1801. 8vo, pp. 240; small paper flaw at head of p. 26, and in centore of p. 35 (touching a couple of letters), some sporadic light marginal dampstaining, with some occasional spotting and browning; uncut and a wide-margined copy, in contemporary red long-grained half-morocco over marbled boards, spine in compartments with raised bands, decorated and lettered in gilt, retaining original silk marker, head and tail of spine lightly rubbed, with two small nicks along upper joint, extremities lightly rubbed, corners slightly worn; an attractive copy. Uncommon first edition, and an attractive copy, of this curious contribution to the corpus of post revolutionary literature discussing the need for a social regeneration and rehabilitation in France, and how best to achieve this, discussing the problem in relation to eugenics and physiognomy. As such, it is an early and pioneering text in the modern eugenics movement in France.
Prior to 1789 many Enlightenment commentators, both medical and political, had sought to provide a biological explanation for the nation's social decline and degeneration, laying the blame on the natural sensibility of women and their predisposition towards hysteria and nervous disease. This view of the 'disorderly woman' ran as an idée fixe through many medical texts of the period, her rehabilitation vital to reform domestic behaviour, health, hygiene and restore national harmony. The debate continued long-after the Revolution, with notable contributions from such authors as Cabanis, Moreau de la Sarthe, Bichat, and Boyveau Laffecteur. Indeed for some, the problem had merely been exacerbated by the Revolution, women gaining greater freedom, as epitomized by the Parisian socialites Mme Tallien and Juliette Récamier, which led not to regeneration, but rather further maternal degeneration. The need to instil domestic virtues amongst the citizenry once again resumed importance therefore, and spurned a literary genre of texts on 'the natural history of women' and feminine rehabilitation.
Louis Joseph Robert ‘le jeune’ here approaches the problem from a slightly different angle, and as such pens an early treatise on eugenics and the inheritance of intelligence, almost seventy years before Galton’s great classic of 1869, Hereditary Genius. The work presents his system which aimed to teach 'l'art de faire des enfans d'esprit, qui deviennent de grands-hommes'. Unlike other works which were addressed to parents and mothers, Robert firmly directs his attention towards government and the L’Institut de France, as he expounds his plan to create a society composed of an intellectual elite. Inspired by earlier writers on the issues of heredity such as Harvey, Bonnet, Cuvier and Maupertuis, as well as the physiognomists Lavater and Camper, he suggests that two primary schools or Athaeneum be established, for each sex, to create model citizens. ‘Using basic physiognomic knowledge, the Ministry of the Interior would place promising children in the schools at the age of seven, and there they should remain until a national jury declared their education complete... finally, at the annual Festival of the Republic, the First Consul (Napoleon) would confer a national award upon the six most distinguished male and female students of the Athénée; and the youngsters would then celebrate their ‘mega-anthropogenetic’ marriages with all the dignity accorded to good republican citizens’ (Quinlan, p. 158).
‘Robert adapts his view of conjugal hygiene to the political goal of forming the “new man” of the post-Revolutionary period... on a larger scale, it provides a blueprint for reshaping the physiognomies of the French nation by forming the ideal citizen according to medical hygienic principles’ (Winston, From perfectibility to perversion: meliorism in 18th c. France, p. 150).
A second expanded edition was published in 1803, suggesting that his ideas and systems, if not eventually enduring, clearly found a ready audience at the time, and indeed provoked much debate. Mégalantropogénesie became the focus of a satirical vaudeville play penned by Barré and Radet, who envisaged a world full of vain and useless aesthetes, eventually saved by a young girl marrying a practical sailor. His work provides an historical view of existing theories on heredity at the turn of nineteenth century, whilst also looking forward to the far-reaching and pioneering work of such men as Quetelet in his detailed statistical investigation on the development of the physical and intellectual qualities of man, ‘Sur l'home et le development de ses facultés’,of 1835, and culminating in Galton's classic of natural science.