Jacques de Mahieu: Foundations of Biopolitics (Excerpts)
May 19, 2023 14:53:10 GMT
Post by Evola As He Is on May 19, 2023 14:53:10 GMT
Preface (excerpt)
One of the most detailed biographical studies on the author indicates that the only apparently certain fact about him until he was thirty is his date of birth. It is wrong: his place of birth too is known with absolute certainty.
During the 1960s, Jaime María de Mahieu was publicly known in Argentina as one of the referents of Argentinian nationalism. General interest magazines such as Primera Plana listed him as a Frenchman who had fought with the Axis powers in the Waffen-SS "Charlemagne" division. Some of his local biographers claimed that he had fought on the Russian front during the Second World War; others, that he had fought in the Nationalist ranks in the Spanish Civil War and that he had been wounded and returned to France; young Tacuarist militants recounted that he had showed them his SS ring. There is no evidence to support any of these claims. For her part, de Mahieu’s widow, Florence Bisschop, interviewed by the Argentinian researcher Daniel Sazbón in the 1990s, denied them all, as well as any connection between her late husband and the Vichy government or administration. She emphasised that both of them entered Argentina on normal French passports, which would show that they were not refugees seeking asylum. What more proof can you ask for?
It is not surprising that all attempts to reveal de Mahieu’s past before his arrival in Argentina in 1946 were unsuccessful. The reason is that he and his wife registered upon entry under false names, namely Jacques-Marie de Mahieu and Florence Bisschop (de Mahieu is thought to be Florence’s maternal grandmother’s name), and kept their true identities a total secret until their deaths. It was their son, Xavier, who finally confessed his parents’ true identity, while still being unable to confirm or deny any of the above claims about his father’s doings. Their real names were Jacques-Auguste-Léon-Marie Girault and Marie-Thérèse Galand. De Mahieu was born in Marseilles on 31 October 1915 from Lange Marius Girault and Marie Suzanne Fargeton. His family lived in Marseilles (44 Rue Borde), Jacques being the eldest of five brothers. He studied literature and sociology at the nearby University of Aix-en-Provence. From a very young age, he was close to Action Française and joined the Fédération des Camelots du Roi, forming close links with Charles Maurras, whom he would later remember as an "eminent master of French nationalism" and "an eminent theoretician of national revolutions". According to de Mahieu’s son, he was a member of the assault group of the Camelots against the Bolsheviks and was also one of the militants who acted as security guards of the nationalist and co-founder of the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme (LVF) Jacques Doriot (1898–1945) at a political meeting in Marseilles. He is recorded as having been president of the Association Georges Cadoudal (a Chouan general, commander of the Catholic and Royal Army of Brittany) in Marseilles as of April 1939. Still according to his son, he was installed by Marshall Pétain, appointed Vice-President of the Council in Paul Reynaud’s government on 17 May 1940, a week after the German offensive, lecturer at the École des hautes études corporatives. De Mahieu was then mobilised as a heavy artillery reserve officer in the city of Nîmes. "Although I hated this war and hated the republic, I do not have, I did not have, the soul of a deserter", he said later. Between 1941 and 1942, he acted as editor and administrator of L’Étudiant français (Paris, November 1920–Lyon, June/July 1944), the propaganda organ of the Fédération nationale des étudiants d’Action française, in which he published various articles, including "Nécessité de la violence", from which the following excerpt will serve as an entrée en matière. After expressing regret that "at a time when we must pursue the National Revolution, and therefore demonstrate harshness and violence, all we find around us is indifference and apathy", he wonders whether "[t]he younger generation [was] capable of action, or even of thinking beyond 'honest' mediocrity". In any case, it is necessary to "give them back [...] a sense of aggression, a taste for violence [...]. Violence does not necessarily mean punching. There is a violence of the spirit that is not indifferent". "Violence is the force that acts in an impulse, that gives itself entirely to the effort of the moment; it is the revolutionary force, it is also an attitude towards the facts. If young people want to play a role, if they want to influence the events that are coming, they must acquire the spirit of violence by which they will assert themselves in their work. Without this, they will be no more than human flocks ripe for the servitude they have earned. But France is more than the present generations, more than their hopeless mediocrity. France is centuries of past greatness that dictate a future in which young people, and particularly young intellectuals, have no right to lose interest. Even if young people no longer have a taste for aggression, they have a duty to do so, born of history. To refuse history is to risk being refused by it, wrote Mr Thierry Maulnier. Now, history, in revolutionary times, requires violence". "We would like to see this necessity symbolised in our lecture theatres and classrooms by a picture that nothing prevents us from envisaging aesthetically: Jesus flogging the vendors out of the Temple, with our old motto in exergue: VIOLENCE IN THE SERVICE OF REASON". This tempered firmness of thought, expressed in a language of adamantine, stellar clarity, will never leave him.
