[p.106] I shall focus here on Renan and Le Bon, for their representativeness: the former because he was one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, the latter because he was a talented popularizer whose works, translated into some ten languages sold hundreds of thousands of copies (this is the case in particular with The Psychology of Peoples). Renan and Le Bon also have their own more original ideas on the subject of race, but I shall set these aside for a time so as to concentrate on the sedimentations, in their work, of the ordinary anonymous racialist ideology of the period, a sort of racial common sense that could have appeared in a "Dictionary of received ideas" of the time.

The original aspect of Renan's contribution, as we shall see, involves the opposition between the Aryan and Semitic, "races." What is not original, what he does not ponder at length, what he is content merely to transmit, is the division of humanity into several major race – white, yellow, and black -- and the hierarchization of this division. The three races have separate origins . . . Philology, he believed, had managed to establish the common origin of all whites . . . but the [p.107] other varieties of the human species are not included: philology “recoils at doing the same for the Chinese race, even more so for the inferior races” – that is, black (Histoire générale et système compare des langues sémitiques [General History and Comparative System of the Semitic Languages], p. 587). [p.107]

Like Renan, Gobineau, and Taine whose work he most often simply summarizes and systematizes, Le Bon is a partisan of polygenesis [the theory that different groups of human came into being entirely separately from one another], and he equates the human races with animal species (something Buffon rightly refused to do).  “By the aid of clearly defined anatomical characteristics, such as the colour of the skin, and the shape and volume of the skull, it has been possible to establish that the human race comprises several species which are quite distinct and probably of very different origin” (The Psychology of People, p.4) If the term “race” is used in preference to “species,” Le Bon suggests, it is in order to avoid offending Christian sensitivities, for Christians maintain that all men belong to the same species: here science is opposed to religious prejudice. . . .

For Renan, the inferior race includes black Africans, Australian aborigines, and American Indians (these groups link by virtue of their cultural inferiority rather on the basis of common physical features).  Renan assumes that in the beginning the whole earth was overrun with members of these races; they have been progressively eliminated by members of other races. “Whenever the Aryans and the Semites went – in fact, in every country where they settled – they encountered half-savage races that they exterminated” (Histoire general, p., 585).  Let us note that no value judgments accompanies the report of exterminations.  The inferior races are defined not only by their primitive or civilized status but by their inability to become civilized, their lack of susceptibility to progress” (p.586). “Furthermore, we do not have a single example of a savage population that has moved up to civilization” (581).  Elsewhere, Renan speaks of: ”the everlasting infancy of those non-perfectible races” (The Future of Science, p.152_, of “peoples doomed to remain stationary” (p.155)  The break with the humanist ideal is quite clear: what Rousseau [1712-1778] had presented as a distinctive feature of the human species – that is, its perfectibility – is denied to part of humanity.  . . .