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PROLOGUE
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
—René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637
In late 1941, France’s Vichy government created a list of metal statues to be melted down for the German war machine. Among these monuments was a full-scale likeness of one of the country’s most beloved writers, the Enlightenment philosopher known as Voltaire. That France’s fascist regime chose to do away with this statue was no coincidence. Though the author of Candide had been dead for nearly two centuries, his name continued to be synonymous with liberty, tolerance, and freedom of thought — the values of the now-disbanded French Republic. By early 1942, the statue had been transformed into Nazi bullets and shell casings.
Two decades later, in 1962, the city of Paris replaced the lost monument with a new statue of Voltaire. Sculpted by Léon-Ernest Drivier, the marble version of the writer was erected in a modest, triangular patch of land not far from the Académie Française. Ringed by low fencing and hemmed in by city streets, the statue sat undisturbed for nearly sixty years. Beginning in 2018, however, activists repeatedly slipped into the park after dark to douse the monument with red paint. One night, someone broke off the statue’s nose. Judging by what was being said about Voltaire on social media at the time, the protesters had been provoked by two well-documented facts. The first was that the writer had owned shares in a trading company that trafficked tens of thousands of African captives to the New World. Even more upsetting, Voltaire had repeatedly claimed that Black Africans and Amerindians were intellectually inferior races with no biological link to Europeans.
In August 2022, activists mounted their final attack on the increasingly degraded monument. Shortly after this last incident, the Paris government defiantly announced that Drivier’s artwork would be removed for repair and reconditioning before being returned to its rightful place. Four years later, the same administrative office released a statement explaining that the monument was now too fragile to return to its park and would be replaced with an exact replica cast in resin. This plasticized Voltaire, which is more resistant to both Paris’s weather and militants, now sits atop the original pedestal.
The downward spiral of Voltaire’s statues in this neighborhood — from bronze, to marble, to a mixture of fiberglass, epoxy, and stone — has paralleled both the writer’s and the Enlightenment’s legacy over the past two decades. At a recent international history conference in Rome attended by over a thousand people, a double session was provocatively titled: “Should we burn Voltaire?” The French philosopher and writer is not alone in suffering such scrutiny. David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, along with a number of other writers and political figures from the era, are also being reevaluated in light of their corrosive and often dehumanizing writings on race.
For many people, castigating these one-time heroes of the Enlightenment has been an act of liberation, a symbolic reckoning with a generation of men whose ideas and writing were tied to colonialism, slavery, or racism. Yet as satisfying as such retribution may feel, this act leaves a number of pressing questions unanswered. The first of these is: Why? Why did this generation of thinkers come to hold such racist views in the first place? And why did these ideas only come into being during the eighteenth century — more than two centuries after the transatlantic slave trade had begun? Such properly historical questions point to an even deeper quandary: Why did so many Enlightenment-era champions of tolerance and civil liberties work so hard to limit these supposedly universal birthrights to Europeans? This book, the first biography-driven history of race, seeks to answer these questions.
Writing or teaching about the subject of this book, the history of race, is no longer simply about the past; it is decidedly about our present. Yet it remains imperative to go back to the eighteenth century and even earlier to understand where the most dangerous idea ever invented came from.
Most people who have thought about the origins of race understand that it is deeply intertwined with two New World tragedies: the disenfranchisement and genocide of native populations and the importation of eleven million captives from West Africa to the New World, approximately 400,000 of whom landed in what is now the United States. Yet the complicated story of race is more than a centuries-long European conspiracy to justify empire and chattel slavery, as useful as the concept itself proved to be in both cases. I first became interested in this complex history when I was a graduate student at New York University during the mid-1990s. I realized then as I do now that one of the reasons that so few people are familiar with this story is because the subject is so mind-spinningly complicated. To begin with, the origins of what would become Europe’s understanding of race are scattered throughout history. The first traces of this concept emerged from earlier eras, for a variety of reasons, and from a number of decidedly nonscientific sources. There are proto-biological notions related to race in writings from classical antiquity, in the Bible, in the medieval-and Renaissance-era blood laws used to chase the Jews out of Portugal, in the papal decrees regarding the enslavement of non-Christian peoples, and in the categorization of various “interracial” combinations in Spanish casta paintings. There are also non-European sources that filtered into this genealogy, among them Arabic writings that came into being alongside the trans-Saharan slave trade. Suffice it to say that what now functions as race in our collective consciousness stems from a variety of sources, many of which are lost in the sands of time.