The fact of race
The concept of race is nowadays so broad that it is really too imprecise, to the point of being almost useless. The term is applied indiscriminately to our species as a whole (“the human race”); to the major “coloured” groups (“the white race”) and to one or more of its fractions (“the Aryan race”); to historical societies (“the Italian race”), and even linguistic or cultural groups (“the Latin race”). In all cases, there is no doubt a vague idea that race is linked to the hereditary factor in man and that a racial group has a certain community of characters, transmitted with life, which differentiates it from others. However, some sociologists and political scientists have attributed the inequality of human groups to the environment alone and have argued, therefore, that all have identical possibilities. Others, while arbitrarily asserting the racial homogeneity of primitive communities, have based themselves on the diversity of types of a given group to deny the actual existence of races. On the other hand, anthropologists tend to establish their classifications on the basis of this or that arbitrarily chosen factor. Sometimes skin colour is the only discriminating factor in racial groups. At other times, it is the shape of the skull, or the clotting properties of blood. In the most favourable case, several somatic characters are considered and any psychological or even biological factor is expressly excluded. The chance of a discovery or pseudo-discovery, or simply fashion, periodically transforms, without valid reason, an essential branch of human science. Ideologies have become involved. These are the reasons why we feel it is essential to reconsider the problem on the basis of the data that experience provides. There is no need for theories to assert the fact of race. Everyone knows the difference between a Congolese and a Chinese; everyone knows the difference between a group of a hundred Swedes and a group of a hundred Spaniards. Everyone also knows that the Negro born in New York is as black as the one born in the Congo, and that, consequently, some of the characters which make it possible for the less competent to recognise an ethnic difference are hereditary. It is only with the definition of the concept of race that the difficulty begins. Let us try to remove the factors that distort it. We can do this very easily by considering, not man, but animals of other kinds. If we can thus establish a zoological definition of race, it will be easy to see how it applies to the human racial phenomenon.
The zoological concept of race
Let us consider a number of dogs of the German Shepherd type. Why do we say that they belong to a certain breed? Superficially, because they look alike. They have the same physical conformation and show the same psychological qualities: medium-sized, with a long brown coat, pointed muzzle and plume-like tail, German Shepherds are courageous attackers with an intelligence superior to that of most other dog breeds. However, not all German Shepherds are the same. Their height varies by a few centimetres; their coat is more or less long and its colour covers the whole range of browns, from almost yellow to almost black; their courage and intelligence are subject to gradation. One individual may have a darker coat than a Doberman, whose characteristic colour is black, or may be less intelligent than a Dane, which belongs to a breed which is not very favoured in this respect. If one were to try, as is so often done in the case of man, to define the breed of German shepherds by one of their characteristics, one would arrive at results whose absurdity would be obvious. But no one thinks of doing so. Because, when it comes to dogs, everyone knows very well that the zoological breed is a group of individuals who share, to a certain quantitative and qualitative extent, a certain number of physical, physiological and psychological characteristics which are transmitted by heredity. The representative individual of a race is simply the one who unites in himself all its characters pushed to their highest degree. It is the same when we say that the Nordic man is tall, blond, dolichocephalic, resilient, courageous, etc, This defines only a “competition specimen” and many Nordic men are of average height, brown, brachycephalic, weak or cowardly. This does not mean that the Nordic race is a fiction. At most, it could be argued that it is not a pure race. But does this expression make sense?
