Paul Topinard

Desiring to launch a form of inquiry that addressed itself to “learned men of every class,” Paul Broca assigned to his student—and eventual successor at the Anthropological Society of Paris—Paul Topinard the task of describing this new field in terms any learned man could understand. The result was Anthropology (1878), a 535-page tome in which Topinard attempted a vast synthesis of the new field, identifying its key questions, principal methodologies, kinds of evidence, and established results.

Topinard’s Anthropology is in many respects a deeply respectful defense of Broca, whose methodological rigor had made a deep impression on the young scientist. Topinard restates and endorses many of the terms and premises developed by Broca in “The Phenomenon of Hybridity in the Genus Homo” (1864), including the phrase “inferior races” to describe various populations, with indigenous Australians occupying the lowest rung of the human ladder.* He also accepts Broca’s naturalistic, clinical approach to the study of man as part of the animal kingdom, and accepts the priority of craniology in this study even as he extends the domain of the measurable to the skeleton, muscles, teeth, and viscera. In Part II, “Of the Races of Mankind,” he undertakes a defense of the latest methods and instruments of craniology, including a striking illustration showing a wide-awake head in the grip of a “facial goniometer” (see Broca). He concludes that “empirical characteristics derived from craniometry are opposed to the monogenistic creed, inasmuch as they witness in favor of the original plurality of the principal groups” (222). Topinard followed this with Éléments d’Anthropologie Générale (Elements of general anthropology) in 1885, a twelve-hundred-page summa of the history, subjects, and methods of the field, dedicated to Broca and Quatrefages de Bréau.

In both works, Topinard describes the methods and results of anthropometry (the attempt to identify human variations, including racial differences, through bodily measurements, especially the measurement of skulls), but includes a full account of the difficulties, flaws, and errors involved in the attempt to measure crania in particular with any precision, much less to draw any conclusions about races from the results. Most dubious, he says, are efforts to establish racial character traits inasmuch as “the traits of character so judged of are entirely individual in the majority of cases, and their estimate depends upon the mental disposition of the observer, as well as upon the accurate recollection of his latest visual impressions.” From a scientific perspective, he argues, the cancerous tendency of classifications to ramify to infinity rendered the entire exercise futile: “In fact, the majority of classifications go on progressing. We see them commencing timidly, then multiplying their divisions, and then descending to details”; “the tendency to run into minutiae is especially predominant here. . . . It is evident that craniology is an illimitable science” (Anthropology, 203, 224).

In the context of the history of racial science, Topinard’s enumeration of the problems created by craniometry is more significant than his overall endorsement of the practice. For if, as he says, it is not only extremely difficult to measure sizes and angles but impossible to derive any general conclusions from a limited set of measurements, then the effort to determine the physical characteristics of racial groups is deprived of its primary clinical support, and the concept of race itself wobbles. On occasion, Topinard speaks in terms Broca might have supported of “initial races” or “simple general types”—the term “type” itself indicating his doubts about the term race—such as “the White, the Yellow, and the Black with wooly hair,” but he then almost invariably adds a statement to the effect that “in Man, many of these divisions are doubtful, or in a state of transition” (507).

This argument was actually being made more forcefully in Topinard’s Anthropological Society of Paris by a new member. A huge book by a young Haitian serving as a diplomat in Paris, Anténor Firmin’s L’Égalité des races humaines (1885) was primarily intended as a response to Gobineau but also challenged Broca for his commitment to polygenism and Topinard for his continued references to lower and higher races.

Topinard’s contemporary response to Firmin, if any, is not recorded, but whether he was persuaded by Firmin or by his own accumulating doubts, he was beginning to establish an independent position. In a further blow to the Broca doctrine, Topinard rejects the notion that cross-racial hybrids are at all infertile, including as part of his argument Broca’s own dissatisfaction with the term race, which “has many acceptations . . . In current language indeed it has a vague meaning, leaving all the questions sub judice. . . . Have these races the value of species, of varieties, or even of genera? This is the question” (197). Rehearsing the contributions of all the leading theorists of race, Topinard finds fault with all of them for stressing the “exclusive character” of races, a difficult position to hold when so few of the world’s peoples conformed entirely to simple general types. In 1878, Topinard was unable to break with Broca, and concluded Anthropology with a restatement of Broca’s equivocation on the definition of the terms race and species. The conclusion to this essay strikes, however, an entirely different note by introducing a third term, family, that overrides both race and species and provides a principle of unity rather than segmentation: “To sum up, The HUMAN FAMILY, the first of the ORDER of Primates, is composed of SPECIES, or fundamental human races” (510-11).

Topinard was not finished with his apostasy. In 1892, by then sixty-two years old and Broca’s successor to the positions of Secretary-General of the Anthropological Society and director of the École d’Anthropologie, Topinard wrote, or rather rewrote, an 1879 essay that had been published in a journal edited by Broca, called “De la notion de race en anthropologie” (On the notion of race in anthropology) in which he revisited his earlier positions.** No longer compelled to articulate and defend the thinking of other distinguished anthropologists, Topinard, perhaps provoked by the example of Firmin, took a more independent stand.

In the 1879 essay as well as in Anthropology, he had described races as “fixed realities with permanent characteristics,” and the determination of race as the fundamental task of anthropology. He had also mentioned without comment Broca’s conviction that the races could be ranked according to their “position in the human series.” Most intriguingly, however, he had underscored, even more firmly than Broca, the possibility that what are now called races were the consequences only of long isolation and environmental influences, and that race was not an object for scientific research at all, but was “only a subjective notion, a conception within our minds.” In the 1892 essay, Topinard strengthened this suspicion considerably, made no mention of racial ranking, dismissed Broca’s beliefs about the infertility of hybrids, and—the coup de grâce—closed with a strong recommendation to reject the term race and any research program associated with the concept.

Over the course of his career, Topinard spanned the vast distance between the utter confidence of Broca in anthropology as the discipline capable of establishing a scientific basis for racial distinctions and rankings, including a polygenetic account of human origins, and the deep and growing post-Darwinian skepticism of others as exemplified by the work of Franz Boas, who would soon be calling for anthropology to abandon the inquiry into race altogether.