Georges Vacher de Lapouge

Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge (vaʃe də lapuʒ; 12 December 1854 – 20 February 1936) was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and racialism. He is known as the founder of anthroposociology, the anthropological and sociological study of race as a means of establishing the superiority of certain peoples. While a young law student at the University of Poitiers, Vacher de Lapouge read Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In 1879 he gained a doctorate degree in law and became a magistrate in Niort (Deux-Sèvres) and a prosecutor in Le Blanc. He then studied history and philology at the École pratique des hautes études, and learned several languages such as Akkadian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese at the École du Louvre and at School of Anthropology in Paris from 1883 to 1886. From 1886 Vacher de Lapouge taught anthropology at the University of Montpellier, advocating Francis Galton's eugenic thesis, but was expelled in 1892 because of his socialist activities (he co-founded Jules Guesde's French Workers' Party and campaigned during 1888 for city mayor in the Montpellier municipal election). He worked later as a librarian at the University of Rennes until his retirement in 1922. He wrote L'Aryen: son Rôle Social (1899, "The Aryan: His Social Role"), in which he opposed the Aryan, dolichocephalic races to the brachycephalic races. Vacher de Lapouge thus classified human races: first the Homo europaeus, Nordic or fair-haired, then the Homo alpinus, represented by the Auvergnat and Turkic peoples, finally the Homo mediterraneus, represented by the Neapoletan or Andaluz peoples. Vacher de Lapouge endorsed Francis Galton's theory of eugenics, but applied it to his theory of races. Vacher de Lapouge's ideas are comparable to 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 almost synonymous with social class.