Not even Paul Broca, the Professor of Medicine held to be the initiator of
physical anthropology in France, agreed, asking in 1864:
Whence come, in fact, the races who people Europe? From Europe. Whence come the
languages spoken in Europe? From Asia.... This is the reason why I could not agree
with a doctrine which, starting from too close an assimilation of language and race,
would posit in principle that conformity of language indicates unity of stock.
(Schnapp 1996: 57).But despite these warnings, repeated throughout the years (although with
apparent inconsistencies in Broca’s case, see page 348), the majority of scholars
and lay people came to believe that race and language weretheelements which
bound together the nation. The past served to explain the formation of
particular races and languages. The discovery of the Indo-European language
branch by the Sanskritist Sir William Jones (1746–94) in the late eighteenth
century would encourage the connection between language and race in the
following decades. In 1813 Indo-Europeans were described as Aryans, and the
racial component of the concept became more dominant in the following
decade. The connection between race and language can be found in thousands
of texts. TheAddresses to the German Nation, published in 1807–8 by the
German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), one of the most
inXuentialWgures in German nationalism, is only one example among many:
In theWrst place, the German is a branch of the Teutonic race...TheWrst and
immediately obvious diVerence between the fortunes of the Germans and the other
branches which grew from the same root is this: the former remained in the original
dwelling-places of the ancestral stock, whereas the latter emigrated to other places; the
former retained and developed the original language of the ancestral stock, whereas
the latter adopted a foreign language and gradually reshaped it in a way of their own.
(Fichte 1807–8 in Baycroft 1998: 21–2).The growing importance of the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘language’ would
inXuence—and at the same time be reinforced by—most historians and
archaeologists. In Germany and France, the historians Barthold Niebuhr
(1776–1831) and Augustin Thierry (1795–1856) were essential for the in-
corporation of the concept of race into historical studies. Their work encom-
passed not only the national past, but also that of the Great Civilizations. This
showed the extent to which race had become a scholarly commonplace. In
hisHistory of Rome, Niebuhr, the pioneer of text-based historical study
(Chapter 11), saw the disputes between patricians and plebeians and those
between Latins and Etruscans as stemming from diVerences of race and
blood. He transformed the history of the Graeco-Roman world from a history
of politics and political ideas into a history of races (Hannaford 1996). Yet, the
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 351