The fallacy of the “pure race”
We have so far considered the racial group as a static conglomerate of individuals. In order to be able to answer the previous question, it is necessary to examine it in its evolutionary aspect. When do we say that a German Shepherd is a pure breed? Not when it reaches perfection of type, but when it is born of unmixed parents. By going back in this way from generation to generation, we will arrive at the origin of the breed, i.e. when, by mutation or in any other way, a litter of German Shepherds were born to parents who were not German Shepherds. We could go back this way, from race to species and from species to genus, to the small mass of proteins which, one fine day, started to live. All this would make no sense. If we consider the common origin, race embraces the whole of animality. If we arbitrarily fix its beginning at the moment of its last differentiation, it is founded on an original heterogeneity, even if we suppose that no interbreeding has taken place since then, which it would be daring to assert in the case of the animal races which have been best controlled for a long time. This does not mean in the least that the genealogical data are of no interest, since it is from them that the common characters and their frequency are derived, according to a process that we will study later. but it is wrong to make purity a criterion of existence and, a fortiori, of the value of the race. As far as human groups are concerned, if we were to accept that they were descended from a primitive couple, we would have to consider them as belonging to a single race, which is contrary to the facts. And if we were to accept the idea of multiple original mutations, we would have to forget the interbreeding factor. In biopolitics, theoretical definitions that do not correspond to reality are of no use to us. What we call the “degree of purity” of a race is quite simply its relative homogeneity, i.e. the fact that each of its components possesses, in greater or lesser numbers and to a greater or lesser extent, the distinctive characters of the whole in question.
Heredity
We know roughly how these traits are transmitted. Each of the two progenitors provides the new being with half the genes it needs and which are potentially its possible future. Two individuals who possess, except for sex, the same hereditary capital and are therefore identical – two white people or two white mice – will produce white offspring. The question becomes more complicated when we consider the crossing of two individuals with different hereditary endowments. Everyone knows from Mendel’s first two laws that their offspring are hybrids, i.e. they unite in themselves the opposite genes of their parents, either combining to give a new character, or some predominate at the expense of others, which are then called recessive. In the second generation, after the crossing of two of these hybrids, one quarter of the offspring appears identical to one of the grandparents, one quarter has the genes of the other and half is hybrid like its progenitors. These first two laws of Mendel therefore seem to indicate that hybridisation is a transient phenomenon and that there is a return, increasingly marked from the numerical point of view, to the primitive types. Nothing is more dangerous, however, than the abusive generalisation and the easy vulgarisation of Mendelian genetics. If it is indeed true that the crossing of a “purebred” white mouse with a “purebred” grey mouse results in a litter of hybrids in the first generation that owe their grey colour only to the dominant character of grey over white and, in the second generation, in a quarter of "purebred" whites, another quarter of “purebred” greys and half of hybrids, the same is not true of human beings. The crossing of two mulattoes, the products of the union of a white man and a Negress, produces only mulattoes of various shades, without the white or Negro type reappearing. Explanations are of little importance. The fact alone interests us: the hybrid type reproduces itself indefinitely. Mendel’s third law would suffice, moreover, to establish this permanence. Indeed, the first law applies only to a character, i.e., a gene, isolated from the group to which it belongs. If we consider not one, but two traits, they will be transmitted independently of each other. The crossing of a long-tailed white mouse with a short-tailed grey one will result, in the second generation, in individuals similar to the grandparents, but in the proportion of one eighth, and in white short-tailed and grey long-tailed individuals.1 When it comes no longer to two genes, but to thousands, the laws of probability calculation make it impossible for an individual identical to one of its primitive ancestors to appear, and all the descendants of the couple considered, in all generations, will be hybrids in the sense that they will possess some of the characters of each of the original types, while in other respects they will be related to both. So, not only are Mendel’s first two laws valid for man only in a relative sense, but the third shows us that the multiplicity of characters involved would be enough to practically prohibit any automatic return to the primitive types of a crossbred lineage.
The combination of genes
So far we have only considered the case of the descendants of a single couple. But it is exceptional, within our societies, for marriage to take place between brothers and sisters. In reality, the problem is much more complex than that posed by the union of two endowments, and the “mixture” of genes is infinitely more extensive. However, within a small and closed community, everyone is related to everyone else after a certain number of generations and everyone in the group has the same ancestry as everyone else. The smaller a community is in number at the outset, the more closed it is during its evolution and the longer it has been in existence, the more its members have genes and, consequently, characters in common and the more they resemble each other. This means that an originally heterogeneous group becomes unified through endogamy. Its members will no doubt not all be identical, but they will be less and less dissimilar to a certain extent: their appearance, their mentality and their reactions will show an increasing degree of homogeneity. The “purity” of a race is thus a creation of endogamy and time. All the more so as genes combine not only by association, but also by interaction. The clash of contradictory genes does not necessarily give rise to an average, but sometimes to a new character. If we borrow the language of chemistry – which must be done with the greatest caution – we would say that genes sometimes join together in a mixture and sometimes in an alloy. In the latter case, the mixing leads to the actualisation of characters that were previously latent. This is undoubtedly an exceptional phenomenon, but it should be taken into account in any study of the hybridisation process.
