The liberal moment of race

This article studies how the “doctrine of races”, which placed race at the core of the history and the evolutions of political societies, was elaborated and promoted in France, between 1815 and 1848, not by reactionary groups or defenders of slavery, but by liberal, republican, and social reformists committed to emancipation, progress and freedom. After reviewing how this link between race and these currents was manifest in the 1830s and 1840s, notably through the composition of the Société ethnologique de Paris and an examination of the networks that promoted this doctrine, the article focuses on the group of the Censeur Européen (Charles Dunoyer, Charles Comte, and Augustin Thierry), which we identify as having played a key role in defining race as a fundamental object and subject of politics. We examine how these authors were linked to the main liberal networks during French Restoration, before focusing on the complex reasons which led them to mobilize race in their political thinking. The article shows how this mobilization, far from being contradictory to their principles, was consistent with their ways of understanding freedom and progress. Race was used both to think about the obstacles and the conditions for an effective realization of freedom. It served also as a way of analysing the struggles that oppose, in various societies, parasitic and productive races. It served, finally, as a means to give a body, a genealogy and a collective memory to groups which had been dominated or erased from history and institutions.