In the Name of Science: the Conceptual and Ideological Background of Charles Richet’s Eugenics

The French physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet was the author of an impressive quantity of writings, including novels and poetry. He was an out–and–out eugenicist, convinced that an “intentional, conscious, scientific, and methodical” selection could achieve “any result, provided we had enough patience”. He believed that the quantitative and qualitative increase of population was a vital matter for France. In La sélection humaine (1913) and other writings, he dreamed of a conscious selection creating “intellectual élites”. The process would be crowned by the production of a “higher human nature, a real surhumanité”. A staunch believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Richet combined Darwinism and Lamarckism.