Professor Le Menthéour on Embracing the Past to Understand Modern Issues

Back in the mid-2000s, when 18^th-century French literature scholar Rudy Le Menthéour was working on his dissertation on philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he came across a curious treatise: French doctor Charles-Augustine Vandermonde’s 1756 Essai sur la manière de perfectionner l'espèce humaine, or Essay on the Manner of Perfecting the Human Species.

Le Menthéour had discovered that Rousseau, who was thought to despise medicine, actually was part of the medical discourse of the time, particularly around hygiene, and often in polemic battle with physicians. The topic became part of his groundbreaking, 600-page dissertation and the basis for a 2012 book. 

“I read tons of medical treatises to situate Rousseau,” says the Eunice Morgan Schenck 1907 Chair of French and chair of French and Francophone studies. “By doing that, I encountered this weird book from 1756.” The seed was planted for his next project — one that looked to upend the usual narrative about modern eugenics. Instead of tracing the movement’s origins to the infamous Francis Galton’s coining of the term in 1883 and racial anthropology, Le Menthéour places the beginnings of eugenics more than a century earlier, during the French Enlightenment and its discourse on medicine. COVID’s arrival delayed plans for a book, but now, he has found his way back to the controversial topic. 

On March 2, Le Menthéour will give an Endowed Faculty Lecture on “Eugenics: How It All Started,” which will include discussion of archival research he did last summer with funding from the College and will focus on the complex legacy of the Enlightenment.

“The idea of improving the human species happened much earlier in the context of values that we associate with democracy, human rights, with positive values,” he says. “We have to understand that paradox. The question is, how did we go from eugenics as an Enlightenment project, a philanthropy project, to racial anthropology? It’s not just a question of date, but it’s a question of reframing the whole narrative.”

Last summer, Le Menthéour scoured the archives of the National Academy of Medicine in Paris to get at answers. He unearthed intriguing treatises, he says, that focused on hygiene, a term that then encompassed not just bodily cleanliness but the art of preserving health, or what might be called preventative medicine today. 

It was a period of scientific revolution, medical advances, and experimentation. It also was a time of soaring infant mortality, especially among foundlings in the care of the state, says Le Menthéour, who also co-directs Bryn Mawr’s health studies and has a keen interest in the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities. Wet nurses were refusing to feed the abandoned children, fearful of contracting venereal diseases. Babies died. 

“It was a crisis,” he says. “Physicians were scrambling to find a solution.” 

As they looked for ways to improve the condition of newborns, “to make their destiny better,” especially those in the state’s care, Le Menthéour says they explored hereditary factors and proposed experiments to test their theories. Vandermonde, for one, suggested mixing the races to improve the health of newborns. It was a call for human engineering — but with the best of intentions.

“Now you see how the eugenics project actually was based on philanthropy,” Le Menthéour says, “but at the same time, it is fully troubling for modern readers, and we shouldn’t dismiss that either.” 

His research is “very novel,” says Ourida Mostefai, a professor of comparative literature and French and Francophone studies at Brown University. “Eugenics has really been a very neglected aspect of this [Enlightenment] period. What Rudy is attempting to do is reinscribe the importance of all the French thinkers within a history that has tended to ignore them.”

Why does that matter?

“Some of the questions posed several hundred years ago are still with us,” says Mostefai, who has collaborated with Le Menthéour in the past. “They have not disappeared. Questions of race or models of ideals. The only way to enlighten the present, in my view, is by understanding how we have gotten here, the intellectual traditions. I see that as one of the major impacts of Rudy’s research.”

Initially, Le Menthéour planned to tackle the origins of eugenics back when he reread Vandermonde. He wrote an annotated edition of the 1756 essay — the first time anyone had done so — that came out in 2015, with plans for a book. But COVID-19’s arrival in 2020 put a halt to his plans to travel to France for archival research, and he was forced to shift gears, resulting in last year’s La Manière trouble: essai sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now, Le Menthéour says the topic that has long fascinated him has even more relevance to these times. 

“We’re in a similar situation now,” he says. “We are at a time that is as complex as the 1750s. The state of technology is incredible. At the same time, you have a resurgence of racism and bigotry that we did not suspect would happen, because we had this illusion that we were living in a new global era.” 

Le Menthéour says he wants students to appreciate that looking at the past can help inform the present, particularly in the case of eugenics and the current rise in racism. 

“History can make a topic more relevant. The point is for people to understand what’s at stake.”

Back in France as an undergraduate, Le Menthéour says he never intended to become a Rousseau scholar or spend time in the archives. In fact, the philosophy and history student disliked archival work so much, he says he got a master’s in the history of Italian Renaissance art. For his doctorate, he shifted to French literature, and as he prepared for the competitive entrance exam, he read Rousseau’s seminal 1762 work Émile, or On Education. Le Menthéour ended up falling for the thinker with radical ideas and sticking with the Enlightenment. In 2009, he joined Bryn Mawr to teach 18^th-century French literature.

Now, Le Menthéour says, he loves his interdisciplinary field of study — especially the conundrums it presents, ones like the origin of eugenics. 

“Instead of depicting the Enlightenment as a monolith,” he says, “we have to embrace the complexity of that period.”