, 55–6, 139, 143, 170 viscose, 43 work injuries, 128, 139, 168–9 science of work, 126–8, 130–1, 139–41, 145–6, 165 workers and working class, 20–1, 31–4, 56, 61, 107, 151, 160, 168–9, 171, 176 World Population congresses, 123, 125–6, 132, 135, 140–1, 180