Georges Vacher de Lapouge

Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and scientific racism. He was also a member of the SFIO socialist party.

He wrote L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899, "The Aryan and his Social Role"), which gave its bases to Nazi anti-semitism. He opposed the white, "Aryan race", "dolichocephalic", to the "brachycephalic" race, whom the "Jew" is the archetype. Vacher de Lapouge thus classified "human races": first the Homo europaeus, Nordic or fair-hair and Protestant, then the Homo alpinus, represented by the Auvergnat and the Turk, finally the Homo mediterraneus, figured by the Neapoletan or the Andaluz.

Vacher de Lapouge introduced in France Francis Galton's eugenics, but applied it to his theory of races. Vacher de Lapouge's ideas partly mirror those of Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), who believed that the Germanic Franks formed the upper class of French society, whereas the Gauls were the ancestors of the peasantry. Race, according to him, thus became a synonym of social class. But, in virtue of "heredity", the Homo europaeus intrinsically possessed more qualities than the lower, Homo mediterraneus. He added to this conception of races and classes "sélectionnisme" ("selectionism"), his version of Galton's eugenics. Vacher de Lapouge's "selectionism" had two aims: first, achieving the annihilation of trade unionists, considered as "degenerate"; second, creating types of man each destined to one end, in order to prevent any contestation of labour conditions. His anthropology thus aimed at blocking social conflict by establishing a fixed, hierarchical social order