God's Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline 1845451724, 9781845451721

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God's Eugenicist

Berghahn Monographs in French Studies Volume 1 The Populist Challenge: Political Protest and Ethno-nationalist Mobilization in France Jens Rydgren Volume 2 French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s Michael Scott Christofferson Volume 3 Sartre against Stalinism Ian H. Birchall Volume 4 Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities Jean-Pierre Boulé Volume 5 The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815 Henry Heller Volume 6 God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline Andrés Horacio Reggiani

God’s Eugenicist Alexis Carrel and the sociobiology of decline

 Andrés Horacio Reggiani

Berghahn Books

New York • Oxford

First published in 2006 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2006 Andrés Horacio Reggiani 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 Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. God’s eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the sociology of decline/ Andrés Horacio Reggiani. — 1st hardback ed. p. cm.—(Berghahn monographs in French studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-84545-172-4 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Carrel, Alexis, 1873-1944. 2. Surgeons—France—Biography. 3. Eugenics—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. RD27.35.C37R44 2006 617.092—dc22

2006017668

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 1-84545-172-4 hardback COVER IMAGE: Le Docteur Carrel, de New York (Illustr. Georges Villa, Chanteclair, no 30, 1914). Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder and to obtain permission for the use of this image.

To my dear wife and children, Svenja, Maia, and Caspar

Contents

 Foreword by Herman Lebovics

v

Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xvi

List of Abbreviations

xix

Introduction

Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past

1

Chapter 1

Medicine, Miracles, and Politics

11

Chapter 2

The Making of a Scientific Celebrity

31

Chapter 3

The Best-Selling Eugenicist

59

Chapter 4

Charles Lindbergh and the Institute of Man

85

Chapter 5

The Commitment to Vichy

103

Chapter 6

Wartime France as Human Laboratory

127

Chapter 7

Reinventing the Eugenicist as a Humanist

159

Conclusion

Alexis Carrel as a lieu de mémoire

179

Sources and Bibliography

187

Illustrations

 Figure 1

Postcard issued in 1993

Figure 2

“Nobody has noticed that I grafted my hands in order to continue Alexis Carrel’s works.”

Figure 3

The Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Basilica (Hautes-Pyrénées)

Figure 4

The Lourdes Grotto

Figure 5

Carrel and his wife Anne

Figure 6

Carrel and Simon Flexner

Figure 7

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research

Figure 8

A group of Carrel’s laboratory technicians

Figure 9

American nurses of the US Army Base Hospital 21

Figure 10

Carrel and Charles Lindbergh

Figure 11

The Carrel-Lindbergh perfusion pump

List of Tables

 Table 1 Adoption of legislation authorizing eugenic sterilization, castration, and/or abortion Table 2 Legal sterilizations (approx.) Table 3 Actual ration of an adult food card holder, Paris, fourth quarter, 1941-1944 (grams per day) Table 4 Caloric needs of selected groups (Geneva Ration) Table 5 Nutritional components furnished daily by rationed items, France, fourth quarter 1941-1944 Table 6 Calories furnished by monthly rations in Germany and non-Soviet occupied Europe (1943-1944)

Foreword

 When we pick up the science section of almost any newspaper today, we inevitably come upon stories about how this or that new genetic discovery promises to give us a way to attack hitherto incurable ailments of humankind. This was the promise of the great human genome project. More recently we read of the planned vast new undertaking to decode the genetic abnormalities of cancer cells, while Africa is promised an end to dengue fever by means of genetically abridging the reproductive period of its mosquito host. Attaching itself to these remissions from genetic errors or unwanted traits, a body of writing is being broadcast proposing to unravel the genetic basis of human qualities which have historically been attributed to social or psychological factors. In our conservative moment, the balance of scientific ideology—and funding—is tipping from nurture to nature. So, evolutionary psychologists (née sociobiologists) speculate on the innate causes of war and peace, of selfishness and altruism, of sexual identities, of intelligence, and, to be sure, of the foundations of aberrant or successful social behavior. For reasons of pride, ambition, or need of support, champions of new knowledge tend to make promises and claims that go well beyond what actually has been accomplished. This is very much the case with modern scientific knowledge. We are asked to have faith that the science will— eventually—confirm the hope and the hype. It took a member of the established country gentry, a man with impeccable social credentials, Charles Darwin, to give the astonishing and humanly demeaning claims of biological evolution a hearing in Victorian England. Without the supporting collateral of the gentleman-biologist, who would have listened to the radical, mystical, and not receivable Alfred Russell Wallace, who suggested the same theory at the same time? Take another, parallel case. Both the scientific and general publics were prepared to accept Pasteur’s flawed experimental proof of the existence of microbes. He was a national hero of science; hadn’t his experiments already saved French wine from ruin? Darwin’s and Pasteur’s stories ended happily for science, but many more—usually quietly forgotten—do



Foreword

not yield sound advances. Edward Teller’s sponsorship of the crackpot “Star War” system for national defense is still being taken seriously by policy makers. Could the father of the hydrogen bomb be wrong? He promises us safety in a dangerous world. Capital accumulated in the field of science can weigh very heavily on the scale of society. When the French-born Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel wrote his best-selling Man, the Unknown—in which he argued for the eugenic betterment of the species through both selective breeding and selective eradication— why shouldn’t readers have taken seriously the hope he held out? In his Rockefeller laboratory in New York, Carrel had kept a chicken’s heart alive in a laboratory vessel for decades—or so he claimed. He developed successful medical inventions with Charles Lindbergh, our national darling of the interwar years. He was a man of gravitas and of faith. So promising in the late nineteenth century, the American and European movements for reforming society had failed by the Great War--or even before, according to the cultural pessimists of the prewar era. And for many bien pensants the Russian Revolution proved that trying radically to alter society by means of planned institutional and political change finished in coercion and violence. So, in the first half of the twentieth century—many believed—social change did not work. Essential man himself needed changing, hence the apotheosis of biological-racial thinking. In the Enlightenment, science and the promise of a better life had become twinned. But as Habermas has long argued, with time, the two projects became unraveled. The horrors of the Great War and the genocidal technoscientific acts of Nazi Germany bear out Habermas’s claim that scientific achievement has been cut loose from the project of making a humane social order with that knowledge. With the Nazi plan for race purification, we see a horrible instance of how scientific discourse can be put to the service of an inhumane project. For France and the United States, Carrel’s special contribution was to link the promise of the genetic renewal of the race with a renewal of faith. Hadn’t this great scientist and doctor witnessed the miraculous cure of a patient under his care at Lourdes? The appeal to put ourselves in the hands of God and of Doctor Carrel was a powerful one in the years between Europe’s two destructive civil wars. But in a republican France that had been created in important ways against the power of the Church, rumors of Carrel’s involvement in a miracle at Lourdes blocked his medical career in Lyon. The Third Republic’s legislature, it will be remembered, was full of positivist and fiercely anti-clerical doctors. Despite his obvious surgical talents, Doctor Carrel had no professional future in Third Republic France. His invitation to the new Rockefeller Institute in New York could have been heaven-sent. Before World War I, who cared about religion--as long as one was not a Jew—in the American medical community? At the Rockefeller Institute Carrel made his most important contributions to medical science. Yet, as a Frenchman loyal to the real France rather than the legal France, he came

Foreword

xi

back to contribute to the national war effort in both world wars. Finally, as perhaps another divine surprise for Carrel, the French defeat of 1940 removed the hateful republic and replaced it with a state, Vichy France, closer to Carrel’s desires. Receiving resources from a diminished but doting government, Carrel created a new institute in Paris where, with a staff of talented fellow scientists, he could begin to make concrete some of the medical, public health, and demographic abstractions sketched in Man, the Unknown. Carrel’s Paris institute had functioned for only a brief time before his death in 1944. Accordingly, Andrés Reggiani had to dig deep among the historical sources of several archives on two continents to establish the historical meaning of Carrel’s institute. Reggiani’s incisive discussion of Carrel’s institute—which, reorganized but not greatly restaffed, played a major role in French social planning after World War II—is a most nuanced and judicious evaluation of this wartime project. His most daunting task was to sort out what was ideology, what were primarily the consequences of wartime exigencies, and what could be a program for the postwar future of France. Carrel’s project was heavily overdetermined. Surely Carrel deserved the Nobel Prize for his work in medicine. Just as surely, to name a street (in several French cities), a medical school (at the University of Lyon), or even a pair of cloned animals (the piglets named Alexis and Carrel by Scottish genetic engineers) after him is a political act that to a greater or lesser degree endorses his eugenic ideas. All this is to say, how welcome is Andrés Reggiani’s book today. He writes the medical story clearly and engagingly. He provides a similarly lucid analysis of the social policy implications of Carrel’s eugenics and of liberal science in the US and fascist science at the moment in France. And he nicely contextualizes these intertwined accounts in the history of both France and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In our times, the temptations of a new, genetically informed eugenics and of a revived faith-based political stance—all over the world—make Reggiani’s study of Alexis Carrel both fascinating and important to read. When Carrel’s name is invoked by contemporary radical-reactionary Middle Eastern intellectuals to denounce the decadence of the West and the influence of that decadence on the Middle East, as Reggiani points out, the mystical doctor and social philosopher is someone we have to know more about. With this book we now have a rich source of insights to inform our scrutiny of promises of how faith and genetic engineering will make us better. Herman Lebovics Stony Brook, New York 30 May 2006

Preface

 This book is a contribution to the histories of the strange mixture of religion and rightwing politics, with which we have now grown familiar, unfortunately. As such, it is less a biography in the traditional sense than a discussion about science, popular culture, and politics centered on the life and work of the experimental surgeon, Alexis Carrel. It addresses contemporary and sensitive issues, such as the public role of science. It examines the process by which scientists become experts—producers and bearers of socially relevant data—, obtain peer recognition, achieve high public status, and commit themselves to political agendas to recast society along “scientific” and technocratic lines. The book also explores important topics of western intellectual history, such as the early twentieth-century obsession with decline and the interwar debates on the “crisis of civilization.” The book places these debates within a French-American frame that spans the period from Carrel’s students days at the time of the Dreyfus Affair to the reappropriation of his ideas by both the Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalism in the late twentieth century. I first came across Carrel when I was writing my dissertation on French population policy. It was the early 1990s when a polemic erupted after the Front national claimed him as the “founder of ecology and a man of the right.” By the time I started to write the manuscript, a colorful campaign of débaptisation had erased his name from the School of Medicine of Lyon as well as from streets all over France. A good deal of all this was connected to Vichy—the symbolic débaptisation of the rue Alexis Carrel near Champ de Mars was timed to coincide with the opening of the trial of the former milicien Paul Touvier. So, was all this another convenient way of putting Vichy and its present day defenders—read, Le Pen—once again on trial, as some critics suggested? Partly, yes, more so when Carrel’s racist eugenics and collaborationist record made it very easy to use him for denouncing both Vichy and the Front national. Yet, that was not the whole story; other references, seemingly unconnected to these debates, drew my attention to previously unexplored issues. Two articles, one by the French journalist Cathérine Simon, published in Le monde, and another by the British-Pakistani writer, Tariq Ali,

Preface

xiii

published in Le monde diplomatique, revealed the appropriation of Carrel’s ideological work by radical Islamic intellectuals. It turned out that his ideas were now being used both to justify Eurocentric xenophobia à la Le Pen and to attack Western (European) modernity. I found this borrowing and recycling of ideas interesting. Shortly afterwards the British press announced the cloning of five piglets. The authors of such epochal breakthrough had no better idea than naming two of the little animals “Alexis” and “Carrel.” As one can imagine, some French scientists were not particularly happy about this choice of names. Few scientists, much less a Nobel Prize laureate from the life sciences, have aroused so much controversy. Why he has remained an “ever-present past” constitutes the goal of the present study. Unlike all other biographies, it does so by historicizing Carrel’s medical and nonmedical work, that is, placing the biographical information within a larger discussion of the political and intellectual context, both in the United States and France. Except for the introduction—which focuses on the “Carrel Affair” as it erupted in the 1990s—and the conclusion—which invites us to reconsider Carrel within the current “memory wars” that sweep the French political and cultural landscape—the book is organized chronologically. Chapter 1 lays out one recurring theme of the book, namely the intertwinement of science and religion—a fundamental issue for understanding Carrel’s status as “Catholic,” “mystic,” and “spiritualistic” thinker. The chapter examines his student days at the University Lyon—the same university whose school of medicine once bore his name—; his participation in the “miraculous” healing of a girl at the Lourdes shrine; and his subsequent expatriation, first in Canada and then in the United States. Chapter 2 focuses on Carrel’s scientific career. It does so by examining his fundamental contributions to experimental medicine—vascular surgery, organ transplantation, wound healing, tissue culture, and cancer research—as well as the heterodox manner in which he promoted his work for public consumption and personal enhancement. Through the analysis of the reactions produced by the award of the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology to Carrel (1912), and his participation in World War I as a medical officer in the French Army, the chapter underlines the contrasting reactions that, for most of his life as a public figure, Carrel elicited in France and the United States—another of the book’s main themes. The public side of the scientist’s career is the main topic of chapter 3. Here we will examine a Carrel who, having reached the peak of scientific recognition and approaching retirement from the Rockefeller Institute, suddenly became a literary celebrity and polemical cultural commentator through his best-selling book, Man, the Unknown/L’homme cet inconnu (1935). The chapter relates these developments to the European and American elites’ concern with Western decline and, more specifically, to eugenics and biomedical holism. Carrel’s friendship and association with Charles Lindbergh was a crucial factor for the scientist’s rising public career. Chapter 4 examines the

xiv

Preface

implications of the relationship between these two popular icons, both in science—together they built the first working perfusion pump that allowed to keep organs alive outside the body—and politics—they made plans for setting up an institute of eugenics research. At the same time Carrel established formal and informal contacts with French technocratic think tanks and fascist organizations. Chapter 5 takes us to wartime France and Carrel’s commitment to Vichy. It assesses the biological impact of the war and the occupation, and Carrel’s decision to take advantage of the exceptional situation created by the demise of the republic to carry out his project of human regeneration. Chapter 6 examines in detail the great institution-building project that came out of the convergence of Carrel and Vichy’s ideological affinities and the deterioration of living conditions in France. Focusing on the work of the Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains, this chapter is the least biographical of all. Here the analysis turns away from Carrel—whom ill health forced to leave the running of the foundation to others—in order to pay closer attention to how his coworkers interpreted his ideas and turned France into a huge human laboratory of sociobiological engineering. Chapter 7 follows the fate of Carrel at the time of the liberation, when his anti-Resistance feelings as well as personal resentments ruined his reputation, both in France and the United States. The remaining part of the chapter tells the story of Carrel’s rehabilitation after his death, first by recycling his foundation through France’s most prestigious center of demographic research, the Institut national d’études démographiques, and second by selectively appropriating Carrel’s medical work and spiritualistic speculations, while shunning his reactionary views. Since the 1950s, streets, educational and research institutions, even a theme park, were named after the Nobel laureate, in France and abroad. His scientific and cultural exploits have also been acknowledged in the fiction work of literary celebrities with left-wing or progressive leanings. This is the case of the international best-selling novel Love in Times of Cholera, by the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. Most unexpected, however, is the rereading of Carrel’s critique of modern civilization by Islamic fundamentalists in the Arab world—quite an interesting phenomenon if we consider the scientist’s Eurocentric prejudices. Could anything else make Carrel a timelier topic? Andrés H. Reggiani Buenos Aires March 2006

Acknowledgements

 I wish to thank many people across two continents whose kindness, help and encouragement made this book possible. Friends and colleagues in the United States, France, and Latin America helped me with conversation, readings of parts of the manuscript, and guidance in areas where I was weak. In the United States, two of the finest scholars of French history, Robert Paxton and Herman Lebovics, encouraged me to write about Carrel and later read the manuscript thoroughly. Over the years I also received valuable suggestions and input from Seth Armus, Christina Cogdell, Susan Currell, Rachel Fuchs, Richard Kuisel, Jon Roberts, Robert Soucy, Judith Wishnia, and the participants of the New York Area French History Seminar. I also want to thank Jo Burr Margadant, Ted Margadant, and the anonymous referees of French Historical Studies whose comments helped improve parts of this book published earlier in article format. In France I am indebted to Paul-André Rosental, whose kind invitation to teach a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales gave me the unusual privilege of being able to discuss my work with a distinguished group of graduate students. His deep knowledge of French demography was an invaluable help that allowed me to refine and nuance my analysis of the Fondation Carrel shortly before the manuscript went to the press. I also want to thank Luc Berlivet, Patrick Fridenson, Anne-Marie Grimaud, Linda Koike, Roland Pfefferkorn, and Henry Rousso for showing their interest and responding encouragingly at different stages of my work. I want to express my gratitude to my colleagues in Latin America, at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Buenos Aires), especially Hernán Camarero, Hernán González Bollo, Andrea Matallana, Guillermo Ranea, Fernando Rocchi, and Ricardo Salvatore, as well as Pablo Yankelevich and the editors of Cuicuilco (Mexico). My wife Svenja Blanke, historian and mother of our two children, gave me her unfaltering confidence throughout the process of writing and finding a publisher. She read the manuscript with a sympathetic yet critical eye, and when it was finished, she urged me—or better, compelled me—to send it away. Finally, discussing Carrel and eugenics with my parents and

xvi

Acknowledgements

brother taught me important things about why history continues to be relevant, not only to historians but also to society at large. Institutions also played a fundamental role in the making of this book. The financial support provided by the Social Science Research Council, the French-American Foundation, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Fulbright Commission, and the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales allowed me to carry out research in the United States and France and gave me the time to write up the early parts of the manuscript. Work would have been much harder and less rewarding without the help and patience of the archivists and librarians of the Academia Nacional de Medicina (Buenos Aires), the Archives Nationales de France, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (Nanterre), the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand, the Faculté de Médecine de Paris, Georgetown University Lauinger Library, the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the New York Public Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Staatsbibliotek in Berlin, the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and the Yale Medical School. Finally I wish to thank Marion Berghahn, Michael Dempsey, and Melissa Spinelli for their enthusiasm and support for the book. Andrés Horacio Reggiani Buenos Aires March 2006

List of Abbreviations

 ACP AEZ AHR AJMS AN ARSS BAADAC BHM BKW BAM BMJ CFFEPH CIHTP CNRS CRSB FFEPH FHS INED INSERM JAMA JEM JHHB JO LC LM MRAP MRNY MSH NYT PM

Alexis Carrel Papers Archiv für experimentelle Zellforschung besonders Gewebezüchtung American Historical Review American Journal of Medical Science Archives nationales Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales Bulletin de l’Association des amis du docteur Alexis Carrel Bulletin of the History of Medicine Berliner klinische Wochenschrift Bulletin de l’Académie de médecine British Medical Journal Cahiers de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent Centre national de la recherche scientifique Comptes rendus des séances de la Société de biologie de Paris Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains French Historical Studies Institut national d’études démographiques Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale Journal of the American Medical Association Journal of Experimental Medicine Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin Journal officiel Lyon chirurgical Lyon médical Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié des peuples Medical Records of New York Maison des sciences de l’homme New York Times Presse médicale

xviii

RD RFA RUA SA SGO TD WW

Abbreviations

Reader’s Digest Rockefeller Foundation Archives Rockefeller University Archives Scientific American Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics Travaux et documents World’s Work

Figure 1. Postcard issued in 1993 by French antiracist groups for the campaign of débaptisation of the Alexis Carrel street in the city of Brest . Similar postcards were printed for other cities. Reproduced with the permission of Ras L’Front (Droits réservés).

Figure 2. “Nobody has noticed that I grafted my hands in order to continue Alexis Carrel’s works.” llustration produced by French antiracist groups to denounce Jean-Michel Dubernard, a conservative surgeon at the Edouard Herriot hospital of Lyon , who vindicated Carrel after he performed a hand transplant. Reproduced with the permission of amnistia.net (Droits réservés).

Figure 3. The Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Basilica (Hautes-Pyrénées) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Figure 4. The Lourdes Grotto at the time of Carrel’s first visit to the sanctuary in the early 1900s. Notice the small shrine, where the Virgin Mary “showed” herself to Bernardette Soubirous in 1858, as well as the many crutches hanging on the wall, symbolizing those who were “cured” after their pilgrimage. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Figure 5. Carrel and his wife Anne in early 1914, shortly after their marriage. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Figure 6. Carrel and Simon Flexner, circa 1915. Reproduced with the permission of the American Philosophical Society.

Figure 7. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1917. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Figure 8. A group of Carrel’s laboratory technicians, in their typical dark-colored scrubs and masks, handling a pump at the Rockefeller Institute. Undated photo. Courtesy of Georgetown University Libray. Special Collections Division.

Figure 9. American nurses of the US Army Base Hospital 21 treating a wounded soldier with the Carrel-Dakin method. Reproduced with the permission of the Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO.

Figure 10. Carrel and Charles Lindbergh at the Rockefeller Institute, circa 1935. Reproduced with the permission of Yale University Library.

Figure 11. The Carrel-Lindbergh perfusion pump, 1935-1938. Author’s photo collection.

Introduction Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past

 In March 2000, the British laboratory PPL Therapeutics announced the successful cloning of five piglets by the biologists of the Roslin Institute. This Edinburgh-based center of biotechnological research had cloned the now dead sheep Dolly in 1997. The piglets, the first of their species to be cloned, were named “Millie” for the new millennium, “Christa” for Christian Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant, “Dotcom” to acknowledge the importance of the Internet for scientific research, “Alexis,” and “Carrel.” To the British biologists’ surprise, the choice of the last two names sparked outrage in France. All of a sudden, they found themselves at the core of a small scandal for associating their epochal experiment with a name that, to their French counterparts, symbolized fascist eugenics.1 Most likely, the British biologists who named the cloned piglets after Carrel did so without knowledge of the scientist’s controversial record. The polemic, however, made clear that the outstanding surgeon was no longer being glorified as a luminary of French science, much less as a benefactor of humanity. Why, half a century after his death, when his name had almost fallen into oblivion, had he become controversial? British historian James Joll once wrote that “while all history is contemporary history, some histories are more contemporary than others.”2 So it is with Carrel. His name elicits, above all, French society’s relationship with its traumatic past. Yet it has also become a convenient means of addressing sensitive concerns that go beyond the limits of French and European history and politics. The resurgence of public interest in Carrel is the result of a convergence of various public issues whose main actors found in the reexamination of the scientist’s life a symbol by which to express their grievances and mobilize opinion. Throughout the 1990s, the human rights campaign against the Front National, the debates on Vichy, the allegedly ideological bias of French demographic research, the ethical challenges Notes for this section begin on page 8.



God’s Eugenicist

posed by human genetics, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism all contributed to repoliticizing Carrel’s meaning and legacy.

“De Le Pen à Pétain, en passant par Alexis Carrel” Carrel reentered French national politics in the summer of 1990, after a group of French Greens questioned the wisdom of having the Alexis Carrel School of Medicine at the University of Lyon named after someone who, as they claimed, “deserves to be included in an anthology of Nazi thinkers.” Jacques Brière, Jean-Pierre Cambier, and Maguerite-Marie Dinguirard warned the mayor of Lyon about “the dangers of using Carrel’s scientific reputation as a model for the younger generations.” The episode took place in the aftermath of a scandal surrounding the visibility of extreme right-wing academics—such as Bertrand Notin and Pierre Vial— at the University of Lyon.3 The following year the Front National held a meeting in the town of Saint-Raphaël (in the department of the Var) to publicize its new interest in environmental issues. In his keynote speech, the then secretary general of the party, Bruno Mégret, attacked the Greens for opening the gates to immigration. He stated that “true ecology goes hand in hand with the defense of identity,” and in a calculated effort to clothe the party’s écolofascisme in respectable credentials, he claimed Carrel as “a man of the right and the founder of ecology.”4 The Front National’s vindication of Carrel was largely determined by the party’s attempt to attract the potential audience of young “apolitical” voters by showing that concern for the environment and people’s quality of life was not necessarily confined to the left-wing agenda. The Front’s views on ecology and society played on people’s fears, relying on unsophisticated shock tactics. The eugenic concern about moral decay was raised during the Front’s 1990 party congress when Alika Lindbergh, president of the party’s Cercle national pour la défense de la vie, de la nature, et de l’animal, stated that “those who want to protect their patrimony are affected as much by the destruction of the landscape and resources of their country as by the moral pollution of their people.” The following year, Jean-Marie Le Pen himself linked the environmental with the political when he defined “an ecologically clean world” as one that “has rid itself” of both the toxic waste that threatens life and the “ideas that pose a lethal threat to society.”5 Pierre-André Taguieff has shown that these views were already present in the rhetoric of one of the Front national’s forerunners, the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE). Closely associated with the right-wing intellectual Alain de Benoist, this movement embraced a pan-European racism and elitist paganism to counteract what they termed “Judeo-Christian egalitarianism.” Borrowing from Carrel’s idea of a “biological aristocracy,” in the 1970s de Benoist advocated a “biological realism” that would eliminate

Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past



defective genes, or “biological waste,” and assure the preservation of the hereditary qualities of the elite.6 Until the early 1990s, Carrel was remembered in France mainly as the recipient of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the author of the best-selling book Man, the Unknown/L’homme cet inconnu. Few people recalled his fascist eugenics, and only a handful of scholars knew of his role as head of the Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains—a sociobiological research institution set up by Vichy. The Front National’s opportunistic reference to the Nobel laureate reawakened French public’s interest in Carrel’s past affiliations and ignited a bitter dispute between scholars, political groups, and the media. Shortly after the Front National Saint-Raphäel meeting, Lyon Libération amalgamated Carrel’s eugenics with the crimes of Vichy and the racism of Le Pen.7 These charges forced the authorities of the University of Lyon to consider changing the medical school’s name.8 An ad hoc committee of scholars— comprising Alain Drouard, André Girard, Roger-Henri Guerrand, and Pierre-André Taguieff—conducted an inquiry into whether the historical record justified Carrel’s critics demands that his name be removed from places of public honor. Their report condemned his eugenics and recommended replacing the school’s official name with the more specific “Alexis Carrel, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology.” They also suggested placing a commemorative plaque stating the following: “The distinction awarded to Alexis Carrel in 1912 was added to the school’s name in 1992 to stress that its name was chosen for the exclusive purpose of honoring the man of science born in Lyon.” In December 1992, just before the holiday recess, the university’s governing board voted to keep the school’s name by a slight majority.9

The Crimes of Vichy Meanwhile, radio and television stations ensured a mass audience for the controversy by featuring prominent intellectuals and academics. In late March 1993, the popular radio program “Les Lundis de l’histoire”, hosted a panel discussion with the scholars who had participated in the inquiry commission. The academics’ views were harshly criticized by some of the leading antiracist organizations, most of which relied for their appraisal of Carrel on a polemical tract published by the psychiatrist Lucien Bonnafé and the philosopher Patrick Tort, in which they linked Carrel to Le Pen and the Holocaust.10 Ras l’Front, for example, attacked the inquiry commission for “rehabilitating an advocate of eugenics,” targeting Drouard, in particular, who had just published a thesis on Carrel and the FFEPH.11 The climax was reached when, coinciding with the trial of Paul Touvier—a member of Vichy’s Milice accused of having participated in a massacre of Jewish hostages—human rights and antifascist organizations linked the



God’s Eugenicist

debate on Carrel and Vichy to their mobilization against the far right and Le Pen. These groups led a highly successful campaign for public awareness aimed at stripping Carrel’s name from streets and buildings (débaptisation). The organizations Appel des 250 and Dévoir de mémoire, for example, drew up a petition signed by Marc Augé, Pierre Bourdieu, Serge Klarsfeld, and other prominent intellectuals, asking the city government of Paris, then led by mayor Jacques Chirac (1977–1995), to rename Alexis Carrel Street—in the fifteenth arrondissement, near the Champs de Mars.12 On the eve of the opening of the Touvier trial in March 1994, representatives of the antiracist and human rights movements, teachers’ unions, student organizations, and citizens’ groups gathered on Alexis Carrel Street to stage a symbolic débaptisation by covering the sign bearing the Nobel laureate’s name with the inscription “Homage au précurseur des chambres à gaz” (Tribute to the forerunner of the gas chambers).13 The affair was also exploited for immediate electoral purposes. During the 1995 elections to the Paris city council, the socialist candidate, Bertrand Delannoë, promised to erase from the city’s streets the name of “an advocate of gassing human beings deemed unfit.” By the end of the year, Carrel’s name had disappeared from the streets and public places of more than twenty cities, yet not from Paris, where the newly elected Gaullist mayor Jean Tiberi (1997–2001) ignored the demands to rename the street. It was only in March 2003, after Delannoë was elected mayor (2001–2007) that the city council finally voted to change the controversial name for that of the Gaullist Resistance fighter Jean-Pierre Bloch.14 The intensity and bitterness of the Carrel debate must be placed within the larger context of the Vichy “syndrome.”15 As became clear in the polemic over François Mitterrand’s wartime record and the trials of Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, among other episodes of public resonance, the Vichy past was not quite yet history but rather, in the words of Eric Conan and Henri Rousso, “an ever present past.”16 After Robert Paxton published his pioneering study on the subject in the early 1970s, French academics and society at large became increasingly “obsessed” with Vichy—and everything related to it. According to these French authors, this pathological relationship with the recent past expressed itself in a partial reading of history that, like a pendulum, assigned guilt to one or another of the memories of the “Franco-French civil wars.”17 Paxton sees in the controversies and trials of the 1990s a ritualized exercise of trying and retrying the politics of collaboration. This attitude became particularly evident in a younger generation who is “infinitely eager of vindictive exposure for their elders’ failings.” The American historian also emphasizes the role of the media in shaping the French people’s way of “coming to terms” with their traumatic past. Anxious to tap into the public’s cravings for fantastic “revelations” about Vichy and its readiness to believe the “phoniest taboos,” newspaper and magazine editors, television and radio producers, and “intellectuals of the eleventh hour lacking the most elementary

Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past



credential,” have all contributed to inflating and distorting the discussion by producing a great deal of sensationalism and fabrication.18 This was well illustrated by the special program on “The Duty to Remember” aired by La marche du siècle, on 30 March 1993. The popular series featured one of the latest hoaxes, namely that Pétain’s regime had willingly “exterminated” tens of thousands of mentally ill patients. On that occasion, the television producers presented Carrel as a Vichy official in charge of psychiatric hospitals—and therefore responsible for the “genocide” of the defenseless inmates. What was perhaps most troubling was that these allegations were based on works whose scientific credibility had been highly contested. Such was the case of the doctoral thesis published by the psychiatrist Max Lafont under the sensationalistic title L’extermination douce—a study that, in addition to its methodological flaws, made no effort to distinguish between the material constraints imposed by the occupation and Vichy’s own policies.19 Thus, the vicissitudes of politics and historical memory placed the name of Carrel back on the shameful list of Vichy criminals—a repositioning not unlike the denunciations of 1944–1945. As the Touvier trial gained momentum, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech made this association explicit in an article published in Le monde. He wrote: “Near the old Vel d’Hiv, where the Parisian police packed thousands of Jews before sending them to a mort toute ‘carrélienne’…, before swearing to eliminate the ‘Jewish leprosy’ … it would not shock us to find that Paul Touvier had read the good Doctor Carrel.”20 Carrel’s defenders counteracted the wave of “slanderous accusations” by portraying him as the victim of a new épuration. 21 The dean of the School of Medicine Alexis Carrel, Jean-Claude Evreux, denounced the polemic as a “delayed indignation” orchestrated for political ends. Although he acknowledged that Carrel’s political and philosphical ideas must be dealt with, he refused to “demonize” (rendre satanique) the scientist only because he was “called for help by the great Satan Le Pen.”22 In a slim biographical essay, the author André Muré deplored the association of the scientist with Vichy, and contrasted the “sectarianism and narrow-mindedness” of the younger generation with the “reconciliatory spirit” of their parents.23 The conservative Catholic playwright Jean-Jacques Antier claimed Carrel as a “visionary” who as early as the 1930s had “warned against the dangers posed by urban, capitalistic, and industrial civilization.” He also vindicated the Nobel laureate as “one of the fathers of ecology” and a revolutionary savant who “dared to explore the uncharted domains of the psyche.”24

The Politics of Demography Carrel’s name was brought up once again during the controversies that shook the INED—a public institution set up in 1945 to manufacture demographic data and advise the government on population issues. In 1991 the



God’s Eugenicist

demographer and government advisor Hervé Le Bras published Marianne et les lapins, a highly critical study of the ideological foundations of French demography in which he claimed that a strong yet disguised pronatalism had pervaded “official” demography both as a discipline and as government policy since World War II.25 Le Bras himself was a prominent activist in both the movement against Le Pen and the débaptisation campaign. He stressed the links between racism and demography by rehashing the continuities between the “demographic bunker” of the INED and its wartime predecessor, Carrel’s FFEPH. Le Bras argued that by setting up the INED with Carrel’s population experts, postwar demographic science inherited Vichy’s essentialist and racist conception of the national population—resulting in pronatalist family policies and ethnic anthropological research. A few years later, he renewed his attack on official demography by criticizing the adoption of “ethnicity indexes” by the INED’s researcher Michèle Tribalat. Although they were conceived as a more accurate device to identify and fight ethnic discriminatory practices, Le Bras argued that such statistical methods not only reinforced “the evil of the origins”—that is, racial prejudices—but also came close to Vichy’s population research.26 Worse, by making ethnic criteria the cornerstone of immigration research the institute risked legitimizing the Front National. Such an outcome was not a far-fetched possibility considering that, as Le Bras claimed, some institute members were linked to Le Pen’s and other right-wing organizations, such as the Club de l’horloge.27

Totalitarian Genetics The explicit association of genetically produced food and embryo research with Carrel’s eugenics illustrates the extent to which his name has become a metaphor for scientific practices that threaten the dignity and quality of human life.28 At issue here is the uncertain path opened by the most recent developments in biotechnological research. In France, the controversy was set in motion after the biologist Jacques Testart called for the suspension of all further research until a public debate addressed the political and ethical implications of the latest genetic breakthroughs.29 These anxieties were spelled out at a conference held at Lyon’s Palais du commerce in May 1995, during which the inquiry commission of the University of Lyon was accused of whitewashing Carrel. Some participants framed the Carrel debate within the convergence of right-wing politics and the revival of scientific racism in the United States. Bruno Escoubès, a physician and member of the CNRS, likened American sociobiology to a modern brand of eugenics “that seeks to reduce culture to science” and “explain social relations in biologizing terms.” To him, the arguments put forward by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994) epitomizes this kind of thinking.30 In order to make their conclusions more

Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past



acceptable to present-day tastes, he claimed, the authors of the best-selling book “refashioned the ideology of exclusion—and racism—held by the conservative right in the United States that threatens to spread to Europe.” Escoubès also evoked seemingly widely shared fears about the implications of the Human Genome Project and genetic manipulation through selection and preservation of “healthy” embryos. “Such practices,” he warned, would “open the door to eugenics” and ultimately to “scientific and technological totalitarianism.”31 For the scientists who sympathized with the antiracist campaign, Carrel evoked the image of a modern Doctor Frankenstein, a scientist become a sorcerer’s apprentice who conjures the powers of nature to create a new breed of supermen. Thus, the association of his biocratic utopia with sensitive present-day issues served the double purpose of attacking him while arguing the case for a socially and ethically responsible science. JeanPierre Cambier illustrated this well when he asked “whether a medical school’s name should be chosen on the sole basis of scientific competence.” Like others, he expected that physicians would take into account not only Carrel’s surgical achievements, but also his role as a “popularizer of a morality unworthy of the Hippocratic oath.” If we fail to see Carrel’s “barbaric project” for what it was, he warned, medicine would be deprived of its civilizing mission and become an instrument of a totalitarian “big brother.”32 In late 1995, after five years of embarrassing publicity, the governing board of the University of Lyon voted to rename the school after René Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope.33

Islamic Liaisons Despite occasional and scattered references, by the late 1990s Carrel’s potential for mobilizing public opinion seemed exhausted. Unexpectedly, however, Western anxieties about the rise and perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalism brought Carrel back to the arena of contemporary politics. Few were aware of the fact that, since the early stages of the clash between the Front islamique de salut and the Algerian government, Carrel had been listed as one of the favorite authors whose works were smuggled to Islamic militants held in detention—along with those of the Pakistani Abu Ala Mawdaudi, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Algerian Malek Benabi, and the Frenchman Roger Garaudy.34 This unlikely association went largely unnoticed until 2001, when the British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali brought to the public’s attention the appropriation of Carrel’s ideas by radical Islamists who sought to cleanse their societies of Western influence.35 In one of the most cited works on the subject, Youssef Choueiri observes that, despite Carrel’s rabid Eurocentrism, his views on modern civilization, morality, and human knowledge are quoted again and again in Islamist literature published as early as the 1950s.36 Thus, the ideologi-



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cal struggle within twentieth-century Islam reshaped the Carrel debate with a paradoxical twist as the racist scientist became “one of the most appreciated western intellectuals” among the very same peoples whose rise in world affairs he had seen as a symptom of Western decline.37

Notes 1. Nigel Hawkes, “Clones Raise Transplant Hopes,” The Times, 15 Mar. 2000; “Dolly et les cinq petits cochons,” http://www.humanite.presse.fr, 15 Mar. 2000, Jean-Yves Nau, “A l’image de Dolly, cinq porcelets ont été créés par clonage,” Le monde, 18 Aug. 2000, 17; idem, “Le passé encombrant d’Alexis Carrel,” Le monde, 18 Aug. 2000, 17. 2. Cited in David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1. 3. Didier Daeninckx, “Quand le négationnisme s’invite à l’université,” http://www. amnistia.net, undated; Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes et Cie., 1994), 285–86. An official commission was set up in 2001 by the then minister of education, Jack Lang, to investigate Holocaust denial at University of Lyon III (Jean Moulin). The official report was written up by Henry Rousso and published as Le dossier de Lyon III: le rapport sur le racisme et le négationnisme à l’université Jean-Moulin (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 4. Bernard Fontanges, “Au Colloque de Saint-Raphaël. Le Pen: ‘Nous sommes des écologiens’,” Présent, 4–5 Nov. 1991, 2; Olivier Biffaud, “L’extrême droite face aux Verts: le Front national tente d’apparaître comme le seul parti authentiquemnt écologique.” Le monde, 2 Nov. 1991, 7; id., “Au cours d’un colloque du Front national sur l’écologie M. Mégret dénonce ‘le principe de disparition des races humaines par métissage généralisé.’” Le monde, 5 Nov. 1991, 8. See Denis Pelletier, “Carrel et les écologiens,” Revue écologie politique, no. 2 (1992): 111–17. 5. Cited in Roland Pfefferkorn, “Une faculté nommée Alexis Carrel,” in Alexis Carrel cet inconnu: quand la science prétend justifier le racisme, ed. Agir ensemble pour les droits de l’homme, Appel des 250, Ras l’Front, Cercle Marc- Bloch, and SOS-Racisme. (Villeurbanne: Golias, 1995), 33. 6. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1977), 284–88. 7. Bernard Fromentin, “De Pétain à Le Pen, en passant par Alexis Carrel,” Lyon Libération, 21 Nov. 1991, 3. 8. Gérard Badou, “L’affaire de la fac de Lyon,” L’express international, 7 Feb. 1992, 26. 9. Alain Drouard, Alexis Carrel (1873–1944): de la mémoire à l’histoire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 17. 10. Lucien Bonnafé and Patrick Tort, L’homme cet inconnu? Alexis Carrel, Jean-Marie Le Pen et les chambres à gaz (Paris: Syllepse, 1992). 11. Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des science sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992). See my review of this work in French Politics & Society 11, no. 2 (1993): 105–8. In addition to Bonnafé and Tort, critical views of Drouard’s book can be found in Jean-Pierre Cambier, “Le projet politique d’Alexis Carrel,” Le monde, 20 Feb. 1993, 2; “Légèreté ou provocation?” Ras l’Front, no. 15 (1993): 1; Roland Pfefferkorn, “Le risque d’une résurgence de l’eugénisme d’Alexis Carrel,” Histoire et anthropologie, no. 6 (1994): 34–37; Nicolas Weill, “Le mythe de l’inégalité des races,” Le monde, 13 Sep. 1996; Laurent Mucchielli, “Utopie élitiste et mythe biologique: l’eugénisme d’Alexis Carrel,”

Alexis Carrel, an Ever-Present Past



Esprit, December 1997, 73–94. Drouard’s responses can be found in Drouard, Alexis Carrel; id., “Défense d’Alexis Carrel,” Le monde, 3 Oct. 1997, 12; id., “A propos d’Alexis Carrel,” Esprit, June 1998, 223–27; id. “Précisions,” Le monde diplomatique, Aug. 1998, 2.  12. Isabelle Alvis, “Pour éviter de banaliser les crimes de Vichy des manifestants débaptisent symboliquement la rue Alexis-Carrel,” Le monde, 18 Mar. 1994, 10. 13. “Laboratoires d’idées du fascisme, hier et aujourd’hui: le cas Alexis Carrel,” 1994, unpublished tract, Institut d’histoire du temps présent, Paris. 14. In January 2006 Lyon followed suit and renamed its Alexis Carrel Street after the Resistance heroine Berty Albrecht. See Alvis, “Pour éviter de banaliser les crimes de Vichy”; Françoise Chirot, “M. Delannoë (PS) souhaite une réduction du traffic automobile ‘de 20% en cinq ans,’” Le monde, 18 Nov. 1994, 12; id., “Les ‘indésirables’ de l’annuaire des rues de Paris,” Le monde, 30 July 1996, 1; Cécile Prieur, “Deux élues écologistes demandent à la Ville de Paris de débaptiser la rue Alexis-Carrel,” Le monde, 5 Jan. 1998, 6; MRAP, “Pourquoi débaptiser la rue Alexis Carrel,” http://www.angelfire.com, 18 Feb. 2001; Armand Ayzenberg, “Rue Alexis Carrel,” http://www.humanite.fr, 18 Mar. 2002. 15. Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987). 16. Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Natan Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). 17. The “pendulum” metaphor comes from John F. Sweets’s essay, “Hold that Pendulum! Redefining Fascism, Collaborationism, and Resistance in France,” FHS 15, no. 4 (1988): 731–58. See also John Hellman, “Wounding Memories: Moulin, Touvier, and the Divine Half-Lie of the Resistance,” FHS 19, no. 2 (1995): 461–86; Bertram Gordon, “The ‘Vichy Syndrome’ in History,” FHS 19, no. 2 (1995): 495–518; Jean-Pierre Azéma, “Vichy et la mémoire savante: quarante-cinq ans d’historiographie,” in Vichy et les français, ed. J.-P. Azéma and F. Bédarida (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 23–44; François Bédarida, “Vichy et la crise de la conscience française,” in Vichy et les français, 77–96. 18. Robert Paxton, “Foreword,” in Conan and Rousso, An Ever-Present Past, xi. 19. L’extermination douce: la mort de 40.000 malades mentaux dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques en France sous le régime de Vichy (Le Cellier: Editions de l’AREFPI, 1987). For a critical assessment of this work see Conan and Rousso, An Ever-Present Past, 13–14, nn. 36–38. Similar references to Carrel’s alleged responsibility in the death of mentally ill patients during the occupation can be found in Hervé Le Bras, “Logique biologique de la démographie: Alexis Carrel et l’élimination des ‘déficients’,” in Transmettre les passés. Nazisme, Vichy et conflits coloniaux: les responsabilités de l’université, ed. M.-C. HookDemarle and C. Liauzu (Paris: Syllepse, 2001), 21–37; “Comment Vichy a tué plus de 40 000 fous,” http://www.humanité.presse.fr, 1 Mar. 2001. 20. “A deux pas de l’ancien Vel’d’hiv où la police parisienne entasse des milliers de juifs en partance pour une mort toute ‘carrélienne’ … Avant de jurer l’élimination de la ‘lèpre juive’ (serment des futurs miliciens) Paul Touvier aurait lu le bon Docteur Carrel qu’on n’en serait pas surpris.” Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, “Le surhomme, cet air inconnu,” Le monde, 16 Mar. 1994, 2. 21. David Barney, “L’affaire Carrel ou la deuxième épuration,” http://www.grece-fr.net, 19 Feb. 2005. 22. Michel Delberghe, “A Lyon la dénomination de la faculté Alexis-Carrel reste controversée,” Le monde, 24 Dec. 1992, 8. 23. André Muré, Alexis Carrel, ce méconnu (Lyon: Editions Lyonnaises, 1996). 24. Jean-Jacques Antier, Alexis Carrel, la tentation de l’absolu (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994), backcover. 25. Hervé Le Bras, Marianne et les lapins: l’obsession démographique (Paris : Olivier Orban, 1991). 26. Philippe Bernard and Nicolas Weill, “Une virulente polémique sur les données ‘ethniques’ divise les démographes,” Le monde, 6 Nov. 1998, 10; Hervé Le Bras, Le démon des origines: démographie et extrême-droite (La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 1998); id., Le sol et la sang (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1994); Sandrine Bertaux, “Les nouvelles

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catégories d’analyse des populations immigrés et de leurs enfants en démographie: ‘assimilation’ et ‘populations de souche’,” La lettre de l’Association pour la recherche à l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, no. 23 (2000): 1–7; Michel Tribalat, De l’immigration à l’assimilation: enquête sur les populations d’origine étrangère en France (Paris: La découverte, 1996); Michèle Tribalat and Pierre-André Taguieff. Face au Front national: arguments pour une contre-offensive (Paris: La découverte, 1998). 27. Le Bras, Marianne et les lapins, 37–55. On the continuities of French population policy see Andrés Reggiani, “Procreating France: The Politics of Demography, 1919–1945,” FHS 19, no. 3 (1996): 725–54. 28. See the website of the Rennes-based organization Sacrée Terre, “Collectif contre Alexis Carrel et ses clones,” http://www.sacreeterre.org. 29. Jacques Testart, Le désir de gène (Paris: François Bourin, 1992). References to Carrel within this debate can be found in Paul Mazliak, La biologie au XXe siècle: les grandes avancées de Pasteur aux neurosciences (Paris: Viubert, 2001), 131–35; Albert Jacquard and Axel Kahn, L’avenir n’est pas écrit (Paris: Bayard, 2001), 224–25; René Frydman, Dieu, la médecine et l’embryon (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), 127–67. 30. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). 31. Bruno Escoubès, “Réductionnisme et dérapages scientifiques,” in Alexis Carrel, cet inconnu, 14–15; Jean-Paul Escande, “Alexis Carrel, le malédiction de l’orgeuil,” Les cahiers de Science et vie, no. 62 (2001): 74–79. 32. Jean-Pierre Cambier, “Ambigu Carrel?” in Alexis Carrel, cet inconnu, 80–81. 33. “Le procès d’Alexis Carrel,” Le figaro, 31 May 1996; Pierre Le Hir, “Le nom d’Alexis Carrel, ‘eugéniste scandaleux’, effacé du fronton d’une faculté de Lyon,” Le monde, 27 Jan. 1996, 9; Declan Butler, “University renames faculty after row over eugenics advocate,” Nature, no. 379 (1996): 575; Patrick Silberstein, “Une victoire de la mémoire sur la barbarie!,” and J. Vago, “Comment Carrel a perdu sa faculté,” both published in Ras l’Front, no. 33 (1995), 3; Gérard Leclerc, “Equivoques du scientisme et dérives de la bioéthique,” Le figaro, 19 Aug. 1994. 34. Catherine Simon, “Algérie: d’une violence à l’autre,” Le monde, 25 Nov. 1993, 5. 35. Tariq Ali, “Au nom des ‘choc de civilisations’,” Le monde diplomatique, October 2001, 18–19; id., The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (New York: Verso Books, 2002), 274–75. 36. Youssef M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 127, 142–49. 37. It is interesting to note the extent to which this apparently odd association has been so far ignored by most in France, precisely at a moment when the name of Carrel is bandied about for the most politically diverse purposes. One can only speculate on the reasons for this silence. It may be argued that suggesting ideological “affinities” between hard-to-reconcile intellectual traditions would have hurt the three-pronged human rights campaign (against Le Pen, Vichy, and Carrel) to right the wrongs of the past, and rewrite history. Moreover, it would also reinforce the already widespread suspicion with which many moderate and even progressive voters regard practicing Muslims, whom many perceive as a threat to France’s republican secularism.

Chapter 1

Medicine, Miracles and Politics

 Alexis-Marie-Joseph-Auguste Carrel was born into a family of Catholic wine growers and textile manufacturers in June 1873, in Sainte-Foy-lèsLyon, a small village southwest of Lyon. After his father’s death in 1877 his family moved to Lyon, where he attended the Jesuit-run Saint Joseph Day School. Between 1890 and 1900 he did his military service and completed his medical studies at the University of Lyon. Early in his career, Carrel’s unusual manual dexterity caught the attention of fellow students and mentors. His small hands and slender fingers, coupled with the sewing lessons he had taken with a local seamstress, made him a remarkable prosecteur (anatomy assistant) and singled him out as a promising surgeon. How and why Carrel developed an interest in surgery had to do as much with his education as with purely circumstantial reasons. To begin with, the Lyon School of Medicine ranked as one of the leading institutions of medical education in Europe. Moreover, from the beginning of the century, eminent surgeons such as Mathieu Jaboulay (1860–1913), Léopold Ollier (1830–1900), and Antonin Poncet (1849–1913) had made Lyon one of the world’s most respected centers of experimental surgery. However, it was the assassination of Sadi-Carnot that, according to Carrel himself, drove him to become a surgeon. In 1894, an Italian anarchist stabbed the French president to death as he visited the International Exposition of Lyon. Dismayed by the physicians’ failure to stop the fatal bleeding, Carrel spent the rest of the decade working on a technique called “triangulation” that permitted the suturing of blood vessels without causing damage to their tissues. The results of these early experiments appeared in a landmark paper published in 1902 in the prestigious journal Lyon médical.

Notes for this section begin on page 24.

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Yet despite such promising qualifications, at various times in 1901–1902 he failed the concours (competitive examinations) required for obtaining a hospital appointment. His own nonconformist temperament and national politics came into play here. As he approached the end of his studies he grew increasingly restless and uncertain about what to do. His repeated failures in the concours were probably caused as much by his inability to find a suitable patron protecteur (mentor) as by his lack of interest in settling for a “bourgeois” career. He was attracted neither to teaching nor to “making money” in a private practice.1 Moreover, the state of science in a country such as France, with few laboratories and scant funding for basic research, discouraged him from pursuing a career as an experimental scientist. Carrel deplored with special emphasis the nepotism and power politics that marred the system of academic promotion and job appointments. From his student days on, he criticized the concours system as a mechanism that encouraged corrupt practices and stifled creativity. It is hardly surprising, then, that he was judged insufficiently prepared for his examinations or made little effort to find a mentor who could have “helped” him through the selection process.2 Carrel’s life was shaped by the conflict between the Catholic Church and the anticlerical republic. Raised as a Catholic, although never a militant one, he felt deeply alienated by the anticlericalism of the university and disapproved of his fellow students’ engagement in the Ligue des droits de l’homme.3 To a certain extent, his experience illustrates the awkward situation of many Catholic students in the largely anticlerical milieus of the French university. There was also another dimension in which the convergence of personal and public issues had far-reaching consequences. The first entries to his private diary—which he began in the mid 1890s—show without ambiguities the “existential” torments of a young man torn between his religious upbringing and the acquired habits of critical thinking.4 This inner struggle manifested itself most clearly in his lifelong interest in “miraculous” cures and his attempts to find a scientific explanation for the relationship between healing and faith.5 Certainly Carrel was not the only one to experience these contradictory feelings, nor was his quest for hidden links between natural and supernatural phenomena exceptional. After all, crossing over cultural boundaries and collapsing mental categories previously held to be irreconcilable was very much in the mood of Fin-de-Siècle Europe. What makes Carrel’s case interesting is the manner in which all these biographical aspects—personality traits, medical education, religious values, and political attitudes—converged on one particular, and very symbolic, episode: his trip to Lourdes. In late 1901, shortly after failing his first concours, he set forth to “dig deep” into the question of miracles with the aim of writing an “entirely sincere” work that would “glorify the Virgin of Lourdes.”6 The following year he volunteered to accompany a group of sick pilgrims to the shrine.

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Science and Religion in the Third Republic Carrel undertook the journey at a moment when Lourdes had become one of the most ideologically charged symbols in the conflict between the French anticlerical elite and the Church. Why and how did the shrine become politicized? We may recall that since the 1870s, the shrine in the HautesPyrénées had been the most popular site of Catholic worship. According to local folklore, on 11 February 1858 the Virgin Mary “showed herself” to the young shepherdess Bernadette Soubirous in the Massabielle Grotto, where the basilica was later built. From then on, widespread stories of “miraculous” cures attracted crowds of suffering pilgrims year after year. Initially, the Church reacted to this outburst of popular religiosity by policing its “excesses,” that is, ensuring that the acknowledgement of supernatural causation would be based on a rigorous evaluation of each claim of miraculous cure. As a result of this, between 1858 and 1901 the Church dismissed most claims of supernatural intervention and recognized only twenty-eight of them.7 Fin-de-Siècle Lourdes had the peculiar feature of being the only major sanctuary in Christendom to possess a Medical Bureau (Bureau de constatations médicales) of international reputation. In the years following the Virgin’s “appearance” the Diocese of Lyon set up an Episcopal Inquiry Commission to handle cure claims. This assembly was composed entirely of clerics, and only occasionally did it request a medical opinion. This changed in the 1880s when the order of the Garaison Fathers established a medical inspection to provide “scientific verification” of the cures and appointed the Baron de Saint-Maclou as the sanctuary’s leading medical consultant. Thus, as Ruth Harris points out, “a quiet revolution” took place at the sanctuary as clerics and physicians began to work together.8 These changes came largely as a response to the attacks of Jean-Martin Charcot—the country’s leading authority in the study of hysteria. Since his appointment at the University of Paris, Charcot had led a campaign against established religion that denigrated saints and martyrs as neurotics and their work as cases of hysteria.9 Although most doctors still scorned claims of miraculous healing as mere “charlatanism,” some adopted a more prudent attitude and even took an interest in the cures. Indeed, during the 1883 pilgrimage season, forty physicians visited Lourdes to assess claims based on supernatural causation. Although the greater medical presence probably resulted in a decrease in the number of such claims, doctors still attested to many sudden cures—over eighty in 1884. Although he was a pious Catholic, Saint-Maclou did everything to run the Medical Bureau according to the principles of science, not religion. Wary of the dangers posed by the unchecked enthusiasm of the pious, he ensured that the bureau issued a medical certificate specifying the pilgrim’s condition prior to the cure. He allowed and even encouraged physicians accompanying the sick to visit the bureau; however, he excluded all the nonmedical

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personnel, especially priests—who had previously been responsible for recording the cures. In the 1890s and 1900s, Lourdes became a favorite target of the literary intelligentsia and the public hygiene movement. As the number of pilgrims rose to between eight and ten thousand every year, the anticlerical camp stepped up its campaign to have the shrine closed down. Perhaps no one did more to make Lourdes and the Medical Bureau an issue of public controversy than Emile Zola. As early as the 1870s he had described the sanctuary as a “miracle show” and fertile ground for fantastic stories and right-wing politics. Writing in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Legitimists’ efforts to restore the monarchy, he dismissed the displays of Catholic piety as nothing more than the “death rattle of the clerical party.”10 His first visit to Lourdes in 1891 left him appalled by [t]he sight of the ill, of the dying children brought before the statue [of the Virgin], of people lying flat on the ground, prostrate and praying … the sight of this town of faith, born of the hallucination of a little girl of fourteen, the sight of this mystical city in the century of skepticism … the sight of the Grotto, of the processions in the scenery, of this flood of pilgrims … The spectacle gripped me to such an extent that, having left for Tarbes, I spent two entire nights writing about Lourdes.11

Zola undertook a second trip to the sanctuary coinciding with an official pilgrimage in August 1892. While his earlier interest in Lourdes had been the result of a chance encounter with the sanctuary, he conceived his return as a scientific investigation to gather the empirical data that would confirm or deny that a web of lies and superstitions had been woven by the Church. The result was Lourdes, a novel that, like his earlier RougonMacquart series, sought to appeal to the prevailing naturalist mood of libre-penseurs and the educated public.12 Here again, the latest medical and psychiatric theories were woven into a story about morbidity, susceptibility, degeneration, and cultural anachronism. Replaying familiar anticlerical stereotypes, the narrative described the sanctuary with lurid images of crowds, madness, sexually frustrated priests, and hysterical women disguised as miraculées—most of the descriptions of the women cured at Lourdes were based on Charcot’s thesis that miracle claims had to be dealt with as cases of hysteria.13 Lurking behind this concern with religion and the irrational was the growing interest in what became known, after Gustave Le Bon, as “crowd psychology.” Zola was certain that the suggestive forces leading to “fury, exaltation, and delirium” could be awakened only through the medium of the “irrational” crowd.14 Therefore, he criticized the Medical Bureau for wasting its time on dubious cures instead of doing something about the shrine’s unhealthy conditions. Zola’s literary campaign was bolstered by the efforts of hygiéniste physicians who saw in Lourdes the symbol of everything against which modern science stood. For them, the dirtiness, icy bathing pools, and

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disease-ridden pilgrims’ trains and hospitals made shutting down the shrine a public duty. Just as Charcot and Zola had used the latest findings on hysteria and suggestive therapy to undermine the shrine, Jean de Bonnefon did so with the microbiological theory that grew out of the Pasteurian breakthrough of the 1870s.15 Showing the same engagé spirit as his literary and psychiatric precursors, de Bonnefon sent letters to physicians reminding them of the threat posed by the sanctuary’s unhealthy conditions. In 1906, he published a tract that associated Lourdes with physical infestation, moral contamination, and right-wing politics. He described the sanctuary as a “ghetto” and “charnel house,” and accused the director of the Medical Bureau of being nothing but a “miracle-counter in the great Lourdes bazaar.”16 However, as the century approached its end, the anticlerical voices became increasingly contested by a “Catholic revival” and a “rebellion against Positivism.” This reaction against the intellectual and aesthetic trends prevalent since the middle of the nineteenth century found different channels of expression. In literature, Zola was challenged by authors who turned to the hidden realms of the human psychology and the spirit as new sources of aesthetic creation. This new fashion was encouraged by the conversion to Catholicism of erstwhile naturalist literati—such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Ferdinand Brunetière. Thus, as the cultural mood changed, Lourdes began to be seen as a formidable metaphor of emotions and passions to be exploited and written about.17 Even medicine, regarded by most as the avant-garde of the struggle against obscurantism, came under the spell of the new zeitgeist. By the late 1890s, more than three hundred physicians holding respectable positions in hospitals, universities, and scientific societies, both from France and abroad, visited the Medical Bureau each year.18 This was in itself a major attitude change, even when, as Carrel once observed, most of them would not dare admit publicly that they had visited Lourdes.19 Perhaps the most revealing example of the ways in which Lourdes encouraged medical eclecticism was the growing interest in “alternative” therapies. Proponents of hypnotism—such as Hippolyte Bernheim, Félix Régnault, and Marcel Magnin—acknowledged the limits of clinical practice and showed a greater appreciation for the curative effects of religious faith.20 The changing attitudes of writers and physicians towards religion accompanied and reinforced another radical transformation within Lourdes when, in 1891, the fanatic Gustave Boissarie became the new head of the Medical Bureau.21 Driven by a spirit of crusade, Boissarie sought to prove the healing power of faith through militant proselytizing. He worked tirelessly to disprove his anticlerical critics by inviting physicians to visit the bureau and by publicizing the cures in the press and public conferences. Shortly after the release of Zola’s novel, Boissarie organized a conference at the Cercle de Luxembourg to convince the skeptical Parisian audiences of God’s work at the sanctuary. Resorting to the same dramatic

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style of his opponents, and with absolute disregard for the most elementary principles of medical confidentiality, he exhibited a group of “cured” pilgrims and told the packed auditorium about their suffering and salvation through faith.22 Boissarie’s proselytism was part of a larger campaign to seek wider acknowledgement of “miraculous” cures by obtaining their formal recognition by the church. Despite the huge numbers of healing tales, there had not been a single official verification since 1862. However, as the fiftieth anniversary of the Virgin’s “appearance” drew closer, the rift between the republic and the church gave the Lourdes movement a distinct militant touch.23 The momentum was reached when, following the dissolution of unauthorized religious orders (1901), the separation of state and church (1905), and the partial confiscation of the Bishopric of Tarbes and Lourdes (1908), the Catholic hierarchy reacted by massively acknowledging as “miracles” many claims that had been previously dismissed. These were the circumstances under which Carrel undertook his trip to the shrine.