The double effect of miscegenation
We shall not deal here with the results of the union of two races into a mixed-race individual. But we must note its consequences within an ethnic community. Leaving aside any value judgement, our previous analyses demonstrate that miscegenation brings to a human group an increase in its hereditary mass. The individuals that make it up are more diverse, and all the more so as the original types were more distant from each other. But what the whole gains in variety, and therefore in possibilities, at least theoretically, is counterbalanced by what it loses in stability and unity, at least until it has regained its homogeneity. The homogeneous ethnic group concentrates on achieving what it is. It has a well-defined goal and a strong will to power. It is selfaware. It is “all-in-one”. The mixed-race group, not yet homogenised, is, on the contrary, torn between diverse and often contradictory aspirations. It is scattered and slackening. It needs time to regain self-control: exactly the time needed to reconstitute its ethnic unity. Of course, the new race which is born of hybridisation, however valuable, is different from its two components. There are, however, races whose main distinctive characters are generally dominant and which thus possess the capacity to maintain in a latent state some of the foreign genes which they incorporate into their hereditary capital through interbreeding. But this property is exceptional and does not invalidate the general fact that two interbreeding ethnic groups lose for a time, along with their hereditary unity, their harmony and tension.
[...]
Hereditary differentiation and functional specialisation
Let us look at the first point. Let us take a society in the making, like that of the American Frontier at the end of the last century. Only adventurous, enterprising men went West. Those who possessed the spirit of a leader, the right physical constitution and sufficient intelligence, naturally gathered around them individuals strong and courageous, but incapable of leading an operation against the Indians or carving out their own domain on the prairie. Others, intelligent but less daring and unable to command, set up grocery stores. Functional specialisation, in an environment where neither fortune nor convention played a role, was thus based solely on individual biopsychic abilities, exactly as it was in the early European Middle Ages. Not so, of course, in today’s organised – and poorly organised – societies. The established order weighs down on the powerful individualities who seek to elevate themselves, while it artificially maintains inferior beings at a level that does not correspond to their reduced capacity. However, if we consider sets, rather than individuals, we will see that, in general, there is still a match between the function and the hereditary endowment of those who exercise it. This is simply because, in contemporary society as on the Frontier, albeit to a lesser degree, the function requires particular biopsychic traits. Under the most egalitarian of regimes, it is not possible to make a ship’s captain out of a stoker. Social stratification is therefore based on the biopsychic selection of individuals who meet the requirements of the various functions. From this point of view, it is true to say, with Vacher de Lapouge, that social strata “attract” beings of a certain type.
Hereditary variability through function
But this is not enough. When the development of industry multiplied the number of factories, there was no hereditary proletarian type to serve as a recruitment standard. Industrialists sought their workers among the peasants, whose type had been fixed by centuries of unchanging lifestyles. Of course, they first attracted the least able, the “least peasant”, but many others followed their example, even though they were perfectly suited to working the land. Nonetheless, today we see a proletarian class that is as distinct as possible from the peasant population. Similarly, to return to our earlier example, the European aristocracy of the Ancien Régime was of a very different type from the bourgeoisie, in the true sense of the word, from which it was constantly being recruited. Vacher de Lapouge rightly notes that chroniclers of the time always describe the medieval lord as tall, slender and blond, while the villain appears as short, stout and brown. Mental qualities were, of course, no less different. No doubt some of the nobles were mutants, individually differentiated from their original layer. But for the most part, they differed from their primitive environment only in the degree of their qualities. They proved to be braver, bolder, more intelligent, more capable of command, and physically lighter than most of their peers. A few generations were enough, with the help of marriages, to incorporate the newcomers into the old nobility, without modifying the latter’s character. There is nothing surprising about this phenomenon. The ennobled and their descendants were under pressure from the new environment in which they lived. Instead of obeying, they commanded. Instead of driving ploughs or wielding tools, they rode horses and fought. Instead of feeding mainly on flour and the meat of domestic animals, they ate game and often replaced water with alcohol. The moral values to which they were subjected were no longer the same.
