52 The New York ReviewInventing the Science of Race
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran
In 1712 King Louis XIV of France
signed the lettres patentes that for-
mally established Bordeaux’s Royal
Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres,
and Arts, a social club of intellectual
inquiry and public edification. In con-
trast to the more conservative Uni-
versity of Bordeaux, whose primary
objective was to educate the country’s
priests, doctors, and lawyers through
lessons compatible with Scripture, the
Bordeaux Academy saw itself as “en-
lightened”: its objective was advancing
scientific truth as part of a larger pro-
gram intended to promote “mankind’s
happiness.”
Every year, the academy organized
an essay contest that it publicized
throughout Europe. In 1739 the mem-
bers announced the subject of the com-
petition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause
physique de la couleur des nègres, de la
qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénéra-
tion de l’un et de l’autre?” (“What is the
physical cause of the Negro’s color,
the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and
the degeneration of both [Negro hair
and skin]?”) Embedded in this ques-
tion was the academy’s assumption that
something had happened to “Negroes”
that had caused them to degenerate,
to turn black and grow unusual hair.
In short, the academy wanted to know
who is black, and why. It wanted to
know, too, what being black signified.
The winner was promised a gold medal
worth three hundred livres, roughly the
annual earnings of a common worker
at the time.
The 1741 contest was only the lat-
est iteration of non- Africans’ fascina-
tion with dark skin. When the ancient
Greeks, Romans, and Arabic peoples
first described the inhabitants of Af-
rica, it was Africans’ color that struck
them most. Over many centuries, Af-
rican “blackness” grew into an all-
encompassing signifier that substituted
for the range of reddish, yellowish, and
blackish- brown colors that the skins of
Africans actually express. The color
black also became synonymous with
the land itself; many of the geograph-
ical names that outsiders assigned to
sub- Saharan Africa—Niger, Nigritia,
Sudan, Zanzibar—contain the etymo-
logical roots of the word “black.” The
most telling example is the name Ethi-
opia. Derived from the Greek aitho
(I burn) and ops (face), it became the
most widespread label for the entire
sub- Saharan portion of the continent
until the late seventeenth century. It
even hinted at the cause of blackness
itself.
Over the course of 1741 sixteen sub-
missions attempting to explain the
source of blackness arrived at the Bor-
deaux Academy, from as far away as
Sweden, Ireland, and Holland. Now
housed in Bordeaux’s municipal li-
brary, this collection of manuscripts
has survived the ravages of mice and
moths, humidity and fire—not to men-
tion the French Revolution and two
world wars. One finds anything but
consensus in this early modern focus
group: there are biblical scholars who
argue that blackness may have been a
curse; climate theorists who affirm that
Africans’ bodily humors—particularly
their bile—have been thrown out ofbalance by the continent’s scorching
heat; an anatomist who announces that
he has discovered the secret of black-
ness while dissecting African cadavers
on a New World plantation ; and an
essayist who hints, four decades be-
fore racial taxonomies began to seduce
European naturalists on a large scale,
that he could classify “Negroes” as
a specific race or even species. Taken
as a whole, these essays do not yet re-
flect the assumed biological and cog-
nitive inferiority that would soon be
attributed to both free and enslaved
Africans. Still, they certainly allow us
to glimpse the insidious relationship
between “science” and enslavement—
and, to amend W. E. B. Du Bois’s reso-
nant phrase, the dusk before the dawn
of race.In announcing its competition on the
origin of blackness, the Academy of
Sciences made no mention of slavery.
And yet, this seemingly clinical inter-
est in specific African traits obviously
emerged in tandem with the growing
dependence on chattel slavery through-
out the New World. In 1741—the year
when the essays arrived at the acad-
emy— 62,485 African men, women,
and children in chains are estimated to
have boarded ships along the west coast
of Africa, destined for plantations in
Brazil, Central America, the Carib-
bean, and North America. A disturb-
ing number of these humans invariably
died en route, 9,454 in this year alone.
Although the transatlantic slave trade
had not yet reached its peak, the num-
ber of Africans who had been forced
to make this dreaded voyage already
totaled well over four million. By the
end of the eighteenth century, the era
we have come to know as the Enlight-
enment, another 4.5 million Africans
were forced to leave their home con-
tinent for a life of brutal enslavement
in cities, farms, and plantations on the
other side of the Atlantic.
Bordeaux, despite its position as a
major Atlantic port city, remained a rel-
atively minor player in the slave tradeat the time of the contest. By 1837, how-
ever, the city’s armateurs (shipowners)
had organized roughly five hundred
expeditions to Africa, resulting in the
deportation of approximately 150,000
Africans to French plantations. This
figure represents approximately 13 per-
cent of the 1.2 million enslaved Afri-
cans who survived the sea voyage and
arrived in French colonies. It also far
exceeds the total population of Bor-
deaux itself in 1789 (around 110,000).