A Physician’s Journey to Lourdes Carrel’s trip is important for several reasons. First, it established his lasting reputation as an unorthodox Catholic with mystic and supernatural inclinations.24 Second, it illustrated the complex motivations that inspired hundreds of other physicians to visit Lourdes. Many of them were Catholics who, like Boissarie and Carrel, believed that the cures were the medical manifestation of a supernatural intervention. Yet religious fervor did not diminish the element of scientific curiosity that the cures awakened in physicians, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. In fact, many of them were mostly interested in studying specific medical and psychiatric aspects of the cures. Carrel’s lifelong interest in tissue research suggests that he was motivated by the cicatrisations ultra-rapides (very fast healing) said to occur in “miraculous” cures as much as he was by more spiritualistic concerns.25 Finally, as the repeated references to “non-medical” cures in Man, the Unknown show, Lourdes provided much of the material for his attack on scientism and its further elaboration into a critique of modern civilization. The main source documenting Carrel’s journey is his own autobiographical account, Le voyage de Lourdes, written in 1903 and based on the report he filed with the Medical Bureau. But because it remained unpublished until 1949, the only source available to Carrel’s contemporaries was Boissarie’s sensationalistic account, Heaven’s Recent Wonders or the Work of Lourdes (1909), a collection of the most publicized cases of “miraculous” healing based on the bureau’s records.26 Carrel’s Le voyage de Lourdes is the only full “account” of his journey to Lourdes. Other sources are fragmentary and cover only partial aspects of the episode—notably, his observations filed with the Medical Bureau. What

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appears to be beyond doubt is that in early May 1903—when thousands of people began to converge on Lourdes in anticipation of the celebration of the Virgin’s Assumption—he undertook a trip to the shrine as the physician in charge of a train of sick pilgrims. During the journey he assisted a young woman named Marie Bailly who suffered from a deadly form of tuberculosis. Once in Lourdes, Carrel agreed reluctantly to honor the girl’s request that she be taken to the Massabielle Grotto for ritual bathing in the pools’ “holy water.” From the beginning, he kept a record of his patient’s condition, examining her at regular intervals and writing down brief observations on her deteriorating health. Filed later with the Medical Bureau—and co-signed by two other physicians—Carrel’s report stated only that on the afternoon of the day after she arrived, the morbid symptoms observed in Marie Bailly disappeared; that is, she had a “sudden” cure. The following day, she was discharged from the Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs Hospital, where the sick pilgrims were committed, and after filing her deposition with the Bureau she returned by train to Lyon. Thereafter, she underwent several medical and psychiatric examinations and was declared physically and mentally sound. At the end of the year, Marie took the vows to become a nun with the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul congregation in Paris and lived without having a relapse until she died at the age of fifty-eight.27 Everything else known about this episode comes exclusively from an account that was conceived as a work of fiction, albeit one with obvious autobiographical connotations. If Carrel’s interest in the physiological processes of tissue reconstitution may help explain his scientific motivations for visiting the shrine, his decision to write Le voyage de Lourdes shows the extent to which “religious feelings”, as we may call them for the sake of simplicity, remained a significant component of his temperament. Much like Huysmans’s Les foules de Lourdes (1906), Carrel’s novel can be read as a counter-narrative of Zola’s work.28 In it, the impersonal observations filed with the Medical Bureau are expanded into a full-fledged vindication of the “healing power of faith.” It tells the story of how the skeptical young doctor Louis Lerrac—Carrel spelled backwards—rediscovers his faith after witnessing the miraculous healing of Marie Ferrand—the fictional Marie Bailly. The character description and moral of the novel are the antithesis of those of Zola’s Lourdes. Marie Ferrand is portrayed not as a suggestiondriven hysteric but as the embodiment of spiritual assurance and sincere religious devotion. Lerrac, by contrast, appears as a restless and tortured soul struggling to reconcile his materialistic values with a reality for which science has no explanation. Marie’s cure, Carrel writes, leaves Lerrac “a solitary, troubled human being” wrestling in the dark with scientific doubts and questioning. He struggles to overcome the “profoundly haunting impression” of all that he has seen and sets himself to reject not only the temptation to draw conclusions, but even the least flicker of thought that might distract him from his original determination to observe and record “like a mechanical instrument.” In the end, however, the young doctor

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feels that something has changed in him, as “all preoccupations with daily life, hypotheses, theories, and intellectual doubts” have vanished. He realizes that “philosophy brought him nothing but unhappiness.” Catholicism has appeased him in its stead, for “it was not science that nourishes the person’s inner life but faith.” The story closes with the crowning act of conversion, as Lerrac goes into the basilica and thanks the “Gentle Virgin” for answering his prayers with “a blazing miracle.”29 Unsurprisingly, Marie Bailly’s cure attracted a lot of attention. When the news reached the pilgrim-filled streets of Lourdes, medical authorities had to place her in an isolated room to protect her from the crowds that thronged around and followed her all over with enthusiastic acclamations. It was not long before the press picked up the case. A few weeks later, the Catholic journal Le nouvelliste (Lyon) triggered a controversy by featuring an interview in which Marie named Carrel as the main witness of her cure.30 Displeased at what he considered to be a deliberate misinterpretation of what he had declared at the Medical Bureau, Carrel responded with a letter to the newspaper in which he rejected Marie’s statements in the following terms: In the story of Mlle. X, only one point is beyond dispute. This young girl who was seriously ill at one in the afternoon of May 26th was cured at seven in the evening, and remains so to this day. Beyond this certain fact everything else is vague. The true nature of the disease is entirely undetermined. Therefore, it is impossible at this moment to draw from that observation the conclusions that you have presented.31

The editors, however, refused to publish Carrel’s rectification. Concerned about the public repercussions of the controversy, and in particular the damaging consequences for his career, he sought to distance himself from any position that could be construed as “sympathetic” to Lourdes. He wrote letters to leading journals in which he blamed religion and party politics for misleading the public in a matter that should have been investigated according to the methods of science.32 Since the beginning of the polemic, supporters of the Church had encouraged him to overcome his reluctance and admit in plain words that the girl’s cure had been a “real” miracle.33 However, his desperate attempts to avoid being publicly portrayed as a “Lourdes sympathizer” disappointed many of them.34 Not only did he refuse to acknowledge in public what he confided to his private diary and depicted in the novel, but he also criticized the “unscientific” way in which Catholics handled such sensitive affairs. He deplored their “ridiculous reports” and accused Boissarie, who had just published his collection of Lourdes miracles, of writing about the cures “as if he were a priest, and not a physician.”35 Nonetheless, his attempts to distance himself from the Catholic camp did not make his situation in the university any easier. Embarrassed by the publicity and accused by the Société lyonnaise d’histoire et de médecine of “imposture

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and gullibility,” Carrel found himself increasingly marginalized by fellow students and mentors. In July 1903 he failed the concours once again. By all appearances he stood no chance after the scandal, and he was advised to give up his attempts to obtain a hospital position. Years later, the rightwing press would single out the radical-socialist physician and mayor of Lyon, Victor Augagneur, for instigating a campaign to isolate Carrel from the academic world.36 Yet despite all the negative repercussions, he maintained a lifelong interest in the cures. He visited Marie Bailly to examine her recovery after she returned to Lyon; moreover, he returned to Lourdes several times—he met his future wife on one of these trips—and remained one of the Medical Bureau’s registered physicians. When the Nobel Prize made him an international celebrity, he became an important source of consultation on nonmedical cures.37

The Expatriate Scientist By the end of 1903, Carrel’s situation was highly uncertain. Unable to obtain a hospital appointment, he wandered between uninteresting jobs at various medical institutions. Frustrated, he fantasized about traveling to exotic places. He toyed with the idea of becoming a physician in the colonies, joining the Boers in South Africa, staging a revolution in Nicaragua, or becoming a rancher in South America.38 In the spring of 1904, without much planning, he left for Canada. One can only speculate about the reasons for what was perhaps his most fateful decision. According to his wife, the decision to emigrate was motivated by the repercussions of the Lourdes episode. One biographer argues that his departure was linked to a group of Jesuit missionaries who convinced him to introduce his medical skills to the New World. Another account gives credit to Carrel’s alleged intentions of becoming a sheep farmer—although he lacked both the experience and capital resources for such an undertaking. More recent scholarship suggests that the increasing contacts between American and French medicine may have stimulated his interest in pursuing a career in the New World.39 His first destination was the French-speaking provinces.40 In Montréal he became acquainted with the brothers François and Aldestan de Martigny, both surgeons at the city’s Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Despite Carrel’s dislike of their Masonic sympathies, the de Martignys did all they could to promote his medical skills, inviting him to perform surgical demonstrations and participate in scientific discussions. In the summer of 1904 Carrel attended the Deuxième congrès de médecine en langue française de l’Amérique du nord. His presentation on the new techniques of vascular suturing—he had published his seminal article two years before—caught the eye of several American physicians who attended the meeting.41 One of them was Carl

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Beck, professor of surgical pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago. Thanks to his knowledge of French, Beck was perhaps the first American who was able to perform Carrel’s surgical techniques. Impressed by the successful results obtained, Beck asked the Frenchman to join his surgical practice at the University of Illinois.42 Carrel accepted the offer without hesitation. Canada had never seduced him as a place to pursue a medical career. Hospital work was poorly paid and research facilities were lacking. Moreover, he could not reconcile himself with the idea of living in Montréal’s suffocating community of French-speaking physicians, among whom he perceived many of the same unpleasant habits that he disliked in the French. These feelings were later reinforced by his train journey from Montréal to Chicago. As he travelled across the western territories, he was struck by the country’s “primitivism” and empty landscapes. And yet, the New World appeared to him as a land of promise upon which “civilization will act” by producing an offspring with “complex brains.” He compared favorably the “pragmatism and optimism” of the “prosaic” English-speaking inhabitants to the “degeneration” and “mediocrity” of their French-speaking counterparts.43 Carrel stayed at the University of Illinois only three months, until he was offered a position at the University of Chicago’s Hull Laboratory. In the almost two years spent at Hull, from November 1904 to August 1906, Carrel published more than thirty articles, most of them with his associate, the physiologist Charles C. Guthrie. He improved the triangulation technique for vascular suturing and performed various types of organ transplants. As they recognized the importance of Carrel’s work for understanding the process of immunological rejection, leading names of American medical science—such as George Crile, Harvey Cushing, William Halsted, Rudolph Matas, John Murphy, and William Welch—paid regular visits to Hull.44 In 1905, Halsted and Cushing invited Carrel to perform a surgical demonstration at Johns Hopkins, which at that time ranked as the leading medical school in the United States. In the spring of 1906 the French scientist performed some of his and Guthrie’s joint experiments at the Johns Hopkins Medical Society but apparently neglected to give credit to his colleague. An exchange followed in which Carrel apologized after Guthrie threatened to discontinue their partnership.45 Guthrie’s ire resurfaced three years later, some time after he had ended his association with Carrel, when he published a stinging letter in Science accusing “some of our contemporaries” of seeking the “dubious distinction of priority.”46 The controversy is worth mentioning only because it was not the last time that former partners would accuse Carrel of presenting his work in such a way that it did not acknowledge sufficiently the contributions of others. Scholarship is divided over this issue. Some medical historians argue that Guthrie’s work on vascular surgery was overshadowed by Carrel’s overrated prominence and his “precipitate alacrity” for publishing. The Frenchman’s critics find this injustice epitomized by the complete

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omission of any reference to Guthrie in the Nobel Prize awarded to Carrel.47 Others, however, hold that the scientists’ mutual correspondence does not bear out such hypotheses. Moreover, they find that Guthrie was as sensitive to press publicity as his associate. They also stress Guthrie’s concern that his work might be “stolen” by scientists who, owing to their superior resources, would “beat them out” in making human applications.48

The “Expert Sewer” In the fall of 1906, following a recommendation from Cushing and Welch, Simon Flexner offered Carrel a position in the newly created Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (New York). Shortly before, the Frenchman had been considered as a candidate for the Harvard Medical School; however, the search committee was unconvinced about a scientist whose only qualification was to be “a very expert sewer.”49 Carrel had just turned thirty-three when he joined the institute’s Division of Experimental Surgery in October 1906.The Institute—what is today the Rockefeller University—had been created in 1901 with a $ 200,000 endowment from John D. Rockefeller. It began its activities in 1904, occupying a rented location at 127 East 50th Street until the construction of its own building on York Avenue, between 64th and 68th Streets, was completed in 1906. The new location comprised the north, middle, and central laboratories, an isolation pavilion, and a main hospital, the library, as well as its own animal pavilion, and power plant. The institute was organized into divisions of experimental surgery, pathology, bacteriology, and physiology. Its initial staff included the pathologists Hideyo Noguchi, Eugene Opie, and J. Edwin Sweet, the physiologist Samuel Meltzer and the biochemist Phoebus Levene. Simon Flexner, formerly a professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, became its first director; William Welch of Johns Hopkins, editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, was appointed president of the Board of Scientific Directors.50 At the institute Carrel found the ideal atmosphere for devoting himself to laboratory research. It was here that he accomplished all of his most significant work, particularly during the first decade. Over the years, he developed a close relationship with Flexner and profited from working side by side with reputed colleagues, such as Rufus Cole, Karl Landsteiner, Jacques Loeb, Samuel Meltzer, Hideyo Noguchi, and Peyton Rous.51 The timing of Carrel’s entry into the institute was particularly significant because it coincided with a historical turning point in the development of American medicine as we know it today—the time when the unregulated, practical, and commercially driven “proprietary schools” were losing ground to the modern university hospital. As the development of new medical subdisciplines—such as physiology and bacteriology—turned the laboratory into a vital instrument for the production of biomedical knowl-

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edge, university physicians promoted a campaign to modernize medical education along more scientific lines. The Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to appoint William Welch as president of the institute’s Board of Scientific Directors illustrated these trends well. In the mid 1870s Welch traveled to Germany to study what was considered the most advanced system of medical education at the time. In the last third of the century imperial Germany was the first—and for several decades the only—country to have set up the modern system of medical education, as we know it today. Welch was convinced that the German model of the university hospital was the best suited for joining laboratory research and clinical work in a university setting. He became a staunch advocate of medical training grounded in a sound scientific basis and inductive laboratory teaching. His campaign for medical reform eventually paid off when Johns Hopkins adopted the basic tenets of the German system. Set up in the years 1889–1893, the Baltimore-based university hospital soon set the trend for all American schools.52 Another important innovation was the introduction of full-time work. This was largely the result of Abraham Flexner’s report on the quality of medical education in the United States. Commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, his study was bound to become a landmark in the history of American medicine. The author— who was Simon Flexner’s brother—investigated all the medical schools in the United States and Canada and concluded that only about 5 percent of them offered their students anything approaching an adequate medical education. The report, addressed to the Carnegie Foundation, stated that low entrance standards, a poorly prepared faculty, and lack of appropriate laboratory facilities and equipment were “at the origins of an overproduction of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners in absolute disregard for the public welfare.”53 Following Flexner’s report, the American Medical Association set up a Council on Medical Education to improve the standards along the lines of Johns Hopkins and Harvard. These medical schools had a graded course lasting four years, the first two devoted to laboratory subjects—anatomy, physiology, and pathology—and the last two to clinical disciplines—medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. This program required well-trained teachers devoted to full-time work, students competent in biology, physics, and chemistry, and accessible hospital facilities for hands-on training. While his study was being released in the United States, Abraham Flexner went to Europe to examine the various systems of medical education there. As Welch had done before, Flexner praised the superior qualities of the German system because German clinicians, unlike their American and British counterparts, were both full-time research scientists and university professors. He also attributed this superiority to the close association between scientific departments and medical clinics in all German universities, a desirable feature that he did not find anywhere else

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in Europe or America, except at Johns Hopkins.54 Flexner called for the appointment of full-time professors as the only way to establish teaching clinics like those he had found in Germany. In 1911, he recommended Johns Hopkins make full-time appointments in clinical medicine so as to offer a scientific career to physicians who would otherwise be forced to enter the “bewitching graveyard” of private practice.55 In the fall of 1913, soon after he joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board, Abraham Flexner recommended that the board encourage the creation of full-time staffed clinical departments in a few selected institutions. In his negotiations with Johns Hopkins, Washington University, Yale, Vanderbilt, Rochester, Iowa, and other schools, he sought to set up an informal national curriculum subsidized by private philanthropic organizations, which were to play the modernizing role that governments had fulfilled in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.56 These qualitative changes in American medical education suited a temperament like Carrel’s. He had always seen teaching and private practice as unpleasant activities that interfered with the pursuit of pure knowledge. The central role that the laboratory began to have in biomedical research, coupled with his surgical gifts, made the institute a perfect setting for his inquisitive mind. To a young and promising scientist like him, it offered all the things that French science lacked. He could pursue his own interests instead of following those of a mentor; moreover, he felt treated as an equal by his older peers and was flattered to see many respected scientists encourage his work. Above all, the institute was a space where he could throw himself into experimental work without having to worry about “politics.” In this sense, the Institute’s atmosphere contrasted sharply with the situation in most of France’s universities—underfunded, bureaucratized, and marred by nepotistic practices and sectarian politics. Carrel immediately realized the possibilities offered by the institute and wasted no time in proving that his appointment had been the correct decision. New York City also shaped Carrel’s life in a profound way. Born in a provincial town and never an enthusiast of big urban landscapes, the young Frenchman experienced life in New York with contradictory feelings. Unlike most European travelers to the United States, he arrived in the city through the “back door,” by train from Chicago via Baltimore.57 Therefore, the powerful images that have caught the imagination of millions of visitors—such as the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island—were missing from the Frenchman’s representations of America’s metropolis. In the early 1900s, the expanding and noisy town appeared strikingly different from anything he had seen before. Furthermore, the frenzied pace of modernization he saw all around must have stimulated him to think about the “human problems” raised by modern civilization. Perhaps no aspect shows more clearly the ambivalence of his relationship with the city than the fact that he lived there as if he were only a temporary resident. He moved various times between hotels and private housing in Manhattan and the

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suburbs until he settled for a small apartment on East 89th Street.58 The few guests that happened to visit his dwelling were struck by the almost monastic simplicity in which he lived. Yet it was New York that brought him the public exposure that made him a celebrity, and in New York that he found the friendly openness he had never encountered in France.59

Notes 1. Alexis Carrel, Jour après jour: journal, 1893–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956), 33. 2. On medical research and practice in modern France see Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Le monde des médecins au XXe siècle (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1996); Thomas N. Bonner, Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1830–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); George Weisz, Medical Mandarins: The French Academy of Medicine in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); id., “Reform and Conflict in French Medical Education,” in The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808–1914, ed. George Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 61–94; Olivier Faure, Les français et leur médicine au XIXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 1993); Pierre Duhamel, Histoire des médecins français (Paris: Omnibus, 1993); Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Harry Paul, From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Lesch, Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790–1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Jacques Léonard, Médecins, malades et société dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris: Sciences en situation, 1992); id., La médicine entre les savoirs et les pouvoirs: histoire politique et intellectuelle de la médecine française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981); id., La vie quotidienne du médecin de province au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1977). 3. Jean Lépine, “L’actualité d’un illustre vivant,” in Alexis Carrel, l’ouverture de l’homme, ed. Yves Christen (Paris: Editions du Félin, 1986). 4. Carrel, Jour après jour, 21–25. 5. Ibid., 7–8; Jean-Jacques Antier, Alexis Carrel, ou la tentation de l’absolu (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994), 29. 6. Carrel, Jour après jour, 117. 7. The Catholic Church established a set of conditions for cures to be recognized as “miraculous” that took into consideration, for example, the seriousness of the illness and difficulty of treating it. The miraculées—as those who had been cured were called—were also required to prove that no medication had been used or that it had been ineffective. Moreover, a cure had to be sudden and complete, and must not have been improved by other means. See Paul Miest, Les 54 miracles de Lourdes au jugement du droit canon (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1958). For a critical discussion on Lourdes, see Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age (London: Viking Press, 1999); Théodore Mangiapan, Les guérisons de Lourdes: étude historique et critique depuis l’origine à nos jours (Lourdes: Editions de la grotte, 1994). 8. Harris, Lourdes, 320–56. 9. On hysteria, medicine, and politics see Sander L. Gilman, “The Image of the Hysteric,” in Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 345–

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452; Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); id., “The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anti-clericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 54, no. 2 (1982): 209–39; Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982). 10. Cited in Harris, Lourdes, 332–33. 11. Ibid., 333. 12. Emile Zola, Lourdes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995 [1st. edition 1893]). 13. Zola deliberately misrepresented real events. For example, he often portrayed wellknown cases of “false miracles” as real ones in order to undermine the likeliness of “actual” (organic) healings. Likewise, while many of his characters were based on real people whom he had either met or heard about in Lourdes, the description of their illnesses and cures bore little resemblance to what he had actually seen—or to what the defenders of the sanctuary thought he had seen. Not only did Zola overemphasize what he believed to be hysteric behavior, but he also “twisted” what he actually saw. Thus, for example, characters whose real-life counterparts actually recovered from their sickness appear in the novel as suffering from relapses; others who had never been diagnosed with mental problems were presented as hysterics. See Isabelle Delamotte, “La médecine, le malade et le médecin dans l’ouvrage de Zola,” thèse de doctorat en littérature, Université de Paris, 1996; Charles Maingnon, La médecine dans l’œuvre de J. K. Huysmans (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1994); Jean Marsal, “Lourdes: un roman d’Emile Zola, genèse et signification,” thèse de doctorat en littérature, Université de Strasbourg, 1992. 14. See Robert A. Nye, Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1985). 15. Claire Salomon-Bayet, ed., Pasteur et la révolution pastorienne (Paris: Payot, 1986). 16. Cited in Harris, Lourdes, 347. On the French public health movement and the changing ideas about cleanliness, see Ann E. F. La Berge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, L’hygiène de la république: l’utopie contrariée, 1870–1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Evelyn B. Ackerman, Health Care in the Parisian Countryside, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, trans. A. Wilson (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Martha L. Hildreth, Doctors, Bureaucrats, and Public Health, 1888–1902 (New York: Garland Science, 1987); Anne-Louis Shapiro, “Private Rights, Public Interest and Professional Jurisdiction: The French Public Health Law of 1902,” BHM 54, no. 1 (1980): 4–22. 17. On this topic see Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. D. Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 18. See Pierre Guillaume, Médecins, église et fois depuis deux siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1990; Harry Paul, The Edge of Contingency: French Catholic Reaction to Scientific Change from Darwin to Duhem (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1979). 19. Carrel, The Voyage to Lourdes, trans. Virgilia Peterson (New York: Harper, 1950), 44. 20. These theories won substantial credibility when, in a course given at the School of Medicine of Paris in 1904–1905, the psychiatrist Hippolyte Baraduc, author of La force curative à Lourdes et la psychologie du miracle (Paris: Bloud, 1907), claimed that it was possible to photograph the entities that mediated between the dimension of the unknowable supernatural and the realm of visible physical phenomena—such as the “burning traces” of the Holy Sacrament. See Harris, Lourdes, 349–56. 21. On Boissarie see Alfred van den Brule, SJ, Le docteur Boissarie, président du Bureau des constatations médicales de Lourdes (Paris: J. de Gigord, 1919).

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22. On the debate between Boissarie and Zola see Harris, Lourdes, 339ff. 23. See Michel Lagrée, “Processions religieuses et violence démocratique dans la France de 1903,” FHS 21, no. 1 (1998): 77–99. 24. See Chapter 7 in this volume. 25. Carrel, The Voyage to Lourdes, 35–36. 26. Boissarie, Heaven’s Recent Wonders or the Work of Lourdes, trans. Rev. C. Van der Donckt (New York: F. Pustet Co., 1909). 27. Stanley L. Jaki, “Two Lourdes Miracles and a Nobel Laureate: What Really Happened?” www.petersnet.net, February 1999. 28. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Les foules de Lourdes (Paris: Plon, 1926). 29. Carrel, The Voyage to Lourdes, 36–47. 30. “Une guérison à Lourdes,” Le nouvelliste, 3 June 1902. 31. “Une guérison à Lourdes,” 10 June 1902. “Dans l’histoire de Melle. X un seul point est indiscutable. Cette jeune fille gravement malade le 26 mai à une heure de l’après midi était guérie le soir à sept heures et la guérison persiste encore aujourd’hui. En dehors de ce fait certain, tout le reste est vague. La nature réelle de la maladie est entièrement indéterminée. Par conséquent il est impossible de tirer actuellement de cette observation les conclusions qu’il vous plait d’en faire ressortir…” 32. Madame Alexis Carrel, “Postcript,” in Alexis Carrel, The Voyage to Lourdes, 49–52. 33. See Father Cazer’s letters to Carrel of 19 July and 5 Oct. 1902, cited in Alain Drouard, Alexis Carrel: de la mémoire à l’histoire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 65. 34. Carrel, Jour après jour, 172. 35. Ibid., 172–74. 36. See, for example, J. Graveline, “Le Prix Nobel au docteur Carrel,” Action française, 12 Oct. 1912; Robert Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 1873–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1972), 34–36; Antier, Alexis Carrel, 77; “Pourquoi Alexis Carrel abandonna, en 1902, Lyon pour l’Amérique,” Progrès médical, no. 89 (1961): 168. 37. L. G. Walker, “Alexis Carrel on Science and Pseudo-science,” SGO 168, no. 4 (1989): 365–70. See also Madame Alexis Carrel, “Alexis Carrel y los milagros de Lourdes,” Iatria. Revista de la Federación de Asociaciones de médicos católicos de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires), no. 122 (1953): 281–93; Jeanne Bon, “Les pseudo-tuberculeuses hystériques,” thèse de médecine, Université de Lyon, 1912; Henry Monnier, “Etude médicale de quelques guérisons survenues à Lourdes,” thèse de médecine, Université de Paris, 1930; Anicet Garnier, “De l’instantanéité des guérisons à Lourdes,” thèse de médecine, Université d’Algiers, 1939; Jean Guérin, “Quelques réflexions médicales sur les guérisons de Lourdes,” thèse de médecine, Université de Bordeaux, 1939; ACP, Box 49–50, Carrel to E. Sedgewick, 15 Nov. 1921, Carrel to M. Prince, 10 and 14 Jan. 1922; ACP, Box 54, Carrel to Izard, 13 Dec. 1926. 38. Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 31; Drouard, Alexis Carrel, 103. 39. Madame Alexis Carrel, “Alexis Carrel y los milagros de Lourdes,” 285; Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 30, 85; Drouard, Alexis Carrel, 72. 40. On Carrel’s life in Canada, see R. Amyot, “Alexis Carrel in Montreal in 1904,” Union médicale du Canada 95, no. 9 (1966): 1072–73. 41. Carrel, “Les anastomoses vasculaires et leur technique opératoire,” Union médicale du Canada 33 (1904): 521–27; “Les anastomoses vasculaires, leurs techniques opératoires et leurs indications,” Revue médicale de Canada, no. 8 (1904): 1905. 42. William Baader and Lloyd M. Nyhus, “The Life of Carl Beck and an Important Interval with Alexis Carrel,” SGO 163, no. 1 (1986): 85–88; William Beck, “Alexis Carrel and Carl Beck—a Historical Footnote,” Perspectives on Biology and Medicine 30, no. 1 (1986): 148–51. 43. Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 51–56. 44. George Crile (1864–1943) specialized in military surgery after serving with the US Army Medical Corps in the Spanish-American War of 1898–1902. He pioneered research on the effects of physiology and emotional factors on successful operations. He stressed

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the importance of safe anesthesia, wide debridement, adequate drainage of wounds, and whole blood transfusions. He experimented with various means of resuscitating patients, such as blood transfusions and the administration of oxygen, and made original contributions to the surgery of the endocrine system, with emphasis on the treatment of the thyroid and parathyroid glands. He also performed one of the earliest laryngectomies and was the first to recognize the need to excise the lymphatic glandbearing tissues in treating cancers of the head and neck. Crile is also best known for his groundbreaking research on shock. He was among the first to realize the need to monitor a patient’s blood pressure during surgery and promoted non-traumatic and bloodless surgery. In 1903 he developed the nerve block system that enabled surgeons to use local anesthesia to shut off the operated area from the brain, thus confining trauma and shock and protecting the brain and nervous system. In 1905 he demonstrated that respiration could be restored to apparently dead patients by giving them adrenaline and performed the first recorded direct donor-to-patient blood transfusion. During World War I he set up the Western Reserve Medical Unit, a civilian hospital system stationed at the American Ambulance Hospital of Neuilly. Operated by the American Red Cross, it became the first hospital unit of the American forces ordered to active duty in France. In 1918 he became senior consultant in surgical research of the American Expeditionary Force. Harvey Williams Cushing (1869–1939) was the leading neurosurgeon of the early twentieth century. He did postgraduate training in Europe’s main clinical centers. Early in his career he published two of the earliest case reports involving the use of X-rays in clinical work as well as a brilliant series of studies on the effects of increased intracranial pressure on blood pressure and on blood flow to the brain. His main contribution was the development of neurosurgery as a field of special surgical interest. He introduced surgical techniques, preoperative evaluation and meticulous postoperative care, and stressed the importance of detailed clinical diagnosis and of correlating observed anomalies with anatomy and physiology. He made significant contributions to the surgical treatment of trigeminal neuralgia and of tumors of the pituitary gland, brain, and cerebellum. He devised the head tourniquet to control bleeding from the scalp and was later influential in supplementing this technique by the injection into the skin of epinephrine, a blood vessel constrictor. He also popularized the use of the small silver clamp for application to blood vessels too small to be tied off and the use of suction to deal with gross hemorrhage. Cushing was the first to establish the value of high-frequency currents for neurological surgery. He taught at Harvard and Yale and served as surgeon-in-chief of Boston’s Peter Brigham Hospital. During World War I he organized a Harvard medical unit. William Stewart Halsted (1852–1922) received postgraduate training in surgery in Vienna. He developed block anesthesia (the production of insensibility of a body part by interrupting the conduction of a sensory nerve leading to that region of the body). At Johns Hopkins he established the first surgical school of the United States based on the system of hospital residencies. He conducted original operations to treat hernia, breast cancer, goiter, aneurysms, and intestinal and gallbladder diseases. He was also an early champion of antiseptic procedures. In 1890 he introduced the use of thin rubber gloves that allowed surgical access to all parts of the body. He stressed the importance of a steadily balanced body metabolism during surgery, gentleness in handling living tissue, and accurate realignment of severed tissues. Rudolph Matas (1860–1957) pioneered the development of local, regional, and spinal anesthesia and the intravenous use of saline solutions and serums for the treatment of shock, hemorrhage, and collapse. He is best known for devising a surgical method for the treatment of aneurysms (endoaneurysmorrhaphy). He also made significant contributions to thoracic, intestinal, and cranial surgery. During World War I he directed an officers’ training school in the treatment of war fractures and military surgery. He was one of the founders of the New Orleans Polyclinic, one of the early postgraduate schools for physicians, and served as both vice-president and president of the American Medical Association and as president of the American College of Surgery. John

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Benjamin Murphy (1857–1916) studied the latest surgical techniques in Vienna, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In 1889 he performed the first successful appendectomy in the United States. Largely owing to his efforts, appendectomies eventually became accepted, routine operations. In 1892 he revolutionized abdominal surgery by inventing a mechanical device (known as the Murphy button) that facilitated the reconnection of the severed end of the intestine after a portion had surgically removed. He was the first to remove a part of an artery and then suture together the two ends. He also pioneered the use of nitrogen gas to collapse and splint an abscessed tubercular lung. His surgical studies of the spinal cord and related nerves contributed significantly to neurosurgery, and he also performed breakthrough operations on bones, joints, tendons, and the prostate gland. He taught at Rush University, the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons, and at Northwestern University. He served as president of the Chicago Medical Society, the American Medical Association, and the Clinical Congress of Surgeons. The pathologist William H. Welch (1850–1934), who trained at the University of Breslau, contributed to the discovery of the agents that caused wound fever and gas gangrene. He is best known for introducing modern medical practice and education in the United States. After teaching pathology and anatomy at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital he went to Johns Hopkins, where as the first dean of its medical school he virtually single-handedly constructed a curriculum that revolutionized American medicine by demanding of its students a rigorous study of physical sciences and an active involvement in clinical duties and laboratory work. 45. Samuel P. Harbison, “Origins of Vascular Surgery: The Carrel-Guthrie Letters,” Surgery 52, no. 2 (1962): 406–18. 46. Charles Guthrie, “On Misleading Statements,” Science, no. 29 (1909): 29–31. 47. See, for example, Falls B. Hershey and Carl H. Calman, Atlas of Vascular Surgery (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1973), 4; J. B. Saunders, “A Conceptual History of Transplantation,” in Transplantation, ed. J. S. Najarian and R. L. Simmons (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger 1972), 17; Harbison, “Origins of Vascular Surgery,” 418. 48. See Guthrie’s letter to Carrel, 11 Sep. 1905, cited in L. G. Walker, “The Carrel-Guthrie Letters Revisited,” Surgery 76, no. 3 (1974): 359–62; Carrel’s to Guthrie, 13 and 26 Sep. 1905, and 19 May 1907, cited in Harbison, “Origins of Vascular Surgery,” 411. See also Serge J. Dos, “The Carrel-Guthrie Controversy,” Surgery 77, no. 2 (1975): 330–32. 49. Letter of W. T. Councilman to Cushing, 7 Mar. 1907, cited in John F. Fulton, Harvey Cushing: A Biography (Springfield IL: Ayer Co. Publishers, 1980), 335. 50. On Simon Flexner and William Welch, see Simon Flexner and James Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Saul Benison, “Simon Flexner: The Evolution of a Career in Medical Science,” in Institute to University: A 75th Anniversary Colloquium, June 8, 1976, ed. Rockefeller University (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1977). 51. Rufus Cole (1872–1966) did his postgraduate training at the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. Under August Paul von Wasserman he worked out a method for distinguishing the strain of typhoid bacilli that advanced the development of the typhus vaccine. In 1908 he was appointed first director of the hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Cole made significant contributions to the study of pneumonia. He produced the first effective serum for its treatment and studied its impact in the military shortly after the United States entered World War I. He was also instrumental in improving American medical education and clinical research through the appointment of full-time faculties. Karl Landsteiner (1868–1943) was an Austrian-born immunologist who discovered human blood groups. He showed that blood serum from one patient would often cause the red blood cells of another to clump or agglutinate. He went on to show that all human blood could be classified in terms of the presence or absence of antigens (A and B) in the red cells and the corresponding antibodies in the serum. His work won him the Nobel Prize in 1930. Phoebus A. Levene (1869–1940) was a Russian-born biochemist best known for his work on nucleic acids.

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His most important contribution was to show that the nucleic acid found in cells is of two kinds, ribonucleic (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic (DNA). Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) was a German-born American biologist noted chiefly for his experimental work on reproduction without fertilization (artificial parthenogenesis). His work was significant in showing that the initiation of cell division in fertilization was controlled chemically and was in effect separate from the transmission of hereditary traits. He made important contributions to the physiology of the brain, animal tropisms (involuntary orientations), tissue regeneration, and the duration of life. He is also known for his work on the theory of colloidal behavior of proteins and his mechanistic arguments that explained life in terms of physical and chemical laws. Samuel J. Meltzer (1851–1920) was a Russian-born physician and physiologist. In 1904 he was appointed first head of the Rockefeller Institute’s Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. He developed the idea of the combined action of opposing processes, according to which a stimulation of a given tissue was followed by a corresponding inhibitory response; physiological phenomena were a compromise between these two opposing phenomena. Based on this theory he conducted important studies on the pharmacological action of magnesium salts. He also carried out work on artificial respiration and developed the technique of intratracheal insufflation, whereby the lungs are kept inflated by blowing a stream of air through a tube inserted into the trachea. Other scientific contributions include his theory of bronchial asthma as a phenomenon of anaphylaxis. Meltzer played an instrumental role in bringing together biomedical and clinical work at a time when the rapid rise of laboratory science was creating tension between practitioners and researchers. Hideyo Noguchi (1876–1928) was a Japanese-born bacteriologist who discovered the causative agent of syphilis in the brains of persons suffering from paresis. He devised means for cultivating microorganisms that had never before been grown in a test tube. He studied polio and trachoma and worked on a vaccine and serum for yellow fever. Peyton F. Rous (1879–1970) won the 1966 Nobel Prize for his research on cancer and the chicken sarcoma virus. His early work on the cellular output of the lymph glands earned him admission into the Rockefeller Institute in 1909. He introduced new techniques for the study of viruses and investigated the nature of chemical carcinogenesis and the role of initiating and promoting agents in tumor production. Rous also made important contributions to blood research. During World War I he developed a method for blood preservation based on a citrate-sugar solution. In the 1920s he worked on normal blood destruction and experimental hemochromatosis—a disorder of iron metabolism—, and developed techniques for studying the function of the liver and the gall bladder. In 1921 he became co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. 52. Some features of the German university system, such as the research-oriented institute, the Privatdozent, the power invested in professors, and the students’ freedom to choose their own courses, were found either impracticable or undesirable in the American setting. Educators in the United States did not adopt the German practice of postponing the core of clinical experience to the internship year after completion of studies. Instead, they followed the British example made popular by William Osler at the Johns Hopkins Hospital of appointing students as clinical clerks and dressers in the last year of medical school. Such practice led to a fusion of scientific and clinical teaching at the undergraduate level that bore close resemblance to what had happened in the German university half a century before. On this topic see Thomas N. Bonner, “The German Model of Training Physicians in the United States, 1870–1914: How Closely Was It Followed?” BHM 64, no. 1 (1990): 18–34; Ira Rutkow, “William Stewart Halsted and the Germanic Influence on Education and Training Programs in Surgery,” SGO 147, no. 4 (1978): 602–606. 53. Quoted in Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 94. 54. Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in Europe (New York: The Carnegie Foundation, 1912); id., “The German Side of Medical Education,” The Nation, 20 Nov. 1913, 660–61.

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55. Samuel J. Meltzer, “The Science of Clinical Medicine: What It Ought to Be and the Men to Uphold It,” JAMA 53 (1909): 512. Flexner’s plan established that clinical faculty would see patients in the university hospital, although the fees collected would not go to the physician, but would instead be used for departmental purposes. 56. Bonner, Becoming a Physician, 304–5. See also Keith Pavitt, “Academic Research, Technical Change and Government Policy,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 143–74; Christopher Lawrence, “Clinical Research,” in Krige, Science in the Twentieth Century, 439–59; Bruce W. Fye, “The Origins of the Fulltime Faculty System: Implications for Clinical Research,” JAMA 265 (1991): 1555–62; Thomas N. Bonner, “Abraham Flexner and the Historians,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 45, no. 1 (1990): 3–10; Steven C. Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy: Abraham Flexner and Medical Education (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 57. Theodor Malinin, Surgery and Life: The Extraordinary Career of Alexis Carrel (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 30–31. 58. In late 1924 Carrel’s apartment was burglarized by four young thieves who took some 1,200 dollars in cash and jewels. “Dr. Carrel Robbed, 4 Arrests Reveal,” NYT, 13 Dec. 1924, 5. 59. ACP, Box 18, Carrel to Attale Guigou, 4 May 1944.

Chapter 2

The Making of a Scientific Celebrity

 Carrel earned an international reputation as an extremely gifted experimental surgeon. He was a perfect example of those late nineteenth-century physicians who came to professional maturity in times of revolutionary change. He was trained during years that saw the ambivalent progress of new surgical methods—such as anesthesia, asepsis, and antiseptics— made possible by the biochemical discoveries of Louis Pasteur and the Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister. Yet, since surgery still depended to a large extent on a practitioner’s intuition and technical talent, only in a few cases did surgeons follow the steps recommended by the experts. This situation reinforced the personal authority of the surgeon, even one who was only an experimentalist. Carrel’s personal style expressed well the endurance of a distinctively individual approach to surgery at a time when the discipline was about to reach full institutionalization.1 It was not uncommon for him to move rapidly from one subject to another as if he wanted to prove something to his own satisfaction, regardless of whether anyone else believed him or not.2 He had the habit of performing a few experiments and then deciding what he believed they showed. Once he had demonstrated a fact to his own satisfaction, he moved on to something new. His certainty was intuitive, and he showed little interest in repeating an experiment to prove a hypothesis in a conclusive manner so that others could accept it. Because his impatience discouraged him from proving the same thing over and over, he tended to recognize the validity of a concept on the grounds of a relatively small amount of evidence. Accordingly, many colleagues often considered his conclusions to be hasty and insufficiently documented, and much of his work was not well accepted by fellow scientists or applied to clinical practice.3 Notes for this section begin on page 52.

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The first decade at the Rockefeller Institute was Carrel’s most productive period. It was then that he carried out most of the work that made him a celebrity. His early experimental research on vascular and organ transplantation earned him the Nobel Prize in 1912. By the time he received the award, his interests had shifted to techniques to grow cells and keep them alive by artificial means. Despite the fact that his methods were hard to reproduce and that many of his conclusions were contested—rightly, as it turned out—by other scientists, Carrel’s cell research increased his reputation among many ordinary people who were led to believe that biology was on the threshold of discovering the key to immortality. The story of the “immortal chicken heart” illustrates well the ambivalent, and at times conflicting, relationship between the Nobel laureate’s reputation as an outstanding experimentalist and his penchant for publicizing his achievements in eccentric ways. Despite all his claims to the contrary, Carrel himself welcomed the media and used then to enhance his career. As we shall see, he gave to the routine and accepted codes of experimental work a colorful and esoteric touch that shrouded his laboratory with an aura of mystery and fantasy. Carrel’s scientific career followed several distinctive phases. In the first, as a student, from 1896 to 1899 he developed an interest in experimental medicine with special attention to vascular surgery and cell research. During the second phase, from 1900 to 1904, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the cancerous goiter and published his first remarkable paper on vascular suturing. In the third phase, from 1905 to1909, he devoted himself to organ transplantation, first with Charles Guthrie at the University of Chicago’s Hull Laboratory, then from 1906 onward at the Rockefeller Institute. At the same time, he developed a method for preserving grafts in cold storage. These lines of research led him to the subjects on which he would focus for the rest of his career. In the next phase, from 1910 to 1914, he began cultivating tissues in artificial media until he was called up for military service in France. During his wartime duties from 1914 to 1918, he developed an antiseptic method for treating infected wounds. After his discharge, he resumed his work on cell culture until the mid 1920s, when his laboratory became one of the leading international centers of research on the topic. During the second half of the 1920s, his main focus shifted to the study of cancerous cells.4 The 1930s marked the end of Carrel’s scientific career. His publications in scientific journals—which in the previous five years had numbered nearly sixty—dwindled to ten in the first half of the decade. His last contribution to medical science was the development, together with Charles Lindbergh, of the first perfusion pump that allowed whole organs to be kept alive outside the body.With the publication of Man, the Unknown in 1935, his main interests shifted to the public arena. To better understand Carrel’s rise to scientific prominence we shall examine in further detail some of his most important contributions.

The Making of a Scientific Celebrity   33

The Surgical Wizard Carrel’s early research dealt with techniques of vascular suturing well before anticoagulants and antibiotics were available. It was his principal contribution to cardiac surgery, and for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He worked out the basics of his method on human cadavers and living dogs at the University of Lyon. After the publication of his experiments in 1902, his name began to attract the attention of physiologists and surgeons in Europe and the Americas. Over the next decade, he refined the method and showed that his technique for suturing blood vessels—or anastomosis—was efficient and safe enough to be used on human beings provided that all steps were correctly followed. His method relied on two fundamental aspects: first, he insisted on an extremely gentle handling of tissues, for which he devised his own very fine, round, polished needles and petroelum jelly-coated silk suturing threads. Secondly, he designed a new surgical trick called “triangulation,” which consisted of sewing blood vessels along straight lines instead of doing so around a circle. The success of this method relied heavily on his manual dexterity—he held needles with his small fingers instead of using the customary needle holders.5 Likewise, assuming correctly that thrombosis was caused by infections, he insisted on the need for rigorous asepsis at a time when such practices were almost unheard of in animal experimentation.6 Carrel’s experimental work on organ transplantation was an offshoot of his earlier work on vascular surgery. His anastomosis technique became a safe and efficient way of renewing the vital connection of a tissue or organ with its host body. He began research on tissue and organ transplantation in 1905, when he joined Charles Guthrie in Chicago. They were the first to show that when a vein was used to replace an arterial segment in the same animal, the vein adopted arterial features, that is, it became thickwalled. Conversely, when an artery was substituted for a vein, the former adopted venous features—it became thin-walled.7 Thus, as they mastered the techniques of joining arteries and veins, they made the transplantation of organs a technically simple operation.8 Carrel continued working along these lines after he left Chicago to join the Rockefeller Institute. Experiments with kidney, thigh, heart, lung, and thyroid gland led him to discern two vital problems of organ transplantation: first, reestablishing circulation between a transplanted organ and its host body, and second, determining patterns of compatibility and rejection between transplanted organs and host bodies. Carrel’s earlier surgical work had solved the first problem. Tackling the second required further research. A first step was to differentiate between three different types of transplants: autoplastic, when an extirpated organ was replaced in the same animal; homoplastic, when organs were exchanged between animals of the same species; and heteroplastic, when the donor and recipient bodies were of different species. Carrel spent a

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great deal of energy trying to overcome the basic problem of organ rejection, which he believed was directly linked to the degree of compatibility between animals because closely related donor and host bodies gave the best results in clinical transplants.9 This line of work led him to coin the notion of “biological individuality” to account for the unique molecular structure that allows for the recognition or rejection of cells and organs from different members of the same species.10 The thyroid gland, kidney, leg, and heart transplants he conducted on animals between 1908 and 1910 furthered knowledge on organ compatibility and rejection. He transplanted kidneys from puppies to cats, and on one occasion a cat with a dog’s kidney survived for over a year. He developed a technique of transplanting both kidneys “en masse” with the animal’s aorta and vena cava so that the operation was done with a minimum of suturing.11 He also performed heart transplants, removing the heart of a puppy and connecting it to the carotid arteries and jugular veins of a larger dog. In 1910, he performed the first coronary artery bypass graft—which, however, failed; the animal died because the operation took too long.12 In the winter of 1908, less than two years after he had joined the institute, an unexpected event offered Carrel the opportunity to prove the uses and potential of his new techniques. On 4 March, Mary Robinson Lambert, wife of Adrian V. S. Lambert, professor of clinical surgery at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, gave birth to a baby girl. Shortly afterward, the infant began to bleed steadily through her mouth and nose. She was diagnosed with melena neonatorum, better known as “purpura”—a fatal disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin K. As attempts to control the bleeding failed, Adrian Lambert came across Carrel’s work on anastomosis. He reasoned that a direct transfusion by Carrel’s method could replace the blood lost from the child’s system. Since blood transfusions had so far only been tried on adults, Lambert discussed the matter with his older brothers, Alexander and Samuel—the future president of the American Medical Association and the dean of the College of Surgeons and Physicians, respectively. The three agreed to seek Carrel’s help and visited him in the middle of the night at his apartment on the Upper West Side. Initially, the Frenchman hesitated to perform such an operation. So far he had conducted all his experiments on cats and dogs and had no license to practice surgery on human beings in the State of New York. Moreover, an operation of this kind on a small child entailed enormous risks. To begin with, a baby’s thin blood vessels were so delicate that their surgical handling made an operation seem highly unfeasible—one of the participants described the child’s vein as “the size of a match and the consistency of a wet cigarette paper.” Moreover, for a transfusion to be successful the blood vessels of donor and recipient had to be sutured in such a way that the smooth and shiny tissue that forms the interior lining of arteries and veins was continuous. If blood came into contact with the muscular coat of the blood vessels, then circulation would stop and the blood would start

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to clot. Carrel agreed to the request only reluctantly, after the Lamberts assured him that they would assume all legal responsibility. The operation was performed on Adrian Lambert’s dining table without anesthesia. Carrel cut into the father’s wrist and pulled the left radial artery out far enough to make the connection with the baby’s right popliteal vein, deeply seated in the back of the leg—the only one large enough to be used in a child of that age. Then he sutured them using his triangulation technique and coated the end of the two vessels with petroleum jelly to prevent clotting. The operation was successful. As the blood flowed, the baby’s skin changed from white to pink. Her nose stopped bleeding, and blood in the surgical wound of her leg began to clot.13 Carrel’s latest accomplishment was important for at least two reasons. First, it enhanced his reputation among scientists—who until then had seen his technique tried only on animals. He proved that such operations, although difficult and risky, could also be performed on small children. What made it possible—and herein lies the second reason—was that Carrel had been able to try it countless times on cats and dogs before he felt confident enough to perform it on a human being. Laboratory animals were important not only as an indispensable means of conducting experiments, but also because the size of their tissues and organs was not dissimilar to a child’s. This point is very relevant because Carrel’s surgical feat took place at the climax of an antivivisectionist campaign to ban experimentation with live animals. Particularly strong in Chicago, New York, and Baltimore, antivivisectionists centered their attack on the Rockefeller Institute, causing its board of directors to pass a resolution requiring Flexner’s direct approval for all experiments using live animals.14 Johns Hopkins’s Hunterian Laboratory faced similar problems after the antivivisection movement forced the university trustees to approve a set of strict rules regarding the use of animals in accordance with the principles of vivisection. Carrel himself became a target of this campaign. In early 1908 the New York Herald Tribune and New York World portrayed him as a “monster” and “low criminal, just fitted for the electric chair.”15 Even after he received the Nobel Prize four years later, he continued to be portrayed as an unfeeling experimentalist physiologist. In late 1912 a Texas newspaper criticized him for presenting his experiments on organ transplantation “good-humoredly and with the eagerness of a small boy who describes to papa just what the clock did when it was taken apart.”16 The sensitivities toward animal suffering were sometimes compounded by public suspicion that experimentation with human beings was but a step away. Later that year, the New York Sun reported that according to the director of the Pasteur Institute, all the problems that baffled physicians would be solved if the laboratory replaced the electric chair, and “wizards like Carrel and Flexner” were given the bodies of live condemned criminals to experiment on.17 Ultimately, however, the operation helped under-

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mine the popular appeal of antivivisectionism and signaled its decline within the medical profession. John D. Rockefeller was so impressed by the operation that he published an enthusiastic account of it, thus enhancing Carrel’s prestige.18 It was not long before the favorable reports reached lawmakers in the New York state capital of Albany. At the time, these legislators were under pressure to pass bills that would either limit or abolish the use of live animals in laboratories. Adrian Lambert soon appeared before the state legislature and recounted the episode to the committee charged with studying the bills, thus helping to turn the tide and defeat the antivivisection measures.19 In France, however, Carrel’s work was received with caution and apprehension. Personal animosities and political differences dating back to the Lourdes episode and Carrel’s expatriation came into play. These underlying feelings found ample justification for surfacing when Carrel was asked to demonstrate his anastomosis technique before his fellow French physicians. In the summer of 1908, as Carrel passed through Lyon to visit his family, his friend René Leriche asked him to assist in an operation at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. Seizing the opportunity to vindicate himself before his French peers and teachers—Antonin Poncet, Mathieu Jaboulay, and Léon Berard were present in the operating room—Carrel performed surgery on a young woman suffering from gangrene in her lower leg. However, the attempts to perform an anastomosis failed. He and Leriche were unable to stop the gangrenous process and had to amputate the woman’s leg. It is unclear whether the loss was due to faulty surgical procedures or, as others claimed, to an arterial thrombosis caused by ergotism—believing she was pregnant, the patient had taken ergot and used intrauterine devices to induce an abortion. If that was indeed the case, then the French hosts had picked the wrong patient on whom to try Carrel’s technique. Although few in his native country questioned his virtuosity as an experimental surgeon, others wondered whether their expatriated peer was nothing more than a “passing fancy.”20

Carrel’s “Immortal” Cells Tissue culture is a technique that allows the maintenance and growth of cells and tissues outside the body.21 Originally, it was a delicate procedure in which pieces of tissues (explants) were placed in a culture medium partly filling a sterile, sealed glass container. Whenever cells grew, they migrated from the edges of the explant and spread on the glass. Also known as “in vitro,” the technique was developed to study normal and diseased cells— by growing viruses and other microorganisms—thus becoming a vital instrument for disease prevention. By the early 1900s, in vitro cultivation of cells in the laboratory had become the focus of many scientists in the United States and Europe—notably, Rhoda Erdmann, Margaret Reed, and

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Ross G. Harrison.22 Carrel’s interest in tissue culture grew out of his work on organ transplantation. For any such operation to become practical, it was necessary to find a way to preserve the transplanted organ between its removal from the donor and implantation into the host. Carrel approached this problem early in his career and worked out a method for preserving arteries in cold storage and various kinds of solutions—formalin, glycerin, saline, defibrinated blood, serum, humid air.23 He saw in Harrison’s work the possibility of adapting in vitro procedures to the preservation of extirpated organs and tissues so that they could be used to replace similar ones removed by surgery or destroyed by disease. However, what Carrel wanted to do—cultivating cells from a warm-blooded animal for an extended period—was something altogether different from doing so with fragments of embryonic tissue from a coldblooded frog for a few days—as Harrison had done. In 1909, Carrel sent his research associate, Montrose T. Burrows, to Harrison’s laboratory to learn the technique. There, Burrows was able to grow nerve cells from chick embryos. Back at the institute, he and Carrel refined the method by cultivating a variety of mammalian tissues in plasma clots. The initial experiments at the Rockefeller Institute were performed on arterial sheath, connective tissue, cartilage, peritoneum, bone marrow, skin, thyroid, spleen, and kidney from dogs, cats, and adult frogs.24 Carrel and Burrows were convinced that adult tissues and organs could be cultivated outside the body.25 Although they were mistaken regarding organ cultivation, at the time such an assertion did not seem unduly optimistic. Cell and tissue cultivation was, after all, a formidable breakthrough, and it did not seem unreasonable that organ culture would follow a similar path. Conversely, Carrel was right to predict that tissue culture methods might allow the cultivation of microorganisms in living cells, so that they could improve the study of certain diseases and discover the means to fight them. He and Burrow extended their experiments with tissue culture techniques to perform research on cancer and, relying on Peyton Rous’s work, showed that it was possible to cultivate fragments of human sarcomas in vitro. By the early 1910s, tissue culture became a respected and promising research topic. The American Association of Anatomists confirmed its rising prominence by organizing the first symposium on the subject in 1911. With the publication of Harrison, Burrows, and Carrel’s work, the method was enthusiastically accepted in the United States and most of Europe. As an editorial of the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed, tissue culture fueled the highest expectations of those who saw in it a “new field for experimental attack on many of the most fundamental problems in biology and medical sciences.”26 Encouraged by their early results, Carrel and Burrows sought to demonstrate that the cultivation of normal cells “would appear no more difficult than the cultivation of many microbes” for which a “simple surgical technique, freshly sterilized glassware and instruments are sufficient.”27

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However, this initial enthusiasm was somewhat offset by criticism from two different sources. The first took issue with Carrel’s seemingly abstruse views and unclear characterization of what actually constituted cell growth in culture. Once again, it was in France that his work aroused the strongest reactions. In late 1910, he and Burrows made at least seven presentations at the Société de biologie de Paris.28 At one of these demonstrations, the eminent biologist J. Jolly forcefully questioned the Rockefeller Institute scientists’ claims. He rejected as an “abuse of language” the characterization of Burrows and Carrel’s results as “cultures,” claiming that they had mistaken changes associated with cell death for signs of cell growth.29 The visiting scientists responded with additional evidence and a contemptuous dismissal of Jolly—who continued to regard their work as inconclusive.30 Jolly was not alone in his criticism. Another French biologist, R. Legendre, argued that Carrel had not proven anything, and that if he had, it was anything but original. He pointed out that the brief notes and rough illustrations used in Carrel and Burrow’s presentations were inadequate evidence of their assertions; moreover, he disparaged Carrel’s style of presenting his experiments as “indiscreet publicity.”31 When Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize the following year, Legendre correctly observed that the distinction acknowledged only his work in experimental surgery and had nothing to do with tissue culture.32 Others, like the American Albert Fischer, were more sympathetic to Carrel and observed that most criticisms failed to acknowledge that the French scientist was, above all, interested in developing new techniques rather than applying them to particular problems.33 The other vein of criticism bemoaned the technique’s apparent complexity. The initial skepticism with which tissue culture was received in France gained momentum when American and British scientists tried to reproduce Carrel’s experiments. As it became evident that the successful use of the technique required special training and a meticulous adherence to procedure, the poor results obtained by other scientists discouraged many others. Years passed before tissues could be cultivated successfully in laboratories other than the Rockefeller Institute’s. Carrel himself overemphasized the problems posed by his technique, thus justifying complaints that his methods were too difficult to follow for those who lacked his dexterity or the technical advantages offered by a modern and fully equipped laboratory. Thus, while declaring that, “in theory,” the technique was “very simple,” he conveyed quite the opposite impression by warning that a successful experiment required a warm, humid operating room, very gentle manipulation, and a well-trained team of laboratory assistants.34 While many of the stipulated precautions and procedures were valuable, others proved to be unnecessary. This difficult and tedious method conceived for prolonging the growth of cultivated tissues by continuous transplantation was improved only in 1923, when Carrel designed his own

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flask. It was an important step forward, for it reduced the risks of bacterial contamination by limiting the number of manipulations required to set up and maintain cultures.35 The study of different media’s effects on cell growth using the Carrel flask showed that a more accurate measuring method was required. Albert Ebeling, who was working with Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute, developed a technique that eventually came into common use. Yet once again, it was arduous and required great care; as Carrel observed, “in untrained hands the experimental errors are of such magnitude as to render the results worthless.”36 Ultimately, such exaggerated warnings contributed to generalize the suspicion that the technique’s complexities placed tissue culture beyond the reach of the ordinary scientist. By the mid 1920s, there were clear signs that tissue culture had deflated the high expectations held a decade earlier. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet expressed its pessimism about a “line of research rich in promise,” whose “fruits have hitherto been meager and far from encouraging.”37 In one of the first contemporary appraisals on the subject, Albert Fischer regretted the “limited understanding” of the importance of tissue culture as a method for studying the physiology and pathology of higher organisms.38 In his address to the 1924 meeting of the British Medical Association, Carrel himself acknowledged that the attempts to apply his method had produced disappointing results.39 The method’s complexity was apparent in a contemporary laboratory manual that listed forty-seven steps to be followed in tissue culture procedures and warned its practitioners against any attempt to “improve,” that is, change, the methods detailed in its pages.40 It is unclear whether Carrel truly believed the technique to be difficult or, as some suspected, exaggerated the precautions to arouse admiration for his work. Because most of his contemporaries formed their opinion of the technique based largely on Carrel’s published accounts, it seems reasonable that many were discouraged by what appeared to be the method’s intrinsic complexities. There were others, like W. H. Lewis and R. M. Lewis, who instead of paying excessive attention to technical intricacies, applied the technique successfully to specific problems; however, their work was overshadowed by Carrel’s rising popularity and the publicity given to his work.41 Recent appraisals tend to confirm the view that whereas Carrel’s work established tissue culture as a research technique with wide applications, his writings on the technique’s difficulties discouraged many from using it. In fact, as Jan Witkowski has pointed out, it could be argued that Carrel’s work had a negative effect on tissue culture studies. Yet, as he also reminds us, the Frenchman was able to grow cells many years before antibiotics were available. This was an amazing fact itself, one that bore out his insistence on the need for asepsis.42

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Laboratory Work as Theater In part, the critical reception of Carrel’s tissue culture research may be understood as a specific case of what the polymath Gunther S. Stent calls “prematurity in scientific discovery.” Carrel’s findings were premature because the proofs he provided did not meet the standards and expectations set and shared by other scientists. Nor were they able to confirm or disprove his hypotheses, or to develop an experimental system that could be followed by everyone. His animal transplant studies are another case in point. He held that the rejection of transplanted tissues and organs in mammals was caused by the “biological individuality” of each living organism. At about the the same time, his fellow French scientist Charles Richet—winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of the process of anaphylaxis—coined the related notion of “biological personality.” Although Carrel and Richet were widely circulated, their contemporaries were unable to follow their ideas because the immunological and biochemical procedures of the 1910s did not allow visualization of the minuscule differences among cells and tissues.43 Misgivings generated by the premature character of Carrel’s work were compounded by his flamboyant style. Some of his critics suspected that he deliberately exaggerated the conditions for successful experimentation— elaborate aseptic precautions, for example—out of a certain egocentrism.44 Studies of tissue culture reception agree that this early insistence on adhering to prescribed methods gave the technique an air of mystical difficulty, turning its “esoteric” methods into “formulas that assumed the role of spells in magic.”45 Carrel’s eccentric personality and flair for publicity had much to do with this verdict. Many believed that the visual environment where he conducted his experiments caused tissue culture to be “wrapped up from the beginning in a considerable cocoon of mumbo-jumbo.”46 This was a direct reference to the peculiar atmosphere of his laboratory. The operating room, in particular, had been specially designed so that environmental conditions could be used to maximize surgical work. For example, in order to reduce glare and improve vision, he had walls and floors painted in dark colors, used black linen, and had the staff clad in black surgical gowns. Likewise, to prevent bacterial contamination, he had his operating room built entirely of lead so that it could be easily sterilized with steam.47 It is not hard to imagine the impression that such an atmosphere must have made on those who watched Carrel and his staff perform a surgical experiment. Soon his laboratory acquired the “aura of a sanctuary where masked acolytes clad in black gowns and caps performed the aseptic mysteries of experimental surgery and tissue culture.” This picturesque mise en scène was well captured by a Time article titled “Men in Black.”48 In it, Carrel appeared as “the master of purified, black-clad servants” who ruled over a “pure and dark domain” of “black, dustless, germless laboratories.”49 Concerned about the negative impact of the Frenchman’s

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theatrical set up on tissue culture research, scientists tended to regard his eccentricity less candidly, as is evident in the following passage from a textbook on tissue culture: The grey walls, black gowns, masks, and hoods; the shining twisted glass and pulsating colored fluids; the gleaming stainless steel, hidden steam jets, enclosed microscopes and huge witches’ cauldrons of the “great” laboratories of “tissue culture”, have led so far too many persons to consider cell culture too abstruse, recondite and sacrosanct a field to be invaded by the mere hoi polloi!50

Perhaps no example illustrates the cultural dimension of Carrel’s career more tellingly than his famous “immortal chicken heart.” In January 1912, he removed a small fragment of heart muscle—the size of a pinhead— from an eighteen-day old chick embryo and placed it in an artificial medium (plasma). Withstanding several transfers into fresh nutrient mediums, the fragment pulsated for just over one hundred days after its removal from the original heart. As connective tissue cells (fibroblasts) gradually outgrew the muscle cells, Carrel and his technicians obtained a pure strain of cells that no longer pulsated and continued to form a network of tissue in an entirely artificial environment.51 They claimed—incorrectly, as we shall see—that they were able to keep the original cell strain “alive” year after year (the culture “died” in 1942 after an assistant failed to replenish it with fresh nutrients).52 This experiment became Carrel’s most widely publicized feat largely because the public believed it would make real the dream of “immortality.”53 A reporter who visited Carrel’s military hospital in 1916 described the scientist as the man who had found the “‘Fountain of Perpetual Youth’ somewhere in the vicinity of the Rockefeller Institute.”54 Albert Ebeling, who assisted Carrel in this project for almost three decades, referred to the “legends” fed by this “oft-falsified scientific ‘celebrity.’” For instance, it was reported that Carrel’s original tiny fragment of chick embryo heart tissue had grown into a “large, pulsating chicken heart.” Another story claimed that the laboratory staff had to “snip off” bits of the animal heart from time to time in order to “hold it in bounds.” An even more fantastic report announced that the “living thing” was kept in a glass jar on a white marble slab as scientists crowded around it, “watching and tending it constantly, day and night!”55 No other scientist was able to confirm, much less replicate, Carrel’s experiment of serially propagating chick fibroblasts for more than one year. As cell biologists would show later, Carrel’s cultures neither involved a chicken heart nor were immortal. What he and his team kept “alive” for thirty-four years was a culture of fibroblasts from an embryonic chicken heart, something quite different from a full “heart.” In the 1960s, the gerontologist Leonard Hayflick, responsible for discovering that cultivated human and animal cells had a finite capacity to replicate and function, disproved Carrel’s conclusions.56 Suspecting that the “immortality” of

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Carrel’s cells was due to a deliberate or accidental replenishing of the cultures with fresh cells, Hayflick challenged Raymond Parker, Carrel’s chief technician in charge of keeping the cultures, to reproduce the experiment. When he failed, Parker confirmed Hayflick’s conviction that Carrel’s apparent success lay in the method for preparing the chick embryo extract used to feed the culture. Moreover, Parker admitted that his technicians, and probably Carrel too, were aware of this contamination of the cultures since on several occasions they had found islands of fibroblasts several millimeters away from the allegedly immortal culture. Despite these findings, Carrel’s erroneous claims survive in the imagination of many misinformed biomedical scientists who, surprising though it may seem, naively praise the now debunked legend of the “immortal chicken heart.”57 The timing of the Nobel Prize in October 1912—awarded after he announced the results of his chick fibroblast experiment—popularized Carrel’s unwarranted conclusions and magnified beyond reason the possibilities offered by tissue culture. The American press hailed him as a “Wizard of Oz” who sought to “assure us all a permanent life” by discovering its secret in the “thumping flesh” of the chicken heart.58 Newsweek publicized his “tricks of biological magic” in a report on the fifty-sixth annual exhibition of the New York Microscopical Society, held at the American Museum of Natural History in December 1933.59 According to the weekly, “of all unseen marvels along the frontier of the invisible” displayed at the exhibition, by far the “greatest wonder” that attracted most visitors was a film depicting a bit of chicken heart “inspired by the brilliant mind of Dr. Alexis Carrel.” Two years later, the same magazine reported the resounding success of a conference given by the “herald of immortality” at the New York Academy of Medicine (see chapter 4 of this volume).60 Commenting on the event’s extensive public repercussions, Time stated that “nothing quite like it had happened to a doctor since Dr. Carrel, 24 years ago, announced that he had started a piece of chicken embryo toward perpetual life.”61 While singular in many ways, Carrel’s public profile was not unique. His colleague at the Rockefeller Institute, the German-born arch-mechanist biologist Jacques Loeb, also shared the Frenchman’s high media exposure. Both were “visible scientists” working on sensational topics at an institution that brought them unusual public visibility. They moreover came to prominence at a time when the general level of science coverage in the press was low—for example, in the 1900s only three American newspapers had expert science writers on retainer.62 Known for his theory of “artificial parthenogenesis” (reproduction without fertilization) Loeb was the first major scientist to be publicly linked to the possibility of creating life by artificial methods. In 1899 the embryologist and geneticist T. H. Morgan (with whom Loeb had worked first at Bryn Mawr and then in Chicago) discovered that sometimes an unfertilized egg could be induced to divide itself in hypertonic water. However, while Morgan saw this as a pathological—that is, exceptional—phenomenon, Loeb thought it could

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be subjected to manipulation. His experiments on the artificial fertilization of sea urchins and frogs’ eggs earned him great notoriety and fed the wildest fantasies regarding the power of biology, and biologists, to create and manipulate life. Despite the differences that separated them—notably, their philosophical outlook on life—Loeb’s attitude was as contradictory as Carrel’s. While they were both highly circumspect in the descriptions of actual experiments that they published in scientific journals, these dry accounts of bare scientific details were belied by their quite different reaction to journalistic attention. That is to say, even as they disapproved of the wilder interpretations of their work, they sought and used the headlines to promote their career and scientific agenda.63

Into the Pantheon of World Science As he browsed the morning paper on 11 October 1912, Carrel learned that the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm had awarded him the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. The prize, established and endowed by the will of Alfred Nobel, had been given annually since 1901 for outstanding achievement in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and world peace. Each winner received a gold medal, a diploma bearing a citation, and a sum equivalent to forty thousand dollars.64 At thirty-nine, Carrel became the youngest scientist ever to be distinguished with this prestigious award. He was the second surgeon to receive the award, after Theodor Kocher (1909), and one of the four Frenchmen so honored to date with the distinction, the others being the bacteriologist Alphonse Laveran (1907) and the chemists Victor Grignard and Paul Sabatier (1912). More importantly for his career at the Rockefeller Institute, he was the first scientist to bring the Nobel Prize to American medicine.65 Upon his arrival that morning at the institute, he found a telegram from Sweden bearing the official confirmation of the news. Surprised and seemingly unable to grasp the full significance of the event, he set about on his daily routine. Since he was reluctant to disrupt the peaceful monotony of his work, he was disinclined to take the trip to Sweden to receive the prize until Simon Flexner, who was well aware of the prestige that the event would bring to the institute, convinced him to go. As telegrams from colleagues, friends, and unknown admirers piled up on his secretary’s desk, a crowd of reporters and passers-by gathered at the building’s entrance hoping to meet, or even only glimpse, the distinguished scientist.66 No event expressed the respect that Carrel had earned in the United States with greater intensity than the ceremony held at City College on 16 November 1912. On that day, the New York institution celebrated “the honor that has come to the City itself through the award of the Nobel Prize to Dr. Alexis Carrel.” US President William Taft and the French Ambassador to the United States, J. J. Jusserand—a Lyonnais like Carrel—attended

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the event. Seated in the crowded College’s Great Hall, Carrel was flattered by his hosts’ generous words. Some of the speakers presented the prize as a symbol that would consolidate the relationship between France and the United States, while others placed the laureate in the distinguished genealogy of those who had contributed to the advancement of medical science. Ambassador Jusserand even predicted that Carrel’s portrait would be displayed in Lyon’s historical museum alongside those of André-Marie Ampère and Madame Récamier. In his short speech, given in English, Carrel acknowledged the influence of Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, and his mentor Léopold Ollier. However, most of his words of gratitude went to Simon Flexner and the Rockefeller Institute, both of which he thanked for making possible “some of the dreams inspired by those great men.”67 Three weeks after his public consecration in the United States, Carrel sailed to Stockholm for the official awards ceremony.68 The magnificent event was held on the evening of 10 December at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. King Gustav and the royal family presided, and the gala was attended by members of the Nobel family, representatives of the Swedish government and parliament, and respected figures from the literary and scientific world. Nonetheless, the ceremony presented some complications. Resentful over what he considered systematic attempts by French physicians to undermine his career, Carrel believed that French science deserved no part of the credit for his achievements. Therefore, he refused to let French authorities represent him at the event. Besides, and more tenably, although he was a French citizen, the work for which the prize was awarded had been conducted at an American institution. As a compromise, it was decided that the American Ambassador to Sweden would introduce the Nobel laureate. Read by the Caroline Institute professor and Nobel Committee member Jules Ackerman, the citation highlighted Carrel’s contributions to vascular surgery and organ transplantation. Ackerman’s closing remarks were a gesture aimed to please French sensitivities: “The piercing and luminous intelligence that you have received as an inheritance from your country—from that France to which humanity owes so many benefits—is united to the courageous and determined activity of your adopted country, and these marvelous operations of which I speak are the evident result of this happy collaboration.”69 As in sports, receipt of the prize was interpreted as a confirmation of national strength and prestige—despite the fact that European scientists were increasingly mobile and showed a marked tendency to migrate westwards.70 Thus, although some were displeased by the Nobel Committee’s and Carrel’s failure to acknowledge the contributions of other scientists—notably Guthrie—to Carrel’s findings, in the United States the news was enthusiastically received as a victory for American science. The press portrayed Carrel as “their” Nobel Prize and “the first American” to win the prestigious award.71 So well deserved was the prize that, according to Harvey Cushing, the Frenchman would have earned it even if he had

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gone “into horticulture below the Equator.”72 The award also buttressed Carrel’s rising popularity among the public. His distinctive looks, strong French accent, and eccentric manners added a substantial element of charm that smoothed the scientist’s way into the elite circles of New York society—one journalist even called him a “son of New York City.” A reporter from Collier’s expressed this celebrity well when he wrote that “[t]housands of people who never knew or cared to know the Wizard of Oz [Carrel] before he was singled out by the Swedish Academy to receive the Nobel Prize are suddenly eager to find out what he looks like and whether he eats like ordinary human beings, and ask him foolish questions … And lovely ladies, and many more who are not lovely, but merely belong to the mob of millionaires, are eager to invite him to their tables and offer him inane compliments, so that they might have the latest nose to exhibit.”73 Reactions in France were more ambivalent. To some extent they reflected both France’s larger political divisions and the mixed reception of Carrel’s work. By and large, and revealing the patriotic potential of cultural achievements, the French press celebrated the Nobel Prize as a triumph of national science. La France illustrée wrote: “We can still claim Doctor Alexis Carrel … as one of ours … Even if he lives in America the illustrious surgeon is French by birth and education. His amazing suturing and transplantation experiments would not have been successful if the work of the French school, and in particular that of the Pasteur Institute, had not prepared the ground through the discoveries that have revolutionized nineteenth-century medicine and surgery.”74 Republican and moderate journals emphasized the contrast between the euphoria of American official authorities and the indifference of their French counterparts. The Télégramme de Toulouse contrasted the unprecedented splendor with which Carrel was acclaimed at City College with the “inexplicable ingratitude” shown by French representatives toward someone who enhanced the nation’s world prestige. The journalist found it unacceptable that Carrel had “received not a single word of praise” from the head of state, the ministry of education, the Institut de France, the Sorbonne, or the School of Medicine of Lyon.75 Although this was not entirely true—Carrel did receive a letter of congratulations from the president of the University of Lyon—what matters here is that many believed that Carrel had been unjustly neglected in his own country. These views were confirmed by the America media. In late 1912 and early 1913 the New York Times ran headlines such as “France neglects Carrel” and “France May Lose Carrel”—an indirect reference to the widespread rumor that Carrel would soon take up the American citizenship, which he never did.76 The Parisian Le temps took another tack, reminding its readers of how others had tried to claim France’s illustrious scientist: When we think that it was the German scientists who, as a majority, voted for him for as a candidate for the Nobel Prize! Germany brought this Frenchman to

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the attention of the world. She even offered to publish in German the results of his research. By praising him, she sought to confiscate him from us.77

The nationalist and monarchist press went further along this line and blamed Carrel’s expatriation on the “persecutory” campaign carried out by the physician and anticlerical mayor of Lyon, Victor Augagneur. In one of the most typical attacks of this kind, and reflecting the widespread antiSemitism of the time, Action française wrote: Doctor Carrel is French. It is a fact worth mentioning [for] it brings into light the marvelous creative qualities of our nation. Each time a new trail is opened, a new scientific synthesis is formulated, it is thanks to the efforts of one of our compatriots… Yet, in our country invaded by métèques, in this France that opens wide the doors of the Pasteur Institute to the Jews of Russia, there is no place for Doctor Carrel. When he was a student in Lyon, today’s laureate promised the highest hopes; but he attended mass without hiding it, and this earned him the hostility of [Victor] Augagneur. This brutal sectarian, then professor at the University (he was also the mayor of Lyon), hindered the career of this devout churchgoer. And doctor Carrel expatriated himself … It is nonetheless fortunate that [Augagneur] could not treat the physician Carrel the way the “great predecessors” treated the chemist Lavoisier.78