One of the most detailed biographical studies on the author indicates that the only apparently certain fact about him until he was thirty is his date of birth. It is wrong: his place of birth too is known with absolute certainty.
During the 1960s, Jaime María de Mahieu was publicly known in Argentina as one of the referents of Argentinian nationalism. General interest magazines such as Primera Plana listed him as a Frenchman who had fought with the Axis powers in the Waffen-SS "Charlemagne" division. Some of his local biographers claimed that he had fought on the Russian front during the Second World War; others, that he had fought in the Nationalist ranks in the Spanish Civil War and that he had been wounded and returned to France; young Tacuarist militants recounted that he had showed them his SS ring. There is no evidence to support any of these claims. For her part, de Mahieu’s widow, Florence Bisschop, interviewed by the Argentinian researcher Daniel Sazbón in the 1990s, denied them all, as well as any connection between her late husband and the Vichy government or administration. She emphasised that both of them entered Argentina on normal French passports, which would show that they were not refugees seeking asylum. What more proof can you ask for?
It is not surprising that all attempts to reveal de Mahieu’s past before his arrival in Argentina in 1946 were unsuccessful. The reason is that he and his wife registered upon entry under false names, namely Jacques-Marie de Mahieu and Florence Bisschop (de Mahieu is thought to be Florence’s maternal grandmother’s name), and kept their true identities a total secret until their deaths. It was their son, Xavier, who finally confessed his parents’ true identity, while still being unable to confirm or deny any of the above claims about his father’s doings. Their real names were Jacques-Auguste-Léon-Marie Girault and Marie-Thérèse Galand. De Mahieu was born in Marseilles on 31 October 1915 from Lange Marius Girault and Marie Suzanne Fargeton. His family lived in Marseilles (44 Rue Borde), Jacques being the eldest of five brothers. He studied literature and sociology at the nearby University of Aix-en-Provence. From a very young age, he was close to Action Française and joined the Fédération des Camelots du Roi, forming close links with Charles Maurras, whom he would later remember as an "eminent master of French nationalism" and "an eminent theoretician of national revolutions". According to de Mahieu’s son, he was a member of the assault group of the Camelots against the Bolsheviks and was also one of the militants who acted as security guards of the nationalist and co-founder of the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme (LVF) Jacques Doriot (1898–1945) at a political meeting in Marseilles. He is recorded as having been president of the Association Georges Cadoudal (a Chouan general, commander of the Catholic and Royal Army of Brittany) in Marseilles as of April 1939. Still according to his son, he was installed by Marshall Pétain, appointed Vice-President of the Council in Paul Reynaud’s government on 17 May 1940, a week after the German offensive, lecturer at the École des hautes études corporatives. De Mahieu was then mobilised as a heavy artillery reserve officer in the city of Nîmes. "Although I hated this war and hated the republic, I do not have, I did not have, the soul of a deserter", he said later. Between 1941 and 1942, he acted as editor and administrator of L’Étudiant français (Paris, November 1920–Lyon, June/July 1944), the propaganda organ of the Fédération nationale des étudiants d’Action française, in which he published various articles, including "Nécessité de la violence", from which the following excerpt will serve as an entrée en matière. After expressing regret that "at a time when we must pursue the National Revolution, and therefore demonstrate harshness and violence, all we find around us is indifference and apathy", he wonders whether "[t]he younger generation [was] capable of action, or even of thinking beyond 'honest' mediocrity". In any case, it is necessary to "give them back [...] a sense of aggression, a taste for violence [...]. Violence does not necessarily mean punching. There is a violence of the spirit that is not indifferent". "Violence is the force that acts in an impulse, that gives itself entirely to the effort of the moment; it is the revolutionary force, it is also an attitude towards the facts. If young people want to play a role, if they want to influence the events that are coming, they must acquire the spirit of violence by which they will assert themselves in their work. Without this, they will be no more than human flocks ripe for the servitude they have earned. But France is more than the present generations, more than their hopeless mediocrity. France is centuries of past greatness that dictate a future in which young people, and particularly young intellectuals, have no right to lose interest. Even if young people no longer have a taste for aggression, they have a duty to do so, born of history. To refuse history is to risk being refused by it, wrote Mr Thierry Maulnier. Now, history, in revolutionary times, requires violence". "We would like to see this necessity symbolised in our lecture theatres and classrooms by a picture that nothing prevents us from envisaging aesthetically: Jesus flogging the vendors out of the Temple, with our old motto in exergue: VIOLENCE IN THE SERVICE OF REASON". This tempered firmness of thought, expressed in a language of adamantine, stellar clarity, will never leave him.
