The principal nineteenth-century medical theory was hereditarianism, a theory of transmission of characteristics and dispositions in the process of organic reproduction. Hereditarianism was the scientific theorization of the permanence of form, meaning the reproduction of physical and mental traits transmitted over generations of descendants: “the tendency toward the regular transmission of traits … a legacy transmitted more or less loyally across an infinitely long chain of generations.”² Laws of hereditary transmission were also derived from pathological deviations from normal heredity. Hereditary degeneration, which theorized this morbid, or pathological, heredity, thus became the companion theory of hereditarianism. Degeneration was understood as...

“From the entirety of our study, the role of the doctor emerges then in all of its importance…. Knowing the hereditary antecedents of his clients, he will be able to foresee what their children will be; in his perspective, the adage: Pater est quem morbi filiorum demonstrant will offer many more guarantees than the famous saying of Roman law: Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.”¹ These words, written by Dr. Fernand Debret in his 1901 doctoral thesis, La sélection naturelle dans l’espèce humaine, synthesize the major conceptual and intellectual shift in the conceptualization of genealogy that occurred under the influence of...

The fall of the ancien régime in 1789 created a favorable climate for the revision of the fourteenth-century trial of the Order of the Templars. Charging them with heresy and sodomy—denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, obscene kissing, and idol worship—the French king Philip IV (Philip the Fair) had the Templars arrested in September 1307. Pope Clement abolished the Order in 1312 and gave its property to the Order of Hospitallers. During the lengthy proceedings, fifty-four knights were condemned to the stake as relapsed heretics in May 1310, and, in March 1314, Philip IV had the Grand...

The task of imperial medicine was to police the metropole’s borders on the outside and to prevent racial métissage and importation of vices and diseases from the colony. But another fear of racial degeneration, the decline of family, French nation, and European civilization, permeated medical discourses as doctors and writers focused on degeneration brought on by internal exhaustion and moral corruption. What lessons about the degeneration of the French race could be excavated from the history of the nation, from within its metropolitan borders? In their search for answers, doctors subjected well-known historical figures to scrutiny and detailed medical diagnosis...

In 1852, in his six-volume Histoire de la prostitution, Paul Lacroix included an essay on medieval urbanism and prostitution entitled “Les rues honteuses au Moyen-Âge” (Streets of Shame in the Middle Ages) and named this reconstitution of sexual topography of medieval Paris a “pornographic archaeology” (archéologie pornographique).¹ In calling this history “pornographic,” Lacroix conformed to the etymology of the word: “The title of pornographic work is above all appropriate to books on prostitution.”² But it is harder to intuit what Lacroix meant by “archaeology.” Already a decade earlier, in 1842, in the wake of road works in Paris, “in this...

In the previous chapter, I traced the philological exclusion of sexuality in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I argued that the civilizing mission of chivalry and chivalric love was preferable to the unbridled and contaminating influence of sexuality of the fabliaux that could not adequately represent the French nation. The preceding chapter, however, brings up the question of why chivalric or courtly love, widely perceived to advocate heterosexual adultery, was not ostracized by academic medievalists and doctors as a form of deviant behavior. In the tradition of the histoire des mœurs elaborated between ca. 1760 and 1855, chivalric...