The Nobel Laureate Goes to War In December 1913 Carrel married Anne-Marie-Laure-Pétronille Gourlez de la Motte. The newlyweds had met in Lourdes in 1910, during the annual national pilgrimage. Anne-Marie was part of a group of Red Cross nurses working as volunteers with the Rennes chapter of the Congregation of the Assumptionist Fathers.79 Born in 1877 into an aristocratic family of the Loire-Atlantique, the bride was the daughter of Alfred de la Motte de la Mairie Montaigu, a general whose services Napoleon Bonaparte had rewarded with a title of nobility. In 1909, following the death of her first husband Henri Jarret de la Mairie—with whom she had a son—she joined the Red Cross and became a trained nurse. Anne never liked New York City, perhaps not even the United States. Therefore, with the exception of the two wartime periods and summer vacations—which Carrel always spent in France—they lived separate lives. The couple remained childless after Anne suffered a miscarriage due to an anaphylactic reaction caused by an insect sting. Carrel was in France when war broke out in 1914. Called up for wartime duties, he was first assigned to routine medical tasks at a railroad yard in Lyon.80 Appalled by the growing number of casualties who died from untreated injuries, he obtained a transfer to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Lyon, where he began working on wound infection.81 These early wartime duties brought him in touch with the horrors of the new type of war, in

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which weapons not only killed but also, and more often, mutilated bodies. Injuries from mines, hand grenades, and artillery fire presented medical problems very different from those owed to the familiar gunshot and bayonet wounds. Twenty years earlier, Carrel had been shocked by the helplessness of the physicians who had tried to save Sadi-Carnot’s life. In 1914, war shocked him once again as he became aware of the primitive conditions of French wartime medicine. Most field hospitals often lacked properly trained physicians and nurses as well as basic equipment and supplies. When France entered the war, military medicine was largely based on the experience of the Franco-Prussian War and it was not infrequent for some army physicians to draw on the lessons of Napoleon’s campaigns.82 The common view before the great battles of World War I held that gunshot wounds were aseptic, that is, noninfectious. Most pre-1914 courses on military surgery at the Val-de-Grâce Army Hospital emphasized this point and minimized the importance of shrapnel wounds, characterizing them as rare occurrences that were likely to cause mostly superficial tissue damage. However, the battles of the early fall of 1914 disproved the traditional doctrines of military medicine. With casualties of heavy artillery fire, light mortars, and grenades greatly outnumbering those of gunfire, hospitals were soon flooded with soldiers suffering from lethal infections, such as tetanus and gas gangrene. Like other frontline physicians, Carrel knew that, in their initial phase, infections caused by microorganism-filled debris were localized and remained on the surface of tissues before they penetrated deeper into the body. Finding a safe and quick method to treat them on the front line would not only save lives, but also prevent the unnecessary evacuation of soldiers to the overburdened rearguard hospitals. As his duties at the Hôtel-Dieu proved stifling, he obtained a new assignment after the government issued a decree placing the Nobel laureate under the direct jurisdiction of Justin Godart—undersecretary of state for war in charge of the Service de santé militaire (Military Health Service). The decree gave Carrel freedom to move within restricted areas of the battlefront and easier access to political authorities. He wasted no time, and in late 1914 he visited various sectors of the western front to inspect the ambulances (frontline medical outposts). There he found a shocking scene. Most military surgeons lacked what he considered adequate training, and few had competent nurses to assist them. Worse, in some units he found that the first-aid kits had last been sterilized ten years earlier! He was further horrified by the chaotic array of preparations used to clean wounds, from kitchen salt to alcohol, ether, and tincture of iodine.83 Back in Paris, he obtained permission from the army to establish a small hospital in Compiègne, close enough to the capital and the front. Officially designated as Hôpital Temporaire no. 2, but better known as “Rond Royal” or “Ambulance Carrel,” the surgical unit was funded jointly by the French state and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rond Royal was every military physician’s dream. Set up in a nineteenth-century luxury hotel erected in

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the Compiègne forest, the outfit was comprised of a fifty one-bed hospital with a fully equipped laboratory and a staff of medical officers, technicians, orderlies, and Red Cross nurses.84 Assisted by British chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin, at the Rond Royal Carrel devised a safe and economical method of wound treatment.85 What came to be known as the “Carrel-Dakin method” was based on the simple principle that, just as one washes a sponge by repeated saturations and wringing, so could a flushing system wash an injury by irrigating every part of it with an antiseptic solution and then soaking up the infectious germs. Military physicians thus needed a chemical solution and a device for applying it. Dakin undertook the tedious process of testing substances for the needed properties of maximum bacterial antisepsis with minimal wound irritation. After trying over two hundred solutions, the British chemist settled on a mixture of sodium hypochlorite buffered with sodium bicarbonate—in fact, a very pure oxygenated solution of ordinary salt, one of the cheapest and best disinfectants.86 An additional advantage of this substance was its negligible cost. Carrel concurrently developed the system of wound treatment that he had first conceived at Hôtel-Dieu, which allowed for the mechanical cleansing, surgical debridement, and chemical sterilization of injured tissue through irrigation. The antiseptic solution was suspended over the patient and flushed down through glass distributing tubes with many branches, each leading to a separate portion of the wound. It was from this periodic flushing that the system took its technical name of méthode d’irrigation intermittente Carrel.87 The daily microscopic examinations conducted at the Rond Royal laboratory showed encouraging results. Infectious bacteria in treated wounds decreased at rates much higher than expected, and the actual healing was accomplished in one-half to one-third of the time required under ordinary treatments. Moreover, once the microscopic studies confirmed the disappearance of all traces of infection, it was possible to close the wound at once, either stitching it or using adhesive plaster. This was a significant advantage over older methods, since 90 percent of the area of the original wound could now be replaced by firm, pliable, serviceable flesh. When the American correspondent Lewis Freeman visited the hospital in 1916, Anne Carrel proudly told him that not one soldier had died in their hospital; more importantly, she remarked, “we are turning out almost no cripples, but men who can fight and work for France.”88 Research on wound treatment led the Rond Royal staff to “discover” what Carrel called loi de cicatrisation (healing law). Based largely on the work done by his assistant, the physicist and mathematician Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, the healing law calculated the number of days required for a wound to heal using the method of permanent irrigation. The finding enabled physicians and military authorities to estimate the rate at which soldiers could be discharged and hospital beds be made available to new patients, thus making the management of scarce medical resources more efficient.89

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Soon the Rond Royal began to attract the interest of political and medical authorities. Ministers Raymond Poincaré, Alexandre Millerand, Georges Clémenceau, Justin Godart, and General Philippe Pétain, among others, made the trip to Compiègne to inspect the hospital’s work and converse with the outfit’s distinguished head. American physicians also took an early interest in the hospital. In the summer of 1915, a US Army medical team traveled to Compiègne and shot a documentary film on the Rond-Royal.90 Impressed by Carrel’s work, Harvey Cushing, William Bainbridge, George Crile, William Welch, and other prominent names of American medicine visited their French peer and lobbied the British and French army commands to adopt the Carrel-Dakin method.91 Nonetheless, from the moment it became operational in March 1915 the hospital had to overcome obstacles of all sorts. To begin with, the Rond Royal was under three different, and often conflicting, jurisdictions. The laboratories of chemistry and bacteriology were financed and controlled by the Rockefeller Foundation; the hospital proper was placed under the authority of the French Army’s Service de santé; and Carrel, as head of the detachment, was accountable to the undersecretary of state for war. Thus, an arrangement that had appeared initially to combine the benefits of independent funding, a direct link with political authorities, and substantial autonomy from bureaucratic interferences, ultimately hindered the unit’s operational capacity. Worse, the outfit’s poor relationship with its French military and medical counterparts delayed the introduction on a massive scale of the new methods of wound treatment.92 Moreover, because the Rond Royal was not attached to a designated combat outfit, its staff had to make special efforts to have commanders of nearby units forward their injured to Carrel’s ambulance. Whether it was out of apprehension, lack of information, or sheer disorganization, by September 1915, the Rond Royal had treated only five soldiers. Months later, when the nearby Third Army was suffering between fifty and sixty weekly casualties, the hospital received only two patients. Carrel also had to overcome the resistance of those who challenged the practical uses and efficacy of his method. One of the technique’s major disadvantages was that it demanded greater care and precision, as well as better-trained personnel and equipment, than was usually available in a frontline setting. Surgeons found the device too elaborate to use, since the routine conditions were hardly adequate for maintaining the proper pH of the solution, applying the irrigations continuously, and running complete bacterial counts. Furthermore, many surgeons doubted the method’s genuine effectiveness. At the time there was an intense controversy, particularly in England, between supporters and opponents of antiseptics. The leading voice of the second group was the British medical officer Sir Almroth Edward Wright, best known for developing the typhus vaccine and the serological test.93 A highly respected bacteriologist and immunologist, Wright favored a method based on a hypertonic saline solution and

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challenged Carrel’s assertion that antisepsis was an efficient method for treating infected wounds.94 The method also met with opposition from French academic medicine. Between October 1915 and February 1916, Samuel Pozzi and Théodore Tuffier presented the results obtained with the Carrel-Dakin method before the incredulous members of the Académie de médecine and the Société de chirurgie de Paris. Resenting what was considered an unfair neglect of what was being done by French scientists, one pediatrician dismissed the enthusiasm over Carrel’s findings as proof of “surgical ignorance.”95 Carrel responded by publishing an article showing the results obtained with his method and brushing aside criticisms as expressions of an esprit de système that blinded French physicians to undisputable evidence.96 All these difficulties furthered Carrel’s sense of isolation and hopelessness. His wartime correspondence is filled with remarks regarding the “ignorance, resentment, and conservative mentality” of French bureaucrats, politicians, and physicians. He portrayed the medical elite as a comédie de Molière filled with “grotesque and tragic characters” that opposed the adoption of his method to alleviate human suffering. In early 1916, he wrote that “[i]f this treatment [the Carrel-Dakin method] were adopted, France would save plenty of money and men, but you know our fellow countrymen well, and they will not let that happen. The pundits of the Institut [de Françe] and the academicians feel deeply insulted by the fact that we did what they should have done. Almost all of them are against me. I am proud of that. Unfortunately, many ordinary people who constitute the most admirable part of the nation will lose their limbs and sometimes their life because of the vanity and incompetence of French surgeons.”97 To some extent, Carrel’s conflicted relations with other scientists were the result of his penchant for egocentric postures that, as in his earlier falling out with Charles Guthrie, often led him to take credit without sufficiently acknowledging the work of others. The misunderstandings that put an end to his relationship with Dakin illustrate this point well. In the fall of 1915, the British government sent the chemist to the Dardanelles to implement the new method among the gangrene-ravaged Commonwealth troops deployed in Gallipolli. When Dakin returned to France two years later, the method had overcome most of the initial resistance and was being rapidly adopted by the allied armies. Despite this success, he became persuaded that Carrel had taken most of the credit for the work they had accomplished together.98 Dakin’s resentment may have had some grounds. Although most scientific journals acknowledged the contribution of both scientists, clearly it was Carrel that got most of the attention—for example, some publications carried only Carrel’s picture while others did not even mention Dakin’s name.99 An allied conference of surgical experts held in late 1916 finally adopted the Carrel-Dakin method as the approved treatment for war injuries. This change was reflected in the large amount of scientific literature devoted

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to the topic—some of which discussed the method’s possible application to civilian practice. Scientific recognition was accompanied by the public acknowledgement of Carrel’s new contribution to the relief of suffering. In November 1915 the French government distinguished him with the title of Officier de la Légion d’honneur. The following year, he received the Ordre de Léopold from the Belgian king and the Orders of Saint Michael and Saint George from the British government.100 As the United States was drawn into the European war, the Rockefeller Institute’s governing board studied plans to contribute to the nation’s war effort. In the summer of 1917, the board granted funds to build a readymade demonstration hospital on the institute’s grounds to give American military surgeons a two-week instructional course on the method of wound treatment. Summoned by Simon Flexner, Carrel returned to New York and assumed command of the Rockefeller Foundation War Demonstration Hospital in the spring. Meanwhile the Rond Royal in France developed an experimental mobile version of the ambulance, called automobile chirurgicale or auto-chir. In March 1918, the Rond Royal came to an abrupt demise when German bombs badly damaged the building and forced its evacuation. Carrel had partially rebuilt the outfit some fifteen miles east of Paris when the war came to an end. Following his discharge in January 1919, he returned to the United States to resume his work at the institute.101 Carrel’s wartime service—accounting for his longest stay in France since he had left the country in 1904—left deep impressions on him. The tour of duty in his native land brought back old resentments and a growing impatience toward all that he disliked about his French compatriots. Despite the recognition and respect that many French accorded him—in 1921 he was elected to the Academy of Medicine of Paris—, he could not help feeling out of place and unduly criticized by physicians and scientists—many of whom, in turn, resented Carrel’s popularity and personal style as well as the privileges and special considerations afforded him by his status as Nobel laureate and his connections to the United States.102 He was happy, then, to return to New York, even though in the long run this meant living apart from his wife, who joined him for only a short time as his assistant at the institute.103 In early 1919, he resumed his prewar research on tissue culture and throughout the next decade and a half he remained aloof from politics and seemingly uninterested in public issues. When he wished to express his views on nonscientific topics, he did so privately, in the company of wellwishers, among them, the French-born international lawyer Frédéric Coudert, the physicist and former Russian Ambassador to the United States Boris Bakhmeteff, and the Reverend James Clifford. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these four men became intimate friends, corresponding with each other frequently and dining every week at New York city’s Century Club. Nicknamed by their occasional guests as “the philosophers,” the

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group became Carrel’s favorite milieu for socializing; there he felt more at ease to let his mind wander on unorthodox subjects.

Notes 1. ���������������������������������������������� Ulrich Tröhler, “L’essor de la chirurgie,” in Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident: Vol. 3: du romantisme à la science moderne, ed. Mirko D. Grmeck (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999), 235–51; Patrice Pinell, ”Champ médical et processus de spécialisation,” ARSS, nos. 156/157 (2005): 5–36. 2. Charles Hufnagel, “Alexis Carrel: Contributions to Surgery,” in Papers of the Alexis Carrel Centennial Conference, Georgetown University, 28 June 1973, ed. Robert W. Chambers and Joseph T. Durkin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1973), 85–107. 3. For a general overview of Carrel’s scientific work, see David Le Vay, Alexis Carrel: The Perfectibility of Man (Rockville, MD: Kabel Publishing, 1996); Angelo M. May and Alice G. May, The Two Lions of Lyons: The Tale of Two Surgeons; Alexis Carrel and René Leriche (Rockville, MD: Kabel Publishing, 1992); F. T. Rapaport, “Alexis Carrel, Triumph and Tragedy,” Transplantation Proceedings 4, no. 5 (1987): 3–8; John M. Converse, “Alexis Carrel: The Man, the Unknown,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 68, no. 4 (1981): 629–39; Julius H. Comroe, Jr., “Who Was Alexis Who?” Cardiovascular Diseases 6, no. 3 (1979): 251–270; William S. Edwards and Peter D. Edwards, Alexis Carrel: Visionary Surgeon (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1974); the articles by J. T. Durkin and L. G. Walker in Papers of the Alexis Carrel Centennial Conference; Theodor Malinin, Surgery and Life: The Extraordinary Career of Alexis Carrel (New York: Harcourt, 1970); Robert Soupault, “Alexis Carrel: l’oeuvre scientifique, l’oeuvre profane,” Histoire de la médecine, no. 1 (1952): 11–29, no. 2 (1952): 31–44, no. 3 (1952): 30–33. 4. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Jean-Jacques Gillon, “Les aspects essentiels de l’oeuvre médicale d’Alexis Carrel,” Concours médical, October 1951, 525–28. 5. Eschewing the forceps used by most surgeons to control hemorrhages, Carrel managed to avoid crushing delicate blood vessels by placing narrow linen bands around the arteries and veins. He coated the needles and sutures with petroleum jelly to avoid contact between blood and the injured endothelium. When the needle stretched the wall of the artery or vein, the jelly rubbed off in the puncture holes, covering the injured endothelium and preventing its contact with blood. Although he employed three retention sutures to make vessel-wall suturing easier, Carrel did not insist on the triangulation technique, and whenever necessary, he used four such sutures. The technique required placing three sutures, each 120 degrees apart, on the circumference of the cut circular ends of the artery, and then pulling two of the sutures in opposite directions. This converted an arc into a straight line and permitted Carrel to sew together one third of the circumference. He then repeated the trick for each of the other two thirds. For a contemporary appraisal of his technique, see Geneviève Grandecourt, “The new era of blood transfusion,” SA, 5 Aug. 1914, 188–95. 6. On Carrel’s work on vascular surgery and organ transplantation, see William S. Edwards, “Alexis Carrel: A Century Later,” Archives of Surgery 124, no. 9 (1989): 1014, and Edwards and Edwards, Alexis Carrel: Visionary Surgeon; Steven G. Friedman, “Alexis Carrel: Jules Verne of Cardiovascular Surgery,” American Journal of Surgery 155, no. 3 (1988): 420–24; Lyman A. Brewer, “Alexis Carrel: A Cardiovascular Prophet Crying in the Wilderness of Early Twentieth-Century Surgery,” Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery 94, no. 5 (1987): 724–26; Gerald M. Lawrie, “The Scientific Contributions of Alexis Carrel,” Clinical Cardiology 10, no. 7 (1987): 428–30; Jacques Descostes, Alexis Carrel: pionnier de la chirurgie cardiovasculaire.” Chirurgie 111, no. 4 (1985): 311–14; R. Cusimano, M. Cusimano, and S. Cusimano, “The Genius of Alexis Carrel,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 131, no. 9 (1984): 1142–50; Saul Jarcho, “Carrel and Tuffier

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(1914) on Experimental Surgery of the Cardiac Orifices,” American Journal of Cardiology 36, no. 7 (1975): 954–56; Robert Soupault, “Carrel et la chirurgie cardio-vasculaire,” Histoire des sciences médicales, no. 8 (1974): 417–23; Hufnagel, “Alexis Carrel: Contributions to Surgery,” 84–107. 7. Alexis Carrel and Charles C. Guthrie, “Uniterminal and biterminal venous transplantations,” SGO 2 (1906): 266–86; id., “Results of the biterminal transplantation of veins,” AJMS 132 (1906): 415–22. 8. Carrel and Guthrie, “Transplantation of veins and organs,” American Medicine 10 (1905): 1101–02; id., “Transplantation of blood vessels and organs,” BMJ 2 (1906): 1796. 9. Carrel, “The surgery of blood vessels and its application to the changes of circulation and transplantation of organs,” JHHB 17 (1906): 236–37; Carrel and Guthrie, “Complete amputation of the thigh, with replantation,” AJMS 131 (1906): 297–301; id., “Results of a replantation of the thigh,” Science 23 (1906): 393–94; id., “Successful transplantation of both kidneys from a dog into a bitch with removal of both normal kidneys from the latter,” Science 23 (1906): 394–95; id., “A new method for the homoplastic transplantation of the ovary,” Science 23 (1906): 591; id., “Reversal of the circulation in a limb,” Annals of Surgery 43 (1906): 203–15; id., “Anastomosis of blood vessels by the patching method and transplantation of the kidney,” JAMA 47 (1906): 1648–50. 10. Carrel, “Remote results of the transplantation of kidneys and spleen,” JEM 12 (1910): 146–50. 11. B. J. Hendrick, “Work at the Rockefeller Institute,” McClure 32 (1909): 367–83. 12. Carrel, “On the experimental surgery of the thoracic aorta and the heart,” Transactions of the American Surgical Association 28 (1910): 243–45. 13. For an account of the operation see Carrel, “La transfusion directe du sang (méthode de Crile),” LC 1 (1908): 13; Samuel W. Lambert, “Melena Neonatorum with Report of a Case Cured by Transfusion,” MRNY 73 (1908): 885; Georges W. Crile, Hemorrhage and Transfusion: An Experimental and Clinical Research (New York: Appleton and Co., 1909), 501–503; T. Wood Clarke, “The birth of transfusion,” Journal of the History of Medicine (summer 1949): 337–38. 14. “Dog Torture Story Called Ridiculous,” NYT, 28 Dec. 1909, 16; “Dr. Flexner Denies Cruel Vivisection,” NYT, 17 Jan. 1910, 4; Geneviève Grandecourt, “Tales of Torture,” NYT, 7 Feb. 1911, 8. 15. ACP, Carrel to Charles Guthrie, 12 Jan. 1908. 16. The Light (San Antonio), 17 Nov. 1912, cited in John Turney, In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 80, 234. 17. “Head of Pasteur Institute Proposes to Replace Electric Chair by Laboratory,” New York Sun, 8 Dec.1912. 18. John D. Rockefeller, “Some Random Reminiscences of Men and Events,” WW 17 (1908): 10997–98. 19. L. G. Walker, “Carrel’s direct transfusion of a five day-old infant,” SGO 137, no. 3 (1973): 494–96. For a critical appraisal on this subject see Anita Guernini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 20. May and May, Two Lions of Lyons, 104–8. 21. On tissue culture, see Albert Fischer, Tissue Culture: Studies in Experimental Morphology and General Physiology of Tissue Cells in Vitro (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1925). 22. Harrison’s experiments on amphibian nerve cells were particularly influential on Carrel’s cell research. First at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, Harrison devised a simple method by which he could observe the growth of cells from explanted fragments of amphibian tissue. He cut out a piece from a frog embryo’s spinal cord and placed it in a drop of clotted lymph; as the cells grew, he could observe the sprouting of nerve fibers. 23. Carrel, “The preservation of tissues and its applications in surgery,” JAMA 59 (1912): 523–27.

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24. On the relationship between Harrison, Burrows, and Carrel, see F. S. Bang, “History of Tissue Culture at Johns Hopkins,” BHM 51, no. 4 (1977): 516–37. 25. Montrose T. Burrows, “The cultivation of tissues of the chick embryo outside the body,” JAMA 55 (1910): 2057–8; Carrel and Burrows, “The growth of tissues of the chick embryo outside the animal body with special reference to the nervous system,” Journal of Experimental Zoology 10 (1911): 63–84; id., “Cultivation of adult tissues outside the body,” JAMA 55 (1910): 1379–81; id., “Cultivation of tissues in vitro and its techniques,” JEM 13 (1911): 387–96. 26. “Growing tissues outside of the body,” JAMA 56 (1911): 1722–23. 27. Carrel and Burrows, “Cultivation of adult tissues outside of the body,” 1381; id., “The growth of tissues,” 66. 28. ����������������� All published in CRSB 69 (1910): 293–94, 298–301, 328–34, 365–68. 29. ������������� J. Jolly, “À propos ������������������������������������������������������������������������ des communications de M. M. Alexis Carrel et Montrose T. Burrows sur la ‘culture des tissus,’” CRSB 69 (1910): 470–73. 30. ����������������������� Carrel and Burrows, “À propos ������������������������������������������������������� des cultures ‘in vitro’ des tissus mammifères,” CRSB 70 (1911): 3–4. 31. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� R. Legendre, “Les recherches récentes sur la survie des cellules, des tissus et des organes isolés de l’organisme,” Biologica 1 (1911): 357–65. 32. ��������������������������������������������������������������������� Legendre, “La survie des organs et la ‘culture’ des tissus vivants,” La nature, no. 40 (1912): 359–63. 33. Fischer, Tissue Culture, 21. 34. Carrel and Burrows, “Cultivation of tissues in vitro,” 390. 35. The Carrel flask was a small device with good optical properties and a long sloping neck that prevented particles of dust from entering. Fragments of tissues were attached to the floor of the flask with plasma, and a fluid medium of saline solution containing various nutritive substances was added. Carrel, “A method for the physiological study of tissues in vitro,” JEM 38 (1923): 407–18. 36. Carrel, “Tissue culture and cell physiology,” Physiological Review 4 (1924): 6. 37. “Tissue Culture,” The Lancet, no. 2 (1924): 507–8. 38. Fischer, Tissue Culture, 17. 39. Carrel, “The method of tissue culture and its bearing on pathological problems,” BMJ, no. 2 (1924): 140–45. 40. T. S. P. Strangeways, Technique of Tissue Culture in Vitro (Cambridge: Heffer, 1924). 41. W. H. Lewis and M. R. Lewis, “The Cultivation of Chick Tissue in Media of Known Composition,” Anatomical Record 6 (1912): 207–11. 42. Jan A. Witkowski, “Carrel’s Immortal Cells,” Medical History 24, no. 2 (1980): 29–42; id., “Alexis Carrel and the Mysticism of Tissue Culture,” Medical History 23, no. 3 (1979): 279–96. 43. Iliana Löwy, “Fleck, Kuhn, and Stent: Loose Reflections on the Notion of Prematurity,” in Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect, ed. Ernest B. Hook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 295–305. 44. See, for example, H. M. Carleton, “Tissue Culture: A Critical Summary,” British Journal of Experimental Biology, no. 1 (1923): 131–51. 45. E. N. Willmer, “Introduction,” in Cells and Tissues in Culture: Methods, Biology, and Physiology, ed. E. N. Willmer (New York and London: Academic Press, 1965), 1–17; Witkowski, “Alexis Carrel and the Mysticism of Tissue Culture,” 288. 46. John Paul, Cell and Tissue Culture (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1976), 2, and Willmer, Cells and Tissues in Culture, 4. 47. ACP, Box 41, Carrel to Paluel J. Flagg, 22 Jan. 1924. 48. I have borrowed the “theater” metaphor in the analysis of laboratory from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, La vie de laboratoire: la production des faits scientifiques (Paris: La découverte, 1996), 27, 265. 49. “Men in Black,”Time, 13 June 1938, 40.

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50. Philip R. White, The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963), vi. 51. When the strain was started it was necessary to transfer the tiny fragments every fortyeight hours. A method was later developed that allowed the transfers to a new medium to be made after longer periods of time—seven or eight days. Once it became available the strain was ordinarily kept in flasks, in a nutrient medium composed of chicken plasma, chick embryonic juice, and a solution of salts and glucose. Following the coagulation (clotting) produced by the mixing of these components, the medium was introduced in the flask and the tissue fragments were placed in it while it was still fluid. A soft, uniform clot quickly took shape, holding the fragments in place while furnishing an invisible, fibrinous network in which the cells could multiply. During their stay in the flasks, the cultures were bathed by a salt and glucose solution, which was then withdrawn by suction. To remove waste products after the washing, fresh, diluted embryonic juice was added to replenish the food supply. The manipulations allowed enough air into the flask to renew the oxygen. For a contemporary appraisal, see Geneviève Grandecourt, “The Immortality of Tissues: Its Bearing on the Study of Old Age,” SA, 26 Oct. 1912, 344; id., “What Is Old Age? Carrel’s Research on the Mechanism of Physical Growth,” SA, 29 Nov. 1913, 400. 52. After Carrel’s retirement in July 1939 the Rockefeller Institute discontinued his work and disbanded the Division of Experimental Surgery. It was then that Albert Ebeling brought the cell strain to the Division of Virus Research at the Lederle Laboratories in Pearl River (NY), where he was able to keep it “alive” for years. 53. See, for example, H. S. Williams, “When Does the Body Die? Experiments in Sustaining Life in Tissues of Dead Animals,” World Today 21 (1911): 1454–58; “Potential Immortality,” Literary Digest 44 (1912): 1153–54; “Carrel and the Span of Life,” Survey 29 (1912): 170–71; “Heart Tissue Beats Long After Death,” NYT, 2 May 1912, 8; “Heart Tissues Grow and Beat 120 Days,” NYT, 20 June 1912, 8; J. Middleton, “Flesh that is Immortal,” WW 28 (1914): 590–93; B. J. Hendrick, “On the Trail of Immortality,” McClure’s Magazine 40 (1913): 304–17; “Immortality of Animal Tissue and Its Significance,” Golden Bank 7 (1928): 787–89. 54. Lewis R. Freeman, “Healing Wounded Soldiers to Order,” WW, February 1917, 431–32. 55. Albert H. Ebeling, “Dr. Carrel’s Immortal Chicken Heart,” SA 166 (1942): 22–24; “’Immortal Chicken Cells Attain 20th. Anniversay,” NYT, 18 jan. 1932, 5; “Living Tissue Endowed by Carrel With ‘Eternal Youth’ Has Birthday,” NYT, 16 Jan. 1942. 56. Leonard Hayflick and P. S. Moorehead, “The serial cultivation of human diploid cell strains,” Experimental Cell Research 25 (December 1961): 585–621; Hayflick, “The limited in vitro lifetime of human diploid in cell strains,” Experimental Cell Research 37 (March 1965): 614–36. 57. For some contemporary debates on Carrel’s cultures, see Barbara Culliton, “Rockefeller Braces for Baltimore,” Science 247 (1990): 148–51; Jan A. Witkowski, “Carrel’s Cultures,” Science 247 (1990): 1385–86; the exchange between Jan A. Witkowski, Leonard Hayflick, and Hassan Najafi in JAMA 252 (1984): 44–45; Hassan Najafi, “Alexis Carrel and Tissue Culture,” JAMA 250 (1983): 1086–1089. 58. Carl Snyder, “Carrel, the Mender of Men,” Collier’s, 16 Nov. 1912, 12–13; George Kent, “Dr. Alexis Carrel Believes We Can Read Each Other’s Thoughts,” American Magazine, Mar. 1936, 20–21, 142–44. 59. “Chicken Dead Since 1912, Heart May Beat Forever,” Newsweek, 23 Dec. 1933, 28. 60. “Herald of Immortality Foresees Suspended Animation,” Newsweek, 21 Dec. 1935. 61. “Points by Prizemen,” Time, 23 Dec. 1935, 24. 62. See Rae Goodell, The Visible Scientists (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1977). 63. For a discussion on biology, scientific performance, and public opinion see Andrés H. Reggiani, “’Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds: Expertise, Public Opinion, and Biopolitics in Alexis Carrel’s Man the Unknown,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and

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American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 88–116; Turney, In Frankenstein’s Footsteps, 64–81. 64. The physics and chemistry prizes were judged by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the physiology or medicine prize, by the Royal Caroline Medico-Chirurgical Institute; the prize for literature, by the Swedish Academy; and the peace prize, by a committee of the Norwegian parliament. A sixth award in economic science was established and endowed in 1968 by the Swedish National Bank and judged by the Academy of Sciences. The 1912 Nobel Committee for Medicine was formed by J. Ackerman, B. E. Gadelius, J. E. Johannsson, K. A. H. Moerner, and C. Sundberg. 65. Two Nobel prizes were awarded to individual Americans before 1912: President Theodore Roosevelt received the award for peace in 1906, and Abraham A. Michelson obtained the distinction for chemistry in 1907. For a critical assessment of the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, see Ragnar Björk, “Inside the Nobel Committee on Medicine: Prize Competition Procedures 1901–1950 and the Fate of Carl Neuberg,” Minerva 39, no. 4 (2001): 393–408; Frank N. Megill, The Nobel Prize Winners: Physiology or Medicine (Pasadena, CA, and Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1991). 66. “Nobel Prize for Dr. Carrel,” NYT, 11 Oct. 1912, 1; “Dr. Carrel’s Miracles in Surgery Win Nobel Prize,” NYT, 13 Oct. 1912, 1–2; “Dr. Carrel’s Distinction,” NYT, 13 Oct. 1912, 16. 67. “Noted Men Praise Work of Dr. Carrel,” NYT, 17 Nov. 1912, 3. See the ceremony’s program in ACP, Box 97. “Nobel Prizes Presentes.” NYT, 11 Dec. 1912. 68. “Nobel Prizes Presented.” NYT, 11 Dec. 1912, 4. 69. “Alexis Carrel: Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1912. Address by Professor Jules Akerman, Member of the Nobel Committee,” Transplantation Proceedings 4, no. 5 (1987): 9–11. 70. On this aspect see Robert M. Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize (New York: Freeman/Times Books, 2001); Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000); Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Elizabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1939: Four Studies of the Nobel Population (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 71. “Lauds Dr. Carrel as America’s Child,” NYT, 19 October 1912, 7; “Our New Nobel Prize,” Literary Digest, 23 Nov. 1912, 953–54; Kent, “Carrel Believes We Can Read Each Other’s Thoughts,” 141–42; J. D. Radcliff, “The Glass Heart,” Collier’s, 24 Oct. 1936, 34–38. 72. ACP, Harvey Cushing to Carrel, 12 Oct. 1912. 73. Snyder, “Carrel, the Mender of Man,” 12–13. 74. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Nous pouvons encore réclamer comme l’un des nôtres le Docteur Alexis Carrel, de l’Institut Rockefeller, à qui a été attribué le prix Nobel pour la médicine. Malgré qu’il soit établi en Amérique, l’illustre chirurgien est français d’origine et d’éducation. Ses étonnantes expériences sur la suture et la greffe animales n’auraient pu être tentées si les travaux de l’école française, et en particulier de l’Institut Pasteur, ne les avaient préparées et facilitées par les applications qui ont transformé la médicine et la chirurgie au cours du XIXe siècle.” La France illustrée, 30 Nov. 1912, 49. 75. ������������������ “Les Prix Nobel,” Télégramme de Toulouse, 12 Dec. 1912. 76. “France Neglects Carrel,” NYT, 22 Dec. 1912, 1; “France May Lose Carrel,” NYT, 4 Jan. 1913, 3. 77. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Quand on pense que ce sont les savants allemands qui, en majorité, ont voté pour lui, l’ont désigné lors de l’attribution du prix Nobel ! L’Allemagne signalait ce français à l’attention du monde. Elle lui offrait même de publier en allemand le résultat de ses travaux. Elle voulait, en l’honorant, le confisquer. “Deux hommes: le savant et la satirique: le docteur Carrel et Henri Rochefort,” Le temps, 4 July 1913. 78. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Le Docteur Carrel est français. Le fait vaut qu’on le signale ! Il met en lumière les merveilleuses qualités créatrices de notre nation. A chaque fois qu’une route nouvelle est tracée, une synthèse scientifique élaborée, c’est l’effort de l’un des nôtres qui en a fourni

The Making of a Scientific Celebrity   57

les moyens (…) or dans notre pays envahi par les métèques, dans cette France qui ouvre toutes grandes, aux juifs de Russie, les portes de l’Institut Pasteur, il n’y a pas de place pour le Docteur Carrel. Dans le temps de ses études à Lyon, le lauréat d’aujourd’hui donnait les plus belles espérances mais il allait a la messe, et il ne s’en cachait pas, ce qui lui valut l’hostilité d’(Victor) Augagneur. Ce brutal sectaire alors professeur en exercice (il était aussi le maire de Lyon) mit obstacle à la carrière de ce ‘calotin’. Et le Docteur Carrel s’expatria (…) Encore est-il heureux que (Augagneur) n’ai pas pu traiter le médecin Carrel comme les ‘grands ancêtres’ traitèrent le chimiste Lavoisier. “ J. Graveline, “Le Prix Nobel au docteur Carrel,” Action française, 12 Oct. 1912. 79. ����������������������������������������������������������������� Madame Alexis Carrel, “Alexis Carrel y los milagros de Lourdes,” Iatria, no. 122 (1953): 290–92. 80. ��������������������������� “�������������������������� Carrel with French Army,” NYT, 14 Aug. 1914,1. 81. ����������������������������� “Blood Operation by Carrel��� ,” NYT, 22 Oct. 1914, 2. 82. On French military medicine in World War I see Sophie Delaporte, Les médecins dans la Grande guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2003); Andrés Reggiani, “Birthing the French Welfare State: Political Crisis, Population and Public Health, 1914–1960,” PhD diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY, 1998), 33–39. 83. ����������������������������� “���������������������������� Carrel On Inspection Tour,” NYT, 18 Dec. 1914, 4. 84. “Carrel’s Hospital Ready,” NYT, 9 Mar. 1915, 2; Harvey W. Cushing, From a Surgeon’s Journal, 1915–1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1936), 33. See ���������������������������� also Georgette Mottier, L’ambulance du docteur Alexis Carrel telle que l’ont connue celles qui soignèrent les blessés, 1914–1919 (Lausanne: Editions de la source, 1977). 85. “Drs. Carrel and Dakin Find New Antiseptic,” NYT, 6 Aug. 1915, 9. Dakin was known for his research on enzymes and the synthesis of adrenaline. In 1905 he moved to the United States and later became director of the Christian Herter laboratories of New York. When war broke out, he went to France to work at the Beaujon hospital with Carrel’s former mentor, Théodore Tuffier. Informed by Flexner that Dakin was in France, Carrel invited him to join the Rond Royal. 86. Henry D. Dakin, “On the use of certain antiseptic substances in the treatment of infected wounds,” BMJ 2 (1915): 318. 87. “New Material for Dressing Soldiers’ Wounds,” NYT, 18 Nov. 1917, SM8; A. Carrel, H. Dakin, G. Dehelly, and J. Daumas, “Traitement abortif de l’infection des plaies,” BAM 74 (1915): 361–68; Alexis Carrel, Mme. Alexis Carrel, and J. Daumas, Technique of the Irrigation Treatment of Wounds by the Carrel Method, trans. Adrian V. S. Lambert (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1917). 88. Freeman, “Healing Wounded Soldiers to Order,” 439. 89. Lecomte obtained a “healing index” by plotting out on a chart “lines of healing” for men aged 40, 32, 30, 25, and 20 years respectively. Then he drew a dotted horizontal line from the point indicating the size of the wound to cut the curve of the patient’s age, and dropped a perpendicular line from there to the base line. As he charted a “healing curve” for each wound under treatment he found that, in nine out of ten cases, the “actual” curve observed was almost identical to the “theoretical” estimation. Alexis Carrel, “Cicatrization of wounds. I: The relation between the size of the wound and the rate of its cicatrisation.” JEM 24 (1916): 429–50; Alexis Carrel and Alice Hartman, “Cicatrization of wounds. VIII: Sterilization of wounds with chloramine T,” JEM 26 (1917): 95–118; Alexis Carrel, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, and Madame Alexis Carrel, “Cicatrization of wounds. IX: Influence on the healing of wounds of variations in the osmotic tension of the dressing.” JEM 26 (1917): 279–95; Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, “Cicatrization of wounds. XI: Latent period.” JEM 34 (1920): 339–48; id. “Cicatrization of wounds. XII: Factors initiating regeneration.” JEM 34 (1920): 425–34. 90. “War Surgery Shown In Moving Pictures,” NYT, 7 Oct. 1916, 11. 91. See Halsted’s letters to Carrel, dated 22 Feb. and 14 Mar. 1917, cited in Rutkow, “Letters of William Halsted and Alexis Carrel,” 683; Cushing, From a Surgeon’s Journal, 30–33, 52–53.

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92. ACP, Box 38, Carrel to Coudert, 25 Nov. and 5 Dec. 1915. 93. Sir Almroth Edward Wright (1861–1947) advanced vaccination procedures through the use of autogenous vaccines (prepared from the bacteria harbored by the patient) and through typhus immunization with typhus bacilli killed by heat. As professor of pathology at the Army Medical School in Netley he developed a vaccine against typhus that was successfully used in the Boer War. As a result, Britain was the only belligerent country to enter World War I with her soldiers immunized against typhus, and for the first time fewer British soldiers died from infection than from gunfire. In 1902 Wright became professor of pathology at St. Mary’s Hospital, London. 94. W. W. Keen to Cushing, 26 Oct. 1916, and Cushing to Keen, 28 Oct. 1916, cited in Fulton, Harvey Cushing, 408–9; Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 124; Rutkow, “Letters of William Halsted and Alexis Carrel,” 682. 95. ��������������������������������������� See the proceedings of 5 Jan. 1916, in Bulletin et mémoires de la Société de chirurgie de Paris 42 (1916): 104–5. 96. ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Carrel, “Les principes de la technique de la stérilisation des plaies,” Archives de médecine et de pharmacie militaires, no. 65 (1916): 489–98. 97. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “Si ce traitement était appliqué, la France pourrait faire des économies considérables en argent et en hommes, mais vous pensez bien, vous qui connaissez mes compatriotes, que cela ne sera pas. Les pontifes de l’Institut et des académies sont profondément insultés parce que nous avons fait ce qu’ils auraient du faire. Ils sont presque tous contre moi. J’en suis très fier. Malheureusement beaucoup des petites gens qui constituent la partie admirable de la nation perdront leurs membres et parfois leur vie à cause de la vanité et l’incompétence des chirurgiens français.” ACP, Box 38, Carrel to Coudert, 24 January, 1 Feb. ��������������������������������������������������������������� and 24 July 1916; ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Coudert, 20 Mar. 1916. 98. ���������� Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 129. See also L. Baguenier-Desormeaux, “Henry Drysdale Dakin à Compiègne en 1915,” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie, no. 249 (1981): 79–88. 99. See, for example, François Helme, “Achievements of French Surgeons,” Current History, Apr. 1920, 137–39; “The Fight against Infection,” The American Review of Reviews, Aug. 1917, 191–92. 100. A. D. Bevan, “The Carrel-Dakin Treatment,” JAMA 69 (1917): 1727; Carrel, “Principles of the Treatment of Wounds,” MRNY 92 (1917): 789–91; id., “Treatment of Infected Wounds,” New York State Journal of Medicine 106 (1917): 816; id., “The Carrel-Dakin Solution,” American Journal of Pharmacy 89 (1917): 84–88; J. S. Lawrence, “The Carrel Treatment of Wounds Applied to Civil Practice,” JHHB 28 (1917): 294; W. O. Sherman, “The Carrel Method of Wound Sterilization,” SGO 34 (1917): 255; W. S. Halsted, “The Carrel-Dakin Method of Treatment of Infected Wounds,” in The Treatment of War Wounds, ed. William W. Keen (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1917); “Industry To Profit By Surgery of War,” NYT, 16 July 1917, 4. Even so, the Carrel-Dakin method remained the subject of controversy, as revealed by a paper on gunshot wounds presented at the 1917 annual meeting of the American Medical Association. See Berkeley Moynihan, “Gunshot Wounds and Their Treatment,” JAMA 69 (1917): 1538. 101. “Dr. Carrel Coming for War Work Here,” NYT, 29 Mar. 1917, 3; “Rockefeller Begins US War Relief Fund,” NYT, 4 May 1917, 5; “Doctors Ready To Go at Tremendous Sacrifice,” NYT, 6 May 1917, 56; “Major Carrel Here To Direct Hospital,” NYT, 5 July 1917, 7, “Aids for Dr. Carrel,” NYT, 20 Jul. 1917, 10; “Carrel Will Teach New Treatment Here,” NYT, 22 July 1917, 72; “Carrel Explains Cures,” NYT, 5 Oct. 1917, 10; “Dr. Carrel To Resume Work Here,” NYT, 4 Nov. 1919, 32. 102. “French Honor for Carrel,” NYT, 30 June 1921, 12. 103. “Madame Carrel Arrives,” NYT, 30 Dec. 1920, 6.

Chapter 3

The Best-Selling Eugenicist

 By the early 1930s Carrel was at the peak of his celebrity. With almost all his scientific achievements behind him and, as retirement from the Rockefeller Institute drew closer, his interests began to shift to broader issues outside his domain of expertise. This was not an uncommon path for a respected physician like him, who had been trained in the age of biomedical specialization. He adhered to the old tradition of physicians perceiving themselves not only as experts in the relief of human suffering, but also as professionals with public responsibilities. World depression, increasing social unrest, and political instability encouraged him to reflect upon the “crisis of civilization.” Having devoted himself entirely to science to date, he felt that the time had come for so famous a scientist as himself to communicate his views on a broad range of topics often grouped under the generic, and by then fashionable, rubric “human problems.” This move from the secluded routine of the laboratory to the exposed arena of public affairs had a profound and lasting impact on his career and life. Man, the Unknown both turned him into a popular cultural commentator worldwide and intellectual icon of the conservative right, and paved the path for his later collaboration with Vichy.

The Crisis of Civilization Carrel’s preoccupations coincided with the overall intellectual atmosphere of the interwar years. There are several ways to understand the scientist’s rising interest in public affairs. One possibility is to see him as part of France’s time-honored tradition of prominent physicians addressing Notes for this section begin on page 79.

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important public issues by becoming writers and intellectuals. Here, the Nobel laureate joined other prestigious names, such as Léon Binet (18911971), Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), Jean Charcot (1867-1936), Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), Georges Duhamel (1884-1966), Elie Faure (1873-1937), Henri Mondor (1885-1962), Charles Nicolle (1866-1936), Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot (1866-1970), Charles Richet (1850-1935), and Victor Segalen (1879-1919), to cite only his most famous contemporaries.1 Carrel’s nonmedical interests also fit within the broader intellectual phenomenon of “cultural despair.” Coined by historian Fritz Stern to explain Germany’s ambivalent response to modernity, the concept also helps us understand the widespread pessimistic mood through which the intellectual elites perceived the transformations that reshaped Western societies before and after World War I.2 This trend found its literary manifestation in widely read authors preoccupied with the various manifestations of “decline”—national, cultural, racial—such as Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset, Madison Grant, and T. Lothrop Stoddard, among others.3 France developed a particular brand of intellectual pessimism that saw demographic and military weakness and Americanization, among other indicators, as symptoms of national decline—a trend well illustrated by the works of Albert Demangeon, Georges Duhamel, Robert Aron, and Henri Decugis.4 An alternative perspective links Carrel to an eclectic group of thinkers and technocratic groups that sought new responses to France’s social and economic problems beyond the traditional boundaries of ideological partisanship. As we shall see in the next chapter, the success of L’homme cet inconnu and Carrel’s participation in Jean Coutrot’s Centre d’études des problèmes humains offers a way of relating him to the agenda pursued by other “nonconformist” intellectuals, such as Robert Aron, Emmanuel Mounier, and Alfred Sauvy. Closely associated with this quest for comprehensive solutions to the “crisis” were debates on the construction of a “new man.” Carrel’s mix of eugenics and spiritualism may be seen as a variation on the authoritarian projects of national renewal—racist, Catholic-corporatist, communitarian—sponsored by the dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and later Pétain. This approach is useful for placing the scientist in a French context as well as within a broader framework that takes into account both the nineteenth-century precedents and the European dimension of this phenomenon.5 Carrel may also be connected to the rise of a new type of scientific vulgarization. Nineteenth-century popularizers of science as Louis Figuier (1819-1894), Augustin Cabanès (1862-1928), and Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (1825-1915) were mostly interested in vulgarizing the latest technological achievements through the dominant literary genre of their time. Seeking to earn the respect of prestigious savants they aimed not at educating the public, but at having it admire the great inventions of the time. Drawing on a century of literary vulgarization, they popularized scientific knowl-

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edge primarily for amusement purposes. Early twentieth-century vulgarization was radically different. To begin with, the popularizers themselves were highly specialized scientific celebrities who, no longer satisfied with earning the appreciation of their peers, sought to publicize the importance and originality of their discoveries among the mass of educated readers. Unlike the nineteenth-century predecessors who had aimed their work at the popular classes, the new popularizers addressed themselves, above all, to students, professors, and the educated public. Authors and publishers alike joined forces to expand the traditional readership of science books by rendering accessible to large audiences disciplines and topics that until then were considered too complex for the non-expert.6 Two examples illustrate well the popularity of scientific vulgarization in the interwar years. One is the collective work La science, ses progrès, ses applications (1935). Edited by a member of the Institut français, Georges Urbain, and the scientist Marcel Boll, the book offered both a general view and an in-depth knowledge of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The other example is the popular collection Que sais-je? which started in 1941 by publishing three science titles.7 Most importantly, early twentieth-century scientific vulgarization had a distinctively humanistic and spiritualistic bent. Carrel’s contemporaries André Georges, Louis de Broglie—winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics—, and Rémy Collin became popular names, writing books in which they mixed scientific descriptions with philosophical speculations.8 This trend was part of a much broader intellectual phenomenon that under the generic concept of “holism” came to dominate the cultural mood of various medical disciplines in the 1920s and 1930s. As an expression of the process of cultural redefinition of biomedicine in the interwar years, holism is an elusive term. It has been used to describe forms of “alternative” medicine, ranging from constitutionalism, biotypology, and psychobiology to neo-Hyppocratism, nature therapy, and homeopathy. If these approaches had anything in common, it was their rejection of medical “reductionism.” Medical holists like Carrel felt that scientific medicine had not lived up to the expectations inflated by its past victories. Increasing overspecialization and the substitution of laboratory-based research for the patient-oriented clinical study of disease generated an enormous amount of empirical data—at the cost, the argument went, of reducing the sick person to an indefinite number of smaller units, each of them the territory of a medical subdiscipline. Holists of different persuasions agreed that physicians should adopt a more “integral” or “synthetic” approach to healing that took into account the human person as a psychophysical, physiological, and spiritual unity or “whole”—to use the then fashionable term. Despite their specific national, political, and scientific cultures, European and American holists shared a common body of concepts and metaphors that sought not only to redefine the relationship between medical knowledge, the human body, and the environment

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but also to restore a more intimate doctor-patient relationship as well as a lost professional or social unity. Many holists knew one another and were active in developing formal and informal networks that sustained and cross-fertilized their discussions.9 Carrel superbly exemplifies the convergence of scientific vulgarization and international biomedical holism. Stimulated by the differences between the United States and France, his thinking expressed an eclectic mix of American constitutional medicine and French medical humanism. Although establishing clear patterns of intellectual influence is sometimes difficult, it may be argued that he sympathized with the antireductionistic views espoused by some of his coworkers at the Rockefeller Institute— Simon Flexner, Samuel Meltzer, and George Draper, among others. In fact, one of the main sources of inspiration for his book was the Rockefeller Foundation president and humanist philanthropist, Raymond Fosdick.10 Similarly, Carrel’s long annual visits to France and his personal connections with local physicians—especially those from his Lyon home region— allowed him to become familiar with René Allendy’s biotypology, René Biot and René Leriche’s Catholic medical humanism, and Pierre Delore and Paul Desfosses’s neo-Hyppocratic movement.11 To a large extent, Carrel’s concerns, and much of what he said in his book, were a response to all the things that he disliked about America, and more specifically about a New York City that was becoming the world’s global capital. The city’s frenzied life, with its social underworld and everchanging multiethnic landscape, was alien to his provincial sensibilities and menacing to his conservative sense of order. From this perspective, his politics were a response to a vision of modernity that saw urban America as its most threatening example of social and cultural decline. At the same time, as recent work on the popular reception of eugenics shows, they may be also seen as a part of the ideologically mixed rhetorical repertoire that during the New Deal sought to raise awareness about the state of decay of American society.12 Unsurprisingly, he framed his reflections by collapsing biology and politics into the familiar notion of “degeneration,” in line with what Robert Nye, in a different national context, has termed the “medical model of cultural decline.”13 However, in the beginning his speculations about biological decay betrayed not so much a cultural mood but, rather, a genuine interest in the physiological aspects of aging as well as a frustration with the slow progress in preventing and treating the “degenerative diseases.”14 This term was commonly used to refer to mysterious anomalies that were seen as connected to the vague nineteenth-century notion of degeneration, such as cancer and cardiovascular and rheumatic diseases—in 1931 Carrel received the prestigious Nordhoff-Jung Award for his research on cancer.15 Speaking before an audience of respected scientists gathered at Johns Hopkins in 1925, he sketched out a gloomy picture: modern medicine was able to protect people against infections that killed rapidly, but it left them exposed to

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slower and crueler diseases and to brain damage. Today the average person, he said, “has more prospect of being tortured by some form of cancer; afflicted with slow diseases of the kidneys, the circulatory apparatus, the endocrine glands; of becoming insane, suffering from nervous diseases; or of making himself miserable by his lack of judgment and his vices.” The solution, for him, lay in discovering the “fundamental principles” of physics and chemistry that ruled the functions of the body. This could be only accomplished by a pure physiological science devoted not to discovering useful medical applications, but to seeking an “accurate conception of the universe.” Physiology should be studied as a pure science far from hospitals and medical schools, by “men possessing the creative imagination and the spirit of the discoverers.” Brought together in an “institute of pure science,” physiologists, physicists, and chemists would create the “proper conditions for the building up of the science which will occupy the summit of the hierarchy of human knowledge, the science of thinking matter and energy.” Only a pure science that sought knowledge in a disinterested way would make possible the understanding and mastering of nature.16 In the unsettling 1930s, these concerns took a distinctively cultural and political turn; accordingly, degeneration lost its more or less specific medical meaning to become a looser concept accommodating a broad spectrum of undesirable phenomena, from cultural standardization to physical unfitness and asocial behavior. French and American informal networks played a fundamental role in shaping Carrel’s ideas as well as convincing him that a savant of his stature should engage himself in the great debates of the time. Since the 1910s, friends and acquaintances had urged him to write about the “decline of French science” and the “crisis of civilization.” In particular, weekly dinners at the Century Club with Coudert, Clifford, and Bakhmeteff gave the French scientist the opportunity to discuss with them a vast array of nonscientific issues. He acknowledged their intellectual input by dedicating Man, the Unknown to all three of them.17 Later, however, he was less generous and presented the book as a mission bestowed upon him.18 It took him a year to complete the manuscript, which he wrote in English and French at the same time. The book amounted to an odd, four hundred-page synthesis of disparate and often poorly articulated topics. Its opening and closing chapters (1, 2, and 8) offer a diagnosis of the crisis and a set of solutions to overcome it. Here the author lays out his particular brand of holism and fascist eugenics. The middle chapters (3 to 7), meanwhile, combine straightforward and masterful empirical descriptions of the body’s physiological and adaptive functions with unorthodox claims about metaphysical phenomena. He conceived the book as a work of scientific vulgarization and “synthesis”—a key term—aimed at the mass of anonymous readers who, like him, despaired about the uncertain times in which they lived. He introduced himself, in the third person, as a scientist who had become acquainted with people from all walks of life:

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With the poor and the rich, the sound and the diseased, the learned and the ignorant, the weak-minded, the insane, the shrewd, the criminal, etc. He knows farmers, proletarians, clerks, shopkeepers, financiers, manufacturers, politicians, statesmen, soldiers, professors, schoolteachers, clergymen, peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats. The circumstances of his life have led him across the path of philosophers, artists, poets, and scientists. And also of geniuses, heroes, and saints … He lives in the New World and also in the Old.19

The book’s main thesis was simple and unoriginal. It argued that a profound crisis was corroding the very structure of Western civilization. It was not a political crisis—due “neither to the presence of Mr. Roosevelt in the White House, nor to that of Hitler in Germany or Mussolini in Rome”—but a “crisis of man” caused by the “gap” between material and spiritual progress.20 Political conflicts, economic depression, social unrest, and cultural malaise were only superficial manifestations of a dysfunction caused by a way of life that no longer satisfied the fundamental needs of the human person. This was so because by privileging matter over spirit, Western modernity had ignored the essential fact that the human being was an indivisible “whole.” The foundations of modernity’s “inauthentic” conception of humanity were first laid down by Galileo Galilei’s distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities of things, and later by René Descartes’s separation of body and soul. Thereafter, and as knowledge became more specialized, the human being was broken down into infinite fragments, each studied separately.21 The argument of the “gap” or discrepancy between material development and moral or spiritual progress as a distinctive and disruptive feature of modern civilization was a favorite topic of most philosophically minded medical holists. It was probably the German zoologist Ernst Häckel (1834-1919) who first, combining scientific authority and accessible language, turned this thesis into a commonsensical belief. In The Riddle of the Universe, he argued that despite its scientific and technological achievements, modern civilization had failed to bring social and moral progress. According to him, the basic error lay in the anthropocentric assumption that man was special and that therefore his nature placed him beyond the laws of nature. This “excessive arrogance,” Häckel claimed, “has led a presumptuous man to believe erroneously that he is the ‘image of God’, the master of eternal life and the owner of an unlimited free will.” Instead, the new human person should abandon this “untenable illusion” and become one with nature and “ecology.”22 In Carrel’s time Chicago sociologist William Ogburn popularized a refined version of this argument through his “cultural lag” theory.23 Carrel argued that by embracing a worldview that neglected the moral and spiritual dimension of the human person, Western modernity sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Nowhere did the manifestations of decline appear clearer to him than in the weakening of the individual’s moral character and biological constitution. In the past, the white races had been

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able to dominate the world because they were endowed with “exceptional” physical and psychological qualities. The ability to withstand disease, hard work, and pain, along with a sound nervous system, had made the Greek, Roman, and Germanic “founders of civilization” a superior race. Modern individuals, however, bore little resemblance to their forebears. As people’s adaptive functions ceased to respond to environmental challenges, they became less resistant to fatigue and more easily aroused by excitement and fleshy appetites. Moreover, exposure to alien environmental conditions—such as heat and humidity—could now prove fatal to them, since “civilized races” developed their best qualities under cold and moderate temperatures and degenerated in tropical climates.24 To Carrel, Western civilization was besieged from within and from without. Inside, feeblemindedness and other psychophysical pathologies corroded the nation’s health, spreading degeneration and criminality. Prompted by these concerns, in 1911 he agreed to give expert advice on surgical matters to a committee on sterilization that had been set up by the eugenics section of the American Breeders Association to find means of “eliminating defective strains” from the population. The association became the most powerful eugenics lobby in the United States and, together with the Eugenics Records Office, played a fundamental role in the drafting and passage of a 1924 law that imposed strict quotas on immigrants from Southeastern Europe.25 Echoing Eleanor Wembridge’s Life among the Lowbrows (1931), he provided readers with chilling “hard evidence”—statistics—to shake them into awareness about the alarming increase of the “unfit.”26 In the State of New York, he warned, One person out of every twenty-two has to be placed in an asylum at some time or other. In the whole of the United States the hospitals care for almost eight times more feeble-minded or lunatics than consumptives. Each year about sixty-eight thousand new cases are admitted to the insane asylums and similar institutions. If the admissions continue at such a rate, about one million of the children and young people who are today attending schools and colleges will, sooner or later, be confined in asylums. In the state hospitals there were, in 1932, 340,000 insane. There were also in special institutions 81,580 feeble-minded and epileptics, and 10,930 on parole. These statistics do not include the mental cases treated in private hospitals. In the whole country, besides the insane, there are 500,000 feeble-minded. And in addition, surveys made under the auspices of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene have revealed that at least 400,000 children are so unintelligent that they cannot profitably follow the courses of the public schools. In fact, the individuals who are mentally deranged are far more numerous. It is estimated that several hundred thousand persons, not mentioned in any statistics, are affected with psychoneuroses … The diseases of the mind are a serious menace … They are to be feared, not only because they increase the number of criminals, but chiefly because they profoundly weaken the dominant white races.27

Carrel’s definition of mental “weakness” was not constrained by even the fuzziest, most biased clinical criteria but instead reflected an ultraconser-

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vative mindset that likened popular tastes—“cheap literature” and “silly public entertainment”—to a weak morality. Thus, he saw the panic triggered by Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast enacting an invasion from Mars as proof of a corrupted social fabric.28 Other foes menaced the West from without. Although Carrel shared every Frenchman’s concern with depopulation, his pronatalist bent was distinctively mediated by American racist thinking. Thus, when he despaired about France’s declining birthrate it was not so much Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that he had in mind—as most French pronatalists did—but above all the non-Western peoples of “lesser” worth: Europe and the United States are undergoing a qualitative as well as quantitative deterioration. On the contrary, the Asiatics and the Africans, [and others] such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today. Even if a suicidal war is avoided, we will be faced with degeneration because of the sterility of the strongest and most intelligent stock.29

Troubled by the class- and ethnicity-associated birthrate differentials between the upper and lower social strata—a favorite topic of contemporary eugenicists—he warned that the declining fertility of the white upper classes would result in the “extinction of the best elements of the race” because the offspring of the more prolific and poor immigrants from “primitive” European countries lacked “the value of those begotten by the first settlers of North America.” This phenomenon revealed to him the extent to which the “strongest and the most intelligent stock” was no longer able to fulfill its reproductive duties.30 Adopting the misogynist arguments of conservative ideologues, he blamed the falling birthrate and the yielding of “inferior offspring” on an “ill conceived education, feminism, and a short-sighted selfishness” that turned “modern women” away from their reproductive and childrearing roles.31 Thus, politics appeared as a regrettable interference in the otherwise healthy and necessary struggle for survival. Modern ideologies were useless abstractions that were doomed to fail because of their incapacity of apprehending the human person “as a whole.” Political democracy was particularly pernicious because it hindered the development of the elite by making the struggle for survival unnecessary. Here Carrel’s illiberal views fed on the themes of old-fashioned conservatism as well as fascism. On the one hand, he rejected egalitarianism as an “error” because it led people to believe that the principle of equality among human beings also applied to individuals—each understood as psychophysically unique. Accordingly, he saw democracy as a “foolish attempt” to standardize society by ignoring the differences among individuals and, worst of all, by reducing everyone to the same level at the bottom. Likewise, he considered it a dangerous illusion to believe that the “feebleminded” and those endowed with “higher intellectual abilities” should be equal before

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the law. Instead, electoral rights and access to higher education should be reserved for “fully developed” individuals. On the other hand, and despite a certain disdain for their plebeian radicalism, he praised the Fascist and Nazi regimes for unmasking the democratic “fallacy” and acknowledging their nation’s sentiments of “fear, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, hatred, and love.” It was not the liberal democracies but the movements led by Mussolini and Hitler that succeeded in creating a “faith that drove the youth to sacrifice itself for an ideal.” Fascism, he wrote, was superior because it “infused with life the products of our mind” and engendered “men burning with a passion to create.”32

Human Science as Eugenics If Carrel’s reading of the crisis was built on many current opinions, his proposals to overcome it appeared, at least to many of his contemporaries, original. His solution for the remaking of civilization rested on three pillars: a universal knowledge, a technocratic elite, and eugenics. The “science of man,” as he called his project of comprehensive knowledge, would undo the epistemological errors of the Renaissance by achieving the synthesis of all the relevant information disseminated in technical journals, treatises, and savants’ brains. His criticism of specialization and expert knowledge had a distinctively holistic outlook. He blamed them for The mass of illusions and badly observed facts; the false problems investigated by the weak-minded of the realm of science, and the pseudo-discoveries of charlatans and scientists extolled by the daily press; also of the sadly useless investigations; the long studies of meaningless things, and the inextricable jumble that has been standing mountain high ever since biological research became a profession like those of the schoolteacher, the clergyman, and the bank clerk.33

The book’s middle chapters illustrate well the author’s understanding of synthesis. He conceived the new human science as beyond philosophical dualisms and devoted to the study of the person as an indivisible totality. Religious and aesthetic phenomena should be studied following the same criteria applied to physics. The originality here lay not in the integration of descriptive data on human biology and psychology but in the discussion of less conventional topics. Overcoming his initial reluctance to speak about them in public, for the first time since the Lourdes controversy he openly addressed topics such as miracles, mysticism, clairvoyance, and telepathy—which he claimed to be as “real” as any other sensory experience, even when they were not measurable by conventional standards.34 This self-confidence was reinforced by the fact that, as he pointed out, other respected scientists—Carrel’s fellow Frenchman and Nobel laureate, Charles Richet, among others—were also looking for explanations for these phenomena.35

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The second pillar of Carrel’s regeneration project was the construction of an elite devoted to the pursuit of universal knowledge. Recruited among the different disciplines, these savants, or “composite Aristotles,” as he called them, would be grouped in “centers of synthesis” with the purpose of “welding their individual thoughts into a synthetic whole” through the method of collective thinking.36 Carrel borrowed some of these ideas from the Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick, who argued that the complexity of the problems faced by modern society could be addressed only by the collective effort of multidisciplinary experts. In The Old Savage in the New Civilization (1928), Fosdick stated: “The great overshadowing need that faces our time and our generation is the need of an organizing intelligence dedicated to the advancement of the common good. We need brains of synthetic capacity. We need a planetary consciousness. We need the ability to think on a terrestrial scale and plan in world terms. We need an Aristotle. … This task is obviously too great for a single brain. The world is now too vast and too complex to be grasped by a single philosopher. When Aristotle comes again, it will be in the form of a collective intelligence, the sustained thinking of many minds, driving towards the common goal.”37 Carrel considered medicine to be the discipline best suited for leading the way to universal knowledge. The role of physicians would be to “guide” the process of human regeneration by supplying society with “engineers of the body and the soul.” Carrel conceived of the scientific elite of the future in highly utopian and authoritarian terms. Drawing a parallel with the collapse of the Roman Empire, he saw the world depression as a “divine punishment” inflicted on Western society for having ignored the “higher laws of life.” Emerging out of the ashes of civilization, and emulating the “spirit of revolt” of the “Aristotelian monk-warriors and savants” of the Middle Ages, the universal scientists would organize themselves in “secret groups” and live according to the rules of military and monastic discipline.38 Isolated from society and free from the burdens of ordinary life, the members of this “higher council of learning” would become an “immortal brain” devoted both to the contemplation of life and to engineering humankind. With the knowledge they provided, “democratic rulers as well as dictators” would be able to impose on the “dissolute and degraded majority,” either “by persuasion or by force,” a civilization “suitable to man.”39 Eugenics, Carrel wrote, must be drilled into people’s minds as an “absolute social necessity” that demands the “sacrifice of many individuals.” It is perhaps because his proposals appear explicitly formulated only in the last pages of the book that his defenders have always dismissed them as an irrelevant or, at best, an eccentric manifestation of an otherwise “visionary” thinking. As we shall see, however, Man, the Unknown was only one of several public pronouncements in which the author unambivalently endorsed a racist biopolitics. Carrel envisioned eugenics as the only solu-

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tion enabling the elite to develop now that, owing to the progress of sanitation and medicine, the principles of natural selection no longer worked. Like most proponents of racial hygiene of his time, his suggestions to “improve” the population borrowed from different traditions of biomedical thought. Likewise, he justified these policies by citing considerations of both biological worth and economic efficiency. Convinced that social status and biological quality were intimately connected, he perceived conflict as a symptom of the “disastrous predominance of the weak” in public affairs. To counteract this he proposed several possible undertakings. First of all, he warned against the “artificial” improvement of the weak. Social divisions, he said, were not the result of chance, conventions, or uneven distribution of power, but reflected each individual’s biological capacities. Peasants and industrial workers owed their inferior status not to social injustice but to their “hereditary organic and psychological weakness.” Those who ruled must accept this fact and work toward the substitution of new biological classes for old social divisions and the creation of a future order in which individuals would “rise or sink” to the social level that is appropriate to their psychophysical fitness.40 Second, he proposed creating a “non-hereditary aristocracy” with the offspring of exceptional personalities, such as “imaginative criminals, great revolutionaries, and high-handed businessmen.” It was in these families that, hidden under the “cloak of degeneration,” lay some of the “ancestral qualities” of the medieval warriors and the founders of civilization. Such qualities were manifest only in the strong will and determination of extraordinary leaders, not among the children of those who “muddled along in their lives in inferior positions.”41 Third, he suggested adopting a program of “voluntary” eugenics aimed at discouraging the “unfit” from marrying. Prospective husbands and wives should be taught to assess their partners’ biological worth as they do their material wealth. Thus, an appropriate education, he hoped, would make everyone realize “what wretchedness is in store for those who marry into families contaminated by syphilis, cancer, tuberculosis, insanity, or feeble-mindedness,” just as if they were marrying into the poor.42 Because marriage should serve a eugenic purpose, gender roles had to be “clearly defined.” Accordingly, individuals should “never be allowed to manifest the sexual tendencies, mental characteristics, and ambitions of the opposite gender”; likewise, all behavior that conflicts with the fulfillment of “natural” biological duties should be discouraged. Women must be trained to rear their offspring, “not to become doctors, lawyers, or professors.” On the other hand, marriage laws would have to take into account the children’s welfare. As among all anthropoids, the union of male and female “must last at least until the young have no further need of protection.”43 Finally, Carrel suggested an array of public health measures aimed at creating the environmental conditions best suited for the

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development of healthy and tough-spirited individuals—such as special diets and exposure to extreme climatic conditions.44 If Carrel expressed any doubts about “negative” eugenics—such tactics as forced sterilization and euthanasia—it was out of technical considerations rather than moral objections. Except for the mentally “insane” and “criminal”—the group he earmarked for negative eugenics—he believed that the current state of medical knowledge provided inconclusive results concerning the hereditability of many degenerative diseases. Therefore, he deemed it premature to “prevent the reproduction of the weak” on a massive scale such as was being done in Nazi Germany, nor did he consider it advisable “to kill sickly or defective children as we kill the weaklings in a litter of puppies.” Utterances like this fill the closing and most disturbing passages of the last chapter, titled “The Remaking of Man.” How should society deal with the “immense number of defectives and criminals?” To answer this question, he followed a line of argument favored by many eugenicists in times of economic hardship, collapsing biological arguments with financial considerations. Normal individuals must not be burdened with the “heavy and unacceptable” costs of preserving the “useless and harmful beings” living in prisons and asylums. Society should deal with the criminals and the insane in a more “economic manner.” He suggested that [t]hose who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings [and] misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such necessity. The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilization.45

Some of Carrel’s biographers have downplayed these proposals, saying that he never endorsed Nazi policies and that therefore one should not make too much out of these words. Implicit in this interpretation is the conviction that these ideas were nothing but a faux pas. Such an approach fails to place these statements within Carrel’s reputation as an illiberal and racist author. These extreme proposals were neither exceptional nor a mere rhetorical device to shock the reader. Two examples illustrate this. In December 1935—two months after the release of the book—he was invited to give a talk at the New York Academy of Medicine. Before a tightly packed audience he criticized the medically assisted prolongation of life as a “far greater calamity than death itself” that burdened civilized countries “with those who should be dead.” He hailed premature death as a “builder of civilization” because it eliminated “the weak, the diseased, and fools.”46 In those days he also received a letter from the publishing house Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt asking that he made certain changes for the German edi-

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tion of the book. The publisher wanted Carrel to insert an explicit reference to the racial laws adopted by the National Socialist regime “concerning the sterilization of men suffering from hereditary diseases and the castration of atrocious and incurable sexual criminals.”47 It may be recalled that by the end of 1935 Hitler’s regime was enforcing several major pieces of racialbiological legislation. Following the recommendation of the Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy, on 14 July 1933 the German government issued the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases. This law substituted compulsory for voluntary sterilization and extended the range of sicknesses regarded as “hereditarily determined” to persons suffering from “congenital feeble-mindedness,” “schizophrenia,” “manic depression,” Huntington’s chorea, “hereditary” blindness and deafness, and “serious physical deformities.” Such a catalogue not only defined as “hereditary” some diseases that various physicians claimed were not; it also made certain categories so elastic as to render them meaningless. On 24 November 1933 the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals empowered criminal-biological experts to order the detention and castration of persons with two or more criminal convictions. Finally, on 26 June 1935, the regime amended the July 1933 law in order to enable the Hereditary Health Courts to sanction abortions for women who had been categorized as “hereditarily ill.” As a result, between January 1934 and September 1939, some 320,000 people—0.5 percent of the German population—were compulsorily sterilized for allegedly having “recessive” genes that might endanger their offspring—the overwhelming majority of these people had been declared “feebleminded” and “schizophrenic.”48 Nazi racism did not need Carrel’s ideas, but it could use his name to lend scientific respectability to Hitler’s murderous utopia. While we may never know whether the scientist was fully aware of the consequences of his actions, one fact is undisputable: he agreed enthusiastically to the Nazi publisher’s request and submitted without delay the following addition, to be inserted in the German edition of the book: The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.49

To a certain extent, it may seem logical that, at a time when the full meaning of Nazi racism remained unknown, most of the readers of Man, the Unknown failed to make the connection between the author’s ideas and Hitler’s policies. But in no way does this minimize Carrel’s contribution to making negative eugenics more acceptable.50 In fact, this is how the Nazis read his book. At the Nuremberg Doctors Trial of 1946, the head of the program for the killing of mentally handicapped, Karl Brand, bolstered his claim that the sterilization and elimination of “life not worth living” (leben-

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sunwerten Lebens) was based on American ideas and experiments by citing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Carrel’s Man, the Unknown.51 As recent comparative research in the history of eugenics shows, ideas like Carrel’s inspired the intellectual debates of the period and shaped public social policy. By the late 1930s, more than fifteen states of the United States, as well as the parliamentary governments of several European states and Canada, had adopted compulsory and “voluntary” legislation authorizing sterilization, castration, and abortion on eugenic grounds (Table 1). In the following two decades, US, Scandinavian, and German medical, psychiatric, and legal experts carried out more than 420,000 legal sterilizations—a conservative estimate—with Nazi Germany accounting for 85 percent of them. (Table 2)

Table 1 Adoption of legislation authorizing eugenic sterilization, castration, and/or abortion Country/State Year Canada (Alberta, British Columbia) 1928 Denmark 1929, 1934, 1935 Estonia 1937 Finland 1935 Germany 1933, 1935 Norway 1934 Sweden 1935, 1941 Switzerland (Vaud) 1928 United States Indiana 1907 Washington, 1908 California, Connecticut 1909 Iowa, Nevada, New Jersey 1911 New York 1912 Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Wisconsin 1913 Nebraska 1915 New Hampshire, Oregon 1917 North Carolina 1918 Alabama 1919 Montana, Delaware 1923 Virginia 1924 Maine, Idaho, Utah 1925 Minnesota, Mississippi 1926 Arizona, West Virginia 1929 Oklahoma 1931 South Carolina 1935 Georgia, Puerto Rico 1937

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Table 2 Legal sterilizations (approx.) Country Denmark Finland Germany Norway Sweden U. S. (31 states)

Year 1929-1945 1935-1955 1935-1945 1934-1954 1935-1949 1907-1941

Total 3.600 1.900 360.000 3.700 19.600 36.000

Source: Gunnar Broberg and Nills Rol-Hansen eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: The Uses of Human Genetics (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985); Jean Sutter, L eug nique: probl mes, m thodes, r sultats (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950); Harry F. Perkins et al. eds., A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics held at the American Museum of National History, New York, 21-23 July 1932 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1934).