The fact of race
The concept of race is nowadays so broad that it is really too imprecise, to the point of being almost useless. The term is applied indiscriminately to our species as a whole (“the human race”); to the major “coloured” groups (“the white race”) and to one or more of its fractions (“the Aryan race”); to historical societies (“the Italian race”), and even linguistic or cultural groups (“the Latin race”). In all cases, there is no doubt a vague idea that race is linked to the hereditary factor in man and that a racial group has a certain community of characters, transmitted with life, which differentiates it from others. However, some sociologists and political scientists have attributed the inequality of human groups to the environment alone and have argued, therefore, that all have identical possibilities. Others, while arbitrarily asserting the racial homogeneity of primitive communities, have based themselves on the diversity of types of a given group to deny the actual existence of races. On the other hand, anthropologists tend to establish their classifications on the basis of this or that arbitrarily chosen factor. Sometimes skin colour is the only discriminating factor in racial groups. At other times, it is the shape of the skull, or the clotting properties of blood. In the most favourable case, several somatic characters are considered and any psychological or even biological factor is expressly excluded. The chance of a discovery or pseudo-discovery, or simply fashion, periodically transforms, without valid reason, an essential branch of human science. Ideologies have become involved. These are the reasons why we feel it is essential to reconsider the problem on the basis of the data that experience provides. There is no need for theories to assert the fact of race. Everyone knows the difference between a Congolese and a Chinese; everyone knows the difference between a group of a hundred Swedes and a group of a hundred Spaniards. Everyone also knows that the Negro born in New York is as black as the one born in the Congo, and that, consequently, some of the characters which make it possible for the less competent to recognise an ethnic difference are hereditary. It is only with the definition of the concept of race that the difficulty begins. Let us try to remove the factors that distort it. We can do this very easily by considering, not man, but animals of other kinds. If we can thus establish a zoological definition of race, it will be easy to see how it applies to the human racial phenomenon.
The zoological concept of race
Let us consider a number of dogs of the German Shepherd type. Why do we say that they belong to a certain breed? Superficially, because they look alike. They have the same physical conformation and show the same psychological qualities: medium-sized, with a long brown coat, pointed muzzle and plume-like tail, German Shepherds are courageous attackers with an intelligence superior to that of most other dog breeds. However, not all German Shepherds are the same. Their height varies by a few centimetres; their coat is more or less long and its colour covers the whole range of browns, from almost yellow to almost black; their courage and intelligence are subject to gradation. One individual may have a darker coat than a Doberman, whose characteristic colour is black, or may be less intelligent than a Dane, which belongs to a breed which is not very favoured in this respect. If one were to try, as is so often done in the case of man, to define the breed of German shepherds by one of their characteristics, one would arrive at results whose absurdity would be obvious. But no one thinks of doing so. Because, when it comes to dogs, everyone knows very well that the zoological breed is a group of individuals who share, to a certain quantitative and qualitative extent, a certain number of physical, physiological and psychological characteristics which are transmitted by heredity. The representative individual of a race is simply the one who unites in himself all its characters pushed to their highest degree. It is the same when we say that the Nordic man is tall, blond, dolichocephalic, resilient, courageous, etc, This defines only a “competition specimen” and many Nordic men are of average height, brown, brachycephalic, weak or cowardly. This does not mean that the Nordic race is a fiction. At most, it could be argued that it is not a pure race. But does this expression make sense?
