Jennifer Hecht’s The End of the Soul offers an intriguing exploration of the contributions of 19th-century French physical anthropology to the entrenchment of secular and republican French society. Hecht firmly establishes the significance of what might otherwise seem only a colorful footnote to serious history of science by compellingly arguing, in her final full chapter, that useful insights into both Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophy and Emile Durkheim’s science of society emerge when one understands their work as a response to claims and counterclaims made over their lifetimes by French physical anthropologists seeking to redefine conventional understandings of humanity in secular, scientific terms.

In approaching this study, it is useful to remember several elements of French history. First, by most accounts, republican France was definitively secured only at the very end of the 19th century, a few decades after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Second, France has long been closely connected institutionally with the Catholic Church as its “eldest daughter,” and during the 19th century the church was generally associated with monarchism and antirepublicanism. Beginning with the Third Republic, the French state has generally been assertively secular, even when held by rightist majorities. Predominantly Catholic (at least by some measures), France is one of the few European countries without a state religion and one of the first and few to legislate the separation of church and state (in 1905). Finally, the public role of intellectuals—as a highly visible corps of counselors to and critics of the secular state and civil society—has been especially important in France and, by most accounts, emerged in its contemporary form over those same last decades of the 19th century that ushered in the secular republic.

Hecht’s starting point is not unfamiliar, although her late 19th-century French case offers an especially pointed example: Individually and collectively, the shift from a world largely explained in theological terms and organized around stable social hierarchies to one explained in scientific terms and demanding egalitarian meritocracy as the legitimate basis of social order is neither self-evident nor angst-free. Hecht argues that over the latter half of the 19th century, French physical anthropologists, grouped in associations such as the Mutual Autopsy Society and the overlapping but less radical Society of Anthropology of Paris, offered a strategic vantage point from which to observe such a transition and, indeed, played a key role in helping French society move from one worldview to the other. Adamantly anticlerical, atheistic, and egalitarian, these anthropologists, she argues, made influential public scientific claims about domains that had previously been private and religious, effectively elaborating deconsecrated understandings of much human experience (e.g., life, death, mind, and sexuality) and transforming awe-inspiring issues into the stuff of rational knowledge. Further, she explores their creation of functional replacements for religion in both its institutional and existential dimensions. Constituting a kind of secular priesthood, they offered a variety of rituals as well as profane understandings of life and death, the promise of immortality through contributions to scientific knowledge, and other redemptive salves to the terrors of existence in a godless, heavenless here-and-now.

The history of the vexed relationship between scientific knowledge and religious belief stands at the center of this study. Certainly, Americans’ experience at the turn of this century is usefully illuminated by that of a century ago on the other side of the Atlantic. But Hecht’s analysis offers more: most notably, provocative insights into the striking variability of causes or political positions for which scientific analysis may be pressed into service. Her discussion of the strongly antireligious twist (absent from the original) given to Darwin’s Origin of Species by its first French translator, Mme C. Royer, provides one case in point.

Another is her discussion of the markedly egalitarian reading of Darwinist evolutionism by most late 19th-century French anthropologists, initially drawn to it as a counter to conventional theological justifications of gender and class hierarchies and as a radical alternative to spiritual explanations of the human condition. G. Vacher de Lapouge offered a contemporary alternative: No less opposed to theological explanations or convinced of the scientific, biological bases of human social organization than were other 19th-century anthropologists, he argued that claims about natural social equality rested on unprovable belief. He elaborated, instead, a conception of European society based on biologically determined racial hierarchies that, although largely dismissed or used as a straw man in France, was influential among U.S. and German eugenicists. (Hecht notes the irrelevance of the “colonial other” in these 19th-century debates about difference, hierarchy, and social equality.)

Finally, Hecht’s work offers a thought-provoking argument about the historical development of French social thought: Especially after 1859, 19th-century anthropologists, she suggests, were concerned with displacing theological modes of thought and so evacuated all nonmaterialist explanation from their vision of human experience. In contrast, Turn-of-the-Century thinkers such as Bergson and Durkheim could take largely for granted secular worldviews. Concerned, instead, to correct the excessively scientistic thinking of their predecessors, these scholars reintroduced elements of immaterial (although now nonreligious) forces to their understanding of the human condition (vitalism for Bergson, collective unconscious for Durkheim); further, Durkheim’s understanding of religion as a social fact to be understood rather than a falsehood to be rejected is, according to Hecht, usefully understood as a response to the work of earlier secularist thinkers like the physical anthropologists considered here.

Although this study is occasionally marred by trite expressions and pat explanations, its overall line of argument is unusually engaging and stimulating. It offers an important contribution to the histories of scientific racism, social science in the service of social problems, and European political culture. Without a doubt, it is a remarkable contribution to the history of anthropology.
[illustrations, references, index.]