Carrel’s eugenics was the byproduct not of his work on tissues and organs but of a loosely articulated worldview that was “modern”—with regards to experimental science—yet profoundly authoritarian in its political implications. Man, the Unknown illustrates the extent to which eugenics discourse had come to shape the social and cultural imagination and concerns of many ordinary people. The book’s success in appealing to broad audiences may be explained by the fact that the racial biomedical discourse of the 1930s was less a clear set of scientific ideas than “a modern way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms.”52 As scientists and propagandists popularized various forms of racial hygiene, they “lent scientific credibility and respectability to attitudes, anxieties, and values” that were prevalent mostly among the bourgeoisie and the educated middle class. From this perspective, Carrel followed the trend of selectively appropriating eugenics to portray society as an organic body that had to be guided by the unforgiving laws of biology. The book also illustrates how an internationally acclaimed celebrity could use his symbolic capital to popularize illiberal and racist views. His scientific achievements and his relationship with the American popular hero Charles Lindbergh gave him and his ideas the public exposure and legitimacy that other eugenicists lacked. Paradoxically, Carrel’s gifts as a literary author and scientific popularizer contributed to spreading the conviction that a radical biopolitics was necessary to overcome an impending crisis at the very moment when US racist eugenics was beginning to lose its popular appeal.53

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Marketing Cultural Despair Initially the manuscript, considered by some “too general to please the expert and too specialized to reach the public,” failed to attract publishers’ interest. Eventually, the Parisian publisher Plon agreed to run a small edition of a few thousand copies after Carrel’s wife stormed their offices to berate the chief editors for their “poor literary judgment.” The New Yorkbased Harper & Brothers, likewise, opted to publish the book, owing to Carrel’s scientific collaboration with Lindbergh (see Chapter 4 in this volume) and the public’s ongoing fascination with the aviator after the tragic death of his child. Indeed, the book was released shortly after the widely covered trial and conviction of Bruno Hauptmann—the kidnapper and murderer of Lindbergh’s baby. Yet what perhaps most brought Carrel to the attention of thousands of Americans was the publication of the book’s chapters in condensed format in Reader’s Digest—which by the early 1940s was selling four million copies a month. Started in the early 1920s by a former Westinghouse employee, Dewitt (William Roy) Wallace, this popular magazine published condensed articles of topical interest and entertainment value taken from other periodicals. Reflecting a conservative outlook that emphasized traditional American ideals, the Digest’s thematic index explored topics from science, nature, and health to manners and mores. Descriptions of unusual occurrences, heroic individuals, and lurking dangers were regular fare, as were broadly inspirational essays and instructions for self-improvement. Its monthly readership jumped from five thousand in 1922 to four million by 1941. In 1934, the Digest began publishing condensed versions of current books, and eventually it commissioned its own articles. Carrel’s literary career benefited from both enterprises.54 After the Digest published the first abridged version of Man, the Unknown in December 1935—at this time the magazine had reached a circulation of 1.8 million copies—the book’s initial modest sales skyrocketed to one hundred thousand for the cloth version. In 1939, Carrel began writing a series of articles specially commissioned by the magazine.55 The book’s commercial success exceeded by far the most optimistic expectations—in the United States some public libraries had to set up waiting lists for the much-sought-after copies.56 The English and French first editions quickly sold out after their release in the fall of 1935. The 3,500 copies sold before Reader’s Digest began publishing condensed versions increased to around 200,000 by 1940—some 180 editions, each of one thousand copies. In France, Carrel’s native country, the success was even greater, with sixty editions published between 1935 and 1939. L’homme cet inconnu sold five thousand copies in the first week, 31,000 by the end of 1935, and some 250,000 by 1940, when many came to interpret France’s crushing defeat as a confirmation of Carrel’s apocalyptic forecasts. By 1942, despite paper shortages, the total had reached 300,000—some 70,000 additional sales for the first two years of the occupation. Nearly 400,000 copies had been

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sold within a few years of the liberation. Even more remarkable was the book’s amazing success outside the United States and France—by the end of World War II, Man, the Unknown had been translated into fourteen languages.57 Carrel’s eccentric personality and his relationship with Lindbergh played a major role in creating a mass readership. In addition to his well publicized scientific achievements, colorful biographical facts such as the Lourdes episode appealed to Catholics interested in discovering how the new science would reconcile humanity’s material and spiritual needs. The book also caught the eye of American and French military physicians and war veterans who recalled Carrel’s wartime services in World War I. Above all, everyone seemed anxious to know the deepest thoughts of the “wizard” who had kept a piece of chicken heart “alive” since 1912.58 Although the 1920s and 1930s were a period of pseudobibliophilia, with many people buying books and putting them on the shelves without reading them, there are some clues that allow us to speculate about the possible reasons of the book’s success. For example, Bernt Hansen has argued that in the 1940s the favorable depiction of physicians in comics and other popular genres illustrated the rising reputation of medical doctors in American mass culture.59 The literary reviews and personal letters sent to Carrel by hundreds of American and French readers give us another perspective on the responses to the book and the ways it was being read. Both author and book generated passionate reactions. The mid September issue of Time featured a long article in which Carrel’s elitist and technocratic proposals were mocked as a “colossal joke” offered by a “mystic” and world-famous scientist who knew of no intellectual boundaries and delighted in “wild rant.”60 These derogatory remarks, however, should not be read as a sign that the book was not taken seriously. On the contrary, the fact that Carrel was featured on the magazine’s cover shows that its editors understood that despite the reviewer’s personal opinions, the book’s author had achieved a public status that was unusual for a scientist in those days. It was precisely the Nobel laureate’s celebrity that led some scientists to react with a mixture of praise and apprehension.61 The Yale neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing disapproved of Carrel’s undertaking and refused a request to write a review.62 In a long commentary published in the book review section of the New York Times, Johns Hopkins biologist and professor of biometrics and vital statistics Raymond Pearl welcomed Man, the Unknown as the first “to give the history of the soul” its rightful place and as a “bold frontal attack upon the smug and narrow orthodoxy” of traditional biology and medicine. Pearl found Carrel’s ambiguous views on science and the study of metaphysical phenomena disappointing. In this matter, he wrote, there could be no compromise or middle ground: “Either the methods of science furnish the only ‘dependable’ way to reach a realistic knowledge of natural phenomena, capable of rigorous proof and verification at will, or they do

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not. And it will want a lot of proving to convince the world that mysticism is as effective a nutcracker as science.”63 Yet Pearl skirted Carrel’s eugenics altogether. This omission is revealing if we consider the biologist’s troubled relationship with eugenics. He had played a fundamental role in the eugenics movement and had served with Carrel as an expert in the American Breeders Association’s advisory committee on sterilization. In the 1920s he distanced himself from the fanaticism and propaganda of mainstream eugenics but avoided aligning himself publicly with its detractors—he refused, for example, to support the campaign led by the anthropologist Franz Boas to unmask Nazi pseudoscientific racism.64 French readers were not only divided but also more political in their assessment. Henri Bergson welcomed L’homme cet inconnu with unqualified enthusiasm while the renowned biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand praised the rejection of the “mechanistic interpretation of the universe” as the book’s most original claim.65 Left-wing scientists and physicians, however, reacted less sympathetically. Academics from the University of Paris dismissed L’homme cet inconnu as “a 393-page hodge-podge” of pitiful intellectual quality, and engagé physicians accused the author of being a fascist and trashed his book as a worthless “humbug” and a “bourgeois utopia” embellished with a “crude version of Bergsonian philosophy.”66 Carrel’s, one of them wrote, “is a decadent work, a work of death that can only help those who seek violence [faire oeuvre de violence] and blood in order to keep the bourgeois reign of the present elite.”67 Yet there were a few exceptions within the antifascist camp that read the book outside the conventional boundaries of partisanship. The anarchist L’éducateur prolétarien, for example, portrayed it as an attempt to confront “without parti pris” issues that the left had so far avoided.68 Religious readers welcomed the book’s bold critique of materialism and vindication of spiritualism. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergymen hailed it as “an oasis of beauty in a wilderness” and thanked its author for giving them a precious source of inspiration for their sermons.69 Stephen Wise, rabbi of the New York City Free Synagogue, found the book so exciting that he “could hardly sleep after reading it.” Indeed, he wrote to Carrel, “I said on Sunday morning, preaching to my people about Man, the Unknown, ‘it is not merely a great book, it is epochal’. It deals with the destiny of the human genius as significantly as Darwin dealt with the origins of species ... I said to the congregation, ‘it is not a book to be talked about from the pulpit, but to be discussed in seminar fashion for many hours with a class.”70 Although most religious commentators celebrated Carrel’s critique of industrial civilization’s “dehumanizing” effects, Catholic intellectuals found other aspects of the book less acceptable.71 The American Jesuit Catholic World, for example, complained that the author’s philosophy portrayed a human-centered macrocosm with no God in it.72 French periodicals such as Les essais catholiques disagreed with the scientific methods of

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remaking mankind, while Sept deplored the author’s “idealistic” bent and “ill-defined behaviorism.”73 Reflecting the growing anti-Americanism of these milieus, the Jesuit Les études labeled L’homme cet inconnu a “very American book” and the “inhuman civilization” portrayed by its author as “foremost the American civilization.”74 While sharing Carrel’s “very noble reaction” against American civilization Ordre nouveau found his thinking unoriginal and filled with hasty generalizations.75 Esprit was one of the few to take seriously, and reject without ambiguity, Carrel’s fascism and eugenics. Should this Nietzschean and Darwinian philosophy prevail, the journal warned, “we shall see the triumph of the most fit and most beautiful barbarians.”76 The popular press, and in particular French middle-class and conservative audiences, read the book’s depiction of the crisis as an ominous reminder of France’s international and domestic problems. Writing for Le petit dauphinois, Georges Blond—later a Vichy sympathizer—placed Carrel alongside such celebrities as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Bernard, Charles Maurras, and Karl Marx, and singled out L’homme cet inconnu as an example of those rare books that radically changed the way people thought about themselves.77 Likewise, and despite certain misgivings concerning the author’s technocratic proposals, L’écho de Paris praised his book as a “far more severe” and “radical” critique of modern society than Georges Duhamel’s contemporary classic, Scènes de la vie future.78 Seeing Carrel’s attack on liberal values as a confirmation of their long held beliefs, the far right welcomed his book with unqualified enthusiasm. Candide applauded the author for endorsing Maurras’s critique of democracy, while Gringoire underscored the similarity between Carrel’s and Léon Daudet’s authoritarian ideas. Le petit parisien praised the book as the “noble and courageous” work of “a priest of science” whom the French had denied the possibility of pursuing a career in his fatherland.79 Ordinary readers were equally split. Some liked the book, others were less impressed, and a few hated it deeply. The wife of Charles Lindbergh, the writer Anne Morrow—herself a close friend of Carrel and his wife— wondered, not without sarcasm, whether the book would breed a race of “tall soft-headed athletes.”80 Reacting to the author’s misogynist views, a student from Barnard College dismissed Man, the Unknown as a book “written to and for men,” and the utopia depicted in its pages as a “man’s world.” She reminded Carrel that many of his ideas were already being carried out in fascist countries, “where women are secluded entirely and are made to produce as many children as possible.”81 An enraged New Yorker addressed a five-page letter to Carrel, taking issue with both the style and the arguments of the book. “The accomplishments in the field of science,” he wrote, Do not give you leave to make vain and incoherent speculations, most of them based on inherited and current prejudices and shibboleths ... The book [Man,

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the Unknown] is in essence about as scientific as some almanac published by a quack drug company that sells tonic to cure girls of eight years of age and over of sterility …You reason around a vicious circle employing all the terminology of science, so that you cannot be accused of being a reactionary, and at the same time confuse the mind of the reader. All this to spin a subtle message, calling for a return to feudalism ... In future years ... I am certain that your name will become anathema in the field of science.82

Anonymous readers thanked Carrel for giving them hope and praised the book for conveying intricate topics in an accessible language. A French housekeeper confessed her delight when she found that “an ignorant of my type” could understand the author’s ideas. Another reader expressed gratitude that the book had been a fascinating read from which “the man on the street” could profit.83 The book was also successful among the milieus associated with the study of extrasensory phenomena, all of which received Carrel’s opinions as a scientific—that is, “objective”—validation of their claims.84 Likewise, Man, the Unknown’s critique of urban civilization, its calls to biological improvement through exercise, healthy diet and closerto-nature lifestyles struck a sympathetic chord with early-day ecologists as well as proponents of “alternative” medicine and outdoor activities.85 Man, the Unknown opened new and unexpected career prospects to Carrel. In late December 1935 he made a rare public appearance at the New York Academy of Medicine. On the scheduled Saturday evening, five thousand people fought their way into the 700 seats of the academy’s Hoosack Hall to hear the Nobel laureate talk about “the mystery of death”; two thousand of them had to be driven away by the police. The following morning the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and other local papers ran lengthy articles on the event, while Time compared the massive turnout at Carrel’s talk to the “few important doctors” who attended the speech given by George Hoyt Whipple, the 1934 Nobel laureate in medicine, at nearby Mount Sinai Hospital.86 These positive responses and the rising commercial success of the book—now available in a two-dollar paperback edition—tempted him with the idea of writing for large audiences and becoming an homme de lettres.87 In 1939 he signed a contract with Reader’s Digest for a set of articles on popular health and self-improvement topics.88 As he approached retirement from the Rockefeller Institute, writing for the “incoherent masses” seemed an appropriate choice for a scientist who had built his career partly on publicizing his work with big audiences. Now, his new literary endeavors gave him the opportunity to reach an even larger public, and in particular the powerful and influential voices that were crucial to putting his ideas into practice.89 He combined his scientific and literary reputations to seek support for the creation of a research institution along the lines drawn in Man, the Unknown. Between 1934 and 1940, he drafted several sketches and secured Lindbergh’s support for the project. Once again, the pilot became a fundamental factor in the scientist’s public career.

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Notes 1. ������������������������������������������������������������� On medicine and literature in France see Louis-Paul Fischer, Le bistouri et la plume: les médecins écrivains (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Gérard Danou ed., Littérature et médecine, ou les pouvoirs du récit (Paris: Bibliothèque publique d’information, 2001); Elise Aley, “Céline ou le triomphe de la médecine en littérature,“ thèse de médecine, Université de Montpéllier, 1988. 2. ������������� Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). 3. ��������������� Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (New York: C. Scribner, 1916); T. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: C. Scribner, 1920); idem, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922); Oswald ����������������� Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1922). English version: The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926–1928); José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1929). English version: The Revolt of the Masses, trans. anon. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932). 4. ���������� Spengler, Le déclin de l’Occident: esquisse d’une morphologie d’histoire universelle, trans. Mohand Tazeou (Paris: Nouvelle r��������������������������������������������� evue française, 1931–1933); Ortega y Gasset, La révolte des masses, trans. Louis Parrot (Paris: Delamain et Boutelleau, 1937); Albert Demangeon, Le déclin de l’Europe (Paris: Payot, 1920); Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930); Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1931); Robert Aron, Le cancer américain (Paris: Editons Rieder, 1931); Henri Decugis, Le destin des races blanches (Paris: Librairie de France, 1935). 5. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On this topic see the essays in Marie-Anne Matard-Bonnucci and Pierre Milza, eds., L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922–1945): entre dictature et totalitarisme (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy et l’éternel féminin: contribution à une sociologie politique de l’ordre des corps (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996); George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 6. �������������������������������������������� Benoît Lecoq, “L’édition et la science,” in Histoire de l’édition française. Vol. 4: le livre concurrencé, ed. Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier and Jean-Pierre Vivet (Paris: Promodis, 1986), 307–17. 7. ������������������ Maurice Caullery, Les étapes de la biologie; Pierre Rousseau, De l’atome à l’étoile, and Marcel Boll, Les certitudes du hasard. The ������������������������������������������������� collection was published in Paris by Presses Universitaires de France. 8. ������������������������������������� The physicist André George published Les grands appels de l’homme contemporain (Paris: Editions du temps présent, 1946) and Le véritable humanisme: propos sur la culture littéraire et scientifique (Paris: Revue des jeunes, 1942), and launched with the publisher Albin Michel two immensely popular science series: Sciences d’aujourd’hui and Les savants et le monde. Similarly, ���������������������������������������������� the biologist Rémy Collin authored Le message social du savant (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941). 9. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a general overview on the subject see Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz, “Medical Holism: The Context,” and Charles E. Rosenberg, “Holism in Twentieth-Century Medicine,” in Greater than the Parts: Holism and Biomedicine, 1920–1950, ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–22, 335–55. 10. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� See Sarah W. Tracy, “The Evolving Science of Man: The Transformation and Demise of American Constitutional Medicine, 1920–1950,” and Jack D. Pressman, “Human Understanding: Psychosomatic Medicine and the Mission of the Rockefeller Foundation,” both in Lawrence and Weisz, Greater than the Parts, 161–208. 11. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On French medical holism see George Weisz, “A Moment of Synthesis: Medical Holism in France between the Wars,” in Lawrence and Weisz, Greater than the Parts, 68–93.

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12. ���������������������������������������������������������������������� See for example the essays in Sue Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and America Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). 13. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Robert Nye, “Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Decline in Fin-de-siècle France,” in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, ed. Seymour Drescher (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 19–41. 14. ������������������������������������ Carrel Is Dubious on Rejuvenation,” NYT, 22 Dec. 1931, N2; “Carrel Urges Fund for the Study of Aging,” NYT, 4 Dec. 1935, 15; “On Growing Old,” NYT, 5 Mar. 1936, 20. 15. ����������������������������������������� “Dr. Carrel Honored for Cancer Studies,” NYT, 20 Mar. 1931, 18; “Carrel Gets Prize for Cancer Studies,” NYT, 29 Mar. 1931, N2. 16. ������������������������������������������� Carrel, “The Future Progress of Medicine,” Scientific Monthly, July 1925, 55–57; “Carrel Says Hope of Man Is Research,” NYT, 23 Mar. 1925, 10. 17. �������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 41, Coudert to Carrel, 19 May 1914. 18. �������� Carrel, Man the Unknown (West Drayton, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1948), xxiii. 19. Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), xix–xx. 20. Ibid. (1939), xiii. 21. Ibid. (1939), ix, 30. 22. Ernst Häckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (London and New York: Harper and & Brothers, 1901). The book sold 100,000 copies in only one year. By the end of World War I, it had gone through ten editions and twenty-five translations. 23. William F. Ogburn, Social Change With Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: The Viking Press, 1928). 24. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1948), 109–110, 200. 25. The American Breeders Association was established in 1903 in Washington, D.C., for the purpose of “bringing together practical breeders, experimenters, investigators and teachers interested in the subject of breeding, for the advancement of the science of genetics.” Closely linked to the Eugenics Records Office of Cold Spring Harbor, by 1912 its eugenics section—its two other sections were on plants and animals—comprised ten research committees on “feeble-mindedness,” “insanity,” epilepsy, criminality, deafmutism, eye defects, immigration, sterilization and “other means of eliminating defective germ plasma,” genealogy, and “inheritance of mental traits.” Besides Carrel, the advisory committee on sterilization was formed by C. B. Alexander and O. P. Austin (Bureau of Statistics, Washington, D.C.), L. F. Barker (Johns Hopkins University), J. M. Beck (New York Bar Association), W. B. Cannon (Harvard University), A. F. Chamberlain (Clark University), J. A. Field (University of Chicago), I. Fisher (Yale University), W. W. Foster (New York Court of General Sessions), F. H. Giddins (Columbia University), H. H. Goddard (Vineland Training School, NJ), L. Marshall (New York Bar Association), S. Paton (Princeton University), R. Pearl (Maine Agricultural College), J. J. Walsh (Fordham Medical College, NY), and H. J. Webber (Cornell University). ������������� Bleecker Van Wagenen, “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasma in the Human Population,” in Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated to the First International Congress Held at the University of London, July 24th30th, 1912, ed. The Eugenics Education Society (Adelphi, Eng.: The Eugenics Education Society, 1912), 460–79. 26. Eleanor H. Wembridge, Life among the Lowbrows (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931). 27. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1948), 147–48��. 28. ������������������� Ibid., (1939), xii. 29. Ibid., (1939)����� , xi. 30. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� It has been suggested that Carrel’s preoccupation with biological decline may have been stimulated by his own childless marriage. ��������������������������������������������� Although there is no direct evidence that he blamed his wife for this, privately he suspected that members of her family bore the

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distinct traits of a “degenerated stock.” See ������������������� Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992), 100. 31. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1939), 93, (1948), 274. On the relationship between pronatalism and the critique of the “modern woman” see Cheryl A. Koos, “Gender, Antiindividualism, and Nationalism: The Alliance Nationale and the Pronatalist Backlash against the Femme Moderne, 1933–1940,” FHS 19, no. 3 (1996): 699–723. The English-language bibliography on depopulation and pronatalism in twentieth-century France is vast. See, for example, the articles in the forum edited by Rachel G. Fuchs, “Population and the State in the Third Republic,” FHS 19, no. 3 (1996): 633–754; Marie-Monique Huss, “Pronatalism in the Interwar Period in France,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 39–68; id., “Pronatalism and the Popular Ideology of the Child in Wartime France,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, ed. Richard Wall and Jay M. Winter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Philip Ogden, “Demography and Pronatalism in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Historical Geography 8, no. 3 (1982): 283–98; Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985); Joseph Spengler, France Faces Depopulation. Postlude Edition, 1936–1976 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979). 32. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1939), xiv; (1948), 249–50. 33. �������������������� Ibid. (1939), 34–35. 34. �������������������������������������������� Ibid. (1939), 56–57, 278–79; (1948), 121–22. 35. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The physiologist Charles Richet (1850–1935) won the 1913 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the process of anaphylaxis. He was professor at the University of Paris and became one of the leading eugenicists of the interwar years. 36. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1939), 278–91. At a meeting of the Rotatry Club held in his honor he declared that “only a composite Aristotle [could] save civilization,” “Carrel Forecasts a ‘Brain Pool’ Era,” NYT, 14 Apr. 1939, 25. 37. ����������������� Raymond Fosdick, The Old Savage in the New Civilization (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, & Company, 1928), v–vi, 31–32. 38. �������� Carrel, Man, the Unknown (1939), 276–77. 39. �������������� Ibid., 291–96. 40. ����������� Ibid., 299. ���� 41. ����������� Ibid., 296. ���� 42. ����������� Ibid., 300. ���� 43. ����������� Ibid., 296. ���� 44. ��������������� Ibid., 296–302. 45. ��������������� Ibid., 290–91. 46. Carrel, “The Mystery of Death,” in Medicine and Mankind: Lectures to the Laity Delivered at the Academy of Medicine of New York, ed. Iago Galdston (London and New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936), 197–217. 47. ���������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, Gustav Kilpper to Carrel, 16 Dec. 1935. 48. ������������������������������������������ Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136, 140, 172, 253. 49. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, Carrel to Kilpper, 1 Jan. 1936. The first German edition of the book was published as Der Mensch, das unbekannte Wesen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1937). 50. See for example “Herald of Immortality Foresees Suspended Animation,” Newsweek, 21 Dec. 1935; ACP, Box 97, Katherine Crutcher to C. Killick Millard, 18 Mar. 1936; John P. Morrow to Carrel, 8 Dec. 1938; Carrel to A. L. Thompson, 29 May 1940; A. A. Brill, “Is ‘Mercy Killing’ Justified? With a Reply to Dr. Alexis Carrel,” Vital Speeches of the Day, 10 Dec. 1935, 165–67. 51. Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 101. See also Michael ������������������ Burleigh, Death

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and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 52. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” AHR 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78. 53. Even Carrel’s critics have acknowledged the extent and striking endurance of different forms of racial hygiene in some of Western Europe’s liberal democracies. See �������������� Jean-Paul Monferran, “Cette monstruosité a eu des precedents,” http://www.humanite.presse.fr, 27 Aug. 1997. Among ������������������������������������������������������������������������ other titles relevant to our discussion, see Currell and Cogdell, Popular Eugenics; Edwin Black, The War Against the Weak: America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2003); Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Gender, Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); �������������������������������������������������������� Geneviève Heller, Jacques Gasser, and Gilles Jeanmonod, Rejetées, rebelles, mal adaptées. Débats sur l’eugénisme: pratiques de la stérilisation non volontaire en Suisse romande au XXe siècle (Geneva: Georg, 2002); Betsy ��������������� L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideologies in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener, eds., Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002); ������������� Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); André Pichot, La société pure: de Darwin à Hitler (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); �������������������������������������������������� Martin S. Pernick, “Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Esthetics, and Mass Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America,” in Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project, ed. P. R. Sloan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 187–208; Nancy Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); Steven Selden and Ashley Montagu, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Daniel J. Kevles, “Eugenics in North America,” in Essays in the History of Eugenics, ed. Robert A. Peel (London: The Galton Institute, 1998), 208–25; id., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Ian R. Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996); Anne Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France: les médecins et la procréation, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995); Edward L. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Robert A. Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society,” The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 687–700; Philip J. Pauly, “The Eugenics Industry: Growth or Restructuring?” Journal of the History of Biology 26, no. 1 (1993): 131–45; Nancy L. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and the Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Nicole Hahn Rafter,

The Best-Selling Eugenicist   83

ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988). 54 For a historical account of the Reader’s Digest, see John Heidenhery, Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of Reader’s Digest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). 55. Cass Canfield, Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1971), 128–31. 56. ���������������������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, Minister Charles Hardesty to Carrel, 22 April 1936. 57. ���������������������������������������������������������� Lecoq, “L’édition et la science,” 313. By ������������������� the early 1990s Man, the Unknown had sold over one million copies in more than twenty countries. I have been able to trace the following editions: Argentina (1942, 1943, 1946, 1949, 1953); Australia (1936, 1937); Chile (1936); China (1945); Czechoslovakia (1937); Estonia (1938); Finland (1937); France (1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1945, 1948, 1954, 1958, 1962, 1968, 1972, 1984, 1990); Germany (1937, 1938, 1950, 1957); Great Britain (1936, 1948, 1961); Hungary (193?); India (1953); Iran (19?); Italy (1937, 1940, 1948); Japan (1941, 1980); Mexico (1953, 1976, 1982); Netherlands (1937); Poland (193?); Portugal (1989); Spain (1952, 1967, 1994); Taiwan (1962); United States (1935, 1938, 1939, 1961, 1967). 58. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� George Kent, “Dr. Alexis Carrel Believes We Can Read Each Other’s Thoughts,” American Magazine, March 1936, 20–21, 142–44. 59. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bernt Hansen, “Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s,” BHM 78, no. 1 (2004): 148–91. 60. “Carrel’s Man,” Time, 16 Sep. 1935. 61. ACP, Box 40, Carl Beck to Carrel, 10 Oct. and 18 Nov. 1935. 62. Harvey Cushing to Arnold Klebs, 7 Dec. 1935. Cited in John F. Fulton, Harvey Cushing: A Biography (Springfield IL: Ayer Co. Publishers, 1980), 668. 63. Raymond Pearl, “Dr. Carrel Ponders the Nature and Soul of Man,” NYT, 29 Sep. 1935, BR3, 23. 64. ������ Kühl, The Nazi Connection, 68. �������������������������������������������������������� On Pearl’s eugenics see Garland E. Allen, “Old Wines in New Bottles: From Eugenics to Population Control in the Work of Raymond Pearl,“ in The Expansion of American Biology, ed. K. R. Benson, J. Maienschein, and R. Rainger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 231–61; Sharon E. Kingsland, “Raymond Pearl: On the Frontier in the 1920s,” Human Biology 56, no. 1 (1984): 1–18. 65. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 41, Henri Bergson to Carrel, 18 Sep. 1936; Jean Rostand, “L’homme cet inconnu. A propos d’un livre du Docteur Carrel,” La revue hebdomadaire, 16 Nov. 1935; Paul Desfosses, “L’élite doit se reconstruire,” PM, 18 Jan. 1936. 66. ������������������������������������ Etienne Rabaud, “Dr. Alexis Carrel. L’homme cet inconnu,” Les cahiers rationalistes, no. 48 (1936): 99–101; Marcel Prenant, “L’hérédité des races,” Les cahiers rationalistes, no. 75 (1939). 67. ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Emile Chauvelon, “Contre l’utopie bourgeoise du docteur Alexis Carrel,” Revue médicosociale 14, no. 4 (1936): 113–21. 68. �������������������� “Dr. Alexis Carrel. L’homme cet inconnu,” L’éducateur prolétarien, 25 Dec. 1935. 69. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, letters of Minister Charles Hardesty from the Methodist Episcopal Church of Sheridan (Wyoming), and Dean Dumper from Trinity Cathedral of Newark (New Jersey) to Carrel, 16 and 22 Mar. 1936. 70. ��������������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, Rabbi Stephen Wise to Carrel, 31 Dec. 1935. 71. ����������������������������������������� See T. Lawrason, “Distress of a Monist,” The Commonweal, 1 Nov. 1935, 12–13. 72. ������������������������������������ Joseph Fichter, “Man the Knowable,” Catholic World, December 1936, 288–92. 73. ��������������������������������� Les Sept, “L’homme ����������������������� cet inconnu,” Sept, 1 Nov, 1935; “L’homme ����������������������� cet inconnu,” Les essais catholiques, October 1936. 74. ���������������������������������������������������������� Jean Rimaud, “Notre civilisation est inhumaine: en lisant L’homme cet inconnu,” Etudes, January 1936, 201–12. 75. ������������������������������������������� Albert Ollivier, “L’homme... cet inconnu,” L’ordre nouveau, 15 Apr. 1936, 47–48. 76. ������������������������������������ Etienne Borne, “La pensée engagée,” Esprit, May 1936, 232–35. 77. ���������������������������������������������� Georges Blond, “Vivons-nous trop facilement?” Le petit dauphinois, 24 Oct. 1935.

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78. ���������������������������������� Louis Gillet, “Dr. Alexis Carrel. L’homme cet inconnu,” L’écho de Paris, 7 Nov. 1935. 79. ��������������������������������������������������� Jean Vignaud, “Un livre du docteur Alexis Carrel,” Le petit parisien, 15 Oct. 1935; Raymond Recouly, “L’être humain est-il en décadence ?,” Gringoire, 8 Nov. 1935; Léon Daudet, “Docteur Alexis Carrel. L’homme cet inconnu,” Candide, 21 Nov. 1935. After the liberation Recouly and Vignaud were blacklisted by the Resistance as collaborationist writers. Daudet died in 1942. 80. ����������������������� Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936–1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 78. 81. ������������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 70, Rosamund Gleeson to Carrel, undated. 82. ����������������������������������� ACP, Theodor Spitz to Carrel, 1940. 83. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Letters of A. Folliot and R. Ricard, 28 Oct. and 12 Dec. 1935, cited in Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, 500. 84. “Survey and Comment: Man the Unknown,” The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 20, no.1 (1936); C. D. Ryan, “The Rising Tide of Theosophy,” The Theosophical Forum 18, no. 4 (1938); Paul Concel, “Geographic Astrology,” American Astrology, January 1939. 85. ����������������������������������������� Kienné de Mongeot, “Nous avions raison,” Vivre et santé, 1 Jan. 1936; Jean Labadié, “Le docteur Carrel et l’aviateur Lindbergh cultivent artificiellement des tissus et des organes vivantes,” La science et la vie, February 1936. 86. “Back to Methusalah,” NYT, 14 Dec. 1935, 14; “Herald of Immortality Foresees Suspended Animation;” “Points by Prizemen,” Time, 23 Dec. 1935, 24; ACP, Box 97, Walter Price to Carrel, 13 Dec. 1935. 87. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 16 Dec. 1938, 3 May, 2 and 13 June 1939. 88. Carrel, “Breast Feeding for Babies,” RD 34 (1939): 1; id., “Married Love,” RD 35 (1939): 12; id., “Do You Know How To Live?,” RD 35 (1939): 19; id., “Work in the Laboratory of Your Private Life,” RD 37 (1940): 21; id., “Prayer Is Power,” RD 38 (1941): 227. 89. Carrel’s ideas were evident in a report prepared by a faculty committee of the Georgia School of Technology. Addressed to President Roosevelt, the document warned against prolonging the lives of the “weak” as “human erosion” that would lead to national decline as much as war, land erosion, and industrial specialization. “Unfit Imperil US, Roosevelt Is Told.” NYT, 18 Dec. 1936, 17.

Chapter 4

Charles Lindbergh and the Institute of Man



In the late 1930s, Carrel made his last contribution to experimental medicine by co-developing with Charles Lindbergh the first perfusion pump that allowed for the preservation of live organs outside the body. Carrel gave up his laboratory research partly as a consequence of the isolation in which he found himself after his mentor, Samuel Flexner, retired. In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Frenchman’s retirement from the Rockefeller Institute illustrate the extent to which his personal style and views had made him an unpleasant presence among many colleagues. Partly too, his interests were clearly shifting to the public arena as he associated himself with influential individuals and groups who shared similar concerns regarding the “crisis.” Perhaps no person played a more important role in this period than Charles Lindbergh. Their relationship became particularly intense in the years 1935 to 1939, when Carrel brought the pilot into his laboratory to work on the artificial preservation of organs. However, it was more than technical interests that brought the two men together. Lindbergh shared the Frenchman’s political views and his ideas of spiritual renewal, and offered his help to set up an Institute of Man in the United States. He was so fascinated with the scientist that he purchased an island in Brittany so he could visit Carrel at his nearby summer retreat. After the scientist’s death, Lindbergh took upon himself the mission of preserving and promoting his late friend’s work and ideas.1

Notes for this section begin on page 97.

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The “Glass Heart” Lindbergh once noted that he “never felt more deeply about anyone as a friend” than he did about Carrel. To him, the Nobel laureate appeared as an “integral intellectual,” indifferent to nothing and showing the same curiosity for the latest physical and biological experiments as well as aesthetic and political developments. Like many others who knew Carrel, Lindbergh was deeply impressed by the Frenchman’s “unlimited breadth and penetration” and his readiness to consider worthy of discussion any subject, even those that went against the grain of conventional wisdom, such as miracles and other supernatural phenomena.2 The two celebrities first met in late 1930. Lindbergh’s sister-in-law had been diagnosed with pneumonia and rheumatic fever and he wanted to know whether an operation could repair her damaged heart. Unconvinced by the answers given by several physicians, he went to see Carrel—he believed that a mechanical device could be used to circulate the blood while the heart was artificially stopped during the operation.3 The scientist explained to him that a mechanical pump could not be used in an operation because blood coagulated as soon as it came in contact with glass or metal surfaces; moreover, blood cells did not withstand the hammering of mechanical valves. Carrel himself had been working on a device to perfuse isolated organs—that is, to suffuse or permeate them with a nourishing fluid—but infection always crept in. As they inspected a collection of tissue-culture flasks and perfusion pumps stored in Carrel’s laboratory, Lindbergh was shocked by the apparent crudeness of these devices and volunteered to build an improved version. The scientist accepted the offer without hesitation and put his laboratory facilities at the aviator’s disposal.4 Carrel’s interest in developing a mechanical device to keep isolated organs alive was a logical outcome of his earlier experiments in organ transplantation and tissue culture. If a technique could be found that permitted the preservation of whole organs, then surgeons would be able to remove a diseased body part for treatment outside the body and graft it back into the patient. Yet, the cultivation of entire organs involved far more complex mechanical and surgical procedures than tissue culture. This is the reason why Lindbergh’s technical skills—he had a degree in mechanical engineering—captured Carrel’s attention. The aviator’s motivation for throwing himself into biomedical research stemmed from his lifelong interest in biology. After his epochal transatlantic flight in 1927, he purchased biology books and a microscope, visited biological laboratories in Princeton, Cold Spring Harbor, and New York City, and even designed a small laboratory for his New Jersey home. His decision to work with Carrel may have also been determined by his desire to avoid the suffocating publicity that followed the kidnapping and murder of his firstborn child in 1932. Harassed by the press, Lindbergh found in Carrel’s laboratory muchneeded privacy and something meaningful to which to put his mind. From

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1932 onward, he cut down on his public activities—surveying routes for commercial airlines and giving business conferences—and devoted more and more time to working by himself at the Rockefeller Institute. In 1931, Lindbergh built the first tilting-coil pump, in which Carrel perfused a segment of a cat artery for a complete month. Although this was the first pump to enjoy success—it enabled prolongued perfusion avoiding infection—, the pressure in the coil pump remained too low for the perfusion of whole organs—meaning that the fluid pulsated at a pace much slower than that of heart-driven blood in a normal body. Moreover, though they did avoid infection during perfusion, the attachment of the cannula in the open organ chamber still resulted in considerable bacterial contamination. The solution was to introduce a pulsating force into the perfusion pump without bringing microorganisms into it and transfer the pulsating force into the fluid, so that the final effect would resemble that produced by the heart. An improved version of the pump was ready in April 1935. The new apparatus, made of a special Pyrex glass, was able to maintain sterilized pulsating circulation for time periods that were dependent only on the condition of the organ and the nutrient fluid. The device allowed the pressure, rate of pulsation, and the gas in contact with the circulating fluid to be controlled and adjusted. Moreover, the organ enclosed in the chamber was kept moist and could be observed at all times. Lindbergh’s new pump consisted of three chambers, one stacked atop another. The organ to be studied was placed in the top chamber. Nutritious fluid from the bottom or reservoir chamber was driven up a glass tube connected to the organ’s artery, and through the organ by pulsating gas pressure. After passing through the organ, the fluid ran down into the middle, pressure-equalizing chamber, and then back to the reservoir chamber. The apparatus was started by compressed air from a tank, controlled by a rotary valve that created the pulsating pressure. The system was kept germ-free by nonabsorbent cotton fixed in the bulbs through which the gases circulated. Twenty-six successful experiments of in vitro cultivation were carried out in the first month on animal kidneys, hearts, spleens, ovaries, and suprarenal and thyroid glands. By May 1939—when work was discontinued—Carrel and his assistants had conducted close to nine hundred perfusion tests. Thus, more than a century after the first experiments in artificial circulation were recorded, an infection-free perfusion system had been devised in which living organs could be pulsated with approximately the same pressure they had been under before being surgically removed from the body.5 The perfusion pump sparked even wider public repercussions than Carrel’s earlier experiments. From a lay perspective, the implications of vascular surgery and tissue culture were an abstruse topic. The microscopic size of blood vessels and cells, together with the poor quality of the technology used to make pictures of them, put research in these areas beyond the ken of the average citizen. In comparison, the implications

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of organ culture were much more obvious simply because organs—and thus the possibility of keeping them alive outside the body in Lindbergh’s pump—were far more recognizable than the minuscule tissue fragment of a chicken heart. For this reason, the pump’s portrayal as a “glass heart” appealed more deeply to the popular imagination than the coverage of Carrel’s earlier achievements had. Once again, the press played a crucial role in vulgarizing scientific experiments that had no immediate medical applications.6 Time’s issue of mid June 1938 is a good case in point. For the second occasion in five years the magazine featured the scientist on its cover—now accompanied by Lindbergh. Moreover, its lengthy article on the glass heart, conveniently titled “Men in Black”—a reference again to Carrel’s dark-colored surgical garments and operating room—replayed some of the usual images of esoteric eccentricity that were associated with Carrel’s work.7 Other reports went even further in their sensationalistic portrait of the perfusion pump. A story circulated by the British press stated that Lindbergh was going to have his heart removed and replaced “by an indestructible one from grateful Dr. Carrel’s stock.” On another occasion Carrel was forced to deny that he was working in a “closely guarded” laboratory with the purpose of creating an “artificial human being.” According to a New York journalist, the French scientist intended to create a “robot” or “synthetic man” that would carry the heart, brain, and the lungs of different persons, but no soul.8

The Institute of Man Lindbergh’s sudden decision to leave the United States shortly after the first experiments had been conducted brought his and Carrel’s joint work on organ culture to an end. In December 1935, the pilot and his wife moved to Europe to escape media harassment in the wake of the Hauptmann trial. They did not return to the United States until April 1939, when Carrel was about to retire from the Rockefeller Institute. As a result of these disjuncts, the institute’s research facilities were lost and further work on the perfusion pump was abandoned.9 The Lindberghs moved first to a country cottage owned by their friends, Harold Nicolson and Victoria Sackville-West, in Kent. In the summer of 1938, the pilot purchased the Breton island of Illiec (Côtes-du-Nord) and moved there with his wife and second child, close enough to Carrel’s favorite residence on the island of Saint-Gildas for them to visit each other when the tide was low.10 This wind-swept, rugged, underveloped landscape made an ideal setting for Carrel and Lindbergh’s quest for “spiritual renewal.” The pilot described these “mystical” islands as a place “beyond description” in which one could feel “the forces of earth and cosmos as though God himself exposed his hand.”11 It was here that Carrel and his wife—who was said to have notable telepathic and clairvoyant powers—felt free to experi-

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ment with bizarre forms of extrasensory perception, of which Lindbergh and the rare guests who visited Saint-Gildas left colorful testimonies.12 This distinctively “mystic” environment also stimulated Carrel’s spiritualistic inclinations, especially after he met the Superior of Notre-Dame-deBoquen, Dom Alexis Presse. Upon their first meeting in 1937, the scientist had become profoundly drawn to this former Benedictine monk who, disillusioned with the “prosperity” of monastic life, had left the order and wandered in the countryside until he came upon a ruined fourteenth-century chapel at Boquen, in an isolated stretch of the Brittany coast. Over the years, he managed to rebuild the church and attract other monks. Presse had significant influence in the last years of Carrel’s life, becoming a confessor of sorts and a source of inspiration for the scientist’s philosophical and religious quests. Carrel acknowledged this and bequeathed Saint-Gildas to Presse’s religious community.13 More importantly, Carrel and Lindbergh’s meetings in Saint-Gildas provided a more secluded forum for discussing the scientist’s projects of human engineering.14 As Man, the Unknown became a success, the Frenchman made plans to set up a research institution along the lines proposed in the book. In the United States, Lindbergh, the business entrepreneur Edward Moore, the Christian fundamentalist James Newton, and the Rockefeller Institute scientists Albert Ebeling and Ralph Wyckoff put together an informal task force to get Carrel’s project started. In March 1939, Moore sent Carrel a memo listing the names of several entrepreneurs—among them, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Dewitt Wallace, and William Kellogg—who were interested in the “problems of civilization” and were willing to support Carrel’s undertaking in various ways, often with generous financial contributions. In addition, Henry Ford offered the facilities of the Ford Hospital in Detroit should the scientist wish to set up a research laboratory. Likewise, Moore directed Carrel’s attention to important academic institutions interested in setting up research projects on the “science of man.” Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor both offered to support Carrel’s work on their campuses after retirement and give him the directorship of these projects.15 James Newton deserves special reference here to exemplify the appeal that Carrel’s calls for spiritual renewal had among American illiberal groups. In 1936 Newton left a successful career with the Firestone Company and embarked on a quest for “moral and spiritual change” that led him to join the First Century Christian Fellowship. This obscure antisocialist and nationalist organization, established by Frank Buchman in 1936, became popularly known as the Oxford Group for Moral Rearmament. Committed to “promoting sound homes, teamwork in industry, and unity within and between nations,” Newton’s fundamentalist organization sought to rediscover the “spiritual power” that would lead to a truly “Christian Revolution.”16 He was deeply impressed by his reading of Man, the Unknown and understood the Oxford Group and Carrel’s ideas to be

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on the same wavelength. He read the scientist’s criticism of modern civilization and his proposals to overcome the crisis of human values as close variations of Buchman’s calls for spiritual awakening. “Everyone,” stated a tract released by the group, Admits the necessity of a moral and spiritual awakening. …The secret is Godcontrol. The only sane people in an insane world are those controlled by God. God-controlled personalities make God-controlled nationalities. This is the aim of the Oxford Group. The true patriot gives his life to bring his nation under God’s control. Those who oppose that control are public enemies. The Godcontrolled nation will have as her armament an army of life-changers. … World peace will only come through nations who have achieved God-control.17

By 1938–1939 the Oxford Group’s campaign to curb class conflict and prevent the outbreak of war had brought the organization significant publicity in both Europe and the United States.18 The Geneva press praised the movement’s efforts to prevent a war during the Sudeten crisis. In the British parliament, the Marquis of Salisbury stated that the solution to the “moral” crisis lay in a “great movement that is taking place at this moment in this country and elsewhere [the Oxford Group].” A leader of the Dutch Socialist Party described the Oxford Group as a “revolution in politics” that was “above party, class, and point of view.” In the United States, Buchman’s group held two massive rallies in the spring of 1939, one at Madison Square Garden and the other at the Hollywood Bowl. Likewise, the group took an active role in securing “cooperation” between management and labor when following a request from the mayor of Seattle Buchman sent some of his “life-changers” into the Boeing plants to counteract communist “infiltration” in the unions of the aviation industry. From France, Carrel wrote to Newton that his movement had been “extraordinarily well received” by the French press, as was shown by the favorable coverage given by the weekly L’illustration to the thirty thousand-strong crowd who attended the Hollywood Bowl meeting. Although Carrel did not join the Oxford Group, whose ideas about renewal he considered somewhat simplistic and naïve, he established a close relationship with Newton, bringing him into his small inner circle and making him one of the very rare guests to visit Saint-Gildas.19 It may be also argued that Carrel’s unreceptive response to Newton’s attempts to bring him and Lindbergh into the Group for Moral Rearmament had to do with the fact that the Frenchman had started his own campaign to publicize the Institute of Man. Beginning in the summer of 1937, he presented sketches of his program at the Journées médicales de Bruxelles, the University of Illinois, and Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH).20 Invited to give the keynote speech at a celebration of the college’s oldest fraternity, he called for the “construction of civilized men” through an institute that would investigate everything that was relevant to the human person. The “solution to the great problems of civilization,” he stated,

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[d]epends on the knowledge not only of certain aspects of man, but of man as a whole, understood as an individual belonging to a group, nation and race. … Such an institution [the Institute of Man] … would have as its mission the examination of mechanical inventions, philosophical doctrines, habits of eating, methods of education, ways of life, and social and economic legislation from the point of view of their impact upon the individual considered as an organic and spiritual whole.21

He also drafted various projects that, with different emphasis, endorsed a new social order organized according to the biological “worth” of its members and aimed at the protection of the human person against the dehumanizing forces of industrial civilization.22 In such a polity liberal values and the petty interests of the professionnels de la politique would be replaced by the enlightened rule of an elite of “competent” experts.23 These more explicit political concerns brought him within the orbit of political and intellectual movements that were also engaged in finding solutions to the “human problems” of modern civilization. In France, his proposals to set up an Institut national pour la rénovation française fit well with the atmosphere of despair that feared the disruptive effects of capitalist industrialization and American-style social and cultural uniformization. In the summer of 1937, Carrel met Jean Coutrot and soon afterward joined his Centre d’études des problèmes humains.24 A graduate of the Ecole polytechnique and co-founder of X-Crise, a leading technocratic think tank linked to the debates on industrial organization, Coutrot became known to the wider public after he published the widely read De quoi vivre and L’humanisme économique.25 Coutrot epitomized the new elite of technical experts associated with the technocratic revolution and the new ideas regarding scientific management in industry. Strategically placed in the modern economy as industrial leaders and consultants, these polytechniciens also became privileged observers of the work process and its flaws. Faced with stagnant productivity, worldwide depression, and social conflict, they insisted that solutions to these problems should take into greater account the social and human dimensions of the work process. Increasingly, as they shifted their attention from the workplace to larger social and economic issues, engineers and industrial physicians came to perceive their role in terms of a nonideological solution to industrial rationalization based on their claim to technical expertise. Accordingly, they sought to assert their position as neutral arbiters in the conflict between capital and labor.26 Carrel and Coutrot shared many ideas about the crisis. Like the scientist, the engineer believed that the problems posed by modern society were caused not so much by the rapid pace of technological innovation, but by the fact that the human sciences were far less developed than the natural sciences. Thus, while knowledge about the physical world allowed industry the means to transform nature, a poor understanding of human psychology left policymakers and industrial experts without the appropriate means to understand the deep roots of declining productivity and labor

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unrest. To bridge this gap, Coutrot proposed to develop an “economic humanism” that would address the rational as well as the nonrational dimensions of the human personality. A supporter of state intervention and industrial planning, Coutrot sought to replace individualism and laissez-faire economics with a collective mystique that reconciled the homo oeconomicus with the “total human being.” He envisioned the expert as the social actor best suited for the task of reconciling science and humanism and for reorganizing the economy to fit human needs. To that end, in 1936 he set up the Centre d’études des problèmes humains with the aim of fostering the adaptation of human beings to the modern world. The center’s work reflected well the singular responses of the French rationalization movement to the challenges posed by economic crisis and social strife. The concern about “human problems” that was shared by many managers and technical experts led them to promote empirical research on psychological and physiological techniques aimed at improving industrial productivity while protecting workers’ mental and physical health. Although important, industrial organization and work process rationalization was but one of various topics that Coutrot envisioned being studied scientifically. The center’s seminars at Pontigny also addressed such topics as creative fulfillment in work; the aesthetic alienation from the modern world, and the assault on the human senses by the media. Although it had a short lifespan—it was disbanded in 1939—the center attracted experts from a wide variety of disciplines as well as representatives of employers’ organizations and unions. Prominent names on the intellectual scene, such as those of Carrel himself, the biologist-writer Aldous Huxley, the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard du Chardin, and the pedagogical expert Maria Montessori, contributed to enhance the center’s international reputation.27 For obvious reasons Carrel’s ideas also attracted the attention of notable Catholic thinkers. In April 1937, shortly before he joined Coutrot’s center, Carrel met Pierre Teilhard du Chardin on board the transatlantic liner Normandie as they journeyed from New York to Le Havre.28 Having read L’homme cet inconnu, Teilhard found that his conversation with Carrel reinforced his admiration for the scientist and convinced him of their like-mindedness. But, in fact, despite their similar conception of the human person in Catholic humanist terms, Carrel and Teilhard diverged on many important issues. For example, the scientist disagreed with the philosopher’s identification of the real with the physical—a position that to him smacked of scientism. More importantly, they had contrasting attitudes toward modernity. While Teilhard took an optimistic stand, seeing political and social crises as the inevitable “pains of childbirth,” Carrel warned against building a civilization that was not suited to the needs of the human person. These disagreements, however, did not come into the open, and shortly after their meeting Teilhard sent Carrel his essays “Energie humaine” and “Sauvons l’humanité,” both of which the Frenchman read with great interest.29

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Carrel’s duties at the Rockefeller Institute and his plans for an Institute of Man in the United States prevented him from taking an active role in Coutrot’s center seminar discussions at the Pontigny Abbey. However, he made small financial contributions and ensured that Coutrot’s project became known in the United States. More importantly, the center had a significant impact on Carrel’s own projects later when, following the defeat of 1940 and the coming of Vichy, he set up an institute of biomedical research and named it after Coutrot’s center.30 As his retirement drew closer, the founding of the Institute of Man was still up in the air. Although Carrel had approached “several distinguished scientists”—which ones he did not say—none had been willing to join him. Despite Newton’s urgency in starting the fundraising and Lindbergh’s offer to house the institute in his four hundred-acre Hopewell estate at High Fields (New Jersey), the project did not move forward. Carrel seemed unable to decide whether it should be a think tank like Coutrot’s center or an institution for advanced biological research that would continue his work on organ culture. As Lindbergh began his tour of duty in the US Army Air Corps, the feasibility of the project became increasingly jeopardized by the prospect of US involvement in the European war.31

Dilemmas of a Retired Scientist In the spring of 1939, the Rockefeller Institute for the first time enforced retirement rules that set an age limit of sixty-five on all its working scientists. Based upon a recommendation from the new Director of Laboratories, Herbert Gasser, the new policy awarded to the retirees a pension and limited resources should they wish to continue their work at the Institute. Carrel was deeply perturbed by the inevitability of forced retirement, and above all by the closing of the Division of Experimental Surgery, in which he had worked for over thirty years.32 Despite his interest in public issues he was unprepared to leave his laboratory and until the last moment harbored the hope that the Board of Directors would agree to keep him. The premature announcement of his retirement in the journal Science a year before the scheduled date of July 1939 put him off and fed his suspicions that the enemies inside the institute were working to push him out. In fact, Carrel’s bitterness may not have been entirely unjustified, since the institute had not enforced any retirement rules until the year that the French scientist turned sixty-five. Moreover, the fact that the other four researchers who were slated for retirement in the summer of 1939 were older than Carrel suggests that the choice of the age limit might have been more than a mere coincidence.33 Some biographers have suggested that he was a victim of Gasser’s maneuvers to remove some of Simon Flexner’s “old guard” of researchers from the institute’s active rolls with the purpose of appointing his own people and transferring resources

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away from experimental surgery to brain physiology. As the timing of the process shows, Gasser was successful in urging the Board of Scientific Directors and the Board of Trustees to pass the mandatory retirement resolution so that the new policy could be adopted “in time to retire Carrel at the first opportunity.”34 The retirement rules did not necessarily mean that he had to give up his work at the institute. The resolution adopted by the Board of Scientific Directors made the provision that, upon their request, members would be supplied with laboratory facilities on a modest scale for an indefinite period after retirement—John D. Rockefeller himself made it clear that this possibility was open to Carrel.35 On at least two occasions, Gasser asked the Nobel laureate whether he would continue working at the institute “on a personal basis” but got no reply.36 After some hesitation, Carrel declined the offer. He may have realized that, with Gasser’s appointment, his time at the institute had come to an end. This was true in so far as the privileges he had enjoyed under Flexner—above all, his laboratory with the precious colony of mice that he had created and kept for decades—would no longer be at his disposal. There is no doubt that over the years the Frenchman’s penchant for public controversy and arrogance had earned him little sympathy among his colleagues. In fact, during his last decade at the institute, he worked with the full support of Flexner but isolated from the rest of the staff. Mary Lecomte du Noüy—wife of Carrel’s former assistant at the Rond Royal, Pierre Lecomte du Noüy— remembered Carrel as someone who left nobody who met him indifferent: he was either loved or hated. The Nobel laureate often “took a malicious pleasure” in making statements diametrically opposed to his real point of view simply for the sake of starting an argument. Nor was it unusual for him to talk to new acquaintances for several hours at a stretch “only to pay no further attention once he had extracted from them everything he wanted to know.”37 The physicist Ralph Wyckoff left a vivid image of the institute’s internal power politics and Carrel’s unfavorable situation in it: The fact that Carrel’s group had its meals always isolated from the rest of the staff was the consequence of the disfavor with which many of the institute’s influential members saw him and his work. The situation revealed, on the one hand, the sentiments of jealousy elicited by his brilliant scientific accomplishments, by his Nobel Prize; on the other, it was the result of the unrestrained manner with which he frequently expressed his critical judgments. Soon after my arrival … a member of the institute informed me about this antipathy and let me know that to succeed I would have to give up my friendship with Carrel. … After Herbert Gasser replaced Simon Flexner … I was notified that given the sort of work that I was undertaking the institute would not renew my contract.38

These sentiments became more evident when the success of Man, the Unknown made Carrel a media celebrity. Scientists, in particular, feared that his polemical views on non-orthodox subjects might tarnish the image

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of science. The University of Chicago physiologist Anton Julius Carson criticized his talk on “the mystery of death” as an attempt to mislead the public and an injury to science “for the shallow fame of personal publicity.”39 Worse, the episode poisoned the Frenchman’s relationship with Herbert Gasser soon after he was appointed the institute’s new Director of Laboratories. Gasser did not share Flexner’s sympathetic tolerance for Carrel’s eccentricity and disapproved of the Nobel laureate’s public statements regarding the metaphysical.40 Without hiding his annoyance he reminded the Frenchman that when “[s]tatements are made on no matter what subject without the rigorous precaution which is exerted in one’s own experimental field, they create in the rebound the possibility of raising doubt with respect to the correctness of conclusions about which the expected scientific care is exerted. The importance of this fact outweighs in my mind any interest in science which may be aroused in the mind of the public by a more popular treatment of material ….”41 Often, Carrel complained about the negative publicity brought upon him by the book and his public appearances, yet he dismissed criticism, attributing it to jealousy, and continued giving public speeches and writing for large audiences. In early 1936 he wrote to a relative: “The success of my book is rather a calamity. It makes a lot of enemies among physicians, even my colleagues. Naturally, they feel offended by its big success. The invasion of the Academy of Medicine [of New York] by a crowd the day of my talk has earned me a large number of enemies … So I am accused of having written a book for the sake of publicity!!”42 Politics also played a role to the extent that Carrel’s reactionary views were at odds with the prevalent liberal mood of most American scientists. As Europe drew closer to another war, his authoritarianism adopted distinctively fascist features. In a new introduction he wrote in 1939 for a new paperback edition of Man, the Unknown, he praised Hitler and Mussolini. Until the outbreak of the war in September 1939, he was far more concerned with the spread of communism than with Nazi policies.43 He dismissed liberal and leftist critiques of Nazi Germany as “Russian and Jewish” attempts to push the Western countries into a fratricidal war. This led him to endorse the German annexation of the Sudeten and express the hope that Britain and France would give Germany “a free hand” in the east.44 He justified Nazi annexations on the grounds that “weakening nations” had no right to keep their territory “just as unfit individuals should have their property taken away.” Likewise, he denounced the negative reactions caused in the United States by Lindbergh’s visit to Germany in the winter of 1938, when he met Hitler and Göring, as “lies spread by Bolshevik and Jewish propaganda”—he disagree, however, with the pilot’s neutrality stand.45 The rise of class conflict and international tensions deepened his already strong antidemocratic feelings. He was dismayed by the weaknesses and internal divisions of the French and blamed their “degeneration”

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on democracy and an esprit de petits boutiquiers anticléricaux. Similarly, he criticized Americans for holding their democratic ideals as if they were a “timeless truth” without realizing that those principles were “the cause of the present catastrophe.” Thus, he observed, they failed to see that fascism was only the manifestation of “a nation that refuses to die.”46 It is no surprise that his anxieties about the collapsing social order and quest for authority should have brought him within the orbit of the fascist right. Although he never formally joined any political organization, his participation in rallies and other public displays contributed to the respectability of the far right. In July 1936, he and his wife, herself an active member of the now disbanded fascist organization Croix de feu, attended the inaugural meeting of François de la Rocque’s renamed Parti social français. Likewise, Jacques Doriot and his far-right Parti populaire français claimed the Nobel laureate as one of their members.47 As the general strike of November 1938 staked the fears of revolution, he unleashed his anger and resentment upon the democratic principles that had “destroyed” France.48 In July 1939, after the closing down of his laboratory, Carrel left the Rockefeller Institute and returned to France. He still entertained the idea of setting up the Institute of Man in the United States, yet once again, war in Europe disrupted his career in North America.49 Following the German attack on Poland, he became a technical advisor with the Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé, a position which enabled him to negotiate the building of a laboratory for blood and wound research.50 However, by the time the French government approved the funding in May 1940, he was on his way back to the United States, filled with frustration and pessimism about the “corruption, ineptitude, stupidity, and mediocrity” of French politicians, doctors, and bureaucrats.51 As he crossed the ocean back to New York, Hitler at last invaded France. In the months that followed the catastrophe of June 1940, Carrel’s future looked uncertain. The Rockefeller Institute was closed to him, and the prospects for the Institute of Man were dimming. Moreover, since the German occupation of the northern part of the country, he had had no news of his wife’s whereabouts.52 Impatient with what he saw as deliberate efforts of the “foreign press and the European refugees” to stir up American opinion against Vichy, he began making plans to return to France. In February 1941he joined a children’s relief mission organized by the American Ambulance Volunteer Corps to bring vitamins, drugs, and milk through Portugal into Spain and France. In March 1941, after a brief tour of war-ravaged Spain, Carrel crossed the Pyrenees and headed for Paris.53

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Notes 1. On the relationship between Carrel and Lindbergh, see Susan Hertog, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (New York: Nan A. Talesse, 1999); Andrew Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: Putnam, 1998); James Newton, Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel, and Charles Lindbergh (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Ane Morrow Lindbergh, 1939–1944 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); idem, The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936–1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Theodor Malinin, Surgery and Life: The Extraordinary Career of Alexis Carrel (New York: Harcourt, 1970); Charles A. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); id., The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Robert Chambers and Joseph T. Durkin, eds., Papers of the Alexis Carrel Centennial Conference (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1973). 2. Lindbergh, “A Tribute to Alexis Carrel,” in Chambers and Durkin, Papers of the Alexis Carrel Centennial Conference, 30; Ralph W. G. Wyckoff, “Souvenirs d’Alexis Carrel à New-York,” BAADAC, no. 17 (1984): 9–16. 3. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values, 132. 4. “Visit to Laboratory Here Inspired Lindbergh to Medical rsearch,” NYT, 13 Aug. 1936, 25. The idea of maintaining a portion of the body alive in order to study its functions had first been formulated in 1812 by the French physiologist Le Gallois. Throughout the nineteenth century perfusion of organs had been tried at various times, yet none of the mechanical devices built was able to keep a gland alive for more than a few hours, and even during this short period the organs were frequently invaded by bacteria. In the early 1900s new surgical and mechanical procedures were improved sufficiently to allow organs to be cultivated in vitro. New research on the transplantation of organs and blood vessels led to improved techniques for handling the arteries, washing blood from the organ without injuring its cells, and preventing emboli. Likewise, the antiseptic procedures developed by Carrel and Dakin during World War I made it possible to perform surgical operations without the risk of bacteria infecting the damaged tissues. By the late 1920s, research in this field had made substantial progress although no apparatus had been designed yet that would perform the role of heart and lungs in an infection-free environment. 5. Carrel and Lindbergh, “The culture of whole organs,” Science 81 (1935): 621–23. 6. See, for example, “Artificial Heart Interests Science,“ NYT, 22 June 1935, 17; Waldemar Kaempffert, “Are Body Organs Immortal?,” NYT, 23 June 1935, XX9; “Lindbergh Details Artificial Heart,” NYT, 4 Sept. 1935, 16; “Animation Suspended In New ‘Life Chamber,’” NYT, 12 June 1936, 24; “Lindbergh, Carrel Have Designed Machines to Restore Life to Organs, Newspaper Says,” NYT, 11 July 1937, 29; “Dr. Carrel and Lindbergh Work on New Experiment,” NYT, 18 Sept. 1937, 8; “Organs Live Days in Lindbergh Pump,” NYT, 22 Apr. 1938, 2; “Carrel Explains Mechanical Heart,” NYT, 6 May 1939, 7; “Lindbergh Widens His Aid to Science,” NYT, 3 Sep. 1939, 2. 7. “Men in Black,” Time, 13 June 1938, 40–43.The article came out shortly after the publication of two important works that condensed most of what was known about organ culture, both authored by the researchers of the institute’s Division of Experimental Surgery. See Carrel and Lindbergh, The Culture of Organs (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1938); Raymond C. Parker, Methods of Tissue Culture (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1938). 8. “Mechanical Heart-Lung Keeps Life Going in Showcase,” Newsweek, 29 June 1935, 26; “Glass Heart,” Time, 1 July 1935; “Lindbergh Shows Robot Heart,” NYT, 12 Aug. 1936, 21; “Device Excites Scientists.” NYT, 12 Aug. 1936, 21; ACP, Box 41, Lou Wedemar to Carrel, undated; id., Carrel to Wedemar, 1 Oct. 1936; Arthur Train Jr., “More Will Live,” Saturday Evening Post, 23 July 1938, 5–7.