The fallacy of the “pure race”
We have so far considered the racial group as a static conglomerate of individuals. In order to be able to answer the previous question, it is necessary to examine it in its evolutionary aspect. When do we say that a German Shepherd is a pure breed? Not when it reaches perfection of type, but when it is born of unmixed parents. By going back in this way from generation to generation, we will arrive at the origin of the breed, i.e. when, by mutation or in any other way, a litter of German Shepherds were born to parents who were not German Shepherds. We could go back this way, from race to species and from species to genus, to the small mass of proteins which, one fine day, started to live. All this would make no sense. If we consider the common origin, race embraces the whole of animality. If we arbitrarily fix its beginning at the moment of its last differentiation, it is founded on an original heterogeneity, even if we suppose that no interbreeding has taken place since then, which it would be daring to assert in the case of the animal races which have been best controlled for a long time. This does not mean in the least that the genealogical data are of no interest, since it is from them that the common characters and their frequency are derived, according to a process that we will study later. but it is wrong to make purity a criterion of existence and, a fortiori, of the value of the race. As far as human groups are concerned, if we were to accept that they were descended from a primitive couple, we would have to consider them as belonging to a single race, which is contrary to the facts. And if we were to accept the idea of multiple original mutations, we would have to forget the interbreeding factor. In biopolitics, theoretical definitions that do not correspond to reality are of no use to us. What we call the “degree of purity” of a race is quite simply its relative homogeneity, i.e. the fact that each of its components possesses, in greater or lesser numbers and to a greater or lesser extent, the distinctive characters of the whole in question.
Heredity
We know roughly how these traits are transmitted. Each of the two progenitors provides the new being with half the genes it needs and which are potentially its possible future. Two individuals who possess, except for sex, the same hereditary capital and are therefore identical – two white people or two white mice – will produce white offspring. The question becomes more complicated when we consider the crossing of two individuals with different hereditary endowments. Everyone knows from Mendel’s first two laws that their offspring are hybrids, i.e. they unite in themselves the opposite genes of their parents, either combining to give a new character, or some predominate at the expense of others, which are then called recessive. In the second generation, after the crossing of two of these hybrids, one quarter of the offspring appears identical to one of the grandparents, one quarter has the genes of the other and half is hybrid like its progenitors. These first two laws of Mendel therefore seem to indicate that hybridisation is a transient phenomenon and that there is a return, increasingly marked from the numerical point of view, to the primitive types. Nothing is more dangerous, however, than the abusive generalisation and the easy vulgarisation of Mendelian genetics. If it is indeed true that the crossing of a “purebred” white mouse with a “purebred” grey mouse results in a litter of hybrids in the first generation that owe their grey colour only to the dominant character of grey over white and, in the second generation, in a quarter of "purebred" whites, another quarter of “purebred” greys and half of hybrids, the same is not true of human beings. The crossing of two mulattoes, the products of the union of a white man and a Negress, produces only mulattoes of various shades, without the white or Negro type reappearing. Explanations are of little importance. The fact alone interests us: the hybrid type reproduces itself indefinitely. Mendel’s third law would suffice, moreover, to establish this permanence. Indeed, the first law applies only to a character, i.e., a gene, isolated from the group to which it belongs. If we consider not one, but two traits, they will be transmitted independently of each other. The crossing of a long-tailed white mouse with a short-tailed grey one will result, in the second generation, in individuals similar to the grandparents, but in the proportion of one eighth, and in white short-tailed and grey long-tailed individuals.1 When it comes no longer to two genes, but to thousands, the laws of probability calculation make it impossible for an individual identical to one of its primitive ancestors to appear, and all the descendants of the couple considered, in all generations, will be hybrids in the sense that they will possess some of the characters of each of the original types, while in other respects they will be related to both. So, not only are Mendel’s first two laws valid for man only in a relative sense, but the third shows us that the multiplicity of characters involved would be enough to practically prohibit any automatic return to the primitive types of a crossbred lineage.
The combination of genes
So far we have only considered the case of the descendants of a single couple. But it is exceptional, within our societies, for marriage to take place between brothers and sisters. In reality, the problem is much more complex than that posed by the union of two endowments, and the “mixture” of genes is infinitely more extensive. However, within a small and closed community, everyone is related to everyone else after a certain number of generations and everyone in the group has the same ancestry as everyone else. The smaller a community is in number at the outset, the more closed it is during its evolution and the longer it has been in existence, the more its members have genes and, consequently, characters in common and the more they resemble each other. This means that an originally heterogeneous group becomes unified through endogamy. Its members will no doubt not all be identical, but they will be less and less dissimilar to a certain extent: their appearance, their mentality and their reactions will show an increasing degree of homogeneity. The “purity” of a race is thus a creation of endogamy and time. All the more so as genes combine not only by association, but also by interaction. The clash of contradictory genes does not necessarily give rise to an average, but sometimes to a new character. If we borrow the language of chemistry – which must be done with the greatest caution – we would say that genes sometimes join together in a mixture and sometimes in an alloy. In the latter case, the mixing leads to the actualisation of characters that were previously latent. This is undoubtedly an exceptional phenomenon, but it should be taken into account in any study of the hybridisation process.