Much of the wealth that was flood-
ing into Bordeaux in the 1700s—the
city’s so- called golden century—came
from its ventures in the Americas, es-
pecially France’s three major colonies,
Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-
Domingue (Haiti). By midcentury,
Borde au x’s rel at ion sh ip w it h t he C a r ib -
bean helped transform its port into the
busiest and most important anchorage
in France, with more than thirty ships
fully dedicated to the colonial trade in
the Antilles. Ships leaving Bordeaux
for the islands transported flour, lard,
beef, ham, rolls of iron, copper uten-
sils, pottery, roofing, hardware, tools,
fabrics, clothing, and the weapons and
ammunition used to control the islands’
Black populations. These same vessels
returned to Bordeaux with cocoa, cof-
fee beans, cotton, ginger root, and mil-
lions of pounds of muscovado sugar.
Profits from the colonial trade also
funded some of the five thousand stone
buildings, apartments, and opulent
townhouses built during the era. The
most visible evidence of Bordeaux’s
colonial involvement in the Caribbean
(and the slave trade) can be found
on the façades of several eighteenth-
century buildings near the old customs
house on the banks of the Garonne.
Looming above the massive portes-
cochères, or covered entryways, of
these former townhouses, mascarons
(sculpted stone faces) with African fea-
tures look down at the passersby below.The forty members of the Bordeaux
Academy by and large did not soil their
hands in the transatlantic slave trade.(This is unsurprising since the acad-
emy did not admit merchants, even
rich merchants, to its ranks.) And yet
many academy members did have sig-
nificant contacts with and financial
interests in the French Caribbean.
Some of the academicians belonged to
aristocratic dynasties whose flagging
fortunes had been revived by the royal
allocation of plantations in Martinique
or Saint- Domingue. This was the case
for Nicolas- Alexandre de Ségur and for
Louis- Charles Mercier Dupaty de Clam
and his brother, Jean- Baptiste Mercier
Dupaty; Jean- Baptiste was born on the
family estate in Saint- Domingue. The
academy also welcomed André- Daniel
Laffon de Ladebat, François- Armand
de Saige, and Pierre- Paul Nairac, all
of whom came from families with ties
to the slave trade. Nairac, with his two
brothers, had actually been involved
in the business himself; the family’s
company had deported more than
eight thousand African captives to the
French colonies, more than any other
syndicate or individual in the city.
All of these links to the Caribbean
dovetailed with the academy’s larger
“scientific” interest in developing
knowledge related to French colonies
generally and to the enslaved peoples
on those islands more specifically. It
was likely with this in mind that the
academy admitted the Martinique- born
botanist, colonial administrator, and
plantation owner Jean- Baptiste Thibault
de Chanvalon to its ranks in 1748.
Perhaps the most revealing moment
of connection came, however, in 1738,
when the aristocratic members of the
academy who were simultaneously
seated in the Bordeaux Parlement were
called upon to pass judgment on the
question of the legal status of the city’s
Black population. Before 1716, enslav-
ing a person in France was, at least the-
oretically, illegal; according to a royal
principle dating from the fourteenth
century, any enslaved person who set
foot on French territory was imme-
diately freed. In 1571 the Bordeaux
Parle ment had famously upheld this
when a Norman slave trader arrived in
the city and attempted to sell his cargo
of African slaves. The parlement, citing
the principle that “no one is a slave in
France,” both freed the slaves and or-
dered the owner taken into custody.
The status of this so- called Free Soil
principle was first called into ques-
tion during the Regency (1715–1723),
the interim period between the reigns
of Louis XIV and Louis XV. In this
age of rampant colonial expansion,
Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France,
proclaimed in 1716 that enslaved Af-
ricans from the Caribbean, whom the
1685 Code Noir deemed meubles, or
property, were no longer automatically
emancipated when they arrived on
French soil. After four hundred years,
slavery in France was once again legal.
Over the next two decades, an in-
creasing number of enslaved Africans
were taken to French cities, includ-
ing Nantes, Saint- Malo, La Rochelle,
Orléans, Paris, and Bordeaux. Bor-
deaux itself was home to several hun-
dred enslaved Africans at any given
time during the eighteenth century.
Most of this Black population laboredJean-Baptiste Oudry: Africa: A European Merchant Bartering with a Black Chief,
from the Four Continents series, 1724CurranGates 52 _ 57 .indd 52 11 / 17 / 21 5 : 43 PM