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9. Malinin, Surgery and Life, 142–44. 10. As always every move of the Lindberghs made it into de headlines. “Lindbergh Paddles Rubber Boat to Isle,” NYT, 5 July 1937, 6; “Lindbergh Sees Carrel,” NYT, 6 July 1937, 2; “Lindbergh Visits Dr. Carrel,” NYT, 30 July 1937, 16; “Lindbergh Visits France,” NYT, 9 Aug. 1937, 21; “Lindberghs Fly to France,” NYT, 8 Apr. 1938, 8; “Lindbergh Buys Island,” NYT, 14 Apr.1938, 15; “Says Lindbergh Is Buying Island Near Dr. Carrel’s,” NYT, 14 Apr. 1938, 12 “Lindberghs Will Move,” NYT, 29 Apr. 1938, 15. 11. For a description of Saint-Gildas’s atmosphere, see “Island Gives Lindbergh Haven,” NYT, 30 Oct. 1938, 28; Albert Delaunay, “Une pélérinage à Saint-Gildas,” BAADAC, September 1994, 5–8; Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values, 364–67; Newton, Uncommon Friends, 140. 12. Malinin, Surgery and Life, 141–43; Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values, 368–72; Newton, Uncommon Friends, 134–36, 144–46, 167–69. It has been suggested that Carrel and Lindbergh’s interest in phenomena such as hypothermia—lowering of body temperature—and “suspended animation” stemmed from their work on organ culture. While he was in England, Lindbergh spent many hours at the Library of the College of Physicians reading reports about cases of rhythmic breathing, controlling pulse rate, and fire walking in Asia. After a disappointing trip to India, where he had hoped to have a firsthand look at these phenomena, he returned to England and began performing hypothermia experiments on animals; he even considered conducting them on himself. Carrel foresaw the practical implications that hypothermia might have for medicine and surgery—the lowering of temperature would decrease pain, thus making anesthetics unnecessary in surgical operations—and encouraged his younger associate to build a hyperbaric chamber in which the temperature and concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide could be controlled. However, Lindbergh was still living abroad and lacked the facilities and equipment to undertake such experiments; he therefore was forced to abandon the project. 13. ACP, Box 42, Carrel to Dom Alexis Presse, 3 Feb. 1939; Joseph Ribollet, “Dom Alexis Presse,” BAADAC, nos. 20–21 (1988–989): 3–8. 14. “Carrel and Lindbergh Writing Book on Isle,” NYT, 14 July 1938, 23. 15. ACP, Box 42, Edward Moore to Carrel, 14 Mar. 1939. 16. Newton, Uncommon Friends, 126–27. 17. ACP, Box 97, “The Oxford Group: A National Assembly in the Berkshires—Massachusetts. Stockbridge-Lenox-Great Barrington. May 29 – June 8, 1936”; Emily Newell Blair, “What I Found Out about the Oxford Movement,” Liberty, 1 Jan. 1938. 18. In the spring of 1937 James Newton and Charles Haines—a former steel businessman— embarked on a mission to Europe to promote the principles of class cooperation among the industrial leaders of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Switzerland. According to Newton, the Oxford Group’s campaign succeeded in convincing “a growing number of businessmen” to transform their relations with workers, competitors, and governments. Similar efforts were conducted to promote international cooperation and peaceful relations between states. In September 1938, as the Sudeten crisis put Europe on the threshold of war, Newton traveled to Geneva to join an Oxford Group team that had been invited by the president of the Norwegian parliament to address the League of Nations. Among the speakers was the Dutch foreign minister, who described how a “basic change” of attitudes following the principles of the Oxford Group had ended a controversy between the Netherlands and Belgium. Newton, Uncommon Friends, 84–93, 170–82, 215–29. 19. Carrel to Newton, 24 Aug. 1939. Cited in Newton, Uncommon Friends, 181. 20. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 4 Nov. 1938; ACP, Box 22, Carrel, “La science de l’homme,” unpublished lecture given in Copenhagen, 1936; id., “The Need for a New Knowledge of Man,” address given after receiving the award of the Newman Foundation, University of Illinois Champaign, 21 Feb. 1937; id., “Le rôle future de la médecine,”

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Bruxelles médicale 17 (1937): 1336–39; “Calls On Science to Save Humanity,” NYT, 12 Oct. 1937, 26; “Convocation Gives Degree to Carrel.” NYT, 16 Oct. 1937, 11. 21. “Dépend de la connaissance non seulement des aspects de l’homme, mais de l’homme tout entier en tant qu’individu inséré dans un groupe, une nation et une race … Une telle institution [Institut de l’Homme] … aurait pour mission d’examiner las inventions mécaniques, les doctrines philosophiques, le mode d’alimentation, les méthodes d’éducation, les habitudes d’existence, la législation sociale et économique, du point de vue de leurs effets sur l’individu considéré comme un tout organique et spirituel ….” Carrel, “La construction des hommes civilisés,” cited in Hilaire Cuny, Alexis Carrel (Paris: Seghers, 1970), 157–66. 22. “Carrel, at 65, Is Deep in New Studies of Man,” NYT, 26 June 1938, 97. 23. ACP, Box 22, unpublished manuscripts: “An Outline of Notes Arranged for the Use of a Few Individuals Meeting to Form a Nucleus of a Thinking Center for Human Problems” (1934–1937), “La nouvelle Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” (1935), “Au sujet d’une institution destinée à améliorer l’esprit des hommes civilisés” (1935), several drafts titled “Institute of Man” (1936, 1938), “Un centre de recherches pour l’amélioration de la race humaine” (1936), “Council for Human Problems” (1937), “Androtechnie” (1937), “Charting the Future: A Preliminary Report on Proposed Institute of Man” (1940). 24. ACP, Box 42, Carrel to Paluel Flagg, 17 May 1937. 25. Jean Coutrot, De quoi vivre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1935); id., Les leçons de juin 1936: l’humanisme économique (Paris: Centre polytechnicien d’études économiques, 1936). On Coutrot, see Jackie Clarke, “Engineering a New Order: The Case of Jean Coutrot,” FHS 24, no. 1 (2001): 63–86; Olivier Dard, Jean Coutrot: de l’ingénieur au prophète (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1999); Michel Margairaz, “Jean Coutrot, 1936–1937: l’état et l’organisation scientifique du travail,” Genèses, no. 4 (1991): 95–114. 26. On technocracy in France see Olivier Dard, Les rendez-vous manqués des relèves des années 30 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002); id., “Voyage à l’intérieur d’XCrise,” Vingtième Siècle, no. 47 (1995): 132–46; id., ”Du privé au public: des technocrates en quête d’un état rationnel et à la conquête de l’état républicain dans la France des années trente,” in Serviteurs de l’état: une histoire politique de l’administration française, 1875–1945, ed. Marc Olivier Baruch and Vincent Duclert (Paris: La découverte, 2000), 485–95; Gérard Noiriel, Les origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette littérature, 1999); Marjorie Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Vincent Guigueno, “Une figure contesté: l’officier-ingénieur (1920–1943),” in La formation polytechnicienne, 1794– 1994, ed. Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, and Antoine Picon (Paris: Dunod, 1994), 397–415; Daniel Lindenberg, Les années souterraines, 1937–1947 (Paris: La découverte, 1990); Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); André Grelon, ed., Les ingénieurs de la crise: titres et profession entre les deux guerres (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1986); Gérard Brun, Technocrates et technocratie en France, 1918–1945 (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985); Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); Jean-Louis Loubet de Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trente: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969). 27. Coutrot’s interest in the scientific understanding of human motivation brought into his think tank names such as René Allendy, one of the introducers of psychoanalysis in France, Jean-Marie Lahy, an expert on efficiency and editor of Le travail humain, and Serguei Tchakhotine, author of the international best-selling book Le viol des foules par la propagande politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1939). Coutrot’s ideas about managerial psychol-

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ogy also became a magnet for experts in the visual arts and the world of advertising, such as Henri Focillon, R. L. Dupuy, and Lucien Augier. Likewise, he brought into his elite circle such economists and social commentators as Alfred Sauvy—with whom he had founded X-Crise—Hyacinthe Dubreuil and André Siegfried, as well as Catholic intellectuals from the Semaines Sociales group. 28. André Gros, “Carrel et Teilhard du Chardin,” BAADAC, no. 19 (1989): 9–13. 29. Henri de Lubac, Eric de Moulins Beaufort, Michel Sales, Georges Chantraine, and Jacques Prévotat, eds., Oeuvres complètes: la pensée religieuse du père Pierre Teilhard du Chardin (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2002). A revised version of “Sauvons l’humanité” was published as “La crise présente: réflexions d’un naturaliste,” in Etudes, no. 233 (1937): 145–65, and reprinted in Cahiers Pierre Teilhard du Chardin, no. 3 (1962): 69–97. “Ou Teilhard du Chardin” See Claude Guénot, Pierre Teilhard du Chardin: les grandes étapes de son évolution (Paris: Plon, 1958), 200. 30. FFEPH, “Ce qu’est la Fondation,” CFFEPH, no. 1 (1943): 7–8; Jean-Jacques Gillon, “Vers un humanisme scientifique,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 7–17. 31. Lindbergh, Wartime Journals, 207–31; Newton, Uncommon Friends, 177–78. 32. ACP, Box 43, Carrel to C. C. Stockard, 17 June 1937; Carrel to Thomas Debevoise, 16 May 1938. 33. “Dr Carrel to Retire Next Year,” NYT, 9 June 1938, 2; “Institute Retiring 5 Noted Scientists,” NYT, 14 Apr. 1939, 25. The other scientists who retired the same year as Carrel were Florence Sabin (then aged 67), Winthrop Osterhaut (67), Phoebus Levene (70), and Carl Landsteiner (70). 34. See Malinin, Surgery and Life, 180–83; Wyckoff, “Souvenirs d’Alexis Carrel à New-York,” 16. 35. ACP, Box 41, Coudert to John D. Rockefeller, 4 May 1939; Rockefeller to Coudert, 11 May 1939. 36. ACP, Box 43, Herbert Gasser to Carrel, 11 Mar. 1938 and 4 Jan. 1939. 37. Mary Lecomte du Noüy, The Road to “Human Destiny”: A Life of Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), 82, 101. See also Lindbergh, Wartime Journals, 38–39. 38. “Le fait que le groupe de Carrel prenait invariablement ses repas à l’écart était la conséquence de la défaveur dans laquelle lui-même et ses travaux étaient tenus par plusieurs membres influentes de l’Institut. Il y avait là, pour une part, l’expression de la jalousie suscitée par ses brillants succès scientifiques, par son Prix Nobel, mais c’était aussi la conséquence de la façon dépourvue de retenue dont il exprimait fréquemment ses jugements critiques. Peu après mon arrivée … je fus personnellement mis au courant de cette antipathie lorsque l’un des membres de l’Institut me fit savoir que si j’espérais y réussir il me faudrait renoncer à mon intimité croissante avec le Docteur Carrel … lorsque Simon Flexner … fut remplacé par Herbert Gasser … je fus avisé qu’à cause du type de travail que je faisait mon contrat ne serait pas renouvelé ….” Wyckof, Souvenirs d’Alexis Carrel à New-York,” 12. 39. “Points by Prizemen,” Time, 23 Dec. 1935, 24. 40. “Everybody Has Telepathic Power, Dr. Carrel Says After Research.” NYT, 18 Sep. 1935, 25. 41. ACP, Box 43, Gasser to Carrel, 6 Feb. 1936. 42. “Le succès de mon livre est plutôt une calamité. Il me fait beaucoup d’ennemis parmi les médecins, même parmi mes collègues. Ils sont naturellement offensés par son grand succès. L’envahissement de l’Académie de Médecine [de New York] par la foule le jour où j’y ai parlé m’a suscité une grande quantité d’ennemis … On m’accuse alors d’avoir écrit ce livre pour amour à la publicité!!” ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 18 Feb. and 28 Sep. 1936. 43. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 15 May, 18 and 26 Sep., and 18 Oct. 1938; ACP, Box 41, Carrel to Coudert, 15 Dec. 1939.

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44. ACP, Box 41, Carrel to Coudert, 8, 14, and 17 Sep. 1938; ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 14 July 1938. 45. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 1 Jan. and 6 Feb. 1939; “Lindbergh Here, Guarded by Police,” NYT, 15 Apr. 1939, 8. 46. Id., 8 and 11July, 16 Nov. and 9 Dec. 1938, 20 Mar. 1939. 47. “Liste de ceux qui sont avec nous,” L’emancipation nationale, 21 Jan. 1938, 1; Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 233; Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992), 30. 48. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 4 Nov. 1938. 49. His presence in Paris led to contradicting rumors. Some French sources believed that the government intended to trust the scientist with the mission of convincing president Roosevelt to intervene in the conflict with Germany. Another rumor, circulated by the European Office of the Rockefeller Foundation, claimed that the French authorities were considering appointing the Nobel laureate as a liaison between the ministry of public health and the American foundation. See Félix-André Missenard, “Sombres souvenirs: la vérité sur le séjour d’Alexis Carrel en France, de 1941 à 1944,” Journal de médecine de Lyon, no. 61 (1980): 399; RFA, Record Group 1.1, Series 500, Selskar M. Gunn to Raymond B. Fosdick, 13 Oct. 1939. 50. Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé, “Arrêté du 8 mai 1940 nommant des conseillers techniques sanitaires,” JO, 29 Aug. 1940. 51. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 14 Jan. 1940, 10, 18, and 23 Feb. 1940. 52. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 29 Oct. 1940; “Nazi Forces Take Channel Isles,” NYT, 2 July 1940, 1; “Lindbergh’s French Home Occupied by Nazi Troops,” NYT, 7 Oct. 1940, 4. 53. “Carrel Sails for Survey in Europe,” NYT, 2 Feb. 1941, 7; James Wood Johnson, “We Saw Spain Starving,” Saturday Evening Post, 28 June 1941, 38, 45; id., “Ah, Madrid! Rumors, Suspicion, Fear!” Saturday Evening Post, 5 July 1941, 29, 37, 40, 45; “Spain’s Diet Found below Life Level,” NYT, 29 Mar. 1941, 2; ACP, Box 41, Johnson to Coudert, 24 Nov. 1940; RFA, RG 1.1, Series 500, Carrel to Gregg, 13 Dec. 1940; RUA, RG 450, C 232, Box 1, “Report to Treasury Department in Respect to Accounts Held to Dr Carrel,” 22 Sept. 1941.

Chapter 5

The Commitment to Vichy

 Carrel’s trip to France in the winter of 1941 is key to understanding one of the most decisive moments of the scientist’s life. Whether his original intention was to return to the United States may not be important. In the end, what counts is that he made a commitment to Vichy. However, any biographical study should also take into account, whenever the evidence allows it, the unfulfilled wishes and intentions of historical actors for only by examining the paths not taken can we avoid the pitfalls of historical overdetermination. What needs to be explained is how the project of an Institute of Man became the reality of the FFEPH. It was one thing to set up a small research institution funded by a few wealthy philanthropists and more or less immune to the political pressures of the outside world. It was something very different to establish a large public organization in the heavily politicized atmosphere of a France divided internally and under foreign occupation. Did he go to Vichy with the intention of setting up the Institute of Man in France?1 The evidence in this regard is inconclusive, at best, and suggests that we take into consideration the role of contingent factors. Despite the success of L’homme cet inconnu, Carrel’s long-standing pessimism about his country had convinced him that the Institute of Man could only be realized in the United States. However, the French defeat of 1940 changed this. His participation in the relief mission organized by the American Ambulance Volunteer Corps may have been a way of getting into France at a time when travel in many parts of Europe was becoming increasingly difficult. His private papers leave no doubt about one thing: he wished to use his prestige to set up a relief network between France and the US. This was, as far as the evidence is concerned, the initial and Notes for this section begin on page 121.

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main purpose of his trip to Vichy in March 1941. Shocked by the lurid scenes of starving women and children in the slums of post–Civil War Spain, he hoped to prevent a similar catastrophe from striking the French by convincing American philanthropic organizations and the government to come to their aid.2 Although the Germans refused him permission to bring medical and food supplies across the Pyrenees, he was allowed to proceed to Vichy.3 So far he had no plans to stay in France; in fact, his colleagues in the American Ambulance Volunteer Corps expected him in Lisbon, where they had booked places on a New York-bound clipper.4 He never boarded that plane. Instead, in defiance of Lindbergh’s advice to get out of Europe, he remained in his country and offered his services to Vichy.5 It was an ominous decision that he seems to have regretted until the very moment of his death, four years later. His commitment to Vichy was grounded in ideology as well as other, more contingent factors. He welcomed the military collapse of 1940 and the demise of the republic with a mixture of wounded national pride and a sense of fulfilled revenge, interpreting France’s darkest hour as a vindication of his apocalyptic warnings. The day Britain and France declared war on Germany, he wrote: “The laws of biology are unforgiving. The wages of sin is death. For more than a century, we have followed ideologies that ignored the reality of our body and soul. Today is too late. An act of repentance will be useless. We will disappear as a great nation …. We will be crushed because of our corruption, vanity and weakness.”6 This was a vision shared by some of his contemporaries, who reread L’homme cet inconnu as a “moral precedent” of the nation’s catastrophe—one of them depicted Carrel as the “Cassandra” whom the French had scorned until history proved him right.7 Vichy’s rhetoric of renewal seemed to validate Carrel’s deeply reactionary worldview and his proposals for remaking society. The religious metaphors that pervaded much of Pétainist and ultra-Catholic discourse agreed with his “spiritualization” of politics. Similarly, the bucolic scenes that made up the social imagination of the regime’s conservative elites revealed strong affinities with his critique of modern civilization.8 These coincidences explain Carrel’s nomination as candidate for the minister of public health in a list addresed by Pétain to the Germans in April 1942 proposing a new cabinet.9 Fascist and Pétainist milieus did not want for occasions to stress these ideological convergences. Jacques Doriot’s Parti populaire français publicized the “immense and generous goals” of the FFEPH.10 Writing for Voix française, Alfred Fabre-Luce used a medical analogy when he wrote that “the unknown lies on the dissection table of war,” next to which “stands Carrel, ready to extract the lesson” of the defeat. Semaine de Paris announced the scientist’s rallying to Pétain as the “revenge of an all too often scorned French science,” while Revue des deux mondes stressed the coincidences between the National Revolution and the science of man.11 More importantly, Carrel became one of the ideological references of the

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institutions that embodied most clearly the spirit of Vichy. The Ecole des cadres d’Uriage, for example, welcomed the scientist’s utopian community of monk-savants as a close variation on their own vision of the new elite. His name also appeared among the favorite authors read by the trainees of the Légion française des combattants, together with Jacques Bainville, Léon Daudet, Léonce de Porcins, La Tour du Pin, Frédéric Le Play, Paul Marion, Henri Massis, Charles Maurras, Ernest Renan, Louis Salleron, and Gustave Thibon.12 Even some of the milieus that in the 1930s had received Carrel’s ideas critically now hailed him as a forerunner of the “new order.” Such was the case with the review Esprit. As may be recalled, in the late 1930s Mounier’s group had shown little enthusiasm for L’homme cet inconnu. In the fall of 1940, however, the review joined the more general trend of reading Carrel through the lens of the defeat and published an article by Pierre Delore—a physician and friend of Carrel’s—that discussed in sympathetic terms the science of man and the Nobel laureate’s call to make medicine—biotypology, eugenics, puericulture, industrial hygiene—the centerpiece of the reconstruction of the human person.13 Carrel’s ideas and the work of the FFEPH were explicitly acknowledged at the Journées de Mont-Dore, held in April 1943. The five-day meeting was chaired by Paul Estèbe and Vice-Admiral Fernet—a member of Pétain’s cabinet and secretary general of the Conseil d’état respectively—and attended by the institutions and associations identified with the “national and communitarian revolution.” During the week of 10–14 April, representatives of the Fondation Carrel discussed the ideological principles on which the new polity should be founded, together with members of the Institut d’études corporatives et sociales, the Centre communautaire, the association Economie et humanisme, the Centre des jeunes patrons, the Mouvement social révolutionnaire, the Ecole nationale des cadres civiques du Mayet-de-Montagne, the movement Equipes et cadres, the Corporation paysanne, the group Université jeune France, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, the Compagnons and scouts de France, the Fédération régionaliste, and the Légion française des combattants. Economic experts were also present, notably Gérard Bardet—secretary general of the Conseil supérieur de l’économie industrielle et commerciale—and Alfred Sauvy—underdirector of the Statistique générale de France and director of the Institut de conjoncture économique.14 Carrel’s commitment to Vichy was also influenced by the efforts of a small group of industrial experts to secure his participation in the task of “remaking France.” The polytechnicien Félix-André Missenard and the medical doctors André Gros, Jacques Ménétrier, and Jean-Jacques Gillon all played a crucial role in Carrel’s appointment to head the FFEPH. Missenard, in particular, must be credited with having convinced the scientist to render a patriotic service to his country by asking him to study the “causes of French decline”—for which he guaranteed full government support. An engineer by training and a member of the Conseil supérieur

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de la recherche scientifique, Missenard was a reputable authority on climate and the impact of heating upon human physiology—and the author of an important book on the subject, which Carrel prologued.15

The Biological “Genocide” of the French Carrel’s ideological affinities with Vichy only partially explain his commitment to Pétain. To understand it we must consider conjunctural factors as well. Like any other physician, the scientist was deeply troubled by the long-term biological effects of wartime restrictions. By the time Carrel arrived in Vichy, it was clear to everyone that the policy of collaboration would not bring any improvement to people’s lives. In the winter of 1941, living conditions in most of the country were already deteriorating rapidly as the metropolitan territory was cut off from international communication and the Germans increased their levies on food and other essential supplies. Carrel’s fears regarding the biological consequences of German food policies were shared by physicians and political authorities, Pétainist and Gaullist alike, who saw the territorial breakup and systematic starvation of the country as a phase of its eventual “Polonization.” The nutrition expert Louis Winter attests vividly to Carrel’s concerns. Winter was appointed by Vichy to supervise the increase of food production through the creation of “collective gardens” (jardins collectifs) and often visited the office of the scientist to bring him news of the food situation in the country. One day, he arrived just as Carrel was discussing rationing policies with a group of German officers. Suddenly, the scientist lost his temper and accused his guests of being “criminals” seeking to carry out the “genocide” and annihilation of the French by way of starvation.16 By early 1941, France had to pay to Germany an amount equal to twice the French national revenue of 1940—roughly 241,000 million francs.17 Part of this astronomical figure corresponded to levies imposed on food production, which were heaviest on cereals, meat, and dairy products— three basic components of the French diet. This compulsive reduction of food stocks was aggravated by a decrease in agricultural output due to lack of manpower, machinery, and fertilizers. As a result, the French government was forced to strictly ration most food items.18 For the average person, whose food needs depended on the rationing system set up by the Secrétariat d’état au ravitaillement, this meant eating less and worse. In early 1942, when Carrel’s foundation began its activities, a physician of the Gaullist resistance warned his superiors that the near-starvation organized by the Germans would not only demobilize the French but, worse, lead to their “spiritual disintegration” as a nation.19 Food experts warned that the poor diets allotted to most food card holders threatened them with “slow starvation”—much as in Spain after the civil war and Germany and Austria at the end of World War I. Generally speaking, the energy-giving

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components furnished by official rations—1,200 calories, 30 to 35 grams of proteins, some 200 grams of sugars—amounted to less than half of an adult’s normal needs. Moreover, most rations were deficient in animal fats and proteins, mineral components—calcium in particular—and vitamins A and D.20

Table 3 Actual ration of an adult food card holder (grams per day) Paris, fourth quarter, 1941-1944 Meat Cheese Butter Margarine Cooking oil ** Fats Sugar Dried Fruits Potatoes *** Eggs ***

1941

1942

1943

1944

21.7 7.1 10.9 2.7* 3.8 14.7 16.3 2.7 169.0 -

15.3 7.1 6.8 1.5 4.6 12.9 16.3 14.0* 133.0 2.7

3.1 4.8 7.7 3.6* 1.1 8.8 16.3 6.0* 133.0 3.2

13.4 2.8 4.7 3.3* 2.0 6.7 16.3 5.5 89.7 1.6

* first quarter; ** liters per month; *** units per month.

Table 4 Caloric needs for selected groups (Geneva Ration) Age group Minimum of daily calories needed 1 to 5 years 5 to 11 years 11 to 15 years Adult Wet nurse Nursling

840-1,200 1,200-2,000 2,000-2,400 2,400-2,800 3,000 198-200 per pound

Source: Commission consultative des dommages et des réparations, Dommages aux personnes (Paris: Imprimerie nationale 1948), Annexe 3, XIII.

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Table 5 Nutritional components furnished daily by rationed items France, fourth quarter 1941-1944 1941

1942

1943

1944

Calories* 1190.000 1233.000 1190.000 1040.000 Proteins** 1.080 1.080 1.150 1.050 Fats** 0.730 0.700 0.520 0.450 Sugars** 8.000 8.050 8.260 7.070 Phosphorus*** 0.020 0.020 0.020 0.020 Calcium*** 0.005 0.010 0.010 0.007 Source: Michel C p de, Agriculture et alimentation en France durant la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris:� M. T. Gu nin, 1961), 384-86. Since the beginning of the occupation, medical authorities had carried out permanent inquiries to investigate the patterns of food consumption and the changing composition of rations. Between 1940 and 1942, the Institut supérieur d’alimentation conducted eight thousand interviews of food card holders in different categories. Other organizations, such as the Institut de recherches d’hygiène de Marseille, the Institut d’hygiène alimentaire de la Seine, and the Institut national d’hygiène, also studied the impact of food shortages among workers, university students, schoolchildren, and the military. Likewise, the Commission for Food Supply of the Academy of Medicine of Paris and the Food Section of the Comité consultatif d’hygiène made proposals to the Comité national de l’enfance and relevant ministerial departments.21 The physician Gabriel Richet estimated the average ration of a Parisian adult in 1942 at 1,500–1,700 calories, that is, just below the level of “slow starvation.”22 These figures, however, failed to convey the shocking contrasts between urban and rural consumption patterns. For example, residents of Marseille and Paris consumed 50 to 70 percent of the “theoretical” ration of fats, while in the rural departments of the west it reached 128 percent.23 Physicians agreed that the restrictions were directly responsible for the alarming deterioration of public health.24 Sustained undernourishment produced all sorts of psychophysical anomalies, particularly in those groups with few or no means of finding alternative food resources, such as the poor in big cities, children, the elderly, sick, and psychiatric patients of public institutions. In a country with a historical record of declining birthrate—and with the political consequences that the elites drew from that—physicians were particularly concerned with the impact of restrictions upon the youth.25 War-related clinical pathologies among this group were aggravated by the hard winter of 1940–1941 and again from early 1944 until well after the end of the war.26 A recurring theme in the medical reports was the steady loss of weight among urban schoolchildren.

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Table 6 Calories furnished by monthly rations in Germany and non-Soviet occupied Europe (1943-1944) Country Consumer (age) Calories/month Baltic States

0 to 3 3 to 6 6 to 14 14 to 18

32,614 31,114 39,812 35,122

0 to 3 3 to 6 6 to 14

89,282 84,592 79,902

0 to 3 3 to 6 6 to 10 10 to 20

83,224 88,912 94,064 92,648

0 to 6 6 and over

30,460 42,268

France

0 to 3 3 to 6 6 to 13 13 to 21

44,220 48,564 43,556 45,164

Germany

0 to 3 3 to 6 6 to 10 10 to 14 14 to 20

106,028 103,396 108,092 114,108 109,552

Greece Norway

Ordinary consumer 0 to 5 6 to 15 15 and over

15,088 71,600 75,865 66,138

Children Cat. L Children Cat. II

14,462 17,389

Ordinary consumer

42,756

Belgium

Bohemia and Moravia

Denmark

Poland General Gov. Yugoslavia

Source: Juliette Lagabrielle, “Le rationnement alimentaire des enfants et des adolescents en France et en Europe,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 35-43.

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In early 1942, the Academy of Medicine advised the Commissariat à la jeunesse to limit and even suppress physical activities in schools because the children‘s meager rations did not permit any unnecessary expenditure of calories.27 Of 23,000 Parisian children aged seven to eighteen examined in 1941 and again in 1942, over a third either lost one to two pounds or gained no weight at all, while the rest increased their weight by less than one pound. What was more alarming was the close correlation between biological impoverishment and social background. Between 60 and 90 percent of children attending schools situated in the poorest neighborhoods—the fourth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements—lost weight, against only 18 to 30 percent of those from wealthier quarters—the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth.28 A report circulated by the Free French in the spring of 1944 described a similarly alarming picture for the children of the Lyon region. A medical study showed that while only 2 percent of children from agricultural milieus experienced a delay in their growth, over 30 percent of those from working-class backgrounds did, other socioeconomic categories falling somewhere between these two extremes.29 Pregnant and breast-feeding women were another group at risk. A study of 2,500 female out-patients treated at the maternity wards of the Assistance publique de Paris found that one-fourth of them had gained insufficient weight, even though the rations distributed in these institutions were qualitatively and quantitatively higher than the official ones. Authorities were concerned by the high number of anemic and asthenic breast-feeding women, and the deficiency of vitamins C and B2 in mothers’ milk.30 The problem was aggravated by shortages of vital provisions, such as milk, in particular in those regions that, like the Midi, depended on shipments from distant areas. By early 1944, the destruction of the railway network as a result of allied bombings, the requisition of rolling stock, and gas restrictions left most southern cities without fresh milk. The problem became so serious that physicians wrote to Pétain asking that the government enforce measures to collect milk on the spot, before dairy farmers used it for making cheese and butter, items that earned good profits on the black market.31 It was not long before undernourishment and poor hygiene led to the outbreak of infectious diseases. A statement released by the Academy of Medicine in late 1943 warned of the fatal consequences that epidemics would have on an already weakened population. Should the war and the cruel winters continue, it alerted, “we shall witness a human catastrophe.”32 A flow of reports drew attention to the disastrous effects of tuberculosis. Although mortality rates had decreased in the decade before the war, the potential for the disease’s resurgence remained strong. Until the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, treatment was based mostly on a rich diet, rest, and fresh air—conditions few people were likely to enjoy while the war was on. The tuberculosis vaccine was effective only if the recipient had not been infected; moreover, vaccination remained

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voluntary. According to statistical reports issued by Vichy‘s ministry of public health in 1942, annual deaths from tuberculosis reached over sixty thousand. Government authorities estimated that there were one million tuberculous men and women in France—a twofold increase over the war years—of whom 300,000 had serious cases. Only 15 percent of these were being treated in dispensaries and sanatoriums.33 Medical authorities reported an alarming pattern in the clinical evolution of the disease. The malady spread faster, the infection process developed ever more rapidly, and the number of acute cases showed an unusual increase.34 At the children’s hospice of Brévannes, the increase in early and acute primary infections in 1941 left no hopes of recovery for those affected by tuberculous meningitis.35 Based upon the record of sickness leaves, the Institut national d‘hygiène confirmed the spread of the disease among postal workers, ministerial clerks, and metro employees. The studies found a steep and steady increase in tuberculosis in the twenty-to-fifty age bracket, more pronounced in men than in women. Among occupational groups, the industrial workforce was the hardest hit, mainly due to poor diets—few workers could afford to buy items on the black market—and unhealthy housing, as close to 40 percent of working-class families lived in single-room flats.36 These disadvantages were reflected in medical examinations conducted in factory infirmaries, which showed that most workers had lost between twenty and fifty pounds since the beginning of the restrictions. Weight loss combined with low blood pressure, digestive upsets, fatigue, and drowsiness, led to a growing number of work-related accidents.37 The spread of tuberculosis was aggravated by epidemics of other infectious diseases, such as typhus and diphtheria. Endemic typhoid fever evolved regularly as of 1940, and by 1942 the number of infected people was six times greater than that in 1938. From the two permanent endemic foci on the Mediterranean and western coasts, the disease spread to distant regions such as the Parisian basin, the Nièvre, and the Côte-d‘Or.38 Diphtheria made slow and steady progress in the first two years of the occupation and increased steeply in the winters of 1942, 1943, and 1944, with most cases concentrated in the Channel area, the eastern departments, and the Gironde. In late 1940, the government passed a law rendering vaccination compulsory for all children under fourteen. This measure, along with the discovery of the typhus serum a year later, enabled the authorities to control the spread of the disease.39

Ideology, Contingency and Population Research The convergence of Vichy’s ideological projects and the humanitarian emergency created by wartime restrictions gave Carrel the opportunity to carry out his long-cherished project. The moment was ripe, he wrote, for setting up an institute “to regenerate the race.”40 To get his project started, he relied

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on Missenard, Gros, and Ménétrier‘s political connections with members of Admiral Alphonse Darlan’s cabinet. Missenard had been at the Ecole polytechnique with the ministers of industrial production and foreign affairs, Jean Bichelonne and Paul Baudouin, and was also well acquainted with the ministers of the interior and finance, Pierre Pucheu and Yves Bouthillier. Both Gros and Ménétrier knew the minister of health, Louis Aublant. Together with Carrel‘s prestige this influential network of medical technocrats and industrial experts played a vital role in securing from the state an extraordinary status and exceptional privileges for the new institution. Created by a law of 17 November 1941, the FFEPH was chartered as a public institution with financial autonomy—an unprecedented formula, as one member admitted—and placed under the joint supervision of the ministries of finance and public health. More importantly, the government accorded it a generous budget of forty million francs, roughly one franc per inhabitant, a true luxury if we consider the heavy burdens imposed on public resources by the occupation. By way of comparison, the CNRS, an older institution boasting strong links to the university and staffed by some of France’s most brilliant scientists, received fifty million francs, while the Institut national d‘hygiène, created in the same year, was allotted fifteen million francs.41 The government charged the Foundation with the mission of “studying the most appropriate measures to safeguard, improve, and develop the French population.“ To do so, it was expected to carry out surveys, compile statistics, set up laboratories, organize a bibliography on “human problems,“ and find “pragmatic solutions“ to “improve the physiological, mental, and social conditions of the population.“42 By the summer of 1942, the foundation represented a hierarchical structure headed by Carrel, who as regent enjoyed the highest executive, technical, and administrative attributions—among them, deciding the research agenda. However, as was clearly established by its internal documents, the institution‘s work was to be carried out in a highly decentralized style, “following the initiative and under the responsibility of the chairs of each research department and their project supervisors“ (Articles 1–4). In addition to the regent, the executive personnel comprised two vice-regents—Gros and Missenard—; one secretary general, first Ménétrier, then François Perroux, and finally Roger Peltier—; and ten department chairs. The regent was to be advised by a board of directors and assisted by a supervising committee. The board of directors was made up of the regent himself, the vice-regents, the secretary general, two department chairs, and a Commissaire à la prospection—a position that was later suppressed. The secretary general was the link between the regent and the rest of the foundation and was also responsible for its public relations with other institutions and the government. The supervising committee comprised five executive members—all from the foundation—plus nine ministerial representatives appointed by the prime minister. The regent was also empowered to set up a technical council made up of a few experts—from within and outside

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the foundation—in order to assess the institution‘s results and examine the pertinence of new projects43 (Articles 5–12). The projects were carried out by small research units (équipes). Although their number and names changed over the years, the most important ones dealt with biology of heredity, birthrate, adolescence, housing, nutrition, biotypology, psychophysiology, industrial hygiene, economy and production, sociology, finance, law, and social insurance. Most équipes operated within the jurisdiction of a research department, while a few functioned independently, providing their services to various projects on demand, as was the case for the unit on statistics and opinion polls.44 The board of directors could also approve the hiring of temporary or permanent personnel (correspondants) or set up autonomous units (formations spécialisées) to carry out special projects or satisfy the needs of different departments. Examples of these were the Laboratory of Biochemical Research, the équipe for statistics and opinion polls, the Institute of Psychophysiology, the Centre de synthèse, and the Centre de la mère et de l’enfant.45 Carrel set up the headquarters in the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation in Paris and housed the rest of the staff and laboratory facilities in rented locations throughout the city. The foundation also purchased or leased additional space in Vulaines-sur-Seine (Seine-et-Oise) to accommodate the Centre de synthèse and the laboratories of psychophysiology, chemistry, physics, and biochemical research.46 From the outset, the fact of having found suitable accommodations in occupied Paris fed rumors about Carrel‘s relationship with the Germans. The appropriation of the Rockefeller Foundation‘s buildings, for example, was not well received in the United States. Although he had no authorization from the US-based foundation, the scientist acted under the assumption that the Americans would rather see their offices taken over by a “friend“ of the United States than requisitioned by Vichy or the Germans. Sometimes exaggerated by the press, this and other, similar episodes, such as the failed takeover of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology (see chapter 7 in this volume), compromised the scientist‘s reputation by making him seem a “Nazi sympathizer.”47 Was Carrel’s Foundation the embodiment of his proposals for human regeneration? There is no doubt that he and his closest associates conceived it as a direct outcome of Man, the Unknown and the Institute of Man. This connection was made explicit in the first of a series of research monographs (Cahiers) published by the foundation. Released in 1943 and probably written by Carrel himself, the first publication presented an overview of the foundation’s nature, structure, and results accomplished after half a year’s work. The introduction reproduced the main tenets of Carrel’s book and presented the foundation as an original enterprise of applied sociobiological research—that is, aimed at producing information for use by policymakers—based on the analysis of specific problems and the comprehensive synthesis of their results through multidisciplinary, experimental, and empirical methods.48

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A second Cahier published in late 1944 offered a lengthy and detailed synthesis of the foundation’s impressive array of projects, accomplished or in progress (examined in detail in chapter 6 of this volume). This treatise asserted in a much bolder way what was considered to be the institution’s distinctive feature, namely that it studied “human problems” according to the principle of “scientific experimentation.” The recurrent use of coded terms such as “synthesis,” “human factor,” “real person,” “complete human being,” and “total human quality” illustrate the extent to which some of the foundation’s architects, economists, engineers, physicians, pedagogues, and sociologists shared—at least to a degree—a holistic conception of human affairs as the guiding principle of their technocratic problem-solving methods.49 Conceptual speculations and theoretical frameworks were rejected as a “sterile“ pursuit of “a prioris.” The only principle to be followed was the “lesson of experience.” The term “experience” referred to an empirically grounded knowledge “free” from the “distortions” caused by abstract thinking, and concerned only with the study of the “real” person, that is, the “concrete” human being in its specific setting—”the worker in the factory, the child in school, the housewife in the kitchen, the peasant on the farm, the sportsman in the field, and the alcoholic in the café.”50 The empiricist critique of theoretical speculation and “intellectualism“ as mental deformities and ideological interferences that prevented a direct, and therefore accurate, apprehension of reality was another trademark of the foundation‘s self-definition. In his preface to a series of conferences the Foundation organized for high school students, the president of the Académie de Paris, Gilbert Gidel, warned lycéens and lycéennes against the perils of the “bookish world in which you have been locked up by your school education“ (monde livresque où vous été trop longtemps enfermé dans vos classes) and the “pitfalls and dangers of a certain bourgeois mentality based on ignorance, pride, and abstract thinking.“ ���������������� (les faiblesses et les dangers d’une certaine psychologie bourgeoise, à base d’ignorance, d’orgueil et de raisonnement dans l’abstrait). In ����������������������������� the same brochure, a preface written by Carrel emphasized the need to “rid yourself of certain mental habits” (vous débarrasser de certains de vos habitudes d’esprit) because “it is neither through logical analysis, nor criticism or denigration alone that we solve human problems,” but through “sentiment as much as reason.” ������������������������������������������������������������������ ([c]e n’est pas par l’analyse logique, ni par la critique, ni par le dénigrement que l’on résout les problèmes humains, car tout problème humain intéresse le sentiment autant que la raison.)51 Carrel and his coworkers heeded the imperative of lining up suitable credentials and precedents, thus ensuring that the foundation would not be seen as an opportunistic improvisation. The Nobel laureate illustrated this clearly by likening it to prestigious centers such as the Pasteur, Rockefeller, and Kaiser-Wilhelm institutes. Jean-Jacques Gillon, chair of the Department of Child and Adolescence, went further along this line and sought to

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place the foundation within a much older and ideologically complex intellectual tradition. Borrowing from Carrel’s “science of man,” Gillon defined the foundation’s knowledge paradigm in terms of “scientific humanism.” By this he meant a study of the human being that was both comprehensive—encompassing all the domains that were relevant to human life—and “scientific”—that is, empirical. He conceived the foundation as the culmination of the Renaissance’s “unfinished” revolution—”unfinished” because the scientific breakthroughs of the seventeenth century were seen as offset by old and new “speculative” and “literal” trends—through the development of a truly scientific human science. Gillon presented the foundation as the twentieth-century embodiment of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. As it may be recalled, this novel tells the story of an explorer who arrives at an island of the South Seas. There he discovers a civilization ruled by a higher council—King Solomon’s House, as he calls it—made up of “technicians”—architects, astronomers, geologists, biologists, physicians, chemists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers—whose aim is the constant improvement of the human race.52 More than these utopian references to a mythical past, it is the foundation‘s links with contemporary developments that best explain Gillon‘s understanding of the institution‘s profile. He described its creation as a consequence of the same intellectual concerns that had led names such as Henri Berr, Jean Coutrot, Raymond Fosdick, and Julian Huxley, among others, to embrace the idea of synthesis and scientific humanism.53 From this perspective, the foundation was seen as following in the steps of other institutions, notably Berr‘s Centre international de synthèse and the British journal The Realist.54 Gillon also linked the foundation to contemporary eugenics. Interestingly enough, however, he placed it not within the French tradition but the Anglo-American one by acknowledging the influence of Francis Galton (father of eugenics), Karl Pearson (founder of biometrics), and Leonard Darwin (Charles‘s son and the longtime president of the British Eugenics Education Society). The implications of Gillon‘s definition of scientific humanism became clear in his references to the American racist eugenicists T. Lothrop Stoddard and Albert E. Wiggam. In the years after World War I, Stoddard had become one of the most popular advocates of Nordic racism. In 1918, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the American Birth Control League, the first organization to advocate birth control and abortion on eugenic grounds in the United States. In the following decade he contributed to the spread of racism and eugenics through widely read tracts, such as A Gallery of Jewish Types (1918), The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920), and The Revolt against Civilization (1922). He also handled the publicity for the Second International Eugenics Conference—held in New York in 1921—and served on the Advisory Board of the American Eugenics Society from 1923 to 1935. Throughout these years, Stoddard was an active participant in the white supremacy movement, serving as a Ku Klux Klan

116   God's Eugenicist

officer in Massachusetts; he also made public his admiration for Hitler. In 1925, he published Scientific Humanism, a book that Gillon acknowledged as a source of inspiration for his own ideas about eugenics.55 Wiggam brought to eugenics the self-righteousness of the moralist, the fanaticism of the religious crusader, and the skills of the political lobbyist. He began his education in eugenics shortly before the First World War, visiting the Eugenics Records Office and establishing contact with its geneticists. In the 1920s he held popular conferences at which the audience was asked to fill out family history forms that were sent later to the Eugenics Records Office. His popular tract The New Decalogue of Science (1923), which portrayed eugenics as the “golden rule” of the new scientific humanism, established him as one of America’s most influential advocates of race hygiene.56 Gillon showed an unmitigated enthusiasm for Wiggam’s biological “commandments” and praised the American’s empiricist critique of the “defective mental processes”—a reference to theoretical speculation and value-rooted inquiry—that “interfered” with the “purely scientific and analytic” study of human life.57 Despite the optimism and self-confidence of its members, the foundation experienced a difficult start. Partly this was due to constraints imposed on public funds, which often led to clashes between Carrel and the overzealous officials of the finance ministry.58 Moreover, the foundation was never able to overcome the problem of recruiting the qualified personnel needed to carry out its projects. In his familiar resentful style, Carrel blamed the French university for “producing too many “’intellectuels prétuberculeux’” and not enough technicians.59 The root of this problem was, of course, more complex. On the one hand, the areas on which the foundation focused its work—population biology, industrial hygiene—had yet to be institutionalized. More often than not, Carrel’s coworkers had to improvise and make do with the few resources at hand. This became most evident in the lack of trained researchers and, worse, the appointment of experts without proper qualifications—as in the case of Missenard, who headed the department of population biology despite having no background in that field. Not surprisingly, recruitment relied more heavily on personal connections than professional qualifications and ideological affinities—although these certainly came into play. This pattern of institution-building is most clearly revealed in the influential position achieved by the networks of polytechniciens and pronatalist activists.60 As a result, some of the foundation’s departments remained little more than disparate assortments of hastily recruited activists and professionals with empirical knowledge—rather than researchers with scientific credentials—who saw the foundation—given its budget and close relationship with the regime—as a convenient means to further their cause. On the other hand, the foundation‘s Pétainist affiliations and Carrel‘s lifelong criticism of French academia undermined the efforts to attract personnel from a university milieu by and large opposed to the regime‘s policies—one of

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the charges leveled later by the Resistance was that Carrel had sought to “destroy” the university. This conflict was more than just an expression of the larger ideological clash between fascists and antifascists. It was also a struggle between two different scientific cultures vying to secure access to scarce public resources and garner for institutional status. Most of the difficulties faced from the outset and throughout most of the foundation‘s short life were, in one way or another, the consequence of its vague and cryptic goals. Its authorities never defined in any clear way what “improving the population“ through a “human science“ meant. Rather, they took for granted that everyone who was familiar with Carrel‘s work would be able to grasp the meaning of the seemingly ambiguous concept. Moreover, they consciously rejected the theoretical framework of the social sciences and relied on a notion of “human problems“ that was vague enough to accommodate various loosely articulated research agendas. Maurice Daumas, who headed the foundation‘s publishing department and later became curator of the Musée des arts et métiers, stressed this point when he recalled the institution‘s aims as “too broad and too many.”61 This was compounded by a loose, and at times chaotic, structure. We have already referred to the confusing proliferation and labeling of research units—departments, équipes, sous-équipes, etc.—and their unclear, often overlapping jurisdictions. His experience at the Rockefeller Institute had made Carrel a strong supporter of a decentralized organization of autonomous research units, which he saw as the key feature of a modern scientific institution. Thus, he refused either to intervene in the work of laboratory staff and fieldworkers, or to establish clear operational guidelines. The imprecise delimitation of roles often led to the overlapping of functions, clashes between the staff, and delays in the implementation of projects. The difficulty of coping with these problems at the top translated into further malfunctions down at the level of the departments and research units. Flawed administrative control and the lack of interdepartmental coordination often led to wasting scarce resources. And the departments were unable to overcome the compartmentalization of the work done by their respective équipes, thus obstructing the accomplishment of the much-touted synthesis.62 The personal conflict between Carrel and the foundation‘s secretary general, François Perroux, brought these problems into the open and almost ruined the entire project. When he succeeded Ménétrier, Perroux was a professor at the University of Paris Law School and one of the leading Pétainist intellectuals. Since 1941, he had been actively involved in promoting the communitarian idea within the National Revolution through reviews such as La communauté française and Idées.63 His entry into the foundation hinged on his intellectual standing within the regime as well as his connections with the academic world. Concerned about the foundation’s isolation from university milieus, and well placed as a member of the Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique appliquée, Missenard convinced Carrel to

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recruit a few academic scientists. The economists Jean Marchal and Henri Guitton; the law experts Henri Denis, Jean Lhomme, and Daniel Villey; the physicians Pierre Delore, Bernard Desplas, and Jacques Parisot; the psychologist Gaston Viaud, and the anthropologist Henri Vallois all joined Carrel’s institution.64 The plan, however, was short-lived, largely because Carrel and Perroux never got along with each other. As is clear from their writings, and in particular Perroux‘s prolific production, their falling out did not arise out of substantial ideological differences. In his much-cited Science de l’homme, science économique, the law professor acknowledged the Nobel laureate’s major contributions and praised the “overwhelming originality” of L’homme cet inconnue.65 The clash instead stemmed from their seemingly incompatible personalities and their different views regarding the foundation. Unlike Carrel, Perroux favored a hierarchical structure based on a clear distribution of roles. He insisted on the need to clarify the mission and specify the immediate goals beyond the vagueness with which they had been formulated. Moreover, he sought to institutionalize certain practices along more bureaucratic and impersonal lines. The worst and final clash took place when Perroux, taking advantage of Carrel‘s long convalescence for most of 1943, tried to substitute his own people for some of the regent‘s closest associates. The affair reached paroxistic levels when Perroux attempted to remove Carrel‘s wife from her self-appointed position as manager of the foundation‘s facility at Vulainessur-Seine. Carrel‘s personal correspondence of late 1943 and early 1944 celebrated with harsh words the “cleansing“ (nettoyage) of the foundation after his enemy’s departure.66 Perroux reacted similarly and, to undo the error of having associated himself with Carrel, inserted a bizarre note at the end of Science de l’homme, science économique warning the reader not to be misled by similarities with Carrel’s ideas: I must call the attention of the reader to the inaccurate significance that, in good faith yet naïvely, I accorded, in the era when this talk was given to the statements of M. Carrel. Not having being trained in the biological disciplines, and misled by the massive and undemonstrated assertions made in the name of science, I accorded to L’homme cet inconnu an importance that specialists have judged severely. I must, therefore, to my own regret, warn the uninitiated public against an error of which I was, for a certain time, the victim, and shall not popularize further. The idea of the Science of Man and its fate are not, fortunately, tied to some of their interpretations.67

Perroux‘s departure in December 1943 triggered the most severe crisis in the foundation as other scientists submitted their resignations. This delicate situation was addressed in a pessimistic report drawn up by Gillon in early 1944. In it he blamed the institution‘s difficulties both on insufficient public exposure and on the attempts to discredit it. He also acknowledged the lack of clear goals and the widespread perception of the institution‘s organization and functioning as “scandalous, anarchistic,

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and incoherent.“68 Such discouraging impressions were also reflected in Carrel‘s wartime correspondence. In private, he harbored deep doubts as to the possibility of accomplishing anything substantial beyond the gathering of data. He believed that France‘s regeneration would take decades to show tangible results—and even that would be feasible only after the war had ended. In his usual unrestrained style, he lashed out at the “foolishness and incompetence“ of his “rotten, malevolent, and despicable“ compatriots.69 He endured his duties at the foundation as an “unbearable and senseless“ task with no future and even belittled its accomplishments. Mean-spiritedly, he wrote about his coworkers that “[e]xcept for a few able young men the rest have neither imagination nor courage. None of them will be able to replace me at the foundation. If I disappear everything will fall apart in a few months. I ask myself often if all this is worth in this nation déchouée. Certainly, we have a dozen first-rate men. But they do not seem to be up to the task . . . The foundation is nothing but ‘a bit of smoke’ for we would need maybe twenty years to train men capable of continuing this undertaking.”70 Nonetheless, once the Perroux crisis was overcome and the foundation’s research programs were producing the first results, Carrel adopted a more optimistic attitude. In late 1943 and early 1944, he reported with enthusiasm the growing number of public and private institutions that sought the foundation‘s expertise.71 By the war’s end, its research departments had set up links and partnerships with almost every ministry—agriculture and supply, colonies, education, infrastructure, finance, industrial production, labor, public health, sports, and war. The foundation also provided various services and expert advice to social security, relief, and professional training institutions such as the Institut national d’action sanitaire des assurances sociales, the Comité d’études de prévention et de sécurité, the Assistance publique, the Secours national, the Institut national d’orientation professionnelle, and the Centre d’information interprofesionnelle. Carrel‘s experts were also sought by the Comité national de l’organisation française and the Commission générale d’organisation scientifique as well as agricultural, construction, public works, and textile associations. Likewise, the foundation sought cooperation—not always successfully—with the Institut de France, the Musée d’histoire naturelle, the CNRS, the Institut national d’hygiène, and the Statistique génerale de France.72 In the summer of 1942, Carrel traveled to Vichy to report to Marshal Pétain on the foundation‘s activities.73 Although few research departments and équipes had been set up yet, he presented a general statement of purpose specifying the three main areas or “human problems” on which the foundation’s work would be concentrated: children’s health, youth development, and industrial hygiene. As we shall see, each of these research areas became an umbrella under which various other projects aimed at the “improvement” of the population were accommodated. This was in line with Carrel’s preference for vague and general proposals as well as with

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his holistic conception of human knowledge. He trusted that his associates would find the way to turn his master plan into feasible projects. The area of children’s health, for example, involved the participation of several departments and équipes working on children’s nutrition, women’s fertility, demography, psychology and education, and eugenics. Research on industrial hygiene targeted occupational diseases as well as food, housing, and social insurance. The choice of these areas revealed, on the one hand, an enduring consensus among French experts and political authorities regarding the need to find “scientific” and nonpartisan solutions to the nation’s secular problems—notably, population decline and lagging industrial productivity. On the other hand, it illustrates the elites’ concern with finding rapid and efficient solutions to the problems posed by the war. The work of the foundation, therefore, must be understood from a three-pronged perspective that combines Carrel’s sociobiological agenda, the conjuncture of economic depression and war in the 1930s and early 1940s, and secular population trends. Such an approach helps us apprehend the foundation’s broad scope of activities as well as the sense of contingency that singled out some of its projects, while keeping in sight the longer-term goals that inspired its creation. Let us now examine Carrel’s institutional monument in greater detail.

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Notes 1. See the diverging accounts of Jean-Jacques Gillon and Félix-André Missenard in Gillon, “La Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” in Science et théorie de l’opinion publique: hommage à Jean Stoetzel, ed. Otto Klineberg (Paris: Retz, 1981), 257–68; idem., “Les chevaux des courses d’Alexis Carrel,” Concours médical 108, no. 41 (1986): 3584; id., “Le grand dessein: aux origines des la Fondation,” in Alexis Carrel, l’ouverture de l’homme, ed. Yves Christen (Paris: Editions du Félin, 1986), 119–32; Félix-André Missenard, “Sombres souvenirs: la vérité sur le séjour d’Alexis Carrel en France, de 1941 à 1944,” Journal de médecine de Lyon 61 (June 1980): 397–411. 2. ACP, Box 42, Carrel to Paluel Flagg, 28 Oct. 1940; ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 24 May 1944. 3. “Carrel Believed Detained by the Nazis,” NYT, 16 May 1941, 1. 4. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 8 June 1941. 5. Carrel did not see his initial commitment to Vichy as a permanent engagement and informed his former secretary at the Rockefeller Institute of his plans to return to New York by the spring of 1942. ACP, Box 43, Katherine Crutcher to Alan Gregg, 27 Feb. 1942. 6. “Les lois biologiques ne pardonnent jamais. La récompense du péché est la mort. Nous avons suivi depuis plus d’un siècle des idéologies qui n’ont pas respecté la réalité de notre corps et notre âme. Il est trop tard au présent. Le repentir sera stérile. Nous allons mourir en tant que grande nation … Nous serous battus, à cause de notre corruption, de notre vanité et de notre faiblesse.” Carrel, Jour après jour: journal, 1893–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956), entry of 3 Sep. 1939; “Dr. Carrel Warns French of Plight If They Loose.” NYT, 7 Dec. 1939, 11. 7. Missenard, “Sombres souvenirs,” 399; Henry Joubrel, “La Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” RFA, RG 1.1, Series 500, unidentified newspaper clip, undated. 8. On Vichy’s National Revolution see Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Philippe Burrin, France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Herman Lebovics, ‘True France’: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Henry Rousso, Vichy: l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Christian Faure, Le projet culturel de Vichy: folklore et Révolution nationale (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1989); Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 9. Hervé Coutau-Bégaire and Claude Huan eds., Lettres et notes de l’Amiral Darlan (Paris: Economica, 1992). 10. “Le docteur Alexis Carrel nous expose les buts immenses et généreux de la ‘Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,’” L’émancipation nationale, undated (1941?). 11. André de Fouquières, “Le Professeur Carrel est à Paris,” Semaine de Paris, 30 Apr. 1941; “La connaissance de l’homme sauvera l’homme par le Dr. Alexis Carrel,” Le petit parisien, 10 July 1941; “De Bossuet à Carrel: la science de l’homme et la revolution nationale,” Revue des deux mondes, 1 Feb. 1942; Alfred Fabre-Luce, “L’Homme qui veut connaître l’homme,” Voix française, 17 Nov. 1942. 12. Bernard Comte, Une utopie combattante: l’Ecole des cadres d’Uriage, 1940–1942 (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 215; Jean-Paul Cointet, La Légion française des combattants, 1940–1944: la tentation du fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 351. See also Limor Yagil, “L’homme nouveau” et la révolution nationale de Vichy (1940–1944) (Paris: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1997).

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13. Pierre Delore, “La médecine et la science de l’homme,” Esprit, December 1940, 43–59. 14. On Vichy’s communitarian ideology see Antonin Cohen, “’Vers la révolution communautaire’: rencontres de la troisème voie au temps de l’ordre nouveau,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51, no. 2 (2004): 141–61; John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau, 1930–2000 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Daniel Lindenberg, “Les ‘années tournantes’ des intellectuels catholiques,” Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle, no. 13 (1995): 103–12; Denis Pelletier, “Utopie communautaire et sociabilité d’intellectuels en milieu catholique dans les années 40,” CIHTP, no. 20 (1992): 172–87. 15. Missenard, L’homme et le climat (Paris: Plon, 1937); id., Etude physiologique et technique de la ventilation (Paris: Librairie de l’enseignement technique, 1933). On physicians under Vichy see Emmanuel Chastan, “Contribution à l’étude du comportement du corps médical sous Vichy,” thèse de médecine, Université de Tours (2000); Donna Evleth, “Vichy France and the Continuity of Medical Nationalism,” Social History of Medicine 8, no.1 (1995): 95–116. 16. Louis Winter, “Souvenirs de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” BAADAC, no. 20 (1987): 5–7. 17. Michel Margairaz, L’état, les finances et l’économie, 1932–1952: histoire d’une conversion (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1991). 18. Max Bonnafous, “German Levies of Food and Fodder,” in France during the German Occupation, 1940–1944: A Collection of 292 Statements on the Government of Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval, ed. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958–1959), 283; Michel Cépède, Agriculture et alimentation en France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris: M. T. Guénin, 1961), 277–86, 355–63; Michel Margairaz, “L’état et les restrictions en France dans les années 1940,” in Les temps de restrictions en France (1939–1949), ed. D. Veillon and J.-M. Flonneau (Paris: Institut d’histoire de temps présent, 1996), 25–42; Paula Schwartz, “The Politics of Food and Gender in Occupied Paris,” Modern and Contemporary France 7, no. 1 (1999): 35–45. 19. AN F60 1666, Santé publique et assistance publique. Etat sanitaire de la population française. “Notes et réflexions relatives à diverses question d’ordre sanitaire en France et plus spécialement en France occupée,” beginning of 1942. 20. A sedentary adult weighing 120–30 pounds needs at least 1,500 daily calories. A day of walking and other low-intensity activities requires 2,000–2,500 calories. A well-balanced diet was held to contain at least 40 grams of lipids (25 grams of animal plus 15 grams of vegetable fats); 70 grams of albumins (30 and 40 grams of animal and vegetable proteins, respectively); the remaining 1,332 calories should be completed with 335 grams of sugars. A modification in the proportion of these components was observed to produce nutrition deficiencies. 21. AN F60 1666, “Le service d’enquête et de contrôle de l’Institut supérieur d’alimentation,” L’effort, 23 May 1943 (newspaper clipping); Jean Hamburger, Recherches médicales en France pendant la guerre 1939–1945 (Paris: Flammarion, 1947). 22. Gabriel Richet was the son of Charles Richet (1850–1935). During the war he served in the Commission de ravitaillement alimentaire (Commission for Food Supply) of the Academy of Medicine of Paris and was an active member in the resistance until his deportation to Buchenwald in 1944. 23. “Documents sur la ration alimentaire allouée à Paris, centre de priorité national de ravitaillement” and “L’état de nutrition de la population à Marseille,” in Recueil des travaux de l’Institut national d’hygiène. Vol. 1, ed. Secrétariat d’état à la santé et à la famille (Paris: Masson, 1944); Michel Cépède, Du prix de revient au produit net en agriculture: essai d’une théorie de la production (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1946), 198. 24. AN F60 1666, “L’état sanitaire de la France,” Documents, 1 Apr. 1943 (clipping). On restrictions, see Flonneau, “Législation et organization économique au temps des restrictions (1938–1949),” CIHTP, nos. 32–33 (1996): 43–58; Veillon and Flonneau, Les temps de restrictions; Veillon, Vivre et survivre en France, 1939–1947 (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1995);

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Rousso, Les années noires: vivre sous l’occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Alfred Sauvy, La vie économique des français de 1939 à 1945 (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); The Hoover Institution, France during the German Occupation. 25. AN F60 1666, V. S. Swaminathan, “War by Starvation,” The Spectator, 18 Aug. 1944 (clipping). See also Juliette Lagabrielle, “Le rationnnement alimentaire des enfants et des adolescents en France et en Europe,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 35–43; Camille Nony and René Binois, “Influence de la guerre sur les capacités psychologiques des écoliers,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 19–34, and the annual reports of the Academy of Medicine’s Service d’hygiène de l’enfance, in BAM, 3 Dec. 1940, 17 Nov. 1942, and 30 Nov. 1943. 26. See the following reports in BAM: Robert Debré and Edmond Lesné, “Note pour le corps médical sur les notions essentielles de diététique à rappeler dans les circonstances actuelles (décembre 1940–octobre 1941),” 6 Jan. 1942; Noël Fiessinger, “L’amagrissement actuel, “ 6. Oct. 1942; Lesné, “A propos du décret sur la réduction du lait chez les enfants,” 29 Feb. 1944; id., “Effets sur les enfants des restrictions alimentaires imposées pendant l’occupation allemande,” 7 Nov. 1944; Louyot, “Le déséquilibre alimentaire au milieu scolaire,” 8 June 1943; H. Vincent, “Voue relatif à l’alimentation de la population française,” 20 Apr. 1943. The first comprehensive study on the subject can be found in J. B. Bouvier, “La santé de l’enfance d’âge scolaire pendant la guerre,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 7–15. 27. Charles Richet, “Sur la limitation temporaire des exercises physiques pendant la période des grandes restrictions alimentaires,” BAM, 20 and 27 Jan. 1942; Paul Le Noir, “Sur la pratique des activités physiques dans ses rapports avec la ration alimentaire actuelle,” BAM, 10 Mar. 1942. 28. A. Cayla, C. Launay, and G. Boulanger-Pilet, “Les variations de poids des écoliers de la Ville de Paris en 1941–1942 étudiés par les médecins inspecteurs d’écoles,” BAM, 14 Apr. 1942, 484–85; H. Gounelle, A. Vallete, and M. Moine, “Enquête sur les poids et la taille d’un millier d’écoliers parisiens en 1941,” BAM, 14 Apr. 1942, 272–74. 29. AN F60 1666, Gouvernement provisoire de la République française, Commissariat à l’intérieur, “Rapport médical de la région lyonnaise,” 3 May 1944. 30. “Le lait maternel contient en ce moment moins de vitamins,” Paris-soir, 9 Jan. 1943. Babies born during the war showed no substantial weight loss compared to those born before the period of restrictions. Part of the explanation lay in the fact that shortages did not have an immediate impact on unborn children for it was their mothers’ bodies that absorbed most of the shock of malnutrition. Only in late 1942 were breast-feeding mothers accorded the same preferential treatment given to pregnant women. Before that date their rations barely furnished them 1,677 calories, out of which 457 went to producing milk—thus bringing the total ration available to meet their needs down to slightly over 1,200 calories. A. Brindeau, “Quelques considérations sur l’alimentation des femmes enceintes pendant la période actuelle,” BAM, 18 Feb. 1941; Henri Vignes, “L’influence de la restriction alimentaire sur la durée de l’accouchement,” BAM, 12 Oct. 1943; P. Leyer, “Les différentes manifestations cliniques attribuées en France à la carence alimentaire de 1940 à 1945,” in Recueil des travaux de l’institut national d’hygiène. Travaux des sections et mémoires originaux. Vol. 3, ed. Ministère de la santé publique (Paris: Masson, 1947), 559–602; Commission consultative des dommages et des réparations, Dommages aux personnes: annexe 3 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1948), xxii. 31. AN 2AG 77. Dossier Bernard Ménétrel, Chef du Secrétariat particulier du Maréchal Pétain. Lucien Cornil to Ménétrel, 20 Apr. 1941 and 1 July 1942; Marcel Baulande to Ménétrel, 2 July 1942. See also AN F60 1666, “Création des centres infantiles pour l’approvisionnement en lait des enfants de moins de 6 ans dans la région parisienne,” PM, 6 May 1944 (clipping); M. Violle, “A propos de la mortalité infantile par gastroentérite à Marseille,” in Recueil des travaux de l’Institut national d’hygiène. Vol. 1. The consumption of butter in the rural departments of the northwest has been estimated at five times the official ration. See Cépède, Du prix de revient, 198. 