The double effect of miscegenation
We shall not deal here with the results of the union of two races into a mixed-race individual. But we must note its consequences within an ethnic community. Leaving aside any value judgement, our previous analyses demonstrate that miscegenation brings to a human group an increase in its hereditary mass. The individuals that make it up are more diverse, and all the more so as the original types were more distant from each other. But what the whole gains in variety, and therefore in possibilities, at least theoretically, is counterbalanced by what it loses in stability and unity, at least until it has regained its homogeneity. The homogeneous ethnic group concentrates on achieving what it is. It has a well-defined goal and a strong will to power. It is selfaware. It is “all-in-one”. The mixed-race group, not yet homogenised, is, on the contrary, torn between diverse and often contradictory aspirations. It is scattered and slackening. It needs time to regain self-control: exactly the time needed to reconstitute its ethnic unity. Of course, the new race which is born of hybridisation, however valuable, is different from its two components. There are, however, races whose main distinctive characters are generally dominant and which thus possess the capacity to maintain in a latent state some of the foreign genes which they incorporate into their hereditary capital through interbreeding. But this property is exceptional and does not invalidate the general fact that two interbreeding ethnic groups lose for a time, along with their hereditary unity, their harmony and tension.
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Hereditary differentiation and functional specialisation
Let us look at the first point. Let us take a society in the making, like that of the American Frontier at the end of the last century. Only adventurous, enterprising men went West. Those who possessed the spirit of a leader, the right physical constitution and sufficient intelligence, naturally gathered around them individuals strong and courageous, but incapable of leading an operation against the Indians or carving out their own domain on the prairie. Others, intelligent but less daring and unable to command, set up grocery stores. Functional specialisation, in an environment where neither fortune nor convention played a role, was thus based solely on individual biopsychic abilities, exactly as it was in the early European Middle Ages. Not so, of course, in today’s organised – and poorly organised – societies. The established order weighs down on the powerful individualities who seek to elevate themselves, while it artificially maintains inferior beings at a level that does not correspond to their reduced capacity. However, if we consider sets, rather than individuals, we will see that, in general, there is still a match between the function and the hereditary endowment of those who exercise it. This is simply because, in contemporary society as on the Frontier, albeit to a lesser degree, the function requires particular biopsychic traits. Under the most egalitarian of regimes, it is not possible to make a ship’s captain out of a stoker. Social stratification is therefore based on the biopsychic selection of individuals who meet the requirements of the various functions. From this point of view, it is true to say, with Vacher de Lapouge, that social strata “attract” beings of a certain type.
Hereditary variability through function
But this is not enough. When the development of industry multiplied the number of factories, there was no hereditary proletarian type to serve as a recruitment standard. Industrialists sought their workers among the peasants, whose type had been fixed by centuries of unchanging lifestyles. Of course, they first attracted the least able, the “least peasant”, but many others followed their example, even though they were perfectly suited to working the land. Nonetheless, today we see a proletarian class that is as distinct as possible from the peasant population. Similarly, to return to our earlier example, the European aristocracy of the Ancien Régime was of a very different type from the bourgeoisie, in the true sense of the word, from which it was constantly being recruited. Vacher de Lapouge rightly notes that chroniclers of the time always describe the medieval lord as tall, slender and blond, while the villain appears as short, stout and brown. Mental qualities were, of course, no less different. No doubt some of the nobles were mutants, individually differentiated from their original layer. But for the most part, they differed from their primitive environment only in the degree of their qualities. They proved to be braver, bolder, more intelligent, more capable of command, and physically lighter than most of their peers. A few generations were enough, with the help of marriages, to incorporate the newcomers into the old nobility, without modifying the latter’s character. There is nothing surprising about this phenomenon. The ennobled and their descendants were under pressure from the new environment in which they lived. Instead of obeying, they commanded. Instead of driving ploughs or wielding tools, they rode horses and fought. Instead of feeding mainly on flour and the meat of domestic animals, they ate game and often replaced water with alcohol. The moral values to which they were subjected were no longer the same.