What happened in eighteenth-century Europe, however, deserves particular attention. As Christianity’s hold on the human story began to falter, secular thinkers raised new questions about humankind’s differences in a range of settings, from medical schools and anatomical theaters to royally sanctioned research academies and the great universities of Scotland and Germany. By the end of the century, scientific inquiry had radically reshaped what it meant to be human. The xenophobia of the past, once based largely on anecdote or religious prejudice, gave way to anatomical “data,” deterministic sociological theories, and racial taxonomies that assigned entire populations to specific stages of development. What we now know as race, in short, came about in large part because of the institutions and methods invented by the Enlightenment.
The specificity of the eighteenth century, however, was not limited to the creation of racialized ideas themselves. It was also about how and to what extent these ideas were disseminated. If, by 1710 or 1720, discussions related to the emerging idea of race were confined largely to elites, by 1800 these same ideas had seeped into school curricula, geography manuals for children, works of natural history for a general public, women’s magazines, and novels. In fact, increased literacy was arguably the Enlightenment era’s greatest race maker. The more progressive a country’s educational policies, the more people were exposed to this pernicious and seemingly scientific concept.
Tracking the idea of race as it evolved in various spheres of thought is perhaps the most logical way to tell this story. I have done so myself in two previous books. Several years ago, however, I concluded that I might be able to write a more accessible history by embedding the story in a group biography — by plunging into the lives and (often messy) psychologies of the people who actually made race. The result of such a project, I thought, might read more like a novel than a textbook.
When I pitched this idea to a friend, she suggested that each one of my chapters feature a “people–idea,” a biography-driven segment that would bring to life the person and the specific concept related to race for which they were responsible. This became the main conceit of the book. The characters in this book are more than simply individuals: They are also stand-ins for the wide range of theorists who helped fashion race during the Enlightenment, among them travel writers, natural historians, climate theorists, anatomists, skull-measuring quacks, classifiers, jurists, planters, kings, ministers, and presidents.
In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, I have chosen to chronicle the lives and evolving ideas of thirteen individuals, all of whom contributed in specific ways to the birth of race as a concept. The first figure is the most famous of French kings, Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century monarch and empire builder who commissioned the sixty-article set of slave laws known as Le Code Noir (1685) for his Caribbean colonies. The second is a French Dominican priest and sugar plantation manager whose published account of African chattel slavery in the Caribbean became one of the most important sources of African ethnography during much of the eighteenth century.
I focus on France and France’s overseas slave colonies in the early part of the book for several reasons. In addition to the fact that France’s population had reached 22 million in 1700 — it was almost three times larger than that of either Great Britain or Spain — the country became the breeding ground for some of the most important developments in racial thinking. The first was the classification of the human species; the second the theory that a prototype race “degenerated” into all of humankind’s varieties, or races. From France, the book moves on, much like the concept of race itself, to other countries and thinkers: to Uppsala, Sweden, and the inventor of the term Homo sapiens, Carl Linnaeus; to Edinburgh where an astonishing group of men including David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson began dividing up humankind in terms of stages of development; and to Prussia and the Electorate of Hanover where Immanuel Kant and Johann Frederich Blumenbach were defining and debating the notion of race as never before. The final chapter brings us to Virginia in the 1780s, where Thomas Jefferson — the architect of American democracy, budding anthropologist, and future president of the United States — confronted the fundamental contradiction between universal human rights and what he believed to be the unfortunate liabilities of the “Black race.” Jefferson is the capstone to this story and this book: He embodies both the lofty ideals of the high Enlightenment and the more brutal, clinical, and economic-based notions of race emerging in the nineteenth century.
The story that I tell in Biography of a Dangerous Idea is admittedly an example of what is sometimes called “top-down” history, focusing as it does primarily on the ideas and the experiences of influential philosophers, naturalists, and politicians. My intention, however, is not to produce glorified portraits of these men. Throughout the book I have tried to engage with their legacies — good and bad — with honesty and unflinching clarity. I have also tried to remind readers that these same Enlightenment-era individuals not only helped transform the world’s peoples into “races,” but the fates of these same “races” as well. Ironically enough, it is Voltaire who perhaps best sums up the reason for a book dedicated to the history of race and, ultimately, its casualties: “To the living we owe respect, to the dead, however, we owe only the truth.”