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32. AN F60 1666, Comité français de libération nationale, Commissariat à l’information, 28 Nov. 1943. 33. Ibid., “Situation sanitaire. La tuberculose et la syphilis,” 28 July 1943; id., “Notes et réflexions relatives à diverses questions d’ordre sanitaire en France et plus spécialement en France occupée,” beginning of December 1942; Jean Troisier, “Rapport sur le taux de morbidité tuberculeuse actuelle,” BAM, 25 May 1943. In 1942 Paris registered a 47.8 percent increase in mortality compared to 1938. In the Bouches-du-Rhône the increase between 1938 and 1943 was of 74 percent, followed by the Var (69 percent) and the Vaucluse (38 percent). Robert Mencherini, “Conséquences sanitaires et sociales dans les Bouches-du-Rhône,” CIHTP, nos. 32–33 (1996): 419–32. 34. AN F60 1666, Etienne Bethet, “Note sur la recrudescence de la tuberculose observée dans les dispensaires antituberculeux depuis quelques mois,” Lyon, 28 June 1941; id., Comité française de libération nationale, Commissariat à l’intérieur, “Rapport médical de la région lyonnaise,” 15 Feb. 1944. 35. Commission consultative, Dommages aux personnes, xxxi. 36. Léon Binet, “La ration alimentaire du travailleur manuel,” BAM, 12 Nov. 1940; AN F60 1666, “Ménaces pour la santé: le taudis,” Avenir du Plateau central, 20 Jan. 1943 (clipping); Fernand Bezançon, “Les ilôts insalubres et la tuberculose,” BAM, 5 Dec. 1944. 37. AN F60 1666, “La misère physiologique des ouvriers français,” Informations sociales, June–July 1943 (clipping). See also Denis Peschanski and Jean-Louis Robert, “Les ouvriers en France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. Actes du colloque de l’IHTP,” Bulletin de l’ lnstitut d’histoire du temps présent, no. 20 (1992). 38. Typhoid fever was spread by using raw animal manure as farm fertilizer and eating the raw produce, consuming illegally collected shellfish and molluscs, and drinking contaminated well water. Louis Tanon, “La fièvre typhöide à Paris et dans le département de la Seine en 1942,” BAM, 3 Nov. 1942, and the annual reports of the Academy of Medicine of Paris, in BAM, 17 Nov. 1942, 23 Nov. 1943, and 28 Nov. 1944. 39. Henri Basse and Simone Dauvé, “Enquête sur quelques foyers de diphtérie constatés en Eure-et-Loir en 1943 et 1944 et sur les résultats de la vaccination,” BAM, 23 May 1944. 40. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 8 June 1941; “Carrel Reported Named To Form French Institute,” NYT, 5 July 1941, 3. 41. “Vichy Endows Work of Dr. Alexis Carrel,” NYT, 2 Feb. 1942, 5. 42. “Loi du 17 novembre 1941 créant la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” JO, 5 Dec. 1941; “Carrel Foundation Maps Study of Man,” NYT, 7 Dec. 1941, 33. 43. FFEPH, “Ce qu’est la Fondation,” CFFEPH, no. 1 (1943): 13. 44. The six departments were: Population Biology (chaired by Félix-André Missenard), Child and Adolescent Biology (Jean-Jacques Gillon), Biotypology (Jean Lombard), Labor (André Gros), Rural Economy and Production (Henri Guivier), and Biosociology (François Perroux). 45. FFEPH, “Ce qu’est la Fondation,” 11. 46. AN, series 2AG 78, “Rapport au Chef de l’Etat sur l’activité de la Fondation en 1942,” 20 May 1943. 47. ACP, Box 43, Crutcher to Gregg, 25 Feb. 1942; Crutcher to Coudert, 4 Jan. 1945. 48. FFEPH, “Ce qu’est la Fondation,” 7–11. 49. FFEPH, “Compte rendu des activités de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains pour l’année 1943,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 11–120. 50. Ibid., 11, 16, 100, 120. 51. FFEPH, L’orientation humaine des futurs cadres (Paris: FFEPH, 1943), 3–6. 52. Jean-Jacques Gillon, “Vers un humanisme scientifique,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 7–11. 53. Among the authors and works cited by Gillon were Henri Berr, L‘évolution de l‘humanité (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1920); Jacques Maritain, L‘humanisme intégral (Paris: F. Aubier, 1936); François Charmot, L‘humanisme et l‘humain: psychologie individuelle et sociale (Paris: Editions Spes, 1934); Julian Huxley, Science and Social Needs (London and

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New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935); J. Jeans, W. Bragg, E. V. Appleton, E. Mellanby, and J. B. S. Haldane, Scientific Progress (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936); Bernard Lovell, Science and Civilization (London and New York: T. Nelson, 1939); André George, Le véritable humanisme. 54. For a definition of scientific humanism see Charles Singer, “Scientific Humanism,“ The Realist: A Journal of Scientific Humanism, no. 1 (1929): 12–19. Published in London, the journal drew from an editorial board formed by Sir Frank Baines, Arnold Bennett, J. A. R. Cairns, A. M. Carr-Saunders, G. E. G. Catlin, Archibald Church, W. H. Coates, J. Conway Davies, F. G. Donnan, F. A. Freeth, Sir Richard Gregory, J. B. S. Haldane, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Harold J. Laski, B. Malinowski, W. MilneBailey, Naomi Mitchison, T. Percy Nunn, Eileen Power, Herbert Read, J. W. N. Sullivan, and H. G. Wells. 55. See Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideologies in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Gender, Queer Anatomy and the Sience of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Richard K. Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1991). 56. Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), 56. 57. Gillon, “Vers un humanisme scientifique,“ 14–16. 58. AN F1a 3661, Fondation française pour l‘étude des problèmes humains, Délégué du Ministère de l’Intérieur en Zone Ocupée au Chef du Gouvernement, “Compte rendu informant sur la réunion du Comité de contrôle de la Fondation française pour l‘étude des problèmes humains qui a eu lieu le 29 juin 1942,“ 2 July 1942. Other, more prosaic factors also delayed the setting up of the foundation, such as failing to comply with the administrative regulations imposed by the Germans. See Paul-André Rosental, L’intelligence démographique: sciences et politiques de population en France (1930–1960) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003), 69. 59. ACP, Box 82, Carrel to Guigou, 23 Dec. 1943. 60. Rosental, L’intelligence démographique, 70–71. 61. ACP, Box 82, transcript of Joseph Durkin’s interview with Maurice Daumas, October 1964. 62. “Compte rendu de la conférence des collaborateurs immédiats du Régent,” 15 July 1943, cited in Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales��������������������������������������� : la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992), 443. 63. See for example François Perroux and Rémy Prieur, Communauté et société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1941). 64. Missenard, “La Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” in François Perroux, ed. François Denoël (Lausanne: L’âge d’or, 1990), 172–73. 65. François Perroux, Science de l’homme, science économique (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1943), 13–14. 66. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 12 and 31 Dec. 1943, 12 Jan., 19 and 27 Feb., and 25 Mar. 1944. 67. “Je dois appeler l’attention du lecteur sur la portée inexacte que j’accordais avec une bonne foi un peu naïve, à l’époque où fût prononcée cette conférence, aux énoncés de M. Carrel. N’étant pas formé aux disciplines biologiques et trompé par des affirmations massives et indémontrées faites au nom de la Science, j’avais accordé à L’homme cet inconnu un crédit que les spécialistes jugent sévêrement. Il me faut donc, à mon grand regret, prévenir le public non initié contre une erreur dont je fus, pour un temps, la victime, et n’entends plus être le propagandiste. L’idée et les destinées de la Science de l’Homme ne sont heureusement pas liées à certaines de leurs interprétations.” Perroux, Science de l’homme, science économique, 41. 68. “Note relative à l’organisation de la Fondation,” 15 Jan. 1944, cited in Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, 353–56.

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69. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 22 June 1943, 14 and 25 Mar. 1944. 70. Id., Carrel to Guigou, 15 May 1944. 71. Id., Carrel to Guigou, 23 Dec. 1943 and 3 Mar. 1944. 72. ACP, Box 82, transcript of Durkin’s interview with Jacques Ménétrier, October 1964. 73. ACP, Box 40, Carrel to Guigou, 2 July 1942.

Chapter 6

Wartime France as Human Laboratory

 The war disrupted normal life and created a large number of “captive” populations—schools, Chantiers de la jeunesse, factories, army barracks— that could be weighed, measured and used by experts in their experiments of social and biological engineering. Herein lies a crucial factor often missed by analysts. As the restrictions intensified, children, workers, and trainees of various semimilitary organizations remained longer hours in their collective settings—where they were fed—so that they could save their daily and weekly food coupons. Thus, wartime needs offered the state an unprecedented opportunity to screen vast numbers of “real” people in their “concrete” milieus. As a result, France became an immense human laboratory in which medical and psychological experts manufactured massive amounts of sociobiological data and devised “scientific” responses to prevent the “genocide” of the French. Despite its improvised character and the contingency that shaped much of its work, the FFEPH was a singular institution in the history of French population research. Its ambitious goal of covering the field of human problems and the methods designed to address them sets it apart from other such undertakings. Its members often exaggerated the novelty of their work, yet there was nothing unusual about that in so far as any new institution has to present its agenda in such a way as to counteract the claims of older and more prestigious competitors, such as the university and the CNRS. Carrel’s foundation was original in many respects. To begin with, it was a relatively “young” institution that in its short lifespan of four years came to comprise over four hundred permanent members and temporary staff with a mean age of thirty-six. This was a significant

Notes for this section begin on page 152.

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feature in a country that was becoming “a nation of old people” (une nation de vieillards). Second, Carrel and his senior staff opposed any attempt to frame the institution’s work within a fixed program, using the same arguments raised against theoretical speculation. “The breadth of the subject,” noted one document, “does not force the researcher to wander permanently in the abstract domain of theoretical conceptions.” On the contrary, the foundation should “[k]eep an ability to adapt itself that will preserve its youthful spirit and vitality. To frame the Foundation within fixed boundaries would be a serious mistake. This pitfall would threaten it if, from its inception, the Foundation had set its goals within a constraining plan. Such a planiste conception of research risks rendering our project sterile.”1 Third, the study of human problems was essentially conceived as a preliminary process of data gathering and analysis by way of multidisciplinary experimental projects, such as field surveys and opinion polls. This stage was followed by the synthesis of the results through the publication of thematic monographs and bibliographical summaries. Every phase of this process was inspired by practical considerations, more specifically, identifying specific and urgent problems affecting people’s lives—or the “national interest”—and finding pragmatic means to act upon them. Fourth, reflecting broader secular trends in scientific research, the foundation envisioned its work on a transnational scale. Carrel’s coworkers stressed the need to carry out comparative studies abroad and learn from other national experiences. The war constrained this goal to the compilation of international sources, yet even this limited accomplishment was far from negligible. Published from late 1942 through early 1944, its monthly Bulletin bibliographique offered a rich synthesis of almost every conceivable topic relevant to humankind.2 The foundation’s activities spanned from mid 1942, when the first research units were set up, until its dissolution in late 1945. Thereafter, part of its projects and experts were absorbed by the INED. Its work peaked in the fall of 1943 and spring of 1944, when most of its research structure was in place and the first results became available. Despite being a product of the war, the foundation also envisioned its work as a response to long-term structural needs. In fact, a substantial part of its research had no immediate impact and was carried out with an eye toward the reconstruction period, which was seen as an opportunity to implement reforms and experiment with new methods of sociobiological engineering. Its multiple activities were aimed at the “qualitative improvement” (revalorisation) of the population. Although it became more obvious in some projects than others, the underlying concern was to improve the efficiency of the nation’s human resources by removing the obstacles that prevented the attainment of their optimum performance. These productivist concerns were more or less present in all the research areas and partly explain the

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leading role of technocratic experts, some of whom had been actively engaged in the prewar debates on industrial modernization.

Fighting Hunger It was in the field of children’s health that the aim of biological amelioration produced the first tangible results. The heavy burdens imposed by Germany on France’s agricultural output forced the foundation to develop urgent responses to deal with food shortages. Throughout the occupation, its pediatricians monitored the impact of restrictions on the youth. They drew up detailed reports of the differential effects of deprivations on the physical growth and psychological development of each age group, and studied the relationship between official rations and the food needs of each category of consumers. This body of data constituted one of the few comprehensive assessments of the country’s biological situation available to policymakers. With this instrument at hand, biomedical experts were able to first identify the groups that were most exposed to deprivations and then design means to protect them. To make the medical surveillance of children more efficient, the foundation dispatched official representatives to various cities to report on the conditions of children housed in public and private institutions. It asked the government to place the medical inspection of schools under the exclusive jurisdiction of the ministry of family and health, instead of sharing it with national education. Moreover, it requested that these controls be implemented in all school districts without exception and that specially trained physicians conduct the tests. Relying on comparative studies of different national systems, they designed a health book (carnet de santé) that allowed physicians and educators to record all the data relevant to a child’s psychophysical condition from the moment of birth (see later in this chapter the section on eugenics). One of the chief tasks was manufacturing data and highlighting the most salient features. Under the supervision of René Mande, the équipe of pediatrics conducted medical and psychological checkups on two thousand Parisian children of elementary school age. The clinician J. B. Bouvier investigated the patterns of growth slowdown according to weight and height measurements compiled by surveys carried out by the Academy of Medicine, the Société de pédiatrie, the Institut national d’hygiène and the Service national des statistiques.3 Although the sources did not always agree on the quantitative incidence of food deprivation among boys and girls of different age and social milieu, they all stressed the fact that children were growing more slowly than before, and in some cases they were not growing at all. Studies on children’s behavior conveyed an equally distressing picture. Commissioned by the équipe of social psychology, a

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survey of schoolchildren from one Paris district revealed on a small scale the war’s disruptive effects on children’s learning abilities.4 The foundation also published comparative studies of rationing systems in German-controlled Europe. Using the statistics of the League of Nations and the Bureau international du travail, it drew up a detailed report of the nutritional composition of the rations allowed to each age group in the Baltic states, Belgium, Czechoslovakia (Bohemia and Moravia), Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland (annexed territories and General Government), and Yugoslavia. The study showed that France’s monthly calorie allotment was the lowest in the region, alongside that of the annexed Polish territories. Moreover, France came last in terms of quantity of fats and, worse, was the only country whose children were not given milk rations after the age of twelve—thus depriving them of vital nutritional components at a crucial stage of their development. Younger children too were exposed to nutritional deficiencies owed to the impoverishment of milk quality—wartime milk furnished only 40 percent of the nutritional value of prewar production. A government decree had reduced the standardized amount of fat per liter of milk from 39 grams to 30 grams. As milk was subjected to further centrifugations and pasteurizations, often in precarious sanitary conditions, it lost nutritional value—through lowered content of vitamins A and D—and became more susceptible to bacterial contamination.5 With these data the foundation’s experts were able to rationalize food production. To expand the cultivation of soybeans in family farms and collective kitchen gardens (jardins collectifs), Carrel appointed the horticultural engineer Louis Winter as supervisor of the équipe of nutrition. Winter was an authority on fertilizers and pesticides and their effects on the nutritional properties of vegetables and meat.6 As head of the Service des jardins familiaux et ouvriers—the government-sponsored horticultural program created by the law of 30 November 1941—he provided the foundation with valuable information about the food output and needs of different regions of the country.7 Also, the foundation proposed to develop a special type of whole milk to meet the needs of newborns and one-yearolds. Following a request from the Secours national, the équipes of nutrition, agricultural production, and biochemical research collaborated on a program to develop resources of high nutritional value out of unused or wasted ingredients to substitute for the staples placed under restriction. Biochemists discovered that, if appropriately used, fish extracts, soy yeast, and whey proteins could furnish important dietary supplements. The rural economy équipe encouraged dairy farmers and food industries to use milk stocks more rationally in order to avoid wasting the product’s valuable proteins—casein and whey. This program furnished the Secours national with sufficient quantities of albumin—used for making cookies—in substitution for other ingredients, such as casein, that the restrictions had eliminated from the market. As a result of these efforts, in the

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occupied zone alone food technicians were able to recycle for commercial use more than one thousand tons of dried albumin and yeast. Nutrition experts also developed a method for recycling vegetable juice waste— rich in calcium and fats—and granted subsidies to the Institut national d‘hygiène, which was then developing a commercial variety of soy flour. Together with the Secours national, they carried out a campaign to expand cultivation of soybeans and watercress in collective gardens—mixed with potato starch, water cress was widely used in ersatz cookies. Following a joint request of the foundation and the Secours national, the ministry of agriculture allowed laboratories to reprocess on the spot the fish oil collected in trawlers, thus increasing the production of vitamin A enough to meet the needs of one hundred thousand children.8 Food scarcity gave nutritionists an ideal opportunity to develop experimental meals. Taking advantage of the restrictions, they popularized their findings with the goal of teaching the population “scientific” eating habits. The first step taken by Jean Sutter—the foundation’s leading expert on nutrition—was to investigate how similar situations of food shortages had been dealt with in the past.9 Specifically, he studied the measures adopted by Austria and Germany after 1918, when the allied blockade threatened large sectors of their population with starvation. Sutter wanted to know how food shortages affected children’s growth and what corrective strategies had been adopted by physicians and sanitary authorities to minimize exposure to long-term incurable deficiencies. He also studied the results of different measures to fight malnutrition in Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States. Then he compared these findings with those made by French physicians since the beginning of the occupation.10 With this preliminary information his équipe drew up a guidebook that explained in simple language the basic principles of a balanced meal. Summarizing the research on nutrition of the previous twenty-five years, the document was conceived as a means to facilitate the work of administrators, cooks in schools, youth camps, factories, and army barracks, as well as housewives, by offering a simple method to prepare a balanced meal according to specific needs.11 The guide followed the principle that the “corrective property” of a food item—that is, its capacity to normalize the rate of growth of an underfed person—depends on an adequate combination of proteins of high biological quality, abundant mineral salts of calcium and phosphorus, and vitamins. If French children were given at least one meal a day with these ingredients, their normal growth would be ensured. To that purpose, Sutter proposed adopting a special type of breakfast developed in 1925 by the University of Oslo professor Carl Shiotz. What came to be known as the Oslo Breakfast furnished 798 to 966 calories and all the ingredients needed to protect a child’s health—proteins, fats, calcium, phosphorus, and vitamins A, B1, B2, C, and D.12

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The Oslo Breakfast offered a quick and efficient means of counteracting malnutrition. But how could nutritionists be sure that their scientifically conceived meals would actually reach the population, and especially the youth? Sutter envisioned two possibilities. One was to send the children most threatened by malnutrition to rehabilitation homes (maisons de réparations), where they would be placed under strict medical surveillance and fed accordingly. The other solution was cheaper and easier to implement, for it relied on the existing school canteens as agents of food reeducation. One of the consequences of the restrictions was that urban families were forced to keep their children at school longer hours so they could receive one full meal a day, and thus save food coupons. For Sutter, however, raising the energetic value of the rations was not enough. What France needed was a “national food policy” (politique alimentaire nationale) aimed at educating the eating habits of children and their families. Experts would have to “educate their taste, fight their inherited or acquired dislikes, and teach them to appreciate what is good for them.” In his view, school canteens should no longer function as charitable soup kitchens but become “active centers of education and physiological regeneration.” Only by running them rationally could the canteens be turned into the avant-garde of the war against disease. In early 1943, the foundation’s équipes of school and nutrition set up experimental canteens at Meaux and Montgeron (Seine-et-Oise), where its experts tried the corrective meals with highly successful results.13 As some of the studies published showed, the war not only slowed down children’s growth but also disturbed them psychologically.14 As more of them became exposed to air attacks, forced relocation, and breakup of the family cell, socializing and learning disabilities became more acute and widespread. The équipe of social psychology set up two experimental programs on child behavior in cooperation with other institutions. The first was managed jointly with the Entr’aide française of Compiègne and involved children from shattered families—the fathers were either dead or held in captivity while the mothers were forced to work outside the home. The second, carried out in cooperation with the municipality of Mégève (Haute-Savoie), was comprised of displaced working-class children from the bombed districts of Paris and Marseilles. In addition to full physical and psychological examinations, both programs investigated children’s responses to forced relocation and treatments for normalizing their behavior and intellectual capacities.15

Institutionalizing Demographic Science Pétain’s much-cited admonition that France had lost the war because of her declining population not only became an article of faith among conservative milieus, but also came to express a broader societal consensus that associated a weak birthrate with poor military performance. One

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way to understand the relationship between the discourse of dénatalité and the wartime experience is by looking at Vichy’s explicit attempts to promote the political, economic, and social conditions deemed to favor a higher birthrate. Examples of what has been has termed “the victory of the family within the defeat” are Vichy’s gendered propaganda, its profamily legislation, and the repression of antinatalist practices.16 An alternative way of thinking about these issues is to examine the implications of the foundation’s demographic work. Instead of focusing on the regime’s explicit actions to make traditional family and gender roles the pillars of the National Revolution—this has been well documented—we shall explore how various projects pursued by the foundation’s technocrats shaped the field of population studies. The foundation brought together pronatalist and eugenicist propagandists, profamily lobbyists, immigration experts, anthropologists, and statisticians to “improve the quantity and quality of the population.” They assessed the demographic costs of the war, funded laboratory and clinical research on sterility, and carried out opinion polls to find out why French families were not having as many children as they were supposed to. Likewise, they set a precedent by making the foundation the first French public institution that openly supported eugenics. To a certain extent, the emergency created by the war made the foundation’s otherwise broad goals self-evident. As we have seen in the previous chapter, both Vichy and the Resistance agreed that the country had a serious demographic problem. The hundreds of thousands killed during the Blitzkrieg of MayJune 1940—the precise figure was still unknown—those held in captivity as war prisoners, and the draft for compulsory labor service in Germany aggravated France’s prewar negative population trends. Between 1911 and 1938, the French population increased by only 2.5 million—from 39.6 to 41.9 million. Throughout the 1930s, the birthrate continued to decline, falling from 18.3 live births per thousand inhabitants in 1928 to 14.6 in 1938. Because the mortality rate meanwhile decreased more slowly—from 19 per thousand in 1919 to 15.4 in 1938—deaths exceeded births by thirty-five thousand by the end of the decade. Likewise, the net rate of reproduction—that is, the number of girls born for every thousand women—was under one thousand and continued to decline, from an average of 950 in the period 1921–1925 to 870 in 1935–1937. As the 1936 census showed, for every one hundred families there were only 180 children of all ages. Those households with more than two children represented just a quarter of the population, compared to a third in 1911.17 Would France become an irrelevant nation as Carrel had predicted, or worse, “vanish,” as many in Vichy and the Resistance feared? How could the goal of demographical renewal be achieved? These were the questions that inspired the work of the foundation’s department of population research. As its members sought empirical answers to these questions, they made a fundamental contribution to population policy by institu-

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tionalizing demography as a scientific discipline.18 The organization of the department relied heavily on personal connections rather than professional expertise and technical competence. Robert Gessain—supervisor of the équipe of biology of heredity and the foundation’s main representative of what was known as “qualitative demography”—was brought into the foundation by his fellow student and friend Gillon, with whom he had been at the school of medicine of Paris in the 1920s. After specializing in physical anthropology with Henri Valois, Gessain went to Mexico to work with Jacques Soustelle and later became an expert on Eskimos. He became a disciple of the German eugenicist Otmar von Verschuer and a regular lecturer at the laboratory of anthropology of the Ecole pratique des hautes études.19 The team of experts on “quantitative demography”—that is, statistics—was also the result of interpersonal relations, in this case the networks of graduates from the Ecole polytechnique. Missenard’s knowledge of the polytechnicien milieu and his connection with Pierre Depoid—former member of the Statistique générale de France and head of the statistics department of the Groupement technique des sociétés d’assurance accident—enabled him to recruit two promising younger graduates, Paul Vincent and Jean Bourgeois. Although none of them had been trained in either statistics or demography, they became the first “demographers” hired on a full-time basis by a state institution.20 As it turned out, it was a wise decision for, together with Gessain, Bourgeois and Vincent authored what are considered to this day pioneering studies of wartime population trends.21 Unlike the other agencies created by Vichy to centralize the gathering and analysis of population data—notably, the Service national des statistiques, set up in 1941 by merging the Statistique générale de France and the French Army’s Service de la démographie—the foundation’s researchers integrated the data from their heterogeneous sources into the first comprehensive analysis of the demographic situation of the country since the outbreak of the war. They compared the age pyramid of France with that of other countries and related its population strength to the agricultural output. Using fragmentary data furnished by the Service national des statistiques, the Institut de conjoncture (a statistical agency attached to the ministry of finance and headed by Alfred Sauvy), and the ministry of war prisoners and deported persons, Bourgeois set the figure of France’s population loss for the period January 1939–December 1944 at 2.8 million. This number comprised all war-related civilian and military casualties, prisoners held in German camps, and deportees and victims of German and Vichy repressive policies. It also included those who had emigrated, had been drafted for the Service de travail obligatoire, and had comprised the population of Alsace-Lorraine—lost to Germany. And yet, as distressing as these statistics were—the more so in a country that in the years before the war had experienced more annual deaths than births—they did not tell the whole story.

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Using a technique he called “patchwork”—assembling and editing data from various sources—Bourgeois compared the human losses to the rates of marriage, birth, and death, and substituted the term fécondité for the more problematic natalité. This method allowed him to see variations in population trends that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.22 What he found was an “unprecedented fact” in the demographic history of France, namely the sudden increase of legitimate births since 1941. Indeed, this phenomenon extended to most of Europe and showed the remarkable endurance of the birthrate in all the belligerent nations throughout the war.23 Although he was not sure of the causes of this finding—nor could he know that he had put his finger on the initial phase of the postwar baby boom—he speculated that the change in reproductive habits might be related to people’s withdrawal into privacy and to the government’s profamily policies.24 The goal of increasing the birthrate lay at the core of the projects supervised by Missenard’s department of biology of the population. To that end, the foundation established partnerships with the ministry of family and public health, the Ecole de puériculture, the school of medicine of Paris, the Baudelocque hospital, the Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation and the Confédération générale des associations de familles nombreuses. For obvious reasons, the fondation worked closely with the pronatalist lobby and appointed its tireless proselytizer, Fernand Boverat, to head the équipe natalité—and also published his tracts.25 It also carried out a survey on the repression of abortion in the departments of Lot, Tarn, and Tarn-etGaronne, and helped publish Jean-Edouard Roy’s study on the subject.26 The field studies and opinion polls on family and the birthrate reveal the extent to which the pronatalist lobbies were able to use the foundation for their own ends—although the ideological convergence between one and the other was evident. These studies also stand out as examples of applied social research. In mid 1943, Boverat’s équipe conducted a survey to assess the standard of living of wage earners according to their household expenses. Twenty female social workers from the Groupement d’action des services sociaux de la Seine visited between eight and ten thousand families of skilled workers, shopkeepers, and lower civil servants. This survey was supplemented by a similar one of widowed mothers. Both studies revealed the alarming living conditions of urban families and the negative correlation between family size and standard of living—a favorite topic of pronatalist and profamily organizations. Boverat’s conclusions were categorical: “In these times of restrictions,” he wrote in an accusing tone, “almost all the childless families and unmarried individuals are able to satisfy their food needs.” That was hardly the case of families with children. Quantifying these hardships into “objective” statistics made Boverat’s argument much stronger. With this hard evidence to hand, he could show the reluctant officials from the ministry of finance that the campaign of the Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation was not mere rhetoric,

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but the expression of the deprivations suffered by thousands of families whose major sin had been to bear children to a depopulating nation. Accordingly, he asked the government to adopt a policy centered on the mother and the child, instead of the male head, as profamily organizations wanted; he also proposed a broad and generous scheme of state support that included prenatal and birth bonuses, family allowances, and special assistance to help widowed mothers raise their children.27 Two surveys, the first of their type ever to be undertaken, were conducted with the aim of inquiring into people’s attitudes and opinions about the birthrate. The first was carried out in the fall of 1942 by the équipe of statistics and opinion polls. The sampling comprised an even percentage of men and women of different age, occupation, marital status, and number of children, from twelve cities in the occupied zone—Angers, Bordeaux, Châlons, Dijon, Laon, Lille, Nancy, Orléans, Paris, Poitiers, Rennes, and Rouan. The interviewees responded to two questionnaires of twenty-four items each that sought to know their opinions about the causes of the declining birthrate. They were asked to rank in order of importance a number of factors stated as alleged causes for the poor birthrate. Released in November 1942, the équipe’s experts concluded that the majority of the interviewees believed that bearing children was a patriotic duty and a source of joy—although few agreed that a large family enhanced a woman’s beauty—and stated that families should bear more children. Most of the people interviewed also agreed on the need to protect the unwed mother and the illegitimate child, and to punish abortion. However, the experts found significant disagreement on the issue of whether fathers of illegitimate children and husbands that forced unwanted pregnancies on their wives should be held accountable and punished. Finally, and interestingly enough, the report indicated that the public considered economic stress, not a selfish morality, to be the main cause of the falling birthrate. The remedy, therefore, should also be economic.28 The following year, the équipe of social psychology and experimental logic carried out a second survey to inquire about young women’s views on the same issues. During the spring of 1943, some one hundred fieldworkers interviewed nearly two thousand women of the northern zone. The questionnaire comprised eighteen items that addressed two issues: the number of children desired and the causes for the insufficient birthrate. The questions were phrased in such a way that experts could later speculate about women’s “hidden” attitudes and intentions. The report’s conclusions observed that the birthrate would no longer be a problem “if young women bear tomorrow the number of children they say they want now.” Moreover, as in the earlier survey, experts acknowledged that most of the women interviewed agreed that the cause of the problem was financial.29 The équipe’s experts observed that the foundation’s initiative had raised people’s awareness about France’s population needs. However, they recommended that policymakers not take too literally the “Platonic”

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belief that families would bear more children provided that they received enough material rewards. Encouraging people’s reproductive duties by way of material compensation, they warned, would fail to address the heart of the problem. Echoing earlier pronatalist demands, the opinion experts suggested that the state should promote collective values and a “family mystique” that acknowledged the patriotic role of bearing numerous children. It was not, they stressed, a matter of improving the birthrate alone but of convincing the French that procreating in large numbers was a duty to the nation and the state.30 The foundation also sponsored research on involuntary sterility. Its experts estimated that if 2 percent of the 230,000 annual marriages that were unable to procreate could be successfully treated, France would gain between eight and ten thousand additional children every year—assuming that each couple would bear at least two—so that by the year 2000 her population would have increased by some 480,000–600,000 inhabitants. To address the problem the foundation first identified the few existing counseling centers with which it could work. There were three of them in Paris—at the Baudelocque and Broca hospitals, and at the Ecole de puériculture—and one each in Angers, Bordeaux, Caen, Lyon, and Quimper, most of them operated privately. After careful examination, Carrel approved the granting of subsidies to the Parisian institutions and to the laboratory of hormonal cytology attached to the Ecole pratique des hautes études, which was then conducting ground breaking work on the chemical aspects of ovulation. In mid 1943, a medical commission and an ad hoc section on sterility were set up to gather and centralize the information produced by each of the centers that were receiving subsidies. In early 1944, the first courses on sterility opened at the Broca hospital.31

The Temptation of Eugenics The foundation developed its own brand of eugenics largely independently from the institutions that were most associated with racial-biological thought, such as the French Eugenics Society, the Ecole d’anthropologie, and Georges Montandon’s anti-Semitic review L’ethnie française. With very few exceptions—notably, René Martial and Paul Vignes—none of the main names of the prewar eugenics were aligned with the foundation.32 Moreover, eugenics was only one of the options available to its population experts—and not the most important one. In fact, it is hard to draw a clearcut distinction between eugenic technocrats and old-fashioned pronatalists. Carrel and Missenard agreed with the Alliance nationale’s criticism of the “modern woman” and favored a campaign to counteract social and cultural attitudes that challenged traditional gender roles. The same can be said of the foundation’s legal expert on family affairs, Jacques Doublet, who as a former counselor of the Conseil d’état and member of the Haut

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comité de la population had played a major role in the drafting of the Family Code and the anti-Malthusian laws of the late Third Republic.33 Most pronatalists supported some sort of mild eugenic measures—after all, everyone agreed that the birthrate was a matter of both quantity and quality. However, these conservative views were often mediated by a technocratic conception of the domestic space that, by way of mechanical appliances and functional homes, sought to make housework routines a scientifically conceived unit that both rationalized the reproduction of the family and appealed to the needs of the home-based childrearing woman (femme au foyer). In this sense, the technical solutions proposed by Carrel’s architects and engineers shared many elements with the progressive policies carried out in the 1930s by the socialists Henri Sellier and Robert Hazeman in the municipalities of Suresnes and Vitry-sur-Seine.34 The foundation’s leading experts stressed the need of what may be termed eugenics-minded pronatalism. As Missenard put it, measures to encourage large families must be in accordance with the principles of eugenics, such as mating only partners of “superior quality” so as to bring about “biologically gifted” children. Although he favored “soft” measures to prevent the transmission of hereditary defects, he did not rule out the use of negative eugenics. Reproducing Carrel’s earlier proposals, he called for an educational campaign aimed at convincing the “unfit” not to bear children. He also proposed voluntary or compulsory sterilization and the confinement of those suffering from “early-age mental insanity, manic and depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, blindness,” and “serious hereditary physical defects.”35 Gillon’s definition of the foundation’s work along the lines of American scientific racism is another example of the enthusiasm with which the foundation’s experts embraced a radical biopolitics. Echoing Wiggam’s views, Gillon—who codirected with Carrel the research department of child and adolescent biology—reminded parents that the “duty of eugenics” demanded that they bear healthy and intellectually gifted children.36 These proposals were never carried out. Although they were convinced that the state should “upgrade” the genetic makeup of the population, the foundation’s biomedical experts believed that contemporary research did not provide conclusive results regarding the interaction of heredity and environment and the causes of many genetic diseases. A document summarizing the main results achieved after a year and half of work expressed well the foundation’s cautious approach to eugenics: “For the time being the implementation of eugenic conceptions belongs to the domain of the near future. Scientific research must still make further progress without having to worry about short-term practical results.”37 This, however, did not mean the outright rejection of race research, but only of its more radical manifestations. In fact, the foundation’s attitude in this regard may be seen as following different stages. For the moment, more data were necessary before scientists and the state could intervene

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in men and women’s biological features. A first step in this direction was the creation of a genetic archive to record data from the “healthy strains” (souches saines) of the population, a project that bore close resemblance to the Galton Laboratory at University College (London) and the Eugenics Records Office (Cold Spring Harbor, New York). By late 1943, the équipe of population, together with the Confédération générale des associations de familles nombreuses and the Centre de coordination des mouvements familiaux, drew up some 2,500 files containing data on desirable and undesirable hereditary traits. Members of the laboratory of demography also researched the archives of the Fondation Cognac-Jay—one of the main sponsors of the financial rewards given to large families—and collected valuable data on the families that had been awarded the prize. Eugenic considerations also inspired various anthropological field surveys. To better understand the influence of environment on heredity, the foundation sponsored the study of “homogeneous” populations that were perceived as having “an ancestral way of life” with hardly any exposure to “external interferences.” The data on these isolats, all of them located in remote rural areas, allowed researchers to study how outside factors, such as immigration and market forces, changed the life structures of these communities. Once identified, the “harmful” forces of change could be prevented, contained, or eliminated. The foundation chose a number of these communities in the departments of Finistère, Loire, and Morbihan and sent a researcher to establish contact with the local notables. Mayors, physicians, midwives, and priests provided information relevant to the inhabitants’ lives, on anything from their psychophysical conditions and hygiene habits to patterns of migration and work. Following a request from the ministry of agriculture, a small experimental survey was carried out in the village of Vouzon, in the Sologne, during August and September 1943. After carefully examining the data collected from different regions to determine the location best suited to in-depth research, the foundation decided in favor of the community of Apinac, located in the area of SaintBonnet-le-Château, in the Massif Central. In the fall of 1943 and spring of 1944, a researcher visited the village. She drew up a dense description of the inhabitants’ biological, economic, social, and cultural features, recording the tiniest details of their lives, and reconstructed the genealogy of Apinac’s oldest family. For each resident she prepared a file in which she recorded the data from municipal and parish records and her own interviews. After two months of work, she compiled a demographic record comprising eight hundred files of “human types,” each containing detailed information and a personal photograph.38 The goal of mapping the biotypology of the “true French”—to borrow from Herman Lebovics’s book title39—through the study of isolated communities had its correlation in the anthropological surveys on immigrant groups. In this matter the foundation continued the racist debates of the 1930s on “good” and “bad” foreigners, despite the fact that it was unable

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or unwilling to recruit the most authoritative opinion on the subject, Georges Mauco.40 In his report to Pétain Carrel warned that the presence of “biologically undesirable” immigrants posed “a threat to the French population.” Should the government wish to carry out an immigration policy that was in accordance with the “nation’s biological future,” then it was necessary to know which immigrants were most “desirable.” He discussed these matters with immigration authorities and convinced them of the benefits that would be drawn from a policy of “planned immigration” based on the methods of physical anthropology.41 Together with the foundation’s (largely nominal) Commission on Immigration—headed by Edouard Le Danois and staffed by the normalien Louis Chevalier—Gessain’s équipe of biology of heredity conducted studies to determine the degree of ethnic compatibility between the French and various immigrant groups, notably the Spanish of Les Halles, the Armenians of Issyles-Moulineaux, and the Russians of Clamart and Petit-Clamart (all in Paris).42 He and Madeleine Doré designed a long and detailed questionnaire that sought to reveal an immigrant’s capacity for becoming French, from the motives of emigration and the emigrant’s geographical and social origins to his or her social (professional) and biological value as well as individual conditions for a successful assimilation.43 Influenced by the ideas of Georges Montandon (ethnie) and René Martial (racial grafting), Gessain sought to lay the foundations of a “scientifically” based applied anthropology by bringing together physical anthropology, demography, and immigration policy.44 He exposed his ideas in a conference held at the Chantiers de la jeunesse of Puy in May 1943. He explained the concepts of nation, ethnicity, and race and applied them to the French and various immigrant groups living in France. The Walloons belonged to a different nation (Belgian) but to the same ethnicity and race as the French (French-Nordic), so they posed no problems since there was no need for assimilation. Northern Italians, meanwhile, although they belonged to the same race as the French, were both nationally and ethnically different from the French. To become fully French they needed only to learn French culture and language. The Poles, by contrast, were in a disadvantageous position because in France there were no pre-existing elements of their nation, ethnicity, and race (Slavic-Eastern Baltic) to allow their successful assimilation. Gessain was convinced that even if assimilation succeeded on the linguistic and cultural level, “no environmental influence whatsoever [would] modify their permanent racial characters.” Allowing such alien groups to settle in France, he warned, would encourage segregation in ethnic ghettoes and, worse, their mingling with the local population. This ill-conceived mixing would produce a hybrid progeny in which the racial traits of their foreign-born predecessors would prevail over the “ancestral” features of the French.45 Gessain was the foundation’s most outspoken proponent of applied racial-biological thinking. He sought to ground immigration policy in an

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anthropological science that assumed the incompatibility—that is, impossibility of assimilation—of unrelated ethnicities. In the conference mentioned above, he warned his audience about the “hundreds of thousands of racially inassimilable immigrants” that “enfeebled” the “hereditary patrimony of our fatherland” with “mongolized [mongolisés], negrified [négrétisés], and judaicized [judaïsés] racial elements.” However, he did not endorse the vicious racism of the Ecole d’anthropologie and the Commisariat général aux questions juives—in fact he considered their practices to be distortions of the otherwise scientific principles of race biology. Although he was uncertain about the feasibility of adopting therapeutic measures to prevent the reproduction of the “unfit,” he nonetheless encouraged French population experts to “study thoroughly” the compulsory sterilization policies introduced in the United States, Nazi Germany, and Scandinavia.46 Similar comparative studies were done on different national systems of sanitary screening of immigrants. Drawing upon the examples of other destination countries, such as Argentina, Canada and the United States, and in line with Martial’s earlier work on the subject, Jean Sutter addressed the “sanitary problems posed by immigration” with the purpose of finding a scientific means—mostly through legal medicine and psychiatry—of dealing with the “disproportionate” numbers of criminals and mental defectives among certain national groups.47 The foundation was also involved in the preparation of the law of 16 December 1942 concerning the protection of mothers and children. By adopting a mandatory premarital examination, the law introduced the first, and to this day only, eugenic measure in French legislation. Article II stated that “[t]he justice of peace will not issue the authorization of marriage … until each of the future spouses produces a medical certificate, no older than a month, stating only that the bearer has been examined with the purpose of marriage.”48 The law, which postwar governments kept with minor changes, was the result of a compromise between eugenicists and the more conservative pronatalist and profamily movements. To overcome the resistance of the latter—who feared that the exam would encourage illegal unions—the text made no explicit references to eugenics and guaranteed the principle of medical confidentiality. Examining physicians could refuse to issue a health certificate, but could not prevent their patients from marrying—this fell within the mayor’s competence. The law also introduced pre and postnatal advising in public maternity wards and an array of material benefits for pregnant and breastfeeding women. It also established a health book (carnet de santé) for each newborn. At the request of the ministry of family and health, the foundation’s équipe of pediatrics drew up two types of health books, one for young children (0 to 6 years) and another for schoolchildren (7 to 15 years). This personal record was conceived as a means of medical surveillance of children from the moment of birth until the end of their school education. In its pages physicians and teachers recorded information regarding the child’s family

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and the results of the periodic psychophysical tests. Shortly before leaving school, a physician recommended the profession or job most suitable to the adolescent’s “morphological type and physical soundness.”49

Testing the Youth The war offered unprecedented opportunities to shape the biological makeup, psychological traits, and social profile of French adolescents. The foundation’s work in this field was heavily influenced by different versions of constitutional medicine, in particular Italian biotypology and American psychobiology. The different projects undertaken by its researchers were a response to the war as well as the expression of a longer-term and ambitious technocratic concern with modernizing pedagogical techniques and maximizing human capacities. Yet, it was the war that ultimately created the conditions for experimenting with new methods of controlled social development. In the eyes of the foundation, France appeared as a large human laboratory, and her schools, Chantiers de la jeunesse, and semimilitary organizations as reserves of human specimens ready to be examined and experimented with. For three years, its experts weighed, measured, X-rayed and photographed thousands of children and adolescents. They investigated their hereditary background, learning abilities, gestures, and personal tastes. The goal was to classify the population into recognizable “types” and determine the training and profession for which each group was best suited. Carrel once complained that he could not find enough young men endowed with the proper biological and intellectual qualifications. In 1943 he wrote: “We find nothing but intellectuals, and often they are tuberculous. We look for true males who are not only intelligent but also strong. I am convinced that it is better to train illiterate yet vigorous individuals than to recruit educated people who are nothing but stillbirths. If you could only see the leaders of the ‘écoles des cadres’! …. What a pitiful lot!”50 With these derogatory terms, he evoked the prejudiced view that portrayed modern urban life and secular education as the seedbed of degeneration. Such assumptions were widely shared by his coworkers in the équipes of biology of adolescence, biotypology, and social psychology. Concerned by what they saw as a “lack of manliness” (manque de virilité) among young males, they investigated those factors of urban life that shaped “their moral and intellectual development.” Cinema ranked among those that influenced young people the most. The foundation’s experts gathered international statistics showing that in the United States 28 million people under twenty-one years of age had gone to the movies at least once a week in 1929. Another survey carried out in 1931–1932 among 21,000 British schoolchildren revealed that only 13 percent had never been to a movie theater. According to Danish sources, a

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third of the cinema audiences in that country were under eighteen. Concerned about the physiological, moral, and intellectual repercussions that the growing appeal of motion pictures could have on the youth, the foundation commissioned a survey to determine the profile of French moviegoers and the regulations required to “protect” them. Carried out in the spring of 1943, the study showed that only 8 percent of the 6,500 Parisian children surveyed had never been to a cinema. In their preliminary conclusions, which included teachers’ views on how the movies “influenced” the children, the interviewers concluded that: “Going to the movies too often stimulates the child’s imagination in a dangerous manner and may develop in him a harmful neurosis… eye fatigue, an enclosed atmosphere, nervous stress all have an impact on sleep”.51 Concerned that France was among the few countries where the state had done nothing to protect her youth from such influences, the foundation urged authorities to establish strict age restrictions on movie attendance. At the same time, it conducted biotypological studies of sportive youth (étudiants sportifs) to determine the essential features of the young Frenchman of higher quality (jeune français de qualité). In May 1943, a first survey was carried out to investigate the physical conditions of 20,000 adolescents of both sexes in schools, youth camps, and factories. A second project followed at the end of the year after the Académie de Paris and the Institut d’éducation physique authorized a study of sports students at the Lacretelle Stadium. A multidisciplinary team was set up. The équipe of adolescent biology was charged with studying the structure of the body (bilan corporal), carrying out the medical tests, and investigating sport performance. The experts in biology of the population and biotypology conducted anthropometric measurements and morphological and psychological exams; the équipe of social psychology assessed the students’ intellectual abilities.52 Some of the findings were published in a report written by Jean Chappert, a physician specializing in sports medicine and head of the Foundation’s équipe of biology of adolescence. Chappert had served as director of the Bureau international du sport universitaire, and in 1941 Vichy appointed him secretary general of the Comité national de médecine sportive. An expert in the field, he conceived his report as a means of raising awareness about the troubling increase of clumsy physical appearance and behavior among the youth. To be more convincing, he attached to the analysis of “defective body bearing” (attitudes corporelles défectueuses) photographs showing the desirable and undesirable morphological traits. His report is an interesting document for three reasons. First, it sought to convince political and medical authorities that body morphology (carrosserie humaine) should be made an object of scientific study and its principles taught in schools and universities. According to him, the body’s outer appearance (allure) revealed not only a person’s general physical condition but also his or her character. Neglecting the cultivation of the body (laisser aller

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physique) not only gave children and adolescents a shrunken aspect of tiny old people (petits vieux), but it also hindered their moral behavior. A second aspect worth noting in Chappert’s report is his criticism of the myth of the healthy peasant. The expert in sports medicine rejected as naïve the cliché that peasants were healthier and fitter than city dwellers and therefore did not need to exercise or practice sports—after all, so the argument went, they live in touch with nature, use their muscles constantly and breathe clean air. He dismissed this idea as pure nonsense and reminded his readers that, since in their respective labor peasants were most likely to exercise only certain muscle groups, more often than not they showed the same bodily defects found in many urbanites. Rural inhabitants were not only overweight and unable to perform swift movements, but also neglectful of the most elementary principles of hygiene. Moreover, they were often ridden with alcoholism, tuberculosis, and other symptoms of physical decay. Even when they lived far from the noise, stress, and chemical pollution of big cities, the rural youth were still exposed to backward habits that medicine and hygiene had uprooted from the cities. Finally, Chappert urged the state to carry out an active policy to instill in families and educators “a true desire of bodily beauty.” To that end he proposed a method that allowed school and sports physicians to identify corporal anomalies early enough that they could be corrected through proper rehabilitation. This method would also help sports and labor experts to determine an appropriate exercise or job according to each person’s overall fitness. He disapproved of the tendency of many athletes to choose their disciplines out of personal ambitions instead of a “rational use of their special physical gifts.” From his perspective, physicians with expertise in sports medicine had an active role in developing a physically and morally “balanced” individual. The foundation came to their aid by promoting sports and gymnastics among schoolchildren and devising techniques to record their performance.53 These surveys are only a small sample of a great many ambitious goals. To help adolescents find the professions that “best suited their capacities,” the unit of biotypology researched psychosomatic factors that would permit the classification of individuals in “biotypes.” Borrowing from Nicola Pende’s definition of biotypology as the “science of the architecture and structure of the human body,” physicians, psychologists, social workers, and educators drew up tests to measure and record everything from organ physiology, blood structure, and glandular conditions to intellectual and manual abilities, psychomotor reactions, and gestures.54 The foundation’s experts favored a method that assessed the relationship between morphology and psychology as they “showed” themselves in a person’s face and body—methods reminiscent of Cesare Lombroso’s taxonomy of criminals. In 1943 and 1944 the équipe of adolescent biology conducted a study of the female inmates of an institution for juvenile offenders. Its report concluded that: “Half of the girls examined … had heterogeneous

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faces or presented strong asymmetries of structure or comical expressions, which shows the overlapping of tendencies that are more difficult to reconcile when the intelligence is less developed. Their behavior is the consequence of contradictory impulses. Those who present a homogeneous face, behave in a homogeneous manner but passively. Thus, laziness and unstable character appear as the two great problems that hinder the blooming of the inmates of La Tutélaire.”55 These findings were later used by the institution’s authorities in the reports sent to the juvenile courts. Similar experimental “character” studies were conducted on the population of the Chantiers de la jeunesse, the stagiaires of the Ecole de cadres de Theix, the nurslings of a Parisian nursery, and the handicapped patients of the Saint-Anne hospital.56 The foundation’s education experts focused most of their work on developing new means of evaluating pedagogical methods and learning abilities. They designed an array of experimental records and questionnaires that were conceived to help teachers measure different aspects of their work; more importantly, they hoped their methods would improve the quality of education by maximizing the use of time and standardizing certain aspects of the learning process. One of the most ambitious and successful projects undertaken in this area was a survey of handicapped schoolchildren. The lagging birthrate and the unpredictable consequences of the war encouraged psychologists, pediatricians, and educators to investigate the best means to “enhance the intellectual value of handicapped students.” Once again, a war necessity—training as many young people as possible, and in the shortest time, to make them socially useful—converged with other longer-term goals. By the late 1930s, France had lost its historical leadership in the field of special education to other European countries and the United States. Although in 1909 a law had recommended the creation of special proficiency classes and schools (classes et écoles de perfectionnement), little was accomplished until the Popular Front came to power. By 1937, the ministry of national education had established one special boarding school and nine wards for handicapped interns attached to state-run departmental institutions for the blind, deaf, and mute. There were also four autonomous special schools and seventy special classes, all of them in large cities. However, the 4,000 children enrolled in these programs paled in comparison to the 300,000 that attended comparable programs in the Soviet Union. France also lagged far behind Germany, where 70,000 children were enrolled in four thousand special classes, and the Netherlands, where over 6,000 children attended more than one hundred special schools. The idea of carrying out a comprehensive survey that would determine special educational needs had been first conceived under the Popular Front. In 1936, the Socialist minister of public health, Henri Sellier, appointed an interministerial commission chaired by the experimental psychologist Henri Wallon to establish the number of children enrolled

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in special educational programs. It was, however, a short-lived project. Less than a year after its creation, lack of funds and Sellier’s resignation from his post put an end to the commission’s work. 57 Four years later, the foundation took up the project following a request from the French Eugenics Society. Carrel welcomed the proposal with enthusiasm and set up a commission charged with implementing it. He appointed various experts who had worked with Wallon in 1936, among them Madame Henri Decugis—president of the Association pour la Sauvegarde de l’enfance en danger moral—and Georges Heuyer—professor at the School of Medicine of Paris. Among the other notables who took an active part in the 1944 survey were René Gille, designer of the tests and future director of the Centre départemental d’orientation professionnelle de la Seine; Henri Piéron, professor at the Collège de France—, and Madame Henri Piéron, who after the war headed a research unit within the Institut national d’études du travail et d’orientation professionnelle; and the foundation experts Louis Henry, Raymond Mande, Jean Stoetzel, and Jean Sutter.58 Of all of them, Heuyer had the longest experience with psychologically and socially disabled children. Before the war he had been head of the mental diseases ward at the Saint-Anne hospital and an assistant physician of the Parisian police. In that period, he made juvenile delinquency one of the fundamental concerns of psychiatry and contributed to establishing the new field of child neuropsychiatry.59 The 1944 survey was far more ambitiously conceived than its precedent. As Heuyer observed, what distinguished the wartime study from earlier ones was its larger scope. The goal was not to draw up a census of handicapped youth but to scientifically assess the “active” and “passive” potentialities (capital) of school-age children.60 Implementing the survey was a complex process that required the cooperation of experts from different fields as well as the support of ministerial authorities, school administrators, and teachers. To prepare the survey the committee relied on a study of 630,000 people carried out by the British Board of Education and the Mental Defective Committee in 1927–1929. On this basis, it set the goal of establishing the approximate number of “mental defectives” and a program for developing their surveillance and education. A team of educational experts conducted several preliminary surveys to assess the reliability of different testing methods. The experiment used Dearborn and Gille tests on five thousand children from public and private schools in the fourth arrondissement in Paris, and from rural districts near the cities of Amiens and Agen. An additional experimental study was carried out on children aged six to twelve of the departmental orphanage of Vitry-sur-Seine. The staff was asked to fill out a questionnaire for each examinee, and to attach to the package of tests all relevant information on the geographic, economic, and demographic features of the region. To make the survey as representative as possible of the country’s geographical and social diversities, Jean Stoetzel’s équipe of social psychology chose a sample of 100,000

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children from urban and rural areas (in equal numbers) distributed among twenty districts across the country. To ensure the successful implementation of the project, the foundation obtained the cooperation of the ministry of national education, the Académie française, the Direction de l’enseignement libre—with jurisdiction over religious schools—the Institut national d’orientation professionnelle, and the Direction d’enseignement technique, which supplied the expert staff to conduct the study. By the spring of 1945, after a year and a half of work, the Centres d’orientation professionnelle had collected 45,000 tests and forwarded them for their analysis to Mande’s équipe.61

Industrial Hygiene and Productivity Drive The foundation’s involvement in industrial questions was partly spurred by the war, which prompted the government to require its advice to protect the workforce and increase productivity. These goals were in line with the technocratic outlook of Carrel’s industrial consultants, who insisted on the need to “humanize” work, not by changing the workplace’s power relations, but through ‘“scientific” methods aimed at fostering industrial rationalization and class cooperation “from above.” Echoing the views of others before them, they insisted that the problems posed by industrial production should be addressed through a comprehensive or “total” method that took into account all the factors involved in the work process—in particular, the “human” ones. Partly, too, the foundation’s interest in these topics reveals the rising influence of physicians, engineers, and architects with practical experience as factory medical counselors (médecins conseils d’usine). In the 1920s, the foundation’s expert René Barthe opened the first factory medical ward in a lighting and heating company, the Société d’éclairage, chauffage et force motrice of Gennevilliers. In those years too, the head of its department of labor research, André Gros, inaugurated the first bureau of occupational diseases and industrial safety in the Fédération mutualiste de la Seine.62 The foundation’s contributions to industrial medicine built upon prewar debates on industrial rationalization and the scientific study of work.63 Its labor experts approached the problems of declining productivity and occupational diseases from a perspective that conceived of the worker as a “total human being.”64 The concept of “humanization” of work, with its emphasis on the “human factor,” had at least two meanings.65 First, it was used as a rhetorical device to overcome the class prejudices that underlay industrial conflict. An example of action to this end was the sponsoring of group activities with lycée students and apprentices aimed at fostering a cross-class, national, and productivity-oriented consciousness. Metallurgical apprentices and high school students visited each other at factories and lycées. Under the supervision of older students from the Sorbonne and the

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Grandes écoles, in June 1942, seventy lycéens from Paris and the Eure-etLoir and twenty apprentices from suburban trade schools came together for a two-day meeting at the Saint-Sulpice-de-Favières youth camp.66 Experts argued that class antagonisms were the result of a “theoretical” education that blinded the elite to the human needs of their workers. These preoccupations inspired a pedagogical effort aimed at reeducating students along scientific and humanistic principles that would enable them to play an active role in the “remaking of man.” Starting in March 1942, the équipe of labor sponsored a series of conferences on “the human orientation of future leaders.” Gros initiated the series with eight talks at the Fénélon lycée. Thereafter, every two weeks, medical inspectors, factory counselors and government officials visited the Fénélon, Henry IV, and Janson-de-Sailly lycées to speak about different aspects of industrial life and work.67 The purpose was to foster the social consciousness of the future elites by giving them a more “humane” view of the proletariat based on the speakers’ “first-hand” knowledge—interestingly, none of them was or had ever been a worker. Thus, they hoped to inoculate the youth against “narrow class prejudices” and win it over to a technocratic reformist agenda. As a brochure distributed among the students, and prefaced by Carrel, put it: “If you have not learned to know men, how can you lead and command them? … We will help you understand the world of the apprentice, the worker, and the factory. In that way, you will be able to see in a group of workers something else other than an anonymous crowd, towards which you experience an instinctive and mutual distrust. Thus, you will no longer be cut off from the workers; by understanding them you will feel yourself linked to them by a shared life.”68 The foundation did not miss the opportunity to undermine traditional elite education by criticizing its biased content and misplaced emphasis. Its experts regretted that so many years were devoted to the study of wars, diplomatic treaties, royal marriages, and the history of arts and letters, while fundamental discoveries and technological breakthroughs remained ignored. These criticisms seem to have found receptive ears. A philosophy student wrote to Carrel about theoretical learning: “It is quite regrettable for those who can not push their speculative capacities far enough to make them a way of life and … this incapacity condemns them to remain failures … . You must, as you have already done, put the finger on this wound inflicted by high school education that extends slowly to an entire civilization. The time has come for the sense of reality to redress the present situation; it is time that the apprenticeship of life is taught to the youth.”69 A “human” approach to industrial affairs also assumed that productivity and factory efficiency depended on the extent to which workers had their “total” needs satisfied, or better, aimed to ensure the “harmony between man and work.” The équipe of labor brought together physicians, engineers, architects, nutritionists, and technicians on occupational diseases to investigate ways of improving labor productivity. They sought to

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counteract the physical deterioration and demographic dwindling of the workforce, and to make employment rules more “efficient,” that is, less burdensome for employers and the social insurance system. In one of the most coherent programmatic documents on the subject, the engineers René Barthe and Jean Daric defined the issues raised by industrial work as “a problem of civilization” that only could be solved through a “biological organization” of the work process. They likened the factory to a “biological reality” that, like a “web of organic relations,” guided human beings, machines, and techniques toward the same productive goals. Daric called for a “new biological phase” in industrial organization, during which multidisciplinary experts would investigate the conditions that ensured the “sustained performance” (rendement durable) of the workforce and the “total rationalization” of production. Crucial to accomplishing this phase was industrial expertise in three disciplines: medicine, engineering, and architecture. The physician surveyed the psychophysical wellbeing of the workforce. The engineer supervised compliance with safety standards and monitored the smooth functioning of the “couple man-machine”; the architect ensured that environmental factors, such as room temperature, noise, and light, were in agreement with human needs.70 The cornerstone of this ambitious program became the factory medical wards (services médicaux d’usine). Staffed by a labor physician (médecin conseiller de travail) and a social worker, they were responsible for conducting the entrance and periodical medical examinations, which included clinical, radiological, and laboratory tests. The factory checkups enabled the early detection of diseases and were a valuable instrument to the experts determining the occupation for which each worker was best suited.71 The foundation’s équipes of labor and housing carried out an intense campaign to lobby government officials and employers for adoption of these measures.72 Starting in 1941, they conducted several studies and drew up experimental models of medical wards that were later used in rubber, mechanical, and textile plants in Angers, Bourget, Colombes, Lille, and Tourcoing. These activities were crowned with success when in early 1942 Vichy’s ministry of labor passed a law, drafted by the foundation, mandating the appointment of a physician trained in industrial hygiene to each Comité d’organization and the creation of medical wards in all firms employing more than fifty workers.73 According to Carrel, less than two years after the passing of the law, the number of industrial plants with functioning medical wards went from less than ten in 1941 to nearly 1,800 by the end of 1943.74 During this year, the foundation’s experts gave two hundred conferences and performed experimental demonstrations before fifteen thousand employers, engineers, students, and workers across the country. The équipe of labor provided technical advice to professional organizations in Argenteuil, Beauvais, Bezons, Elbeuf, and Lille. Gros, Daric, Missenard, and the supervisor of the foundation’s équipe of housing and chief architect of the

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government, Jean Merlet, were invited by the Fédération nationale de la Mutualité française, the Association des ingénieurs des Arts et métiers, and the Institut technique du bâtiment et des travaux publics to speak on the new methods of industrial organization. Likewise, the Commission générale d’organisation scientifique sought Jean Stoetzel and André Girard’s advice on the use of new psychological tests and statistics to measure business performance.75 The foundation supported other, related projects of applied industrial research. Along with the Fédération mutualiste de la Seine, it set up a program for the placement of workers suffering from heart conditions. It granted subsidies for research on wound healing—one of Carrel’s lifelong interests—and designed a ward of occupational medicine at the American Hospital in Neuilly to investigate methods of physical rehabilitation for victims of work accidents. Likewise, together with the French Red Cross and the Institut national d’action sanitaire des assurances sociales, its experts conducted various surveys to monitor the spread of tuberculosis and venereal diseases among workers. The équipe of physiology of labor designed special tests to measure stress (énergometrie) and assess the impact of air, light, dust, temperature, and noise on the working person, and studied the feasibility of using hormones to increase productivity.76 At the request of the social insurance administration, technicians on occupational biology and biotypology devised methods for career advising, job placement, and retraining. The équipe of social insurance carried out a statistical survey of five hundred handicapped employees of the Fédération mutualiste de la Seine. They drew up a guide that facilitated the job placement of physically impaired workers (tableaux d’équivalences professionnelles). By the spring of 1943, this technique had been adopted in the aviation, automobile, metalwork, textile, rubber, construction, and railroad industrial sectors. They also compiled records of workers’ psychological and morphological features. Nutritionists set up an experimental canteen in Bellevue to study the effects of food substitutes.77 Experts on housing and the environment investigated the conditions under which individuals could perform their activities with minimum stress. They studied the influence of room temperature, noise, and light on human physiology, and drafted a bill to prevent harmful noise. A team of specialists—in which Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) participated—visited plants in Carmaux, Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing to discuss with architects, government officials, workers, and members of the Comités d’organisation ways of improving the conditions of the workplace. At the request of the équipe of housing, the experts on statistics and opinion polls carried out a survey on people’s housing. Expanded and completed by the INED after 1945, the project sought to establish the preferences of 2,461 urban residents of different age, sex, professional group, and social class regarding home ownership, comfort and location. The survey was a useful means of assessing popular needs and tastes, and revealed, among

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other things, that most people—though not, predictably, the bourgeois respondents—were willing to sacrifice domestic comfort and style for the benefit of private ownership—even of a small flat in a public housing development. This information was supplemented with a field study of workers’ lodgings in Germany and a documentary collection on architecture and housing policies in various European countries.78 A good example of the foundation’s multidisciplinary work in this field was its experimental model of a screening station for immigrants. Drawn up at the request of the foundation’s commission for immigration, this centre de triage was a scientifically conceived instrument that allowed a staff of five hundred immigration and customs officials to screen one thousand immigrants a day, at a rate of 125 persons an hour. Designed according to the latest standards of work rationalization, hygiene, and personal comfort, the project was based on the idea that an immigration facility should be both efficient for its bureaucratic personnel and “comfortable” for its users. Experts addressed all major questions posed by the arrival, screening, admission, and rejection of large numbers of immigrants. They took into account the users’ physiological and psychological features, the logistical and functional needs of each stage of the screening process, and the operating costs. The center was made up of various stations, each built according to its specific mission. Prescreening facilities would be set up with the goal of speeding up the process. They housed special stations for personal identification, medical examination, laboratory tests, as well as restrooms and lockers. Incoming foreigners would also find other conveniences such as the laundry services, nursery, infirmary, library, cinema, cafeteria, and restaurant. The postscreening stations were the immigrants’ last bureaucratic checkpoint before being allowed into the country. The center also housed administrative offices, staff accommodations, and maintenance facilities. Published by the INED after the war, the project illustrated the technocratic-humanistic conceptions—in the sense that they envisioned efficiency and rationalization as a way of “humanizing” the bureaucratic process—that underlay the foundation’s otherwise racist and essentialist population thinking.79 These were amazing accomplishments, considering the most difficult political circumstances under which they were achieved. Despite the war’s expansion into the metropolitan territory after the Allied landings of June 1944, and the rapid deterioration of living conditions, the foundation showed a remarkable capacity and tenacity for carrying out work. Its results are all the more significant if we take into account that most of the field projects were conducted in a northern zone subjected to both systematic Allied air attacks—which destroyed part of the foundation’s archives—and tight German controls on civilian circulation. Despite this situation, Carrel was able to obtain hard-to-come-by supplies, such as paper, as well as special authorization from the Germans to move freely

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in restricted areas. He spent most of 1943 in Saint-Gildas, which, surprisingly, the Germans did not occupy. Yet, with the civil war of the summer of 1944 and the approaching liberation of the capital, the future of the Vichy elites appeared extremely uncertain. As the Allies pushed eastward and Pétain’s regime was evacuated to Sigmaringen, those who perceived the foundation as a collaborationist stronghold waited for the moment to settle accounts with its regent. In turn, Carrel’s habit of seeing political conflict as a web of conspiracies anticipated the bitter outcome of his political commitments. Just as France’s dark years were coming to an end, Carrel’s blackest days began.

Notes 1. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Conserver une faculté d’adaptation qui préservera la jeunesse de son esprit et sa vitalité. Se fixer dans un cadre immuable serait pour elle un grave écueil. Cet écueil la menacerait si, dès l’origine, elle avait inscrit les limites de son action dans un plan de travail restrictif. Une telle conception planiste de la recherche risque de conduire à la stérilité.” FFEPH, “Compte rendu des activités de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains pour l’année 1943,” CFFEPH, no. 2 (1944): 13. 2. ������� FFEPH, Bulletin bibliographique mensuel (1942–1944). �������������������������������������� The bulletin listed titles on administration, adolescence, agriculture, anthropology, biology, botany, cancer research, career advising, chemistry, colonial affairs, constitutional medicine, corporatism, demography, economy, education, ethnography, extrasensory perception, family, finance, geography, geology, history, housing, hygiene, jurisprudence, medicine, climate studies, narcotics, nutrition, occultism, paleontology, pathology, pediatrics, philosophy, physics, physiology, politics, psychology, religion, social insurance, sociology, statistical science, typology, urban planning, work, youth, and zoology. 3. ������������������������������������������������������������������������� J. B. Bouvier, “La santé de l’enfance d’âge scolaire pendant la guerre,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 7–15. 4. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Camille Nony and René Binois, “Influence de la guerre sur les capacités psychologiques des écoliers,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 19–28. 5. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Juliette Lagabrielle, “Le rationnement alimentaire des enfants et des adolescents en France et en Europe,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 35–43. See also Société des nations, Rationnement alimentaire et ravitaillement, 1943–1944 (Geneva: Société des nations, 1944). 6. �������������� Louis Winter, Organisation de la production des légumes et des fruits. Etudes, projets, rapports (Rennes: Imprimerie de l’Ouest-éclair, 1940). 7. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Louis Winter, “Souvenirs de la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains,” BAADAC, no. 20 (1987): 5–7. 8. ������������������������������������ FFEPH, “Ce qu’a fait la Fondation,” CFFEPH, no. 1 (1943): 25–26; FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 31. 9. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Jean Sutter, “La cure des retards de croissance dûs aux restrictions alimentaires,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 47–64. 10. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� H. Gounelle, M. Bachet, and J. Marche, “Thérapeutique de l’oedème de dénutrition par les vitamines, le sucre, la caséine, le beurre, le lait et le soja,” Société médicale des hôpitaux de Paris, 16 Oct. 1942; L. Brull, “Résultats essentiels de nos recherches sur le bilan d’azote en période de sous-alimentation,” Bulletin de l’Académie royale de médecine de Belgique 7 (1942): 672–78; id., “Le bilan d’azote chez l’homme au régime carencé en

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calories et en protéines,” Archives internationales de physiologie 53 (1943): 1–11; M. Bachet, Etude des troubles causés par la dénutrition dans un asile d’aliénés (Paris: L. Arnette, 1943). 11. ������� FFEPH, Guide pour l’établissement des rations alimentaires équilibrées (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1943). 12. The Oslo Breakfast comprised 400 to 500 cubic centimeters of fresh milk, two 20-gram cookies made of non-bolted wheat flour, two 50-gram toasts made of rye bread, 20 grams of margarine, and 20 grams of cooked goat cheese. 13. ������������������������������������������������������� Jean Sutter, “La protection alimentaire des écoliers,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 41–49, id., “La cure des retards de croissance,” 39, 59; FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 44–46. 14. See the study mentioned above by Nony and Binois. 15. ���������������������������������������������������������������������� Maurice Daumas, “Deux expériences de centres éducatifs pour enfants,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 75–81. 16. ������������������ Michèle Bordeaux, La victoire de la famille dans la défaite: Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 17. Colin Dyer, Population and Society in Twentieth-Century France (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), 64–83. 18. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On population policy and science in twentieth-century France see Paul-André Rosental, L’intelligence démographique: sciences et politiques de population en France (1930–1960) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003); id., “Treize ans de débats: de l’histoire des populations à la démographie historique française (1945–1958),” Population, no. 6 (1996): 1211–38; Jacqueline Hecht, “La démographie comme question politique,” in Les implications de la politique familiale, ed. M. Chauvière (Paris: Dunod, 2000), 54–74; Rémi Lenoir, “Savoirs et sciences d’état: généalogie et démographie,” ARSS, no. 133 (2000): 96–98; id., “L’invention de la démographie et la formation de l’état,” ARSS, no. 108 (1995): 36–61; Hervé Le Bras, ed., L’invention des populations: biologie, idéologie et politique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000); Alain Desrosières, “Démographie, science et société: le cas français,” in Les contours de la démographie au seuil du XXIe siècle, ed. J.-C. Chastelan and L. Roussel (Paris: INED/Presses universitaires de France, 1997); Jean-Claude Chesnais, “La politique de population française depuis 1914,” in Histoire de la population française. Vol. 4: de 1914 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Dupâquier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988); Jacques Dupâquier and Drouard, “La connaissance des faits démographiques,” in Histoire de la population française. Vol. 4, 13–27. 19. ��������������������������������������������������������� On Gessain see Jean Dorst, “Robert Gessain (1907–1986),” Objets et mondes 23, nos. 3–4 (1986): 95–96. 20. ���������� Rosental, L’intelligence démographique, 74–75. 21. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Robert Gessain and Paul Vincent, “Quelques aspects quantitatifs et qualitatifs de la population française,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 19–32; Jean Bourgeois, “Evolution de la population française de 1939 à 1944,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 97–118. 22. For a critical discussion of the use of the concepts of birthrate (natalité) and fertility (fécondité) see Joshua Cole, “ ‘There Are Only Good Mothers’: The Ideological Wok of Women’s Fertility in France before World War I,” FHS 19, no. 3 (1996): 646ff. 23. �������������������������� FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 19. 24. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bourgeois, “Evolution de la population française,” 104, 110–11. On this topic see Guy Desplanques, “La fécondité française de 1939 à 1945: le ‘baby boom’” and Sauvy, “La population française pendant la seconde guerre mondiale,” in Histoire de la population française. Vol. 4, 147–79. 25. ����������������� Fernand Boverat, Une doctrine de natalité (Paris: FFEPH, 1943); id., Le niveau d’existence comparé des travailleurs suivant leurs charges de famille (Paris: FFEPH, 1944). 26. ������������������ Jean-Edouard Roy, L’avortement; fléau national, causes, conséquences, remèdes: étude historique, démographique, médicale et médico-légale, sociale, théologique, morale et juridique (Paris: Jouve, 1943). 27. ��������� Boverat, Le niveau d’existence, 44–46. 28. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� FFEPH-Equipe sondages et statistiques, “Rapport sur l’enquête natalité,” unpublished, 1942, INED, Paris.

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29. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� FFEPH-Equipe de psychologie sociale et de logique expérimentale, “Rapport sur l’enquête concernant l’attitude des jeunes filles et des jeunes femmes à l’égard de la natalité,” unpublished, 1943, INED, Paris. 30. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� FFEPH, “Rapport sur l’enquête natalité,” 3–4; id., “Rapport sur l’enquête concernant l’attitude des jeunes filles et des jeunes femmes à l’égard de la natalité,” 8. 31. ����������������������������� FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 22–24. 32. Eugène Apert, Charles Binet-Sanglé, André Cazalis, Georges Papillault, Adolphe Pinard, and Charles Richet all died before the war; Justin Sicard de Plauzoles and Edouard Toulouse were seventy and seventy-five years old respectively. Anne ������������ Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France: les médeins et la procréation, XIXe-Xxe siècles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), 333. 33. On Doublet see Andrés Reggiani, “Procreating France: The Politics of Demography, 1914–1945,” FHS 19, no. 3 (1996): 725–54; Rosental, L’intelligence démographique. 34. �������������������������������������������������������������� On Sellier and Hazeman’s policies see Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, ����������� L’hygiène dans la république: la santé publique en France, ou l’utopie contrariée, 1870–1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 35. ������������������������ Cited in Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des science sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941– 1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992), 224–25. 36. ������������������������������������������������������� Jean-Jacques Gillon, “Vers un humanisme scientifique,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 15. 37. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “La mise en pratique des conceptions eugéniques n’est, pour l’instant, que du domaine d’un avenir plus ou moins proche. La ������������������������������������������������������ recherche scientifique doit encore progresser sans préoccupations d’applications pratiques immédiates.” FFEPH, �������������������������� “Compte rendu,” 24. 38. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� AN 2AG 78, Carrel, “Rapport au Chef de l’état sur l’activité de la Fondation en 1942,” 20 May 1943, FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 25–26. 39. Lebovics, “True France”: The Wars Over Cultural Identiy (1900–1944) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 40. Mauco was a leading member of the Haut comité de la population (in 1939 and in 1945) and a supporter of Jacques Doriot’s t Parti populaire français until 1942—when he published a racist and anti-Semitic article in Montandon’s review L’ethnie française. See Rosental, L’intelligence démographique; Patrick Weil, “Georges Mauco, un itinéraire camouflé: ethnoracisme pratique et antisémitisme fielleux,” in L’antisémitisme de plume, 1940–1944: études et documents, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris: Berg International, 1999), 267–76; Taguieff, “Face à l’immigration: mixophobie, xénophobie ou sélection. Un débat français dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” Vingtième siècle, no. 3 (1995): 103–31; Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Georges Mauco (1899–1988): un psychanalyste au service de Vichy. De l’antisémitisme à la psychopédagogie,” L’infini, no. 53 (1995): 73–84; William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 41. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� AN 2AG 78, Carrel, “Rapport au Chef de l’état sur l’activité de la Fondation en 1942,” 20 May 1943; FFEPH, “Ce qu’a fait la Fondation,” 21; FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 26. 42. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Robert Gessain, “Facteurs comparés d’assimilation chez des russes et des arméniens,” Population, no. 1 (1946): 99–116; Madeleine Doré, “Enquête sur l’émigration russe,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 140–59; Louis Chevalier, “Note sur l’émigration danoise,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 160–61; Madame Elie Chevalley, “Etude de 4.000 dossiers du Service social d’aide aux émigrants,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 94–113; Roger Establie, “Enquête sur les étrangers aux halles centrales de Paris,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 114–18; Mademoiselle E. T., “Quelques aspects démographiques de la colonie arménienne d’Issy-les-Moulineaux,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 119–39; Robert Sanson, “Les travailleurs nord-africains de la région parisienne,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 162–94. 43. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Robert Gessain and Madeleine Doré, “Questionnaire à l’usage des enquêteurs,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 79–93. 44. ������������������������������������� Gessain, “Données anthropologiques,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 24–29; id., “Généalogies et assimilation,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 43–76. ������������������������������������������������ Considered, like Georges Mauco, one of the most influential names in the field of immigration studies, Martial argued that a prerequisite

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for successful assimilation was the previous selection of the “appropriate graft.” To fill it, first it was necessary to determine the “biochemical index” of a given population— that is, the average blood distribution among its individual members. According to this theory, the closer the index of the graftee’s group was to the index of the host population, the better were the immigrants’ prospects of assimilating. As the proponents of the “cephalic index” had done before him, Martial claimed that he had discovered a “scientific” method to solve the problems posed by immigration. In fact, his method was marred by ideological bias and lack of rigor. As his attempts to find a stable correlation between races and blood groups provided inconsistent results, he resorted to cultural and psychological factors to explain unexpected variations, thus undermining his own claims of scientific validity. 45. ������������������ Cited in Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales, 230–31. 46. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Gessain and Vincent, “Quelques aspects quantitatifs et qualitatifs de la population française,” 29–30. 47. ������������������������������������������������������������� Jean Sutter, “Problèmes sanitaires posés par l’immigration,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 197–223. 48. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “L’officier de l’état civil ne pourra procéder à la publication en vue du mariage … qu’après la remise par chacun des futurs époux d’un certificat médical datant de moins d’un mois, attestant, à l’exclusion de toute autre indication, qu’il a été examiné en vue du mariage.” “Loi 941 concernant la protection de la maternité et de l’enfance,” in Bulletin du Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé. Service de documentation. Textes officiels concernant la famille et santé, 1940–1943, ed. Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé (Paris: Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé, 1942), 301–10. 49. ������������������������������������������������������������������ René Mande, “Sur le carnet de santé de l’enfance d’âge scolaire,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 33–40. 50. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Nous ne trouvons que des intellectuels, et encore ils sont le plus souvent prétuberculeux. Nous cherchons des vraies mâles, non seulement intelligents, mais aussi solides. Il vaut mieux, je crois, instruire des ignorant vigoureux qu’essayer d’utiliser des gens instruits qui ne sont que de fausses couches … Si tu voyais les chefs des ‘écoles des chefs’! … c’est à pleurer de pitié.” �������������������������������������������� ACP, Box 82, Carrel to Guigou, 23 Dec. 1943. 51. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “La trop grande fréquentation du cinéma sollicite dangereusement l’imagination de l’enfant et peut réussir à créer chez lui une névrose préjudiciable … fatigue oculaire, atmosphère confinée, tension nerveuse, influence sur le sommeil.” FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 62. 52. ������������� Ibid., 56–57. 53. ������������������������������������������������������������������������� Jean Chappert, “Les attitudes corporelles défectueuses chez les jeunes,” CFFEPH, no. 4 (1945): 63–74. 54. On Italian eugenics see Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 55. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “La moitié des jeunes filles examinées … avaient des visages hétérogènes ou présentant des fortes asymétries de structure ou de mimique, ce qui indique des juxtapositions de tendances qui s’harmonisent d’autant plus difficilement que l’intelligence est moins différenciée. Leur comportement résulte d’impulsions contradictoires. Celles qui ont le visage homogène, réalisent principalement une homogénéité dans le style passif. Or, la paresse et l’instabilité sont bien les deus grands maux qui entravent l’épanouissement des pensionnaires de la Tutélaire.” FFEPH, “Compte rendu,” 55. 56. Ibid., 59–61. 57. The 1936 commission was formed by the psychiatrists George Paul-Boncour, Georges Heuyer, and Jacques Roubinovitch; the president of the Association pour la sauvegarde de l’enfance déficiente et en danger moral de la région parisienne, Madame Henry Decugis; school authorities and teachers; and representatives from the ministries of education and public health. 58. Alfred Sauvy, “Préface,” TD, no. 13 (1950): 9–12. 59. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On Heuyer see Nadine Lefaucheur, “Psychiatrie infantile et délinquance juvénile: Georges Heuyer et la question de la genèse ‘familiale’ de la délinquance,” in Histoire de la

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criminologie française, ed. Laurent Mucchielli (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 313–33. On French psychiatry and eugenics see Anne-Laure Simonnot, Hygiénisme et eugénisme au XXe siècle à travers la psychiatrie française (Paris: S. Arslan, 1999). 60. ������������������������������������������������������������������� Georges Heuyer, “Le recensement des enfants déficients en France,” TD, no. 13 (1950): 13–29. 61. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On the survey’s methodology, organization, and preliminary results see Mande, “A propos d’une enquête pour le recensement des enfants anormaux”; G. Heuyer, R. Mande, H. Piéron, Mme. H. Piéron, A. Sauvy, and J. Sutter, “Le niveau intellectuel d’enfants d’âge scolaire,” in TD, no. 13 (1950) : 9–283. 62. In 1915 the ministry of armaments created a bureau of medical inspection for war industries. In the following decade the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers began offering the first courses on labor physiology and industrial toxicology, and by the early 1930s the universities situated near major industrial centers—Lille, Lyon, Paris—set up special chairs and research programs on labor medicine. ����������������� See René Barthe, Hygiène et protection des ateliers de manipulation des solvants (Paris: Centre de documentation chimique, 1942); André Gros and Jacques Ménétrier, La médecine du travail (Paris: Bernard Frères, 1941); Gros, Le service médico-social d’une usine de métallurgie (Paris: Bernard Frères, 1941/1943). 63. On this topic see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990); William Schneider, “Henri Laugier, the Science of Work and the Workings of Science,” Cahiers pour l’histoire du CNRS, no. 5 (1989): 7–34. 64. ������������������������������������������ FFEPH, “Ce qu’a fait la Fondation,” 27–28. 65. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a history of the concept of the “human factor” see Yves Cohen, “Lorsque le facteur humain paraît (1890–1920),” Lettre de la Maison française d’Oxford 9, no. 1 (1998): 59–78. 66. ������� FFEPH, L’orientation humaine des futurs cadres (Paris: FFEPH, 1943), 29–34. 67. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The speakers and conference titles (in chronological order) were the following: Dr. Gros (vice-regent of the foundation and médecin inspecteur général du travail), “Les conditions du travail humain: ce qu’est un ouvrier”; Dr. Eck (médecin inspecteur général du travail), “Lycées et apprentis”; Dr. Hanaut (médecin conseil des houillères), “Le travail de mineurs du fond”; Dr. Goulène (médecin conseil d’usines de textiles artificiels), “L’effort de l’homme pour se procurer un vêtement”; Dr. Sieurin (médecin conseil de l’usine Ford-Poissy), “L’effort demandé à l’homme pour construire un automobile”; Dr. Nouaille (secretary general of the foundation’s équipe of labor), “La protection de la santé de l’ouvrier”; Dr. Bour (médecin conseil au secrétariat d’état à la production industriel), “La charité dans la vie moderne”; Dr. Ménétrier (médecin inspecteur général du travail), “Le chef.” 68. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “Si vous n’avez pas appris à connaître les hommes, comment pourrez-vous les diriger et les commander? … Nous allons donc vous faire entrevoir ce qu’est l’apprentissage, la journée d’un ouvrier, l’organisation d’une usine. Ainsi vous saurez voir dans une ‘sortie d’usine’ autre chose qu’une foule anonyme, à l’égard de laquelle vous éprouvez une méfiance instinctive et d’ailleurs réciproque. Ainsi vous ne serez plus coupés des travailleurs; les comprenant, vous vous sentirez liés à eux par une même vie.” FFEPH, L’orientation humaine des futurs cadres, 7–8. 69. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “Est assez fâcheux pour ceux qui ne peuvent pousser la spéculation assez loin pour leur tenir lieu de pratique et … cette incapacité condamne à rester des ratés … Vous deviez, comme vous l’avez déjà fait, mettre le doigt sur cette plaie de l’enseignement secondaire qui s’étend peu à peu à toute une civilisation. Il est temps que le sens des réalités vienne redresser cet état de choses; il est temps que l’apprentissage de la vie soit fourni aux jeunes.” Ibid., 25. 70. ������������� René Barthe, Les valeurs de la vie: mission commune de l’ingénieur, du médecin d’usine et de la conseillère sociale du travail (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1943); Jean Daric, “La couple homme-machine et l’ingénieur du travail,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 51–60. See also Barthe, Connaissance de l’homme au travail et médecine préventive (Paris: Fédération nationale des syndicats d’ingénieurs et des cadres supérieurs, 1947).

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71. ������������������������������� Henri Bour and François Emery, Aménagement des services médico-sociaux d’entreprises (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1945). 72. ������ Gros, La médecine du travail, exposé fait le 19 avril au siège de la Fédération mutualiste de la Seine (Paris: Lahure, 1941). 73. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “Loi no. 625 du 23 juillet 1942 relative à l’organisation de services médicaux et sociaux du travail,” JO, 29 July 1942; AN 72 AJ, Agence française d’information de presse, “Les comités médicaux-sociaux deviennent obligatoires,” 28 July 1942. 74. ACP, Box 82, Carrel to Guigou, 23 Jan. 1944. 75. ������������ See Barthe, L’usine, laboratoire de l’homme (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1943); Marc Degas, La Mutualité française (Paris: Bernard Frères, 1943); Emmanuel Perret, Service social d’entreprise (Paris: Edition sociale française, 1943); Comité français d’études ‘prévention et sécurité’, Le service médical d’entreprise (Paris: S.C.I.P., 1945); M. Crevel, J. Boudreaux, A. Hanaut, M. Iselin; C. Duvelleroy, Le traitement des accidents du travail: manuel du praticien (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1945). 76. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� FFEPH, “Ce qu’a fait la Fondation,” 32–33; id., “Compte rendu,” 63–91; Gros, Le reclassement technique des assurés sociaux invalides (Paris: FFEPH, 1944); Roger Giblin, “Le rendement énergétique en physiologie du travail,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 75–83; M. Cohu, F. Dumail, and J. Merlet, “Méthode pour déterminer l’éclairement d’une pièce d’habitation,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 61–71; G. Viaud, “Recherches sur le pouvoir réparateur du sommeil et ses conditions externes,” CFFEPH, no. 3 (1945): 99–110; Maurice Crevel, Législation des locaux de travail (Paris: Librairie Médicis, 1945). 77. ������������������������ See Raymond Foussereau, Fiches d’études de postes et fiches d’aptitude individuelle, complétées par l’étude des gestes professionnels (Saint-Dié: A. Weick, Hodapp et Cie., 1950). 78. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� FFEPH, “Ce qu’a fait la Fondation,” 36; AN 2AG 78, Carrel, “Rapport au Chef de l’état sur l’activité de la Fondation en 1942; Félix Dumail, Jean Merlet, and Albert Mutin, “Désirs des français en matière d’habitation urbaine,” TD, no. 3 (1947): 9–17. 79. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Edouard Albert, “Etude d’un centre de triage et d’hébergement pour émigrés,” TD, no. 2 (1947): 224–33.

Chapter 7

Reinventing the Eugenicist as a Humanist

 As of early 1944, Carrel fell into a deeply pessimistic mood that, on a personal level, partly reflected the hopeless fate of Vichy. War deprivations took a heavy toll on his weakened health, and in mid 1943 he was forced into convalescence. With food and coal shortages making life in Paris increasingly difficult, he retreated to Saint-Gildas and then, after the Allied landings in Normandy, to the foundation’s estate in Vulaines-surSeine, where he and his wife could at least feed themselves on what was grown in the facility’s gardens. Gradually, he withdrew from public life and the dreaded Vichy politics, leaving the responsibility of running the foundation to his senior staff—Gillon, Gros, Ménétrier, and Missenard. His gloomy mood also betrayed a frustration and anxiety with regard to the evolution of the war. He was disillusioned with Roosevelt’s policies—he had hoped, naively, that the United States would mediate between France and Germany and work out an accommodation with Hitler. He was horrified by the “unnatural” alliance of the Anglo-Americans and the Russians and, putting aside his anti-German feelings, was coming to see the final stages of the conflict as a tragic clash between Western nations that would benefit the non-European peoples and Soviet Communism. He despaired to see his two patries—the United States and (Vichy) France—at war. He accused Jews and Bolsheviks of this catastrophe, and lashed out at De Gaulle and the Free French as “traitors.” Against this background, the postliberation settlement of accounts with the scientist seems hardly surprising. Identifying Carrel as a collaborationist, the Resistance placed his name on the list of prominent personalities to be hunted down and prosecuted for treason. Too weak to withstand the emotional distress caused by this “defamatory” campaign, he died in Paris Notes for this section begin on page 173.

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in November 1944, amidst a wave of confusing rumors. Meanwhile, the foundation continued working for another full year, until the provisional government disbanded it. Significantly, it kept the institution’s population experts to set up the INED. Thus, the preoccupation with the amelioration of France’s population ensured the continuity of the foundation’s demographic personnel and research projects. Likewise, as the postwar recovery and quest for normalcy buried the unpleasant memories of the Vichy past, French Catholics and conservative authors cleared Carrel’s name of the stigma of collaboration and racism and reinvented him as a scientific genius and mystic humanist. As war, domestic divisions, and the loss of the empire deprived France of much of its international prestige, the political elites of the Fourth and Fifth Republic found in Carrel a symbol with which to remind the old generations, and teach the young ones, of their country’s glorious heritage.

The Stigma of Collaboration Throughout the war, Carrel pursued two parallel projects, both of which stemmed from his earlier reflections on “human problems”: he undertook his institution-building project for biological renewal, and as ill health forced him into long periods of convalescence, he devoted much of the time to writing about nonscientific topics. From mid 1943 onward, he busied himself almost exclusively with exploring the subject of miracles and the relationship between healing and faith. The result of these late spiritualistic speculations was his second literary success, La prière, which sold out two months after its release in May 1944. The book was a slightly expanded version of his essay “The Power of Prayer,” first published by Reader’s Digest in early 1941 and later reprinted by the Journal de Genève. In what reads like a literal transcription from Man, the Unknown and the unpublished manuscript of his journey to Lourdes, the author vindicates the curative power of prayer and posits the reconciliation with the “sense of the holy” as the precondition for the remaking of human kind. These same concerns inspired Carrel’s last and unfinished manuscript, Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie, published after his death.1 The devotion with which he undertook these last literary projects was the result of his social isolation. Partly too, it was a deliberate attempt to escape from the unpleasant political realities of Vichy’s approaching collapse. The clearer the defeat of Vichy and the Germans appeared, the more apocalyptic Carrel’s political utterances became. He perceived the war as a “suicide of the white races” and a dispute between “peoples of the same culture” that threatened the entire edifice of Western civilization.2 In the end, he never fully reconciled himself with his decision to stay in France, nor did he overcome his skepticism concerning the feasibility of achieving anything worthy as long as the country remained at war and divided. He

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deemed it “unbearable and senseless” to head a French institution after having worked at the Rockefeller Institute. On and on he complained of his compatriots’ “narrowness, wickedness and ignorance.” They fooled themselves, he wrote, believing that France “was the center of the world whereas for the last thirty years the center of the world had been the United States and Germany.”3 Such pessimism reflected a lack of understanding of wartime politics, or a surprising naïvité. He blamed the political situation on “the incapacity of people for understanding each other,” and criticized the French for “detesting themselves” and for being “incapable of acting in a constructive manner.”4 Perhaps, no other episode reveals more bluntly the implications of Carrel’s political isolation during the last phase of Vichy than his failed takeover of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology—a faux pas that tainted even further his reputation with the scientific community. Set up in 1927 by an endowment of the Baron Edmond de Rothschild, before the war the institute’s research facilities at the Ecole pratique des hautes études had attracted some of the nation’s most brilliant physicists and chemists. Its board of directors comprised many prestigious members of the Academy of Sciences, such as Jean Perrin, Paul Langevin, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie—cowinner with his wife, Irène Curie, of the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Following the German invasion and the introduction of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws, many of the institute’s Jewish researchers emigrated or went into hiding. However, acknowledging the importance of its work and the advantages that could be taken from it, the German military commander of Greater Paris allowed the institute to continue functioning in the occupied zone. As living conditions worsened, its researchers came to play a vital role in the development of badly needed food and pharmaceutical supplies. Starting in 1942, they worked with the Pasteur Institute to increase production of the antityphus vaccine and of insulin after the Germans requisitioned horse stocks and banned their slaughter (insulin was made out of horse pancreas).5 The institute’s work attracted not only the interest of the German military but also Carrel’s. Seeking personnel and laboratories for his foundation’s food research, in June 1942 he obtained from the prefect of the Seine a requisition order that placed the institute under his authority. The measure caused uproar among scientists who saw it as a personally motivated attempt “from the French side” to undermine their work, just when the institute had obtained from the Germans the authorization to carry out their investigations.6 The episode reached the highest level of the government when a group of prominent scientists asked Pétain to review the measure and denounced Carrel for behaving like a “gangster.”7 In late August 1944, as the fighting for liberation spread to the streets of Paris, the head of the Comité médical de la résistance and secretary general for public health of the provisional government, Louis Pasteur ValleryRadot, issued a decree suspending Carrel from his functions as the founda-

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tion’s regent.8 In the months that followed, the French and American press circulated all sorts of rumors regarding the scientist’s whereabouts. Some reported that he had been arrested by the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI) and sent to the Palais des sports, along with thousands of collaborationists; others claimed that he was very sick and never abandoned his apartment on Avenue de Breteuil. In any case, it was the intervention of the Americans that saved him from being sent to prison.9 After Carrel died on 5 November, a group of his coworkers asked the government to specify the crimes for which the scientist was being accused of collaboration. They were informed that no formal charges had been brought against him.10 This was all the more surprising considering how widespread Carrel’s image as a collaborationist had become. Even Missenard admitted, not without embarrassment—understandable in those days of widespread anti-German resentment—that during the occupation, the Nobel laureate nourished the hope that the French would put an end to their differences with the Germans and reach an understanding with that “intelligent, hard-working, and serious-minded people.”11 This is also how others, like the collaborationist writer Alfred Fabre-Luce and the Nobel laureate Paul Claudel, understood Carrel’s wartime politics.12 The allegations that circulated within the ranks of the Resistance covered a wide spectrum of crimes, from fraud to unFrench behavior. The communists, for example, blacklisted him as a “charlatan of science who rushed from America to enter the service of the Boches” and blamed him for “all the misfortunes of our country.” Similarly, the Forces francaises de l’intérieur accused him of blackmailing and harassing university scientists so that they would have to join the foundation.13 Carrel’s death may have spared him the humiliating trial reserved for those who had “disgraced French intelligence,” the blanket accusation leveled at collaborationist scientists and academics. The University of Paris law professor, Louis le Fur; the dean of the School of Law of Bordeaux, Roger Bonnard; Vichy’s minister of justice, Joseph Barthélemy, and the racist anthropologist Georges Montandon all died before charges could be brought against them.14 Yet, the selectivity with which the tribunals applied punishment also reveals the ambiguities and contradictions of postliberation justice and the extent to which personal issues came into play. The case of François Perroux illustrates this combination of motives well. In September 1944, the former theorist of Vichy’s communitarianism and onetime secretary general of Carrel’s foundation asked the Communist minister of public health, François Billoux, to disband the wartime institution, claiming that it was a “scientific fraud” (escroquerie scientifique). More importantly, he appealed to the political myths of the time when he accused Gros, Missenard, and Ménétrier of being members of the infamous Synarchy conspiracy. After obtaining the support of big industry and finance, it was said, this conspiratorial group had “attempted a takeover in France just like the one that brought Hitler to power.” According to Perroux, Car-

Reinventing the Eugenicist as a Humanist   163

rel and the foundation continued the work of the Centre d’études des problèmes humains after Jean Coutrot, the center’s founder and one of the alleged leaders of the Synarchy, died in 1941. Perroux claimed that Carrel’s “intimate relationship” with Maurice Bunau-Varilla—the allegedly fascist owner of the newspaper Le matin—and his “contacts” with Jacques Doriot amounted to clear proof of the scientist’s anti-national sentiments.15 Carrel’s commitment to Vichy also tarnished his reputation in the United States—and poisoned his relationship with old an pro-Allied friends and disciples, such as Frédéric Coudert and Pierre Lecomte du Noüy.16 A statement broadcast by The People’s Reporter in early 1944 announced that the Frenchman had “gone into partnership with the devil,” as if he “wanted to show us that the title of his book [Man, the Unknown] was true.”17 Later that year, a physician from Yale University reported a “charming story” that he had heard in France about Carrel’s attempt to take over the Pasteur Institute. According to this rumor, the scientist gave up on this idea and occupied the Rockefeller Foundation’s offices instead, only when the Institut de France announced that he was being considered for membership—indeed, a very unlikely possibility.18 Americans also gave credit to the rumors that portrayed him as a candidate for the ministry of public health in Pierre Laval’s cabinet.19 Unsurprisingly, neither the French nor the US government sent official representatives to Carrel’s funeral. Of the four victorious powers it was the British and the Soviets who paid their respects to the “great surgeon” by appointing their respective delegates to the discreet religious ceremony held at Saint-Gildas.20 Others, however, perceived things differently. In May 1944, U. S. General T. Bentley Mott wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, dismissing as “sheer nonsense” the allegation that Carrel was “in sympathy with the Nazis.” The American officer, who had met the scientist in the winter of 1944, attested that the Nobel Prize winner had set up “a wonderful laboratory” and was doing “very remarkable and splendid work” to “help abate illness and disease in France.”21 Lindbergh was even more categorical in his defense of the scientist. During his tour of France in the spring of 1945, the pilot recalled being shocked by the “triviality” of the charges. One of his witnesses told him that Carrel and his wife had attended a meeting at the German Embassy to discuss matters concerning the foundation and afterwards joined a social gathering organized by their hosts.22 Carrel’s defenders deeply resented these allegations and steadfastly denied them. His widow dismissed them as a revenge orchestrated by the “phony elite” of physicians and bureaucrats who, like Pasteur Vallery-Radot, were “jealous” of the foundation. According to her, Carrel had neither accepted special privileges from the Germans, nor he objected to recruiting researchers who were engaged in the Resistance. Missenard confirmed her views, saying that the Nobel laureate had refused to take the loyalty oath to Pétain. Even within the Resistance, he claimed, there

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were those who held a favorable opinion of Carrel and the foundation. In late 1944, a tribunal d’épuration investigated Missenard’s wartime responsibilities. Ironically, the presiding judge was Bernard Lafay, a lawyer who during the occupation had applied without success for admission into the foundation. Contrary to Missenard’s fears that Lafay might take advantage of the situation to settle old scores, Lafay not only cleared him of any charges of antinational behavior, but also acknowledged Missenard and Carrel’s “patriotic service” during the occupation.23 Evidence coming from the very people who removed Carrel from his public duties seems to bear out these claims. The former member of the Comité médical de la résistance and assistant to Pasteur Valéry-Radot in August 1944, Paul Milliez, admitted that Carrel was never formally accused of “intelligence with the enemy” and that he was only “suspended” from the responsibilities that Pétain had conferred upon him.24 Some Germans confirmed these views. The writer Emil Ludwig, who met Carrel in Paris in January 1940, denied the accusations, saying that “he was the enemy of Germany for four years.”25 The case of Robert Gessain is even more telling if we consider his racist views and praise for the work of Montandon. Not only did he survive the purges unscathed, but he was also able to secure a position in the new institutions set up by the liberation. Following the dissolution of Carrel’s foundation, he joined the INED as head of a research department. Thereafter, he pursued a successful career as an anthropologist at the Musée de l’homme, in which he served as under-director (1958–1968) and director (1968–1979).26

Recycling the Foundation After Carrel’s suspension, the foundation was placed under the directorship of Roger Peltier. Although its researchers continued their work, the future of the institution became increasingly uncertain when, in September 1944, Billoux became the new minister of public health. The newly appointed official, whose ministry had direct jurisdiction over the foundation, had no sympathy for an institution tainted by its ties to Vichy. He suspected, not without some grounds, that Carrel’s “human science” was a rhetorical disguise for old-fashioned reactionary politics. However, and despite pressures to disband it exerted by other institutions—notably, the CNRS— deciding the future of the foundation single-handedly was a complicated issue. As a contemporary observed in 1945, it was “politically unwise” for a Communist to shut down a scientific institution and leave intellectuals out of work. It was not only party politics that shielded the foundation from an eventual épuration, but also the nonpartisan conviction that its work was important for the reconstruction of the nation. While Billoux decided whether to scatter its research projects and équipes among the different departments of the CNRS, others like Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy lob-

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bied higher up in the Gaullist government to save what they believed was the institution’s most valuable asset: its population experts.27 Debré and Sauvy both enjoyed close ties with De Gaulle’s provisional government and reputations as experts on population. The polytechnicien Sauvy had been actively engaged in the prewar debates on industrial organization and served as economic advisor of the Daladier government. In 1939 he became a member of the Haut comité de la population, which drafted the Family Code.28 During the German occupation he headed a bureau of statistics within the ministry of finance—the Institut de conjoncture—and worked as an advisor of Carrel’s foundation. After the liberation he was briefly appointed ministry of family and population. Debré was a highly respected pediatrician—before the war he had published pioneering studies on the treatment of tuberculosis in children—and a former leader of the underground. The son of a rabbi, he was pushed out of the medical profession by Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws and in 1943 became one of the leading members of the Comité médical de la résistance, an organization set up by Vallery-Radot as a medical branch of the armed resistance.29 His professional standing and wartime record, together with his personal connections to both Communists—through his fellow physicians of the Front national des médecins—and Gaullists—through his son Michel—made Debré a leading voice in the postwar debates, especially in those concerning the reconstruction—he established the Commission on War Damages and Reparations to assess France’s human and material losses. During the war, Sauvy and Debré authored some of the programmatic works that inspired French population policy after 1945.30 Both men were pronatalists, yet in a different way from the conservative Alliance nationale. Even when the résistant Debré praised the work of the Pétainiste Boverat, their convictions stemmed from differing assessments of the demographic problem. For Debré, a higher birthrate was associated neither with France’s military capacities nor with a moralistic defense of traditional gender roles. Born of his expert knowledge of pediatrics, his pronatalist convictions became an instrument for achieving the “happy family” or, as he termed it more technically, optimum familial—that is, the number of children (three to six), which best suited their physical and psychological development.31 Sauvy was also “pragmatic” in so far as he saw pronatalism as the best means to stimulate the economy and improve productivity—bear more children today and there will be more workers and consumers tomorrow. Perhaps the clearest indication of his pragmatism was his defense of an open immigration policy as an indispensable measure to enable the recuperation of agriculture and industry. To him, the problem with old-fashioned pronatalism was not its anachronism but its incapacity to put France back on her feet. With the controversial Carrel out of the picture, deciding the foundation’s future posed fewer ideological problems. On the one hand, the goal of “improving the population” and the “technical” character of the war-

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time institution’s work shielded most of its staff from accusations of collaborationism. On the other, Debré and Sauvy found in Carrel’s institution a valuable instrument to achieve a “demographic renewal” (renaissance démographique). During the fall of 1945, while Sauvy looked for a new position in the public administration, Debré used his political connections to secure control of the foundation’s population experts with the purpose of setting them up as a new independent institution devoted solely to demographic research. The alternative solution was their reassignment to, and dispersion throughout, the research departments of the CNRS. Debré’s efforts were crowned with success when in October the provisional government replaced the foundation with the INED and appointed Sauvy as its director. More than half of the institute’s staff had worked under Carrel, among them Jean Bourgeois and André Vincent (demography), Jean Daric (industrial engineering), Jacques Doublet (law), Robert Gessain (anthropology), Jean Stoetzel (social psychology), André Girard (sociology), and Jean Sutter (medicine). Like its wartime predecessor, the institute recruited young experts; their mean age was thirty-three.32 Thus, despite its collaborationist past and the criticism of its vague goals, Carrel’s foundation, or a substantial part of it, was able to recycle itself after the liberation. The broad and nonpartisan political consensus on the urgent need to find solutions to France’s demographic decline explains Debré and Sauvy’s decision to take advantage of Carrel’s population experts. Debré acknowledged publicly the links between the institute and Carrel on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the INED in 1961. On that occasion he wrote: Alexis Carrel, whose brilliant discovery ensured through the culture technique the immortality of the tissues of our perishable body, made it possible that long after his death other scientists cultivate viruses and cancerous cells. Furthermore, like the physician and “physiocrat” François Quesnay, he left biology for the study of society, setting up the Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains. That was the initial legacy received by the l’Institut national d’études démographiques at the time of its creation.33

Sauvy and Debré called for a coherent, state-guided demographic policy. This meant not only setting clear goals but also giving the field of population—comprising demography, family, and health—full ministerial status and financial autonomy to enforce policy. In this state-centered model, manufacturing population data was crucial. Here is where the foundation and the INED were seen as having a major role to play. Gone were the days when immigration, family, and health policymaking stifled parliamentary debates to agonize between the individual initiatives of a small group of pronatalist propagandists. Since the beginning of the war, in fact, with the creation of the Haut comité de la population in 1939—which De Gaulle recreated in 1945 as the Haut comité de la population et de la famille—the shaping of population policy had been left to technocratic-

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minded population experts trained in different disciplines and employed by the state in well-funded research centers. The innovations introduced by the foundation in the field of applied population research left their mark on its staff. Although in the postwar years some of them downplayed their association with Carrel, in the long run they came to see their passage through the foundation as a significant formative experience in empirical and experimental sociobiological research—this notwithstanding the criticism of the vagueness of goals and Carrel’s politics. In a series of interviews carried out in the mid 1960s by Joseph Durkin, they recalled the important lessons drawn from their exposure to collective thinking and teamwork. Their experience had been no minor step, for it broke with the long hegemony of Durkheimian theoretical analysis and the Catholic-inspired social surveys of Frédéric Le Play. Jacques Ménétrier stressed the foundation’s systematic efforts to bring under the same roof experimentation, analysis, and synthesis. Robert Gessain emphasized the originality of a population thinking that placed equal importance on both quantitative and qualitative factors. Jean Merlet praised the studies on housing for their unique multidisciplinary character, while Jean Sutter underscored the widespread interest that this research model aroused among scientists from developing countries. Using the experience and contacts made during the war, in the 1950s André Gros founded the influential review Prospective and became the leading expert on counseling in industrial relations.34 In a document on occupational health in the 1960s, the British Trade Union Congress acknowledged and praised the initiatives taken by French wartime labor experts as precedents of the regulations adopted by the International Labor Organization after 1945. These measures also formed the basis for the proposals on occupational health issued by the Common Market’s commission to all member countries.35 Unsurprisingly, the legacy of the foundation became most evident in the work of the INED. The institute completed its survey on handicapped children and published its results, thus providing much of the empirical data and methods that have shaped modern research on education.36 Likewise, Gessain and Sutter’s work stimulated enduring interest in eugenics as a research field. In the late 1940s, Sutter became an advocate of a milder form of biopolitics and authored the first comprehensive French-language study on the topic, which the INED director, Sauvy, prefaced.37 The institute also continued the multidisciplinary research on population quality and assimilation—both theoretical and applied—that it had begun in the wartime.38 One of the most important projects that came out of this enduring concern was the study of the commune of Plozevet in the Finistère. Commissioned by the Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique and supervised by Gessain and Stoetzel, the choice of a Breton community known for its high rates of intermarriage reveals the persistent interest in ethnic homogeneity among population experts. More signifi-

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cantly, Gessain explicitly acknowledged the continuity with the fondation when he phrased the survey’s aim as the study of “human problems as Carrel understood them.”39

Rescuing Carrel from Oblivion (and Vichy) The épuration of Carrel’s name from public life did not last long. As French society returned to normalcy after 1945 and the wartime past was neutralized through forgetfulness and denial, the polemical scientist made a subtle return into the collective memory. By the early 1950s, the climax of the Cold War and the need to “heal” the wounds of Vichy and the occupation through national “reconciliation” cleared the path for a more indulgent interpretation of Vichy. This shift led, on the one hand, to the passage in 1951 and 1953 of amnesty laws for wartime offenses. On the other, it laid the ground for a new historiographical consensus that, following a trend-setting work by Robert Aron, was to become the “official” interpretation of Vichy for over two decades—until the publication of Robert Paxton’s inconoclastic book on the subject.40 Throughout the 1950s, as in other European countries that had experienced foreign occupation and civil war, a more condescending view of the wartime experience progressively replaced the partisan and myth-ridden narratives of the early liberation years.41 Coming to terms with Carrel did not imply a public rehabilitation of his ideas, at least not in the beginning. Rather, it started with the efforts of his friends and disciples to challenge the “dark legend” inherited from the liberation. In the early 1950s, the former Pétainist physician Robert Soupault published the first biography of the scientist. Based largely on Carrel’s scattered letters and published works, Soupault’s book became the standard biography in the French language for nearly four decades.42 In the mid 1960s, the Jesuit scholar Joseph Durkin introduced Carrel to American audiences by publishing the first English-language study under the revealing title of Hope for Our Time, which Lindbergh prefaced. As curator of Carrel’s papers at Georgetown University—where he taught Philosophy of History—Durkin was the first scholar to have at his disposal most of the savant’s writings, including his private correspondence and unpublished work. With this material he produced not a biography in the usual sense of the word, but a sympathetic study of the scientist’s spiritualistic philosophy.43 Durkin’s interest in Carrel was part of a broader effort by postwar Catholics to reconcile religion and science—or faith and reason—at a time when the idea of the human being as a unique and indivisible totality conceived by God seemed irremediably threatened both by scientific progress—notably, in physics and genetics—and by the ongoing secularization of industrial societies.

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Catholics’ renewed interest in Carrel must be seen within this larger historical frame. This process started with the release of his two unpublished manuscripts, Le voyage de Lourdes—for which Lindbergh wrote a preface—and Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie, as well as his journal, Jour après jour, all of which revealed Carrel’s lifelong interest in spiritualistic and religious issues.44 The release of these nonscientific works encouraged a reexamination of the Nobel laureate’s life and, in particular, his reflections on science and religion. Purged of his fascist sympathies and racist eugenics, Carrel was thus reinvented as a scientific genius and visionary humanist. In the next three decades, Catholic and conservative publicists and writers in France and the United States popularized Carrel as a symbol of the triumph of spiritual values over a world enslaved to empty material progress. Whether he appears as the agnostic physician who (re)discovers the true faith or the humanistic crusader fighting against his materialistic times, what is surprising about these works is not only their arbitrary association between technical expertise and moral authority, but also their convenient disregard of the biographical evidence—such as his fascist and racist views—that contradicts any definition, religious or secular, of humanism.45 Carrel’s widow played a major role in framing her late husband’s legacy within the Catholic intellectual tradition. In the late 1940s, Anne de la Motte fulfilled his wish of setting up a religious community in Saint-Gildas and released his unpublished works. In the early 1950s, she left France and went to Argentina, where her son from the first marriage lived as a rancher. Shortly after her arrival in Buenos Aires, she was invited by the Federation of Catholic Physicians of Argentina to give a talk on “Alexis Carrel and the Lourdes miracles” at the National Academy of Medicine. Over seventy years old, she became a rural nurse well known for her powers of “divination” and a tireless proselytizer of the savant’s ideas.46 Moved by his reading of Carrel’s nonscientific works, in the early 1960s a rural priest who knew her built a church and an elementary school and named these Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes and Alexis Carrel respectively.47 Argentina was also receptive to his eugenics. Before Anne’s arrival in the country, Man, the Unknown and Reader’s Digest articles had become popular among physicians and the educated public.48 Advocates of alternative medicines and health educators spread his teachings among middle-class audiences. Carrel’s biopolitics also appealed to the conservative technocrats that served in Juan Peron’s populist regime (1946–1955). His minister of public health, in particular, quoted Carrel’s apocalyptic warnings about the decline of the white races and set up a school of biotypology along the lines of the Institute of Man—however, it was not Carrel’s eugenics but Pende’s biotypology that became the dominant trend among Argentine eugenicists.49 Perhaps, no one did more to vindicate Carrel’s work and ideas than Lindbergh. He wrote the prologues to both Le voyage de Lourdes and Durkin’s biography, and helped Anne de la Motte with the transfer of the

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scientist’s papers to Georgetown University.50 In 1965, he established the Association des amis du docteur Alexis Carrel in Nantes—later transferred to Carrel’s birthplace in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon—to preserve and promote the savant’s legacy. The association published a bulletin and monitored anything that was printed or said about the Nobel laureate. In May 1985, it organized the Journées Carrel in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon to honor the “prophet that warned us against the domination of the homo technicus.”51 Lindbergh also contributed to popularizing Carrel’s scientific achievements. As may be recalled, he had ended his work on organ perfusion when Carrel retired from the Rockefeller Institute. An unexpected opportunity to resume these experiments became open to him when the physicians Vernon Perry and Theodore Malinin, who both worked on organ perfusion at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda (Maryland)—Malinin also published a medical biography of Carrel—, invited him to participate in a research program on a storage bank for human organs. The pilot undertook the project as his personal contribution to fulfilling “Carrel’s dreams.”52 The commemoration of Carrel’s one hundredth birthday in 1973 was a significant marker of the process of reinventing the eugenicist as a humanist. In the United States, Durkin and Malinin organized an international conference at Georgetown with distinguished participants. Although a large number of them were physicians, Durkin, Gros, and Lindbergh—the guest speaker—ensured that the spiritual dimension of Carrel’s thought would not be overshadowed by his scientific legacy.53 It was in France, however, that his attack on materialism and industrial civilization was vindicated most enthusiastically. Conservative authors—as well as supporters of holistic medicine and ecology—celebrated him as a prophet who had anticipated all the ills of modern life.54 Far from being a phenomenon limited to marginal or nostalgic right-wing milieus, these expressions reflected a much broader—and more positive—societal reassessment of Carrel. By the 1970s, recognition of the Nobel laureate proceeded apace as streets and public buildings in France were named after him. Following a proposal by Jacques Descostes, head of the cardiovascular surgery ward of the Herriot hospital, in 1969 the University of Lyon named one of its medical schools after Carrel. The commemoration wave continued in the next decade. In 1976, at the request of a member of the Institut de France, Jean Lépine, the municipal council in Paris named a street in the fifteenth arrondissement after the scientist and placed a memorial plaque on Carrel’s former apartment on Avenue Breteuil. The event’s key speech was given by the former résistant and president of the municipal council, Bernard Lafay.55 Today, Carrel lives on in educational and scientific organizations, such as the Institut Alexis Carrel d’orientation et formation professionnelle (Lyon), the Villages Alexis Carrel (Tarbes), a facility for the treatment of drug addiction; the Alexis Carrel Foundation for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Research (Pavia), the Alexis Carrel Association for Integral Medicine (Verona); and the Alexis Carrel Conferences on Chronic Transplant

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Dysfunction and Arteriosclerosis, which are held at periodic intervals in Sweden.56 His name is displayed before lay people as well. In Montréal— Carrel’s first destination after he left France in 1904—a theme park and shopping mall bear his name. Internet surfers will be amused and amazed by the many websites both praising and criticizing every aspect of Carrel’s life and work, from miracles to organ perfusion. Here one can find the scientist’s prophecies and most quoted aphorisms as well as denunciations of his eugenics. It is not unusual, as we have seen in the introduction, to find his name associated with scientific endeavors that are seen as dangerous for nature and humankind—as in the case of a campaign by an antiglobalization group portraying genetically modified food as “Carrel’s Clones.”57 The tide of Islamic fundamentalism that hit Algeria in the early 1990s revealed an unexpected, and seemingly paradoxical, appropriation of Carrel in the Arab world. The first to have introduced Carrel to Muslim audiences seems to have been the Indian religious scholar Abu al-Hasan “Ali” al-Nadawi. However, it was the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) who extracted from the scientist’s views and recommendations a far more radical political theory with which to attack Western values. In the late 1940s, Qutb was sent to the United States as a representative of the Egyptian ministry of education to study modern pedagogic methods. Shocked by American racism and “sexual permissiveness,” he described in The America I Saw a society that excelled at “organization, production, reason, and work” yet lacked “social and human leadership, manners, and emotions.”58 Upon returning to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and during the 1952 revolution he became a cultural adviser to the nationalist Free Officers movement. However, Qutb’s radical interpretation of Islamic scriptures soon led to confrontation with the Nasser regime, and shortly afterward the government outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested him together with other leaders. In 1966, he was shot on charges of armed revolt and terrorism. While in prison, in 1959 or 1960, Qutb came across an edition of L’homme cet inconnu and, upon reading it, felt “as if all the pieces of the puzzle had begun to fall into place.” To Qutb, Carrel’s views appeared as a modern vindication of the Quran’s message. In fact, the narrative of his Islam and the Problems of Civilization is structured on long quotations from an Arabic translation of L’homme cet inconnu.59 Moreover, out of all the Western scholars cited by Qutb, Carrel is the only author singled out for praise and worthy of a biographical note. Above all, Qutb welcomed Carrel’s criticism of Western materialism, scientism, and individualism. The Islamic scholar praised the Catholic scientist as “a man of wide knowledge, high sensitivity, extreme sincerity” and a “dissenting rebel” against industrial barbarism. The Frenchman’s call for a moral and spiritual revolution also struck a receptive chord. Carrel’s fondness of the “unknown” and his endorsement of mysticism, telepathy, clairvoyance, intuition, spiritual illumination, and the search for God agreed with Qutb’s own appreciation of metaphysi-

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cal phenomena. Like Carrel, Qutb looked at society as a living organism threatened with decay by fatal viruses and foreign microbes. His borrowing from the French scientist becomes most obvious in the analysis of family and gender roles. Here, Qutb buttresses his biological and functional arguments with quotations of the Nobel laureate’s views on the physical, chemical, and psychological differences between men and women. Of the proposals for remaking society, it was neither the new science of man nor eugenics that seduced Qutb most, but Carrel’s radical suggestion of creating an elite of monk-scholars bound by strict codes of conduct and self-discipline. Like Carrel, the Muslim scholar rejected liberal democracy and endorsed an authoritarian form of elite politics. His fascist sympathies were the result of his encounter with the right wing and nationalistic youth organizations that sprang up in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. As such, they carried both anticapitalist and anti-Semitic undertones. Furthermore, just as Carrel insisted that “a program would stifle living reality in a rigid armor,” Qutb also dismissed discussing the details of his program as “futile arguments about technicalities.”60 Half a century after his death, French society staged yet another épuration of Carrel. However, unlike the settlement of accounts of 1944–1945, the débaptisation campaign of the 1990s centered its attack not so much on his collaborationism as on his racism. The prominent role played by antiLe Pen groups, such as the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié des peuples (MRAP) and Ras l’front, gave the recent reexamination of the savant’s record a distinctively “postcolonial” touch. Revising, and condemning, his ideas became a “duty of memory” (devoir de mémoire) in a society that was growing more and more suspicious and critical of its traditions and history. From this perspective, the Carrel debate may be seen as another episode of coming to terms with the past that, beginning with the debates on Vichy and leading up to the ongoing controversy over the legacies of colonialism, seeks to expose the dark side of the French Sonderweg. Certainly, unveiling the resilience of France’s illiberal and authoritarian traditions is anything but new, but the context in which it is being done today gives it a singular meaning. As minority groups and the right attempt to rewrite history by passing new “memory laws”—political correctness à la française—societal revisionism steps up its dethroning of the nation’s cultural celebrities.61 Meanwhile, in the suburbs, the French-born children of North African immigrants set fire to their miserable share of the republic. Today, neither Tocqueville nor Carrel may be read disingenuously as examples of French cultural splendor. The political philosopher’s calls to crush Arab resistance to French rule in Algeria mercilessly and the Nobel laureate’s urging to eliminate the biologically unfit must be now taken also as disturbing reminders of France’s ambivalent and troubled relationship with modernity.62

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Notes 1. Alexis Carrel, La prière (Paris: Plon, 1944); idem, Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie (Paris: Plon, 1950). 2. ACP, Box 70, Carrel to Guigou, 7 May 1943. 3. ACP, Box 82, Carrel to Guigou, 11 Mar. 1943. 4. Ibid., Carrel to Guigou, 7 May 1943, 18 June 1944. 5. AN 2AG 78, Prof. A. Duclaux, “Note sur l’Institut de biologie physico-chimique,” undated. 6. AN 2AG 78, Prof. Pierre Girard to Préfecture du Département de la Seine, Directeur des affaires de réquisition et d’occupation, 22 June 1942; Michel Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), 214; Herbert R. Lottman, The French Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995), 247–49. 7. AN 2AG 78, Gaston Aubel to M. Manoury, 25 June 1942. 8. “French Health Minister Dismisses Dr. Carrel,” New York Times, 29 Aug. 1944, 1; Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, Mémoires d’un non-conformiste (Paris: Plon, 1970), 285. 9. “Carrel Denies He Aided the Germans,” NYT, 1 Sep. 1944, 4; “Collaboration Camp,” Newsweek, 11 Sep. 1944, 60–61; “Carrel Seriously Ill,” NYT, 20 Oct. 1944, 4; “Dr. Alexis Carrel Dies,” NYT, 6 Nov. 1944, 19; “Milestones,” Time, 13 Nov. 1944, 86. 10. ACP, Box 43, Katherine Crutcher to Frédéric Coudert, 13 Dec. 1944. 11. Félix-André Missenard, “Sombres souvenirs: la vérité sur le séjour d’Alexis Carrel en France, de 1941 à 1945,” Journal de médecine de Lyon 61 (June 1980): 408. 12. Alfred Fabre-Luce, Journal de la France, 1939–1944 (Geneva: C. Bourquin, 1946), 579–84; Paul Claudel, Journal II 1935–1955 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 353. 13. “Dr. Carrel Arrested as Vichy Adherent,” NYT, 31 Aug. 1944, 4; Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1990, 143–47. 14. On the purges see François Rouquet, L’épuration de l’administration française (Paris: CNRS éditions, 1993); Herbert Lottmann, L’épuration (Paris: Fayard, 1986); Peter Novick, L’épuration française, 1944–1949 (Paris: Ballard, 1985); Pascal Ory, Les collaborateurs, 1940– 1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976). On the purges of collaborationist physicians see Céline Lesourd, “L’épuration des médecins,” in Une poignée des misérables: l’épuration de la société française après la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Marc-Olivier Baruch (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 336–67; Claude Singer, L’université libérée, l’université épurée (1943–1947) (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1997). 15. Cited in Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: la Fondation Alexis Carrel, 1941–1945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992), 169–73. On the Synarchy conspiracy see Olivier Dard, La synarchie ou le mythe du complot permanent (Paris: Le grand livre du mois, 1998); Richard F. Kuisel, “The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy,” FHS 6, no. 3 (1970): 365–98; Alfred Sauvy, De Paul Reynaud à Charles de Gaulle: Scènes, tableaux et souvenirs (Paris: Casterman, 1970), 55–59. 16. ACP, Box 43, Crutcher, “Notes on Conversation with Dr. P. Lecomte du Noüy,” 18 Jan. 1943; id., “Notes on Conversation with Robert Davis,” 16 Mar. 1943; Mary Lecomte du Noüy, The Road to “Human Destiny”: A Life of Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1955), 253. 17. ACP, Box 43, Broadcast by Fulton Oursler, 24 Feb. 1944. 18. RFA, RG 1.1, 500, J. F. Fulton to Alan Gregg, 2 Dec. 1944. 19. ACP, Box 41, Crutcher to Gregg, 27 Feb. 1942; Crutcher to J. Mckeen Cattell, 5 May 1942. 20. Charles A. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 376; James Newton, Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Har-

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vey Firestone, Alexis Carrel, and Charles Lindbergh (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 197–98. 21. RFA, RG 1.1, 500, General T. Bentley Mott to Gregg, 23 May 1944. 22. Newton, Uncommon Friends, 200–201; ACP, Box 41, Crutcher to Flagg, 21 Dec. 1942; Crutcher to M. Wolf, 11 Sep. 1944; ACP, Box 82, Durkin’s interview with Jean Lombard, October 1964. After the war Alice Epting-Kullmann, wife of the Nazi director of the Institut allemand, revealed many of the names of the “tout Paris” that had been guests of the German Embassy; Carrel was among them. Henri Amouroux, La grande histoire des français sous l’occupation. Vol. III: les beaux jours des collabos, juin 1941-juin 1942 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1978), 495–96. 23. Missenard, “Sombres souvenirs,” 407. 24. Georges Arnulf, “Documents inédits sur le comportement du Dr. Alexis Carrel en France pendant la guerre 1939–1945,” Histoire des sciences médicales 19 (1985): 263–67. Arnulf was a cardiologist from Lyon and a member of the Resistance. 25. Emil Ludwig, Galerie de portraits (Paris: Fayard, 1948). 26. Singer, L’université libérée, 307, 313. For a comparative analysis of other scientists under the occupation see Brigitte Chamak, “Un scientifique pendant l’occupation: le cas d’Antoine Lacassagne,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 57, no. 1 (2004): 101–33; Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, 167–225; Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: The New Press, 1996), 309–17, 356–57. 27. Sauvy, De Reynaud à De Gaulle, 178; François Billoux, Quand nous étions ministres (Paris: Editions sociales, 1972). 28. Michel Chauvière, “L’expert et les propagandistes: Alfred Sauvy et le Code de la famille de 1939,” Population, no. 6 (1992): 1441–52. 29. On the Comité médical de la résistance see Andrés Reggiani, “Birthing the Welfare State: Population, Public Health and Political Crises in France, 1914–1960.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Book, New York (1998), chap. 5; Anne Simonin, “Le Comité médical de la résistance: un succès différé,” Mouvement social, no. 180 (1997): 159–78. 30. Alfred Sauvy, Richesse et population (Paris: Payot, 1943); Robert Debré, Médecine, santé publique, population: rapports présentés au Comité médical de la résistance et au Comité national des médecins français (Paris: Editions du médecin français, 1945); Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy, Des français pour la France: le problème de la population (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). 31. Robert Debré, “La famille heureuse ou l’optimum familial,” Population, no. 4 (1950): 619–24. 32. On Sauvy and the creation of the INED see Paul-André Rosental, L’intelligence démographique: sciences et politiques de population en France (1930–1960) (Paris: Odile Jaob, 003), chap. 5; id., “Le premier monde de la recherche: la gestion du personnel dans l’INED d’Alfred Sauvy (1945–1962),” Genèses, no. 51 (2003):128–46; Alain Drouard, “La création de l’INED,” Population, no. 6 (1992):1453–66; Michel-Louis Lévy, Alfred Sauvy, compagnon du siècle (Paris: La manufacture, 1990); Alain Girard, L’Institut national d’études démographiques: histoire et développement (Paris: INED, 1986). 33. “Alexis Carrel, dont la découverte géniale assure par l’artifice de leur culture l’immortalité aux tissus de notre corps périssable, a permis longtemps après sa mort à d’autres savants de cultiver les virus et les cancers. Par ailleurs, quittant comme François Quesnay, médecin et ‘physiocrate’, la biologie pour les études sociales, il créa la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains. Ce fut l’élément initial que recueillit lors de sa naissance l’Institut national d’études démographiques.” Robert Debré, L’Institut national d’études démographiques: statuts et mission, organisation, méthode, travaux, résultats (Paris: INED, 1961), 7. 34. ACP, Box 42, 43, 82. Joseph Durkin’s interviews with Jean Crépin, Robert Gessain, JeanJacques Gillon, André Gros, Jacques Ménétrier, Jean Merlet, Roger Peltier, M. Ruffieux, and Jean Sutter. October-November 1964. See also Jacques Ménétrier, La médecine des fonctions (Paris: Le François, 1974); id., La médecine en mutation (Paris: Casterman, 1970);

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id., Introduction à la médecine fonctionnelle: de la fonction catalytique à la fonction sociale (Paris: Pacomhy, 1954); André Gros, Les conseillers de synthèse (Paris: Société internationale des conseillers de synthèse, 1957); id., Une fonction humaine expérimentale nouvelle en industrie: le conseiller de relation (Paris: Imprimerie de Chaix, 1949). 35. ACP, Box 38, R. Murray, “Occupational Health in Other Countries,” Transactions of the Association of Industrial Medical Officers, no. 3 (1963) (clipping). 36. The INED published several collective studies that were either a continuation of the wartime survey or largely based on it. Half of these studies were authored by the same experts that had worked in the original project, among them Georges Heuyer, Raymond Mande, Henri Piéron, Madame Henri Piéron, Alfred Sauvy, and Jean Sutter. See INED, “Enquête sur le quotient intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire,” Population, no. 3 (1946); id., “Le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire I,” TD, no. 13 (1950); id., “Le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire. II,” TD, no. 23 (1954); id., “Enquête nationale sur le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire. I,” TD, no. 54 (1969); id., “Enquête nationale sur le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire. II,” TD, no. 64 (1973); id., “Enquête nationale sur le niveau intellectuel des enfants d’âge scolaire. III,” TD, no. 83 (1978). 37. Jean Sutter, “Le facteur ‘qualité’ en démographie,” Population, no. 2 (1946): 299–316; id., L’eugénique: problèmes, méthodes, résultats (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950). On Sutter see INED, ed., “Génétique et populations: Hommage à Jean Sutter,” TD, no. 60 (1971); Etienne Lepicard, “De l’eugénique à l’eugénisme scientifique: sur le pas de d’Alexis Carrel, cet inconnu, et de son disciple, Jean Sutter,” in Comités d’éthique à travers le monde 4: recherches en cours 1989, ed. INSERM (Paris: INSERM, 1991), 278–94, 38. INED, ed. “Enquête internationale sur la reprise de la natalité,” Population, no. 3 (1946); Alfred Sauvy and Sully Ledermann, “La guerre biologique (1939–1945): population de l’Allemagne et des pays voisins,” Population, no. 3 (1946): 471–88; Paul Vincent, “Conséquences de six années de guerre sur la population française,” Population, no. 3 (1946): 429–40; id., “Guerre et population,” Population, no. 1 (1947): 9–30: Robert Gessain, “Observations morpho-physiologiques sur des Italiens,” Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie, no. 8 (1947): 80–84; id., “Aspects ethniques et individuelles des mélanges des populations,” TD, no. 8 (1955): 111–30. 39. Robert Gessain, “Preface,” in André Burguière, Bretons de Plozevet (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 11. More or less explicit vindications of Carrel’s holistic approach to the study of human problems can be found in the work of his former coworkers. See, for example, Félix-André Missenard, Barbares ou humains (Rio de Janeiro: Atlantica Editora, 1942); id., In Search of Man, trans. Lawrence G. Blochman (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1957); id., Vers un homme meilleur … par la science expérimentale de l’homme (Paris: Librairie Istra, 1967); André Gros, La reconstruction de l’homme (Paris: Plon, 1956); André Gros and Michèle Aumont, La reconstruction du citoyen (Paris: Fayard, 1964). 40. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy (1940–1944) (Paris: Fayard, 1954); Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). 41. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in I. Déak, J. T. Gross, and T. Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 293–324. 42. Robert Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 1873–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1952, repub. 1972). During the occupation Soupault was a surgeon at the Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris. After the liberation he was purged and temporarily suspended from his post. Interview of the author with Claude Debré and Philippe Monod-Broca, Paris, 25 May 1994. 43. Joseph Durkin, Hope for Our Time: Alexis Carrel on Man and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). A French version of Durkin’s book was published as Alexis Carrel, savant mystique, trans. Sam Maggio (Paris: Fayard, 1969). 44. Alexis Carrel, Le voyage de Lourdes, suivi de fragments du journal et de méditations (Paris: Plon, 1949); id., Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie (Paris: Plon, 1950); id., Jour après jour: journal, 1893–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956).

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45. See Albert Bessières, La destinée humaine devant la science: Alexis Carrel, Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, Charles Nicolle (Paris: Editions Spes, 1950); id., Alexis Carrel: le voyageur de Lourdes (Brussels: Foyer Notre dame, 1952); Octavio A. Inglez de Sousa, L’homme tel qu’on peut le connaître: réplique anthroposophique à l’Homme cet inconnu du docteur Alexis Carrel (Geneva: Mongenet, 1950); Fernand Lelotte, ed., Convertis du XXe siècle (Paris: Casterman, 1953); John O‘Brien, Roads to Rome: The Intimate Personal Stories of Converts to the Catholic Faith (New York: MacMillan, 1954); Henriette Delaye Didier Delorme, Alexis Carrel, humaniste chrétien, 1873–1944, Prix Nobel (Paris: Apostolat de la presse, 1963); Jean-Jacques Antier, Alexis Carrel (Paris: Wesmael-Charlier, 1970); id., Carrel cet inconnu (Paris: SOS, 1974); Fabien Jouniaux-Duffresnoy, Sous les yeux du célèbre docteur Alexis Carrel: un miracle à Lourdes (Paris: Liegel, 1974); Jean-Marie Cassagnard, Carrel et Zola devant les miracles à Lourdes (Lourdes: Editions de la grotte, 1975); Léon Levic, Liberté et discipline: commentaires sur Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie d’Alexis Carrel (Paris: La pensée universelle, 1977); Stanley L. Jaki, “Two Lourdes Miracles and a Nobel Laureate: What really Happened?” http://www.petersnet.net, February 1999; Laura Roberts, “Voyage to Truth,” http://www.catholic.net, Mar.–Apr. 1999. 46. Madame Alexis Carrel, “Alexis Carrel y los milagros de Lourdes” Iatria. Revista de la Federación de asociaciones de médicos católicos de la República Argentina, no. 122 (1953): 281–93; Joseph Ribollet, “La fin de Madame Carrel en Argentine,” BAADAC, nos. 22–23 (1989): 7–9. 47. Letter to the author, 28 June 2001. I want to thank the headmaster of the Instituto Alexis Carrel (Río Tercero, Argentina) for informing me on the history of his school. See the institute’s website, http://http://www.itc.com.ar. 48. Most if not all Spanish translations followed the English, not the French, version of Carrel’s book. In Argentina the book was published as La incógnita del hombre (Buenos Aires: Joaquín Gil Editor, 1942, repub. 1943, 1946, 1949, 1953). His ideas were also widely circulated by local medical journals as well as the popular monthly Selecciones—the Spanish-language edition of Reader’s Digest. 49. On eugenics in Argentina see Andrés H. Reggiani, “La ecología institucional de la eugenesia: repensando las relaciones entre biomedicina y política en la Argentina de entreguerras,” in Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, ed. M. Miranda and G. Vallejo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005), 273–310; Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and the Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). On the reception of Carrel’s ideas in Argentina see Andrés Reggiani, “El científico frente a la ‘crisis’ de la civilización: una aproximación a La incógnita del hombre, de Alexis Carrel,” Cuicuilco (Mexico) 11, no. 31 (2004): 27–48. 50. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values, 399; Newton, Uncommon Friends, 278, 340. 51. “ ‘Journées Carrel’ à Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, 10–11 Mai 1985,” BAADAC, no. 18 (1985). The association’s board of directors was made up of Joseph Ribollet, Joseph Carrel-Billiard, Jean-Jacques Gillon (a former member of the Fondation Carrel), Jeanne Boissier, Philippe Montbord, and Lucette Borget. Jeanne Boissier, “Comment est née notre association?” BAADAC, no. 21 (1988): 9–19. 52. Lindbergh, Autobiography, 399–400. 53. Robert Chambers and Joseph Durkin, eds., Papers of the Alexis Carrel Centennial Conference (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Pres, 1973). 54. Jean-Jacques Gillon, “Il y a cent ans naissait Alexis Carrel,” La croix, 28 June 1973; Gaëtan Sanvoisin, “Le centenaire d’Alexis Carrel,” Ecrits de Paris, no. 327 (1973): 33–44; Jean Ferrara, “Alexis Carrel, avait-iI raison?” Science et vie, no. 672 (1973): 34–38; Albert Camelin, “Centenaire d’Alexis Carrel,” LM, no. 229 (1973): 1067–79; René Olivier, “L’homme cet inconnu d’Alexis Carrel toujours un best-seller,”Ecrits de Paris, no. 400 (1974): 53–61. 55. See BAADAC, no. 17 (1984), no. 20 (1988), no. 21 (1988). 56. “Eighth Alexis Carrel Conference, Ricksgränsen, Sweden, 14–16 June 2001,” http:// www.provatis.se/alexiscarrel; letter to the author, 1 July 2001. I am grateful to Stefano

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Nazari for his information on the Alexis Carrel Foundation for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Research. 57. See the website of the Rennes-based organization Sacrée Terre, “Collectif contre Alexis Carrel et ses clones,” http://www.sacreeterre.org, undated. 58. Anthony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 321. 59. Sayyid Qutb, al-Islam wa Mushkilat al-Hadara (Islam and the Problems of Civilization) (Dar al-Shuruq: Beirut and Cairo, 1980). 60. Youssef Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 127–49. Brief references to Carrel in the literature on Islamic fundamentalism can also be found in Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talatoff, eds., Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam: A Reader (London: Palgrave, 2002); Johan H. Mueleman, ed., Islam in the Era of Globalization: Muslim Attitudes towards Modernity and Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Carl L. Brown, Religion and the State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Roxane L. Euben, Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Robert D. Lee, Jr., Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (New York: Westview Press, 1997). 61. The “Gayssot” law of 13 July 1990 forbade racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic acts. The law of 29 January 2001 acknowledged the Armenian genocide. The “Taubira” law of 21 May 2001 recognized the enslavement of African, Asian, and Native American populations as a “crime against humanity.” The “Mekachera” law of 23 February 2005 acknowledged the patriotic services to France of the Harkis and other repatriated settlers from Algeria. For a criticism of these lois mémorielles see the dossier “Les mémoires, la loi et les historiens,” http://www.editionscomplexe.com. 62. For a reappraisal of Tocqueville and the colonial question see Olivier Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’état colonial (Paris: La découverte, 2004).

Conclusion

Alexis Carrel as a Lieu de mémoire

 If all history writing is, in one way or another, contemporary history—and I believe it is—then any historical study of Carrel should take into account, if not start with, the recent controversies. Such a viewpoint enables us to approach our subject in terms of the highly disputed lieu de mémoire, which Pierre Nora defines as “any significant entity, whether material or non material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”1 Despite his early expatriation in the United States and lifelong conflicts with his fellow countrymen, Carrel became a “symbolic element in the memorial heritage” of French conservatives and Catholics, who after 1945 came to see the savant as a crusader fighting the ills of modern civilization—materialism, rationalism, secularism, individualism, and cultural relativism. Either in its French version or in the more recent appropriation by Muslim thinkers, this “Occidentalist” narrative has revealed the unpredictable and versatile meanings that Carrel can elicit among those who perceive the Western model of the civilizing process as a force dissolving time-honored values and collective identities. Carrel’s criticism of progressive ideologies—in fact, of politics tout court—fit well with the mood of many French people, from old-fashioned conservatives to right-wing extremists, who were inclined to see the country’s past as a series of naïve attempts to make good the promise of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Against this view rises a militant counternarrative that portrays him as a symbol of an antimodern tradition that has surfaced time and again from the Dreyfus Affair to Le Pen. This reading of Carrel scored an important point when it convinced the French public that there was a straight line between L’homme cet inconnu’s racist proposals, Vichy’s anti-Semitic Notes for this section begin on page 185.

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policies, and the Front national’s xenophobia. Thereafter, Carrel could no longer be honored by having his name displayed in public places. Despite its highly partisan character and occasional lack of concern for historical evidence, this “human rights memory” has the merit of challenging a myth by triggering a broader debate on France’s history of scientific racism. As often happens, it was these critics that exposed publicly and vociferously what historians had known all along but failed to get across the society at large—namely that Carrel’s responsibilities as a vulgarizer of racism had been overshadowed by his medical achievements and standing as a spiritualistic thinker. There is, finally, what I will call a “scientific expertise” memory, which has construed an image of Carrel within the narrowest confines of laboratory work and shunned any discussion of cultural and political issues. In France this reading has begun to change as a result of the debates on the human genome and the eugenics potential of race-based genetic screening and human cloning. Nothing like this, however, has happened in US scholarship, where Carrel remains almost absent from the histories of eugenics, and where scientists often speak about some of his discredited claims as if they were proven facts. Disciplinary boundaries and specific epistemological cultures have made this narrative one of the most resistant to revision. Let us take up this issue and summarize the arguments made in earlier chapters.

What Do Scientists Do When They (Say They) Do Science? Carrel first became famous as an experimental surgeon. He pioneered the fields of cardiovascular surgery, organ transplantation, and cell culture as an explorer venturing into new territories and breaking new trails. In this sense, he was still rooted in the “old” model of medical science based on individual savants working more or less on their own. In his purest form he was also a laboratory scientist, largely unconcerned with the possibilities of immediate application of his work. He left that task to others. That some of his work took decades to be introduced as standard medical practice is owed to several factors. Many scientists either were unconvinced by what he claimed he was doing or were unable to replicate his results in their own laboratories. This discrepancy was due in part to the fact that back then few institutions enjoyed the research facilities that Carrel had at his disposal. It was also caused by his tendency to carry out or present his experiments in a theatrical manner, making the laboratory a stage on which science’s struggle against disease was displayed for public consumption—and personal enhancement. This style of self-promotion was resented by many of his peers, who would have preferred a more orthodox way of making the new discoveries known to the nonexpert. They feared that by drawing the public’s

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attention to the laboratory Carrel would turn scientific work into a media event differing little from other forms of public entertainment. Negative reactions to his style of self-promotion, when they were not personally motivated, revealed many scientists’ fear of seeing their independence and “objectivity” hindered by the interference of factors that, as they saw it, had little to do with the pursuit of science for science’s sake. This was an important issue in a market economy like the United States, especially at a time when research universities and new disciplines were, as they are today, actively competing for private funding—and the brightest scholars. Finally, Carrel’s publicity-prone style raised the issue of the problematic relationship between scientific expertise and vulgarization at a time when science was on its way to professionalization and gradual integration with the national interest. This approcah had several outcomes. It secured him an important audience that was willing to accept his technical expertise as a sound basis for making claims on public issues and politics, and it enabled him to lobby influential individuals into supporting his project of sociobiological engineering. All this, however, was achieved at a high cost because many of his peers disapproved of his illiberal views as well as his new literary interests. If anything, their reactions reveal the unstable status of the savant as popularizer and public intellectual in the age of scientific specialization and fragmentation of knowledge—the more so in Carrel’s case, because he could not be easily ignored or dismissed as a charlatan. From this point of view, Man, the Unknown was both an example of elite response to the “crisis” and a product of a new and more ambitious genre of popular science that, unlike its nineteenth-century predecessor, mixed pedagogical concerns with political engagement. To explain Carrel’s literary and public interests, we must turn to the sociological and epistemological changes undergone by Western medical practice in the half century after the Pasteurian revolution. Any overview should take into account the growth of empirical disciplines and the rise of a narrower conception of science, with the ensuing replacement of the Enlightenment ideal of the cultivated scholar by the specialized expert. Just as in society and politics, modernization bred cultural despair among scientists—even those that most benefited from this process, like Carrel. Thus, as research was incorporated into industry and science became a way of living, many savants developed a longing for an idyllic past in which the pursuit of knowledge was imagined as a “pure” and noble undertaking freed from the demands of industrial or commercial exploitation.2 Intensified by economic hardship, a surplus of degreeholders, and fears of “bureaucratization,” the malaise within European and American medicine reached its climax in the 1930s with the proliferation of unorthodox biomedical trends. Carrel’s diagnosis of the crisis and his call for a comprehensive human science were rooted in this tradition. We need not be concerned by the apparent contradiction between his

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highly specialized, laboratory-based training and his critique of overspecialization and scientific reductionism—recent work shows that this was the case with many biomedical holists.3 In fact, it could be argued that the more specialized scientific practice became, the more intense became the unease about the increasing estrangement from the social context.

Eugenics as Politics by Other Means What singles out Carrel’s holistic proposals is not so much the racist clichés with which he interpreted humanity’s fall, nor the endorsement of bizarre paranormal phenomena, but the way in which he combined them with masterfully simplified biomedical descriptions and a program of human regeneration—all in one stroke. The “total” approach to solving human problems advocated by Man, the Unknown and embodied in the FFEPH had at least two potentially dangerous dimensions. One of them was that of a politicized science conceived to serve the enlightened power and the goal of human regeneration—this understood in Social-Darwinistic terms. Carrel’s critics did not exaggerate when they warned that his utopian elite would lead to a new Comité de salut public—only this time ruled by merciless scientists. But in fact, the science of man bore many more disturbing features than the idea of a world ruled by Aristotelian monk-savants, for it was the dimension of eugenics that tied the entire project together. Carrel’s eugenics may be seen as an authoritarian form of technocratic antipolitics. This form of biopolitics offered both the state and the professional experts “unlimited powers to eradicate disease and improve the health of future generations.”4 Like other contemporary proponents of race hygiene, Carrel saw eugenics as “politics by other means,” that is, a way of moving beyond the sectarian and divisive party politics and making science—and medicine above all—the solution to social problems. This entailed the substitution of biological categories for those of political economy and civil society. He was uninterested in how societies chose to organize themselves as long as the elites did not lose sight of their higher duties. However, as he also made clear, democratic polities were ill equipped to achieve the goal of human renewal because their principles could not be reconciled with the idea that societal and political systems should be organized according to biological criteria. Democracies were “false” because they ignored the laws of nature. Few scientists have ever had the opportunity to shape public policy as Carrel did under Vichy. The FFEPH did not become the “universal brain” advocated in Man, the Unknown, nor did it carry out Carrel’s eugenics to its full extent. So far, there is no evidence of compulsory sterilizations and abortions, castrations, euthanasia, or other forms of negative eugenics ever practiced under its name—and it is very unlikely that scholars will

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find any. Nor is there any conclusive evidence showing that Carrel was responsible for the death of thousands of mentally ill patients during the occupation. These people died because of their living conditions—insufficient food and medical care—and the utter neglect of those who should have looked after them. Comparing Carrel with the Nazi physicians may be a useful device to attract the public’s attention and raise awareness about the links between science and ideology, but it will not take us far in our understanding of the scientist and the policies that he inspired. I suggest that an alternative way of exploring the issue of Carrel’s wartime behavior and its connection with his earlier proposals is to think of the foundation as an attempt to turn wartime France into a huge laboratory of sociobiological experimentation and human engineering. The foundation was Carrel’s great monument of institution-building and a relatively successful experiment in state-sponsored biomedical holism. Despite the vagueness of its goal of “improving the population,” it accomplished remarkable results and left an enduring legacy in France’s postwar population science. The foundation’s approach to solving social problems was not only holistic but also distinctively technocratic. As such, it must be seen as another example of wartime experiments of social and economic planning, and more specifically, as a “knowledge-generating” institution—to use Theda Skocpol’s terminology—that supplied Vichy’s policymakers with vital information for reshaping France’s social and demographic structure “from above.”5 Moreover, the multidisciplinary outlook of its knowledge-bearing experts furnished the state with the closest thing to an overall picture of France’s human problems. The fact that the foundation’s published work was largely phrased in the language of rationalization, efficiency, and scientific expertise rather than that of Carrel’s vague philosophical humanism not only made it easier for its experts to outlive Vichy but also secured them a leading role in the postwar reconstruction. The foundation, or some of its experts, also attempted to pursue a far more dangerous biopolitics. Like their counterparts in other countries, French eugenicists urged the state to use their putatively objective knowledge of genetics to solve France’s human problems. They committed their technical expertise to the goal of a biologically sound public policy, in some cases advising interference in human reproduction in order to increase the frequency of socially good genes in the population and decrease that of bad ones. Although the more radical proposals of the foundation’s eugenicists were not carried out, the shadow of this technocratic biopolitics still hangs over contemporary French discussions of the social implications of genetic research. The fear that eugenics could be resurrected under the guise of the human genome project was clearly expressed at the exhibition “La Vie en Kit” (life in a test tube), staged at La Défense in the spring of 1991. Amidst displays of molecular genetics and the human genome project, a prominently posted statement warned visitors that the generation

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following Nazism “is giving the world the tools of eugenics beyond the wildest Hitlerian dreams.” As the worldwide apprehension aroused by the mapping of the human genome and cloning research reveals, unease over the prospect of modern genetics “sliding” into eugenics is not limited to France. A case in point is the polemic triggered by the human genome project proposed in July 1988 by the European Commission. The document’s emphasis on a “predictive medicine” that would limit expensive treatments and make Europe more competitive raised a “neo-eugenic flag” in the minds of many European deputies. The West German Green Benedikt Härlin, for example, warned that “eugenic tendencies and goals” lay concealed under the alleged intention to protect people from contracting and transmitting genetic diseases. Under the terms presented by the project, he stated, the use of human genetic information would often involve eugenic decisions about what are “normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, viable and non-viable forms of the genetic makeup of individual human beings before and after birth.” Implicit in Härlin’s criticism of the European Commission’s report was a warning that eugenics might sneak through the back door of market economics: the more costly medicine becomes the greater the likelihood that taxpayers will refuse to pay for the care of those singled out as genetically predisposed to acute disease or disability. He was also suggesting that the new biotechnologies might open the door to a “modern test tube eugenics” far “more radical and totalitarian” than its crude Nazi predecessor.6 In the age of DNA profiling, cloning, and test tube babies, much of what New York University sociologist Troy Duster first predicted on the eve of the Human Genome Project has come true. The recent resurgence of race as an issue in genetics and medicine, and the deployment of human molecular genetics in such sensitive areas as crime and behavior, illustrate the extent to which eugenics continues to influence welfare reform, criminal justice, and public health policies, thus perpetuating the myth that race is a genetic trait and that problems stemming from racial inequality can be fixed biologically.7 Daniel Kevles reminds us that there is no direct path from yesterday’s eugenics to today’s genetics. Yet, he also admits that since the unveiling of the structure of the DNA molecule, the invention of the technique of recombinant DNA, and the establishment of the complete map of the human genome comprising the DNA sequence of all the 100,000 human genes, together with cloning research, biological science has produced a staggering mass of genetic information. The ethical challenges posed by modern human genetics and biotechnology “lie in the control, diffusion, and use of that information within the context of a market economy.”8 The lessons of the past have made democratic polities with strong civic organizations particularly sensitive to any attempt that seeks to institutionalize a biopolitics along potentially discriminatory lines. And yet, history also teaches us that the quasi-universal belief in the dominant role of

Alexis Carrel as a lieu de mémoire   185

biological heredity as shaper of human beings led to the introduction of eugenic sterilizations in Progressive-Era America and Social Democratic Scandinavia and their subsequent application on a massive scale in Nazi Germany. That belief was embedded in a body of scientific knowledge, institutions, and scientific styles of speech and writing. From this perspective, Carrel can be taken as a reminder that science is always political, not only because its practitioners have their partisan and ideological preferences, but also because they must always choose how to go about doing science—by what means and to what ends. Science is also political “whenever the objects under investigation are matters of vital human interest”—such as the work undertaken by Carrel’s foundation. Most importantly, science is political when scientists give in to the temptation of engineering human souls.

Notes 1. Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Vol. I: ������������� Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii. 2. Robert Proctor, Value Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 264. 3. See Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz, eds., Greater than the Parts: Holism and Biomedicine, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7–20. 5. Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, “Introduction,” in States, Social Knowledge and the Origins of Modern Social Policies, ed. D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. 6. Cited in Daniel Kevles, “From Eugenics to Genetic Manipulation,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 313–16. 7. Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics. 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). �������������� See also JeanNoël Missa and Charles Susanne, eds., De l’eugénisme d’état à l’eugénisme privé (Paris and Brussels: Deboeck et Larcier, 1999). 8. Kevles, “From Eugenics to Genetic Manipulation,” 316.

Sources and Bibliography

 Archives Alexis Carrel Papers. Georgetown University Library. Washington, D.C. Archives nationales. Paris. Assistance publique. Paris. Charles A. Lindbergh Papers. Yale University Library. Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Rockefeller Archive Center. Tarrytown, NY. Rockefeller University Archives. Rockefeller Archive Center. Tarrytown, NY.

Research Libraries Academia nacional de medicina. Buenos Aires. Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine. Nanterre. Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine. Paris. Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. Paris. Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. Paris. Facultad de ciencias médicas. Buenos Aires. Institut d’histoire de la médecine. Paris. Institut d’histoire du temps présent. Cachan. Institut national d’études démographiques. Paris. Ministère des affaires sociales. Paris. New York Public Library. New York. Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin. Berlin. Yale Medical School. New Haven.

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Works by Alexis Carrel Nonmedical “The Future Progress of Medicine.” Scientific Monthly, July 1925, 54–58. “Tuffier.” Revue de Paris 39 (1932): 347–59. “A Tribute to a Great Physician.” Opinion 3 (1932): 28. “An Outline of Notes Arranged for the Use of a Few Individuals Meeting to Form a Nucleus of a Thinking Center for Human Problems.” 1934/1937. Georgetown University Library. “Au sujet d’une institution destinée à améliorer l’esprit des hommes civilisés.” 1935. Georgetown University Library. “La nouvelle Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.” 1935. Georgetown University Library. L’homme cet inconnu. Paris: Plon, 1935. Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935. “Un centre de recherches pour l’amélioration de la race humaine.” 1936. Georgetown University Library. “La science de l’homme.” 1936. Georgetown University Library. “The Mystery of Death.” In Medicine and Mankind: Lectures to the Laity Delivered at the Academy of Medicine of New York, ed. Iago Galdston, 197–217. London and New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936. “Institute of Man.” 1936/1938. Georgetown University Library. Der Mensch, das unbekannte Wesen. Stuttgart: Deutche Verlags-Anstalt, 1937. “Council for Human Problems.” 1937. Georgetown University Library. “Androtechnie.” 1937. Georgetown University Library. “The Need of a New Knowledge of Man.” Commonweal 26 (1937): 13. “Le rôle futur de la médecine.” Bruxelles médicale 17 (1937): 1336–39. “The Making of Civilized Men.” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, no. 30 (1937). Foreword to Félix-André Missenard, L’homme et le climat. Paris: Plon, 1937. “The Problem of Prolongation of Life.” Good Health 73 (1938): 73, 104. Foreword to M. S. Gilbert, Biography of the Unborn. Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1938. Man, the Unknown (new preface). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. “Breast Feeding for Babies.” RD 34 (1939): 1. “Married Love.” RD 35 (1939): 12. “Do You Know How To Live?” RD 35 (1939): 19. “Charting the Future: A Preliminary Report on Proposed Institute of Man.” 1940. Georgetown University Library. “Work in the Laboratory of Your Private Life.” RD 37 (1940): 21. “What Type of Physical Fitness for America?” New York State Journal of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation 5 (1941): 2. “Prayer Is Power.” RD 38 (1941): 227. “Le pouvoir de la prière.” Journal de Genève, 4–5 May 1941.

Sources and Bibliography   189

“To Develop Men.” Think 7 (1942): 16. “La science de l’homme.” France: revue de l’Etat nouveau, December 1942, 682–87. La incógnita del hombre. Buenos Aires: Joaquín Gil Editor, 1942, repub. 1943, 1946, 1949, 1953. La construction des hommes civilisés. Paris: Collège technique Estienne, 1942. La prière. Paris: Plon, 1944. Man, the Unknown. West Drayton, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1948. Le voyage de Lourdes, suivi de fragments du journal et de méditations. Paris: Plon, 1949. Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie. Paris: Plon, 1950. The Voyage to Lourdes. Trans. Virgilia Peterson. New York: Harper, 1950. Jour après jour: journal, 1893–1944. Paris: Plon, 1956.

Medical “Stomac biloculaire.” LM 82 (1896): 54. “Une épidémie intérieure de varicelle dans un asile d’enfants: arthrite varicellique.” PM 11 (1897): 85–88. “Gastrostomie pour néoplasme de l’œsophage.” LM 89 (1898): 375–76. “Anévrisme artérioso-veineux du creux poplité.” LM 89 (1898): 413–14. “Calcul vésical et actinomycose ano-rectale.” LM 89 (1898): 522–23. “Cancer du pylore et gastro-entéro-anastomose.” LM 89 (1898): 553–54. “Mastoïdite simulant une fièvre typhoïde.” LM 90 (1899): 200. “Gastro-entéro-anastomose par le procédé transmeso-colique de von Hacker.” LM 90 (1899): 415–17. “Cancer de la langue ayant envahi le plancher de la bouche et la moitié gauche du maxillaire inférieur.” LM 91 (1899): 379. “Cancer de l’amygdale.” LM 91 (1899): 485–86. “Ostéosarcome de l’extrémité inférieure du fémur.” LM 91 (1899): 557–58. “Cancer du pylore: gastro-entéro-anastomose postérieure.” LM 92 (1899): 20. “Désarticulation de la hanche.” LM 92 (1899): 23. “Tuberculose mammaire.” Gazette des hôpitaux de Paris 72 (1899): 45–53. “Anévrisme poplité.” Gazette des hôpitaux de Toulouse 13 (1899): 13, 35. “Fibromes utérins.” LM 93 (1900): 52. “Calcification du foie.” LM 93 (1900): 89. “Trois cas de goître avec troubles respiratoires.” LM 93 (1900): 271–72. “Cholécystite calculeuse: cholécystostomie, guérison.” LM 93 (1900): 561–62. “Kyste demoïde extrait de la vessie par la voie uréthrale.” LM 94 (1900): 93–94. Le goître cancéreux. Paris: Baillière, 1901. “La technique opératoire des anastomoses vasculaires et la transplantation des viscères.” LM 98 (1902): 859–64. “Anastomose bout à bout de la jugulaire et de la carotide primitive.” LM 99 (1902): 114–16. “Présentation d’un chien porteur d’une anastomose artério-veineuse.” LM 99 (1902): 152–53. “Un procédé rapide de résection costale.” LM 99 (1902): 184–86.

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“Les anastomoses vasculaires, leurs techniques opératoires et leurs indications.” Revue médicale du Canada 8 (1904): 29–32. “Les anastomoses vasculaires et leur technique opératoire.” Union médicale du Canada 33 (1904): 521–27. “La transplantation des veines et ses applications chirurgicales.” PM 13 (1905): 843–44. “The transplantation of organs: a preliminary communication.” JAMA 45 (1905): 1645–46. “Anastomosis and transplantation of blood vessels.” American Medicine 10 (1905): 284. “Transplantation biterminale complète d’un segment de veine sur une artère.” CRSB 49 (1905): 412–13. “Extirpation et replantation de la glande tyroïde avec réversion de la circulation.” CRSB 49 (1905): 413–14. “La réversion de la circulation dans les veines valvulées.” CRSB 49 (1905): 518–19. “De la transplantation uniterminale des veine sur les artères.” CRSB 49 (1905): 596–97. “Circulation et sécrétion d’un rein transplanté.” CRSB 49 (1905): 669–70. “The surgery of blood vessels and its application to the changes of circulation and transplantation of organs.” JHHB 17 (1906): 236–37. “Anastomoses des vaisseaux sanguins par la méthode de Patching dans la transplantation du rein.” CRSB 51 (1906): 276–78. “Transplantation de vaisseaux conservés au froid (en ‘cold storage’) pendant plusieurs jours.” CRSB 51 (1906): 572. “Résultats d’une replantation de cuisse.” CRSB 60 (1906): 378–79. “Transplantation des deux reins d’un chien sur une chienne dont les deux reins sont extirpés.” CRSB 60 (1906): 465–66. “Technique de la transplantation homoplastique de l’ovaire.” CRSB 60 (1906): 466–68. “Résultats éloignés de la transplantation veineuse uniterminale.” CRSB 60 (1906): 529–30. “Augmentation artificielle de la circulation dans les glandes pathologiques.” CRSB 60 (1906): 582–83. “Artério-sclérose par modification chirurgicale de la circulation.” CRSB 60 (1906): 730–31. “L’exclusion longitudinale des vaisseaux et ses résultats.” CRSB 60 (1906): 984–86. “Méthode simple pour établir une fistule d’Eck.” CRSB 60 (1906): 1104–06. “Résultats du ’patching’ des artères.” CRSB 60 (1906): 1009–11. “Le Hunterian Laboratory of Experimental Medicine.” PM 14 (supplement) (1906): 821–23. “L’enseignement de la médecine opératoire au Hunterian Laboratory of Experimental Medicine.” PM 15 (supplement) (1907): 1–3. “Résection de l’aorte abdominale et hétéro-transplantation.” CRSB 62 (1907): 131–32. “Transplantation de la cuisse d’un chien sur un autre chien.” CRSB 62 (1907): 1035–36. “Au sujet de conservation des artères en ‘cold storage’.” CRSB 62 (1907): 1173–75. “The surgery of blood vessels.” JHHB 18 (1907): 18–28. “Hetero-transplantation of blood vessels preserved in cold storage.” JEM 9 (1907): 226–28. “Transplantation of the kidney with implantation of the renal vessels in the aorta and vena cava.” Science 25 (1907): 740. “Hetero-transplantation of blood vessels.” Science 25 (1907): 740. “La transfusion directe du sang (méthode de Crile).” LC 1 (1908): 13. “La transplantation des membres.” Revue de chirurgie 21 (1908): 1694–98.

Sources and Bibliography   191

“Greffes expérimentales: rein et membre postérieur.” Bulletin et mémoires de la Société de chirurgie de Paris 34 (1908): 952–54. “Acute calcification of the arteries in a cat with transplanted kidneys.” Proceedings of the New York Pathological Society 7 (1908):199–203. “Transplantation in mass of the kidneys.” JEM 10 (1908): 98–140. “Calcification of the arterial system in a cat with transplanted kidneys.” JEM 10 (1908): 276–82. “Further studies in transplantation of vessels and organs.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 47 (1908): 677–98. “Results of the transplantation of blood vessels, organs and limbs.” JAMA 51 (1908): 1662–67. “Doppelte Nephrektomite und Reimplantation einer Niere.” Archivs für klinische Chirurgie 28 (1909): 378–411. “Chirurgie expérimentale de l’aorte thoracique par la méthode de Meltzer.” Bulletin et mémoires de la Société de chirurgie de Paris 35 (1909): 1337–40. “Résultat éloigné d’une double néphrectomie avec réimplantation d’un rein.”  CRSB 66 (1909): 419. “Résultats de l’arrêt temporaire de la circulation des veines rénales.” CRSB 66 (1909): 527. “Thyroid gland and vascular surgery.” SGO 8 (1909): 606–12. “Note on the production of kidney insufficiency by reduction of the arterial circulation.” Procedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine 6 (1909): 107. “On the experimental surgery of the thoracic aorta and the heart.” Transactions of the American Surgical Association 28 (1910): 243–55. “Experimentelle intrathorakale Chirurgie mittels der Methode von Meltzer und Auer.” BKW 47 (1910): 565–66. “Résultat éloigné de la transplantation des veines sur les artères.” RC 41 (1910): 987–96. “Experimental intrathoracic surgery by the Meltzer and Auer method of intratracheal insufflation.” MRNY 77 (1910): 491–93. “On the experimental surgery of the thoracic aorta and the heart.” Annals of Surgery 52 (1910): 83–95. “Graft of the vena cava on the abdominal aorta.” Annals of Surgery 52 (1910): 462–70. “Peritoneal patching of the aorta.” JEM 12 (1910): 139–45. “Remote results of the transplantation of kidneys and spleen.” JEM 12 (1910): 146–50. “Latent life of arteries.” JEM 12 (1910): 460–86. “Experimental surgery of the aorta by the method of Meltzer and Auer.” JAMA 54 (1910): 28. “The cultivation of tissues of the chick embryo outside the body.” JAMA 55 (1910): 2057–58. “The treatment of wounds.” JAMA 55 (1910): 2148–50. “The ultimate result of a double nephrectomy and the replantation of one kidney.” JEM 14 (1911): 124–25. “Patching of the abdominal aorta with a piece of rubber.” JEM 14 (1911): 126–28. “Rejuvenation of cultures of tissues.” JAMA 57 (1911): 1611. “The preservation of tissues and its applications in surgery.” JAMA 59 (1912): 523–27. “Die Kulture der Gewebe ausserhalb des Organismus.” BKW 48 (1911): 1354–57. “Life of tissues out of the body.” Proceedings of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia 14 (1911): 98. “Le rajeunissement artificiel des cultures des tissus.” CRSB 71 (1911): 401–02.

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“Ultimate results of aortic transplantation.” JEM 15 (1912): 389–92. “Technique for cultivating a large quantity of tissue.” JEM 15 (1912): 393–96. “On the permanent life of tissues outside of the organism.” JEM 15 (1912): 516–28. “Permanent intubation of the thoracic aorta.” JEM 16 (1912): 17–24. “Pure culture of cells.” JEM 16 (1912): 165–68. “La vie manifeste des tissus in vitro: techniques nouvelles et leurs résultats.” PM 20 (1912): 693. “The preservation of tissues and its applications in surgery.” JAMA 59 (1912): 523–27. “Visceral organisms.” JAMA 59 (1912): 2105. “Technique and remote results of vascular anastomoses.” SGO 14 (1912): 246–54. “Results of the permanent intubation of the thoracic aorta.” SGO 15 (1912): 245–48. “Neue Fortschritte in der Kultivierung der Gewebe ausserhalb des Organismus.” BKW 49 (1912): 535–36. “Neue Methoden zum Studium des weiter Lebens on Geweben in Vitro.” Handbuch der biochemichen Arbeitsmethoden 6 (1912): 519–28. “Artificial activation of the growth in vitro of connective tissue.” JEM 17 (1913): 17–24. “Concerning visceral organism.” JEM 18 (1913): 155–61. “Contributions to the study of the mechanism of the growth of connective tissue.” JEM 18 (1913): 287–99. “Variations artificielles de l’activité du tissu conjonctif à l’état de vie autonome.” Montréal médical 1 (1913): 219–22. “Neue Untersuchungen über das selbständige Leben der Gewebe und Organe.” BKW 50 (1913): 1097–1101. “Vie autonome des tissus en dehors de l’organisme: état de tissu conjonctif après deux ans et quatre mois.” BAM 71 (1914): 759–61. “Present condition of a strain of connective tissue twenty-eight months old.” JEM 20 (1914): 1. “Technique of intrathoracic operations.” Transactions of the American Surgical Association 32 (1914): 451–56. “On the technique of intrathoracic operations.” SGO 19 (1914): 226–28. “Experimental operations on the orifices of the heart.” American Journal of Surgery 60 (1914): 1–6. “Present condition of a two-year-old strain of connective tissues.” BKW 51 (1914): 509. “Science has perfected the art of killing. Why not saving?” SGO 20 (1915): 710–11. “Les principes de technique de la stérilisation des plaies.” Archives de medicine et de pharmacie militaries, no. 65 (1916): 489–98. “Cicatrization of wounds. I: The relation between the size of the wound and the rate of its cicatrisation.” JEM 24 (1916): 429–50. “The Carrel-Dakin solution.” American Journal of Pharmacy 89 (1917): 84–88. “On the treatment of war wounds.” Military Surgeon 40 (1917): 479. “Principles of the treatment of wounds.” MRNY 92 (1917): 789–91. “Treatment of infected wounds.” New York State Journal of Medicine 106 (1917): 816. “Remote results of operations on the pulmonary orifice of the heart.” JEM 34 (1920): 441 “Growth-promoting function of leucocytes.” JEM 36 (1922): 385–91. “Les cultures pures de cellules en physiologie.” CRSB 89 (1923): 972–74. “Nouvelle technique pour la culture des tissues.” CRSB 89 (1923): 1017–19.

Sources and Bibliography   193

“A method for the physiological study of tissues in vitro.” JEM 38 (1923): 407–18. “Action of serum on the multiplication of lymphocytes in vitro.” JEM 38 (1923): 513–20. “Measurement of the inherent growth energy of tissues.” JEM 38 (1923): 521–17. “Rôle des tréphones leucocytaires.” CRSB 90 (1924): 29–31. “Energie intrinsèque et énergie résiduelle des tissus.” CRSB 90 (1924): 66–68. “Effet d’un abcès à distance sur la cicatrisation d’une plaie aseptique.” CRSB 90 (1924): 333–35. “Diminution artificielle de la concentration des protéines du plasma pendant la vieillesse.” CRSB 90 (1924): 1005–7. “Résultat éloigné de la section et de la suture d’une valve sigmoïde.” CRSB 90 (1924): 1008. “Cultures pures de fibroblastes provenant de sarcomes fusocellulaires.” CRSB 90 (1924): 1380–82. “The method of tissue culture and its bearing on pathological problems.” BMJ 2 (1924): 140–45. “La malignité de cultures de monocytes du sarcome de Rous.” CRSB 91 (1924): 1067–69. “Action de l’extrait filtré du sarcome de Rous sur les macrophages du sang.” CRSB 91 (1924): 1069–71. “Les tréphones cellulaires et leurs fonctions.” Gazette hebdomadaire des sciences médicales de Bordeaux 45 (1924): 470–71. “Leukocytic trephones.” JAMA 82 (1924): 255–58. “Tissue culture and cell physiology.” Physiological Review 4 (1924): 1–20. “Mechanism of the formation and growth of malignant tumors.” Annals of Surgery 82 (1925): 1–13. “Effets de l’extrait de sarcomes fusocellulaires sur des cultures pures de fibroblastes.” CRSB 92 (1925): 477–79. “Comparaison des macrophages et des macrophages transformés en cellules malignes.” CRSB 92 (1925): 1491. “La genèse de sarcomes.” CRSB 92 (1925): 1491–93. “Des facteurs nécessaires à la genèse d’un sarcome.” CRSB 92 (1925): 1493–95. “La résistance de l’organisme à la formation du sarcome.” CRSB 93 (1925): 10–11. “Mesure de la susceptibilité de l’organisme à la substance de Rous.” CRSB 93 (1925): 12–13. “Sérum sanguine et résistance à la substance de Rous.” CRSB 93 (1925): 185–87. “Action du principe filtrant d’un sarcome de goudron sur des cultures de rate.” CRSB 93 (1925): 491–93. “Le principe filtrant des sarcomes de la poule produits par l’arsenic.” CRSB 93 (1925): 1083–85. “Un sarcome fusocellulaire produit par l’indol et transmissible par un agent filtrant.” CRSB 93 (1925): 1278–80. “Essential characteristics of a malignant cell.” JAMA 84 (1925): 157. “The mechanism of the formation of a sarcoma.” JAMA 84 (1925): 1795–96. “Un sarcome de goudron de faible malignité et transmissible par son extrait filtré.” CRSB 94 (1926): 337–38. “Au sujet de la nutrition des fibroblastes et des cellules épithéliales.” CRSB 94 (1926): 1060–62. “La membrane ondulante des monocytes et des macrophages.” CRSB 94 (1926): 1345–46.

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“Some conditions of the reproduction in vitro of the Rous virus.” JEM 43 (1926): 647–68. “Tissue culture,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 3. 13th. ed. London, 1926, 786. “Etude expérimentale des sarcomes à cellules fusiformes de la poule.” PM 59 (1926): 274–84. Foreword to Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, Equilibres superficiels des solutions colloïdales: étude de biophysique moléculaire. Paris: Masson, 1926. “Things that doctors do not know.” Cancer 4 (1927): 110–15. “Au sujet de la technique de la culture des tissus.” CRSB 96 (1927): 601–3. “Les milieux nutritifs et leur mode d’emploi dans la culture des tissus.” CRSB 96 (1927): 603–6. “La malignité des fibroblastes sarcomateux en culture pure.” CRSB 96 (1927): 1119–21. “Au sujet du sarcome de l’arsenic de Fischer.” CRSB 96 (1927): 1121–24. “La cytologie nouvelle.” CRSB 96 (1927): 1198–1200. “Les propriétés spécifiques des fibroblastes d’un sarcome du rat.” CRSB 96 (1927): 1201–3. “Le rôle des macrophages dans la croissance d’un sarcome du rat.” CRSB 97 (1927): 19–21. Foreword to Albert Fischer, Gewebezüchtung. Handbuch der Biologie der Gewebezellen in Vitro. Munich: Muller et Steinicke, 1927. “Modern techniques of tissue culture and results.” AEZ 6 (1928): 70–81. “The mechanism of senescence.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 4 (1928): 1144–46. “Immortality of animal tissues and its significance.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 18 (1928): 327–29. “The immortality of animal tissue and its significance.” Golden Bank 7 (1928): 787. “La mesure de concentration des ions H des milieux de culture à l’aide de l’électrode de verre.” CRSB 102 (1929): 639–41. “La technique de la culture des tissus en goutte pendante.” CRSB 102 (1929): 742–44. “Nutritional properties of malignant cells.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 68 (1929): 129–32. “De l’étude simultanée de la morphologie des cellules et des conditions de leur milieu.” CRSB 105 (1930): 826–29. “The relations of cells to one another.” In Human Biology and Racial Welfare, ed. E. V. Cowdry, 205–18. New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1930. “Process of wound healing.” Proceedings of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago 8 (1930): 62–66. “Maintien de la constance du milieu dans les cultures de tissus.” CRSB 106 (1931): 7–10. “The new cytology.” Science 73 (1931): 297–303. “Physiological time.” Science 74 (1931): 618–21. “Physiological substratum of malignancy.” Libman Anniversary. Vol. 1 (1932): 289–95. “Die neue Zellenlehre.” AEZ 19 (1937): 21–28. “Technique pour l’étude simultanée des propriétés structurales et fonctionnelles des cellules.” CRSB 117 (1934): 1144–46. “Monocytes as an indicator of certain states of blood serum.” Science 80 (1934): 565–66. “La culture des glandes thyroïdes entières.” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 201 (1935): 14–16. “Le présent et l’avenir de la cytologie expérimentale.” Montréal médical 6 (1932): 37–40. “Culture of whole organs. I: Technique of culture of thyroid gland.” JEM 65 (1937): 515–26.

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“Cultures primaires, secondaires et tertiaires de glandes thyroïdes et cultures de péritoine.” CRSB 69 (1910): 328–31. “Cultures de sarcome en dehors de l’organisme.” CRSB 69 (1910): 332–34. “Seconde génération de celles thyroïdiennes.”  CRSB 69 (1910): 365–66. “Culture in vitro d’un sarcome humain.” CRSB 69 (1910): 367–68. “Cultivation of adult tissues outside of the body.” JAMA 55 (1910): 1379–81. “Human sarcoma cultivated outside of the body.” JAMA 55 (1910): 1732. “Cultivation of tissues in vitro and its techniques.” JEM 13 (1911): 387–96. “Cultivation in vitro of the thyroid gland.” JEM 13 (1911): 416–21. “Cultivation in vitro of malignant tumours.” JEM 13 (1911): 571–75. “An addition to the technique of the cultivation of tissues in vitro.” JEM 14 (1911): 244–47. “On the physico-chemical regulation of the growth of tissues: The effects of the dilution of the medium on the growth of the spleen.” JEM 14 (1911): 244–47. “The growth of tissues of the chick embryo outside the animal body with special reference to the nervous system.” Journal of Experimental Zoology 10 (1911): 63–84. “À propos des cultures ‘in vitro’ des tissus mammifères.” CRSB 70 (1911): 3–4. “Die Technik der Gewerbskultur in vitro.” Handbuch der biochemichen Arbeitsmethoden 5, part 2 (1912): 836–41. Carrel, Alexis, Madame Alexis Carrel, and J. Dumas. Technique of the Irrigation Treatment of Wounds by the Carrel Method. Trans. A. V. S. Lambert. New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1917. Carrel, Alexis, H. D. Dakin, G. Dehelly, and J. Dumas. “Traitement abortif de l’infection des plaies.” BAM 74 (1915): 361–68. Carrel, Alexis, G. Dehelly, and J. Dumas. “Fermeture secondaire des plaies de guerre.” BAM 75 (1916): 32–40. Carrel, Alexis, and G. Dehelly, Le traitement des plaies infectées. Paris: Masson, 1917. The Treatment of Infected Wounds. New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1917. Carrel, Alexis, and Albert H. Ebeling. “The multiplication of fibroblasts in vitro.” JEM 34 (1920): 317–37. “Age and multiplication of fibroblasts.” JEM 34 (1920): 599–623. “Heterogenic serum, age and multiplication of fibroblasts.” JEM 35 (1922): 17–38. “Pure culture or large mononuclear leukocytes.” JEM 36 (1922): 365–77. “Action of a shaken serum on homologous fibroblasts.” JEM 36 (1922): 399–403. “Heat and growth-inhibiting action of serum.” JEM 36 (1922): 647–53. “Leukocyte secretion.” JEM 36 (1922): 654–59. “Tréphones embryonnaires.” CRSB 89 (1923): 1142. “Survie et croissance des tissus in vitro.” CRSB 89 (1923): 1144–46. “Action du sérum sanguin sur les lymphocytes.” CRSB 89 (1923): 1261. “Tréphones leucocytaires et leur origine.” CRSB 89 (1923): 1266. “Antagonistic growth principles of serum and their relation to old age.” JEM 38 (1923): 419–25. “Survival and growth of fibroblasts in vitro.” JEM 38 (1923): 487–97. “Action on fibroblasts of extracts of homologous and heterologous tissues.” JEM 38 (1923): 499–511. “Antagonistic growth-activating and growth-inhibiting principles in serum.” JEM 37 (1923): 653–58.

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Carrel, Alexis, G. M. Meyers, and Phoebus A. Levene. “The influence of the removal of fragments of the intestinal tract on the character of nitrogen metabolism. II: The removal of the intestine.” American Journal of Physiology 25 (1910): 439–55. “The influence of the removal of fragments of the gastro-intestinal tract on the character of nitrogen metabolism. III: The excision of the stomach.” American Journal of Physiology 26 (1910): 369–80. Carrel, Alexis, and Morel. “Opération de Pawlow.” LM 99 (1902): 12. Carrel, Alexis, P. K. Olitsky and P. H. Long. “Multiplication du virus de la stomatite vésiculaire du cheval dan des cultures de tissus.” CRSB 98 (1928): 827–28. Carrel, Alexis, and A. Pic. “Contribution à l’étude des troubles fonctionnels rythmiques associés au phénomène respiratoire de Cheyne-Stokes.” Province médicale 11 (1897): 277–85, 291–93, 325–27, 337–41. Carrel, Alexis, and T. M. Rivers. “La fabrication du vaccin in vitro.” CRSB 96 (1927): 848–50. Carrel, Alexis, and Rochet. “Aï douloureux de la portion carpienne des tendons courtextenseur et long abducteur d’un pouce.” Archives provinciales de chirurgie 7 (1898): 7, 634–38. Carrel, Alexis, and T. Tuffier. “Patching and section of the pulmonary orifice of the heart.” JEM 20 (1914): 3–8.

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Index

 A Academy of Medicine (Paris), 51, 110, 129 Academy of Sciences (Paris), 161 Ackerman, Jules, 44, 56n64 Action française, 46 al-Hasan, Abu, 171 al-Nadawi, “Ali,” 171 Alexis Carrel Association for Integral Medicine, 170 Alexis Carrel Conferences on Chronic Trasplant Dysfunction and Arterosclerosis, 170 Alexis Carrel Foundation for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Research, 170–171 Alexis Carrel School of Medicine, 2, 5 Alexis Carrel Street, 4 Algeria, 171 government, 7 Ali, Tariq, 7 Allendy, René, 62 Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation, 135–136, 137, 165 alternative medicine, 61 therapies, 15 Ambulance Carrel. See Rond Royal, 47 American Ambulance Volunteer Corps, 96, 103 American Breeders Association, 65, 76, 80n25 American sociobiology, 6 Americanization, 60 amnesty laws (1951,1953), 168 anastomosis, 33, 34, 36 anti-Americanism, 77 anti-Malthusian laws, 138 anticlericalism, 12, 13–16 Antier, Jean-Jacques, 5 antisepsis, 50 antiseptics, 49 antivivisectionist campaign, 35–36 Apel des 250, 4

Apinac, 139 applied social research, 135 applied sociobiological research, 113 Aron, Robert, 60, 168 Assistance publique de Paris, 110, 119 Association des amis du docteur Alexis Carrel in Nantes, 170 attack on scientism, 16 Augagneur, Victor, 19, 46 auto-chir. See automobile chirurgicale automobile chirurgicale, 51 B Bailly, Marie, 17, 18, 19 Bakhmeteff, Boris, 51, 58 Barthe, René, 147, 149 Beck, Carl, 20 Ben-Abi, Malek. See Islamic fundamentalism Bergson, Henri, 76 Billoux, François, 162, 164 biological constitution, 64 decay, 62 individuality, 34, 40 organization of work process, 149 personality, 40 renewal, 160 biomedical thought, 69 biopolitics, 73, 167, 182, 183, 184 racial, 68, 138 technocratic, 183 biotechnology, 184 biotypology, 139, 142, 144, 150 biotypological studies, 143 Italian, 141 birthrate, 66, 132–133, 135, 137, 138, 145 Blond, George, 77 Boas, Franz, 76 Boissarie, Gustave, 15–16, 18 Boll, Marcel, 62 Bonnafé, Lucien, 3

234   God's Eugenicist

Bourgeois, Jean, 134–135, 166 patchwork, 134 Bouvier, J.B., 129 Boverat, Fernand, 135–136 Brand, Karl, 71–72 British Medical Association, 39 British Trade Union Congress, 167 Buchman, Frank, 89 Bulletin bibliographique, 128 Bunau-Varilla, Maurice, 163 Bureau de constations médicales. See Medical Bureau, 13 Burrows, Montrose T., 37, 38 C Cabanès, Augustin, 60 Cahiers de la Fondation française pour l’études des problèmes humains, 113, 114 cinema, 142–143 state-sponsored biomedical, 183 Cambier, Jean-Pierre, 2, 7 Canada, 19–20, 22 cancer research, 37 Candide, 77 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 21 carnet de santé, 129 Carrel, Alexis antidemocratic feelings, 66–67, 95 as a collaborationist, 159, 161–162, 164 as a Nazi sympathizer, 113 as Catholic, 12, 16 as homme de lettres. See Reader’s Digest as mystic savant, 160 as public intellectual and popularizer, 181 biopolitics, 169 concours, 12, 19 critique of modern civilization, 104 economic humanism, 92 eugenics, 3, 6, 63, 68–69, 73, 77, 86, 182 eurocentrism, 7 experimental research, 32 experimental surgeon, 31, 180 experimental surgery, 11, 38 experimental work, 33 failure of colleague recognition, 20–21, 44, 50–51 fascism, 66–67, 77, 96, 169 gender roles, 69, 137–138 holism, 63 holistic proposals, 182 ill-health and death, 159–160, 162 laboratory atmosphere of, 40–41, 88 New York City, 23–24, 45 one hundredth birthday, 170

political isolation, 160 postwar rehabilitation, 168 racists views, 70, 73, 169 scientific career, 32 self-promotion, 180 son of New York City, 45 spiritualistic philosophy, 168 as visionary humanist, 169 World War I wartime duties, 46–52 worldview, 73, 104 Carrel Flask, 39, 54n35 Carrel’s clones, 171 Carrel, Ann-Marie. See de la Motte, AnneMarie-Laure-Pétronille Gourlez Carrel-Dakin method, 48, 49, 50 Carson, Anton Julius, 95 Catholic Church. See Lourdes Catholic World, 76 cells cancerous, 32 cultivation, 37 culture, 32, 180 in vitro cultivation, 36–37 research, 32 Centre d’études des problèmes humains, 60, 91–92, 163 centre d’orientation professionnelle, 146, 147 Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), 6, 112, 127, 129, 164, 166 Century Club (New York City), 51, 63 Cercle pour la défense de la vie, de la nature et de l’animal. See Front National Chantiers de la jeunesse, 105, 145 Chappert, Jean, 143–144 body morphology, 143–144 myth of the healthy peasant, 144 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 13–14, 60 Chevalier, Louis, 140 Chicago, 20, 33 College of Physicians and Surgeons, 20 child neuropsychiatry, 146 children’s hospital of Brévannes, 111 Chirac, Jacques, 4 Christian revolution. See Oxford Group for Moral rearmament cicatrisations ultra-rapides (very fast healing), 16 City College (New York), 43, 45 classes et écoles de perfectionnement, 145 Clifford, Reverend James, 51, 63 cloning research, 184 Club de l’horloge, 6 Cole, Rufus, 21, 28n51 collective gardens (jardins collectifs), 106, 129 collective thinking, 167 Collier’s, 45

Index

Collin, Rémy, 61 Comité de salut public, 182 Comité médical de la résistance, 161, 165 comité(s) d’organisation, 149, 150 Commissariat à la jeunesse, 110 Commission de ravitaillement alimentaire (Commission on Food Supply), 108 Commission on War Damages and Reparations, 165 Compiègne, 47–48, 49 comprehensive human science, 181 Confédération générale des associations des families nombreuses, 135, 139 conferences Chantiers de la jeunesse of Puy, 140–141 The Construction of Civilized Men Deuxième congrès de médecine en langue française de l’Amérique du nord, 19 Human orientation of future leaders, 148 Journées de Mont-Dore, 105 Journées médicales de Bruxelles, 90 Lyon Palais du commerce, 6 Conseil supérieur de la recherche scintifique, 105–106, 118 Coudert, Frédéric, 51, 63, 163 Council on Medical Education American Medical Association, 21 couple man-machine, 149 Coutrot, Jean, 60, 63, 91–93, 163 Crile, George, 20, 26n44, 49 Croix de feu, 96 crowd psychology, 14 cultural despair, 60 lag theory, 64 cures, 12–16, 18–, 18–19, 24n7, 25n13 Cushing, Harvey, 20, 21, 27n44, 44–45, 49, 75 D Dakin, Henry Drysdale, 48, 50 Daric, Jean, 149, 165 Dartmouth College, 90 Daumas, Maurice, 117 de Benoist, Alain biological aristocracy, 2 biological waste, 3 de Bonnefon, Jean, 15 De Broglie, Louis, 61 De Gaulle, Charles, 159, 164, 166 de la Motte, Anne-Marie-Laure-Pétronille Gourlez, 46, 48, 118, 169–170 de Martigny, Aldestan, 19 de Martigny, François, 19 De quoi vivre (Coutrot), 91 Dearborn test, 146 débaptisation, 4, 6, 172

235

Debré, Robert, 164–166 optimum familial, 165 Decugis, Henri, 60, 146 Decugis, Madame Henri, 146 degeneration, 62 degenerative diseases, 62–63, 70 Delannoë, Bertand Mayor of Paris (2001-2007), 4 Delore, Pierre, 61, 105, 118 Demageon, Albert, 60 demographic policy state-guided, 166 demography qualitative, 134 quantitative, 134 dénatalité, 133 Depoid, Pierre, 134 Descostes, Jacques, 170 Dévoir de mémoire, 4 diphtheria, 111 Dolly (sheep), 1 Doré, Madeleine, 140 Doriot, Jacques, 96, 104, 163 Doublet, Jacques, 137–138, 166 du Noüy, Mary Lecomte, 96 du Noüy, Pierre Lecomte, 94, 163 Duhamel, Georges, 60, 77 Duke University, 89 Durkin, Joseph, 167, 168, 170 Duster, Troy, 184 duty of memory (dévoir de mémoire), 172 E Ebeling, Albert, 39, 41, 89 Ecole d’anthropologie, 137, 141 Ecole des cadres d’Uriage, 105 Ecole des cadres de Theix, 145 Ecole polytechnique, 91, 112, 134 Ecole practique des hautes études, 134, 135 écolofascisme, 2 elite anticlerical, 13 education, 148 scientific, 68 endemic typhoid fever, 111 énergométrie, 150 Entr’ aide française of Compiègne, 132 Episcopal Inquiry Commission, 13 épuration, 164, 168, 172 Escoubès, Bruno, 6–7 Esprit, 77, 105 esprit de système, 50 ethnicity indexes, 6 ethnie. See Montandon

236   God's Eugenicist

eugenicists, 70, 73 Argentine, 169 contemporary, 66 French, 183 eugenics, 3, 6, 60, 65, 67, 68, 73, 76, 115, 116, 133, 137–138, 167, 183–184 fascist, 3, 63 law of 16 December 1942, 141 movement, 76 negative, 70, 71, 138, 182 principles of, 138 sterilization, 185 technocrats, 137 voluntary, 69 Eugenics Records Office, 65, 116, 139 European Commission project on the human genome. See Härlin euthanasia, 70 Evreux, Jean-Claude, 5 F Fabre, Jean-Henri Casimir, 60 Fabre-Luce, Alfred, 104, 162 factory medical wards (services médicaux d’usine), 147, 149 faith and reason, 168 Family Code, 138, 165 fécondité, 135 Fédération mutualiste de la Seine, 150 femme au foyer, 138 Ferrand, Marie, 17 Figuier, Louis, 60 First Century Christian Fellowship, 89 first-hand knowledge, 148 Fischer, Albert, 38, 39 Flexner, Abraham, 21–22 Flexner, Simon, 21, 35, 43, 44, 51, 62, 85, 93, 95 Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (FFEPH), 3, 6, 103– 105, 112, 116–120, 129–152, 159–167, 182 commission for immigration, 140, 151–152 équipes biology of adolescence, 142–145 biology of heredity, 140 children’s nutrition, 120 demography, 120 education, 120 eugenics, 120 housing, 149–150 labor, 148–149 natalité, 135 nutrition, 130, 132 pediatrics, 129, 141 population, 133, 139 psychology, 120 rural economy, 130

social insurance, 150 social psychology, 129–130, 132, 136, 143, 146–147 statistics and opinion polls women’s fertility, 120 eugenicists, 183 genetic archive, 139 homogenous population(s), 139, 167 immigration policy, 140–141 screening stations (centre de triage), 151–152 industrial medicine, 147 industrial organization, 92, 149–150 sociobiological research, 167 surveys birthrate, 136 handicapped employees, 150 handicapped schoolchildren, 145, 167 people’s housing, 150–151 physical conditions of youth, 143 women’s views on birthrate, 136–137 Forces françaises de l’intérieur, 162 Ford, Henry, 89 Fosdick, Raymond, 62, 68, 115 Free French, 110, 159 French Army's Service de santé, 49 French Eugenics Society, 137, 146 French university anticlerical milieus, 12, 16, 18, 25n13 neopotistic practices and sectarian politics, 23 Front National, 1–3, 6, 180 G Garaudy, Roger. See Islamic fundamentalism Gasser, Herbert, 93–94, 95 genetics. See biotechnology Geneva Ration, 106 genocide of the French, 106 George, André, 61 Georgetown University, 168, 170 Gessain, Robert, 134, 140, 164, 166, 167–168 Gidel, Gilbert, 114 Gille, René, 146 Gillon, Jean-Jacques, 105, 115–116, 119, 134, 138, 159 Girard, André, 3, 150, 166 glass heart, 87–88 Godart, Justin, 47, 49 Grant, Madison, 60, 72 Greens, 2 Gringoire, 77 Gros, André, 105, 112, 147–149, 159, 162, 167, 170 Groupement d’action des services sociaux de la Seine, 135

Index

Groupement de recherche et d’etudes pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), 2 Guthrie, Charles C., 20–21, 32, 33, 44, 50 H Häckel, Ernst, 64, 80n22 Halsted, William, 20, 27n44 Härlin, Benedikt, 184 harmony between man and work, 148 Harper & Brothers, 74 Harrison, Ross G., 37, 53n22 Harvard Medical School, 21, 27n44 Hauptmann, Bruno, 74, 88 Haut comité de la population et de la famille, 166 Haut comité de la population, 137-38 Hayflick, Leonard, 41 healing and faith, 160 healing power of faith, 30 Henry, Louis, 146 Heuyer, Georges, 146 holism, 61–64 biomedical, 182, 183 homo technicus, 170 homooeconomicus, 92 Hope for Our Time (Durkin), 168 Hôpital Temporaire no. 2 (Compiègne). See Rond Royal Hôtel-Dieu hospital (Lyon), 36, 46–47, 48 Hôtel-Dieu hospital (Montréal), 19 human engineering, 183 Human Genome Project, 7, 183–184 human regeneration, 142 human rights campaign, 1 movements/organizations, 3, 4, 10n37 human science, 67, 117, 164 humanization of work, 147 hunger epidemics, 110–111 food rationing, 106 food shortages, 106–111, 129, 159 malnutrition, 108, 110, 132 national food policy (politique alimentaire nationale), 132 nutrition, 131 Oslo Breakfast, 131–132, 153n12 pregnant and nursing women, 110 school canteens, 132 slow starvation, 106, 108 Huxley, Aldous, 92 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 15, 17 hysteria, 13–15

237

I Illiec, 88 immigrants, 140, 151 immortal chicken heart, 32, 41–42, 55n51 Institut Alexis Carrel d’orientation professionnelle, 170 Institut de conjoncture, 105, 119, 134, 165, 170 Institut national d’action sanitaire des assurances sociales, 119, 150 Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), 5, 6, 128, 150, 151, 160, 166–167 Institut national d’études du travail et d’orientation professionnelle, 119, 146, 147 Institut national d’hygiène, 108, 111, 112, 119, 129, 131 Institute of Man, 85, 90, 93, 96, 103, 113 Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology, 160 institutionalizing demography, 133–134 intellectualism, 114–115 International Exposition of Lyon, 11 International Labor Organization, 167 Islam and the Problems of Civilization (Qutb), 171 Islamic fundamentalism, 7, 171 J Jaboulay, Mathieu, 11 Jews, 159 Johns Hopkins, 20, 21, 62 Hunterian Laboratory, 35 Medical Society, 20 Jolly, J., 38 Jour après jour (Carrel), 169 Journal de Genève, 160 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 37 Journées Carrel, 170 Jusserand, J. J., 43–44 K Kellogg, William, 89 Kevles, Daniel, 184 knowledge-generating experts, 183 L L’écho de Paris, 77 L’éducateur prolétarien, 76 L’extermination douce (Lafont), 5 L’homme cet inconnu (Carrel). See also Man, The Unknown, 3, 60, 74–75, 76, 77, 92, 103, 104, 105, 118, 171, 179 misogynist arguments, 66 L’humanisme économique (Coutrot), 91 La France illustrée, 45 La marche du siècle, 5

238   God's Eugenicist

La prière (Carrel), 160 La science, ses progrès, ses applications, 61 La Tutélaire, 145 La vie en kit (exhibition), 183 Lafay, Bernard, 164, 170 Lambert, Adrian V.S., 34, 35, 36 Lambert, Mary Robinson, 34 Landsteiner, Karl, 21, 28n51 law of 17 November 1941, 112 Le Bras, Hervé, 6 Le Corbusier (Jean-Edourd Jeanneret), 150 Le Danois, Edouard, 140 Le nouvelliste, 18 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10n37, 172, 179 Le petit dauphinois, 77 Le petit parisien, 77 Le temps (Paris), 45–46 Le voyage de Lourdes (Carrel), 16, 17–18, 169 Legendre, R., 38 Lépine, Jean, 170 Leriche, René, 32, 62 Lerrac, Louis, 17–18 Les essais catholiques, 76 Les études, 76 Les Lundis de l’histoire, 3 lesson of experience, 113, 114 Levene, Phoebus, 21, 28–29n51 Lewis, R.M., 39 Lewis, W.H., 39 Lhomme, Jean, 118 lieu de mémoire, 179 Life among the Lowbrows (Wembridge), 65 Lindbergh, Charles, 32, 73, 74, 75, 78, 85, 86–89, 90, 93, 95, 104, 163, 169–170 Loeb, Jacques, 21, 29n51, 42–43 artifical parthenogenesis, 42 loi de cicatrisation (healing law), 12, 13–18, 19, 48 Lourdes, 12–18, 160 controversy, 67 episode, 19, 36, 75 Medical Bureau, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 19 Lourdes (Zola), 14, 17 Ludwig, Emil, 164 lycées, 148 Lyon, 11, 46, 62 School of Medicine, 11 Lyon Libération, 3 Lyon médical, 11 M Malinin, Theodore, 170 Man, The Unknown (Carrel). See also L’homme cet inconnu, 3, 16, 32, 59, 63, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74–78, 89, 94, 95, 113, 160, 163, 169, 181–182

Aristotelian monk-warriors and scholars, 68 centers of synthesis, 68 collective intelligence/thinking, 68 composite Aristotles, 68 crisis of civilization, 59 crisis of man, 64 gap between material and spiritual progress, 64 immortal brain, 68 miracles, 67 modernity’s inauthentic conception of humanity, 64 multidisciplinary experts, 68 mysticism, 67, 76 universal knowledge, 67, 78 Mande, Raymond, 146 Mande, René, 40, 129, 137, 147 Matas, Rudolph, 20, 27n44 Mawdaudi, Abu Ala. See Islamic Fundamentalism médecin conseiller du travail, 149 médecin conseils d’usine, 147 medical humanism, 61 reductionism, 61 technocrats, 112 medical education Germany, 21 United States, 21–22 medical model of cultural decline, 62 melena neonatorum, 34 Meltzer, Samuel J., 21, 29n51, 62 memory laws, 172 Men in Black (Time ), 40–41, 88 Ménétrier, Jacques, 105, 112, 159, 161–162 Mental Defective Committee, 146 mental weakness, 65–66 Merlet, Jean, 150, 167 méthode d’irrigation intermittente Carrel, 48 Milliez, Paul, 164 miracles, 12, 160, 171 miraculées, 14, 24n7 Missenard, Félix-André, 105–106, 112, 116, 118, 134, 135, 137–138, 149–150, 159, 162–164 modern test-tube eugenics. See Duster modern women, 137 monk savants/scholars, 172, 182 Montandon, Georges, 137, 140–141, 164 Montessori, Maria, 92 Montréal, 19–20 Moore, Edward, 89 moral pollution. See Front National Morgan T.H., 42 Morrow, Anne, 77 mortality rate, 133

Index

Mott, General T. Bentley, 163 Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié des peuples(MRAP), 172 Muré, André, 5 Murphy, John, 20, 28n44 N natalité, 134 National Revolution, 104, 117, 133 Nazi policies, 70, 95 racism, 71 New Deal, 62 new man, 60 New York Academy of Medicine, 42, 70, 78 New York City, 22, 62 New York Herald Tribune, 35, 78 New York Sun, 35 New York Times, 45, 75, 78 New York World, 35 Newsweek, 42 Newton, James, 89–90, 93 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1912), 3, 32, 33, 35, 38, 42, 43 Noguchi, Hideyo, 21, 29n51 non-hereditary aristocracy, 69 nonconformist intellectuals, 60 Nora, Pierre, 179 Nordhoff-Jung Award, 62 Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs hospital. See Lourdes Nuremborg Doctors Trial of 1946, 71 O Occidentalist narrative, 179 occupational biology, 150 disease, 147 health, 167 Ogburn, William, 64 Ollier, Léopold (1830-1900), 11, 44 Opie, Eugene, 21 Ordre nouveau, 77 organ compatibility, 33 cultivation, 37 culture, 88, 93 perfusion, 170, 171 Ortega y Gasset, José, 60 Oxford Group for Moral Rearmament, 89–90 P Park Alexis Carrel (Montréal), 171 Parker, Raymond, 42 Parti populaire français. See Jacques Doriot

239

Parti social français. See Croix de feu partisan and myth ridden narratives, 168 Pasteur Institute, 35, 45, 46, 56n74, 57n78, 114, 161, 163 Pearl, Raymond, 75, 76 Peltier, Roger, 112, 164 perfusion pump, 32, 85–88 Perroux, François, 112, 117, 119, 162–163 Perry, Vernon, 170 Pétain, Philippe, 106, 119, 132, 140, 161, 163 Piéron, Henri, 146 Piéron, Madame Henri, 146 piglets, 1 Plon, 74 Plozevet. See Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains homogenous population(s) Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand, 5 politicized science, 182 polytechniciens, 91, 116, 134 Poncet, Antonin, 11, 36 Pontigny Abbey, 92, 93 Popular Front, 145 postliberation justice, 162 postwar demographic science, 6 Power of prayer (Carrel), 160 premarital exam, 141 prematurity in scientific discovery, 40 preserving arteries, 37 preserving grafts, 32 Presse, Dom Alexis, 89 principles of vivisection, 35 profamily, 133, 135, 141 pronatalism eugenics-minded, 138 pronatalists, 135, 137, 138, 141, 165 Prospective (Gros), 167 psychobiology, 141 public hygiene movement, 14 pure physiological science, 63 Q Que sais-je?, 61 Qutb, Sayyid, 7, 171–172 R racial biomedical discourse, 73 hygiene, 69, 73, 116 Ras l’front, 172 Reader’s Digest, 74, 78, 160, 169 Red Cross (French), 150 Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie (Carrel), 160, 169 remaking of man, 46, 48, 148 Resistance, 117, 159, 163–164

240   God's Eugenicist

Revue des deux mondes, 104 Richet, Charles, 40, 60, 67 Richet, Gabriel, 108, 122n22 Rockefeller Foundation, 47, 49, 62,117,163 General Education Board, 22 in Paris, 113 War Demonstration Hospital, 51 Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, 21, 32, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 51, 62, 86, 93, 96, 161 Board of Scientific Directors, 22, 94 Division of Experimental Surgery, 21, 93 mandated retirement, 59, 78, 85, 88, 93–96 Rockefeller, John D., 36, 89, 96 Rond Royal, 47, 48, 49, 51, 96 Roslin Institute, 1 Rostand, Jean, 76 Rous, Peyton, 21, 29n51, 37 S Sadi-Carnot, 11, 47 Saint Joseph Day School, 11 Saint-Gildas, 88–90, 152, 159 funeral, 163 mystic enviroment religious community, 169 Saint-Maclou, Baron de, 13 Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, 11, 170 Sauvy, Alfred, 105, 134, 164–166, 167 Scènes de la vie future (Duhamel), 77 School of Medicine Alexis Carrel, 5 School of Medicine of Lyon, 45 Science, 20, 93 science and ideology, 183 Science de l’homme, science économique (Perroux), 118 science of man, 67, 89, 104, 105, 115 scientific cultures, 117 expertise, 181 humanism, 115–116 racism, 6, 138, 180 vulgarization, 60–62, 63 Scientific Humanism (Stoddard), 116 Secours national, 119, 129, 131 Secrétariat d’état au ravitaillement, 106 Secrétariat d’état de la famille et de la santé, 96 Sellier, Henri, 138, 145–146 Semaine de Paris, 104 Sept, 76 Service de santé militaire (Military Health Service), 47 Service des jardins familiaux et ouvriers, 130 Service national des statistiques, 129, 134 Société de biologie de Paris, 38 Société de chirurgie de Paris, 50

Société de pédiatrie, 129 Société lyonnaise d’histoire et de médecine, 18–19 sociobiological engineering, 128, 181 Soupault, Robert, 168 Spain, 96, 104, 106 specialization, 181 Spengler, Oswald, 60 spiritualization of politics, 104 sports medicine. See Chappert Statistique générale de France, 105, 118, 134 sterilization, 70, 72, 137–138, 138, 141 Stoddard, T. Lothrop, 60, 115, 116 Stoetzel, Jean, 146–147, 150, 166, 167 surgery cardiac, 33 cardiovascular, 180 Sutter, Jean, 131, 141, 146, 167 suturing of blood vessels. (See anastomosis), 33 Synarchy, 162–163 synthesis, 61, 63, 114 T tableaux d’équivalences professionnelles, 150 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 2, 3 technocratic, 77, 138, 183 antipolitics, 182 biopolitics, 183 elite, 67 experts, 129 problem-solving methods, 114 reformist agenda, 148 revolution, 91 Teilhard du Chardin, Pierre, 92 Télégramme de Toulouse, 45 Testart, Jacques, 6 The Bell Curve (Herrnstein, Murray), 6–7 The Lancet, 39 The New Atlantis (Bacon), 115 The New Decalogue of Science (Wiggam) The Old Savage in the New Civilization (Fosdick), 68 The Passing of the Great Race (Grant), 72 The People’s Reporter, 163 The Riddle of the Universe (Häckel), 64 theorectical education, 148 Tiberi, Jean, 4 tilting-coil pump, 87–88 glass heart, 88 Time, 75, 78, 88 tissue cultivation, 32, 37 culture, 36, 37, 51, 86, 87 culture research, 40 Tort, Patrick, 3

Index

Touvier, Paul, 3, 4, 5 transplantation, 20, 32, 33, 35, 37, 44, 86, 180 rejection of, 33, 40 vascular, 19–21, 32 triangulation, 11, 20, 33 Lambert’s infant daughter, 34–35 Tribalat, Michèle. See Institut national d’etudes démographiques (INED) tribunal d’épuration, 164 tuberculosis, 110–111 typhus, 111 U universal knowledge, 67, 68 University of Chicago Hull Laboratory, 20, 32 University of Illinois, 20, 90 University of Lyon, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 33, 45, 170 committe of scholars, 3, 6 inquiry commission, 3, 6 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 89 Urbain, Georges, 60 V Val-de-Grâce Army Hospital, 47 Vallery-Radot, Louis Pasteur, 60, 161, 163– 164, 165 vascular surgery, 20, 32, 44, 87 suturing, 19–21, 32, 33 Vichy, 103–105, 106, 111, 119–120, 133–134, 159, 160, 163–164, 168, 183 anti-Semitic laws and policies, 161, 165, 179–180 collaboration, 59, 159, 161, 182–183 ministry of labor, 149 ministry of public health, 111 Villages Alexis Carrel, 170 Villey, Daniel, 118 Vincent, André, 166 Vincent, Paul, 134 visible scientists, 42 Voix française, 104 Vulaines-sur-Seine, 113, 118, 159 vulgarization, 60–61, 181 W Wallace, Dewitt, 74, 89 Walloon, Henri, 145–146 Welch, William, 20, 21, 22, 28n44, 49 Welles, Orson, 66 Wembridge, Eleanor, 65 Whipple, George Hoyt, 78 white races, 64–65 Wiggam, Albert E., 115, 116, 138

Winter, Louis, 106, 130 Wise, Stephen, 76 work process rationalization, 92 wound infection, 46 wound research, 96 wound treatment, 48, 49 Wright, Almroth Edward, 49–50, 58n93 Wyckoff, Ralph, 89, 94 X X-Crise, 91, 100n27 Z Zola, Emile, 14–15, 17, 25n13

241

242   God's Eugenicist